It is a while since I used my blog to capture future reading, so here I go again.

This connects to my interest in complexity and facilitation: https://thecynefin.co/neither-baggy-nor-boxed/

Last time I did this, there was no AI around, and so here is a Claude summary of “Neither baggy nor boxed” by Dave Snowden

1. The conversation it joins. Snowden responds to Chris Mowles, who contrasts a baggy research conference with a tightly timed facilitated workshop and reads Mike Jackson’s preference for structure as favouring the latter. Snowden offers a third option.

2. Where he agrees. He shares the criticism of workshops built on timed exercises, dot voting and applause on cue, which force premature convergence and shut out the unexpected. He also shares Mowles’ concern that AI encourages passivity.

3. The wrong question. The issue is what kind of structure, not how much. Governing constraints fix outcomes, while enabling constraints make the unexpected more likely. Practical test: for each element of a session, ask whether it dictates a result or shapes conditions.

4. Power in baggy conversation. Without structure, seniority, confidence and familiarity decide who is heard. Having no facilitator does not remove power, it leaves it unexamined.

5. Entrainment and scale. The first confident voice shapes what follows. Trusting clubs can afford to drift, but hospitals, departments and communities in conflict cannot, and the least powerful pay the price.

6. The triopticon. Snowden’s method sits between a conference and an unconference. It brings together disciplines that disagree so that conflicting views surface, and it can run from two hours to three days.

7. The sequence (practical exercise). At least three Eagles, experts from different disciplines, present in turn and respond to each other. Everyone else listens in silence as Ravens, then makes sense in trios. Trios recombine into Beaver groups to build concepts, the whole group clusters the outputs, and volunteers take them forward.

8. Roles and features. Optional Coyotes challenge assumptions and Magpies carry ideas between groups. The convener holds the space from the back and never engages with content. Roles cut across hierarchy, opposition is ritualised, and odd numbers avoid polarisation.

9. Six design principles. Distribute cognition, disrupt entrainment (silence, anonymity, recombination), ritualise conflict, keep the convener out of the content, work at a workable granularity, and run parallel safe to fail probes rather than voting.

10. Synthesis and caveats. Mowles is right that dead ends can generate new thinking, and Jackson is right that open conversation does not protect the least powerful. Snowden proposes testing a triopticon with Eagles from each tradition. He admits it is his own method, it takes time and can disorient, and not choosing constraints is still a choice.