April 13, 2026

Salmon, Dam or Bear

Think about a time when your attempt to change a system didn't work: a good idea stalled, a room full of capable people producing nothing, a moment of exhaustion because the friction of trying wears you down. Can you relate?

Whenever she finds herself in that situation, Dr. Jessica Riddell, our speaker for this Thursday's Seeds of Flourishing session, runs a thought experiment:

Salmon, dam or bear?

The instinct is to find someone to blame. But what if the problem is not a person? What if it is the structure everyone is swimming in?

This is the salmon and the dam.

The salmon is anyone moving through an institution with purpose: sturdy, innovative, built to push upstream. The dam is the institution's invisible architecture: how value circulates, what gets rewarded, what the system requires in order for someone to survive in it. The colleague who stalls may not be the obstacle. They may be another salmon, pooling in a place the dam created for them.

There is also a third figure: The bear. Comfortable on the bank, neither blocked nor blocking, but benefiting from an ecosystem that stays exactly as it is. 

Jessica's provocation is that we are all three.

Salmon in one situation, dam in the next, bear in yet another. We often play a part in reproducing the systems we so deeply understand as broken.

Something that makes Riddell's approach uniquely powerful is a piece of background most systems thinkers can't claim: she's a Shakespeare scholar.

That takes us into a realm of swords, witches and dilemmas.

Shakespeare's take on systems change

Hamlet is standing, his sword drawn.

Claudius, the man suspected to have killed his father is right there, kneeling in prayer, unguarded.

The ghost clearly says Claudius is the murderer. 

But Hamlet sheathes his sword and walks away.

What if the ghost itself is a demon, sent to trick him into killing an innocent man? And what does killing one man actually solve, when corruption runs through the whole of Denmark?

As the audience, it's natural to feel impatient watching this unfold.

Make up your mind, Hamlet! Stop circling, solve the problem, just get the job done!

If you have ever been involved in systems transformation work, you have probably witnessed this impulse in your clients a lot, and at times possibly in yourself too (lol).

But Shakespeare drives his point home right in Act 1:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Not in Hamlet. In Denmark.

A self-help book with 10 steps to find your purpose will not help Hamlet. Nor will a better support system, or task forces and resilience training. The systems themselves are broken, and when systems are broken, even the sturdiest salmon cannot flourish.

Hamlet is not a procrastinator. He is a salmon. Denmark is the dam.

A Shakespeare scholar, Dr. Riddell would know this well. And yet, at one point, she too got trapped.

Join the Witches

Dr. Riddell tells a story of how her and two colleagues, all three of them Shakespeareans, stripped the joy out of their work in order to be taken seriously. The dirty bits, the strangeness, the delight, all of it sanded down and made rigorous. They wrote the articles, earned the evaluations and eventually got tenure.

"And we were deeply sad," she says. "Because the thing that called us to the word was the thing that we had dismembered in order to manage within these broken systems".

In June 2015, on a bus in Vancouver, they asked a different question:

What would it look like to write a book that sounded like themselves?

They called themselves the weird sisters, after Macbeth's witches: the three women Shakespeare places at the margins of the play, with no positional power, no institutional authority, only what the land around them provides. They gather at the edges, build intentional community, and dare to imagine that something else is possible.

What they discovered was a different practice of being in a room together. Gathering with intention, building shared vocabulary, sitting in discomfort, doing collective sense-making and trusting that the solutions needed were already present in the community around them.

This is the foundation of her book: Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing, and of everything she has built since.

"We can no longer just ask our students and our staff and our faculty to be resilient," she writes. "We have to look at the systems that are making us unwell, exhausted, and dropping out."

Her answer is what she calls an ecosystem approach to gathering: designing spaces where collective sense-making can happen, where the point is not to receive wisdom from the front of the room but to generate it in communion with the people around you.

Dr. Riddell doesn't claim to have resolved the question. She is still living it. And the most generative thing she has found she can do is invite others to live it with her. 

That is the invitation for this Thursday.

This Thursday: An Ecosystem Approach to Gathering in Times of Rupture 

Dr. Jessica Riddell, a Full Professor at Bishop's University and Jarislowsky Chair in Undergraduate Teaching Excellenceour, will be our guide for this Thursday's session at Seeds of Flourishing.

She will explore what it means to design gatherings that go beyond delivering answers and instead harness the transformational power of holding questions. 

April 16, 12-12:45pm, online, free (with the option to donate in support of the series).

If you are registered already, we can’t wait to see you there!

With warmth,

The Centre for Human Flourishing Team