Four things conspiring here today.
- I had lunch with a friend/student, and we had a long conversation about what it means to “hold space.”
- This post from Michelle Holliday in which she finds herself Rethinking Self-Organization.
- Working with Cynthia Kurtz, who published Confluence a couple of years ago, which is a framework that helps create a thinking space for the intersections of organization and self-organization.
- Getting ready to teach our next cohort of Complexity From the Inside Out.
So before you dive into this post, go play Horde of the Flies at Complexity Explorables. Play with the sliders. Find a way to lock all the dots in one super stable state. Find a way to ensure endless randomness. Find a way to have the dots self-organize such that patterns emerge, persist for a while, and then change. Play with trying to control the system. See if you can get desired results.
Now, what’s going on here?
There is a relationship between organization and self-organization. Systems self-organize within constraints. Without constraints, anything is possible, which makes it far more likely that complete nonsense will occur, utter chaos. But with too many constraints in a system, nothing will emerge, and the system will be locked into one steady and stable pattern with no possibility for emergence, adaptation or evolution.
This intersection between organization (the deliberate application of constraints) and self-organization (what happens inside a constrained space) is really the whole world in which facilitation and leadership play. It is the world of complexity. As Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz wrote with a nod to Alicia Juarerro in “The New Dynamics of Strategy” back in 2003:
Humans are not limited to acting in accordance with predetermined rules. We are able to impose structure on our interactions (or disrupt it) as a result of collective agreement or individual acts of free will. We are capable of shifting a system from complexity to order and maintaining it there in such a way that it becomes predictable. As a result, questions of intentionality play a large role in human patterns of complexity.
Kurtz, C & Snowden, D (2003) “The New Dynamics of Strategy: sense making in a complex-complicated world” in IBM Systems Journal Volume 42 Number 3 pp 462-483
This remains one of the critical insights about anthro-complexity that is the basis for how I look at facilitation and leadership.
Practically speaking, the implication here is clear. Anyone working with a group will find themselves creating a temporary space inside of which some degree of self-organization will take place and outside of which one’s influence is limited. The job is to manage the constraints in the system, which means primarily creating a container formed of boundaries and catalyzing attractors, which creates a context for connections and exchanges between people inside the container. Once the container is set, one monitors it and, if possible, works with the constraints to take what is happening in a positive direction of travel.
THIS IS A PERILOUS UNDERTAKING. It is fraught with power dynamics, ethical questions, moral quandaries, conflicting value judgements, surprising results and crushing failures. There is always a chance that people will have a peak experience of their life, and it’s also possible that someone will experience traumatic and lasting harm. Along the way, you might even get good work done, if the existential crisis doesn’t eat you first. If you think leadership (or facilitation, parenting, or being a citizen) is easy, you haven’t lived.
Many of us get into facilitation because we want to help create a better world. Creating the conditions for good creative work, productive dialogue, and good relations is one way that can happen. The shadow side of this is that we often get VERY attached to what happens in the containers we create. More attached than we think we are. We want things to go well, we want people to be safe, we want a good outcome, and we want every voice to matter and for people to exercise their power and leadership. We cannot guarantee any of those things, let alone that any of them will go the way we want. Too often, facilitation and leadership situations fail on the reefs of good intentions. Things grow very controlling and prescriptive. And yet…
And yet, the work of holding space is not a flakey woo-woo concept. Holding space means two things. First, it is about creating and holding a boundary, or as Dave Snowden famously puts it when describing the complexity approach to hosting a children’s birthday party: “We draw a line in the sand known as a boundary…and we say to the children ‘cross that you little bastards and you die.'”
Second, it is about creating probes inside this container that influence how people behave inside it. When it appears that one of the probes has become a beneficial attractor, we find ways to stabilize it. And when one starts producing non-beneficial behaviours, we destroy it right away because emergence and self-organization can make bad things worse, and as any parent or gardener knows, you need to learn to nip things in the bud.
That’s what facilitation is. And it’s a lifelong practice where you will get that balance wrong a lot of the time. In fact, I would say that MOST of the time, I get it “wrong” because no matter where you start, as soon as the people enter the room, shit gets real, as the kids say. It’s all about how one adjusts to the situation. Hence, you need to build flexibility and adaptability into the process design, and keep a careful watch on what is going on, both in the container around you and in the container inside you, because THAT one is often the one that creates the most trouble.
Buy and read Cynthia’s book if you want a guided tour through the very deepest implications of this simple intersection of organization and self-organization. I’m going to bring the essence of her ideas into this upcoming cohort of Complexity Inside and Out because I think it really helps us explain the terrain upon which leadership, management, facilitation and coaching all take place. And I think it also presents an honest take on facilitation and leadership and how those roles are related to issues of control, constraint, creativity, emergence and self-organization.
An invitation to learn about transforming power.
Power.
What’s your reaction to the word? Do you love it? Does it make you shudder? Are you frightened by it or rather do you relish power, look for chances to acquire some and use it? Or maybe you’d rather talk about “influence” or “inspiration” because the word “power” seems toxic?
Have you been hurt by power? i have; my own and others. Power that exploits, power that lords it over us, power that extracts from us and drains us.
But I’ve also been lifted up and supported by power. Mentored, helped along, corrected, guided, enabled.
Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and I have been talking about power in the context of lots of different pieces of work over the years including at the intersection of indigenous and settler systems of governance, policy and philanthropy. We’ve worked together with social service leaders, Indigenous families, Foundation leaders, churches, students of transformative systems change, folks interested in convening groups and making the world a better place. We’ve been in an active conversation about taking a view of power and it’s uses through a Nuu Chah Nulth lens.
Kelly, who is a member of the Tseshaht Nation is a deep student of her Nation’s culture and language, and in her work with Elders and communities over the past fifteen years, she has been thinking about power in a different way, by connecting it to its relational sources, grounded in family and community and lineage. When we are teaching together, Kelly uses the examples of four animals – the whale, the wolf, the eagle and the hummingbird – to explore four key aspects of cultivating and using power.
Stemming from a worldview that begins with an assumption that “everything is one” her learnings about power from a Nuu Chah Nulth lens invites us to look at how we use power to plumb honest Depth, strengthen collective Courage, create shared Vision and sustain one another to work with Joy.
With our friends Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions we are ready to offer a series of four conversations about these ideas to those who work with power in group process and systems change. We know, working in participatory ways, that we can use and transform power to embed it in a relations system that shares leadership and lifts all of us, but it’s not always a simple matter to do so. So in this course we will explore relational power and its uses beginning with ideas Kelly has been putting together from her experience as a host and facilitator and leader in community and queried by my own experience working with power as a settler who is trying to lift more of these relational ways of doing things into the formal structures and systems in order to address the harms of colonization and promises of an alternative way of organizing and being actively reciprocal in the world.
If you are up for the conversation, we’d love to have you join us to explore how to transform our use of power. You might learn:
- How power shows upin group work and we might work with it differently
- How leadership is about creating shared contexts for action and actualization of both individual and collective work
- How working with power has the potential to transform relationships and create sustainability in social change and community.
And you might learn a bunch of other stuff besides! This course will place you in active learning with these ideas, and you will leave with a compendium and harvest of the teachings we all create together.
Want to join us? Learn more and register here.
There is no really easy way to write this, so perhaps its just best to be polemical about it.
I am no longer going to be supporting cishet white men who are running for office. Basically guys that look like me. We’ve had our run, we have propagated genocide, mass destruction and murder, war, criminal economic inequality and the destruction of the life support systems of the planet we live on and now I think it is time to stop. Of course folks will “not all…” me on this, but just stop. Our role now is to support different people than us. Because what happens when we feel the MEREREST slipping away of power and influence is that we do ridiculous things like driving hundreds of trucks into the middle of Ottawa and demanding that the unelected Senate assist us in the overthrow of the government. Or worse. Much worse.
We do shit like this:
Just read the replies on that thread. I’m not going to tell you how bad it is.
Policy making matters. The people who make policy matter. Our job now is to use our power, money and influence to get behind different decision makers and support their election to office, or their appointment to the judiciary. because we need different decisions and we need to change the face and experience base of those making those decisions.
Three years ago the Canadian inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded – quite rightly – that what has happened and continues to happen to Indigenous people in Canada constitutes genocide. And what continues to happen to women, non-binary, and trans folks is a good indicator of a country’s character and perspective. In Louisiana if this law goes through, any woman who terminates a pregnancy because it is ectopic and life threatening is a murderer. A women who has an unimplanted fertilized egg that flows out with her period is technically a murderer. And a judge that seeks to stay the charges is to be automatically impeached.
Let us stop being outraged and surprised at this continued pursuit of genocidal policies and fascist radical Christian extremism, for none of this is new. Let us instead change the game by changing the people with their hands of power. Make laws not blog posts.
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.
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.