Tag Archives: integrity

Letter and Coffee

A weekly, experimental newsletter

I have been blogging on this page since July 2011 when I wrote an article on using principles from evolution in development. Since then, I have published 117 blog posts and in 2020 I had almost 10,000 views from 6,300 visitors. It has been fun, but I have also always struggled to put meaningful content onto the blog. My intention has never been to publish a blog post every day – I actually stopped following people who do that as I can’t handle it. I have always seen my blog as a place to ponder ideas and think out loud. Yet there has always been a threshold to get writing as I still somehow felt that a blog post needed to have something substantial and mature to say – even though I’m also aware that whatever I write is never finished. In order to overcome this threshold, I decided to pause blogging – for the time being at least – and try a new format. From the week of 19 April, I will start a weekly newsletter.

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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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