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Monthly Archives "December 2015"

Crossing 

December 30, 2015 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized One Comment

  
Early morning crossing for Howe Sound. It’s below freezing, with a strong windchill coming from a Squamish wind. Fresh snow on the mountains, clear sky, dawn coming. Last night we had a little earthquake, 4.8 magnitude. It smacked the house and for a moment I thought it was my teenage son coming up the stairs. 
The year is ending, all is well with that. And although it is in reality an arbitrary boundary – the solstice is a better marker of turning – I nevertheless find myself deepening into reflective mood at this time of year. 
I will put aside this year of theory. It was a year in which I discovered the praxis if complexity both at home on my home island and in my work. It was a rich year of learning and opening and now it is back to a deepened practice in so many ways. 
Happy new year to you all. May the dawn come, shaking you a little and clearing you out with a cold northerly wind. 

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The simplest facilitation tip to build group capacity

December 10, 2015 By Chris Corrigan Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space 5 Comments

Thinking that the facilitator has the answers is one of the biggest problems with the way people are entrained to relate to facilitators.  Because you are guiding a process, many people will feel that you are also an authority on what to do.  They will often stop and ask questions about how things are going to work.

Imagine: you have just done an elegant and energetic Open Space opening and you are ready to hand the process over to the group.  You have slowly and clearly explained the instructions.  You have showed everyone how the process works.  You have restated the theme of the gathering to refocus everyone on the task at hand.  Just as you start to walk out of the circle and let the group take over, a hand goes up “Excuse me, but what if no one comes to my session?”  And then another “Yes and what happens if there are two things going on at the same time and I want to do both ”  And so on…

Here you have a choice.  Answering the questions stops everything.  And truthfully your answer SHOULD be “I don’t know” but you are also trapped in the pattern of “facilitator as expert” and so you try to answer…”well, you could wait a while and see who comes…and you, you can move around between sessions or maybe see if you can get a session moved to another time slot….”

“Yes but what if…”

And on it goes.  And you are not getting to work.  And those that are ready are also not getting to work, which is REALLY frustrating because what you are actually doing is indulging people’s anxieties.  Anytime you answer a question about a hypothetical situation, you are not helping.  You are entraining the group into your perceived expertise instead of letting them discover possibilities on their own.

So there is a better choice and it’s one that I’ve been using for a couple of years now.  In the second before you let people get to work you ask the group a question: “Put your hand up if you have enough clarity from the instruction I just gave to get down to work.”  Many, many hands should go up.  Invite people to keep their hands up, and then utter these magic words.

“If any of you have questions about the process, ask these people.”  And then remove yourself from the situation.

This does two things.  First it immediately makes visible how many people are ready to get going and that shows everyone that any further delay is just getting in the way of work.  And second, it helps people who are confused to see that there are people all around them that can help them out.  And that is the simplest way to make a group’s capacity visible and active.

You will have to brave a little fire from time to time.  Even after doing this recently I had a person say “Can I just ask a question for clarification, though?” to which I replied “no.”  She was shocked.  I let people get to work and then went over to talk to her myself.

“What can I help you with?”

She got a little angry.  “I had a question about notes.”

“Sure what is it?”

“Well I’m not going to ask it now.  I think it was a question that the whole group should have heard.”

You need to help people see that their anxiety and their ego are a potent mix.  It may well have been a great question about taking notes.  It may well have been valuable on some level for everyone to hear.  But almost certainly it would not have been more valuable than the group becoming aware of its own capacity and getting down to work.  And if I couldn’t answer the question one on one, then I was left wondering if it wasn’t just going to be some clever grandstanding.

Getting myself out of the middle of the work is hard not only because my ego gets tickled a little by my own role, but because other people’s egos conspire to keep me in the middle.  Ever since I have used this technique, turning the group’s attention to its own resourcefulness has never failed.

And as a shameless plug, we’ll cover more techniques like this in my Open Space Technology facilitator training June 2-3, 2016 in Vancouver.  I hate adding commercials at the end of a blog post, but click on through if this is something you’d like to learn more about!

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Pattern entrainment is one of our biggest problems

December 8, 2015 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Uncategorized 3 Comments

whirlpoolIn the last year of applying Cynefin theory to my practice I’v e made a few conclusions about things.  One of these is that what Dave Snowdon calls “pattern entrainment” is probably our achilles heel as a species.  Pattern entrainment is the idea that once our brains learn something, it is very difficult to break that knowledge.  And while we may be able to change our knowledge of facts fairly easily – such as admitting a mistake of a factual nature “you’re right, there is no 7:30 ferry after all!” – changing the way we make sense of facts is surprisingly hard.

It’s like water flowing into a whirlpool.  The water coming into to the whirlpool is entrained into the pattern, and finds it impossible to escape.

For example, with the recent spate of massacres around the world, the social sphere has been full of people seeking answers.  And the kind of answers people are seeking are firmly rooted in an entrained set of patterns of how we make sense of and solve many problems in the world: linear causality.

A belief that there is a clear set of steps that solves things like gun violence or war assumes a kind of order that isn’t there.  Dave Snowden points out that our ability as humans to see in retrospect how something came to be leads us to believe that if we just get the steps right going forward, then we can prevent future bad things from happening.  All we need to do is put the right things in order and follow the plan.

This act of “retrospective coherence” fools us into believing that we know what to do, and because decision makers in the complex space of social problems rely on retrospective coherence to understand how we got to where we are, this particular assumption – that problems have a linear causality – has infected discourse, policy making and politics.   In short, research and investigations show the chains of causes and effects.  Policy recommendations often advocate solving problems the same way we make sense of them.  And we can’t.

This is becoming quite dangerous now.  A tendency and romance of simple and well ordered solutions has resulted in Donald Trump getting away with identifying Muslims and Islam as the sole cause of terrorism.  This is an easy sell to people who have been made to feel afraid and convinced that all problems are solved with simple solutions.  It is true that you can solve all problems with a simple solution – just kill everyone – but this is not an option in a humane and sustainable society.  This is, however, the logical end point of a simplified, linear solution being brought to complex problems: it creates psychotic societies.

This is showing up everywhere. I am at the early stages of working with a client who is a service provider.  The funders of her programs are starting to want to to see evidence that her work (and their money) is ‘shifting the needle’ on the large scale social problems she is addressing.  Both the funder and the service providers are suffering at the moment from the idea that a well designed set of interventions will address the root causes of poverty and vulnerability in communities.  This is impossible of course as these are effects that are the emergent properties of, among other things, an economic systems that is designed to create inequality.  The service providers cannot change the system, and everyone is frustrated.

To really eliminate poverty, we need to change the economic system, because it is that of attractors and constraints that gives rise to the transactions and social relationships that create the emergence of poor communities and people.  What the service providers are doing well is effectively addressing the effects of an economic system founded on inequality, and while vulnerability may be increasing, in many local places, service providers are making a real difference in economic security for individuals and families.  It is only when we confuse this local act with systemic change that the problems appear.  We do good work, but in the big picture nothing changes.

For strategy, and especially for non-profits and service organizations trying to bring about a better world, this is an achilles heel.  If you and your funders both evaluate your work on the basis of macro indicators that are the result of a myriad of interacting causes at a myriad of scales, you will be shown to be ineffective.  And yet the myth persists that we can simply choose actions with limited resources, prioritize a set of steps and achieve “a poverty free community.”  The failure to reach this goal is dispiriting to all involved, and it doesn’t have to be.

Non-profits and funders need to address the pattern entrainment that creeps into policy making and program design.  We need to understand the proper role of a linear causality analysis and begin to take a more sophisticated, multi-pronged and complexity based approach to social problems.  Seeking single answers to complex problems reveals much about the pattern entrainment and confirmation biases of people.  It does very little to actually change these dynamics, and as a result, we can find ourselves stuck in a whirlpool, trying more and more things and getting further and further away from the world we’re wanting to create.

 

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Missing these sisters

December 6, 2015 By Chris Corrigan Being

Every year I am reminded that the work is never done.

  • Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
  • Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  • Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
  • Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
  • Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
  • Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
  • Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  • Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
  • Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
  • Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
  • Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

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