I was in a call with a colleague yesterday and we were discussing Founder’s Syndrome. Over the years, it’s one of the more persistent patterns I have seen in non-profits and social enterprises. There are a lot of similar aspects to this pattern, and it generally unfolds like this:
A person or small group of people start something. Usually, they come from the front line and have experience working directly with people, delivering services, restoring landscapes, organizing campaigns, etc. With a little bit of success, these folks start thinking about growing their operations and stabilizing them over time. This means bringing in staff, board members, and funders who believe in them and want to support the vision. Some staff may be the same kind of front-line folks that the founder was. Still, many will be experts in another aspect of growing and operating an organization: managers, board members, marketers, finance people and so on. While these folks are all crucial to running an organization well, they don’t always share the founder’s experience with grassroots or front-line work.
Often, as the organization grows, the founder realizes that their role can no longer be directly involved in the front-line operations of the organization. They retreat to a more visionary role, and, as the holder of the core story and vision of the organization, they become an ambassador for the work, obtaining funding and support and good board members who can oversee the organization. This sounds good, but it can often generate many issues, especially as the founder begins to sense the end of their involvement with their organization.
At this stage a number of inevitable patterns begin to emerge. They don’t always work like this, but these are common enough that I see them over and over in organizations that have been around for a couple of decades, sometimes less.
The founder begins to feel irrelevant and starts getting nosy. If your whole life has been spent creating programs for vulnerable youth, you might not find yourself relishing leading an organization set up to do this. Founders often have a hard time removing themselves from the day-to-day operations because their heart lies with the activism and the work of change-making, not organizational sustaining. Sometimes founders will involve themselves too much in the front-line work, micro-managing and being unaware of their power and influence. This can lead to trust issues, where newer hires don’t feel like they can learn and grow in their jobs. The antidote to this is to establish good governance structures and good roles and for the founder to transition into a new role through learning and cultivating leadership.
Hardly anyone thinks of succession until it’s too late. This controlling dynamic affects the ability of a founder to plan well for succession. Very few founders give much thought to their own disappearance from their life’s work, especially when building and growing an organization which relies so heavily on them. If an organization successfully survives over the long term, there will always come a time when the founder will step back. I have talked with founders who occupy all points of the spectrum that range from “I can’t leave because the organization will collapse without me” to “if the organization dies when I’m gone, I’m okay with that.” Once you’ve created a structure and moved into a leadership role, it is time to think ahead about how you will get out of it. Even if that is 20 years ahead, it shapes your approach to mentorship and shared leadership. Building shared leadership early will help folks move into roles and create mutual support relationships that allow people in the organization to grow into these roles, increasing organizational resiliency over time.
Resisting change. Organizations that grow their stability also become less able to change. Board members appointed to support the founder’s vision often govern to a rigid version of what that looks like, and Boards like this are always more risk-averse than a swashbuckling social entrepreneur. Funders can enforce a kind of rigidity of approach too as funding grants can bend an organization’s operations to the funder’s theory of change rather than create the ongoing ability of social enterprises to grow and adapt. Stability is a polarity, and from the beginning, organizations need to develop resiliency rather than robustness. They must survive by being changed rather than stand as a bulwark against change. This is hard when you deliver services because clients require a continuity of care, and there are no easy answers to these questions. Managing this polarity is crucial for overcoming a founder’s syndrome, where the governance and funding are tied to an original vision and are not allowed to grow beyond the founder.
Splits between board and staff. In the early days of an organization, everyone is moving in the same direction, doing the same things and pitching in wherever they need to. However, as organizations become larger and more stable, roles become highly differentiated. Board members are often chosen more because of their connections to funding and power than to the front-line work. Staff are learning and adapting at the coal face of the work. The two groups often develop a distance between them, making it hard for them to be mutually supportive. When organizations ask me to help them with strategic planning, I always ask them to do it jointly with the board and staff and even clients and other stakeholders. Organizations that set their mandates and future plans through closed board sessions tend to suffer from a deep lack of situational awareness about the organization’s context. This can exacerbate founder’s syndrome even after the founder has left, as they will often invoke the founder’s intentions in their role as stewards and guardians of that vision. Ignoring the needs, concerns, creativity and awareness of staff and partners is a good way to dig a hole of irrelevancy for an organization.
This is just a bit of the ground I covered with my colleague yesterday. What patterns and responses do you notice?
A little piece I’ve just written about Harrison Owen’s work on High Performance Systems for an Art of Participatory Leadership workbook on the connections between Open Space Technology facilitation and leadership for self-organization.
From the moment Open Space was formalized as a meeting method in 1985, its creator, Harrison Owen, saw massive potential for the process to inform organizational design and leadership. Watching groups of 100 or more people self-organize a conference over multiple days was simply a microcosm of what could go on in organizational life. It offered a radical view that perhaps there was a different way to organize and a different way to lead when we are confronted with complexity and chaos.
In many ways, Open Space Technology was the doorway to the participatory leadership approaches championed by the Art of Hosting community. In his book Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, Owen shares his observation that what he saw happening in Open Space meetings was a practical expression of what organizational scholars were observing in high-performance teams. He formulated this working hypothesis:
High Performance is the productive interplay of diverse, complex forces, including chaos, confusion, and conflict, characterized by holiness, health, and harmony. it is harmonious, including all elements of harmony, both consonance and dissonance, in that multiple forces work together to create a unitary flow. It is whole in the sense that there is a clear focus, direction, and purpose. It is healthy in that the toxins of its process (metabolic byproducts in organisms) are eliminated effectively and without prejudice to itself or its environment. High Performance can never be sustained at the cost of a fouled nest. A High Performance System is one that does all of the above with excellence over time, and certainly better than the competition.
Harrison Owen. Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance, p. 35
To create the conditions for high performance, Owen turned to what he had learned from facilitating Open Space Technology meetings. Creativity springs from urgency, passion (including conflict) and responsibility. It is facilitated by providing leaders with the time and space to organize their work and choose the places where they make a maximum contribution of learning or doing, and essentially getting out of the way of work. When these conditions are in place, and the leader simply holds the space for self-organization, a high-performing System will emerge.
In Wave Rider, Owen provides three simple principles for leaders to create these spaces:
- “Never work harder than you have to.” Let the managers manage, and as a leader, focus only on what is yours to do. Take action that feeds the system with resources of time, money, and connection and holds space for outcomes to emerge.
- “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” This requires a leader to be patient and wait for the system’s wisdom to emerge. Too often, leaders respond to their own anxiety and discomfort with uncertainty by rushing to a solution or constraining their people to deliver something—ANYTHING—on time and under budget. For complex problems, staying open longer and allowing people to self-organize and explore many options for moving forward will increase the chances of novelty and innovation.
- “Never, ever, think you are in charge.” The myth of control lies at the heart of much management and organizational leadership literature. The assumption is that if you simply maintain control of the situation, including focusing on accountability for deliverables and directing efforts in a single direction, you will hit your KPIs and achieve a return on investment. The reality is that things are much more messy than that, Understanding that the leader is never solely in charge of the whole system liberates the leader to address situations with curiosity and invitation and builds the conditions for co-creation.
Owen explored these principles and approaches alongside the emergence of the World Wide Web and the idea that organizations could become more flexible and agile if they self-organized in networks around core purposes. New organizational forms and emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, enabled by the web’s ability for people to find each other and resources quickly. Manufacturing was revolutionized by agile approaches to product development, and organizational development became informed by complexity and dialogic practices often based on experiences formed using large-scale self-organizing meeting methods like Open Space Technology. The dynamics of self-organization were harnessed to create currency systems and governance models, which required leaders to be more like facilitators or hosts than dictators or controllers.
Participatory leadership is a set of practices rooted in the need to create spaces of creative self-organization and collective responsibility for new responses to complex and emergent problems. Facilitating Open Space Technology meetings is a tangible way to explore and practice these transferable skills from a single gathering to years-long project management to creating entire organizational structures.
When we are teaching dialogue practice and participatory meeting design, I often draw on the example of organizational and team staff meetings. Every organization I’ve worked with has these meetings and they ae almost nearly the same: an endless re-iteration of what people are doing, and rarely nothing more compelling that an email wouldn’t take care of. There is rarely even time for discussion becasue you have to get through everyone’s update in the 30 minutes assigned for the meeting.
So I often advise folks who want to bring more participatory culture to their organizations to focus on staff meetings. Rotate leadership, get serious about pruning out stuff that can be done by email and replace it with dialogue. After all, 30 minutes with an open agenda is a great place to brainstorm and discuss the thorny questions that are are dogging your team.
Today I cam across a great post from Tom Kerwin addressed to team leaders to help change their staff updates. I like this becasue it builds a container for team members to think about their work and share it in a way that makes it clear and helpful to others. (I’ve often said that if you’re having trouble explaining what you do, try to tell you great-aunt or your teenager about it.)
At any rate, here’s how Tom has re-designed his team’s update meetings:
I asked everyone to give a mini-pitch. In one minute, tell us:
- What’s the main challenge your team is tackling right now?
- What approach are you using to help your team tackle it?
- What are you looking for to tell you if your approach is working?
- And what are you looking for to tell you if your approach isn’t working?
I designed this to follow a key complexity principle: don’t try to change people, instead change their interactions. I designed this particular interaction to be a kind of ‘intuition-pump’ that could indirectly generate beneficial effects. And it did.
Here are five cool things it ended up doing:
- Everyone on my team got to practise pitching their work so that it would make sense to others and not only to themselves. This is a valuable skill in business. It took some repetitions to get this working, but we started live in low pressure small groups to lower the barrier and enable people to learn from each other. We could choose to switch to asynchronous written pitches when the ritual was stable.
- In order to figure out a pitch, each person had to understand why they were doing what they were doing for themselves. People started to develop a sense for different shapes and contexts of work, rather than sticking to one tool or process.
- I could instantly tell when someone was confused about what they were doing because their pitch either didn’t add up internally or didn’t cohere with the team’s strategy. We could grab time right then and there to figure it out together – before they’d spent days on pointless stuff. And this happened less over time.
- We started to enjoy the progress updates. I’ll use a food analogy. Before the change to the meeting format, it felt like we had to sit through people droning on about their food shopping lists. Afterwards, we got to hear chefs inspiring us with the delicious meals they were preparing.
- And folks on different teams started to actually understand what their colleagues were working on. This meant fewer complaints about not having enough visibility, and much more spontaneous collaboration.
I’ve been going down a bit of a rabbit hole these past few mornings, looking at some commentary and writing about Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who died in 1947 was a psychologist whose theory and research had a tremendous influence on the modern movements or organizational development, action research, Gestalt theory, change management and group dynamics. To read his writings now is to read a person deeply interested in the complexity of human systems long before there was much language at all available to even discuss complexity.
His ideas – or more precisely other people’s ideas about his ideas – have been largely responsible for the way mainstream organizational change is conceived and thought about.
One example is the theory of change attributed to Lewin that is known as “Change As Three Steps” or CATS. This theory is reduced to an incredibly simplistic set of moves called “Unfreeze –> Move –> Refreeze”. Looks simple enough to use right away and authentic enough because it can be attributed to Lewin. Lots of consultancies uncritically use this model, and even a cursory glance at Lewin’s work would make it clear that he would never make change that simple or linear.
The fact is that Lewin never proposed this set of moves, and it’s not even clear if he ever used the terms “freezing and unfreezing.” The rabbit holes I’ve been down started with a paper from 2015 that showed up in my feed by Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman, and Kenneth G Brown called “Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management.” This is SUCH a great critique of how Lewin’s ideas have been misattributed and misused. Lewing is the victim of a classic strawman argument, where something simplistic is attributed to him, and then folks pile on saying that his work is simplistic. Meanwhile. the work he did do is ignored or lies unread.
And that is a tremendous shame, because that paper led me to look at some of Lewin’s writings again and some of the papers about him. I got especially interested in his work on Field Theory, which is a term used in the world I travel in quite a bit. The Presencing world is predicated on working with “social fields” and lots of facilitators talk about “sensing the field” and so on. In my experience the uses of the terms “field” feels like a softer, more approachable, but more mystical way of describing complexity in human systems. Some might call it a “fluffy bunny” approach to complexity, but anything applied without much rigour can be that.
Lewin’s work is really worth a long look. His work is important because it embeds human behaviour in a set of contexts that influence change and stability. This was pretty groundbreaking in Western thought especially thinking that was rooted in Cartesian theories of mind and behavioural psychology. Lewin called that context in which we are all embedded “the life-space” which represents a field of influences that creates what we might now call “affordances” for behaviour. Lewin’s work anticipates ecological psychology, the effects of trauma, anthro-complexity, systems theory and other approaches to organization, culture, and human behaviour.
The implications for this idea are pretty clear, and a 1991 paper by Malcolm Parlett called “Reflections on Field Theory” in the British Gestalt Journal articulates five principles of Field Theory that are quite useful for thinking about change. In that paper, Parlett reflects on five principles of Field Theory that are rooted in Lewin’s work and influenced by subsequent thinkers like Gregory Bateson, Gary Yontef and Carl Hodges. The principles are:
- The Principle of Organization which states that field are organized by what I would now call “constraints” and that changes to these organizing forces will result in changes to what happens within the field.
- The Principle of Contemporaneity says that what matters in the field is the present. While history helps to explain how the field is currently organized, there is no special causal weight given to actual events that have happened in the past. However, it is important to understand how a person in the present has made sense of those events because that is what guides behaviour. To me, this is an acknowledgement of the limitations of retrospective coherence for making sense of the present and also an important insight for trauma-informed practice.
- The Principle of Singularity which states that each situation is unique and therefore requires a unique response. This clearly acknowledges the limitations of best practices on dynamic fields. Generalizations are of limited use and every moment needs to be approached afresh to find the affordances of timing and opportunity that allow for some actions to be easier to accomplish than others.
- The Principle of Changing Process which acknowledges that the field is in constant change. This is why the metaphor of unfreezing – moving – refreezing is of such little utlilty. It is predicated on a knowable stability in a system that simply isnt’ present. If one’s change management strategy is predicated on that, one is walking into a dark alley of surprise with a dangerous and blissful assumption of certainty.
- The Principle of Possible Relevance which points to the fact that in an interconnected field of actors and effects, anything can be a locus for change. And because we just don;t know which points in a field will be the most relevant in any given time, Snowden’s approach of multiple, parallel safe-to-fail probes can teach us a lot about the potential for change that takes us in the desired direction of travel.
In 1991, I finished an honours thesis that tried to use several theories and approaches to traditional knowledge, postmodern ethnography, critical theory, sociology and organizational development theory to create a new way of looking at organizational culture in Indigenous organizations. It was admittedly a little pompous for an honours thesis. Still, it led me in the direction of curiosity toward complexity and epistemologies that were rooted in more holistic ways of knowing. It would have been great to have Parlett’s paper back then and a better understanding of Gestalt approaches, to make the case in the academy that such ideas were not ONLY rooted in the marginalized worlds of “traditional knowledge” at that time but were in fact a long-standing part of the western intellectual traditional of behaviour, culture, and action in organizations.
Ove the years I have been aware of Lewin’s influence in the fields in which I work, especially organizational development. But I have to confess that I didn’t take an active interest in his work because I saw how it was used, especially CATS. It turns out that Lewin never developed CATS as a theory, and his actual work is much more interesting, especially as a source of some of the vestigial ideas and language that is present in the “field” in which I work. His work deserves a broader reading for those of us wanting to ground our practices in the history of thinkers like him and Mary Parker Follett and others who dreamed us into being 100 years ago.
Part 1: Introduction to the model
Part 2: A deeper dive into the model
The two loops model emerged from many years of conversations amongst people working in the Berkana Exchange and their friends and mates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As my friend Tim Merry pointed out on a comment at LinkedIn, the model itself was an emergent framework of how organizing happens on what we called back then “trans local” communities of practice. The Berkana Exchange was made up of many learning hubs around the world in places like Zimbabwe, South Africa, Senegal, India, Brazil, Mexico and Canada. These learning centres supported all kinds of experiments in living and the Art of Hosting took root and was co-created and developed in many of these places too, notably at Kufunda Village in Zimbabwe and The Shire in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Part of the origin of the two loops model was from the network making sense of itself and trying to understand what was required to create and sustain these kinds of experiments in an increasingly connected way. In the early 2000s there was so much talk about the way in which networks enabled by the open web were bringing people together and making interesting new forms of activism and organizing possible. Berkana was at the forefront of this lived inquiry and at some point prior to 2010, Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley published a pamphlet called Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, summarizing the Berkana approach to developing leadership in communities, which sought to build on the promise of networks by discussing the role of emergence and how to support communities of practice so that they can grow into systems of influence. Although this diagram above is not in the published document, the “Name-Connect-Nourish-Illuminate” pathway was named.
My earliest photo of a skecth of the model in my handwriting from 2009
I’m trying to remember when I first encountered this model. This is probably the earliest version of it I have in my photos, dated March 9, 2009. At that time, I was working a lot with Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony, Tim Merry, Tuesday Rivera (Ryan-Hart) (who now offer an online course on their version of the model) and Phil Cass, all of whom were deeply involved with the Berkana Institute and the Exchange. So this was in our conversations then. We started sharing the model in Art of Hosting workshops and in some client work. I think the first time I was involved in teaching it “on the floor” was at an Art of Hosting in Springfield, Illinois, in March 2009.
That particular way of working with the two loops has become my preferred way of teaching when we are in person. In 2009, Teresa, Tenneson and I were in a convent in Springfield when we had the idea of making a map on the floor and asking people to position themselves on it according to where they were in the systems in which they were working (which in this case was the Illinois education system). We asked people to quietly walk around the map until they “felt” the right place to be. Once there, we asked them to talk about what it was like in that spot with others and then offer insights to the whole. I remember the poignant moment a teacher who stood on the legacy side of Transition broke down into tears, saying that she could see the education system dying around her, and all she was trying to do was throw children across the gap and into the new system. She had no idea if anyone was there to catch them. And in that moment, a tall man who worked for a Foundation pointed to a woman who was on the other end of the Transition bridge and said, “We’ve got you. We fund those programs. Keep throwing those children our way.” It was a powerful lesson about what happens when folks can see others in the wider world to whom they are connected.
Around that time, work carried me into a few other places where this model just made sense. Tenneson and I started working with Canadian Labour unions back then, especially the Canadian Union of Public Employees and in October 2010, we used this model on the floor of the Canadian Labour Congress Training Centre in Port Elgin, Ontario, to talk about how the labour movement was changing. That was the first time I saw people position themselves entirely outside the map. In this case, the two that stood outside were Executives of the CLC, both vice presidents of their provincial labour federations. They both agreed that their job was to care for the whole system, see everybody in it, and try to meet everybody’s needs.
Perhaps the most influential moment in my own development of the model came when I was working with churches in 2012. I had been working with the United Church of Canada at that time working with congregations and presbyteries to look at the changes that were accelerating across the church at that time. As a mainline Protestant denomination, the United Church, like all the others, is going through a massive generational shift in the structure and future of the denomination. After its founding in 1925, the Church grew rapidly and became an influential progressive social and spiritual force in Canada. Membership in the church peaked in the 1960s and since then has been declining. In the last 15 years, many congregations have closed their doors, and very few churches are growing or evolving within the denomination anymore. The two loops model captured this moment incredibly well and asks the question of what is already amongst us that gives us a clue about how progressive Christianity will take form in its next iteration.
Using this framework and infusing it with the theology of progressive Christianity made for a deeply meaningful experience in the dozens of congregations I worked with during those years. It gave everyone a place in the system and opened up conversations about tradition, innovation, and what is required for the church to change. Some churches were just not up to the task, falling to strong traditional voices that squashed the new sprouts of innovation because they couldn’t reconcile them with the church they knew and loved. And I’ve seen some congregations embrace the emerging alongside the traditional and do well meeting the spiritual needs of their congregation members.
One lovely story I remember from this time that I want to record here happened when my friend Tom Brackett – at the time a bishop in the Episcopal Church in the USA – invited me to create a retreat with him for folks we loving referred to as “heretics” within the Church. The retreat was called “Can these bones live?” and the organizing scripture was Ezekial 37:1-14, the vision known as The Valley of Dry Bones. In this vision, Ezekial is taken to a box canyon that is full of the skeletons of slain soldiers, and God asks him, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekial sensibly replies “Oh God, you know.” And from that moment of paying attention to spirit and letting go of certainty, Ezekial and God wake up the bones and send the people home.
My notes from the day. I love the quote i jotted down that someone must have said “Heck: where the bad kids go.”
As we dove into this story and the framework, I invited people to walk contemplatively on the map and explore the Valley of Bones. It was indeed a deepening experience, and the rest of the retreat was full of stories, hopes, and real reckoning with what needs to die if the Episcopal Church is to live. Or even whether the Episcopal Church needed to die for progressive Christianity to live. Heretics indeed.
This particular gathering led to further engagements in the Episcopal Church in the USA and with ecumenical organizations like the Foundation for Theological Education (now known as the Foundation for Theological Exploration). That group sent a number of participants to a workshop that we did in Salt Lake City called “The Art of Convening in Faith-Based Communities,” and I worked closely with the FTE participants to think through this framework and its relationship to issues of justice, marginalization and equity. That single conversation would lead to many years long relationship and a pivotal event in the life of the two loops model in the United Church of Canada.
In 2013, as a part of a massive Comprehensive Review process, the United Church hosted a conversation about the future of theological education in Canada, with everything from academic seminaries to workshops on the spirituality of maple syrup on the table. I was invited to join a team hosting a huge gathering in Toronto to bring the whole system into the room for that conversation. To my delight, four of my friends from FTE were invited to attend as witnesses. The first two days were really hard, and there was a lot of conflict and rancour in the room. We had several conversations which served to surface the tensions and the conflicts. On the second evening, my friends from FTE took me aside and said that the group needed to take the gathering in a whole different direction. The host team from the General Council office didn’t know what else we should do, but my FTE friends and I sat in a hotel suite, watched by others and started to sketch out a plan to take the group through the two loops.
This would require changing the meeting room to accommodate a movement-based workshop for 175 people, so once we had settled on the design, we asked the hotel if they would change the room for the morning. They refused and wouldn’t let us change the room set up ourselves.
And so, at 11:00 at night, we snuck down to the conference room and persuaded a security guard to unlock the doors for us, saying we had a little prep to do for the morning. We locked ourselves in and took about an hour and a half to reset the room ourselves, taping a HUGE version of this model on one half of the floor and rearranging the tables and chairs to set up a World Cafe space.
We started the next day in a circle around the map, and I taught the model. Next, we had everyone place themselves on the map and go through the exercises of talking about what it was like where they were in the system. We followed that with a conversation about what gifts are offered from each place in the system, and the rest of the day was spent hearing about and discussing those together. It was a healthy, powerful conversation, and the moderator, Gary Paterson, absolutely fell in love with the model. Over the next two years, as he led the conversation on the Church’s future, he ran over 50 workshops using the model to talk to people across the country about the future of their Church. Here I am in 2014, teaching the model to the United Chruch’s EDGE Network as a part of the leadership development work at that time.
Of all the frameworks I have worked with over the years, this one has been as important as Cynefin. Both help us understand complexity, make sense of current conditions and both help people find affordances to action. I am immensely grateful for everyone I have ever worked with on this model, from my friends in Berkana to the Art of Hosting community to folks in the churches, transition movements, education systems, and elsewhere.