Emergence

May 22, 2009 - By Milton Friesen

About the piece

I've always loved to draw. But the carefree drawing of early childhood gradually 'matured' to a conscious emphasis on technique and comparison. I remember at the age of 10 sitting down with a Glen Loates Birds of North America book that contained finished paintings and pre-painting sketches. I ended up erasing furiously and giving up that particular session in frustration when my duck didn't look like a real Loates duck. I have since discovered that photorealism isn't the point. Exploration of the good, the true, and the beautiful is more promising. Simple materials like conte crayon and paper can point to profound things. That's the wonder of drawing.

About the artist

My curiosities have driven me to explore organizational ideas and practices that will contribute to more adaptive and thus effective long-term institutions. These institutions could be small nonprofits or cities. Questions of resilience and persistence have different answers depending on scale, context and what we hope to achieve. It is critical that we constantly combine knowledge and practice if we want our organizations to respond well to change. Resilient enterprises invest energy in designing and nurturing intelligent processes that allow room for surprise, novelty and feedback signals.

One place where these ideas are gaining ground is in the growing social enterprise movement. Canada has many valuable social enterprise projects that are at various stages of maturity and that hold promise for improved long-term performance. You can see a budding Social Innovation in Canada map here or listen to my interview with Paul Martin on social enterprise in Canada. I also had a chance recently to interview a leading global innovation expert Charles Leadbeater in Ottawa.

Adaptive leadership based on context-driven collaborative strategies is needed today. The world is not composed of straight lines, though we have often built organizations with approaches that assumed it was. Instead, it is a highly complex system of networks and networks of networks - an ecosystem of exchange and interaction. Complex systems theory helps us understand how to build, lead, design, and develop policy under these conditions. You can watch a Skype video interview below that features me talking to a Dutch project manager about some of these ideas.

Over the last ten years, I have had the humbling privilege of teaching five different undergraduate courses in history, culture, theology, and science as well as seminars on writing, social media and the history of computing. My formal graduate work includes a philosophy of language master’s thesis on the theory of words and objects, paper presentations at the University of Toronto, the University of Sherbrooke, Adelphi University, and publication of a peer reviewed paper on religious influence in 5th-7th c. Ireland. I'm also working toward a Ph.D. at the UWaterloo School of Planning and participate in the Waterloo Institute on Complexity and Innovation as well as the UWaterloo Network Science reading group. Here is a draft paper on interrogative planning based on Christopher Alexander's ideas. I also had a chance to be part of a group project that designed a redevelopment plan for LeBreton Flats in Ottawa.

Corporate communications projects include development of marketing collateral, presentations, magazine editing, writing, interviewing, political campaign development, web strategies and content development and creative team leadership. I have also had political experience including a three-year term as an elected municipal official and I've also run in two other campaigns (including a mayoral race) that did not lead to election.

Michelle and I have four children ages 9, 12, 15 and 17. We live in a three-story brick house in East Hamilton.