STEPS: Coffee & Complexity Club #3

​Come and join us for a new series, where we’ll grab a coffee and dive into all things complexity.

​This week, Tom, Kyle and John are joined by very special guests Mushfiqa Monica Jamaluddin and Mark James. Over to them:

​"For this Coffee & Complexity Club, we’re taking an exercise from the Wayshaping framework — “Shaping a Path to Walk In” — and experimenting with how we can use our imaginative and anticipatory capacities to sustain a change we are trying to make within complexity.

​The question we’re asking is: How do we stabilize change across varying contexts? Our aim with this exercise is to explore how we use anticipation and improvisation in service of maintaining a meaningful direction within uncertainty and continually changing circumstances.

​In this session, we’ll work individually and in pairs we’ll anticipate some of the challenges we may encounter relative to a particular change effort, identify the scaffolds that might support it, and imagine how the path might unfold across different environments and situations. The aim is not to devise a perfect plan, but to develop a more flexible orientation that can hold as the terrain changes, even in unexpected ways."

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​About these sessions

​Over the years, The STEPS Collective has been gathering people to explore how we might help design things that are socially, environmentally and economically regenerative. All three of these things invite us to work and worry at an entanglement that can feel like it is too hard to tackle, too difficult to shift. It can stop us from doing anything.

​In order to give you new ways to think about the things we might be faced with, we wanted to explore complexity in a little more detail, over coffee every other Friday, with Kyle Soo and Tom Kerwin.

​From Tom:

​“STEPS has got it right: systems can feel too hard to shift. Most of what makes complexity feel impossible is that we tend to keep reaching for tools that work for a different kind of problem. One where you can map it all out, find the leverage point, agree the plan and get the result. None of that survives contact with a complex system. You can't know what'll work until after it's happened. The only thing you can count on is unintended consequences … and yet you have to act anyway.

​You don't need to be a complexity expert to come along. None of us has this figured out, and that's the point. Whether you're curious, a bit unsure, or even sceptical, you're exactly who this is for.”

​How the sessions will run

​In the series, we're not going to explain complexity at you. Instead, during each Coffee & Complexity Club session, we'll take one way in, bounce it around, try it out, and then come back to see what actually happened. We'll seed the first few sessions to get us going. After that, it becomes what the room makes it: we’ll offer one, or you can bring your own experiments to share!