Meredith Bowden and Dave Godden host a community called Complex Mess that supports people who are looking for new and different ways to engage with complex messes. They explain how to Coddiwomple is to travel purposefully toward an as-yet-unknown destination.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
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Transcript
Peter Hayward: In a complex world that is probably accelerating in both complexity, weirdness and messiness how can decision-makers both find enough coherence in the mess to chart a way forward, as they must, while also remaining open and skeptical about any temporary coherence they stumble onto? And how do they also handle the psychic burden of such an intellectual high-wire act?
Meredith Bowden: Ee identified six values that we think are really important when you're dealing with complex problems. So the first one, is care. And we really feel at the moment, the way the world is, that care is fundamentally important thing in terms of the types of challenges that we're thinking about is, how do we make sure that as we're dealing with this complex problem, we're caring about other people, we're caring about the people that we disagree with. That we're caring about what the future will look like. We're caring about all of those things.
Dave Godden: What we've put as front and center of the practice is that idea of, bringing community together of people who are working on complex challenges and want support from it. And I think, probably when we started out, We were thinking around, building our cognitive abilities to deal with it.
Bringing in frameworks and thinking through complex problems. But I think what's emerged much more strongly is the idea of bringing people together into a space that's safe and comfortable where we can try different ways of being.
Peter Hayward: Those are my guests today on FuturePod Meredith Bowden and Dave Godden who host an international community of people who are looking for new ways to engage with their Complex Messes.
Welcome to future pod, Meredith and Dave.
Meredith Bowden:Thank you, Peter
Peter Hayward: We do our work to engage people with the idea of open futures. To support collaboration and to help them find their agency. Museums which curate Futures exhibits know about what works and why and so we brought back three guests of the Pod to discuss this.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to future pod, Meredith and Dave.
Dave Godden: Thank you, Peter. It's great to be here.
Meredith Bowden: Hi Peter. Thank you.
Peter Hayward: It's great to finally be speaking to both of you. So yeah the Meredith and Dave story, so who wants to start the story?
Meredith Bowden: I guess I've been thinking about, how it is that I came into the foresight world and I got to a point in my career where I was thinking, what's my next step? I was a psychologist. I'd started to take on management kind of work and I was looking at, I've had my kids, now what? Now what's the next thing for me? And the logical obvious thing was that I would do my master's in psychology. But when I had a look around, I was like, I'm not interested in pathology. I really feel like a lot of the individual focus on what's wrong is misplaced. but then I also wasn't too interested when I started looking up either, that, that was not a direction that I wanted to go in terms of management.
So I thought I've got to try and find some kind of thing to study. I'd already studied a fair bit I'd done an undergraduate in criminology. I'd done an undergraduate in early childhood education. So I'd done a few different bits and pieces. And I'd never really set out to be something, I was really jealous of friends who were like, yep, I know that I want to be a lawyer or be an engineer. I never really knew what I wanted to be and I fell into psychology. So then when I was looking around for what's the next postgraduate study that I might do, I really wasn't sure.
So I went to an open day and it was all MBAs. I was actually really surprised at how limited the options seem to be and through that process, I came across the Foresight Masters Through a conversation with you, Peter, it's I'm not really sure what this is all about. Can you tell me a bit about it? And you told me a bit about it and I still wasn't very sure, but I thought I've got to sign up for this. And one of the reasons for that was it was intriguing. But the other reason was I had this sense that the program might not be around for that much longer, so I didn't really have time to wait.
Peter Hayward: Very foresightful.
Meredith Bowden: It was very foresightful. Yes, I thought, okay, I'll sign up for this. And I went back to my workplace at the time and had a bit of a chat with Dave .
Dave Godden: I think I definitely wouldn't have found foresight if it wasn't for Meredith. We were working together at that time in community health, and I think I was probably at a similar kind of stage in my career where I've been in public health for I think about 12 years. I worked in the UK and in Australia.
And I got to a point of feeling like I'm not really quite sure what the next thing is. Meredith and I had been talking at that time about doing studies. And I think we'd both gone off to various places to look and I was thinking about doing something in public policy.
But then when Meredith started talking about foresight it just sounded very intriguing. And I think what was most intriguing was the fact that she was so interested, but yet she couldn't quite say what it was. But it was clear that there was something new there, something different And I think I probably would have waited and watched her and seen how she found it and then followed her in.
But that option seemed to be likely not to be there. I think I had a chat with you, Peter, and I think you hinted that, it might be now or never. So I thought I'd give it a go as well and follow Meredith in. So we both ended up doing it together.
Peter Hayward: Your story about being mid career and finding foresight or foresight finding you was I certainly, a repeated story I had. And I think you enjoyed your time in the room and I think you enjoyed the content and the process of learning. But I'm also going to suggest that at the end of the course, I'm not sure you actually really understood then now what?
Meredith Bowden: Definitely not, Peter one of the big things coming out of that was really, how do you then make this land in a useful and meaningful way? And that's definitely been a journey. the thing for me was whatever I want to be doing in this part of my life, I want to be doing something meaningful that makes a difference. And this work felt so important, but yeah, trying to work out what that would look like was really really hard and remains challenging.
Dave Godden: I think for me, I just describe foresight as a kind of a readying process. Like it was readying me for something, but I didn't know what it was. And I wasn't ready at the end of it, but, I've let it stew for a few years and now feel a bit more ready. I think that foresight creates a shift at that sort of level of how you're thinking about things that kind of gets you ready to do other things, even if you're not sure what that is at the time.
Peter Hayward: What's the advice you would have given to a younger Meredith and Dave about how one finds purpose and path in a very complex and messy world?
Dave Godden: I think for me, the advice would probably be experimentation. I think I probably came out of foresight and in previous modes in my career, wanting to know, what's the path? I think where I've found that I have made progress, it's been much more around when I've not really had the path but tried to make something happen through experimenting., Which is not something that comes naturally to me. I tend to worry about it. Meredith and I, worked together during the foresight Masters and a bit afterwards and then didn't for a while.
And then when we reconnected, it came at a time when I'd said to myself last year, I'm going to start saying yes to things. I need to get unstuck in what I'm doing. So my way to do it was to start saying yes, looking out for opportunities, trying to put myself in a position where possibilities were open and realizing that, there are possibilities out there all the time if you pay attention and you adopt a "say yes" mindset. And luckily enough, one of the things that happened at that time was that Meredith came along and started talking to me about the idea of a complex mess community and so I was in a frame of mind to say yes to that.
Meredith Bowden: Yeah, I guess for me the advice I would probably give to myself is that it isn't linear, so I think my mum and dad, when they were young people, you went to uni, if you went to uni, you studied something, you came out as something and you did that all the way through to retiring and then you retire and I don't know what happens after that, but that was the pathway. And I think I would probably say to myself, don't worry so much about it having to be such a perfect linear kind of journey. When I was trying to find my way, one of the pieces of advice that I got before I signed up for Foresight was from a mentor of mine who said, “Meredith, I think that you're best going to be on a meandering path”. And that was the first thought that I'd ever had that, Oh, it isn't just about linear step one, step two, step three, going up up forward, that you could have permission to wander your way around and go backwards a bit and sideways a bit and
go down one path and come back again. And, so having that messier approach to having a career and that's okay. And that sense that everything that you're doing might not make sense now, it will make sense eventually I think that would be what I would tell myself, it’ll come together.
Peter Hayward: I wonder how, given your parenting responsibilities, will you be similarly relaxed with your children's meanderings?
Meredith Bowden: Yes, that will be very interesting to see, Peter.
I was just going to say the other thing that for me, post study that was really important as I was trying to find my way and trying to find my path. I'm always looking for mentors, Peter. And I really had you in high regard as one of my foresight mentors but also Nita Cherry was somebody who I sought out, she'd been amazing in our foresight program and I reached out to Nita because I thought, “Oh, maybe you have got some answers for me, psychology, foresight, maybe you can tell me what on earth it is that I'm doing here”. And so I had the great privilege of being able to spend about a year with her trying to help me understand and unpack and unravel what I had been doing and where I might be going.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Is there any A big ask for you, but any kind of distilled, Nita wisdom that still sits with you from that year?
Meredith Bowden: Oh, look, so much. I guess one of the big things that really sits with me is, it's really all about the present moment. the past is the past and the future will be, but, all we can do really is be in this moment and make decisions and take actions in this moment and that's really powerful and that's really sat with me.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. So the decision you made in the moment you took was to start together, this thing that has become complex mess. So do you want to maybe start moving into that part of the story and start to now lay down some of the theory, so to speak, or your theory of what this is really about?
Meredith Bowden: with where I had been with Nita we had, she'd been really guiding me around how to work with other people, that we can't just work on our own. And I guess when very sadly, she passed away I suddenly found myself without somebody to work through that process with.
And I felt really acutely that I had to do something. Like I'd done all of this work with Nita and she'd really given me so much of her time and thinking and so much of her heart. And I thought, Oh, I've just got to get to action. One of the things Nita said to me was “Meredith, these boots are made for walking, get out of your head, start doing something”.
And I thought if she could see me now, she would be going, “you start doing something , otherwise why did I waste my time?” So I started to think what can I do? And I thought the obvious thing is I have to try and find people who are wanting to be with other people, trying to find a bit of a community.
And so that was what sort of led me to think about gathering a community together. And then I started to think “what sort of community am I trying to gather together?” That was a big question for me. And I thought it's really people who are working on complex problems and complex issues, it's this idea of wanting to do meaningful and important work and needing to do that with others. So how do we make sense of this world together?
Dave Godden: It was the idea of community that kind of resonated for me. This idea that it starts with two people and then it grows from there was something, I think it had a really nice kind of feel to it that we could start something together and see how it went.
So that's been the kind of the fundamental of it, hasn't it? It's starting where we are. If it was just us turning up the first few times we were prepared for that. And we never quite had to do that, but it did start with, I think, two other people came the first time and then grew from there.
What we've put as front and center of the practice is that idea of bringing a community together of people who are working on complex challenges and want support from the community. And I think, probably when we started out, we were thinking about building our cognitive abilities to deal with complexity, bringing in frameworks and thinking through complex problems. But I think what's emerged much more strongly is the idea of bringing people together, into a space that's safe and comfortable where we can try different ways of being, we can try different ways of thinking about things. We can open up about the challenges that we're facing in work and in life. And I guess deepening connections has been the kind of the core theme that, it's not so much about, what are the tools that we can apply to our complex problems so much as building trust so that we can tap into each other's wisdom by being really open and honest about the challenges that we're facing.
Peter Hayward: At what point did it, did you start I'm not going to say codify it, but you started to, obviously I'm going to assume that the principles, the values, the frameworks, the fundamental ideas that these things, how did they start to emerge and become present?
Meredith Bowden: we'd started the gatherings halfway through last year and we had been trying, as Dave said, to say, Oh, come along to this thing, come with your complex problem and we'll do this clever process where we'll all share our complex problems and then we'll ask good questions and then we'll go away and we had this sort of process in mind. And Dave said that our first session we had two people turn up, actually our first session we had to cancel because no one showed up and that was okay, we said “okay, we'll put that out there. We'll be honest about it”. And because we were honest about it and we said, Oh, nobody actually showed up, we actually had somebody who we didn't know us at all, get in touch and say “that's devastating. This sounded like such a great idea. I wanted to come. I will definitely be at the next one if you do it again”.
And, true to her word, she did turn up and I credit her for the complex mess community really getting going. So we'd had this bumpy start to the gatherings and every time Dave and I would design this really fantastic process, we never got to it, did we, Dave? we'd just get stuck on the, who are we? Why are we here? kind of conversation.
Dave Godden: I think also, in terms of where sort of the theory started to come in, I think it emerged from the conversations in terms of, one of the things that we kept coming back to is why are we here? What are we trying to do here?
What are these things called complex messes and why are we coming together? And I think we probably started with our own sort of definition in mind, but the real kind of sense of the breadth of the types of issues that
people wanted to talk about came from talking that through with the group where people were bringing in, their challenges with difficult colleagues , or their, working on more sort of systemic issues through to their balancing of work and life.
I think that we started to develop a kind of a sense of what is a complex mess through kind of the breadth of issues that people were bringing. And then, as Meredith said, then, I think we took some time over the summer to step through what does that mean in terms of what are the sort of the principles that might be useful for people to have in mind when thinking about those challenges?
Meredith Bowden: Yeah, because we're not trying to say there's a certain way of approaching complex messes, that you start at this point and then you do step 1, 2, 3, 4 and voila, problem solved. But we thought it might be useful to start thinking about how we actually engage with those complex messes over the long haul. And that then lent us to this idea of what are some principles. And I think it really was around trying to communicate, we were being asked some curly questions and I think we just spent some time sitting down together just to try to nut that out ourselves.
Additional comments:
· Readying is a term Nora Bateson uses to describe the way a system becomes ready for undetermined change. We use the term describe one of the steps in engaging with complex problems (see https://complexmess.com.au/pillars).
· Based on conversations at our gatherings, Meredith wrote a blog describing 6 Types of Complex Mess which formed the basis for a page on the website (see https://complexmess.com.au/complex-messes).
· We also developed the following Principles for Engaging with Complex Messes: Together, Slowing, Moving, Intention, Creating Conditions and Noticing (see https://complexmess.com.au/principles).
Peter Hayward: Now you've been doing complex messes as physical gatherings. And obviously for some people listening to this podcast, they in fact, might be interested in joining one of those gatherings. So that's something that's possible from this podcast, and there'll be information on your page about how they might do that. But I'm wondering about people who are in a different country who are listening to this podcast, because FuturePod goes all around the world. Are the principles and values That you've developed useful frames for if somebody wanted to create their own community where they were.
Meredith Bowden: We would think so.
We have put on our complex mess website that it is an international community, and we have had interest from many different parts of the world actually. And we're just trying to work out how can we actually make that work? But my thinking would be those principles and the values, it doesn't really matter where you are in the world, I think they're, useful, what are your thoughts Dave?
Dave Godden: Yeah, oh definitely, yeah. I think, we've also tried to be as kind of open as possible in terms of what we've put on the website. So there is on there, I think we've now got sort of group practices and group rules that we've developed with the group that we meet with monthly. Lots of it is borrowed from other people. It's not original ideas but, they are things that work around how groups gather well and have conversations. So yeah there's lots on there.
Peter Hayward: What would one of these gatherings operate like? How long would they take? What kind of phases would it work through? How do people bring and address and get things? And get strategies for dealing with their mess.
Meredith Bowden: Yeah, it's a good question, Peter, because we, it has evolved quite a lot, but the way that it currently works, we meet for two hours and maybe next time we speak, it will be different, but we meet for two hours.
The first half hour is a very informal settling in kind of process. And then we begin by with a very deliberate arrival process where we reflect on what we've all been doing in this moment where we've all come from. We take a moment just to get present, get anchored in the present moment.
And then think about how we want to show up for the rest of the session. So the process it's very process driven. It's really all about helping the group work at as well together as it can more so than the content.
Dave Godden: One of the things that we do with that arrival process is really.
try to bring people into a space of thinking about values. We see values as, I guess, the compass or the guide when you are engaging with complexity. One of the things that we've introduced is this idea of getting people as they're going through that arrival process that Meredith mentioned to think about the two or three values that they want to bring to the group as well as to the challenges that t they're facing. And to think about those in a pretty concrete form in terms of not just what are the values you want to bring but how might you express that to the group?
If your value is care, how might you express that to the group on that evening?
Additional comments:
Our Complex Mess Community gatherings typically go through the following phases over 2 hours:
· Informal settling-in process
· Arrival – connecting with intention and values
· Guardrails – agreements & group practices. In developing the group practices we use in the Complex Mess gatherings we drew heavily on the Circle Way guidelines: https://www.thecircleway.net/circle-way-guidelines.
· Check-in question - “what’s front of mind for you?”
· Deepening question – often focused on a tension we are grappling with. The group focuses on listening and asking generative questions
· Closing process – what struck you, what is the connection you have made?
· Open discussion for those who have a specific topic they would like to discuss
· As we meet in a local pub, some people choose to stay for a meal and a chat afterwards.
Peter Hayward: Do you want to maybe just quickly step through the values and just why you lean on them?
Meredith Bowden: The values, I think it's exactly as Dave said, it's really the compass.
You can approach a complex problem in whatever way you want to, there are so many tools and techniques and methods, in terms of the, as you said earlier, the cognitive side of how you deal with a complex problem. But then the way that you go about engaging the complex problem, you need to have some kind of North Star that kind of guides you, I think.
So we identified six values that we think are really important when you're dealing with complex problems. So the first one, as Dave said, is care. And we really feel at the moment, the way the world is, that care is fundamentally important thing in terms of the types of challenges that we're thinking about is, how do we make sure that as we're dealing with this complex problem, we're caring about other people, we're caring about the people that we disagree with, that we're caring about what the future will look like. We're caring about all of those things. the other five values that we've identified as being really important are a willingness. So a willingness to engage. We mentioned earlier that, complex problems are not going to be quickly solved. There's no quick answer. So we really do need to have a willingness to show up, but to then keep showing up, even as things get harder and darker. Playfulness as well. It's very easy when things are very difficult to become really serious and Dave and I both agreed that it's important to try and maintain a level of play, playfulness and humor to keep that energy going. We also have hope as one of our values. And again, this is because we feel like in order to keep going, we need to feel like there's some kind of light at the end of the tunnel.
Grace is our fifth value. So that's really around trying to recognize how small we are and trying to contribute to something bigger than ourselves. And then our last one is generosity and that's about how we give our time, how we give our hearts, how we give our resources to other people, how we can stay focused and engaged.
Dave Godden: I think, the values are, I think we've said it on the website, they're very personal things that, I think, that we obviously share but they seem to resonate as far as we can tell with people. We don't necessarily spend a lot of time talking about them explicitly in the gatherings. But I think that they're there, they do sit as an underpinning.
Meredith Bowden: They also guide our action, which is what I think you were talking about before Dave, so it's one thing to have six values , but it's much more about, okay, if this is my intention, then what are some actions? How can I behave? Am I at the moment acting with grace, am I actually enacting grace. I think Aristotle said, it's one thing to say that you value honesty, but he said, if you want to be an honest person, you have to do honest things. And so to me, the idea of the values is to connect with these are the things that matter to us, these are the things that are important to us, and it can be really easy when we're engaging with a complex problem to start behaving in a way that isn't necessarily informed by our values. And I think to have an intentional check in around our values and to say, okay if I really do believe in a willingness, if I really do believe in generosity , what's a generous act that I can do in this moment?
What's an act of willingness that I can do in this moment? So it's not just about the abstract, it's really about how do we actually bring those values to life.
Dave Gooden: Yeah. I think it's that intentionality, isn't it? Like the idea of generosity, that's one that I've been drawing quite a bit since we laid those out in terms of just reminding myself when I'm getting frustrated with someone, if I feel like they're not engaging productively with an issue, just reminding myself, what's the most generous interpretation of what's going on rather than leaping to thinking they're trying to be obstructive or they don't care.
And Ido you feel like you get rewarded from that. If you stick with it then often you find that the other person is trying as well. It's just that there's something else going on for them that you're not aware about.
I think also, if you have that sort of mindset then if the other person doesn't react in a positive way then you've learned something that way as well. So you can't lose if you stick with those values.
Additional comments:
· Our values for engaging with Complex Messes are outlined on the Complex Mess website: https://complexmess.com.au/values.
Peter Hayward: I hope you're enjoying the podcast. FuturePod is a not for profit venture. We're able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons. Like Julia Canty-Waldron, who has been a long time patron. Thanks for the support, Julia. If you would like to join Julia as a patron of the Pod, then please follow the Patreon link on our website. Now back to the podcast.
So I wonder, moving on, you've been immersed in complex messes, as well as both hosts of the space, and you've also been, I would imagine, employing it in your work, and your lives. What are the things around you that you find you are most sensitive to and paying attention to now? that you think, to some extent, You are now aware of, or you are now willing or interested in because of these, this conscious work on values?
Dave Godden: So I think for me, the thing that I'm paying attention to, and I think this is something that we're collectively wrestling with as well is, it feels to me that the present and the future are full of really tough choices and tough decisions.
There are very few pathways forward that don't involve some form of trade off between things that we hold to be important. One of the areas that we've been looking at is the idea of, the energy transition and the idea of a just transition.
And, there are so many competing values and priorities around the natural world, social equity, culture, the impacts on local communities of new infrastructure that we require. I guess one of the things that feels important for me is that if we're going to work our way through these tough choices, then, the quality of the conversations that we have within organizations, across organizations, between organizations, decision makers and community, really need to be at a level that's able to deal with complexity, to deal with multiple different priorities, to deal with kind of, I guess, dilemmas. If we're going to find ways forward that people can be brought along with and we're not sacrificing one set of values in the interests of another.
Meredith Bowden: Yep. I think we've both been thinking about all of those difficult challenges that lie ahead of us as a collective group of humans and the thing that Dave and I are both really aware of is really how people work together is going to be the critical thing, that no one person has got the answer And so really if we're going to be able to engage with those complex challenges in a way that does keep moving us forward in a good direction we need to be able to work really well together. And we're often trained in our technical area of expertise. But we're not really trained so well in how you actually work with somebody else, how you disagree well with somebody else, how you put aside your assumptions and your biases and. actually listen with curiosity and interest, and thinking about how together we might come up with something that on our own we never could have come up with. So people aren't trained in that, but I think that is actually going to be the thing that will set groups of people apart who engage well with these challenges and people who just spin their wheels trying to do important work, but not going anywhere.
And then I think that the bit that I'm also really concerned about is the mental health of our population at the moment for a number of reasons COVID being one of them, but we know that people are depleted, they're exhausted, they're anxious, this idea of a certain world that they thought they knew before COVID has been turned on its head.
We've got this population who have to do some really complex problem solving, but they're depleted. And not only is that going to affect their ability to think through these challenges, but it's certainly going to affect how they work with other people, how patient they can be how well they can regulate their own anxiety and and that kind of thing. So from my perspective Yes, there's the degree of complex challenges that are ahead, but also we've got this sort of social complexity that that we need to deal with.
Peter Hayward: I see too that, you are talking a language of complexity of sitting with wickedness, learning from it, playing with it. And that, to some extent, you are singing to a choir that are thinking this way, but you're also operating in a larger political system and social system where we're also seeing a rise in people who are arguing for simplicity and more simple ideas to solve complex problems. Yeah, this notion that at the time when we are becoming more aware of interrelationships, We're actually got the rise of forces that are simply saying, it's much simpler. We're right and they're wrong. And so that's being practiced simultaneously with your, and not just yours, but the attempt to hold openness. How do you practice generosity and grace and care for people that are attracted or drawn towards the simple, Ideas for how to deal with complex situations?
Dave Godden: It starts with trying to maintain that curiosity around what is it that's driving people. Not just judging or dismissing those views but trying to be curious about why are people seeking simple solutions?
Why are they seeking to respond to challenges in ways that may feel not in alignment with the way that we would want to do it or the values that we bring. I think that's not an easy task, but I think it has to start with that curiosity and that listening and an assumption that most people are just trying to do right by some set of values, they're trying to do right by their family or their community. They're not they're not setting out to be deliberately nasty or mean to people.
It's just that the way that they're seeing the world is different to how we're seeing the world.
Peter Hayward: I'm going to move it to the communication space. Cause for people who go to the complex mess website, they're going to notice something. You're going to notice what the website looks like, and they're going to notice some of the language that you are using. And I want you to talk to the listeners around the careful use of language and images for what you think is, for me, still consistent with the values of what you've talked about.
Meredith Bowden: Yes. The communication's been an interesting journey for definitely for me to move from academic language and formal language of the workplace into something a bit different. And I guess when things are complex, my observation has been that there is a lot of technical language out there. There is a lot, there are a lot of complicated frameworks, there's a whole way of talking about complexity that to me is quite baffling. And I still find that I write and rewrite things and then realize, oh, you're getting too much in your head. Trying just to speak in a way that's really clear to understand, it's easy to identify with and to relate to so that it is not this sort of abstract idea. The language is very deliberately trying to be playful, but also trying to cut through some of that noise, so that people go, yeah I really understand that, this is something that I can really relate to.
Dave Godden: I think we've, become increasingly wary of overly abstracting complexity. I think we've wanted to make it something that, everyone can engage with. I notice when people come to the gatherings, some people will come and their assumption is that we're going to be talking about various kind of abstract frameworks but most people they want to talk on a more kind of I guess a real life level.
So I think that's been what's happening in the gatherings and we've tried to bring that through into the website. And I think the imagery, Meredith you can probably talk about the the figures that Jessamy Gee's done, which I think are part of that playfulness with the complex mess character.
Meredith Bowden: Yeah. I just love Jessamy's work I asked her if she could draw some characters for me that could express some of these ideas. And so we've got a small set of images at the moment , but the aim is to increase those images.
But I think they're very evocative of the concepts that we're talking about,
Peter Hayward: I think there's a bit more, I'm going to, you talk about trying to cut through abstract ideas and then you introduce a word on the first page, which is the word coddiwompling. Again, there's, I understand playful and I understand certainly, Jessamy Gee and her ability to draw rich pictures that evoke, a lot of information for people in simple ways. And I wonder to what extent language you're encouraging and trying to practice that we need to create language to talk about the messes we're in that are appropriate to the mess.
Meredith Bowden: Yes, that is that's a really interesting observation, Peter, and I think I think you're exactly right. I think that we are looking to create a language that does make sense to people. It's interesting that you bring up that coddiwomple example because I just came across it, someone had put a post up on LinkedIn and when I read it, I was like, Oh my goodness, that describes to me a hundred percent what it is that we're trying to do when we're thinking about the future, when we're thinking about complexity . Coddywompling means to travel purposefully toward an as yet unknown destination. So I reposted that and I had quite a big response to that. People were saying, oh my goodness, I didn't realize I have been coddiwompling my whole life. How fantastic that there is a word that describes what it is that I've been doing. And I think you're right, Peter. I think it really is about coming up with a language that is accessible for anybody. And Nita used to talk about work and life practice, so we need to have a language that when we're doing our work, when we're fulfilling our other roles in life, whether that's as a partner or a parent or a child or a colleague or, whatever it is, that we've got an accessible way of talking about the complexity that we're facing, but that doesn't minimize, it's not actually trying to simplify the complexity.
Coddiwompling is not a made up word. It's a really old word. It's got a lot of history to it.
Peter Hayward: For people who are interested in either the ideas or engaging with you or even engaging with Complex Mess, where do they go? What do they do? That kind of thing.
Dave Godden: So the website is www.complexmess.com.au. And on there you'll find all the things that we've been talking about. I suppose there are two or probably three ways that people can engage. One is the is the face to face gatherings for people who are in and around Melbourne.
We meet monthly. It's the first Wednesday of the month and that's where we connect as a face to face community. We are looking at extending that to a virtual community. So anyone who is interested can get in touch with us through the website and we'll definitely get that happening once we've worked out the right platform and the best way to do that and time zones and all that sort of stuff.
I guess the other aspect that is also on there is this idea of a collective. So we've got both the community and the collective. The community is basically people who want to have conversations about their complex challenges and meet and talk about them.
The collective is a sort of a space which we've created for people to put themselves on there, so that if people are looking for support around their complex messes they could come to the collective to see what support can be offered.
And, I think we hope that will grow into a really diverse group of people working in different sorts of spaces, as consultants, as coaches, as artists as whatever it might be. So that people can find someone who might be able to help if they're looking for some help.
Peter Hayward: Great. And I was also very excited to see on your on your website that there is possibility of a complex mess podcast and we need more podcasters in this space. So you get my vote of confidence for that one.
Meredith Bowden: Thanks, Peter. We've been trying to work that one out as well.
Part of our website is what we've called the Sandpit and we're really keen for people to contribute we're really looking at if people have got an article that they would like to contribute, or if they've got a resource they'd like to contribute. So we had one of our members read a poem that she'd written at our last Complex Mess gathering which we've now put up on our website. We're really keen to get those contributions from the community. So yes, you can come to the in person gathering. Yes, we'll try and get this online version working. Yes, you can put your name up on the collective part of the website, but we would also really love to be getting contributions. We really see this website as being an emerging, evolving thing rather than a static piece of information. And Dave and I are certainly not trying to say that we know everything. As Dave said, we're borrowing heavily from a number of different people. These aren't original ideas. So we're really keen to get other voices involved in this website as well. And I guess the guiding thing for us comes back to those values, Peter. Will always put people out there, put their work out there provided we feel like they are in line with the values that we are saying that we stand for.
Peter Hayward: Terrific. Congratulations on your collective coddiwompling.
It was great fun to have you in the classroom and I enjoyed working with you. And congratulations to each of you on the complex mess. And I hope you have bigger and more spreading messes in the future. Thanks for spending some time with the FuturePod community.
Dave Godden: Thank you Peter. It's been really great to talk to you.
Meredith Bowden: Thanks, Peter.
Peter Hayward: I hope you got some ideas for engaging with your own Complex Messes, and if you are looking for a good community to support you in your coddiwompling then reaching out to Meredith and Dave would seem a great first step. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If we would like to support the pod then follow the patreon link on our website. This has been Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time.