This one has been a long time coming.
Confusiasm first appeared in my life and vocabulary in 2007 or so when Riff Fullan first mentioned it in a KM4Dev annual gathering.
Sources differ on this origin, and as Nancy White mentioned, it’s travelled to the urban dictionary, it’s even a music album).
Confusiasm you said? 🤯
Confusiasm = confusion + enthusiasm
It basically means to be ‘happily confused’ or comfortable enough with some degree of chaos, in order to be receptive to emergence and learning
(yours truly)
And please note that here I’m not talking about confucianism.
Two. Totally. Different. Things.
Confusiasm looks like some play on words. It’s also that. But the notion is a lot more profound than the pun implies.
It felt natural to unpack this properly, so I have a piece I can come back to time and again. And I can share it with anyone else coming across the term for the first time, or a new ‘convert’ who might want to explore it further…
This is such a fundamental piece in my work, somehow, that I reckon this will be a dynamic blog post, occasionally updated.
What is confusiasm (and what are its benefits)?
To me, at its heart confusiasm is really about accepting that things are messy. It is a feeling that we hold – both individually and collectively – which invites us to be less anal about our need for clarity, order, linearity, predictability, straightforward logic etc.
In the process, it helps us to be receptive to feedback loops, patterns, emergence and ideas or perceptions we may not normally embrace.
It is on the other hand a key to build our capacity to hold discomfort, to tolerate challenges (from the general context, from others, from within ourselves), to empathise with alternative views and experiences, to build our openness to emergence, beautiful unpredictability, observation, listening, learning, adaptiveness and resilience.
When we first enter a domain of knowledge or expertise, it is natural to crave for understanding, order, clarity, logic, predictability.
It can be difficult to snap out of that set of needs. It’s human, it’s expected and it’s also OK to crave that structure. It offers us grips to learn more and navigate that domain.
But at a given point, if we clinch to those needs, it prevents us from being open, fully open to whatever emerges…
The subtle deal is to inject just enough chaos, confusion, discomfort that we enter the learning zone and openness to other views. If we go too far out of our comfort zone, we can snap back to what we know. Our limbic / lizard brain kicks in and protects us from what feels like too much risk.
As Rainer Maria Rilke invites us (thank you Michael Weinraub for the reference), cultivating doubt is incredibly helpful…
Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers — perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
So how can confusiasm play a role?
What does confusiasm mean to my practice?
Confusiasm has become an important aspect of my process literacy work… And it happened progressively.
I loved the play on word from the get-go, and it made sense back then when I was myself in a state of confusion and unclarity but I trusted the process to see beautiful things emerge…
Slowly and surely, confusiasm crept more and more deeply into my work. Particularly once I came across Sam Kaner and his life-changing concept of ‘groan zone‘.
Indeed, the beauty of the groan zone is to tolerate the confusion, frustration, irritation at each other’s challenging communication styles, in order to remain open to all the ‘data points’ that could lead to a novel, sustainable outcome or step forward. In the work that I do with group facilitation skills, obviously I cultivate confusiasm centrally, as you can see in the little video below (or here).
Confusiasm naturally invites itself in all the work I do with Liberating Structures (LS) and most notably in Wicked Questions, because the LS philosophy and pragmatic approach emerged out of complexity- and emergence-focused work, where patterns are being identified and considered as you go along. And it’s even in the balancing act of liberating views and controlling the direction of the conversation.
Confusiasm is what I cultivate with the resident ‘Friction Lab’ sessions that I run at Never Done Before. I invite the people attending my (nearly always co-facilitated) Friciton Lab sessions to explore all sorts of ‘cringe-worthy’ aspects of facilitation and collaboration, so we all find more graceful ways of dealing with discomfort at all levels.
Confusiasm is what I cultivate with my ‘loving provocation’ style of process agent provocateur. I want to reveal the elephants in the room (and all other animals), invite critical feedback, explore our inner self and work and our own contradictions.
Confusiasm is what I cultivate with all the groups I support, from the design teams (the sponsors) to the acticipants: I try and acknowledge their need for safety (and psychological safety is essential for a brave space) and at the same time to help them realise that nothing special happens in ‘business as usual’ and without taking risks.
Confusiasm is present both in the beautiful individuals that have struggled enough in their life to appreciate what is essential, and in the increasingly clear need to let go (of many things) as you age…
Confusiasm is a philosophy of work and life, and I hope a concept that will travel around because it really makes a lot of sense for people, and for groups of people, to appreciate its value and its power.
It is not easy, but it’s worth it. And as hard as it is, it sure is better than the alternative ‘ostrich’ approach of putting your head in the sand or pretending everything is fine.
So, does this post makes you more confusiastic? Or more confused?
Related stories
- Wicked Questions, /confusiasm/ and diverse richness at their best
- Yes to a ‘safe space’, and HELL YES to a safe and brave space (the next logical step)
- What do you do, as facilitator, when you are ‘clearly confused’ (and expected to be the one adding clarity 😜)?
- Soul searching, ‘signature’ and services: my dragon year (2024) in perspective
agilefacil 
Leave a comment