Over the past six months, mostly out of curiosity to learn more about Liberating Structures (LS), I embarked in organising and being an active member of the design teams for a few LS immersions workshops with Keith McCandless, co-author of the book Liberating Structures. It has taken me to New Zealand, Australia, Peru, Argentina and Chile, where I met 100s of people focused on exploring new ways of facilitating for inclusiveness, innovation, and tackling organisational issues.

Most organisations have at least one significant company event such as the annual company-wide conference, the CEO company-wide meeting to share changes about the strategy or market, town-halls dealing with inclusion or cultural issues, sales conferences. These events may run yearly or on a bi-annual basis. There is an intensity of effort and one-off costs that go into putting the event together, in most cases run by a cluster of HR folk, maybe a few businesspeople, and comms peeps. Whatever the theme or the premise that brings this event to life, there is the assumption that it will trigger new awareness that will lead to behavioural changes – all positive, of course – to what they just heard or saw happening.

For a while now, a few brave souls have tried to introduce new concepts, ways of being and working in organisations to help them thrive in complex and uncertain times. I call them brave souls, as the most common response to this invitation, has been: “That’s interesting, but no thanks; We don’t need that here.”; or “This is just too complicated or advanced for us.”  

Polarised? Segmented? Adversarial? Are these questions creating the world we see? With elections looming only a few weeks away here in New Zealand one of the six members of our small and global Human Systems Dynamics (HSD) learning group pointed to the emerging polarity amongst political parties between Health VS Economy. She was interested in unpacking what this meant, and if other people in the group were seeing the same elsewhere in the world. 

It was the first week in December 2020, and there was a lot of publicity around the announcement that New Zealand had declared a state of climate emergency.

En medio del estruendo de conflictos, divisiones y, en ocasiones, apatía, el eco de la paz, tanto interna como externa, se percibe cada vez más tenue, afectando nuestras vidas en diversos niveles. Al igual que un sistema complejo y adaptable, nuestro enfoque ha cambiado y evolucionado con el tiempo. A lo largo de los meses, nuestras conversaciones sobre “Patrones de Paz” se han expandido y enriquecido a través del diálogo, manteniéndonos abiertos y receptivos a las emergentes posibilidades.

No matter where we are, we may struggle with separating work and home life at some point in our life. For some, the only thing we can think off is work,  and we may over-focus on the issues at hand—my manager, the workload, teammates and so forth.  As soon as we start a conversation with someone unrelated to our workplace, we find a “Segway” to talk about our work, especially our grievances. This talk about work has been going on for a long time. When people see you coming, you sense they are trying to avoid you. 

At the beginning of Feb 21, I saw an e-mail from a familiar name in my inbox. I was 17 when I met Ana María Tamayo briefly as an AFS student, I was returning from a year abroad, and she was departing to start hers. Ana Maria’s e-mail mentioned that a mutual friend had suggested she and her husband Ray Raymond Feeney had a chat with me as I worked with applied complexity. Ana Maria had taken the time to read through the site content and thought I could help them. She even quoted that they could identify with an opening quote “Change is like a wave that keeps getting bigger and bigger, there is no way to avoid it, but there are ways to surf it.”

 Applying complexity concepts in business and daily life may seem challenging, as we often associate complexity with difficulty. In my years of grappling with this concept, I’ve distilled my understanding into a simple perspective: embracing complexity helps me confront the unexpected, unveils hidden connections, keeps me grounded in the present, and expands my choices.