Two Tim Merry references in a row. Yesterday Tim posted a video blog on planning vs. preparation. It is a useful and crude distinction about how to get ready for action in the complicated vs. complex domains of the Cynefin framework. I left a comment there about a sports metaphor that occurred to me when Tony Quinlan was teaching us about the differences between predictive anticipation (used in the complicated domain) and anticipatory awareness (used in the complex domain).
In fact this has been the theme of several conversations today. Complicated problems require Tim’s planning idea: technical skills and expertise, recipes and procedures and models of forecasting and backcasting using reliable data and information. Complex problems require what Dave Snowden has named an artisian approach which is characterized by anticipatory awareness, theory and practice (praxis) and methods of what they call “side casting” which is simply treating the problem obliquely and not head on.
When I was listening to Tony teach this last month, I thought that this distinction can be crudely illustrated with the difference between playing golf and playing football (proper football, mind. The kind where you actually use your feet.) In golf there is a defined objective and reasonably knowable context, where you can measure the distance to the hole, know your own ability with golf clubs, take weather conditions into account and plan a strategic line of attack that will get you there in the fewest strokes possible.
In football it’s completly different. The goal is the goal, or more precisely to score more goals than your opponent, but getting there requires you to have all kinds of awareness. More often than not, your best strategy might be to play the ball backwards. It may be wise to move the ball to the goal in AS MANY passes as possible, in a terribly inefficient way because doing so denies your opponent time on the ball. And the context for action is constantly changing and impossible to fully understand. And the context also adjusts as you begin to get entrained in patterns. If you stick to a long ball game, the defending team can adjust, predict your next move and foil the strategy. You have to evolve or be owned.
This is, I believe, what drives many Americans crazy about world football. There is rarely a direct path to goal and teams can go for whole games simply holding on to the ball and then make one or two key finishing moves. Some call that boring, and it is, if you are in a culture that is about achieving the goal as quickly as possible and moving on. And God knows we are in a culture that loves exactly that.
You plan golf holes by pre-selecting the clubs you will use in each shot and making small adjustments as you go. In football you prepare by doing drills that improve your anticipatory awareness, help you operate in space and become more and more physically fit, so that you have more physical options. You become resilient. Yes you can scout an opponent and plan a strategy and a tactic, but football is won on the pitch and not in the strategy room. Golf is very often won in the strategy room, as long as your execution is masterful.
It’s a crude distinction and one has to be mindful all the time of downright folly of “this vs, that”, but sometimes these kinds of distinctions are useful to illustrate a point.
How’s this for a conference centre?
Last week, we hosted a group of 35 emerging and legacy leaders in the human services sector on Bowen Island to kick off our sixth Leadership 2020 cohort. Hosting the group on Bowen Island is a powerful way to begin and end this ten month program, and there is tremendous value offered by hosting it on Bowen Island.
We are a small island with a working village and we have evolved an inventive way of hosting gatherings. We call it “Village as a Venue” a name coined by my friend Tim Merry to describe the way he hosts gatherings in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. This is a way to reimagine the local economy of small villages who can compete in unorthodox ways with larger venues in nearby cities for conference and meeting business.
On Bowen Island, our village as a venue model starts with one of the retreat centres on island We use the Bowen Island Lodge mostly for our work (and sometimes we host at Rivendell and Xenia as well). The Lodge is ideal because it is set up to host groups (as opposed to acting like a hotel), it is right on the water, and is only a five minute walk from the ferry dock and the village, meaning that people can actually arrive using public transit from anywhere in Vancouver. It is located in a neighbourhood so we keep a careful eye on our noise levels at night, but if people want to socialize in a rowdy way, there are pubs nearby. The Lodge is also perfect in that it is not a high end retreat facility, and it provides an incredibly affordable and accessible venue to accommodate and host people. It has shared rooms and shared washrooms, but the beds are comfortable and when we are there we have the whole space to work in. Overflow registrants are housed at the Lodge at the Old Dorm and other local B&Bs.
The Bowen Island Lodge is a dry rental, meaning that they don’t have their own catering staff. This means that we get to hire local friends to provide us with food. Usually we have our events catered by The Snug which is a little cafe that has always punched above it’s weight in terms of quality. Over the years, both The Snug and the Sam Trethewy, the manager at the lodge have come to appreciate to people we bring to Bowen, who are often social workers and others on the front lines of human services. They treat them well, with good food and sensitive hosting which makes for a superior experience for people.
Spreading the joy further, we always schedule a night out at Rustique, where our friend Thierry Morbach cooks us up a rural French feast. We book the whole restaurant for this, and it becomes a raucous and memorable dinner. On other nights we will head up to the pub for drinks (this past week a group of 15 or so invaded on a Tuesday night, which is no small boost to Glen’s business on a January night). On the Thursday night we usually have a celebration at the Lodge which necessitates folks walking up to the Beer and Wine Store for supplies.
During the day, we give people a couple of hours at lunch to be hosted on the island. Many folks end up going to the village to walk around, buy chocolate and meet folks. They get to see our village for what it is, a friendly working commercial centre. It is not set up to attract tourist dollars, and my friend Edward Wachtman and his partner Sheree Johnson has just completed a study that shows that tourists are looking for something other than that tourist experiences that are sold in many other small towns on the coast. What they find on Bowen is authentic community. They notice the way we look after each other, the way people talk and discuss issues. They often head out for early morning walks or runs on the nearby trails and stop in at The Snug and get to see a community as it is. I hear story after story of these encounters and we often talk about the friendliness of the village and what it says about leadership and community. What happens on Bowen becomes a living teaching for how it is possible to live and work together, and visitors SEE that.
And finally, we use the island itself to host. Bowen is a beautiful place and to get there you need to cross three miles of water. this is an almost archetypal journey, and it marks a thresh hold to a different experience. When you arrive you are received in Snug Cove, and when you leave again, it is as if you are birthed back out into the world. While on the island, we often take people out on the land, to experience the serene calm of the place and to spend time in reflection about their lives. There are so few places in the modern world, especially in the social services sector, where people can just slow down and reflect and pause, surrounded by forest and water and ravens and deer. It becomes transformative, which is the point. Edward’s survey revealed that this is a primary reason why people come to Bowen Island.
We are in a loose conversation with friends in Mahone Bay and in Ballyvaughn, Co. Clare in Ireland about this concept. In Ballyvaughn a group called The Burren Call has set up to host gatherings at the Burren College of Art and on the land around it as well. This pattern is repeating and it takes these places of beauty and transformative potential and leverages what we already have to provide experiences for vistors that also benefit us locals, both financially (and especially in the off-season) as well as psychologically. There is nothing nquite like having your place seen through the eyes of visitors and reflected back.
For Bowen that reflection is that we have a special place, a beautiful natural setting, a friendly and welcoming community and an authentic working village. Locals are always curious about what our visitors are up to and Piers at The Snug or Paul Ricketts at the Beer and Wine Store are always curious and, its fair to say, appreciative of the folks who are “in that workshop with Chris and Caitlin.”
Village as a Venue holds a lot of promise for villages like ours. Having run more than 30 events on Bowen like this, I think we have hit a stride in bringing people over for 3, 4 and 5 days. It is the unique and quirky local character of our community and the beauty of the land and seas that makes this possible. These are strong assets and contribute to the visitor experience of renewal, restoration and serenity.
Not so much hair anymore
Yesterday I had my first haircut in 24 years.
Since 1990 I have kept my hair in a braid that was probably 18 inches long, for all kinds of reasons. Yesterday, for all kinds of reasons, it was time for that braid to come off.
It’s been a bit of a conversation on my facebook page and folks here on Bowen Island are starting to get a look at my new head. News travels fast in small communities.
And commonly I am asked, does it feel lighter? And surprisingly, the answer is no.
Because when you chop off your hair that you have grown for 24 years, you do a lot of work before hand, and I would say close to three years of work went into this decision. It involved me asking myself some fundamental questions about who I am and where I am and what matters to me and how I choose to present my identity in the world. It was not an easy decision, and it took me all that time to think about it and work with it from many different angles.
But I didn’t engage in that work so that I could chop off my hair. I engaged in it because that is what we do as middle aged men in this culture. In your mid forties (I am 46) you have enough distance from both your past and projected future to think about what’s up. Questions of identity and meaning, both personal and professional present themselves. If you have a good practice and good and supportive friends, crossing this thresh hold is made easier. It has largely been easy so far, with no major crises other than some occasional dark and sad times.
So the truth is that much has already been chopped away in my life over the last three years, but nearly none of it has resulted in a change to my outward appearance. Cutting my hair yesterday was not the act that shed a lot of stuff, it was an act born of a new lightness. A little tender, but stable enough that it felt right to cut my hair.
Someone asked me why I chose yesterday to do this. My reply was that, because January 27, 2015 was the day I was ready to do it.
Shortly you will see another shift born of this lightness. My website is being totally redesigned as well. Same great resources, same old blog. Fancy new wrapper. Coming soon.
Just off a call with a potential client today and we were scoping out some of the work that we might do together, with a small organization facing unprecedented change. They are in a place of finally realizing that they are not in control of what is happening to them. They are completely typical in this respect.
I am constantly struck by the fact that we have so few skills, frameworks and so little language for dealing with complexity. Clients all the time approach me looking for certainty, answers and clear outcomes. It’s as if they are searching for the one person who will promise them the relief they are looking for. And no one can. Because mostly what they are FEELING is their emotional reponse to the reality of a complex world. And no amount of rational and linear planning will address that feeling. in fact quite the opposite. Sitting down and deciding on a vision, goals, objectives and plan just defers the pain, because it fools you into thinking you are in control but it sets up a false ideal against which your progress will always be measured to be short.
Confronting complexity is hard. It is not merely that we need better tools to think about it. We need better tools to emotionally deal with it. it is overwhelming, infuriating, confusing, and frightening. And almost every organization I work with that fails to address it well fails because they don’t attend to the fear. They build fears into their processes, or they build processes to avoid confronting what they are afraid of: usually that we don’t know what’s going and we don’t know what to do.
My potential client asked me if I could say what outcomes would come from working with me. In brief they are this:
- We will build the capacity to understand and work with the problems you are facing in context by confronting and changing the view we take around complexity
- We will work strategically with the content of the project, and build participatory processes together that will change the way we do the work of addressing complex problems
- We will build resilient containers for the work that will allow us to confront our fears and limiting beliefs about the work and the change we are in, and that will provide a solid strategic framework for our project.
- We will arrive at a set of strategic decisions about the present moment and be prepared to make strategic decisions about the future.
That’s it. Sometimes those outcomes are incredibly concrete, sometimes it is more about building capacity, but it is always about acting strategically, and that sometimes means learning a new language and a new set of skills. I find that it’s the learning part with which people are most impatient. They seems to want to be able to accelerate the outcomes they want without having to change their approach. But, if you found yourself teleported to rural Bangladesh and you now had to make a living as a rice farmer, do you think your current language and skill set would be applicable, if only you applied yourself harder?
There are projects that fit the ordered domain of work, in which project management and strategic planning leads to predictable outcomes. And there is work for which “learning” is both the outcome and the new organizational structure and leadership practice. It is very important not to confuse the two contexts. And it is surprising just how much we are willing to turn a blind eye to complexity (as both a friend and a foe) in favour of a stable and knowable future, no matter how impossible that idea is.
We have an Art of Hosting event coming up in February 23-26 on Bowen Island. This is my home based offering, which I have been doing for nearly ten years with friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Caitlin Frost, and lately with our new colleague Amanda Fenton. All of these folks are incredible facilitators and teachers and great humans.
1 2