Labels, outliers, complexity and praxis

An ‘about me’ page is surprisingly tricky to write when you don’t use labels the usual way.

So I’m taking another approach, starting with an illustration of what I mean by that last statement about labels, and then weaving in how and why I think it’s important to presence coaching.

How an ‘outlier’ uses labels

My life experience has largely been as an ‘outlier’, and that’s taught me to bring an outlier awareness and perspective to everything. When I hear about someone’s educational qualifications for example, my assumptions are thin indeed. I assume only the things that really must be true (i.e. somehow the person was considered to have fulfilled the requirements of the degree at that time) and leave everything else in an unresolved blur of possibilities.

Useful as labels can be, they don’t actually provide much insight to reality — to what IS in a given case. They’re just heuristics, convenient statements of probability. An 80% chance of a stereotype or assumption being true still leaves a 20% chance that it isn’t, and because I have so often been an outlier, that 20% really remains alive for me. Throwing it out or forgetting about it is unthinkable to me.

Treating labels as probability heuristics is a central feature of my personal approach to navigating the world, and it turns out to be a very powerful tool. What many others seem to feel as sudden upheavals in external reality, I frequently feel as minor shifts in possibility space.

Years ago, a friend laughingly named this the ‘Kylie boom factor’, explaining that he’d observed me going 100 miles an hour in one direction and in the next beat, boom! I’m moving at the same speed in an entirely different direction.

Of course I laughed with him about how crazy this must look from the outside. His comment was also a huge insight for me. Internally, ‘boom!’ is not my experience at all — I am simply taking the next right-feeling step available in my personal possibility space, so to me it feels like I’m travelling a pretty straight line.

I’ve since come to understand that my habit of holding uncertainty as ‘just the way things are’ enables a degree of flexibility and creativity that simply isn’t available once assumptions are accepted as truth, as fixed or hard boundaries on what is possible.

Labels and social norms can be useful tools, certainly, but when we use them unconsciously or mistake them for reality itself they limit our ability to make sense of the world… which makes for ill-informed (or ‘stupid’) decisions.

Consider the different possibilities available to someone driving a 4WD truck compared to the possibilities available to that same person when they’re driving a low-slung 2WD sedan. The 4WD can take dirt roads or drive on the beach (if tides allow); the sedan can’t take those paths, but can drive faster on a paved road.

Now imagine there are 90% sedans and 10% 4WD trucks, but the label everyone uses is motor vehicle, and you unconsciously ignore the trucks (outliers) because there aren’t as many of them. The only roads that will appear as possibilities to you will be the paved roads, because you’ve shut off the possibilities for a 4WD truck. It’s pretty obvious that you wouldn’t do that if you actually had a 4WD truck, right? Unless, of course, the map you happened to be using in an unfamiliar area only showed the paved roads.

I think this is a good metaphor for the navigational tools we typically have access to, the assumptions baked into them, and the limitations created by those assumptions.

Complexity

The past 6 years have been a bit of a rollercoaster for me, discovering complexity science and gaining for the first time access to symbolic tools that make it much easier to communicate with others about my approach to the world. I have ‘found my tribe’, so to speak, which is on the whole tremendously exciting and heart-warming.

It can, however, also be frustrating and depressing at times.

It’s common for people to say “the map is not the territory”, and then simply switch maps without dealing with the territory at all.

Obviously I’m not immune to this map-trap myself. Using heuristics is a non-negotiable aspect of human-ing, and the heuristics we treat as axiomatic can lurk sticky and fundamentally connected in our belief structures long after we first realise that they’re harming more than helping and ‘decide’ that we’re done with them.

Back in 2018-2019, one Hydra heuristic gave me trouble for nearly 18 months before I finally managed to loosen its grip: the concept of ‘ownership’ as some kind of natural law.

As soon as I consciously examined it, I realised that ownership (or property) is not a law of nature, but actually a social construct — a normative bundling of agreed rights and responsibilities. In practice, however, the old subconscious heuristic was so entangled with my core emotions and fundamentally woven into other models and constructs in my toolkit that it continued to blind me to possibilities outside of its walls. I’d think I’d demolished the wall, only to find myself tripping over it again somewhere else 10 minutes or 10 days later.

This process of recalibrating heuristics is core to presence coaching and helping someone forge their own path.

Praxis

The frustrating/depressing aspect I referred to above is not that we make mistakes with our maps, but rather, that in practice, we cumulatively tend to act as if having and sharing theoretical knowledge in the complexity domain is enough.

The need for practice with appropriate tools and environments is sometimes discussed, but very rarely supported by much in the way of time, attention or resourcing. We mostly leave people to figure it out on their own.

To use a wonderful term of James Gibson’s that I picked up from John Vervaeke, what’s missing from this theoretical domain are affordances, the presence landscape of relationships between agent and arena.

Prior to praxis, affordances don’t exist outside our imagination.

John Vervaeke often uses the example of riding a bicycle to illustrate this. Someone might know all the theory of what a bike is, who designed it, and how it works, but it doesn’t really help them to actually ride it. (And notice that we can ride a bike without knowing any of the theory! So how important exactly is the theory??)

Transition work requires agents with sufficient affordances in and beyond the current arena to effectively reshape the arena itself.

This is what we keep asking politicians and billionaires to do. Unfortunately, we’re nearly always asking for the impossible. When we’re not asking the impossible, we’re usually asking for the wrong actions to be taken — wrong in the sense that they would almost certainly make things worse. **

At any rate, this state of affairs has highlighted the need for work that I accept as being at least partially mine to do. As a generalist who came to complexity from practice rather than theory, who is fascinated by outliers and individual differences, who regards labels and models and maps and theories as toys and tools to be played with (and never played by)… I feel I’m about as well-qualified to help with praxis in complexity as anyone can be.

Tools are needed for navigating the unknown, and I have been tailoring these for myself and helping others tailor theirs, for much of my life.

And of course, there’s Kairotic Flow — the most powerful tool for navigating life I’ve encountered so far!

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** These are big statements I’ve thought a lot about and am happy to explain; this page is just not the place for it.