 Hello everyone and welcome. Thanks so much for joining Complexity Weekend 2021, May. It's May 21st where I am, but it might be a different date for you when you're watching this live or in replay. We're really excited to have your attention and participation for Complexity Weekend and we're gonna be starting this kickoff live stream in just a few minutes, 25 to be exact. We're gonna have 25 minutes of some awesome cybernetic music from one of our great facilitators, Michael Garfield, and the organizers will be back in 25 minutes to give a kickoff before our keynote speaker, Dave Snowden, comes on. So thanks so much everybody for joining. Enjoy this music and we will hear from you very soon. Hello everyone. Welcome to Complexity Weekend May 2021. We are live and we are really excited that you're watching live or in replay. We're gonna introduce ourselves briefly as organizers and then we're gonna kick off into this introductory hour. So hello everyone. I'm Daniel. I'm in California and I'll pass it to Shirley. Hello, I'm Shirley in Seattle, Washington. Nice and I am Sean. I'm in Austin, Texas. So we're a little sampling of some geographic distribution but it's much broader for our cohort across the whole world. Awesome. Well, let's get right into it. In this organizers introduction video, we are going to have two main sections. First, we're gonna be talking about Complexity Weekend, which is the community of practice as well as the specific weekend event that you all are participants at. We're gonna be talking about how people, tooling, and ideas come together to lead to emergence. We're also gonna talk about the sort of who, what, why, where, and when of our global weekend event. We're also gonna give some notes on weekend overview and how to make the most of it. Then we're gonna go into a little bit more discussion of our community purpose, values, and guidelines before describing a bit about our facilitators and keynote who all really in a much appreciated way stepped up to make it happen this weekend. And then a brief gather introduction orientation and that will happen before our keynote speaker of Dave Snowden coming on in one hour from now. Any overview thoughts or we can jump right in? Let's jump right in. Awesome. Initial conditions are important for complex systems. Historicity, it's a big topic in complexity. And so we'd like to begin by sharing a bit about our initial conditions. On the left side of the screen, you see a picture of us having our first ever Complexity Weekend, though it was not known by that name at that time. In person in downtown San Francisco in the United States of America. And while we were planning for our second Complexity Weekend, there were some changes in the world associated with 2020. And we went online. We also realized that by going online we could highlight some aspects of complexity as a community of practice, not just as a shared in-person experience but truly a global community that would come together for these weekends. In May, 2020, we had our first online complexity weekend. It was awesome with 20 facilitators, 70 participants, bunch of teams forming, and we got great feedback. It helped us develop into our second Complexity Weekend online which was in October, 2020. And that also was a great experience, a lot of feedback, a lot of building, a lot of teams. And here we are today in May, 2020. It's something that we've built up another layer of participants and another round of facilitators. What would you say about how we got here and where we're at today? One thing I just mentioned is each one of these was so different from the last and it's just evolved so dramatically. I think lots of people are in this cohort have been in previous cohorts. And so they've seen it firsthand how the way that we utilize the technology stack to do these weekends has evolved a lot. And the participant cohorts have grown so much each time. Like this time, last time we had about 100 really active participants during the weekend. This time we're looking at closer to 200. So it's just growing and kind of evolving over time. And we're all along for the ride and we're all influencing that evolution. Shirley, what do you think? Yeah, I'm somebody who joined in actually in October. So my perspective is coming in fully online. So I'm aware of what happened briefly about the start of complexity weekend, but I really see it being online and global and really exploring the online space. And that's a whole new world for a lot of us is taking so much online. Challenges too. Great. Let's take a look at the structure of our community, which is a complex system itself. Complexity weekend is a global community of practice and we base our activities around participation in event specific roles. So here are some of the roles and entry points graphically arranged on this slide. We'll just start with the biggest circle, which is participants. Everyone is a participant. If you're watching live or in replay, if you're on key base, if you're on gather, however you're interacting with complexity weekend, you're a participant. We also have two main entry points for participants to get involved. The first one is a monthly heartbeat, which we'll talk about more in a second, but these are informal and drop-in events that are usually the last weekend of every month, except for the months where we have a full complexity weekend, such as this weekend, which is so fun because we've been looking forward to it for a long time. And at these full complexity weekends, it's really a cohort-based experience. There's a pre-weekend phase that people participate in to various degrees. And that is what builds this cohort experience and a cohort solidarity, shared knowledge and shared experiences together. And then that weekend cohort is always gonna be connected through a key base team and through a special gather space that only they have access to, but then there's also a broader community of those who are alumni of weekends, and also those who haven't yet participated in a weekend. We're all participants. Teams are forming before, during, and after the weekend. We'll talk more about team formation later in this presentation. And then we can also highlight a few of these other roles, which are event facilitators and event organizers. So facilitators and organizers are not special kinds of people. They're participants who have stepped up in an event-specific capacity to help scaffold and support our community. We also point to our associates and our supporters who are those who contribute whether through financial or non-financial means to provide the support for us to persist as a community, and that includes community supporters. Any thoughts on this, either of you two? I think maybe one quick thought is just how dynamic this diagram actually is in reality, because as you were saying, it is event-specific, and these roles are just things that half people will wear for specific events, and people have been facilitators and organizers, then back-to-facilitators, then participants. They've facilitated at a heartbeat and then participated in a cohort. It's like it's all over the place. And the other thing I'll kind of mention is anyone in any of these circles can always step up into the other circle. So for instance, surely in October, amazing participant, you buy a lot of amazing energy to the cohort, and then you kind of express how I'm interested in helping to organize. And so now here you are, having organized our best cohort yet. And it's just like that. If you're interested in facilitating and organizing or anything, just reach out at complexityteamonkeybase or complexityweekend at gmail.com and step up. And it even doesn't have to be that role-based. It can be just in a moment. You could be a participant on a team with other participants and get a bit of facilitator energy going on, right? Where you just realize, hey, someone in the back hasn't really spoken up this whole meeting. Why don't I just ask if they have something to say? That is being a facilitator in that moment. Shirley, what do you think? Yeah, yes, I've been on my own journey, I think in terms of roles coming, you know. And in fact, I think of myself as a participant actually in this cohort as well. But I am also a co-organizer. And that's my primary role to support the community. But yeah, I've been kind of in flux moving. And sometimes I have to remind myself what hat I'm wearing. Oh, maybe I should act a different way in certain instances. But yes, so I did first organize, or excuse me, co-organize a heartbeat, I think in November, right after my first experience, because it was so fun and I just wanted to be involved and it was a good time in my life to do that. Well, thanks again. Yeah, thanks again, Shirley. And that's definitely the pathway is to co-organize with us as absolute co-equals in a heartbeat, more informal. It's a four-week sprint with an organizing, whereas the weekend is a bit longer and we like people to have organized a heartbeat previously. So complex systems are often about multiple representations and perspectives. So this is sort of the role-based graphical layout. Let's look at the layout through time. We have here in the green curvy line, the community energy. So read into that, what you will. The peaks are on the weekends. We have about over 50 of you are watching live and many more people in our cohort will be finishing work or waking up and watching this in replay. So we have the most synchronous energy during the weekend, even though not every single person is awake at each moment, that's when the most overlap and the most opportunity for synchronous connection occurs. We also have these smaller energy peaks every single month that's not a weekend. Those are our heartbeat events. Big shout out to an early organizer, JP, who introduced that idea of a heartbeat and circulating energy through the system. We're right here in the May, 2021 weekend, but we can already look ahead to the heartbeats to come and to November, 2021, which is gonna be our second cohort this year. And then through deep time, which we'll talk more about soon, we will have these heartbeats every month and we will have two weekend based cohorts every year. There's the green line with energy, but there's also this yellow line. And that reflects you, your relationships and your team. Each one of us here are on our own complexity journey. And hopefully you'll find relationships and teams that help you develop in that capacity. And so in the background is you and your team developing. It's not a sprint. One thing that differentiates complexity weekend from other hackathon styled events is we're not competing. We're not pitching at the end of the weekend. We're not getting to the minimum viable product and then dissipating. We're here to have impact through deep time. And that means that we're there more like a scaffold for you and your team to develop in the background. So when you're ready to communicate, share, get feedback, ask for assistance, all those things, we're there for you and your team. And that's happening on your own schedule, on your own pace. Anything else you wanna add about these? No, I think that hit it really well. Let's keep going. Great. Let's look at a little bit of the overview of this weekend. There's sort of three phases to the weekend. There's the introduction, which is what we're in right now. Then there's gonna be a long middle section of the weekend. And then there's gonna be a closing ceremony. And the days here are written as Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but it actually might be different days for you and that's okay. So I think of it as kind of like a bathtub or a bookshelf. We have a start and an end, and then everything in between is just an accordion. It's what you make of it. But in broad strokes on Friday in this introductory phase, we're gonna have the welcome live stream, which is what we're in right now. We're gonna have a keynote presentation and panel with Dave Snowden, who we'll talk more about soon. We're also then gonna go right after this live stream, jump right into our cohort specific gather space and just have a little bit to just mingle as if it were flooding out of a keynote address in person. Let's just hang out in person and connect with each other for perhaps the first time. Also seeing some old friends. At that point, the sessions will begin. And remember to check the single source of truth spreadsheet at this address at the bottom. That's really gonna be the point of reference for the program. That's gonna come into play during the weekend. That whole middle phase for all of Saturday and almost all of Sunday, check the program to find out what's happening. There's going to be a variety of events ranging from facilitator led, live and interactive sessions in gather, which are unrecorded unless we specifically note that. You can also attend office hours at almost every single hour of the day. We have facilitators who are going to be bringing their experience and their perspective to an office hour session. So you can go and just say, what do I do? Or say, I've been reading your papers for years. Can you fill in the dots for me here? And then even a level less formal, not less powerful, but certainly less formal is just to be around gather. And when we're in gather, we're showing up for each other at the times and in the ways that work for us. And you'll find other people who are there at that time. That's really where you connect with other participants and start to identify and grow the seeds of teams, which are planted and developed through deep time. And then on Sunday, as we head towards the closing ceremony in your teams, we're gonna be trying to have you prepare a presentation and either record about a five minute video, which we can play on the closing ceremony live stream, or it will be okay to have you present life. And then that closing ceremony is gonna be an opportunity for the teams to share out a little bit about what they've been working on and less about, we did it, we finished it, we answered this complex problem because we know that's not how complex problems work, but more to say, here's who we are, where we're coming from, where we've gotten as far as purpose and vision over the weekend. And here's how we're gonna keep moving forward on that. And that's gonna be the end of the weekend logistically. But again, it's not the end of your complexity journey for an individual or a team. Anything to add on that? Yeah, I think the way to think about this weekend is there is kind of a natural flow to it. As organizers, our kind of main mantra is anybody who wants to be on a team this weekend will find their way onto a team as a valued member. And so we're really gonna be focusing on that. Getting into Saturday today is really more about sense making together, starting to learn about complexity. A lot of people over a third, typically each cohort are totally new to complexity. So we're just gonna be trying to understand this from different perspectives today. And then we really kick off the team seed formation. And we will make announcements throughout this whole and have different live streams to kind of go through this. But you get the team seeds to start to form and then getting into Sunday is when the teams have mostly formed and some will still be forming then. It's totally dynamic and by the Sunday closing live stream that's kind of the time to share with everyone else in the cohort what your team's been up to, what your shared purpose is and all that. So that's one point and then I think the only other point that I can think of and surely I'd love to hear what you think after is just making sure that you're taking care of yourself this weekend. Because this is even more so than last but where it is truly global. Like it is not anchored to any particular time zone. There will be activity basically every hour from now until the end. And none of us are gonna be up that whole time. So be sure to sleep, be sure to take a break, eat. It's really exciting, especially as Keybase really fires up and we're all just connected to each other nearly almost, but do take time away and also be very conscious to other people on your team who will be sleeping at different points and leverage the asynchronous with the synchronous to really pull everyone together. Shirley, what do you think? Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that there is this energy that is it just spreads throughout the group. I remember the last time I think my heartbeat because now we all have these they're really elevated for a long time. After the event, the closing ceremony, so I don't wanna get people too excited but because it isn't a sprint but there is this energy that I think is wonderful. And I think too that for me personally as a co-organizer I have read people's intros and kind of have a feel for what people are interested in. So I might come up to you, message you or come up to you in a gather and say, oh, hey, you wanna talk to this facilitator who actually specializes in an area that you might be interested in or vice versa and try to kind of gather folks just matchmaking I guess in some sense because there while we have a lot of interest we have the umbrella of complexity. But sometimes when you have a certain interest you wanna just chit chat with people. Yep, we always want to be connecting the general to the specific, the macro and the micro and the ideas to the applications we all have so much to learn on all those fronts. In the program, you'll find that at the single source of truth link which we'll post right now in the live chat in case you haven't seen us spam it 500 times. You'll see that the time is provided in UTC aka GMT goes by both names, we don't know which one is more proper but we don't have a reference time zone. We wanna be exploring the emerging adequate and the best practices for working with truly distributed teams for teams that are remote first and that are accessible and inclusive of not just different backgrounds and skill sets but truly different time zones which is why we have such a strong asynchronous component. We're gonna be making edits and tweaks to this program throughout the weekend. For example, a facilitator might say, hey, something came up, can you push this back by an hour? And we're gonna be editing it as needed. So shouldn't change too much but always make sure to check the program for the single source of truth. It's our point of reference and that's not a statement about truth being absolute. It's a logistical claim about how we need to have a point of reference as a community and as a cohort and as teams so that we're on the same page. We're here in this 1600 UTC live stream with three of our four organizers. We'll introduce Jared, our fourth organizer here in just a few seconds and then we're gonna be having as stated before, two hours with Dave Snowden. We're then gonna adjourn together and that's when it's gonna kick off. That's when we're gonna be just starting the nonstop sessions. Anything to add on the program overall? Shirley, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think because the time zone converter or conversion is a bit of a task, I have to say. I hope people will be patient with it. It's not perfect. We have so many different frames of reference and so we selected that trying to hit as many people as possible, but of course feedback is encouraged and desired. We wanna know what works, what doesn't. So I apply that across the board, but certainly with the program as well. It's so true about the multiple frames of reference and that is sort of, it's easy when we can look at the times and just subtract a number or put it on our calendar, but then think about the real cultural and the interpersonal variation around the world as well. So we're working on how to integrate multiple frames of references. So apologies that if it's not in your reference time zone because it's not in anyone's reference time zone, that's kind of how complexity is. How do we participate? There are five avenues to participation. These are the five broad avenues of participation. Maybe there are more and they're as follows. The first two are at will. You can do these at any time. You don't need to go synchronous. You don't need to be dressed any specific way. Any time of day for you, you can one, interact on Keybase. Greetings. Hey Jared. Welcome. Hey Jared. You can interact on Keybase. You can go to our cohort specific team. You can leave an introduction if you haven't. You can leave emojis on other people's posts to let them know that they've been seen and heard. Also asynchronously or at will, you can watch or rewatch the facilitator introduction videos. So each facilitator made an intro video just maybe five to 20 minutes long. And it's just to introduce themselves to you because they're gonna be in gather, hanging out with us, doing office hours, leading those facilitated sessions and the introduction videos are just to start the conversation. Just to get you excited and to give you a little bit of a taste of the diversity of facilitators who are coming to the table. And then the other three avenues are a little bit more synchronous. So three is hang out and work and gather. So anytime you wanna go to our gather space, just drop in and it's our space to hang out with. When you're in gather, you can be attending in office hours or a facilitated session. Check the program for that or not just hang out in the central cafe and bump into somebody. And five is when you're feeling like you want to seed or join onto a team, we will make sure that you have a team if you want to be joining one. You can always go on Keybase in our cohort team to the I need a team Keybase channel and just say, we're a team of four and we're looking for this skill. Or on the other side of the table, I have this skill and I'm looking to contribute to these kinds of problems, these kinds of teams. Also you can go to the explore channels or engage through facilitators. Basically as a community of practice we really highlight the importance of learning by doing and joining diverse teams. And you can do that through Keybase or through gather. Any thoughts on that or welcome, Jared. Yeah, what do you think about that, Jared? Five avenues of participation or others? Yeah, participate wherever you can. I think is and take breaks whenever you need them. You can easily blow yourself up by pushing too hard to be part of everything. So yeah, by the way, I'm Jared. I'm the other organizer and I'll be around. I don't think I'm running any special sessions. If people are interested, I may teach some workshops on programming or tooling. If that's something that interests you, please contact me on Keybase. Nice, great. Let's go ahead and try. I was gonna say also that you can contact anyone through the chat as well. So facilitator or participant, no matter who it is in our cohort, direct message to. Yeah, it's actually, we would recommend that because there are all these channels, but it's also you're hitting 200 people or however many are in whatever explore channel. But one-on-ones, that's the way our cohort gets interconnected and forms this amazing network of interaction. So really encouraged one-on-ones. Great. Let's turn to the icebreaker slash participant information tab. Shirley, do you wanna cover this one? Yes, okay. So there is a new tab that was added this morning, I believe in the single source of truth. And it is a tab where participants, it is an icebreaker in the sense that participants can go in and answer questions. I put the information in the spreadsheet so others can have an idea about some of your thoughts. And of course, this also includes facilitators as well, I believe. Yes, we'll make sure. Yes, okay, okay. So, you know, there are more general questions. What is complexity to you? Things you're looking for here in this community. Some of the stuff you could also post in Keybase when we have appropriate channels. And also contact me, contact me, you know, about something you wanna offer or talk to people about, offer, you know, some specific skills even. Also, that can happen in Keybase, but here's another way that people can reference this information at once in the spreadsheet. And it is also connected to people's names, first names at least, and Keybase user name. So I think that can be a fun thing, fun activity, so that you can do it anytime. Excuse me, and look at it anytime. Great, and this really just helps us see the diversity of our participants in terms of their understanding and sense of complexity and what they're sort of looking for and looking to be contacted about. Let's turn to you. Actually real quick, Jared, having facilitated or and co-organized in the past, like you've seen these answers, you know, for participants in this tab in different cohorts. What's kind of been your thought to kind of seeing all the varied perspectives on complexity and, you know, every personalized kind of view you can have? Yeah, I mean, I guess for participants in this cohort, I think that you should just feel free to say whatever it is that's on your mind. Because people are coming here. I mean, there are some people that are into mathematical modeling and whatnot, but there's a lot of other perspectives. And you're here to add what you can and learn what you can. So if you think that it's off the wall, that's fine as long as it's polite. Say what you're thinking, say what you need and we'll get to you, hopefully. I think put it another way would be like, show up as your most authentic self and that's kind of the best way to contribute to the cohort. Because if we all show up as our authentic selves, then we can truly mix and match all these very diverse interesting perspectives into amazing emergent holes. Right, there's no single sense of complexity. There's no way to be a participant other than just the way that it's presenting itself to you. Let's turn to one of our key tools, one of our two key tools, that's Keybase. So Shirley wanna give a little rundown on this Keybase slide. Yes, right. So, you've registered as participants, facilitators in this cohort. So, you should have a Keybase username, hopefully you do. If you don't, please contact us. I'm not sure how. Not a Keybase. And complexityweekend.gmail.com, email. Okay, complexityweekend.gmail.com. And then gather, we'll be there as well today. So, you know, this is asynchronous team chat. Could also be synchronous if you're in there together chatting away. But we have some tutorials on this. But, you know, you'll see a very long list now of channels. Don't be intimidated, because I know that for folks who are coming on new, there's a lot in there. Got your own pace. You know, don't feel like, oh my God, there's like whatever, 2,000 messages here. You don't have to see all of them and you could just kind of jump in where you are. So, we encourage that. But it really is, would be great if you could introduce yourself, just briefly, you know, grounded in who you are as a human being too, is important. Yeah, join channels. You can see where there's a little gear and you can browse all the channels, join them as you wish. But it would be great if you could post your introduction. And, you know, if you need any help with Keybase, please, again, reach out through the Gmail or gather. Great. Let's turn to our second tool, which is gather, as we're about halfway done with this organizer introduction. So please continue gather surely. Yes, I think about 20 folks were in gather this morning before this session and it was really fun to see people. For some, it was the first time that they were in that space and I felt like, oh yeah, we got some feedback that it was fun and people were wandering around and it was, it is a large space actually now with rooms and a hub. So we do have maps out there or in there, excuse me, that you can access. There are little bulletins throughout the space with different posters, as we call them. But a lot of the introductory information is in the welcome house, which looks like a house and is off of the cafe on one side. Yep, I have the map up here. So why don't you just swipe this bird's eye view and then head into some tips about how to use gather best. Sure, well, actually there. Okay, I didn't realize because I don't know what you're sharing. There is the directory of the entire space and you may notice that when you're in any of these rooms, excuse me, you can hit the minimap but it only shows you the room you're in. So just be aware of that. So we added this map that Sean actually made and it's wonderful. The committee made, we gather committee made. Okay, the committee made this map. Yes, and we made the whole space for this cohort. So you can get a bird's eye view, just to ground yourself in this. It's a real landscape really. It even has a pond, moonlit pond. I'm not really sure how that fits into the buildings and whatnot, but this is all, this is fun stuff. It is fun. And this is now the gather interface. So this is what it looks like when you're using it. What are some key tips, Shirley, for using this interface best? Do you mean the whole platform? Just, I have slide 13, just what people will see when they're in, gather, in their browser. What is some tips or what are some ways that people can make the best of it? Well, so on the left-hand side of your screen, you have a variety of icons when you're in gather. And you can drop down and chat with folks, there's speech bubbles. You can see how many people are in gather and so that's the entire space. It is not the room you're in or anything. And those are some of the main features there. And then, of course, you use your arrow buttons to move around the space. Sometimes you might get a little stuck because you might be aware as you go into it that this is a virtual space, but it's obviously physical in the sense that we have embedded objects that you cannot walk through, can't walk through the table. Sometimes, actually, it's a little tricky because you can walk through tables and share sometimes. Some of that is made to facilitate movement. So, yeah, Sean, anyone else have anything to add to that? I'm actually curious, Jared, from your perspective, kind of, again, having seen a lot of history when we first kind of adopted gather from when we went fully online. Like, what does the gatherer space feel like to you? Like, what are interactions in that space feel like? How does it help facilitate interaction during the weekend? Personally, I think gather is very natural. But that might be because I'm a very text-oriented person. So, to me, any kind of face-to-face interaction with video and high interactivity seems to me to be like, that's the same thing. I'm talking to Sean on a video phone that I may as well be sitting right next to Sean, shoulder to shoulder. I think it may differ for different people. But one thing that gather really does emulate well is the ability to naturally associate. So, if you want to pull back from a conversation, you can escape out of that closed screen and you can walk away with your character, right? You can go to the bathroom, you can turn off, you can come back on. And so, you shouldn't feel, you know, you're not in a video conference. You shouldn't feel entrapped by any conversation. That's my key point with gather. And I think that's really useful for that. And I think it reminds us that it's more like a party than a lecture. So, the live streams are recorded so that we can include people across time zones. But gather is really about showing up for each other when we're there. What will people find in gather? Well, people. So, let's talk about the different people and the roles that are constituting this complexity weekend organism. We'll start with the four of us, the organizers. So, any organizer thoughts? Nice photos there, that's awesome. Look at Sharp. As we've described, though, the organizers are just events, specific roles. They're people who like to organize and there are many different skills and many different perspectives that even they bring to the table. So, if you wanna get involved in organizing it anyway, just reach out to us. But we really had an awesome time and I really appreciate that each one of us was able to step up and volunteer and to be in this position. Yeah, it was a pleasure. It really was a pleasure and it was great times. How about our facilitators? Do you wanna, who wants to give an overview of the facilitators? Shirley, you wanna take it over? Sure. So, here we have all our facilitators, their key base names and their photos. They're just a really great group of diverse thinkers, a lot of different backgrounds and we really try to get a diverse group of people and we look forward to continuing to work on that. Awesome, these facilitators are the centers of gravity. They really make it happen and their participants as well. So, some are bringing a specific project and saying, I'm looking for people to work on this project with me. Other times, they're coming just to help catalyze and help your projects. So, they're all there for you in their own ways because they come from also all over the world and with many different skill sets just like we do as participants. And you'll see, yeah. Sorry, I'm just curious. Jared, you've been a facilitator in the past. Could you go into the experience of being a facilitator just so we can share that on the live stream? Yeah, I think that there are broadly, I don't know. It's very common for me to, and I think a lot of other people are like this to wanna categorize stuff. So, for safety's sake, it's my categorization, but I would say there's broadly two kinds of facilitator experience and I've been on both sides of the fence. There's one where the facilitator really just facilitates. And I think that that's how we originally envisioned the job. The idea would be to allow groups to form naturally around an idea. And then after the enucleation point when the group is in the storming phase, you step back and you're just there offering tools, trips, tips, tricks, all the good stuff without becoming two hands on. There's also another kind of facilitator which I'm saying maybe is increasing in commonness, but that's a person that becomes sort of a group leader and then pushes the project to a certain point until it becomes like division of labor stage and then they step back. And I've seen both. There may be other versions. I'm open to that. I'd like to see it. So, yeah. It's intentionally vague. I think we don't try to, as an organization, broadcast any particular categorization because there's actually new forms seem to kind of pop up now and then. And it's just, it's this facilitator title and people have so many different directions they're gonna take. And that's also why our facilitator batch is so large is because then you get across the whole spectrum of not only their perspectives and backgrounds, but also their approaches to facilitation. There's just diversity in all dimensions. Jared? If I may. One thing I think that you'll see here that we have always delighted in as organizers is you will see emergent behavior, not only in yourself, but amongst the groups and the facilitator is itself an emergent role. You'll see organization pop up. That in itself is complexity, right? It's meta, meta complexity. We're all about that here. Great. And on the last part, before we get to the participants, we'll just highlight thanks so much to the gather committee, which is constituted by Sean, Shirley, Steven, Alexandra, and Barb. This is a really fun committee. So if you like gather and you're excited by the possibilities, get in touch with any of these people, their key base names are written there below. And that's something that we'll look forward to augmenting and building on in future events. Let's get to the participants. So Sean, please take it away with the participants. Who are we? Sure. Yeah, great question. It is kind of hard to answer, especially given most of the registration forms were text based, but we may do. So this is definitely the largest cohort we've had so far. So we're over 200 participants, right? Over 30 facilitators, over 50 countries. So it's also becoming more and more global unless fixated on particular time zones. There's still a little bit of a lean toward US, UK, Canada, but it's growing. That other side of the pie chart is growing and it's amazing to watch. And basically, that's what's driving this to be a nonstop kind of every hour there's going to be some activity because it is a global experience. And we need to keep that in mind when we form teams, that we open a membership slots up in the team for people in other time zones and really keep that space open. And you actually find you get into a pattern of working with people across the globe that just flows. You might be going to bed and another person's waking up and you can just pass workloads that way. And we'll get into all that throughout the weekend. But if we go to the next slide, we just were kind of mapping out some of the text-based responses people gave to the question, what kinds of problems or topics are you most interested in applying complexity science to? And complexity science is also not all that we do here. It's complexity thinking generally. There's non-scientific approaches to complexity that are equally valid. So just that is the framing on this particular answer. But what's really interesting about this diagram is not only do you see some things, you know, design, development, evolution, governance, social, but really how wide the tail of the distribution is. There's so many different diverse edges out there. And complexity weekend is really all about connecting those edges up and getting to some innovation across that. So looking at this diagram, anyone else, any thoughts? One thought is just that there's always, amongst any two people or within any team, there's things we share and there's things that make us unique and there's diversity amongst the team. And so the things that we share, it's our strength because that's how we have common understanding. And then where we're unique, that's also our strength if we can figure out how to integrate it under a complexity way of thinking. I think actually just looking at some of these things, ecosystems on the tail, ecosystems, right? We've got technical, we've got interdisciplinary, we've got agent, innovation, public, participants, business, networks. I mean, it's just all over the map, living. So it's just, you know, get into these conversations with people and gather and find where those edges connect up to something interesting and that's really what the weekend's all about. So the next slide is actually another question which was, you know, what is your preferred teamwork style? And this again had a long distribution, a long tail distribution. So, you know, some commonalities for everyone were things like collaborative, you know, teamwork groups like tasks, diverse, you know, asynchronous, it was an interesting one to be so large. But there's this huge distribution, the ways people like to work as teams. And that's something to keep in mind too as you're forming teams is be very, you know, respectful, inclusive about the differences all the teammates have in lots of dimensions, not just communication style and background and perspectives but also the way that they like to work together. Those are all things that you need to iron out as a team so that you can work as effectively as effective as possible. Shirley, Jared, any thoughts? Let's go to the next one. That sounds good. So this other one was actually a numerical question. Yay. So what is your familiarity with complexity? And again, this is 200 plus of us in the cohort. It's a really interesting distribution actually. I don't know why nine is so not popular. People just do not want to say they're nine out of 10. You skip over nine, you go from eight to 10. Yeah, exactly. You're either 10 or you're... But the important thing in this diagram is levels, you know, one through four, that's probably half the people, you know, like most people are beginners. And the other thing that we like to say is while there are some 10s, they're rare and it's also hard to be an expert in complexity just because your understanding of complexity, it may only relate to certain, you know, three or four different disciplines. And complexity is in most disciplines. So you really have to understand how it's embodied in many, many, many, many disciplines to be like an expert in complexity, the general idea. And that can be hard for one person to do in a lifetime. Also on that note, even if you studied for 50 years in one field, you still would not be at the bottom of that rabbit hole. And especially for those for whom complexity has been a theoretical endeavor, a learning endeavor, we all have so much to learn about applying complexity. So there's many dimensions and many ways of learning and doing complexity. And this self-assessment, there's no test, there's no competency certificate. This is self-assessment. So you might be quite surprised to find out who self-evaluates at a one. And hopefully that should make you feel comfortable about wherever you are in your journey. Nice. Let's talk about backgrounds. And then surely, Jerry, I'd love to hear your perspective. So just looking at the different sectors and backgrounds that people put down, we had kind of a checklist that people could check. And they could be multiple, right? So that's important to keep in mind. This sums up to more than 200. But basically, you know, we have a third student, a third academia, and this is with that tag. So they could also be an industry, you know, they could be doing other things too. You know, almost 20% nonprofit, right? For-profit industry hovering around 15%. Government, is there a little under 10, right? Media is an interesting one. Not too many media. And so we'll have to really seek out that perspective in order to balance all of our teams with that perspective. Startups are a little under 20%. And then self-employed is also a third. And that's actually a really great one because we all, I think, like learning about complexity by doing and stuff like that. But if you could make it your work and you can really find a way to build revenue to support your team yourself as an individual, that's an amazing skill in this community practice. And knowing that a third of people have that self-employment expertise is amazing. So I'm really looking forward to that. Jared Shirley, any thoughts on the last two slides? One thing I will say is that this is an interesting diagram in terms of people assessing their own familiarity with things. Seeing a uniform distribution is very fascinating. Notably, there's a drop-off at level eight. Don't be intimidated in general by this notion of familiarity with complexity. This is not something that you have to have to be here. I emphasize that during the pre-week in phase. And I still want to push that. Also, it's the beginner who asks the prescient question that can change the course of the expert and the whole team and the whole community. So beginners asking questions and beginners sharing their perspective, it's what you're here for. So please, everyone feel welcome to share their views and ask questions. What was that term you used? And you won't hear, we're moving on because we have content to cover. No, we're here to be sharing and to be communicating across these differences. Any other thoughts on this, Shirley? Well, I was just, yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say that you could also look at it as a journey of one individual and they start out with a lot of questions and they end with a lot of questions. Great. That's the people roles that we covered. And before we get to our values, there are also some organizations and some institutions that support us in what we do in very important ways. So, Sean, you want to cover these next two and we'll get to them. Yeah, so we've got about 10 more minutes, so I'm just gonna go through our associates and our supporters for our cohort. And then we'll talk about purpose and values for the remainder of the time, which are key to how we engage each other during this weekend. But really quickly, our associates, our organizations out there that have a lot of vision alignment with Complexity Weekend and we collaborate often through deep time with each other. So every cycle, you might see Innovator's Box, it's an innovation, a lot of these that they're around in an ecosystem that we're building with them. And so they're really, really amazing organizations. You'll see Monica around gather from Innovator's Box one of our facilitators is associated with the hub for systems innovation through physical hubs around systems innovation. Remotor Consulting Group, RJ, Dan helped consult remote teams, research mentors, one-on-one mentorship for people interested in research. That also Dan and I work on together. These are organizations that are really interesting, go to their websites, check them out and they're supporting our cohort. So we can really respond by going and supporting them and seeing kind of what they're all about. Speaking of support, supporters are a role for organizations where they help us out with the in-kind or financial help because it does cost money to produce this. And a lot of supporters are actually individual supporters, people who gave money while they were registering. We really appreciate that. It all goes toward good stuff. We'll talk about that in a second. But really quickly, the different supporters, Wolfram Language is really nice. They've actually contributed a lot of software. If you're familiar with Wolfram at all, definitely check it out. We have facilitators from their organization. Most of these organizations have people present, as participants and facilitators. So it's not just this organization out there, they're here with us in the cohort experiencing things with us. If you get involved, interested in Wolfram Language at all, you can get some, your team can actually get some licenses and stuff. We'll work through all that in later live streams. Love is Unlimited, Second Time Supporting, which is really, really appreciate it. Go to the website, kind of see what they're all about. I know it's a lot. You'll meet Jax, who's a facilitator from this organization. A lot about accounting from a complexity perspective, which is really beautiful. Much cool stuff on the website. Dialectic Simulations Consulting, is him as a facilitator from this organization. He does consulting in this really amazing, complexity-driven perspective, which you should check out. Go to the website, check it out. And thank you, Shirley, for contributing. We really appreciate that. For those who wanna be a community supporter, they can go to this PayPal link, or just get in touch with us, because one of our core values is that there's never a financial barrier. We wanna be accessible for people who just don't have the funds now or ever. It's just not relevant because we're all gonna support each other in this journey. If you wanna support us, again, the PayPal is a good way or get in touch with us. The main costs that we do have are the bandwidth for gather to make sure that we can have the capacity that we wanna have simultaneously. And then we also honor our facilitators, not value their time, which is priceless, but just honor them with an optional honorarium. And it also helps us support future CW events. We're not yet a 501C3 nonprofit, but we're gonna get there. So all of you complexity lawyers and organizers, that's a great place for you to get involved. In these last eight to 10 minutes before we have our keynote jump on, let's cover maybe one of the most important parts, which is our purpose, values and guidelines. So Sean, take us through maybe all three or we can stop at each one or we can pause at the end. Sounds good. Yeah, the way that I think we like to think of this, we organize complexity a weekend from a complexity perspective. And so we're all agents in this system, right? And maybe as an agent, literal gather agent, how could you maybe embody some values from the macro perspective, right? From the organization down that influence your nearest neighbor interactions and your ways of interacting so that we can reinforce that, but also evolve and expand it. So at the highest level, we've got purpose, which is essentially why are we all even here, right? Why did we all agree that complexity was interesting enough to register for this, right? But so we all are interested in learning complexity, science, complexity thinking by doing, by actually getting your hands dirty and trying to influence systems in a positive way and learn how complexity is embodied in particular systems. We also serve through deep time. You might have heard deep time several times already in this hour. This organization will be continuing to do monthly heartbeats. So we continue to do bi-annual weekend cohorts. It's gonna be happening basically for all time if we can do it, if we can come together as an organization to make that happen. So our individual, our team journeys have that backdrop that they can always fall back into and then out of again. And then lastly, the type of innovation we're really going for is one that requires a high degree of diversity. A lot of the problems we're trying to solve are some of the hardest problems that are out there. They evolve in interesting ways. They connect across many, many disciplines. And the only way to really as a team to handle that is to try to get more people to the table that have all these different perspectives embodied so that you can find the truth together and actually find a valuable way to push forward. One last thing I'll say about that before I open up to everyone else is one thing we're really gonna encourage this weekend is talking to stakeholders. Stakeholders are anyone who has, is impacted by a system. So you as a team are starting to focus on, say hospitals, talk to a facilitator and see if they know a nurse or a doctor, anyone you can talk to to really ground your thinking and your problem statement and the solution you're coming up with. That feedback is critical to actually get at the truth. So any thoughts about purpose that we're gonna move on to values and guidelines? Purpose is the North Star. Yeah, I would say that, I mean, if you're gonna do anything here, do it with the collective purpose in mind. We're all stepping up and no one's being paid to be here. So it's really important that we're aligned on these qualitative dimensions because we just don't have the bandwidth to do anything else. Let's go to the values. Thanks, okay. So values are kind of one step down. It's just thinking of, okay, we got purpose, our North Star, right? We've got values that are kind of as a community, what have we agreed upon? And these are living, breathing values. They change as people give feedback on these or if you have any thoughts, post them in Keybase right now and they will be integrated. But at a high level, complexity weekend is itself a complex system and indeed our teams are complex systems. Us as individuals are complex systems. It's really all throughout all the different layers, complexities first. Anything we learn about complexity as it's embodied in a particular system, we can take some of that understanding and try to bring it back into the way we organize these events, the way we organize our community practice, the way we organize our teams, all of it is a relevant complexity system or complex system to kind of apply this thinking to. And also education itself is an active thing. We actually, we think the best way to learn complexity is by doing it, is by actually unpacking the terms, what is emergence, what is non-linearity, what are these concepts at an abstract level for complex systems? How does it actually get embodied in a social colony or in a traffic system, right? Or any number of different systems, physical, chemical, whatever. It's only by unpacking those terms in these specific systems that you really get a grounding and then you pull it back up into the abstract and you can keep going, you can do this, you knew complexity again a million times and get something different every time out of it. And then I'll say teamwork really makes the dream work as our phrase, but it's really because it's hard as an individual to embody so many different perspectives that the team is really makes that more possible. So we encourage teamwork, but of course it's up to you, you can do individual as a team, it's totally your journey. Participation, it involves a lot of things, accessibility, inclusion, respect. These are things that help to create the diversity, backdrops that makes our team so diverse and everything so interesting in this cohort. So putting those forward is really important. And then really just being brave, it can be uncomfortable sometimes to interface with complexity, it's uncertain. There's things you will not know, but if you're open to learning and you're open to stepping up and being brave with your interaction and showing up and gather and chatting in key base even though you may sound like a question that's silly, it's not, someone out there is learning from it. So that bravery is so key. Any thoughts on core values before we move on to guidelines? I think we'll have more time in a future organizer stream. Let's cover the two minutes of participation guidelines and then we'll have the next segment beginning soon. Nice, and we'll have other live streams that you'll see in the program. So we'll be back. Participation guidelines are the lowest level. We understand the purpose, we understand the values. How can I as an agent in the system, as an individual through my interactions embody these values and further the feel of this community and the growth of the community? So adopting a complexity thinking mindset is kind of our top point, which is lots of things, right? That means I come in with a beginner's mindset. I'm humble, right? I seek the truth wherever it is, disregard disciplinary boundaries. Do things that get you kind of in the mindset to absorb this complexity understanding. Communication is key. And so this isn't a typical weekend hackathon. We're not looking for deliverable at the end, like we mentioned earlier. It's more about your team and it's more about the way your team communicates and what shared purpose do you have together? How are you gonna meet multiple times after the weekend on an ongoing basis to really reach that purpose together? Those are more important to us and the relationships than any deliverable you'll come up with in the next 72 hours. And then technology. This is kind of a techie stack in a sense. Gathering, Keybase. Doing our best we can to onboard everyone onto it, but the reason we went with this tech stack is that we feel like it produces the best emergent outcome for the cohort. But it is limited, right? It's technology and technology is just a tool. And ultimately we're humans first. So there's things we can do with the technology to optimize it, like put your video on when you can. So there's this human relationship interaction like Jared was getting at. We're sitting like we're next to each other and gather if you have that video on. If you have it off, it may make you more comfortable but it's actually hurting the cohort to some degree. You're not having as much of an interaction as you can. At the same time, turning your microphone off when you're not talking, just keeping that background noise down is really important. And I think lastly I'll just say, participate when you can, take breaks when you need to. But when you do show up, just try to show it fully and try to give with every interaction. And then take time when you need to rest, recover, process, honestly. You're gonna be doing a lot of that this weekend. And get out and really connect to people on the edges and see what interesting synthesis can occur. So I think I'm done with that. Any thoughts on guidelines before we move on to our keynote, which I'm very excited for? We'll be ready to bring Dave on when he joins. And we have facilitator Alexandra staffing the green room. So let's actually just take a second here, unpack these participation guidelines and he'll join in just a few minutes. I think the one that really stood out to me was embrace technology, but know its limits, especially as how that relates to some of the more values that we were talking about. How are we gonna have inclusive teams when people are using different technology, when there's lag, when we're talking across countries? Take an extra breath, allow that somebody else might be taking a few more seconds for a cultural or for a computational reason. How can we help each other participate with the technology that we have? And that's about relating as humans and thinking about the other person on the other side there and thinking about how the dynamic between the two of you is gonna play out given the opportunities and the constraints that we have. Shirley or Jared, what's one that stands out to you or one that you'd wanna highlight? Yeah, Shirley first then Jared. Yeah, I mean, I was really thinking about that because so much communication is non-verbal. So if people are actually not on camera, wow, you know, it would be hard sometimes to have contacts to communications. So really, yeah, I'd like to take a breath, be patient, keep this in mind, keep in mind the limitations and affordances of the community, excuse me, communication tools we are using or technology tools. This is also, you know, well, in gather as well. So yeah, there's a lot to unpack and explore as we, as a lot of communities are so much more online or operating online. Yeah, a lot there, a lot there to think about. So at least that space to take a break or breath is good. Jared, what's your last thought? And then Dave is ready to join. So we'll have him join in just a second. So Jared, close us out here. Yeah, the only thing I would add is this is a good opportunity to explore different sides of yourself. If you're used to being a wallflower, you know, try role-playing somebody that's not a wallflower. If you're used to being a leader, try sitting in the rear and just offering help. Be open to change and allow something to emerge from this. Nice. Awesome. That was a quick hour. Thanks again, organizers, and thanks to the more than 60 of you who are watching live. We're gonna be bringing on Dave Snowden in just a second. So to the other organizers, you can hop off this video call and join the live stream. I'll see you in the live chat and then I'll see you all on Keybase and Gather in just a few minutes. See you later. All right, bye. Greetings. Hello, Dave. Hello, Dave. Hi there. It's all wood. Perfectly timed. I hear a feedback. So if you're listening to this stream or something, or if you have any other way to not have feedback, but it will probably only be when I'm speaking. So when you're speaking, it won't have feedback. Well, welcome. Well, welcome. Feedback is a complex idea. You don't have a problem with Zoom. You do no feedback. Absolutely. Absolutely. So while you're setting that up, welcome to Dave Snowden. I'm gonna take off my headphones so that I don't have that repression of speech, but Dave, thanks so much. It's truly an honor. We really appreciate that you've come on to provide this keynote for us. We're just looking forward to what you have to share and we'll look forward to your presentation in the following panel, which will also feature facilitator Nancy Mills. So please, Dave, take it away and I'll make the live stream look the way that highlights you best. You're all right. You possibly even let me see people. It's a lot easier to present when you've got an audience. Okay, so I'm gonna speak for about 25, 30 minutes, yeah, and provide an overview. There are a couple of elements on this. First of all, I want to talk about the nature of the field and where I'm positioned in it. And then I want to go on and talk about the European Union handbook on how to manage income tax in a crisis, which has just come out and for which I was the principal author. So that's the pattern for today. So the overall name for the field is naturalizing sense-making. That it's now acknowledged as one of five distinct schools of sense-making. Along with people like Carl Weik and Brenda Durvin and Gary Klein. I define sense-making as how do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it? And with that comes the concept of sufficiency. Yeah, it's almost like how do I know when I know as much as I can do to make a reasonable decision in context? It's another way of phrasing that. The naturalizing element comes from that use in philosophy as in, for example, naturalizing epistemology, which says to root what you do in the natural sciences. So the approach I've adopted for over 20 years now is to say, what do we know from natural science about the nature of systems and nature of human decision-making? And then we use that in complexity terms as an enabling constraint. And we develop methods and tools and practices within those constraints. So to give a couple of examples outside the field of complexity because we do a lot of work with cognitive neuroscience and anthropology, as well as complexity science. Now, the one I always quote as illustrative of many problems is called inattentional blindness. So if you give a group of radiologists a batch of x-rays and on the final lecture, and ask them to look for anomalies. And on the final x-ray, you put a picture of a gorilla, which is 48 times the size of a cancer nodule in plain sight. On average, 83% of radiologists won't see it, even though their eyes physically scan it. And that's called inattentional blindness. And it arises from a whole set of evolutionary practices. So most people from a Western background, for example, the most that they will scan of available data is about 5%. That then stimulates a series of fragmented memories. And they blend those together. It's called conceptual blending, if you look in the literature. And the first blended pattern, which fits, they apply. So it's a first bit pattern match, not a best fit pattern match. Now, you can see why this arises in evolutionary history. Now, if you think about the early hominoids on the savannas of Africa, you've got something large and yellow with barry sharp teeth running towards you at high speed. Do you want to artistically scan all available data, look up a catalog of the flora and fauna of the African Velt, and have an identified lion, look at best practice case studies and how to avoid being eaten by them? Yeah, by that time, the only book of any use to you will be the book of Jonah from the Old Testament, which is the only example I've found of how to escape from the digestive tract of a large carnivore written by a survivor. So we evolved to make decisions very, very quickly based on a partial data scan privilege in our most recent experience. So once you understand that, kind of like most training and systems analysis just goes out of the window because you won't see what you won't expect to see. So you have to develop methods and tools which make the 17% who have seen something visible before they talk to the 83% who didn't and come to believe they were wrong. I'll give one other example before I go into complexity theory. We know that the human brain picks up negative stories, faster than it picks up positive stories. We also know that human fairy stories, it doesn't matter where you go in the world, don't tell stories of success, except accidentally, they generally tell stories of failure. Yeah, it's not Dick and Jane went into the, stayed at home, did what mommy and daddy said, achieved the family KPIs and the family purpose statement. It's Dick and Jane went into the woods against mommy and daddy's advice, almost got eaten by wolves devoured by witches. We can kind of make sure they have a happy ending because we want them to sleep at night. But the bulk of fairy stories talk about failure. And actually avoidance of failure is a more successful evolutionary strategy than imitation of success because the circumstances of failure frequently repeats and that's some of the biological reason for it. Now, again, if you look at that, that means that for example, building worse practice systems is more effective than best practice systems. Agreeing what you don't want to be provides more coherent guidance than trying to create some sort of anodyne statement of what you would like to be and so on. I could go on with a whole body of examples on this, but the key principle is not to say that everything can be handled by natural science, but we should take what we do know from natural science and use that to inform what we do. And that's where complex adaptive systems theory comes in because that's important. And I want to make it clear that I'm in the group of most people in complexity now would object to it being seen as a set of systems thinking. On the basis, it has actually different origins. It's principle origins are not really in things like cybernetics or systems dynamics. Yeah, there's principle origins are actually in biology and physics and chemistry and then more recently in social systems. So I'm happy to defend that later and I know seeing people get irritated by it but it's not my fault they're wrong they just have to learn to live with it. So complexity from my point of view deals with systems which are deeply entangled. Alicia Giuraro has a lovely phrase for this. She says a complex adaptive system is like bramble bushes in a thicket. And if anybody's ever gone walking and tried to navigate through dense undergrowth and mango swamps would be another one. You know that if you get entangled in bramble bushes it isn't fun. I mean, partly it's painful. And if you tag on the thing actually something hits you in the back of your neck. So everything is connected with everything else but you can't control the connectivity. So seeing complex systems as entangled and this is kind of like where we get into some key features of a complex adaptive system. There is no linear material causality. There is dispossessionality and there are propensities. So I can measure the disposition of a system and talk about how it's likely or unlikely to evolve. And I can talk about the propensities the stable elements of a system. But I can't use a linear cause and effect model. So from my point of view, the minute you see lots of boxes with lots of arrows with lots of feedback loops talking about first and second order whatever that's not complexity. Because it's actually messy, biological, unstructured. And when pattern stabilized they may or may not stabilize for long. I'll just throw something out for discussion later. One of the big things we've done is to actually identify the way in which delusional assemblage theory actually matches the concept of a stranger tractor in complexity. So an assemblage is a pattern of narrative or belief which basically accumulates so it becomes like an attractor well a whirlpool. It's difficult to escape for it. Deluse talks about lines of flight. And from my many and various sins I had to read Trump's tweets every morning for four years for a project. And I'm still suffering with drawrel symptoms from righteous indignation every morning which is a terrible drug. But the thing Trump did which was brilliant was to use key words to trigger tropes which is a better phrase in narrative than memes. So a trope like an assemblage like a stranger tractor is a pattern of interaction which once it forms is very difficult to escape. And it fashions people belief systems. And you can link assemblage by the way with affordances which is a biological concept. So any decision maker is not sitting in abstract making a decision based on what should be. They're dealing with the affordances offered by the current environment and they're within the pattern of assemblages which come from people's past perception of the system. And that is one of the reasons why in complexity we focus on describing the present and effectively starting journeys with a sense of direction. What we don't want to do is to actually have specific goals because if you have goals that assumes you've got an ordered system and it doesn't work like that. Now within complexity as well there are different schools of thought. So one of the most common one and extremely useful one is what I call computational complexity normally associated with Santa Fe. So this is agent-based modeling. It's a mathematical end of it. It has links with things like deterministic chaos and the like. And it's very, very powerful. But I don't think it can encompass everything. The way I famously said this once at Georgia University and I rather upset some people with it is you guys have got to realize that human being's aren't ants but you won't do that because your models wouldn't work if you did. Sorry, there's dangers in being Welsh and having a training in rhetoric you sometimes get carried away. So the field I'm in is actually called anthrocomplexity which is say in complexity in human systems is radically different. That's why for example we take cognitive neuroscience. And this includes what we call the three eyes. So human beings have multiple identities. They fluidly move between them often with ritual without thinking about it. So they don't have single agency which really hits the models. Secondly, we have intentionality. We're not just responding. Human beings are the only group that show empathy outside the kinship group or will actually have empathy with an ideology or an abstraction. And thirdly, we have intelligence. We have reflective ability which means we can learn in very different ways and we can spread learning. And it's the elder distinction, lots of animals create tools but only human beings repurpose tools to something completely different. And this is the last bit of science I'll introduce before I go on to the field guide. One of the key things which has come out of evolutionary biology this is Steven J. Gould and others is a recognition of a process of exaptation which is different from adaptation. So the two examples I normally give are dinosaurs because everybody loves dinosaurs. We now know that all dinosaurs have feathers. The discovery in Northern China have been fascinating and they were very colorful. So the argument is these things evolved for warmth and sexual display. We then get a class of dinosaurs who are quite small who develop extended skin flaps on their forelimbs to better display the feathers. You can, it's almost like peacock and not the tail but on each wing. And they're very small and they're subject to predation so they run very quickly. And as they run very quickly their forelimbs go out so they glide and that's how we get flight. So a trait which evolved for one function under conditions of stress exaps to something completely different. It doesn't add up. Now the other biological one which I love is the cerebellum at the base of your brain which evolves in higher apes to do fine grain manipulation of muscles in fingers and then exaps in humans to create grammar in human language. So the huge sophistication of grammar couldn't happen in a linear adaptive way. It required a radical repurpose in an exaptive change. And the scary thing is most of the things in our evolutionary theory actually turn out to be exaptive. So something which evolved for one function we're using for something else. Now that's important to understand and it also applies to technology. So in 1945, a Raythian engineer maintaining the magneto of a radar machine notices that a chocolate bar melts in his pocket. Now he wasn't the first to notice it. Several other people have noticed it. They just swore and got their trousers clean. He realized a significance and he put a metal box around the magneto and created the first microwave oven. So something technology which evolved for one function was repurposed for something else. And of course there are famous cases like the rather embarrassing side effect from the cardiac pill mentioned by one Pfizer researcher to another which produced until the vaccines came out the best-selling Pfizer line of all time in Viagra. Thalidomide produced negative side effects but also was the first cure for leprosy. Brian Arthur has written a really good book on this by the way, part of the thing is about his only book which the way in which technology evolves is principally ex-aptive, not adaptive. IBM is the famous case on this is they were the world leaders in punch cards to control nifty machines in factories. They repurposed it to give them first mover advantage in computer programming. And I could go on with lots of other examples. An ex-aptation, one of the key things we know in humans is that art comes before language in human evolution. One of the reasons we think for it and music comes before language as well. One of the reasons we think that's for is that the process of abstraction involved in art means you make novel connections. So it makes us highly adaptive in innovative which is why some of us worry about the focus on STEM education in schools because if you're not taught art you haven't got that inventive capacity in terms of the way it works. And again, what I'm trying to do is just give you an idea of what the anthro complexity field is about. It's a transdisciplinary field trying to bring all of these sort of things together. Yeah, so that's the principle. Okay, so on to the EU field guide. We were working with the European Union anyway. So the Kinevin framework which I created almost 21 years ago now which actually didn't start as a complexity framework. It start as a way of understanding knowledge and social interaction. And then it migrated sideways into complexity theory. And that's important. It has different origins from Stacy and uses the language in very different ways, different origins from Zimmerman as well. And I'm not gonna go into that now. I mean, I think it's now used in all branches of the American armed forces, for example. You don't get to be kernel level without learning Kinevin. It was used in team of teams. If anybody's read that and the follow up to it you'll see Kinevin and you'll see that in the sort of conversations. And Kinevin was designed to basically say in different systems you make decisions in different ways. So the key phrase on this is it's multi ontology sense making rather than single ontology sense making. I either isn't one type of ontology there are three different types in your work from there. So anyway, this had been adopted by the European Commission as a framework for understanding complexity in government. COVID came and so we rapidly scrambled and produced the field guide which is freely available. You can download it. I'll happily put up the link so everybody can see it. And at the end of next week we'll have actually also completed the assessment process by which you can assess where you sit on this. So the EU field guide is fundamentally informed by Anthro complexity. And it identifies three, four stages you go through in a crisis. Assess, adapt, accept, transcend. And I'll run through those at a high level and then talk about some of the key methods and then finish. So the assess process is kind of fairly simple. It basically says, are we really in a crisis? So if something has happened that we have contingency plans for that we plan for that we know what to do then we're not in a mega crisis. We just institute the contingency plan. But if it's something unexpected or something that as in COVID we'd sort of plan for but not really then you're in a crisis. And this is the point where the role of the leader is to act decisively. The general principle of leadership and the complexity is actually to focus on coordination not decision-making. So kind of like rule number one for leadership in a complex environment is link people and connect people but distribute the decision-making. The only exception to that is in a massive crisis where you're the only one who can make the call. And probably the best example of this is Joe Cinder who was the Prime Minister of New Zealand who actually broke the law to do lockdown. Their own Supreme Court said she had no didn't have the power to do it but by that they were too late. And what she did was a radical decisive act to hold more options open for longer and it was very successful. In contrast, Britain, Sweden, America waited until there was no choice but to lockdown by which time their options were more severely limited. So that creation of options is key. And there's some key things we should be doing now on climate change, not to solve the long-term problem but to bias a couple more decades to actually do that. Once you've done that then you have to start to radically change your practice. So you have to move into a distributed model very quickly and then as you come out of that you're gonna find very quickly you're doing lots and lots of rapid repurposing. One of the things you see all the way through COVID crisis is that existing knowledge had to be repurposed and then as you come out of that, you can move on. So there are three core practices identified by the guide based on complexity principles. So I'll run through each one of those and then kind of like wrap this up. First one is, and this is probably the most critical. I've done about 70 interviews now with CEOs and heads of government at all levels of government. The one common element of all those interviews is the thing which really helped them in the crisis was their informal networks, not the formal processes. Now from my point of view, that's interesting because when I started in this field over 20 years ago I studied the role of informal networks in IBM. That was actually the first Kinevon article which ever came out, sorry, the second. And one of the things we found is the ratio between formal and informal was one to 64. It was that significant. And the key thing about informal networks, and this is a really important principle, anybody's into constructive theory and physics you'll know where I'm going with this. What actually informal networks do is they create channels which don't need to store information because information will flow very quickly in context at the time of need. And that's a really important principle because context is everything. And the trouble is people's informal networks are based on what business school they went to what cohort group they dropped and those aren't truly cross silo. So one of the methods we developed based on complexity which is in the guide is called entangled trios. I won't go into the details. But what it does is to create entanglement between formal roles across silos. So it builds a dense informal network. And it does it in a way which isn't based on bias. And within six months, you can have everybody within three degrees of separation of everybody else having worked together on a small project. And that's all about creating the right sort of fertility within the soil which is the metaphor I want to develop for this. As many of you will know you can have trees, you can have a forest but the thing which keeps the forest healthy are the fungal roots that pervade the soil. And they spread to something like 500 times the density and distance of the tree roots. And they have a symbiotic relationship one with the other. So that's kind of like a metaphor the informal networks of the fungal roots the formal systems of the visible trees. So rapidly building informal networks is key because even a crisis or recovery from a crisis you're gonna need that information flow. And I repeat it because this is a key point. And complexity is all about creating connections and linkages not things. In complexity theory we're not too much worried about individuals we are worried about how people connect. And if you have connections in which information can assemble in the context of need they're far more fluid because you reduce the cost of storage and everything else like that. So that's been like one. The second thing that you do is to build knowledge maps at the right level of granularity. Now this is a point Brian Arthur makes in his book to repurpose thing, repurpose anything it has to be fairly finely grained it's the magneto not the radar machine. So again, one of the things we do is to create exact databases in which you map everything you know at the right level of granularity. And then it can be rapidly discovered and repurposed. Again, you'll note we're not actually designing assemblies we're just creating things at a granular level and finding ways to connect them quickly when we know the context of the need. So we don't design things in anticipation of need. We design capability that can report the context. And the final thing and one of the biggest things as I come into the final three minutes of this is build human sensor networks. In a crisis, you can't afford to wait more than half an hour for feedback. So one of the things we actually do is we build whole of workforce engagement systems in which you can throw out a question to the workforce and they can conduct situational assessment and micro scenario planning in real time but critically they can't gain the result. We use a thing called high abstraction metadata which means people don't know what the right answer is and comes back to that point about abstraction which is linked with innovation. And from that we can draw patterns. And that allows us to find the 17% to see the gorilla before they talk with anybody else. And what we're now building we're building these and I'll talk about one final project to a whole of citizen sensor networks. So one of the things we're doing in the US at the moment, post-election. This is a pilot project which is just starting is to build packs for schools, church groups and sports clubs by which young people become ethnographers to their own communities. And then we're looking at patterns in what they discover where there are things common to red and blue and then bringing people from those two political groups together on things which they agree are problems and build those relationships in the way they work. And that's based on work I did in Northern Ireland in the 70s where we didn't get people together in workshops to talk about how things should be better which is a real problem with systems thinkers. They love workshops where everybody agrees how things should be and then assume that's it. Yeah, what we actually did, we took two people from Catholic to Protestant or vice versa and we dumped them on development projects in Latin America without talking about the troubles. And they discover pretty damn fast. They had more in common than they realized but they worked it out for themselves and that built lasting relationships. So I've given you a couple of examples there and if you go back to what I said about complexity theory you'll see how this is what we actually call theory informed practice. I have an intense dislike of anybody who develops theory from observational data because they always confuse correlation with causation. What we do is we look at what the scientific theory says which has been validated and proved and then we build systems based on those principles or at least make sure they're not in contradiction with those principles. So that's the broad field and to my mind that's the practical aspect of complexity theory. We're not doing simulation models and doing things retrospectively. We're actually designing ecosystems which can respond quickly to as yet unanticipated problems. And hi Nancy, good to see you. Thank you for that. You're an unexpected bonus. Well Nancy is one of our facilitators. Dave thanks so much for that very fascinating presentation and we're really happy that we'll have a lot of time to unpack some of these ideas. I've written down a bunch of questions from the live chat and I will be able to continue taking down questions but Nancy perhaps you'd like to say hello, introduce yourself and maybe start off this panel discussion. Oh you're muted and then feel free to continue. Yes, thank you Daniel and Dave. It's always great to see you and learn from you. I first took a class by Dave Snowden and that's when I learned about the work he's doing in research using his methods based on complexity science. I have run some global projects using his methods, one doing regional branding for a government entity and then understanding consumers in consumer products and then some change management projects where we understand employee engagement and blocks to innovation and collaboration all with glowing results. Great, do you wanna start off with a question or would you like me to pass over the first question? Who's the question addressed to? Nancy would you wanna ask the first question to Dave or I'm happy to ask a question. No, please start with the other questions. Great, I'm just gonna start in somewhat of the order that we got them in. So Blue Knight who's a facilitator wrote, I dislike the discrete categorization of sciences. It creates silos which I feel complexity science is poised to eradicate. How can cybernetics and systems thinkers and really all backgrounds play a role in complexity science? First of all, I'm not sure that, I mean, first of all, transdisciplinary science is actually really important, yeah? And we have very few generalists available. I'm not sure cybernetics is a science. And remember I made this distinction. So if you look at cognitive neuroscience, for example, you'll find people who are also philosophers working in it. Walter Friedman's Sacred Memory was one I could give you several other examples. So we are starting to see if you want to look in cognitive neuroscience, which is a huge field, it takes a philosopher's brain to reinterpret it. So you need that ability to look across disciplines, but you need actually deep specialism these days in some sciences to get anywhere, yeah? I mean, you need to be careful on that. So for example, I mentioned constructor theory in physics, yeah, which basically argues you could, it takes physics from a systems point of view, not an atomistic point of view, and looks at energy gradients and constructors within that. And that's actually really interesting. It's one of the fields which has given rise to the modern thinking that information may have mass and may actually account for dark matter, which is a current hot topic in physics, right? So we need to be able to mix and merge these sciences and respect the individual disciplines, but I'd to be quite honest, if I'm brutal about this, I don't think cybernetics has got much role to play anymore. I think it was really brilliant when it started, but we've gone way past that now. Well, let me respond or push back on, how can non-scientists get involved if the bright line dividing things as science versus not, then how can non-science perspectives come into this discussion and participate on teams? Well, first of all, you do, all right? We bring the humanities as well, but my background is in a philosophy. I mean, I studied physics as well, and I've had to learn anthropology, but I'm not a biologist, but I know how to talk to biologists. I know how to read Scientific American and new scientists, and I know how to go and make inquiries and talk with people. There's a huge role for generalists, yeah? You just have to be intelligent and have an inquiry mind and be open, and then that synthesis is possible. Right. Great. RJ Corday asks the question, where are silos useful? Maybe speaking to that point about disciplinary versus transdisciplinary, where are silos useful? Well, silos are necessary. They're necessary in organizations. I mean, the first formal complaint about silos in government is one of the early tyrants in Athens. So we've known about the problem for several thousand years, and nothing's happened about it, so maybe we should start to take a different approach, right? One of the reasons silos are so valuable is you get what Boasso called high abstraction language. So if I need, for example, a group of people who study philosophy, I can talk much faster using key concepts. I can link and connect people. I don't have to dumb down. That's not that environment I do. Nothing wrong with that. But silos allow highly developed bodies of knowledge to apply in highly specialist language so you get effective communication. Our focus is to recognize the sciences but then entangle people across it. So to give you an example, something we're about to start with one of the big US universities. When you join the university is what we call an undergraduate in the UK, yeah? You get put into a threesome. So if you're in humanities, your other two members is one is from engineering and one is from the pure sciences. And you have jobs to do throughout the first two years of your university career. Now, what we're doing there, if you think about that, because that's across the whole of campus is we're putting people together in informal networks across the disciplinary silos so they have conversations, can talk and can bring something together. And that's my point about build networks across silos, don't try and destroy silos. And even with grain silos, it's the connections in and out that actually make the silo function. And the bow, and the bow, yeah, sorry, I've got a farming background as well, so I get that one. Nancy, do you wanna go for a question or I can ask more? Well, I was just curious about the answer to the previous question about cybernetics. If it was valuable in the time and we've moved past it, what do you think we've moved to, Dave? I think we moved on to complexity science. I mean, if you want me to speculate, I think your Stafford beer had been born 20 years later. We wouldn't have seen VSM. Be easy to have better knowledge available to him, which is not to show any lack of respect. I love his work. Yeah. Yeah, but science moves on and we gain new insight. It's like single and double loop learning. It was a really good concept when it came out. But we now know it's linked to Cartesian models of consciousness and we now know more about that so we can move on. And I think this is the key thing. People have to understand human knowledge moves on. It doesn't show a lack of respect for the past to say we now know its limitations. So a related question is there from Sylvia and she wrote, definitely not irritated by the differentiation between complexity and systems thinking, but intrigued to hear more of the differences as I hear the two likened a lot. Can you expand on that? Okay. So I think it depends. First of all, systems thinking isn't coherent body. So I can look at two or three things. So for example, if you take Peter Chapman's work and I knew Peter had a huge amount of respect for him and soft systems methodology. Now back in the 80s, I was using that extensively. And then we got to know more about semiotics and ascetics and then the whole field move forward. So I wouldn't say I've used anything from Peter in the last 20 years, but he was the original inspiration. And, you know, Michael Jackson who is inheritor, he and I are having a series of exchanges at the moments of which I've got to produce the latest one, because he thinks critical systems thinking is the answer to everything and I don't, all right? You then got the cybernetics, which I mentioned and I think that was a particular period. An interesting, I'm doing a lot of work at the moment with Nora Bates and warm data, where there's a huge affinity with complexity theory. And if you look at the work of a father as an anthropologist, it's complexity theory. I don't think he'd own cybernetics anymore if he was still alive, right? Because I think, again, that's moved on. You then got the systems dynamics guys. Now, these guys are deeply problematic because they have popularized stuff. That's the sort of Peter Sangy and the like, right? And Forrester famously said, there's always room for somebody to popularize something they didn't understand and make a lot of money out of it, which I thought was one of the best put downs I've ever heard in my life, right? And the trouble with systems dynamics and systems modeling is it's highly causal. Everything is linked and it's also based on endpoint targeting. So if you look at Sangy, he says, what you have to do, you can't handle the complexity. So you set clear goals. And of course it's always the leaders who set goals in Sangy. Everybody else is meant to abandon individuality and subordinate themselves to the need of the master. Then that's in fifth discipline, right? So they control complexity by defining an endpoint. Now, if you've got a non-causal system, that doesn't work. And if you look at all the other popular methods, they always start off with a group of leaders getting together and deciding where they want to be and trying to close the gap. In complexity, we don't do that. We describe where we are, what are the evolutionary possibilities of the present? And then we start to shift forward with the ability to adapt as we go. So the me systems dynamic is deeply problematic. Now, there are then other aspects of systems thinking, which are quite closely to complexity theory, but they're not as popular. Yeah, so it's like in knowledge management, right? I was in knowledge management. It doesn't mean what I meant thought it was. It now means information management. And there's no point you've been romantic about that, it's move on. So systems thinking now de facto means systems dynamics and cybernetics if you're talking with leaders. And we need to move away from that. And the key thing is this, do you start in the present or start in the future? And also, how much to use workshops? The minute you try and do everything in a workshop with a group of people having a conversation, you limit it. And if you look at, for example, the heavy criticism of participative action inquiry, yeah, by anthropologists, which also includes design thinking and design labs. The problem is it attracts the usual suspects. It attracts people who match the culture of the facilitator and it doesn't scale at volume. What we do with distributed ethnography scales at no cost and it's ongoing, it's not one-off. Right. Nancy, anything to add there or I can continue asking? Yeah, the distributed ethnography is really key because I come from a research background trying to understand why people do what they do, how to influence them. And if you start off by trying to understand people with a limited set of questions that some researchers in a room have come up with, then already the questions are constrained by our bias and our knowledge and it doesn't leave open any room for anything outside of that box. So when we are opening with these open-ended questions and then letting the participants or the respondents to signify to interpret their own answers, which is distributed ethnography, it's not a researcher sitting in a tribe and writing what they think the tribe is doing. It's letting the tribe say what they're doing in their language and their jargon and that's just so much more meaningful and true. It was the paradigm shift for me. It's what really helped me to get past the blocks that I had previously in all of my research endeavors. It also links with a key concept from feminist work which is epistemic justice. Now for people who don't know about this, Beth Smith who works for me has a wonderful way of expressing it. She says, old men of philosophers, old wives tell tales and that illustrates epistemic injustice, right? So what matters is who interprets the story and that's what we focus on at high abstraction level. And it was originally interesting, it was originally designed when I was working in DARPA programs in counter-terrorism which was about 10 years of my life. So I was one of the two leads on Genoa 2, yeah? And we were focused on weak signal detection which means seeing things in the street stories of ordinary people very early on in the cycle and you'll never get that through workshop techniques. Right. Maybe just on this workshop topic before we jump to some other questions, we're about to jump into a really interesting experience with complexity weekend that has facilitated sessions, office hours, informal interactions. So how can we make the best of our synchronous times whether we call it a workshop or not, especially given the new constraints and opportunities of online? I mean, they're cool. I mean, I've run lots of workshops, all right? I mean, but just to be clear, I have paranoid of most of our methods we originally developed when I was in IBM working in Denmark. So I worked in Denmark, so I would facilitate in English but the participants were speaking Danish so I couldn't understand what they were saying. All right, so we put a lot of work into getting the facilitator out of the content into just the process, all right? So that's one thing, all right? But the real issue is you need to recognize it's very easy for people to get together in the workshop and agree how things should be. In fact, they tend to that, but how often have you done that and then nothing really changes afterwards? So to me, workshops should be part of a more structured, more distributed process. They shouldn't be the initiating point except in broad design and really you need more data to come into them, yeah? On the virtual physical, that's actually quite scary at the moment. I mean, I had my first physical meeting the other day so I went down to our Bristol office, sat down with four or five of the staff and after five hours we sorted out a whole bunch of stuff. Now I couldn't have done that in Zoom. And there are several reasons for that. One is that human communication is not limited to visual and oral transmission. For example, we know that pheranomes are a large factor in determining whether you trust people and giving you early warning if you're saying the wrong thing. So in a virtual environment, you're not getting the level of stimulation you evolve to handle, to handle relationships. So I think when we go for hybrid solutions, neither approach comes first. You have to see the context and decide what to do and how you do it, all right? It's also true that virtual works better if people have already met physically. So if a group of people actually have met physically, they can actually handle virtual better than strangers. And I'll tell you this from a speaker's point of view. I mean, I'm suffering another withdrawal symptoms. I was doing 256 days in hotels every year until COVID. And we now have a green policy within the company and I've discovered I'm 90% of our carbon footprint, so I'm in deep trouble with people, right? But if you're speaking to an audience of 50 people or 2,000 people, you get completely different feedback if you're in the room than anything you get virtually. So, and we know a lot of the science on that. So I think companies need to get, we need to think about this. We need to think about distributed meeting rooms. We also know that natural light and oxygen and space are critical. So actually there's some encoded terms. Ventilation is more important than distance. So there's things like that that we can work with. Great answer, thanks a lot. We still have a ton of awesome questions. So Makayla, who's one of our facilitators asks, what is the role of communication in complexity science and soft skills in general? Well, I think I would look at connections rather than communication per se. So one of the things we say in the field guide is you should communicate by engagement. So engaging people in assessing the situation and come up with micro scenarios and then feeding back what you're gonna do in the language that they've used to give you is more effective than trying to explain things to them. And a lot of the work I do on communication is effectively to feedback people's own their anecdotes and opinions in order to sort of steer or guide or influence the trope. The other point is the point I've made several times. You need to create channels in which information can flow in context. And peer to peer communication is probably more important than center to center to group peer communication. Great, and another question from Makayla was, is there a perpetual pendulum between the focus on generalists and deep specialists? Okay, this one's a problem, right? And you'll get me onto a pet subject because certainly in Britain there aren't any journalists left under the age of 55 because the education system changed. So to give an example, all right, when I was at school, several things that happened, all right? First of all, if you were doing the sciences which as I was, and you hadn't read the same books as the history and the arts graduates, you actually couldn't have a conversation. Yeah, the peer pressure, you know, I was doing sciences but I'd read all of Shakespeare and I'd performed a Shakespeare play every year even though it had nothing to do with my curriculum. And that was peer pressure, all right? And I still remember at the age of 11 I'd go up to grammar school, all right? I'm now allowed to wear long trousers. In Britain, we weren't allowed to wear long trousers as we were 11. And if you've ever walked two miles to primary school in a British winter you know that it breeds toughness, all right? And I walked up to the front of the class. I was called up first because my mother was head of the education committee so I was always a bloody victim, all right? And I was given a card and it said, you support capital punishment. Now as far as I'm concerned, capital punishment is evil and societies who practice it have no idea of ethics. And if anybody's offended by that, I do not apologize, all right? So I, but I had to speak for seven minutes in favor of something I profoundly disagree with. Without notes, without preparation. We did that every week from age 11 to 18. And that made us journalists because you never knew what you're gonna get for. You read everything you could, you synthesized it. The process created that. Now my children haven't gone down that route. They did module by module, exam by exam, everything is bloody measured. And therefore, the minute they've got a tick in the box, they move on to the next one, all right? So I wrote a paper the other day for systems engineers. We said no systems engineers should be allowed near system design without actually training in ethics because the implications of what they're doing is so profound that they haven't got the mental framing to understand the problem. So, and I don't buy the sort of neo-generalist concept of the T-Shift journalist because if you're deep in one area that always dominates it. Yeah, it's not a pendulum swing, you need both. So you need deep specialists, but you need journalists who sort of do a thin slice across the top. And you don't need many of them, yeah? And the other interesting thing, if you don't know it, is that actually, dyslectics meant the best generals. Because dyslectics, I mean, I'm partially dysleptic, right? Which means God help me if there's not a spell checker around, right? But, and I read the page at the time because I'm looking for patterns. And I see connections and I can't understand why anybody else hasn't seen this connection, right? And that's what dyslectics do. It's a deficiency in some ways, but it's an advantage in others. So this, and this is linked with what we call cognitive diversity. When I was the guy, I got Google to employ people who were autistic because we know they make really good programs, right? So the so-called educational deficiencies are actually part of collective intelligence. You need those sort of balances. I'd like to ask a question building on this topic of education and pathways. So reimagined science wrote, from a perspective of worrying about the focus on STEM education, science, technology, engineering, mathematics in schools, do you believe there's any way to alter the extreme focus on STEM as what the best students should focus on as pathways to career success? I think there is, but it's a major source of worry at the moment, all right? So let me give you two examples. What they've done in Australia is if you go to university to do a STEM subject, you will not have to pay much money back. If you want to go and do the humanities, the fees go through the roof. And we're about to, we're doing the same in the UK. Now, what that actually means, this is a 19th century model in which the elite can fund their children to be journalists, but everybody else is slave labor. And you can see the same sort of tendency. And this is really worrying, right? And one of the things we need to do, I think, in schools is encourage curiosity. The trouble is the measurement scheme doesn't do that. So let me give you another bit of science. I can give you the link to new scientist on this, a matter study of all studies of human motivation. Whenever people are working for explicit goals, it destroys intrinsic motivation. There's no evidence to contradict that. So where do we most need intrinsic motivation, health, education, and social services? Where do we have the highest degree of explicit targets? When we need children to be intrinsically motivated to learn, we have them on monitored tests and lead tables every three weeks or every four weeks. So we create a measurement regime which actually destroys the sort of education we want, unless you're rich enough to go to a private school with very low teacher-people ratios, which can achieve the results and give you that integrated education. And income disparity is at levels higher than it was in the 19th century, and educational disparity, which used to be a lever is going the same way. Nancy, anything to add there, or I'll bring up another question. No, next question, please. It's very well said. Great. So Stephen asks, how does Dave calibrate for abstract language in stories and narratives when working across disciplines? Are the ways that language is physically embodied by fields of practice factored into sense-making? Yeah, I think, I mean, there's ways you can do it, all right? So one is abstract language or metaphors work better than precise. So I'll give you an example, then it will illustrate how sense-maker works and then talk about the next generation which we're currently working on. So I'm assuming that everybody's done an employee satisfaction survey at some stage in their lives, right? And I remember getting one from IBM and just to be clear, I had a lot of problems with IBM because I was in permanent war with the HR department, that they never forgave me for scientifically proving that astrology was more accurate than Myers-Briggs in predicting team behavior and they'd actually paid for me to do it without realizing it. I had a lot of fun with HR, right? So we get this questionnaire and it says, does your manager consult you on a regular basis, scale of zero and not at all 10 all the time? This is what Nancy was referencing, it's a hypothesis question. So you know what answer they want. So if you're happy, you say 10. If you're unhappy, you say zero. If you're statistically literate, you say eight or two because you know they eliminate outliers. So if you want to, you know, just remind about that, all right? And you can't trust the results. So I phoned the HR and just to be clear, I was on a watch list. So I had to wait for the US to wake up for me to speak to somebody in our monk, all right? And I said, how am I meant to answer this? You're asking me a context free question in a context specific world. And complexity is all about context specificity, right? And I don't think she understood it, but she said, just average your experience over the year and stop causing trouble and slam the phone down. So she didn't hear me say, and you call yourself HR in a research group. Now we take a different approach. We'll ask a non-hypothesis question. So when we use the military lot, for example, is you're a grandparent, your grandchild says they're gonna follow your career, what story will you tell them? Yeah, or you're in a workforce, what story about the last five weeks would you tell somebody you wanted to join or you wanted to encourage to join or discourage you? You know, it's hypothesis free. Then we ask people to interpret the story. Not to evaluate. And this is a key principle. We move from evaluation to description because that's better. So we'll give people six triangles and one of the triangles will say, in this story that manages behavior was, altruistic, assertive, analytical. So those are three positive qualities. Now what that does is it creates a cognitive load on the brain. So the brain switches from autonomic to novelty receptive processing, which is a better description than thinking fast and thinking slow, by the way. There's better science and carnival stuff, which actually means you go deeper. So six triangles, 18 data points, and there's other ways we do that, all right? So that's a quant approach in what's a qual domain, but the stories carry with the numbers. So if you see a statistical pattern, you can see the stories which produced it and that's really important. Now, abstract language works better and of course it's polymorphic, so you translate it for the group. So for example, a justice triangle might have restorative, distributive, preventative, but if you move it as we did into rule of Pakistan, it's get your own backstopper, the bad people doing the same thing, restore people to the community. So that's polymorphic language. We're now actually using symbols and cartoons and illustrations. Yeah, and that's actually producing really good results because those can be common, yeah? They can be universal and abstraction ironically leads to precision in sense making. If you're precise in the questions you ask, you only discover what you expected to hear. If you're highly ambiguous in the questions you ask, you find things you didn't expect to see. But that are highly relevant to what you're interested in. It's weak signal detection. Well, then let me pull back to a great, ambiguous and open question from a participant, Sylvain. They wrote, what is the relationship between narrative and complexity? That is huge. First of all, one of the great things about narrative is it carries necessary ambiguity. So if you look at all major world religions, all right, they teach through parables, yeah? There's no such thing as a purpose statement or a value statement in the Bible. There are a lot of really awkward parables which don't tell you what to do. They tell you more or less what you shouldn't do and ask you difficult questions. So for example, some of my corporate work is to actually construct parables for organized chief executives to tell rather than, you know, it used to be mission statements, now it's purpose statements. I mean, it's all a bunch of nonsense. It's just the same group of platitudes thrown on a flipchart, yeah? And if anybody wants, by the way, we now offer a purpose destruction service which just involves you, you know, buying me and five of my friends a good meal and by the next day would have destroyed your purpose statement and told you all the ways it can be corrupted. I'm really happy doing those projects, all right? And the more evil you are as a company, the better the wine you'll have to buy is kind of like one of the sort of rectifying factors here. So one of the things that, and if you look at humans, there's a famous phrase on this, we're homo-narans as much as we're homo sapiens. We're also homo-ludens and we're homo-faber. So for example, if you don't know about material engagement theory, go and read about it because tools change cognitive function within two generations, right? That's also linked to epigenetics. We use jokes and irony. Well, actually, irony is a British characteristic and it's an unfair weapon when we use it on Americans. Now, when I was an IBM, we used to switch it on and off with HTML characters in conference calls with American vice presidents and it confused the hell out of them, right? There's a guy called Glenn on the West Coast. He just doesn't get irony so I can just send him ballistic any second that I want, right? And the point about this is human sense-making requires ambiguity. So language is part of this, right? But then think of the way we use language, we've referenced stories, right? So if you're British, you've read Winnie the Pooh and Winning the Willows. I can say Eeyore, a huge associated meaning, by the way, I don't mean the Disney corruption of Winnie the Pooh, which was truly nothing terrible, right? I will make references to commonly understood stories because they create high level meaning in condensed way. So one of the functions of stories in human evolution, apart from spreading failure, is to convey deep insight and a common reference space that you can talk to across groups. So there's a huge role for narrative in complexity theory. Anything to add there, Nancy, or I can go for another question? Right, so all of that of course, but in just going down to what that means, if we're trying to understand what people think, a checkbox, a multi-choice answer is not going to get you there. So we need narrative to get them to say things in their own perspective and words. And then on the other side of that, how do you interpret all that narrative and that's been solved with database? So it really is, we need narrative to understand complexity and then we need tools to help understand the narrative across cultures. And so when we set up a research project, we need to research the values that we're trying to measure. So if it's about employee engagement, we'll set up some of the triads around those values. And of course, like Dave said, they're either all positive in the responses or all negative or all neutral. So they have no idea what's the right answer and that already confuses them. And then they're more true in their responses. And so when we can set up the parameters based on the values that we're trying to measure and based on the context that we're operating in, then we let the narrative responses fill in all the richness of the meaning that's actually there and tie it into the situations in people's daily lives and tie it to specific situations. That's the other key thing that he mentioned is, it's, you know, what do you think about working here? Well, yesterday my boss yelled at me and it was terrible, I hated it. But today I went to lunch with my friends and we all have a lot in common from work. And so I loved it. So it has to be rooted to a particular situation. That's the only time you're gonna get true meaning out of someone's narrative is the context and in that particular situation. A narrative is fundamental to culture as well. So for example, the here is journey, which everybody knows about. It's very specifically North American. Yeah, Northern European, right? You don't see that form in other cultures. And then there's a huge divide. There are three fundamental narrative forms you find. One goes after Aristotle's Poetics, which is the Western one. So it has a beginning and middle and end and the message is at the end, the morals at the end of the story. Australian Aboriginal stories, which I've studied all my life, don't seem to have an end. In fact, there's some argument, the story's more real than reality. But then the Middle East form of stories, a ring form of stories. So it builds in three, five or seven sub-stories, gives the message, then reverses in three, five or seven sub-stories. Now, actually the whole of the Old Testament is written in ring form. But Western people interpret it in linear form. Abraham and Isaac is a completely different story if you realize the message is in the middle. And so understanding narrative is actually really important in terms of the way societies work. Great, a related question was, Dave, when you introduced data gathering into a stressed system, have you identified the range or types of questions that one can ask to ensure meaningful input while also maximizing response rates? Thanks again. There's several ways that you can do this. We actually do a lot of work using children as ethnographers. Nobody refuses a kid on a school project. Yeah, they just don't do it. And it can be quite interesting. We did one up in Ohio on adult obesity, which was rather ironically funded by Victoria Secrets because everything in Ohio is funded by Wexler. And by making children ethnographers to adult obesity, we changed the children's eating habits, which is actually what the plan was. We didn't lecture them about their food. We got them to investigate a problem they're working out for themselves, but they got adult stories nobody else did, but it was part of the school program. Yeah, so we didn't have a problem with response rates. We've done a lot of work with sports clubs because sports clubs want to know the attitudes of their players and their parents so they can make the kids capture stories as journalists because otherwise they won't get picked for the team. The key thing is not to do a survey. The key thing is to embed story capture in a natural process. Well, a related question there was from Roya and Roya asked, I'm very interested to know who and by whom do you interpret the narratives, specifically in intercultural contexts? We don't. The person who tells the story interprets it. That's the key factor. So we create an abstract context, but then the person who tells the story decides what it means and they placed it. And that's the epistemic justice angle. Okay, another rapid-fire question from Reimagined Science is, do you have any thoughts about Caitlyn Walker's clean language? I think it's a cute idea. It'd be quite nice if everybody did it, but to be quite honest, I quite like to swear a lot and I quite like to beat up idiots. Yeah, and it's like a appreciative inquiry. It always reminds me of the final scene of Monty Python's, yeah, life of Brian. Everybody's swinging backwards and forwards on the cross, singing, always look on the bright side of life. Yeah, I think things like clean language are useful skills, but trying to make people feel guilty because they use language which is natural, and that isn't, all right? People's own voice is their own voice and they should be authentic to it. Anything to add there, Nancy? Nope, I think that's, I didn't know about it, so it was my first time to hear about it. So let's turn to the knowledge management topic, which you had addressed a little bit earlier. RJ wrote, I also agree that knowledge management is now synonymous with CRM, the customer relationship manager software usually, and information systems. It makes it frustrating to communicate. Is there a term for the type of knowledge management that you work on or how does knowledge management play a role today? Oh, yeah, we talk about decision support. And actually, it's interesting, that's my background. I used to, my thesis is decision support systems and I built decision support systems for people like Guinness, a group worldwide, all right? And then it became called knowledge management. And I think that was the problem. So if you call it decision support, you focus on what it does for people. If you talk about it as knowledge management, you try and make knowledge a static entity, yeah? So there are two reasons for managing knowledge. And I should be clear, there's a difference between manage and mainage. This is the origin of the word managed in Italian. Mainage is the ability to ride a horse in dressage. That then gets corrupted by the French. Many things have been corrupted by the French, but not as many as by the English to mean household management, right? Now you need both types of management. Yeah, within the system, right? And that's also important to understand. Yeah, because in the dressage example, you're on top of a dancing half tonne creature that you're hoping will respond to the slightest nuance of your movement. And the other one, you're actually in control of things and can take how they'll turn out. And both about it, right? And I think it's that skill. I mean, it's like I don't like nonsense like things like servant leadership, right? I mean, these are again, pendulum effects. So the answer is sometimes as a leader you have to be a very dictator. Sometimes you have to listen to people and make the soup, right? There isn't a single model and that's the problem. Everybody is trying to create context-free solutions in a context-specific case. And everybody's trying to make their method universal when actually no method is universal. Awesome. Well, here in Complexity Weekend we're gonna be forming these project-oriented teams. So I'm curious, how can a team collaboratively and in a distributed fashion guide that process and maybe not congeal onto a system of interest or an approach or deliverable too early? How do we stick and make space for complexity and make teams that end up being effective? Good question. That's a facilitation techniques you can use, right? One of the ones I've used a lot. And I'll give you the example the first time I really used it in Angus. So we were working with New Zealand Department of Education. Now you may not know this but New Zealanders play rugby, right? And the Welsh play rugby. Yeah, we're two nations who are passionate about it. And the one thing everybody in Wales has agreed is it doesn't matter what happens as long as we beat the English. In fact, there's a pop song about that. And the New Zealanders feel the same about Australians. So they have t-shirts which say we support New Zealand and anybody playing against Australia. They've recently added, unless it's the English which I have sympathy for. So we had a big workshop and we said, look, we can't afford for the first day for anybody to come up with a, we should do this or I know what's happening. All we can do is describe, yeah? And I brought out an Australian rugby jersey. And I said, the first person I catch doing anything other than description will have to wear this jersey. And then they're free to prowl around and find somebody else committed the same mistake at which point they can hand over the jersey. Yeah, and if they're still wearing after five minutes we'll take their picture and put it on the internet. That was a wonderful workshop. Yeah, I got the group that was done with humour, all right? So I got somebody from IBM who didn't like rugby to make this make first. So that was good news because they all thought that was very funny. So you're creating a self-regularity mechanism, right? The other way when we teach complex facilitation which is not process facilitation is we'll actually break the group up into groups of five and do something, then we'll break them up again and break them up again and break them up again. So nobody can stabilise in the group until we're ready to pull the conclusions through. And so there are techniques you can do in workshops. The other thing is to look at crews. So crews is one of the most interesting type of team there is. And in crew, people are trained in role and role expectation. Yeah, so if you look at an aircraft you've got a pilot and navigator, whatever. With the minute they put on uniform, they go into role. And the cognitive capacity of a crew is higher than a team. So again, some of our work at the moment is designing crew structures for companies because you just put a year of investment into training people in role, then you can put together cross-silent teams where people don't have to go through any form in norm in storming because they're in role and they're working in that way. And if you look at it, all the military, all of emergency services work off crew structures not team structures. Yeah, and just to add on that, it's really key if you're getting, for example, employees together to not have the boss or anybody's supervisor involved because when it's the peers, they're more free to express what they think. And then there's no one also clearly in charge there. So the dynamics are more fluid. And I'm so sorry that I have to jump off in just a moment but I will be back in for my session in a few hours. Thanks so much, Nancy. We're looking forward to hanging out with you over the weekend. See you soon. Bye. So Dave, maybe on that last note there, Sean, one of our co-organizers and you can just close the window, Nancy. One of our co-organizers wrote, could you go into how the different branches of the armed forces use Kenevan, especially how they use the system differently, perhaps across branches or across countries? I don't know the more in detail. I've taught a lot at Quantico and I spent time at the Navy Academy on Rhode Island. Navy Academy has used extensive being strategy and I can't talk too much about that because there's issues on carrier strategy and such like that. In the Army, it's taught as part of the from the motion course, major to cause operational. If you look at a team of teams, you'll find it in that structure so it's extensively using special forces. And the whole point about Kenevan is to know when you do different things. It has five domains in five different states and you operate differently, so that's how it's used. If you actually have a search on Google Scholarly, you'll find quite a lot. Chris at Naval Postgraduate School has written a lot about Kenevan. And I say you'll find it across on that. And when I teach it at Quantico and actually teaching it at all levels, but the Marines are fairly non hierarchical anyway. In fact, one of the most precious presents they've ever had came from them, which is this. So it's that sand from EO Jimba. Would you move it up a little bit? Yeah. Very nice. Yeah, there are so much marine blood in those sounds. That one is precious for me now. All right, let me ask another question from John. Maybe just following up on that is, can you give a practical example of your work applied to something relevant today? And if you want an example, another question from a participant was, how do we go from the stories of overly stressed healthcare workers to influencing policy changes that preserve worker well-being? Okay, so we're actually doing a huge amount of work in the health sector at the moment. And one of the things you found is if numbers are objective, stories are persuasive. So if a senior person actually can see a statistical pattern, they'll pay attention to it. If they can read the stories, they'll act differently. So to give another example, we've got a big project which is we're about to package up and make available worldwide if anybody's interested. We've been working with old people's homes in the Netherlands. Big project funded by the Dutch government. And we've been getting resident narratives, relative narratives, and care worker narratives continuously captured in journal form every day, linked in with the operational systems. And what's actually happened is the narrative system is dominating the operational systems because it's weak signal detection, it shows lack of care, it shows connections. And we're about to put something in there which is actually the death book. So when somebody dies, all the stories are collected automatically and represented as a sort of memorial. And that sort of ability to see things from different perspectives is key. And it's the explanatory power of narrative that matters. And I need to be careful on this one but I got a standing innovation at a nurses conference a year or so ago when I said you guys break the rules three times a day on average to provide empathetic care to patients. And nobody had had the courage to say it before but we'd done the ethnography. That allowed us to gather nurses' stories and patient stories and demonstrate the way that the regulations have been designed for the center of a normal distribution when actually most people were working in the tales of operator distribution. So the exceptions were more common than the norm. And again, that changed the way people saw things because one of the things we can do with narrative is create what are called vector measures. So vectors measure speed and direction of travel for intensity of effort and not outcome-based targets. So if we're measuring that from patient narrative, for example, nurses who care for patients are gonna get rewarded because their figures will look right. Whereas at the moment nurses who are bureaucratic and to help with the patients will achieve the targets. So is that switch? Michaela asks, what is the role of hierarchy in facilitating an efficient team or maybe just more generally, how can we be the best facilitators and facilitate in an efficient way, especially online? Mike, I gave you an example already which is don't get involved in the content. Manage the process. Don't look at the content because you've got too much of an ability to bias it. Yeah. Try and avoid what's called premature convergence. If you run a really good workshop, you'll be panicking up until the last hour about whether it's gonna get a result and then it will all come together quickly. Yeah, that's one of the key lessons. The other thing is don't use facilitation as a part of a wider process because then you've got some background to it. Well, in complexity weekend, we say there's no single or best type of participant nor facilitator. And so we hope that people can bring their unique perspectives. Earlier, you were smashing purpose left and right and it seemed to be addressed at an organizational or an institutional level and John asks, how does one go through life without purpose? What does a person look like who has none? So in other words, is that purpose smashing something that we can do or how do we integrate or move beyond purpose? Now, there's a complete difference between human beings having a sense of direction or a sense of purpose. Although I would say I would go more with Aristotle. It's about a focus on virtue rather than goals, right? You know, to quote Aristotle, the virtuous man will make the right decision and the conditions you can't yet foresee. But that's completely different from a very expensive consultant spending time with your CEO and writing some platitudes on a flip chart and saying, this is now our corporate purpose. And that was done with mission statements and mission statements didn't work. I think ACOF would really regret ever proposing it given what actually happened afterwards. And ACOF is a transition between system thinking and complexity thinking by the way, in my opinion, right? So basically every admission statements, it didn't work. So somebody publishes a popular book saying it's all about purpose and his speaker fee goes up to 70K for a half hour of repeating slot. Everybody, you know, the big consultancy latch onto it. Everybody rolls out a purpose program for two or three years. Everybody in the company says, oh my God, here we are again. What's the language we're now meant to use? And they game it. Every executive will change their slide set. You can find and replace in word was entirely invented to deal with corporate fats. All you do is just change the words and don't change the strategy. And I'll make another point. Good leaders don't need to have purpose statements. People know what direction they're going in. And you don't, anybody has a purpose statement at home. I used to satirize this, but I was in Dallas. So I satirized the idea of having KPIs and purpose statements for your family. Thinking that nobody would ever dream of doing it and discover there's a whole industry which does that in Texas. And then I discovered I wasn't allowed to talk about evolution as it was a controversial theory. And I was talking to the Abel the management group which was deeply depressing. So I had a bad week that week, right? So another great question for Makayla is what should we thrive for in order to integrate complexity? Integrate complexity into what? The world is complex. The issue is will you navigate it? If you wanna talk about how you integrate complexity thinking now actually is common sense. But what you do is you pick off the intractable problems. The issues that conventional techniques can't solve and you start to run in methods and tools for that. I mean, we went two months ago, we went open source in a wiki on all of our methods because the markets now, you know, we wanted to remove the barriers of entry. So there's a lot of things you can do but don't focus on the low hanging fruit, focus on the intractables. Speaking of intractables, how were some of your projects and ideas used during the COVID-19 global crisis and what impact do you seek for your field guide? Field guide for me is important because it's a major government endorsement of complexity theory. That's the first time it's actually happened, right? So that makes it easier to adopt complex systems thinking, right? It's why actually people buy McKinsey's. It's not because McKinsey's know what the hell they're playing at but you won't get fired if you implement a McKinsey's report. It's how IBM survived for years with bad kit. You can get fired for buying the market leader. So the field guide, I think one of its main purposes is to actually legitimize something, yeah? And if I look at the stuff we, I mean, we doubled in size during COVID, it's been good for us, yeah? Because the need to do fragmented lessons learned in the field is key. Yeah, you got to find out what's actually going on, yeah? And we're currently working on mental health because if you think COVID's bad, the mental health like which is coming next is even worse. So by linking and entangling people in small groups, we can increase the resilience of the community and they'll get away from the sort of individualistic type approach. So there's a lot of work going on there, right? Yeah, I mean, I've given you two or three examples. I've given you the care home one, right? That's equally important because with isolation you've got that. One of the things we're now starting to look at is how do we measure attitudes? So if we go into another lockdown period, will people put up with it this time or not? And if we've got community-wide engagement, we can measure it. And this is actually, we've done a lot of work in safety on this in measuring attitudes because attitudes are lead indicators, compliance is a lag indicator. And that's also one of the ways you get the ideas in. We're doing that at the moment on cyber security, which is a massive issue. If you didn't know, I was working on this today, the entire Irish health system was closed down by a ransom, by ransomware. Now, and that's catastrophic. People will die as a result of it. And attitudes are more important when you're looking at things like security because they give you weak signals before you hit a compliance breach. Mr. Blank writes, how could Kenevan have been used in response to the 2001 World Trade Center event in New York? That's a really interesting story, right? So I was working on DARPA before 9-11. In fact, I was in Arlington the night before 9-11. I flew out that next day and picked up the news and it was like a week before I knew my team was still alive because they were in the bed of the panther which got hit. So this is an active period of my life, all right? And I ended up being flown back from Singapore on an American transport plane, which is kind of like fairly traumatic, all right? But we did a lot of work. And we actually went into the Blue Mountains. I need to be very careful what I say here. We were actually working with Clinton's al-Qaeda team. It's of course, the nice thing about the American system is every four years you throw everybody out and they become available as research subjects. So research is useful. And we were trying to get people to go through 9-11 through Kenevan. John Poindexter, I work for, a member who used to be Reagan's National Security Advisor. Famously, when he saw Kenevan said, that explains 50 years of failure in American foreign policy. Yeah, which I'm still quite proud of on that sense. So either way, we're talking this through, we couldn't get anybody to see things as complex. So they kept saying, oh, yes, but we should have known that. So retrospective coherence meant they could always create a causal link. And myself and Lance and John were beginning to despair like, like lunchtime we'd ever get to do it. Then we had lunch. And that was when the Americans hit a military target in the Middle East. And nobody knew what the hell was gonna happen. And then they talked it through Kenevan. And one of the things we learned from that is if you don't know the future, frameworks like Kenevan work well. If you look them retrospectively, they don't because people always attribute causality in terms of the way it works. But the basic principle of Kenevan is fairly simple. And this is high level. If it's ordered, you can apply best of good practice. If it's complex, you find out all the coherence hypotheses about what's going on or what you should do and test for coherence is key. Yeah. And then you run small probes on each of those hypotheses to see how the space changes. And by the way, that's a lot cheaper than trying to decide what the right solution is. So that's what you would actually do. Now, if you're building up to 9-11, and this is what we worked on, remember that an FBI agent spotted that people who been trained to take off and fly but not land. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, everybody celebrated her and she's promoted. It's wonderful. They obviously don't understand the statistics. Somebody always spots something in advance. Yeah, their chance of doing it the next time round is remote. And the phrase, if you read the congressional report on 9-11, which I spent a lot of time reading, right? It says, why didn't we join up the dots? Yeah, it's a famous phrase. Okay, well, I'll give you the mathematics of dots. If there are four dots, there are six linkages between the dots, which means there are 64 possible patterns. If I go up to 10 dots, there are over 3.4 trillion. If I go up to 12, there's over 4.8 quadrillion. So with the benefit of hindsight, everybody can see what you should have paid attention to but you don't with four sides. So one of the things we do with the narrative stuff that we do is you actually create, and it was designed to create training data sets for AI because the big problem with AI is the training data sets. And this is actually Google and now finding that, right? So just to, again, if I offend somebody for this, I don't apologize. Yeah, most algorithms and most AI has been designed by misogynist white males on the West Coast of the US who take and ran seriously after puberty, which I think is a sign of mental derangement, right? And you can see that reflected in the way I work. So one of the things we did was develop a way to create more fair training data sets. That's one of the things SEMS maker does. But then you can also train it on the weak signals available before terrorist outrage. And then that can trigger what's called an anticipatory alert, which means look at this because it may be significant. And that was the big problem I was set. And I can go into more detail if people want. It said, how do you solve the problem of adaptive decision-making? And that's what we focused on. Very interesting. And we have a few ideas about abductive logic from the active inference perspective. Shirley writes a question related to your last point there. What about narratives and how power dynamics influence what is shared and what is heard? How power differentials are a barrier to narratives and ground truth? Yes and no, right? I mean, we talk about micro narratives, not narratives. So at a micro narrative level, you tend to, you have less of that, right? We then look at patterns in multiple narratives and that's where we get into assemblages. And then those, those can, that's where you start to look at what Deluce calls the line of flight, how do you escape from those? But the key thing I think on power is we let people interpret their own narratives, right? So the, and what, and basically the story is an explain them for a statistical pattern. So we don't start with a narrative. Let's talk about understanding. Sean wrote, is reductionism a necessary precursor to complexity thinking? For example, understanding the atoms or alphabet of your system and then understanding the relationship between those atomic components. Now, it's a guaranteed way of not understanding a complex system. Complex systems are irreducible. Yeah, that's the important point, right? That's why I'm interested in things like constructive theory and physics, which doesn't mean reductionism doesn't give you huge insight, but the behavior of the whole is not the same thing as the behavior of parts and you can't predict the behavior of the whole from the behavior of the parts. The thing you're doing complexity and this is how you scale a complex system is you reduce what you're looking at to the lowest level of coherent granularity. That's not the lowest part, it's the lowest level of coherent granularity. And then you allow those objects to recombine. And that's how you scale a complex system. It's by recombination. And if you think about it, the whole organic life form comes from four chemicals in different combinations. Let's keep on that constructive and developmental topic. The second question was, Dave, are there any plans for writing a parenting book to build in some of what you've learned into building virtue across the developmental life cycle? Yeah, provided you don't get me on to adult development because I have profound disagreements with the whole movement around that. It's very culturally biased. I think, yeah, I mean, the answer is yes. I mean, the best teaching story ever created was a children's party story, which you can find online, but with me, 35 kilograms heavier than I am now. So, you know, we'll wash it with that in mind, all right? I actually think, and I often recommend that people should read books like, you know, there are a whole bunch of children's books which explain complexity really well. Yeah, his dark materials, does it brilliantly. Yeah, the same with the children's books like Wind in the Willows and the like, all right? The problem is when Disney gets hold of these things, they make them linear stories where you know the outcome, they remove the ambiguity, yeah? And really good quality children's stories have high ambiguity in them and those help you understand complexity. So, you, kids get complexity anyway. And it is actually quite interesting. You don't see racial prejudice in kids till they hit puberty, which is why we use kids of those age to capture stories in difficult conflict in relations. It's as puberty starts to lock the brain down based on the prejudices of the people you're growing up with. And if it's interesting, actually it breaks up again when you get old. So once you get to your late 50s, the brain becomes plastic again. So if you want innovation, it's why we use young people with old people. It's called transgenerational pairing because in primitive times, all right? You know, up till puberty, you're a kid you play around. After puberty, you've got to go and hunt for the tribe. If you survive into your 50s, then you've obviously got something about you. You can't lead the tribe anymore. So you go into the wisdom business and the teaching business. And so it was actually quite interesting. If you put young people with older people, they come up with completely novel ideas that neither group would separately. And we do a lot of that on social intervention. Great. There's a lot of awesome questions here. You've mentioned a few times about finding the correct level of granularity for knowledge. And Roya asks, how can we know that the level of granularity is coherent enough, but not too much? It's, you need to be careful. Let's talk about how you do it in a workshop and how you do it more broadly. It's never a major issue, to be honest. It's kind of like in context, it's fairly easy to do. But you look at something, you say, what aspects of that are complex? What aspects are complicated? And the minute you get to the point where there aren't any complex aspects, there's only complicated or vice versa. You're there. So that's a really simple heuristic, right? You can also do it with what we call mass sense, which is getting thousands of people to look at different things and interpret them and then look at statistically the patterns of interpretation. So that's also available. But the first method is actually pretty sound. So if anybody's into IT, for example, let's look at that because we're working on this at the moment. So you can take a method like scrum, right? And the lowest level of coherent granularity on scrum is a sprint or a retrospective. You can't reduce those anymore, yeah? So one of the things we're building at the moment is a facilitation kit, by which we have all of the agile methods at that level of granularity. So you can peel out the hexagon, which indicates retrospective and replace it with a three month time box. So what we're doing with that is to allow methods and tools to be combined in practically different ways by starting with the right level of granularity. Great. Jen writes, so if we're listening to weak signals, what might be some big cultural stories coming up that most of us are probably missing? Weak signals create a trigger. You need to be careful on this. I can throw out some things I'm watching, right? One is, people have not realized yet that this is not gonna finish, all right? It isn't gonna finish, all right? We're gonna get multiple variations we're in and that's we can get pill-based vaccines so we can vaccinate huge numbers of people simultaneously. This is not over. And that's actually, when the bacteria stuff comes out of the tendra in Siberia with global warming, it's even more scary. Because there's stuff there that we haven't got antibiotics for and we won't be able to develop antibiotics. So we're in a world which, and you look at the speed of change, exponential curves of global warming, people are now experiencing them in weather patterns and everything else and that's gonna accelerate. So we are actually gonna start to live in a world of permanent complexity, virgin or crisis. And you can start to, some people are starting to recognize that. And most government crisis planning assumes that you start and then you finish, all right? Now the other thing which comes on this, I'm sorry I'm being depressing but I have to sit on this bloody thing thanks and listen to other people so you might as well suffer too, all right? The only economic model we have for the level of resource starvation we're gonna have with global warming is patriarchal feudalism. And you can see that coming through in populist leaders. All right, and people aren't aware of that and they're not trying to do something to stop it. So that's the thing. The mental health one is a huge one. We've now got people who don't want to see, they've spent a year not seeing people. They're finding it very difficult to see people again. Yeah, you've got levels of stress. So I think people aren't picking up the weak signals of mental health at the moment. Yeah, and that's one of the things which really worries me, right? Because if that builds, particularly we're seeing, for example, in the UK an increase in teenage suicide, I think you are in the States as well. Now that's actually a nearly indicator of far wider problems. Thanks for raising these really important issues. Stephen writes, how do you connect Kenevan ontologies to active inferences that are beyond perspective taking, such as beyond representational approaches in geography, phenomenology, or indigenous ways of knowing? Okay, so a lot of the methods and techniques I developed were actually developed when I was working with indigenous people in Kakadik. So things like ritual descent and the like are there. And the one thing that you will find in indigenous communities as a type of knowledge is connectivity matters more than things. And actually clan type structures are more important. So I don't have any problem with that because a lot of that stuff comes across intact. I'm not so sure about books like Sand Talk, for example, because they're trying to use Western language to explain a different phenomenon, but I can see where he's trying to come from on that. So I don't have a problem with it because I think a lot of that work comes into complexity. My ritual descent technique came from observing people in Kakadu back in the 70s, yeah, in terms of the way things work. So there's a body of richness there that we can handle. I think also the abstraction thing is key. It's quite interesting. Human beings have developed things like poetry to convey very complex ideas and paradox. I mean, one of those cartoons behind me, this is Gape and Void, they specialize in semiotics. One of the ones they've got there, which you can just about see with a red cross on it, right? The slogan is saying cross different nails. Now that's brilliant because it doesn't give you precise meaning, it gives you ambiguous meaning. And again, I'm jumping around a bit, but you won't find an indigenous community sitting and talking about values. They may talk about what they do things and the values emerge from the actions. And that's something we could really do within the West because there's this huge problem and everybody wants to get together and talk about something and they want people to confess their sins. I call it the Billy Graham School of Management Consulting in which you have to come to the mercy seat and go behind the altar, right? And the reality is most people in real communities just go and do things differently. I made that reference earlier on peace and reconciliation. So action-based change rather than talking-based change actually fits with complexity very well. Excellent answer, thank you. Aswini wrote, how can complexity thinking and sense making be better used for poverty alleviation and the achievement of SDG Sustainable Development Goals? Okay, so sustainable development goals have gained all the time. The minute anybody produces a goal like that, everybody plays games with it, all right? Because it's the way you get funding. And the amount of money spent in the development sector on evaluation exceeds the money spent on making real change, all right? So that's been a bit of a simple book. There are better ways of handling that, all right? In terms of alleviating poverty, I think a lot of this is allowing people's voice to come through. So the big thing we're working on at the moment which we're trying to get funding for and we're finally getting close is to have every child at the age of 16 in every school in the world as an ethnographer to their community with the right technology. Because then their voices can be heard in context and we can create peer-to-peer flow. The key thing in alleviating policy is peer-to-peer flow of ideas so that communities can find ways to self-generate. It's not about dependency, all right? It doesn't mean that you should cut development aid budgets and things like that. We still need to do that. But I will say that, you know, if you just look at it within, I mean, within 20 or 30 years, there are whole countries around the equator where if you're not in air conditioning for two or three hours at midday, you'll die, all right? So there are really significant issues and then there's weirdness. So for example, deaths in Africa from COVID aren't like deaths in India. But we also know COVID seems to light Neanderthal genes. Whereas most Europeans and North Americans have got Neanderthal genes, which help us against things like cholera but seem particularly vulnerable to coronaviruses. So we're starting to find those sort of differences. And that also impacts because the ability of a community to be genetically resilient to disease is actually quite interesting as it develops. Thanks. Kevin Flowers wrote, what statistical methods do you use for validating your models, whether a Kinevin or ethnographic? Well, Kinevin is based on physics, it's based on ontology. So I'm not going to use a statistical model to validate it. It's a sense-making framework, yeah? The statistical methods we use, I mean, you need one of my statisticians to talk to you. I mean, we're more likely to use Spearman's coefficient than anything else because it's better for abducted links, all right? And we export all our data into ours. So to be honest, you can do what you like with the statistics and see what you get out of it, all right? A lot of primary sense-making is done without statistics. People look at the data the way they put it in and they make sense of it. Great, there's two very nice and related questions. So Roya on the note of breaking silos in order to build networks around them asked, as you said, change is usually driven by effective and fast communication about values and terminology. How can we overcome resistance in engaging with others? And Sarah on a similar note wrote, do you have any suggestions for discussing the importance of complexity with individuals who might tend towards dogmatism or people who don't even understand what dogmatism is because of a dogmatic upbringing? Okay, so first of all, I wouldn't break down silos. I'd link and connect individuals and groups between silos and I wouldn't challenge the silo. And you can look up the entangled trios method, right? The other thing is kind of like ignore them. I mean, one of my other frameworks is called Fletcher's Curves, which is a variety of market life cycle. One of the things you learn pretty fast is if you're doing something new, you sell to the early adopters or the inner majority, a late majority person will never buy it. So get real. If somebody's locked into a dogmatic framework, you've got to find a way of disrupting that dogmatism. And we do do that work. But so, for example, we'll take, let me give you an example. We did a big project in Africa with young girls who've been genetically mutilated and raped. And they became ethnographers to people at risk in their own community of the same horror, which actually was more therapeutic than talking with them. Yeah, doing, not talking. So then we took a group of narratives captured by the girls, which was self-similar. So they were indexed the same way. We represented that to experts on sexual practices in The Hague and Washington and London. And we got them to interpret it the way they thought the girls would have interpreted it. And we showed them the results. And of course, they were radically different. Now, there are three reactions to that. One is, oh my God, we're not the same. And that's stupid, because the only way you can be the same is go and have a horrendous operation when you're young and get raped by a, yeah. You can't see it the same way. That's called a gradient in fact. See, the difference is actually quite interesting. That's the good answer. Why are we seeing this differently? What are we missing? Yeah, or what are, yeah. And that's opportunity. The worst one, which we actually got was they don't understand their own stories. They've indexed them wrongly. And that's actually very common until people think about what that means and move forwards. So that, that, that, we can't descriptive self-awareness, putting people in positions where it's not you telling them something, they discover it for themselves are one of the ways you disrupt that. Getting people to work together, I might give you an old Nyland example. You take young people from two, two communities and dump them into a hostile environment. I also got that idea from Star Trek, by the way, if you actually look at the episodes, Darmonk is a good one to understand that. It's actually far more effective. And again, come back to the indigenous question. That's changing by doing, not changing by talking. Excellent. On another note, Makayla wrote, is there a role for religion and complexity? Yeah, well, I'm a Catholic. We're actually running a project at the moment on the Numinous, which if anybody's interested in is launching shortly. We're looking at parable forms in all world religions, right? And the whole concept of abstraction, though, if you actually look at a lot of evolutionary psychology at the moment, they basically say people can't avoid being religious. It's part of what we've all to be. And if you look at idiots like Richard Dawkins, who's no geneticist, I don't take seriously, he's creating a new religion. And Mary Midgley, famous, called it, scientism. If you go on his website, he has testimonies to people who became atheists after they heard him preach. It's like going to an old Stygian Bible show when you hear Richard, right? So the religious form is a universal, right? You can't escape it. And I think one of the issues we've got is people, I'm not saying religion is the solution to everything, but you need something that you believe in. One of the real disasters which happened, and I have a strong opposition to any approach based on Freud or Yer. It was a quite 19th century concept when we were into Cartesian dualism, but we now know consciousness is distributed. But one of the worst things which actually happened is Freudism was brought sideways in the early marketing movements in the States. And we moved politicians from arguing for something they believed in to have tried to find out what the voters wanted them to say. And everything goes wrong from that point. Yeah, because the system effectively becomes recursive and then everything coalesces. So if you look at what happened in America and Britain, nobody could see a distinction between left and right. It's a modernization. When you get to modernization, the energy cost of extremism goes down, right? And there's a key phrase I use a lot in complexity is you need to manage for coherent heterogeneity. Yeah, and a lot of facilitators don't like that. They want everybody to believe the same thing. Now, the way I normally explain that, all right, is I'm Welsh, right? If you don't know, we sing hymns at rugby grounds because rugby is a religion where I come from. And I support a team called Cardiff Blues, who are an honorable group of people who always play fairly and are put along by bad referees and evil guys who break the rules, right? But we're good guys. Then there are those bastards down the road from Llanelli who can't be trusted to play fair and bribe the referees and we've beaten them three times this year, so we're feeling really good. And it's all fun, right? But when the English come, we're all Welsh, right? And that's coherent heterogeneity. They'll be different and then be the same in different contexts. And too much change movement and too much is like, I don't like the purpose statements. Yet you're trying to get everybody to be the same. It's my big argument with Peter Sange and Otishamika who are actually neo-colonialists. They want everybody to be white males from MIT. That's their value system. And all of their frameworks assume that's the ideal place and that won't work. It won't work in rural Georgia. It won't work in urban Georgia. It won't work in Africa. The cultures are different and you need to respect those. On the topic of differences of differences from Yuri, Dave, have you put any effort in trying to understand the different ways of transitioning from socialism to capitalism in Russia and China? Well, actually, I mean, it's a good Catholic Marxist from the 70s. I will repeat what Marx said, is that a rural community, a rural society, can not become socialist because they will end up as a dictatorship. Marx actually said only Germany or Britain can become socialist. He said Russia won't be the same with China. All right, and that was the inevitable thing which happened. You do get this weird thing, is as I mentioned and ran earlier, nobody takes seriously as a philosopher who studied the subject, but has a popular following in the States and in certain parts of former Eastern Europe. So it's that reverse anti-type thing. And I think a lot of things were dry. I think Reagan and Yeltsin were partly, and Thatcher were responsible for this and just to be clear, right? I was one of many people who bought thousands of copies of The Witch is Dead when Thatcher died to try and get it on top of the Pops. And we got it to number two. I mean, that was one hell of an evil woman, right? But what they did is they didn't support Gorbachev who was going to get a gradual transition. They listened to Yeltsin who was in the pay of the mafia who offered to do what they thought capitalism was. And that's why one of the reasons Russia is corrupt. It's this radical transformation, right? The Easty-Westy problem in East Germany is there. So we create a lot of issues or problems. And to be quite honest, I mean, you should read David and other people like this. In the Anthropocene, socialist and capitalist, modernist and post-modernist are irrelevant concepts. Yeah, we've moved beyond that now, yeah? And David Chambers is really good on this, right? That those were the models, the pre-anthropocene period. What really matters now is who do you care about and what do you care about? Yeah, the economic fight of socialism and capitalism is a competition for the resource which is no longer scarce. And capitalism grew up on the assumption of infinitely available resource. And that's no longer possible. Here's another great question from Stephen. He wrote, how should we mitigate dangers of false senses of certainty in large-scale data sets even in sense-making? For example, do you warn sense-maker projects when they're using digital tagging on huge numbers of micro-narratives? Well, we mitigate it because the things attacked by the people who put the narrative in, they're not tagged by an algorithm or by expert methods. So there's a huge amount of diversity in that and so you can see patterns in it, right? I think you have a much bigger problem with big data, right? And that's down to the training data sets. I wrote a blog post on this which is titled, Big, Thick and Rich, right? Partly because I was irritated by Trump at the time so the title came naturally, right? But it's a contrasted answer. Ethnographers talk about rich data compared with big data and I actually said, you know, now they talk about thick data compared with big data and I said, well, actually what we do is rich data. You know, we get the ethnographic insight but we do it at scale and without the cultural bias, right? So I think you need to do that, you need validation on it but the key thing is to make sure that the interpretation is not done by an algorithm. Keeping a human in the loop and on that note, Roya who had asked some earlier awesome questions about the silos, they wrote, from a pure curiosity intention, should we force individuals in silos to network with other individuals of other silos or how do we really pragmatically go about this kind of connection? We do that with integral trios. So we define roles within silos. Then we connect people in pairs across the silos and give them free choice about who is the third provide it from a different silo. And then we give them tasks that find relevant. And to be quite honest, if people don't want to do it, we don't force them because over about six to nine months, there's enough people doing it that you get the entanglement in place, yeah? So that's one of the ways you do that sort of thing. That's not too difficult. And what was the first question? Because I've forgotten it. That was a great response. Okay. In these last couple of minutes for a question, Dave, this is another future book question. Do you also have plans for older adults highlighting what they are now more capable of so that they can maximize developmental creativity and potential rather than feeling like they're done? I think that's more where we're doing things. I mean, I've got three to four books I need to write. And I can get in there, right? So those will start to come off the stock shortly, right? So probably published 2022 and 2023. So one is on complexity, one is on narrative, one is on organizational design and strategy. So I'm going for three books at 70,000 words each rather than the major one because we can get them out faster, right? So that's the plan, right? But most of the something you're talking about is done by doing. So for example, our transgenerational pairing idea is really powerful. So we use children's ethnographers saying to a rural community, they then sit down in the village hall but they can only use the software if they bring somebody from their grandparents' generation with them and they work as a pair. If they find something in the narrative which they could change, then they come up with an idea. If it's a good idea, somebody from government is put in a trio with them to make the idea work. And one of the big things which happened recently in Liverpool is they actually co-located an old people's home with an orphanage. Yeah, and that's very effective. So I think again, it comes back to finding ways in which people interact. I term this famously the grandparent syndrome. Grandparents will tell things to grandchildren and they won't tell to their children and vice versa. And new joiners in a company will get narratives from people about to retire that middle managers will never get. Sometimes in genetics, they say it skips a generation. It doesn't really work that way, but they do say that. No, it does. And I think one of the reasons for that is the next generation is a threat. They're too close. Yeah, the generation afterwards, you can have a very different relationship with. Also, we're not responsible for them. Great. And I have all of my daughter about this, all right? I mean, I have forgotten everything she did between 14 and 18 just for my own mental health. But I intend to remember it all in vivid detail the minute she has a teenage daughter of her own. All up here. So one general question and then a final tactical question. Who are some of your favorite poets? Oh, Dylan Thomas, RS Thomas and the poet of complexity, Robert Frost. Good fences make good neighbors is the poem of constraints. Awesome. So as a... Or mending walls, sorry, it's cold. That's the chorus. Awesome, thank you. What would be any advice that you could provide to individuals, relationship teams, facilitators, everyone here at Complexity Weekend as we head into this next 72 hours where we're gonna be learning complexity by doing? Read in a transdisciplinary way. Read some cognitive neuroscience, but read some anthropology, but don't read the popular books. I've yet to find a popular book on cognitive neuroscience which has any value. And if you look at nonsense like Malcolm Gladwell's blink, the cognitive neuroscience community produced a whole book called the invisible gorilla to counter the nonsense in that book. So go to the real, I mean, Walter Friedman's had the brains make up their mind. Yeah, there are a lot of good, good deep scientists who write good books. You don't need to go to the populace and read around. This is another really important question from Alhaz who wrote, being in a country with the largest number of young people, which is India, do you think it's a disadvantage for the country and for a complexity thinkers? Or how can we make that into an advantage? It can be an advantage. I think that there is a massive divide and this is a political and philosophical divide behind commuterianism and social atomism. So Northern Europe, North America are socially atomistic. They see the individual as the primary units and communities aggregations of individuals. And by the way, that goes back to the reformation and the birth of Protestantism, the individual relationship with God, the rise of capitalism. Africa, Asia, an interest in the Irish and the Welsh and the Scottish. Yeah, a commuterian. They see the primary identity as the group. So if you ask people, which is the odd one out of cow, chicken and grass, people from Northern Europe and North America will get rid of grass because it's a vegetable than the other two animals. People like me, all right, and people from tribal groups will get rid of the chicken because the cow has got a relationship with grass. All right, now that's closer to complexity and commuterians with closer to complexity. What India needs to do at a young and old level is to keep to its commuterian roots and not adopt the atomism of the West. Yeah, I mean, I've said this in Mexico as well. Stop looking North, look South. You should never look at the current apex predator because you can never beat them. You've got to actually work to your strength and behave differently. And India is trying to imitate the states too much, including having a populist demagoguers lead it. But maybe I shouldn't have said that. Dave, this was really a fantastic panel and a fantastic way to begin our May 2021 complexity weekend. Is there any last thoughts or any questions you would like to ask us? Now, if anybody's interested, we got the website. I said we've moved all of the methods into open source, feel free to participate, ask for ID, you'll see stuff coming out on there. Yeah, we need to create a community around this and now is the time to grow. Thank you so much again. We really hope if you feel free to drop into gather, you're always welcome there. And at any future event, any of you or your colleagues or your friends and family will be welcome to join complexity weekend. It's a pleasure. Thanks again, Dave. Thanks a lot. See you. Okay. Bye. Bye. Thanks everyone for watching, live or in replay. That was quite a special stream. We hope that it was thought provocative and that it gave you something to think about, maybe something to do as well. So thanks again for watching and for those who are participating live, please join us and gather. Take a few minutes, take a walk and we'll meet you right in the central room of gather where the rest of our weekend is going to be held. All right, bye.