Chris Corrigan: in our most creative moments, we feel invited into working together
Release Date: 06/29/2020
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...
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Dr Toby Lowe #2: responding to Covid-19 with human learning systems
The Systemic Insight podcast
Marcus is welcoming back Dr Toby Lowe to the show! The Covid-19 crisis has hit the world and so many things have changed in the short time since we talked to Toby last. Particularly, ideas on complexity and systems thinking have suddenly gained a lot of traction as people realise that the world is indeed an uncertain place and the certainty that we imagined to be in, pre-crisis, was not to last forever. Marcus discusses with Toby how this plays out in the world of social interventions, which has many parallels with the world of international development, as we found out in the last episode....
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Dr Toby Lowe: why outcome-based performance management doesn’t work
The Systemic Insight podcast
In this episode, Marcus is talking to Dr Toby Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership and Management at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. Toby describes his purpose as an academic as helping improve the funding, commissioning and performance management of social interventions (across the public, private and voluntary sectors). His research team has used complexity theory to create a critique of New Public Management approaches, particularly highlighting the problems created by attempts to use Outcome-Based Performance Management (e.g. Payment by Results) in complex...
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On Competitiveness
The Systemic Insight podcast
In this episode, Shawn and Marcus discuss the concept of competitiveness. The chat was inspired by some reading Marcus had been doing that condemned competition to be part of the driving force that makes our society so extractive and unequal. In particular, Marcus is using two quotes from Daniel Wahl’s book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ to exemplify the argument. To contrast this viewpoint, Shawn and Marcus 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...
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An interview with Kristin O’ Planick about market systems resilience
The Systemic Insight podcast
In this Podcast, Marcus Jenal interviews Kristin O’Planick from USAID’s Bureau for Food Security about the agency’s recent work on market systems resilience. Kristin is part of a team that has been developing a new framework to capture market system resilience, which is currently going through early field testing. The framework builds on similar ideas as Mesopartner has been using on its work on resilience.
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An interview with Jeanne Downing
The Systemic Insight podcast
Jeanne Downing, Senior Enterprise Development Advisor, Office of Microenterprise Development, USAID talks about the discussions she and her colleagues have within USAID about the necessity of using a systemic approach in development. She mentions the need to switch away from linear approaches towards approaches that are better able to capture the complexities of real world phenomena, especially when taking into account the new focus on resilience, which puts a further layer of complexity on the work in market systems. With regard to Monitoring and Evaluation frameworks, Jeanne gives examples...
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An interview with Dave Snowden
The Systemic Insight podcast
In this episode, Marcus Jenal interviews Dave Snowden. The podcast explores the recognition that development takes place in a dynamic, complex system and the resulting consequences for monitoring and evaluation frameworks. Current monitoring and evaluation frameworks are built around predefined outcomes and based on assumptions of causal, linear, and attributable connections between a project's activities and changes at its outcome and impact levels. Based on complex systems research, these assumptions tend not to reflect the reality of complex systems, such as markets or communities. Dave...
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An interview with Shamim Bodhanya about the characteristics of complex adaptive systems
The Systemic Insight podcast
In this episode, Marcus interviews Dr Shamim Bodhanya. The podcast explores the origins of complex adaptive systems research and the application of its findings to development work. Bodhanya explains the characteristics of complex adaptive systems and their consequences in social systems such as the economy. He stresses the need to include multiple perspectives to develop a systemic view of markets and allow for solutions from within the system to involve rather than prescribe top-down solutions. In this sense, he points out, development project needs to be co-constructed by multiple...
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Systemic Insight Episode 1
The Systemic Insight podcast
In this first episode, Marcus and Shawn introduce the podcast series. Some of the key issues of economic development from a systems perspective are discussed. For more information on our work on managing economic complexity and change, visit . This podcast is brought to you by
info_outlineIn 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