My daughter Aine is a musician. She is a singer and also a songwriter and she loves collaborating. She has a Soundcloud channel where you can hear some of her stuff accompanied by herself on guitar. And while she is pretty good on guitar, it’s really cool to hear what happens when she works with a collaborator, in this case her friend Zach Brannon, a local shredder from here on Bowen Island. They’ve been working on an album together and have just reeased an acoustic version of a new song called “Not Afraid to Cry.”
It’s pretty good.
This afternoon I’m coming home after a morning running a short process for a church in Victoria, BC. The brief was pretty straightforward: help us decide between four possible scenarios about our future. Lucky for me, it gave me an instant application for some of the stuff I was learning in London last week.
The scenarios themselves were designed through a series of meetings with people over a number of months and were intended to capture the church’s profile for its future, as a way of advertising themselves for new staff. What was smart about this exercise was the fact that the scenarios were left in very draft form so there was no way they could be confused for a “vision” of the future. It is quite common in the church world for people to engage in “visioning exercises” to deal with the complex problems that they face, but such visions are doomed evermore to failure as the bigger organization is beginning to enter into a period of massive transformation and churches are suffering from all kinds of influences over which they have no control.
Visioning therefore is not as useful as selecting a lens through which the organization can make some decisions.
Each scenario contained some possible activities and challenges that the church would be facing, and the committee overseeing the work was charged with refining these down to a report that would, to use my own terms, be a collection of heuristics for the way the organization would act as it addressed future challenges.
Our process was very informed by some thinking I have been doing with Dave Snowden’s “Simple rules for dealing with complexity.” Notably principles about avoiding premature convergence, distributing cognition and disrupting pattern entrainment. Furthermore, the follow up work will be informed by the heuristic of “disintermediation” meaning that the team working on the project will all be working with the raw data. There is no consultants report here. The meaning making is still very much located with the participants.
So here was our process.
- At small tables of four, participants were given 5 minutes to read over the scenarios silently.
- We then entered a period of three 15 minute small group conversations on the topic of “what do you think about these scenarios?” Cafe style, each conversation happened with three different groups of people. I was surprised how much introduction was going on as people met new folks. The question was deliberately chosen not to be too deep or powerful because with a simple question, the participants will provide their own depth and power. When you have a powerful need, you don’t need to contrive anything more powerful than what people are already up for.
- Following the cafe conversations, a round of silent reflection in which people were given the following direction. “Express your preference for each of the scenarios on a scale of 1-7. Seven means “Let’s do it” and one means “No Way.” For each scenario write your preference on your post it and write a short sentence about the one concrete thing that would make your vote one point higher.” So there is lots in this little exercise. First it’s a way of registering all of the objections to the scenarios without personalizing them. Secondly it gets at concrete things that the team can do to improve scenarios and third it harvest preferences and not simple yes/no decisions which are not appropriate for this kind of work.
- At each table someone gathered all the posts its of the same colour and by colour folks came to the front and placed them on the scale. Doing it this way meant that no one was sure whose preference was going where and it also meant that people couldn’t revise their post its once they saw how the preferences were being expressed.
The whole thing took about 75 minutes.
The result of this sense making was the chart you see above. Two hundred pieces of finely grained information ordered by the people themselves. The project team now has at least three things they can do with this material.
- They can recreate the scale, as each post it is colour and preference coded. That way they have a rough idea of the scenario with the greatest support, and they can show anyone who wants to see metrics where we stand on the proposals.
- They can cluster post its for each scenario according to “work that will make it better” which means they don’t have to pay attention to the scale. The scale is completely subjective, but each of these post-its contains one piece of concrete information to make the scenario better, so in some ways the numbers don’t really matter. They can cluster these ideas by each scenario AND they can re-cluster them by each topic to give an idea of overall issues that are happening within the organization.
- If we wanted to go a step further, we could use these post it notes to do a number of Cognitive Edge exercises including a Cynefin contextualization (which would tell us which things were Obvious, Complicated and Complex (and maybe Chaotic) and we could also do some archetype extraction which might be very useful indeed for constructing the final report, which would stand as an invitation to thier new personal and an invitation to the congregation.
Back from London now from a four day deep dive into complexity theory and Cynefin practice with Dave Snowden and Tony Quinlan from Cognitive Edge. It was a packed full four days with many many many bits and pieces of philosophy, natural science, organizational theory and a few exercises thrown in. It was presented in a straight up lecture format, eight hours a day with one or two exercises and some short periods of conversation. The best reflection periods were the three to four hours afterwards with classmates engaged in what my new Welsh friend Sion Charles and I called “Celtic reflection” which obviously involves pints, craic and towards the end of the evening, a night cap of whisky (and I do owe you a round of malt Sion!). Oh, and really terrific chats about what we had learned and how it can be applied.
At least I was ready for it, having had several friends tell me that the pedagogy is all about “download from the front, try a few things at your tables.” When you know this is what you are going to get, you just go in prepared. It’s not how I teach, but then I wasn’t there to see an imitation of myself. I was there to hear the latest thinking from Dave (especially around the Cynefin sub domains, Cynefin dynamics and the other bits and pieces of theory he’s chasing down) and to hear practitioner stories and experience some of the methods, which Tony showered down on us on days one and four. I was alos curious to explore how Cynefin might better inform my thinking about developmental evaluation. I think now I have a good idea of Cognitive Edge’s approach with clients, and some of the heuristics and principles for applying Cynefin and designing exercises that help us work in the complex domain. And I have a few new lines of inquiry and practice around developmental evaluation that might make their way into some new teaching material, and perhaps a new offering.
I am not new to this framework at all, and it has been a staple of my work with clients over the past few years. I find that it helps to present a strong and clear sense of why you need to do things differently when you are faced with complexity. It helps us understand the point of dialogic approaches to problem-addressing, and in deeper applications, it helps us to adopt better strategic practices for working with emergent and evolutionary situations. I have even worked with SenseMaker(TM) on a project in the United States and learned quickly how people with traditional social science research mindsets hit the wall with gathering data for collective sense-making rather than expert analysis.
As a reference point I though I would gather together a few of my pieces on Cynefin, including videos of me teaching the framework, illustrated with stories from my own practice. So here is a recap of what I know about the framework so far, and it will be interesting to see how that changes as the future unfolds.
Video of me teaching
Webinar recording
Blog posts
A composite of missing and murdered indigenous women
Every year on this day I mark the remembrance of the 14 women that were killed at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989. It was one of the most transformational experiences of my life, to be alive and aware on that day.
Since then, the long gun registry that was put in place as a result of that murder has been disbanded and we aren’t making much progress on dealing with violence against women in this country
And so from now on my December 6 posts will include both the 14 roses and images that capture something of the scale of loss of more than 1200 missing and murdered indigenous women, some of them friends, many of them close relations of friends.
This afternoon Caitlin and I were in a delightful conversation with new colleagues that ranged across the landscape of the work we are all trying to do in the world, supporting leadership, supporting quality and addressing the ineffable aspects of human experience that pervade our work on leadership.
And in the conversation we found our way to the idea of friendship.
In our Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics offering we are exploring friendship as a key strategic pillar to transforming the nature of engagement, organizational life and community development. And today as we were discussing friendship as the highest form of accountability, I was reminded of my work 15 years ago in the BC Treaty Process.
Back then I was employed as a public consultation advisor for the federal government. It was my job to talk to non-indigenous people about the treaties that governments were negotiating with First Nations. Most of the non-indigenous stakeholders I had to meet with were hostile to the treaty process, to put it mildly. Some of them were just downright furious, driven by the white hot heat of completely irrational racism, uncertainty and disruption to their lives. At their worst, hey shouted at us, threatened us with violence and tried to have us removed from our jobs. these were not folks that I would ordinarily try to meet with, let alone befriend. But I found I had no choice. No amount of rational discourse about rights, law, policy and economics could persuade these people that treaty making was a good idea.
And the truth is that I didn’t have to have them think it was a good idea. But I did need them to understand what was happening and I did need to offer them many many ways to engage with what we were doing, even if they were 100% opposed to it. It was my professional obligation as a person responsible for the mundane daily workings of a democratic government, and it was my moral obligation as a human being who saw a group of people in danger of being dismissed by their government for their opinions, no matter how odious those opinions were to the government of the day, or how opposed those opinions were to government policy.
I realized that the only way we were going to create lasting agreements that gave First Nations the best possible future was to treat the noin-indigenous stakeholders as human beings. And that meant that I quickly abandoned my professional guise of talking to them as experts in their field and instead I adopted a stance of friendship. Instead of asking them questions I was interested in answering, I asked questions about what they were interested in: logging, ranching, fishing, making a living, what they did in their spare time, what was important to their families.
In due course I found myself hanging out with these folks. Having dinner, going on long drives through the British Columbia wilderness to visit clear cuts and mining sites. Joining them on board their fish boats and in their pastures, hanging out in local hockey arenas watching junior teams from Quesnel and Prince George and Powell River ply their trades. I ended up playing music with people, drinking a lot of beer and whisky and meeting up with folks when they were in Vancouver. It became social. We developed friendships.
And in the end I believe it helped to transform the atmosphere in BC from an angry and bitterly divisive climate to one where folks were at least tacitly okay with treaty making, if not outright supportive. My seven colleagues and I and our counterparts in the provincial government worked hard at developing these relationships.
Friendship is not something that we set out to create. It is an emergent property of good relationships and good collaboration. When you do a few things together that end up being – well – fun, then you begin to experience friendship. And in the end when times turn a bit hard, that friendship will see you through, helping to sustain the work you have done.
It is not perfect by any means, but those three years spent in the late 1990s befriending folks all over BC proved to me that no one is above friendship, and that the results of dedeicated and personal relationship building are essential to a humane society.
What passes for “engagement” these days is so professionalized and sterile that I think it threatens the very fabric of the kind of society that we live in. Society by definition is an enterprise that connects everyone together. “Public engagement” that does not also include the capacity for personal connection is a psychotic and sociopathic response to the need to care and be cared for. And when we get into hard places – think Ferguson, Burnaby Mountain and even Ukraine – it is friendships, tenuous and strained, but nevertheless intact, that offer us the way out.