Category Archives: podcast episodes

Chris Corrigan: in our most creative moments, we feel invited into working together

I had the great pleasure to talk to Chris Corrigan for another episode of the Systemic Insight Podcast (Episode 9). Chris is a facilitator and an expert in complexity-sensitive facilitation techniques. He has been using similar methods and frameworks as Mesopartner, such as for example the Cynefin framework, developed by Prof. Dave Snowden. Chris describes himself as a process artist, a teacher and a facilitator of social technologies for face to face conversation in the service of emergence. His business is supporting invitation: the invitation to collaborate, to organise, to find one another and make a difference in our communities, organisations and lives.

Chris and I talked about the difference between being an expert that brings solutions and a facilitator that creates the conditions for emergence. We discussed the importance of invitation and respecting human dignity in collaborative processes and in dialogue. During the discussion, Chris described the Cynefin framework and how he uses it in his practice. Chris presented Cynefin as an incredibly useful generative framework and shared how we can use it to make sense of action.

Chris and I also discussed the current COVID-19 pandemic, how complexity concepts suddenly become very important and useful, and we explored quite deeply the relationship between leadership, moral and ethics, complexity and decision making.

Finally, we talked about the concept of dialogue and dialogic approaches and how they are fundamentally part of how we humans make sense of the world around us, interact and collaborate, and explore different options on how to act.

As the episode is 1.5h long and not everybody might be able to put aside enough time to listen to it, below some extracts of the podcast, partly verbatim quotes by Chris, partly paraphrased by me. Hopefully this is enough of a teaser so you will still go and listen to the full episode, its well worth it!

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Why outcome-based performance management doesn’t work: podcast with Dr Toby Lowe

Last week we published the 7th episode of the Systemic Insight podcast (get it from Libsyn or Apple Podcast or you can also find it on Spotify). It features Dr Toby Lowe of Northumbria University and his work on why outcome-based performance management doesn’t work – and what to do instead. In this blog post, I’m sharing some quotes from Toby and some insights I took from the conversation.

The discussion in the podcast touches upon why outcome targets distort rather than enhance performance, why they lead to gaming becoming a rational strategy, and what the alternatives are for people who work in complex contexts. As outcome-based performance management is still the prevalent method to manage the performance in many fields, this discussion is highly relevant and pertinent.

This episode is packed with ideas and quite challenging thoughts! In this blog post I am bringing together a number of quotes from Toby and some comments from my side.

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New Podcast Episode: On competitiveness

We have just launched a new episode on the Systemic Insight Podcast. In this episode, I discuss with Shawn the concept of competitiveness. The chat was inspired by some reading I had been doing that condemned competition to be part of the driving force that makes our society so extractive and unequal.

In particular, I am using two quotes from Daniel Wahl’s book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ to exemplify the argument. To contrast this viewpoint, Shawn and I explore the positive aspects of competition and why competitiveness and in particular systemic competitiveness in the way it is used by Mesopartner and others still are and will remain important concepts in economic development – and why they can indeed also be forces that drive a positive transformation of society towards a more sustainable future. We also asked Christian Schoen to share his opinion on competitiveness in development. 

Find the episode on Libsyn or Apple Podcasts.