the boundary between trust and love in complex human systems

Iceland is a country the size of Leicester in the UK. The similarity doesn't end there, both places have football teams that achieved remarkable - nay 'impossible' results. Leicester won the Premier league and Iceland not only won through to the finals of the European championship but also qualified from the group stage and then knocked England out of the last 16 to meet France in the quarterfinals.

O=∑R^t (a system is the sum of its relationships to the power of the trust in the relationships)
is an equation that shows how a team with strong relationships can beat a group of Individuals - a well know phenomenon in sport. The equation enables us to see inside a system and watch how the relationships grow and build, or not, and how the trust of the equation becomes love. Love is the strongest most efficient form of trust. With love, often little spoken communication is required, you know and feel the other so well, that a look or even a thought is enough to take the agreed action.

This magic called love is complex, unpredictable, uncontrollable and powerful. The Iceland team has been together since they were youngsters, the environment of few professional footballers didn't allow for anything else. Slowly they have learned to make the best of the skills they have, individually often less than their opponents, and the strength of their teamwork has grown with them. They also have two coaches, giving more perspectives than one, and in their environment they have been able to learn and grow.

The workshop on 5th July at Foam, Brussels will explore how to create the conditions for this growth of relationships and trust and how trust becomes its more powerful efficient form called love.

The Leicester team only came together at the start of last season, yet they too were able to reach a level of 'impossible' results, perhaps with a little more luck, but the stability of their core and the environment  and boundaries created by the manager and his staff team enabled players to reach their full potential.

This is a new form of leadership, not based on ego but on unleashing the collective brain and spirit of a group to take individuals to places they never dreamed of. Understanding the nature of complex human systems is the foundation of this approach.

Brexit- Its a perfect example of not understanding how to think and make decisions in complex systems; the relationship(s) the UK has with EU is for more involved than even a hundred heads could hold, and it's suffered a linear intervention reduced to two options of In or Out.

 Linear interventions into complex systems explode in your face, QED.

Come to the workshop on 5th July at Foam in Brussels and we'll see together how to avoid these unintended consequences, by using our felt sense to navigate and map the systems and relationships involved and design appropriate interventions that don't throw the future to the wind of fortune.

Passionate about complexity science, I accompany people and organizations along the paths of their most difficult challenges.

Complex human systems arrive with a whole new way of thinking and making decisions. Simple right and wrong often ceases to have meaning, instead the art of navigating, harvesting and surfing become relevant, as we deal with contexts that contain too much information and too many uncontrollable variables for one head to think about and keep under control.

Unlocking the collective intelligence of an organization is one of the important interventions in situations like this.

The inclusive nature of complexity means that we map and remap the various topographies involved, so that the full extent of the relationships involved interventions and decisions can be thought through before pressing the button. 

This sounds like its getting there.....

My news is that i just bought a Windmill, with my half of the old house in Grez Doiceau, and my half of the flat in Schaerbeek, where Jane is going to live - having got a job in a school in Brussels.

It's just 400m from Hilde's house, and it comes with a 5 bedroomed house on a plot with a garden. In need of some renovation, both Mill & house, i'm going to restart the mill, millstones and flour mill is all still there although unused for nearly 10 years. (the sails were removed after war damage in 1950, replaced by a big diesel engine, also now gone i will run with electric motors. I’ll be starting up as an organic mill, there are not many in Belgium so it should have a good market. 

The business will run as a multi-stakeholder cooperative, optimising and sharing the value created across the whole value chain - my thing you know, to demonstrate that complex systems that include customers, suppliers, investors, co-workers and friends can be run successfully, if you understand the nature of complexity and how to navigate and harvest complex conditions.

And that's the third part, together with a friend who’s at from the Prigogine school of complexity at the ULB, a Physicist about our age called Vasilios Basios - greek of course - we're writing a book on harvesting complexity. A non-linear book, based around complexity lunches and workshops we’ve been holding over the past year, we hope in writing to capture a bit of the experience of navigating complex contexts, which means honing your ‘felt sense’ - a combination of Intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, intuition and musical senses. The combination of my operational use of complexity and the theory of complexity science has been fascinating, and inspiring and thats what we’re trying to get first into a book form, although etc,there are obvious multimedia forms too, from games to videos via workshops that we hope to develop over time.

Using the Mill which has great space for meetings and hosting people.

Come and see it when you’re next in Brussels, stay too, lots of space.

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