Kairotic Flow

COACHING & CONSULTING 

Conversations / Interviews

The first time I heard the joke, it was on me.

“How long is this project going to take?”

“It depends…” (I started, intending to explain relevant context)

“You should be a consultant!”

I paused, confused. “Why?”

“That’s what consultants always say. It depends.”

“Oh.”

Next time I heard the question, I answered with a small smile and a question of my own.

“How long is a piece of string?”

We all know that context is important, but we often assume that the context we’re familiar with is “just the way things are” and that “everybody knows” what it is. A competent consultant can’t make those assumptions.

What we can do is develop (or learn) frameworks and methods for rapidly discerning context in new situations. The one I have found most useful is part learned (from Simon Wardley’s Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners framework) and part observed or discovered (by me).

I call it the Kairotic Flow, pictured here in its most basic form.

Kairotic Flow cycle diagram of six archetypes: Pioneer, Settler, Town Planner, Steward, Curator, and Scout. The first three are on the right hand side and coloured orange. The second three are on the left hand side and coloured purple.

At first glance, it’s pretty simple. There are 6 archetypes arranged in a circular flow. Three of them - Simon Wardley’s three - are on the ‘lit’ side of the circle, represented by orange, an active and attention-grabbing colour. The three I added - Steward, Curator and Scout - are shown in purple, representing a quieter and ‘shadowed’ (less visible) side to the cycle.

I’ll provide links to some presentations that give an introduction to the Kairotic Flow and the 6 Archetypes at the end of this page, but first, I want to draw your attention to three aspects I regard as far more important than the Archetypes. Two of these aspects became the name, and the third sits right at the centre of the diagram.

Flow

What comes to mind for you when you think of the word ‘power’?

We use the word ‘power’ in a number of different ways in everyday life, but of late negative uses like “power over” and “power corrupts” have been more frequent than benign ones. (This is why, after some protest, I eventually removed the word from the name of the cycle, originally the “Kairotic Flows of Power Cycle”).

Changing the name hasn’t changed what this cycle is about, though.

If there’s one thing I hope everyone remembers about Kairotic Flow, it’s this: Power only gets corrupted when it accumulates and when it stagnates. Power is not inherently corrupted or corrupting… but it does have to flow freely. Like electricity, or like the energy we get from eating and digesting food. Power is energy in motion, doing work.

Power must flow continuously to remain healthy.

Kairos

The ancient Greeks had two words for time: Chronos and Kairos.

Chronos is clock time, evenly divided in hours, minutes, seconds. You see it show up in words like “chronological” and “chronometer” and “chronic”.

Kairos is living time, seasonal and cyclical, judged not by duration, but by its importance and value. Kairos is the opportune or defining moment.

The word “Kairotic” comes from Kairos.

The Kairotic Flow points to the opportune moment for power to move from one phase to the next in the cycle, as determined by living context.

Here’s what I mean by that. We humans define Spring as starting on a particular day in the calendar (chronological) year, but trees and plants don’t care about what month or day of the year it is. They start flowering when their living conditions and their internal states show them it’s the ‘opportune moment’ for them to do so. Not a moment before, not a moment after.

The Kairotic Flow shows movement through the ‘archetypes’ occurring in the same way — at the opportune moment.

It’s not arbitrary though. The sequence is crucial. Consider: We can’t turn on a light switch before it has been installed and connected to power.

Tension

When we make choices, we’re nearly always making some kind of trade-off between opposites, which exist in a natural and inevitable tension. More of Option A means less of Option B and vice-versa.

In common parlance, we say we can’t have our cake and eat it too.

Do we buy a new car, or repair the one we already have? (PioneerSteward)

Do we optimise a process we have tested a bit, or do we reconsider whether the process actually does what we want it to do? (SettlerCurator)

Do we develop a routine around an approach we have been using for a while, or do we look for other approaches that might better meet our needs? (Town PlannerScout)

The choices we make might be well-considered or the automatic result of ‘blind habit’, but the trade-offs are always there. Being aware of those trade-offs in the context we’re in enables us to make wiser choices.

Orange and purple

You’ll see in the section above that the first option presented in all three tension questions is the one on the orange side of the Kairotic Flow cycle.

I’ve done this to demonstrate the choices we tend to make in the world we have today, where power in nearly every form is ‘stuck’ on the orange side of the cycle, which we associate with ‘economic growth’. Our social institutions, and in particular, market and ‘state’ (the word I use to point to formal government institutions), were created to facilitate these choices and activities, all of which are in one way or another immediately and obviously important to getting us the resources we need to live.

Now I want to draw your attention to the critical importance of the purple side, which we unfortunately tend to think of as unproductive, laborious, and costly activities with no immediate or obvious value.

I’m going to start with a personal story, which you may or may not relate to yourself, but which demonstrates just how deluded I (and we!) can be in this respect.

For many years, up until maybe 10 years ago when I was in my late 30s, I seriously resented my body’s need to sleep. It felt like a waste of time. I did not like ‘losing’ a third of every day to what felt like not living, not being awake and conscious, especially when I was also doing work during the day that didn’t feel fulfilling to me — but that’s another story!

Anyway, it wasn’t unusual at all for me to get sleep-deprived, going sometimes 2-3 days without sleeping at all, and fairly regularly staying up late and waking up to an alarm 4 or 5 hours after I went to bed. (I admit I still do this last one a bit but not to anything like the same extent!)

Needless to say, this wasn’t good for my health or, in all honesty, my daily life. Many of the choices I made weren’t great, and eventually I burned out from my career as a project manager. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I would have entered that career at all, much less stayed in it as long as I did, if I hadn’t been depriving myself of sleep at night and as a result, effectively sleep-walking through my days as well!

The point is this: Our bodies need sleep; our minds too. Even though we’re not conscious of what’s going on, much of the repair (Steward) and clean up (Curator - e.g. autophagy) and regeneration (Scout) activities our bodies do happens only while we’re in a sleeping state. The sleeping activities prepare us for our waking activities. If we don’t make those preparations, our waking activities are adversely impacted in myriad ways.

We ignore or avoid the purple side of the Kairotic Flow at our peril.

I would suggest our world is in the mess it’s in now largely because, when it comes to our operating system of social institutions and the way they entice us to behave, we’ve collectively been doing exactly that — ignoring and/or avoiding the purple side of the cycle.

Kairotic Flow is a map of the patterns of life

If you look around at the natural world, you see this full Kairotic Flow cycle playing itself out everywhere, because life adapts to the nature of its environment, of the inevitable consequences of the way our world spins on its axis and travels around the sun. There is no summer without winter, no harvest without pollination, and no pollination without the directing of energy away from the no-longer-viable structures (like old leaves and branches) and towards the building of new structures in wherever the new ‘best place’ is, to suit current conditions.

Life changes continuously as it learns and adapts to its continuously changing environment. Nora Bateson’s word symmathesy describes this mutual learning beautifully.

The complexity of relationships continually changing — dynamic interrelating — is as real as real can be. Maps and models and the institutions we create are often useful to us, but on the most fundamental level they are all wrong, all disconnected from reality the second we create them.

The Kairotic Flow is no exception to this fundamental law of reality, since it too is a map of sorts. It does however attempt to describe what seem to me to be eternal patterns of life that play out over and over again in multiple contexts. If I’ve succeeded in this, the usefulness of the Kairotic Flow ‘map’ will, at least for the foreseeable future, rest largely in our human abilities to sense what’s going on around us and, using our pattern-matching abilities, respond accordingly to what’s happening now and what’s needed next, rather than getting lost in our own creations and trying to impose them on reality.

Here are links to a video presentation with WINfinity CORE, and two presentations, in case you are interested in diving in further. More Kairotic Flow material is in development.

Introduction to Kairotic Flow with WINfinity CORE - video

Kairotic Flow - Introduction - slide presentation (used in the Introduction video above)

Kairotic Flow Archetypes - a short slide presentation with more detail on the 6 Archetypes

Kairotic Flow Book Campaign Video - a shorter 9 minute video created for a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo (to write a book)

Kairotic Flow diagram with six archetypes

Learn more!

  • Learn more about the Kairotic Flow with me, in one on one zoom sessions.

    I love free-flowing conversations and responding to any questions you have as they come up, but am happy to provide a full overview first, or delve into more specific applications if that’s your preference.

    Coaching is great for:

    • discovering your own ‘home’ archetypal lens

    • understanding the perspectives of others

    • resolving conflicts

    • getting a ‘bird’s eye view’ of aspects of your life

    • making wiser choices about what to do next when you’re at a choice-point

    Kairotic Flow coaching sessions run for 60 minutes each, and cost USD $149.

    All sessions are to be booked and paid upfront - HERE.

    Sessions cancelled up to 24 hours in advance will be refunded, less a $39 admin fee.

  • I’ve found the cycle of Kairotic Flow provides insights at multiple levels of abstraction, which seems to help tremendously with a huge range of problems. Especially those of the “we’re caught between a rock and a hard place” variety.

    If your organisation or project is experiencing some thorny issues, I do recommend seeing what sort of insights the ‘lens’ of Kairotic Flow can provide to untangle them.

    Important to note: This consulting offering is only just entering the Pioneer stage of development after several years of quiet Scouting, so I’m keeping fees low for a while. I also deeply appreciate any and all feedback regarding how it works in practice, so if (1) within 30 days you appropriately implement what I suggest and it fails, and (2) you walk me through what happened, then I will, with sincere gratitude, refund 80% of the relevant consulting fees you paid.

    Kairotic Flow consulting sessions run for 90 minutes each, and cost USD $299.

    All sessions are to be booked and paid upfront, HERE.

    Sessions cancelled up to 24 hours in advance will be refunded, less a $49 admin fee.