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

The Systemic Insight podcast

In this episode of the Systemic Insight Podcast, Marcus talks with Chris Corrigan. 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.

Marcus and Chris talked about the difference between being an expert that brings solutions and a facilitator that creates the conditions for emergence. Chris made his first experiences with truly complexity-sensitive facilitation when he started working with the Open Space technology. The two discuss the importance of invitation and respecting human dignity in collaborative processes and in dialogue. According to Chris, in our most creative moments, we feel invited into working together, into collaborating.

During the discussion, Chris describes the Cynefin framework and how he uses it in his practice. Chris presents Cynefin as an incredibly useful generative framework and shares how we can use it to make sense of action. He also introduces some other useful concepts of complexity such as containers, boundaries and connections, attractors, and identities.

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

Finally, they talk 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.

This episode is with almost 1.5h the longest we have produced so far, but it is packed all the way through with Chris's wisdom and experience. Enjoy!

Resources that were mentioned in the episode:

• Chris’s blog post: A tour around the latest Cynefin iteration
• Chris’s blog post: Living on islands: complexity, self-organization, and pandemic coping
• Zhen Goh’s blog post: Aporetic Meditations
• Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge
• Glenda Eoyang, Human Systems Dynamics Institute
• Dave Snowden and Mary Boon’s HBR Article on Cynefin: A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making
• Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz’s IBM Article: The New Dynamics of Strategy
• Book: Dynamics in Action by Alicia Juarrero
• Dave Snowden’s blog post on the liminal version of the Cynefin framework
• Book: Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change. Edited by G. R. Bushe and R. J. Marshak.
• Finite and Infinite Games: Two Ways to Play the Game of Life
• Dunbar's number