One of the quotes I keep rolling out all the time is this one from Christina Baldwin:
No group can prove itself safe by the definition of one member; it can only prove itself healthy and responsive to the the needs of different people over time
Christina Baldwin, Calling the Circle, p. 172
I sometimes reframe this quote as “No one person can be responsible for safety in a group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for its own safety.”
For a group to work well, especially if it is confronting challenges, uncertainty, complexity, or conflict, it needs to be safe enough for members to freely share and contribute, and also challenging enough that ideas that no longer serve can be questioned, stretched and broken to make space for the new. Rather than saying “we will create safe space” it’s useful to take some time to explore the polarity of safety and danger. We often talk about “safe enough” or “brave space” or similar terms that capture this space of leading and facilitating.
So the way to do this is to enlist the group itself in co-creating the conditions that create a creative, generative, challenging and supportive space. I usually do that by facilitating this process that I call The Golden Rule Principles Setting Exercise.
The Golden Rule, of course, is the principle that underlies the perennial tradition of many religious and spiritual traditions. In Christianity it is worded as “Love your neighbour as yourself.” It recognizes our interdependence with others and it invites us to practice offering to others the same things that we ourselves need.
The process is very simple.
- Invite people to reflect and discuss these two questions: During this meeting how do I want to be heard? During this meeting how do I want to be spoken to?”
- It’s good to do this in pairs and folks can record some of these needs and place them on stickies or a virtual whiteboard or chat log.
- Have the pairs share a few of their needs into the whole group.
- Next invite people to reflect on how to offer to others what they want for themselves. If I need to be allowed to ramble a bit uninterrupted because I think out loud, I can put this need in the centre and also commit to not interrupting others.
- Have people commit to a single practice that they will endeavour to live up to, one that they may even be willing to be accountable to, and place it on a sticky note.
That’s it. Except under very specific circumstances, I don’t ask the group to vote on these principles, or approve them in any other way. Rather, I trust the people to do their work. From time to time of course as a facilitator one needs to step in, but usually when this process is put into play, I need only offer a period of silence and reflection on the commitment for a group to restore its collective responsibility to care for the container.
As a way to begin a meeting, this is a first foray into co-creation of something that the group all needs and is therefore an excellent way to set the tone for collaborative work, creating a space that can hold the range of emotions that show up in complexity work
Our Complexity Inside and Out course is now in full swing and after 3 of 7 sessions we have covered some of the basics that make up our understanding of complexity theory and some of the core practices to affect change in complex systems, both inner and outer.
One of those strategies of course is through shifting constraints. To work with self-organization and emergence in a system, finding the constraints that enable behaviour and creating different ones can have the effect of shifting the behaviour. Not always of course – we have to pay attention and monitor what we are doing – but these are the promising places to get a start.
Based on work from Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang, the constraints I work with are these, listed in order of ease to work with:
THe Connecting constraints of
- Connections between agents in a system
- Exchanges that flow across those connections
And the containing constraints of
- Attractors around which behaviours or actions coalesce
- Boundaries that define the context for actions
There are two other constraints which come to us from Snowden’s field of anthro-complexity and they are Identity and Dark constraints, both of which are a sort of subclass of the above. Identities create or maintain coherent connections or containers and the Dark constraints are simply the nones we don’t know about and which only reveal themselves in real time.
It’s not always easy to spot these in the wild as you are learning about them, but this article in The Conversation is a good example of thinking about managing complex behaviour. Every October in Ontario there is a traditional homecoming week at universities in which former students return and current students party. The flocking behaviour of students in these times creates emergent behaviours at the grouplevel that are not immediately present at the individual level, and the authors provide a handy link to one research paper that explains this.
The response to behaviour like this is typically banning certain kinds of activities, which, in Cynefin terms, is a misapplication of governing constraints aimed at control to self-organizing behaviour. What is needed instead are constraints that enable the emergence of different behaviours. It is hard to spot these because with events such as the ones described in the article, the tendency is to want to squash the problem.
But a harm reduction approach first begins by identifying the fact that there will always be these behaviours and always be these problems, and the way to address them is to create adjacent possibles (a Stuart Kauffman term) which invites the system to an alternative state. Such possibles cannot be too far away from the current state, but they must not be too close to the current state to be rendered ineffective. For example, proposing that students only consume alcohol in sanctioned places with oversight from police and campus security is likely to fail. Few students will love to party in such a heavily surveilled way. On the other hand, allowing students to party anywhere and then providing a ntip line for any issues that might come up is a weak response that is unlikely to affect the behaviour.
So the authors propose an oblique strategy, which is an excellent approach to complex problems. First, the say that students need to be empowered to co-create harm reduction approaches to these issues to create safety in a public health and gender-violence context. It is unlikely that on their own students will come to a meeting to co-create these, or if they do, their authority to enact the approaches may be compromised by their perceived identity of “goody two-shoes.” So instead the authors propose a new attractor in the field, a for credit course that is about generating harm reduction approaches but which alos teaches skills needed to address and manage public health issues:
Conversations are a good start, but a systemic approach that integrates understanding of these events and taking action through curriculum is essential.
One of these strategies could be creating a university credit based multidisciplinary course that is aimed at proposing solutions for how students could gather and celebrate in a safe — including COVID-19 safe — manner that reflects their own, and community values.
The students would learn (among many things) how to address diffusion of responsibility and gender-based violence. It would provide them with opportunities to learn about city bylaws, police costs and potential challenges to the health care system of large student gatherings.
The instructors could be an advisory team of mentors including members from the city, police, first responders and university experts. This initiative would challenge students to research the problem and be an active part of the solution.
Co-creating solutions with students by providing them with opportunities to lead with support and guidance will empower them to take ownership and responsibility when it comes to implementing positive change. If they lead the new way forward, students will come and be together in a way that meets their needs.
Backed with the power of the university to sanction this approach, makes this new attractor for action stronger. REQUIRING students to participate in this exercise would be too rigid a boundary, but for students that are charged with under age driking violations for example, they may be required to participate in these discussions in a restorative process designed to using their lived experience and also having them make amends.
Working with constraints gives us lots of ideas about how to shift things. The key is implementing what you can and watching for change. As for this example, what a great case study. I will see if I can follow up with Craig and Kolomitro about what happens with their ideas.
Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking for evidence that I am NOT on the path. Is there broken foliage? Is the soil compressed and eroded by boots rather than hoofs or water? Are the roots underfoot rubbed clean of bark? Are there any trail markers about? When I find myself answering “no” to these questions I move slower, until the evidence is overwhelming, and I stop and track back to find out where I went wrong.
You can see why looking for evidence to DISPROVE your belief creates a safe to fail situation. If I find a single piece of evidence that confirms my belief that I am on the right track, and I follow it unquestioningly, the results become increasingly dangerous, and failure becomes unsafe.
A lot of my life and work is about paying attention to these weak signals. Whether it is making music with others, facilitating groups, helping organizations with strategy, playing and watching sports like soccer, rugby and hockey, it all comes down to paying attention in a way that challenges your beliefs.
The other day I offered a pithy comment on facebook to the question of “what is the difference between critical thinking and buying conspiracy theories?” and it really came down to this: critical thinkers look for evidence to disprove their beliefs and conspiracy theorists look for evidence to confirm their beliefs.
I think the latter is quite the norm in our current mainstream organizational cultures, even if it doesn’t lead to conspiracy theory. The pressure for accountability and getting it right leaves very little space to see what’s going wrong in the organization. The desire to build on what is working – while being an important part of the strategic toolkit – is not served without a critical look at the fact that we might be doing it wrong.
This is why sensemaking has become a critical part of my practice. And by sensemaking I mean collecting large numbers of small anecdotes about a situation and having large numbers of people look at them together. The idea is that with a diverse set of data points and a diverse number of perspectives, you get a truer picture of the actual culture of an organization, and you can act with more capacity to find multiple ways forward, including those which both challenge your assumptions about what is right and good now and those which discover what is better and better.
Recently in Canada we have been having a little debate about whether celebrating Canada Day on July 1 is appropriate given that fact that this month – National Indigenous Peoples Month, as it turns out – has been marked by a reckoning with the visible evidence of the genocide that has been committed here. While hundreds of thousands of people here are in mourning or grief, and are reliving the trauma that has travelled through their families as a result of the genocidal policies of residential school and the non-consensual adoption of children, many others are predictably coming out with a counter reaction that goes something like this “yeah, well let’s get over it. Canada is still the best country of the world to live in.”
And that makes sense for many people – like me – who live here and have a great life. But as I have been saying elsewhere on Twitter: don’t confuse you having a great life with this being a great country. There is nothing wrong with people having a great life. That is what we should want for all people. But Canada is not a place where that happens for everyone. The story is very different for lots of people who struggle to find contentment and acceptance inside this nation-state. Canada’s very existence is owed to broken treaties, environmental destruction, relational treachery, economic injustice, and genocide.
Paying attention to the weak signals is important here. If all you can see is how great your own life is, and you think we just need to keep doing whatever it is that we are doing that assures that continuity, then we are headed for a precipice. We are headed off an environmental cliff, into a quagmire of injustice and economic inequality that destabilizes everything you have in a catastrophic way.
Listening to First Nations – really paying attention to possibilities – is mutually beneficial to everyone. If one wants all lives to matter, then one has to ensure that every life matters, which means taking the lead from those whose lives have been considered dispensable in the project called “Canada.” And it’s not like they haven’t been out here for the past 250 years calling for a better way. It’s just that the mainstream, largely led by commercial interests who have hungered for and exploited natural resources that never belonged to them, have cheered on the idea that if Canada is good for me, it must be good period.
Let seeing be disbelieving. This country is not an inherently GOOD place. But it could be. It could be great. It could be safe, healthy, prosperous, balanced, creative and monumentally amazing. But it requires us to first question the limiting beliefs we have that it could never be better than this and second to pay attention to the weak signals that help guide us onto a path that takes us there.
It is far too early to celebrate Canada Day. We haven’t yet fulfilled the promise of the treaties and the vision with which indigenous Nations entered into relationships with Europeans oh so long ago, and that vision which is continually offered up to settlers through reciprocity and relationship. If there is anything to celebrate, perhaps it is the fact that we do have the resources to make this country work for all and we have the intelligence and creativity and willingness to do it, but you won’t find that in the Board rooms and the Parliamentary lobbies and the Cabinet offices and the global markets.
It is in the weak signals, the stories and small pathways of promise out there that are born in struggle and resilience and survival and generate connection, sustainability and the promise of well-being for all.
For much of the past few years my facilitation and evaluation practice has been steadily merging together. When I FINALLY came across Cynthia’ Kurtz’s body of work, Participatory Narrative Inquiry a few years ago, I felt simultaneously validated and challenged. Validated in that the participatory facilitation work I have been doing since I stumbled on Open Space Technology in 1995 met the complexity work I have been in since 2005 and the developmental evaluation work I’ve been doing for the past ten years. Challenged in that it opened up new streams for my practice, and that has been gratifying.
Nowadays I regularly do story gathering as a part of all my projects. I use online tools like NarraFirma, Spryng or Sensemaker and sometimes pen and paper approaches. In a future blog post perhaps I’ll name some of the projects we’ve been doing with these tools and how they have contributed to our work.
Today in a conversation about getting started with stories, someone asked about how to get a bunch of perspectives from throughout to company on a new phase in a company’s evolution. I responded with a simple approach to PNI. You can use this to get started with a group.
- You want to begin by collecting stories, not running a workshop where everyone tells you what they think are the issues. That approach tends to get everyone prepared to advocate for their own position. So try this simple approach. Do a little questionnaire, using Google Forms for example. Ask participants to “share a story of something that happened lately that made you think: ‘we need to address this issue…'” Get everyone in the organization to enter one story, a few sentences. On the form then ask them a) how common do you think this is in our organization and b) what is one thing we could do to address that issue?
- Now you have a collection of grounded stories and a bunch of material you can use to host some more interesting strategic sessions. Convene some meetings and give people the stories to look at, maybe separated into common and rare, and have them look at the material and work together to create ways of addressing the issues.
- There are many things you can do with these stories, but the principle is “Use the harvest to convene the conversation.” From that the conversation can produce a harvest of things to try to address the issues you discover.
The advantage of this is that everyone’s voice gets in the mix, and everyone has a chance to interpret their own stories and then interpret what other people’s stories might mean. This generates massive engagement.
I really appreciate Cynthia’s clear writing on this and offer you this quote from work as a heuristic in your own planning and design:
In my experience, the greater the degree of participation the stronger the positive impact of any project that involves people and aims to improve some situation faced by those people. I have also noticed that some forms of participation are easier to manage than others. So I generally encourage people planning projects to think about taking one more step up the staircase of participation, wherever they find themselves now; but I order the steps so as to make the transition more feasible in practice.
If you are asking people to tell you stories, why not ask them what their stories mean?
If you already do that, why not ask people what the stories other people told mean?
If you already do that, why not ask people to build something with their stories? Why not ask them what that means?
If you already do that, why not ask people if they can see any trends in the stories that have been told?
If you already do that, why not ask people to design interventions based on the stories they have told and heard?
Then, why not ask people to help you plan new projects?And so on. As you step up, keep watching your project to see if increasing participation is making it better. If it stops making the project better (for the people you are doing the project to help), stop increasing the participation. Wherever you find yourself is participatory enough. For now.
I sometimes feel like I’m repeating myself here, but please indulge me. When I get my teeth into learning about something I come back to it over and over, finding new ways to think about it, polishing it up. I love blogs because they offer us a chance to put drafting thinking out into the world and get responses, forcing me to think more deeply and more clearly about things.
Likewise teaching, which for me is always the best stone that sharpens the blade, so to speak. Tomorrow I will rise at an ungodly hour – 4am – to teach a two hour session to some amazing social justice activists in Eastern and Central Europe, who are fighting for things like environment justice, and racial and gender and sexual orientation equality, among other topics. I get to teach about working with complexity.
As part of that, I will elaborate on my little model of constraints, which for the record is now described as Connections, Exchanges, Attractors, Boundaries and Identities the short form of which is CEAB(I). In this blog post I’ll explain why.
These five types of constraints essentially cover all the ways that complex systems or problems are constituted. They function as a mix of constraints that govern and constraints that enable. These two terms come from the work of Alicia Juarrero and Dave Snowden. Governing constraints stop certain things from happening (a door keeps the public out, a bolt attaches two pieces of metal). They create a limitation on action. Enabling constraints create a space, a context or a container in which action can happen within boundaries. They are essential for emergence and coherence in a complex system. Think about form in poetry, or the kinds of direction that managers give their workers. If these constraints are too tight, we compromise and stifle emergence. If they are too loose, we create too diffuse a context for action. A manager that says “do whatever you want” is going to make trouble in the organization. So too will one who says “let me review every single move you make.” Managing enabling constraints is really the high art of working in complexity especially as you can never know in advance what “too tight” and “too loose” looks like.
So far so good.
Now this little model, CEAB(I) can be used to both analyse a situation and to take action to change that situation. When I am confronted with a stuck problem in ir near the complexity domain, I will often do a quick survey of the constraints that are active in the moment. From a social action perspective, lets just look at a relatively straightforward (!) case or trying to change policy around affordable rental housing. What are the constraints at play that create the emergent situation of “unaffordabilty?” Here are a few sketched out thoughts:
CONNECTIONS – Landlords can use AirBnB to get a better revenue stream rather than long term rental; tenants need to be “connected” to find good deals;
EXCHANGES – Insiders in communities recommend “good” tenants to landlords, thereby gaming the market for accessibility to affordable spaces;
ATTRACTORS –Landlords have few incentives to offer long term housing over short term rentals that give them more flexibility; landlord regulations make long term rental prohibitive, but lax regulations on BnB’s make it easy to rent short term; high mortgages and house prices mean landlords charge high rents to recover costs.
BOUNDARIES – Government regulations make developing a suite to be prohibitive (secondary suites are often banned in residential neighbourhoods due to concerns about traffic and noise); restricted zoning means rentals are located only in certain places making them more scarce and therefore higher priced on the market; lack of rental increase guidelines that allow landlords to charge maximum rather than affordable rents.
IDENTITY – Renters perceived as poorer than the home owners in the surrounding neighbourhood; rentals and density considered undesirable as it is perceived to lower property values; density considered a change to the character of a neighbourhood opposed by people with a vested interest in the status quo; fear of outsiders or transient residents.
Okay. You see where this is going. Complex issues are so named because these factors (and many many more) work together to create the emergent characteristic of unaffordable rents.
To change the system we need to change the constraints.
There are some high value targets. For example, you could create a governing constraint in the system that bans rents above a certain price point and creates expensive fines for breaking that law. This may have the unintended consequence of forcing rentals OFF the market and possibly into shotr term rentals OR having a black market emerge of unregulated suites and apartments. It may limit the supply and force renters into tent cities for example, creating another situation. On the other hand such a law may give everyone clarity and force a change for the good. But this is a very high energy solution and requires a great deal of power to effect.
At the other end of the spectrum, you could create different kinds of connections in the system. You could ban AirBnB (as some jurisdictions have done) but also incentivize rentals by providing a property tax breaks to people renting out affordable suites or apartments. Tenants can organize to strike against high rents by creating tight connections and limiting the exchanges that go between them as a class and landlords as a class, forcing political action.
You could also change the nature of the problem by allowing different kinds of rentals (such as secondary suites in single family homes, which happened in my community and instantly increased the amount of rental housing in the stock). Potential renters could form new connections, such as co-ops and co-housing groups (or indeed create tent cities) to create new forms of housing and community.
The four constraints of connection, exchanges, attractors, and boundaries offer places for action. As you go from C —-> E —-> A —> B you require more and more power to act. Creating and enforcing boundaries is very difficult for community organizers to do. But creating new connections and changing the exchanges that happen are accessible tools for people without formal power in a system. This is how people organize and build movements for change. If your hands are not on the levers of power, you need to mobilize to get them there.
Identities are a special class of constraint, and everyone plays in this space. You are often forced into a certain class by the ethos of a culture: in a white supremacist culture like Canada, BIPOC people are often marginalized as outsiders. But white people have choices about using power and privilege, to either uphold the status quo or change it. Identity and context play together. Some people are able to code switch, or form alliances, or play along with epectations and then make surprise moves. The film Black Klansman is a great example of this. How you name yourself, appear, code-switch, separate and join groups is a tactical consideration for making change. Do you join certain clubs and networks to gain influence? Or is it better to stand outside the system and protest? Do you join the mainstream or offer alternatives? Do you participate in advisory panels or critique and tear down the process? Or do you do all of these simultaneously. Identity and identity politics are a big deal.
To set up new attractors and new boundaries is possible only if you have some power. That power can be formal coercive power, or it could be charismatic influence. Even a social movement without policy making capability can force change through boycotts (limiting exchanges), shifting the story (through re-casting identity), creating alliances (connections acorss power gradients) or creating alternative glimpses of the future (off the grid experiments, tent cities communities) that might force policy makers to stabilize good ideas or finally confront the constraints that create problems by breaking them.
Being effective in mobilizing for change requires a huge amount of creativity, collaborative relationship, collective intelligence, and situational awareness. You need to ask:
- How does this problem work?
- What do we have the power to change?
- What do we not yet have the power to change?
- What can we change now that will create more stories and examples of what we want to see and fewer examples of what we don;t want to see?
Then you make small plans, try to catalyze new patterns in the system and see what happens. And you fail. A LOT, which is something that all activists know, but which doesn’t stop them from organizing and working anyway.
A long ramble, but hopefully it gives you a peek at some of the thinking that I’m doing about how power comes into play in influencing complex systems and addressing complex problems. Let me know what you think in the comments.