Coming back from Campbell River tonight. I was working with a group of Churches who are currently trying to understand their future. The United Church of Canada is in a period of massive restructuring due to all kinds of causes. We are very clear, retrospectively, what these causes are…everything from demographics shifts to the overall decline of Christendom. Most folks I have been working with over the past few years actually welcome these dynamics and realities, even though it means that the Church has plunged into a period of deep uncertainty. For people that are both spiritual AND religious in the liberal tradition of the United Church, this is actually a good thing and an opportunity for practice. In short, an uncertain world is where a spiritual practice comes into it’s own.
And of course from a complexity perspective, this is where the tools of complexity thinking comes into play as well, although that is largely a harder sell. In the United Church, leadership has emerged over several generations firmly in the managerial model. In fact some Churches I have been in don’t even start their board meetings with a prayer, claiming that “this is business.” Which is shocking, actually.
Ironically complexity thinking tools are perhaps in short supply but the scriptural texts contain a fantastic set of heuristics (experienced based principles) with which to understand and live with complexity and change. The New Testament, for example contains letters from various apostles to the new Churches scattered throughout the Levant, Turkey, Greece and Rome. These letters contain guideline after guideline for living together in community true to the message of Jesus, which was essentially that love is the number one heuristic. Practice that and your community thrives. Forget that and things founder. More stories lie that, less like this.
At any rate, despite it being right there, in plain view, I find myself over and over having to reintroduce and reinforce the need to think differently when confronted with the complexity of what is happening to the Church. And make no mistake, this is a dress rehearsal for the inevitable collapse of many social institutions that we take for granted, so doing this work has been illuminating. I have been trying to simplify the Cynefin framework’s distinctions between ordered and unordered systems and, inspired a bit by Dave Snowden’s recent post, have started teaching from a list that invites new strategies for planning. In it I contrast complexity strategy with strategy used to solve technical problems and knowable situations. In Cynefin terms, this is complex vs. complicated.
Here are a few of the contrasts that I talked about today, complexity first and its correlation second:
The basic difference between complex problems and complicated problems comes down to whether a problem is solvable or not. Is there a stable outcome? Is there an end state? Can research and expertise provide us with answers? Is the situation predictable? Answer yes to these questions and you have a complicated problem. Answer no and you have a complex one. It comes down to the difference between building a community and building a building.
- Complex problems aren’t solvable; complicated ones are.
- Address complexity by sense patterns and weak signals and amplifying them; solve complicated problems by analysing data and problem solving.
- In complexity, pay attention to what works and ask why?; for complicated problems, keep your eyes on the prize and study gaps (ask why not?)
- Be informed in your strategy by stories, myths and parables that translate across many contexts; for complicated problems, adopt “best” practices and rule based solutions.
- Employ collaborative leadership to address complexity; employ experts to solve complicated problems.
- In complexity, truth is found in stories; for complicated situations, truth is found in facts.
- Complex planning requires anticipatory awareness, meaning that you have to constantly scan for meaning through the system; a vision won;t help you. In complicated situations a vision is useful and the end state can be achieved with logical, well planned steps.
- In complexity, the future is already here, but it is quiet and hidden in the noise of the culture. in complicated systems the future is not here and it is well understood what it will take to get there from here.
- In complex systems, the solutions will come at you obliquely, out of the blue and in surprising ways, so you need to cultivate processes that allow that to happen. In complicated systems, problems are tackled head on from a position of knowing as much as you can about how to proceed and then choosing the best course of action.
The point of this list is to make a crude distinction in order to have people understand that they need new strategy tools to address the situation they are in. In the Church, leaders have had to confront a situation of such fraught complexity in many generations, and so the leadership that has brought them to this point no longer answers all the questions. This can be a profoundly traumatic experience for people who are used to being able to understand what is going on and influence the situation. So there is lots in this work, and a gentle, clear and fierce introduction to complexity thinking is really needed now. That’s what I’m after here.
Interesting paper released that demands that policy makers adopt a complexity approach to policy making around environmental decision making. These principles are useful, and can you see how they would apply to social systems too?
- Create policies that have legs: When developing a policy to manage fisheries or allocate water distribution in agriculture, for example, make it flexible so it can continue to effectively manage the resource, no matter how it changes in the future.
- Support policies that encourage ecosystem diversity: Opt for plans that encourage organism and habitat diversity, because casting a larger net will let the policy be most responsive no matter what happens in the future.
- Invest more in monitoring: Don’t just collect data, but actively analyze the data, drawing connections to the past and assessing what that relationship might mean for the future. Do more field-based monitoring and less predictive modeling.
- Expect a future that’s different from the past: Move away from a “better safe than sorry” approach to management and assume the ecosystem will shift in unexpected ways. Design policies that can adapt based on how the ecosystem changes.
Good, basic complexity principles applied to the management of resources, an area often dominated by predictive, target-based planning approaches.
via Embrace unknowns, opt for flexibility in environmental policies | UW Today.
Thinking of friends and especially the Elders and survivors in Alert Bay today as the residential school is torn down. I was in a meeting today where we were discussing ethics and the social contract that Canadians have with one another and here’s the thing: if you are a Canadian, whether born here or recently arrived, you are bound to an ongoing relationship with indigenous peoples. It is impossible for you to own land or to benefit from the taxes paid by those who have exploited resources without being directly connected to the original relationships that founded this country. This country was founded and made possible because of an ongoing relationship with indigenous peoples, which most times only indigenous people remember. And this is not about the past, this is current and real today. Each person living here is a contemporary beneficiary of the treaty relationships or the outright theft of land. Right now, if you are a Canadian, you are benefitting.
But if you forget that, you forget who you are and you have forgotten on what basis the accident of your birth has accorded you privilege.
May this be a day to honour those who have died and to remember and renew the relationship that makes living in this country possible for most of us, while lots of us still struggle to benefit from the original promises of respect, trust, reconciliation and mutual benefit.
Later this spring, Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak will be publishing a new text on Dialogic Organizational Development. It is a book that is a mix of theory and mpractice, written by both academics and practitioners. I contributed a chapter on holding containers.
There are several events happening in the next few months in connection with the launch of what we hope will become the standard text in a new field. This includes a full day pre-session before the Academy of Management conference in Vancouver in August
Here is what Gervase sent along this morning:
Bob Marshak and I are hosting a conference on Dialogic OD in August in Vancouver. Bringing together an international cast of experts who have all contributed to the soon be released Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change(Berrett-Koehler, May 2015), this should be an outstanding day of colleagueship and learning for anyone interested in transformational change in organizations. Conference brochure attached and at: http://www.dialogicod.net/DOD_Conference.pdf
Please pass it on to anyone in your network you think would like to know about it. Note that Ed Schein’s opening address will be by video.
If this is the first you are hearing about Dialogic OD, you can learn more about it and the book at www.dialogicod.net
For consultants, a good short overview is http://www.gervasebushe.ca/practicing.pdf
For managers, a good short overview is http://www.dialogicod.net/ATC.pdf
For academics, a good scholarly over is http://www.gervasebushe.ca/mindset.pdf
We certainly hope you will be able to join us at the Academy of Management in Vancouver this summer. Failing that, keep an eye out for the book this spring.
Regular readers will know that I’ve been thinking a lot about evaluation for many years now. I am not an evaluator, but almost every project I am involved in contains some element of evaluation. Sometimes this evaluation is well done, well thought through and effective and other times (the worst of times, more often than you think) the well thought through evaluation plan crumbles in the face of the HIPPO – the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. So how do we really know what is going on?
When I stumbled across Michael Quinn Patton’s work in Developmental Evaluation, a whole bunch of new doors opened up to me. I was able to see the crude boundaries of traditional evaluation methods very clearly and was able to see that most of the work I do in the world – facilitating strategic conversations – was actually a core practice of developmental evaluation. Crudely put, traditional “merit and worth” evaluation methods work well when you have a knowable and ordered system where the actual execution can be evaluated against a set of ideal causes that lead to an ideal state. Did we build the bridge? Does it work according to the specifications of the project? Was it a good use of money? All of that can be evaluated summatively.
In the unordered systems where complexity and emergence is at play, summative evaluation cannot work at all. The problem with complex systems is that you cannot know what set of actions will lead to the result you need to get to, so evaluating efforts against an ideal state is impossible. Well, it’s POSSIBLE, but what happens is that the evaluator brings her judgements to the situation. Complex problems (or more precisely, emergent problems generated from complex systems) cannot be solved, per se. While it is possible to build a bridge, it is not possible to create a violence free society. Violent societies are emergent.
So that’s the back story. Last December I went to London to do a deep dive into how the Cynefin framework and Cognitive Edge’s work in general can inform a more sophisticated practice of developmental evaluation. After a few months of thinking about it and being in conversation with several Cognitive Edge practitioners including Ray MacNeil in Nova Scotia, I think that my problem is that that term “evaluation” can’t actually make the jump to understanding action in complex systems. Ray and I agreed that Quinn Patton’s work on Developmental Evaluation is a great departure point to inviting people to leave behind what they usually think of as evaluation and to enter into the capacities that are needed in complexity. These capacities include addressing problems obliquely rather than head on, making small safe to fail experiments, undertaking action to better understand the system rather than to effect a change, practicing true adaptive leadership which means practicing anticipatory awareness and not predictive planning, working with patterns and sense-making as you go rather than rules and accountabilities, and so on.
Last night a little twitter exchange between myself, Viv McWaters and Dave Snowden based on Dave’s recent post compelled me to explore this a bit further. What grabbed me was especially this line: “The minute we evaluate, assess, judge, interpret or whatever we start to reduce what we scan. The more we can hold open a description the more we scan, the more possibility of seeing novel solutions or interesting features.”
What is needed in this practice is monitoring. You need to monitor the system in all kinds of different ways and monitor yourself, because in a complex system you are part of it. Monitoring is a fine art, and requires us to pay attention to story, patterns, finely grained events and simple numbers that are used to measure things rather than to be targets. Monitoring temperatures helps us to understand climate change, but we don’t use temperatures as targets. Nor should we equate large scale climate change with fine grained indicators like temperature.
Action in complex systems is a never ending art of responding to the changing context. This requires us to be adopting more sophisticated monitoring tools and using individual and distributed cognition to make enough sense of things to move, all the while watching what happens when you do move. It is possible to understand retrospectively what you have done, and that is fine as long as you don’t confuse what you learn by doing that with the urge to turn it into a strategic plan going forward.
What role can “evaluation” have when your learning about the past cannot be applied to the future?
For technical problems in ordered systems, evaluation is of course important and correct. Expert judgement is required to build safe bridges, to fix broken water mains, to do the books, audit banks and get food to those who need it. But in complex systems – economies, families, communities and democracies, I’m beginning to think that we need to stop using the word evaluation and really start adopting new language like monitoring and sense-making.
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