Online reading

A few conversations this month have sent me back to Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. In this short essay from 1999, she wrote about formulating a list in a burst of exasperation, and then having to explain it. Here’s how Meadows introduces the thing:

What bubbled up in me that day was distilled from decades of rigorous analysis of many different kinds of systems done by many smart people. But complex systems are, well, complex. It’s dangerous to generalize about them. What you are about to read is a work in progress. It’s not a recipe for finding leverage points. Rather it’s an invitation to think more broadly about system change.

What this invitation turns out to be is a list of twelve places to intervene in a system, ranked in order of effectiveness, spanning from (least effective):

12. Constants, parameters, numbers.

to (most effective):

1. The power to transcend paradigms.

I have benefited from this document many times over the years:

• It guides me away from “inflicting help” (thanks, Jerry Weinberg) by offering interventions that are not wanted.
• And it guides me toward noticing interventions that:
  • People love to do—“quick fixes” or strategy or whatever—but
  • End up pushing problems around. They will never be effective in changing systems.

That said, what I offer now is an invitation to ponder Meadows’ invitation.

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

The Academy for Systems Change

ProSci has published a great online guide to managing resistance to change. I was pleased to see this as it shares a bunch of their research findings and recommended actions that one would normally have to hit the books or take a course to access. I’ve written about resistance before. If you want to dig in to the topic and get a few solid checklists and approaches for making the most of this important signal, start here:

The Complete Guide Managing Resistance to Change

Prepare to manage resistance to change effectively by using Prosci’s research-backed change management strategies for lasting success.

Prosci - The Global Leader in Change Management

(Although, if you have a few days and a professional development budget, consider their three-day certification course.)

On the site

I’ve refreshed a couple pages on the site recently, including:

• a less bad biography/introduction page,
• a new consulting page, and
• a much shortened set of recommended books and sites.

Upcoming event

In April, May, and June, some practitioners and teachers of Liberating Structures—a facilitation approach I’ve written about before and use regularly—are hosting a series of online gatherings under the topic of “Vitalizing Health, Care, and Community with Liberating Structures”.

One problem folks run into when learning group facilitation is that the best way to learn this is to see one, do one, teach one. But it’s not always easy to find opportunities to watch other facilitators do what they do, and then to practice the methods directly. I lucked out: I learned Open Space Technology by watching Michael Herman do it decades ago. And my first real exposure to Liberating Structures was at some local events in Seattle.

Because this series is offered online and has sliding scale pricing, consider attending if the topic or the format are interesting to you:

Vitalizing Health, Care, and Community with Liberating Structures

This series explores the relationship between health and LS. Funds will support the health and recovery of a member of our community.

Eventbrite

The storm

2025 in America has been tough so far, and things are worsening rapidly. So many people have lost so much in such a short time. It is like watching a bulkhead in ill repair erode with each tide. Can such erosion be restored, reversed? Yes, but not without huge effort and coordinated action. That’s why I am so focused on systems thinking and facilitation these days:

• Systems thinking as a way to reason about systems, power, change—not “merely” in the workplace, but all around us.
• And facilitation as a simple, whole-hearted way to improve gatherings.

Last week we had an evening of spring thunderstorms, with cautions of hail and wind damage—rare weather conditions here in the Pacific Northwest, especially this time of year and at the forecasted intensity. I grew up in the middle of the cornfields in Michigan, so something in me is always longing for a thunderstorm. Hearing rolling thunder as the clouds rushed overhead was such a joy. The beauty of weather. Here in Tacoma, the worst conditions did not come to pass—no hail, no wind damage, and so forth. But it was good to prepare, and to be ready. To watch and to listen. And now, a few days later, everything is in bloom and the blossoms are very fragrant and bright.

Online reading

SessionLab’s third annual State of Facilitation report is out. It helps me reflect on my own facilitation practice, which tends toward the solitary and variable based on the projects I take on.

Three personal highlights from this year’s report:

Facilitated sessions are becoming shorter. Comparing responses from the 2022 and 2024 surveys, the proportion of facilitators who have never conducted workshops lasting more than one day has increased by 10%.

I ditched the multi-day facilitated workshops in 2019. I traded in “big bang” three-day workshops in for sequences of 1- or 2-hour online sessions, spaced out over a week or two, with opportunity for new ideas in the margins. This works out better for everyone involved, except for the person who has to schedule all the meetings. (That person is usually me!)

In-person sessions are back, but remote and hybrid facilitation are here to stay. In 2022, 57.8% of sessions were held online, but by 2024, in-person workshops have regained the top spot.

Although 2024 was a very busy year, the only days I worked with clients in-person were devoted to facilitating workshops. If you are reading this and I handed you one of those little vinyl cactus toys, you are very special to me.

You can even detect the random walks of corporate fashion, with the rise of L&D and the total gutting of design and product organizations:

The responses to the question, “What department do you work in?” highlight that individuals facilitating sessions, training, and workshops are spread across various company departments. Major contributors include Learning and Development and, of course, Management.

Then cast one’s gaze toward the bottom of the list, where Design and Product departments accounted for less than 8% of responses.

Much more for you to peruse in this free report:

State of Facilitation 2025 – Report and Expert Insights

The 2025 edition of SessionLab’s State of Facilitation report. Data, trends, and insights from a survey of workshop design and facilitation professionals.

SessionLabKeith McCandless (2014)

Next, from Ali Alkhatib’s “Defining AI”:

We should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to ‘democratize’ AI routinely conflate ‘democratization’ with ‘commodification’. … This way of thinking about AI (as a political project that happens to be implemented technologically in myriad ways that are inconsequential to identifying the overarching project as ‘AI’) brings the discipline—reaching at least as far back as the 1950s and ’60s, drenched in blood from military funding—into focus as part of the same continuous tradition.

Finally, Erin Kissane’s celebration of Ursula Franklin:

Ursula Franklin's lifework was highly practical. As a metallurgist, she studied the structure of ancient artifacts to produce knowledge about the cultures that made them. As a peace activist and conservationist, she practiced civil disobedience and obstruction as well as healthy renewal. As a far-sighted thinker about modern technology, she worked relentlessly to lay the foundations of ways to think together that could produce better technologies—and to define what “better” meant. Maybe starting with this small way into her work—a single list for thinking about decisions—makes sense.

Kissane wanders through a little passage where Franklin wrote seven questions to consider when designing a public project. Here’s the seventh:

Whether the reversible is favoured over the irreversible? The last item is obviously important. Considering that most projects do not work out as planned, it would be helpful if they proceeded in a way that allowed revision and learning, that is, in small reversible steps.

If we’ve worked together before and Franklin’s name rings a bell, it’s because I rely on her formulation of “small, reversible steps” (which I sometimes call “small, reversible changes”).

Ursula’s list

Ursula Franklin is one of my all-time favorite thinkers about both the obvious and obscured parts of our technological world.

wreckage/salvageErin Kissane

A plug for better online typography

There was this thing going around that the presence of em dashes (—) is a hint that a text is generated by an LLM. Of course, the real tell is that the text is boring as shit. You have my eternal permission to stop reading anything dull. When your mind wanders, let your feet follow. For example, I recently resolved to stop reading anything containing the word “alignment” and this has saved time.

Anyway, my purpose is to share Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, a site on using typography—including em dashes—to improve your written communication. This is not a topic I know much about, but I do know enough to crib from an expert and spend an additional 5 minutes making things look nice on the screen or page before proceeding onwards.

Butterick’s Practical Typography

Butterick’s Practical Typography

Podcast appearance

Last week I appeared on my pal Andy’s “Own Your Awkward” podcast. True to the name, it was an awkward, but ultimately fruitful, conversation.

My main awkward thing is that I’m too hard on myself. For the awful details on what that means and ways in which I’m a work-in-progress on getting past it, listen in your podcast player or watch on YouTube.

Take good care of yourself and the people in your life.

There is so much more to do, urgently, but let’s begin there.

My accomplished, wonderful pals

2024 was difficult—but ultimately very good—for me. Something that got me through the difficult parts was enjoying the successes of my friends, pals, and comrades, of which I offer an incomplete list here, in roughly chronological order:

• The boffins over at Fenwick released the Think Like a Writer course, which I have taken and personally recommend. Most online courses are bad. Not this one. Instead, it’s a three-week commitment that produces immediate, durable results. (I wrote about this in May).
• Lissy launched her playful learning company, HuMindWise, “turning burnout, stress, and imposter syndrome into opportunities for growth through game based learning and community.”
• Devon completed and published her book project: The Accessibility Operations Guidebook. (My notes from October.)
• A bunch of my friends rafted the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. No names and no URLs to share, but everything about that adventure astonished and inspired me.
• Shannon and Jamie completed their 80’s Kids cover album, which you can stream now, and which they’re taking on the road next year. My favorite track is the Boss’s Dancing in the Dark; play it really loud.
• Over the summer and fall, Neetal released a set of 4 children’s books in her Pineapple Friends series of social impact books for kids. These passed muster with my seven-year-old child—so they’re the real deal.

On the site in 2024

I only shared one new blog post this year. I did manage to keep up with monthly links & notes, and did a bunch of cleanup—tidying older posts, organizing the junk drawer, and so forth. Everything about this was good, but I’d like to do more soon.

A format for year-end reflection

Greg and Brett at Same Team Partners created a simple, free activity called Replay and Reset for 2025. I worked through this over the weekend—in under an hour—and uncovered a couple ah-has as well as committed to some new to-dos for the new year. I encourage you to try this for yourself.

• If you’re a video person, watch this 10-minute introduction that walks you through the activity and how to do it on your own.
• After drafting my own Replay and Reset for 2025, I had coffee with Greg and shared what I came up with. Here’s what Greg had to say about that.

The bit about my waders

I hope you find some time to say farewell to 2024 and get your waders on for 2025. The water is rising fast and looking pretty choppy.

I leave you with this, from §67 of the Tao Te Ching, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation. It’s as good an answer as any to the question of how we are meant to proceed from here.

I have just three things to teach:

simplicity, patience, compassion. 

These three are your greatest treasures. 

Simple in actions and in thoughts, 

you return to the source of being. 

Patient with both friends and enemies, 

you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself,

you reconcile all beings in the world.

Online reading

“I feel connected to my organization’s culture.” Only 40% of leadership, 23% of management, and 19% of staff agree with this statement.

My pal Jenny Zhang recently gave a superb conference talk on ways it might be more useful to think about values (fit/mismatch/tension) in the workplace, instead of culture.

I particularly enjoyed this:

The expected return of going to leadership with negative feedback is terrible. Risk alienating your boss for the sake of telling the truth? Why? Even if you’re not directly retaliated against, and people often are, it can still really damage your standing. If you speak up too often, you’re branded as the naysayer. If you’re part of a marginalized group raising issues about how marginalized people are treated, you’re tarred as being “political” or “biased”. And of course, most of the time the canaries in the cultural coal mine are the marginalized employees with the least standing, because they’re the ones with the least protection when the cracks start to show.

Part of my client work is to get emerging leaders to develop systems for:

• hearing bad feedback and
• actually doing some damned thing about it—
• even when the doing is difficult.

An important predicate here is that leaders must realize that by the time one person is willing to speak up about a problem, they typically speak for a scared-as-shit coalition of their peers. And, as Jenny points out, leaders should understand that the people who have the capability and urgency to speak up first tend to be the least protected.

Please, read Jenny’s talk or watch the recording:

the values of work

In October I gave a talk at Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine, a small and intimate tech conference with a big impact in the industry. It’s quite unlike any other conference I’ve been to, which is explicitly the point. I’d been hearing about the conference from friends for years, and it somehow still managed to exceed all my lofty expectations. Monktoberfest asks that your talk be something you wouldn’t be able to hear at any other conference. Mine was about values and how they show up at work and what happens when there is a gap between your stated and enacted values. It’s a theme that percolates through a lot of my writing and something I’ve spent many sleepless nights ruminating on, and giving this talk to such a receptive, empathetic, and compassionate audience was incredibly meaningful to me. You can watch the talk here: Seeing as I am personally allergic to watching any YouTube videos longer than five minutes unless I absolutely have to, I’ve also included a lightly edited version of the text of the talk below.

The Roof is on PhireThe Roof is on Phire

The “Multisolving” Book

I think this book by Elizabeth Sawin, just released, is an instant classic in systems thinking. The approach:

While the idea of killing two birds with one stone (or “filling two needs with one deed”) is age-old, and the notion of co-benefits in policy-making has been around for years, Multisolving addresses the current mismatch between complex, deeply intertwined societal issues and our siloed approach to them.

Systems thinking is vital for so many kinds of work, but it can also be easy to encounter it and come away thinking—that’s neat, but all a little theoretical, and I have these specific things I am trying to get done this week. This book builds on systems thinking from Donella Meadows and others, but organizes it all in a direct, useful way. Each chapter ends with two things:

• First, some questions for reflection that I am finding useful, both for myself and to bring into discussions with others.
• And second—this is a really wonderful surprise—a short poem that crystallizes the point of the chapter. I remember the images from these poems better than I do the content of the text (which is a good thing).

Buy a copy at the link below and use the code MULTI for a 20% discount.

Multisolving Book - Multisolving Institute

MULTISOLVING: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World Order the Book Synopsis For most of Elizabeth Sawin’s career, she was not a multisolver. Instead, she worked on a single, albeit immensely important problem: climate change. Despite tremendous effort—long hours of teaching, attending conferences, publicizing analysis—at the end of the day, she felt like she was […]

Multisolving InstituteKelsi Bowens

Whole-heartedness

A theme for the month of Zen readings and week of silent retreat I did back in October was “whole-heartedness”—which I cannot think of as anything but the opposite of half-assedness. Here in the USA, we’re entering a season of the politics of the very worst. Achille Mbembe’s 2019 “Necropolitics” is the book through which I understand where we’re heading.

My task right now is to know where the community is—where my communities are—and to engage gently, but whole-heartedly. Does everyone know it’s OK to ask for help? Or to share their fears and specific, material concerns? Because we will continue to need each another. There is no one, or nothing, else.

I’ve been listening to this song for 25 years. It is what whole-heartedness means to me, and I hope it lets some light in for you:

Anthem by Leonard Cohen on Apple Music

Song · 1992 · Duration 6:09

Apple Music - Web Player

Take good care of yourself and the people around you.

Online reading

At the beginning of October, I felt afraid and stagnant. Let’s start there.

On fear—Bill McKibben writing on October 9, a few hours before Hurricane Milton hit Florida, a month before a consequential and confusing US election:

The fear of a planet where the old rules no longer hold is the ultimate fear—because then how do you even think about the future? And that’s as true as politics as it is in meteorology.

Fear

When It Helps, When It Hurts

The Crucial YearsBill McKibben

And stagnation—revisiting an essay by Mandy Brown:

Growth occurs in intervals: there are times of growth, and there are times of non-growth. The latter isn’t a failure so much as a necessary period of rest. Dormancy isn’t stagnant; it’s potentiating. It’s patient. If you’ve grown a lot in the past however many months or years and now feel that growth coming to a close, don’t fret right away. Wait. Reflect on what you’ve learned. Look for signs of spring. Move to where there’s water, if you need to.

Latewood | everything changes

On the seasons of growth.

everything changes

While all this is going on, I keep busy at work. In my facilitation practice, I help people uncover their priorities and values and then, within those new structures, gleefully deliberate and take skillful action.

Here’s Chelsea Troy on group deliberation:

The perspectives that matter the most in decision-making, are precisely those perspectives that typically get excluded from participation in the thing we’re making decisions about. … When you’re facilitating a decision that’s going to have a wide impact crater, you have to go find precisely the interests that often aren’t represented for this kind of decision—who don’t even get a vote—or who always lose the vote.

These parties frequently have concerns that the vote completely fails to address. Recall from the last post that we introduced two categories of metric: optimizing metrics (where we need to find the best solution) and satisficing metrics (where we need a minimum acceptable solution). Marginalized concerns in decision-making often should be preliminary satisficing metrics: they should be table stakes, because they determine who gets to participate at all, rather than a slight preference.

How to flub (and not flub) group decision-making on technical teams

This post from a week ago talked about three decision-making traps that technical leaders fall into like flies into a honey jar: They’ll solve for the general case without collecting or considering…

Chelsea TroyView all posts by Chelsea

By the way, the best method I know of for designing something new while ensuring that everybody’s minimum specs (what Troy calls table stakes) are identified, met, and exceeded is set-based design.

Books

Standard Ebooks has produced a beautifully formatted, freely available ebook edition of Mary Parker Follett’s “The New State” from 1919. Yes, it’s over a hundred years old. And it remains a readable, engaging look into group formation, deliberation, and decision-making.

The New State, by Mary Parker Follett - Free ebook download

Free epub ebook download of the Standard Ebooks edition of The New State: The theory of group organization is formulated and applied in an attempt to design a truly democratic political state.

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

There are a million ideas in Follett’s writing. One that sticks with me is this:

Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed.

And finally, my friend Devon Persing’s book, “The Accessibility Operations Guidebook,” is out. She writes:

This book is two things. The first is a crash course in frameworks and ways of thinking from fields like information science, organizational theory, and DEI. The second is a walkthrough of building and operationalizing sustainable, data-driven accessibility programming.

Even though I don’t work in the digital accessibility field, I got a lot of practical information out of the back half of this book (chapters 10-14). Devon has great advice on org design + operations challenges, like:

• whether to couch an offering as a service and/or a program,
• ways to use or commission information, and
• tips on goal-setting in service of group decision-making.

Learn more about the book and buy a copy (if purchasing on Payhip, use coupon code PUMPKINTOAG for 25% off):

The Accessibility Operations Guidebook | Devon Persing

Lessons in making accessibility work more practical and sustainable for you and your organization.

Devon Persing

Gratitude

I entered October feeling afraid and stagnant: worried about the climate, about the US elections, about a dozen wars around the globe, about every horror ongoing and unabated and by this point nearly forgotten, about the health and wellbeing of my immediate family.

Thank you to Liana and our children and various folks at work and kind friends in town and around the globe, each of whom supported me in going on silent retreat for a week.

This month, that community of silence made all the difference.

So as we leave October, I’m still afraid. But I am also ready. I cling to these lines from Yu Xuanji (the 9th-century poet/courtesan/Daoist nun):

Water fits itself to the vessel that contains it.
Clouds drift artlessly, not thinking of return.
Spring breezes bear sorrow over the Chu river at dusk:

separated from the flock, a lone duck is flying.

The season has turned here in Tacoma. Rainfall and drifting clouds. I look out the window for the reminders I need: to fit myself to this vessel. To drift imperfectly and without thinking of return. To engage and assist and participate as much and as long as I can. To keep flying, in darkness.

Online reading

First, novelist Thea Lim on the many harms of algorithmic systems and the stultifying context their corporate owners want us all to be stuck in, where “every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit”:

If there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.

And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age | The Walrus

Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?

The WalrusThea Lim

Next, Mandy Brown on a changed, distanced stance to social media:

There was a time when I felt some resonance between spending time in the social stream and doing my own work. As if the movement of the water imparted some energy or power I could make use of, and then return. But it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. I grieve that loss: a great number of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find I still often long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people in whose company I felt at home. But I know that longing to be a kind of nostalgia, an unrealizable wish to return to a past that never was quite as I remember it. I do not want those memories to be a burden, like stones weighing down my pockets. I want, instead, to carry them lightly and tenderly, to have the fortitude to accept the grief that comes with leaving the past where it belongs.

I have become comfortable with my little nests on Mastodon and [REDACTED], with the small web goofiness of the moment, but I also think and worry sometimes about the countless people I’ve lost track of—or lost “ambient awareness” of—as tech+finance hollows out, immolates, and desecrates the places where we once played.

Coming home

Into the gap.

A Working LibraryMandy Brown

Not all is gloomy. A recording of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s famous 1982 lecture, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” has recently been pried off some obsolete media and parked on YouTube.

This is an astonishing, hilarious, valuable talk. I watched it through twice. I took notes. You will benefit from this lecture if you are interested in systems stuff or continuous improvement stuff or working with smart, cranky, opinionated people. Here’s a taste:

Never in this office say, “but we’ve always done it that way.” If, during the next 12 months, any of you says, “but we’ve always done it that way,” I will instantly materialize beside you and I will haunt you for 24 hours.

Some additional context and links to the recordings:

We can now watch Grace Hopper’s famed 1982 lecture on YouTube

The lecture featured Hopper discussing future challenges of protecting information.

Ars TechnicaJennifer Ouellette

On the site

Recent changes @ improvesomething.today:

• Created a new, simple Recommendations page with selected books, newsletters, blogs, and podcasts.
• For web-based readers, a new overall theme & organization. The old one was feeling that way. Read about this site for more detail.

Online event

Registration is now open for Abby Covert’s 4th annual Makesensemess, an affordable, online celebration coming up on November 1, 2024.

This is the hottest ticket in the nerdile, infinitely curious information architecture zone. Flexible pricing, anchored around $30.

I have attended several Makesensemesses prior and it’s a great event. If you like messes, or making sense of them, consider joining us.

That is all I have for now. I sit in a campus library looking idly out the window at some gorgeous trees in the arboretum whose leaves seem not more than a week away from turning into their fall colors and changing from there into the next thing. Change is here for each of us, it is all around us, and it is all, ultimately, somehow, good.