Since October 2011, when I first lay on the floor and listened to Tuesday Ryan-Hart teach at the Art of Social Justice in New York held thirty-five blocks from where Occupy Wall Street was just getting started, I have been intrigued, challenged and enamoured by her work on these issues.
She has been working hard for the past 8 years to articulate a model of power, justice and relations that can deeply inform the Art of Hosting community of practitioners, certainly in the North American context if not elsewhere in the world. Tuesday’s work has made me a better person. She took the challenge of entering into the Art of Hosting word because it was worthy on its own merits as a place full of promise with respect to social justice and she added stuff to make it better. I was gifted with the chance to witness the development of her work since the very moment she encountered our community and I want to speak to it now to name that it has influenced my own ideas about power, relationship, grace and multiplicity.
Here it is in its current form, The Shared Work Model, a gift of one Black woman’s lived experience, thoughtfully condensed and rolled into an offering specifically for our community of practice. It is both a map and plan. But mostly it is a treasure buried in this field.
I have met so many people and voices in our community around the world who aren’t afraid to speak to power in our midst. It seems unfair just to name Tuesday in this, but I want to lift her up specifically for the work she has offered as an invitation to make us all better.
My work has been at the intersection of culture, history and power for nearly thirty years, largely moving in-between indigenous and settler communities in Canada as a facilitator and host of strategic dialogue practice. I have made many more mistakes than most people I know, in this respect. I have stumbled and used my power and privilege badly. I like to say I have had the gift of being scolded by more aunties and grandmas than I can count. And occasionally I have got some things right too.
If I’ve been right it’s because I have listened to people deeply and honestly, I have seen far beyond their initial impressions and I have seen and been seen in my work. I make the right moves when I listen to and remember Tuesday’s teachings, and the teachings of the Elders, youth, kids, mums and community members I get to work with.
So I offer this reflection this morning to remind us that the practice of “calling out” has it’s place, to shake the foundations and remind us of the important truths of difference. And to remind us that we have a unique opportunity this community because we are also gracefully and beautifully “called in” by our friends and mates to notice how the bigger systems of which we are a part guide our own behaviours and patterns and address them.
I’m continuing to refine my understanding of the role and usefulness of principles in evaluation, strategy and complex project design. Last week in Montreal with Bronagh Gallagher, we taught a bit about principles-based evaluation as part of our course on working with complexity. Here are some reflections and an exercise.
First off, it’s important to start with the premise that in working in complexity we are not solving problems, but shifting patterns. Patterns are the emergent results of repeated interactions between actors around attractors and within boundaries. To make change in a complex system therefore, we are looking to shift interactions between people and parts of a system to create a beneficial shift in the emergent patterns.
To do this we have to have a sufficient understanding of the current state of things so that we can see patterns, a sense of need for shifting patterns and an agreed upon preferred and beneficial direction of travel. That is the initial strategic work in any complex change intervention. From there we create activities that help us to probe the system and see what will happen, which way it will go and whether we can do something that will take it in the beneficial direction. We then continue this cycle of planning, action and evaluation.
Strategic work in complexity involves understanding this basic set of premises, and here the Cynefin framework is quite useful for distinguishing between work that is best served by linear predictive planning – where a chain of linked events results in a predictable outcome – and work that is best served by complexity tools including pattern finding, collective sensemaking and collaborative action.
Working with principles is a key part of this, because principles (whether explicit of implicit) are what guide patterns of action and give them the quality of a gravity well, out of which alternative courses of action are very difficult.. Now I fully realize that there is a semantic issue here, around using the term “principles” and that in some of the complexity literature we use, the terms “simple rules” or “heuristics” are also used. Here I am using “principles” specifically to tie this to Michael Quinn Patton’s principles-based evaluation work, which i find helpful in linking the three areas of planning, action, and evaluation. He defines an effectiveness principle as something that exhibits the following criteria:
- Guides directionality
- Is useful and usable
- Provides inspiration for action
- Is developmental in nature and allows for the development of approaches (in other words not a tight constraint that restricts creativity)
- Is evaluable, in that you can know whether you are doing it or not.
These five qualities are what he calls “GUIDE,” an acronym made from the key criteria. Quinn Patton argues that if you create these kinds of principles, you can assess their effectiveness in creating new patterns of behaviour or response to a systemic challenge. That is helpful in strategic complexity work.
To investigate this, we did a small exercise, which I’m refining as we go here. On our first day we did a sensemaking cafe to look at patterns of where people in our workshop felt “stuck” in their work with clients and community organizations. Examples of repeating patterns included confronting aversion to change, use of power to disenfranchise community members, lack of adequate resources, and several others. I asked people to pick one of these patterns and asked them to create a principle using the GUIDE criteria that seems to be at play to keep this pattern in place.
For example, on aversion to change, one such principle might be “Create processes that link people’s performances to maintaining the status quo.” You can see that there are many things that could be generated from such a principle, and that perhaps an emergent outcome of such a principle might be “aversion to change.” This is not a diagnostic exercise. Rather it helped people understand the role that principles have in containing action with attractors and boundaries. In most cases, people were not working with situations where “aversion to change” was a deliberate outcome of their strategic work, and yet there was the pattern nonetheless, clear and obvious even within settings in which innovation or creativity is supposedly prized and encouraged.
Next I invited people to identify a direction of travel away from this particular pattern
using a reflection on values. If aversion to change represents a pattern you negatively value, what is an alternative pattern, and what is the value beneath that? It’s hard to identify values, but these are pretty pithy statements about what matters. One value might be “Curiosity about possibility” and another might be “excitement for change.” From there participants were asked to write a principle that might guide action towards the emergence of that new pattern. One such example might be “Create processes that generate and reward small scale failure.” I even had them take that one statement and reduce it to a simple rule, such as “Reward failure, doubt
The next step is to put these principles in play within an organization to create tests to see how effective the principle is. If you discover that it works, refine it and do more. If it doesn’t, or if it creates another poor pattern such as cynicism, stop using it and start over.
Most of my work lies with the organizations of what Henry Mintzberg calls “The plural sector.” These are the organizations tasked with picking up the work that governments and corporations refuse to do. As we have sunk further and further into the 40 year experiment of neo-liberalism, governments have abandoned the space of care for communities and citizens especially if that care clashes with an ideology of reducing taxes to favour the wealthy and the largely global corporate sector. Likewise on the corporate side a singular focus on shareholder return and the pursuit of capital friendly jurisdictions with low tax rates and low wages means that corporations can reap economic benefits without any responsibility for the social effects of their policy influence.
Here’s how Mintzberg puts it, in a passionate defence of the role of these organizations:
“We can hardly expect governments—even ostensibly democratic ones—that have been coopted by their private sectors or overwhelmed by the forces of corporate globalization to take the lead in initiating radical renewal. A sequence of failed conferences on global warming has made this quite clear.
Nor can private sector businesses be expected to take the lead. Why should they promote changes to redress an imbalance that favors so many of them, especially the most powerful? And although corporate social responsibility is certainly to be welcomed, anyone who believes that it will compensate for corporate social irresponsibility is not reading today’s newspapers.”
What constantly surprises me in this work is how much accountability is placed on the plural sector for achieving outcomes around issues that they have so little role in creating.
While corporations are able to simply externalize effects of their operations that are relevant to their KPIs and balance sheets, governments are increasingly held to account by citizens for failing to make significant change with ever reduced resources and regulatory influence. Strident anti-government governments are elected and they immediately set out to dismantle what is left of the government’s role, peddling platitudes such as “taxation is theft” and associated libertarian nonsense. They generally, and irresponsibly, claim that the market is the better mechanism to solve social problems even though the market has been shown to be a psychotic beast hell bent on destroying local communities, families and the climate in pursuit of it’s narrowly focused agenda. In the forty years since Regan, Thatcher and Mulroney went to war against government, the market has failed on nearly every score to create secure economic and environmental futures for all peoples. And it has utterly stripped entire nations of wealth and resources causing their people to flee the ensuing wars, depressions, and environmental destruction. Migrants run headlong into the very countries that displaced them in the first place and meet there a hostile resistance to the newcomers. Xenophobia and racism gets channeled into policy and simply increases the rate of exploitation and wealth concentration.
And yet, the people I know who struggle under the most pressure to prove their worth are the organizations of the plural sector who are subject to onerous and ontologically incorrect evaluation criteria aimed at, presumably, assuring their founders that the rabble are not only responsibly spending money (which is totally understsndsble) but also making a powerful impact on issues which are driven by forces well outside their control.
I’m increasingly understanding the role of a great deal of superficial evaluation in actually restricting the effectiveness of the plural sector so that they may be relegated to harm reduction for capitalism, rather than pursuing the radical reforms to our global economic system that will lead to sustainability. It’s fristrating for so many on the frontlines and it has led for calls for much more unrestricted granting in order to allow organizations to effectively allocate their resources, respond to emerging patterns, and learn from their work.
There are some fabulous people working in the field of evaluation to try to disrupt this dynamic by developing robust methods of complexity informed research in support of what the front line of the plural sector is tasked with. The battle now, especially now that science itself is under attack, is to make these research methods widely understood and effective in not simply evaluating the work of the plural sector but also shunting a light on the clear patterns at play in our economic system.
I’ll be running an online course in the winter with Beehive Productions where we look at evaluation from the perspective of facilitators and leaders of social change. We won’t shy away from this conversation as we look at where evaluation practice has extended beyond the narrow confines of program improvement and into larger social conversation. We will look at history and power and how evaluation is weaponized against radical reform in favour of, at best, sustaining good programs and at worst shutting down effective work.
Its that time of year when we are getting ready to invite people back to Bowen Island for our annual Art of Hosting. Since 2004, folks have travelled from all over the world to come to this gathering. Over four days and three nights, we will be diving in with each to explore powerful tools for participatory leadership, engagement and hosting conversations.
Our team this year consists of myself, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton and Teresa Posakony, four long time Art of Hosting stewards who have extended their practice into other related fields. These are some of my closest colleagues in the work, and people with whom I have done some of most interesting, engaging and complex work in my career. We each bring a deep set of practices and experiences to our work and we all love teaching.
Caitlin is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of The Work of Byron Katie, a practice of self-inquiry that has been used by leaders and participants in our program to develop a strong personal leadership practice for inquiring into limiting beliefs. Being able to show up resrouceful in challenging work is a crucial aspect to participatory leadership, whether you are leading an organization, a community or a single meeting. The Art of Hosting is predicated on the ability of hosts to hold space when we are uncertain of outcomes and dealing with emergence. Caitlin will be leading a half day of work during the workshop to introduce participants to the practice and demonstrate ways of using similar practices collectively, so that groups can increase their capacity for working in complexity.
Amanda is a steward of The Circle Way, which is the core practice behind the Art of Hosting. Understanding how to lead and work in Circle gives hosts and leaders a powerful practice ground for participatory leadership. It is a place where hosts can learn how to practice standing in places of power and leadership and how to lend their attention to holding open the space that is needed for voices and leadership to emerge within a system . Circle practice is not simply about a dialogue method, but is instead a ground for developing the leadership skills needed for participatory work.
Over the past decade, Teresa’s work has combined skillful participatory practice with a curiosity about how to change systems, especially those systems that are responsible for health and education. Using a combination of learnings from research in neurology, epigenetics, adverse childhood experiences and resilience, Teresa has put together a body of work to bring trauma informed practice to leadership, participatory gatherings and systems change.
This year we are also being joined by a colleague from Japan, Yurie Makihara who uses dialogue and participatory leadership in her work with businesses and municipalities in Japan on sustainability issues.
As for me, I get to bring my deep interest in designing process for complex challenges, using hosting for planning, action and evaluation to address tricky strategic work into this work. What I love about teaching is how much more I learn about my own work as I share it with my colleagues and with participants who are bring real life challenges to the program.
It’s not all about us though. It’s also about you, the participants. each Art of Hosting is highly experiential and you are invited not only to bring your own work and curiosities to Bowen, but bring your courage to step up and host with us. We have participants coming from a variety of sectors including business, education, social services, churches, local and indigenous governments and philanthropy. The conversations and connections that are formed on Bowen often last year, between diverse folks from a variety pf places. We invite you to join us as well.