A really good post from Chris Mowles that talks about how we seek to outsource our discomfort with uncertainty to an algorithm or a method or a process.
Why is it so scary that unexpected things might happen when we get together to try and achieve something, unless we have things all planned out? Where is the room for the spontaneous, the novel and the eccentric?
Two contrasting recent events have made me think about the technologies that we apply to meeting together, that aspire to create what my late colleague Doug Griffin used to refer to as the doubling of process: feeling that we need a process in order to have a process. The aim is often to make meetings more ‘effective and efficient’, to make maximum use of our precious time together, but perhaps also to render them friction-free and more predictable. For me this is the same kind of instrumentalised thinking that informs AI.
I agree with him wholeheartedly. This is an important challenge to practitioners who find themselves designing interventions. I don't think we need people who are better at their "tools." I think there are other capacities and capabilities practitioners need to develop as they host interventions and work with change. How about you? What do you think?
When you worry that something you care about is going out of fashion, but you have no evidence for such a thing happening, the best course is to make the best argument you can for it as if the decline were happening. And then, if the decline is not happening, your best argument will still be useful.
So I thought: What is my best argument for participation? What would entice a listening-weary, stay-at-home population to leave home and travel to the other earths of the people around them? How about an appeal to enlightened self-interest? Let’s see what I can write along those lines.
— Cynthia Kurtz, Why — and whither — participation.
Cynthia Kurtz has crafted a long and important blog post that brings her usual clarity and approachable manner to the question of why we should be doing more participatory work. Along the way she explores some thoughts about why we AREN'T doing it much right now and what it takes to do more. It's a beautiful post and I encourage you to set aside 20 minutes or so and read it thoughtfully.
I’m writing about dialogic containers these days. They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it’s important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container. As facilitators we are used to using the world “container” to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. Dialogic containers are important to dialogic organizational development. In the Dialogic Organization Development book there are several metaphors employed by several of my co-authors to describe containers. What I’m finding is that we commonly refer to containers in four distinct ways…
Lots of new stuff is bubbling up into the Art of Hosting we teach, including different ways of teaching. Read on to find out more.
Gabriele Bammer and Jean Boulton identify a role and a set of capacities needed for research teams, and they call that role a “complexity entrepreneur.”
This style of operating in a complex world requires engendering a milieu in which people regain confidence in working with intuition, making sense of subjective and evolving information, and are able to hone the skills of judgement. Traditional methods of mapping and modelling have their place in surfacing less visible systemic patterns in relatively stable situations, but such methods can also mask the qualitative, contextual and emerging aspects central to facilitating a deeper understanding of the dynamics of change, stuckness and opportunity. Complexity entrepreneurs need to go beyond the analytical and gain experience in handling the ambiguous, the paradoxical and the co-evolving nature of context and action.
To brand these skills as entrepreneurial puts them in a positive light. It is hard not to feel at odds in a world seeking predominantly hard evidence and clear evaluation of alternatives to support conclusions and action strategies. And even with those intent on ‘embracing complexity’ there often lurks the hope that methods can be identified that will reduce that complexity sufficiently so that objective clarity is found. This can lead to a search for methods at the expense of enhancing and valuing the cognitive and emotional qualities needed to apprehend the terrain, judge what can be done and take action.
I’m sure some will seize on the brand title without seizing on the actual role, but I think there is some decent descriptions in this article that can help teams of researchers and others see the role of those who are skilled nd experienced at working with complexity. I especially like their description of the shadowy forces that drive our search for methods. We are teaching this week a cohort of labour educators in the Art of Hosting and we have a two day workshop that deliberately dives below methods. Even though we are sharing and using methods to ground the learning, the focus of the workshop is on the role of hosts as people who work with constraints to work with emergence.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this!