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Dealing with the architecture of fear

August 7, 2012 By Collaboration, Conversation, Learning, Organization, Unschooling, Youth 6 Comments

Just read an article on how the fear of failure is the greatest thing holding back innovation in the business world. One reads these kinds of articles all the time. The essence is that unless we can let go of fear or deal with our deep need to be in control at all times, innovation is stifled.

This is true of course, but I see few articles that talk about how fear of failure in built into the architecture of the organization.

We live in an expert driven culture. Kids raised in schools are taught at an early age that having the answer is everything. Children raise their hands and are given points for the correct answer. Marks and scores are awarded for success – failure gets you remedial help, often crushing dreams and passions at the same time.

In the post-school world, most people are hired in a job interview based on the answers they give. There are millions of words written on how to give a stellar job interview, to land the job of your dreams. It is has to do with giving the right answers.

And so it is no surprise in the organizational world that I see success as the the only way forward and failure as “not an option.” For leaders, embracing failure is almost too risky. Despite the management literature to the contrary, I see very few leaders willing to take the risk that something may fail. Sometimes the failure is wrapped in competence – it’s okay to fail, but not to have losses. In other words, don’t do something I can’t repair.

This is because few of these articles talk about some of the real politiks of organizational life. It’s not that I’m afraid to fail – it’s that I am afraid to lose my job. When there is a scarcity of political capital and credit in an organization, there are multiple games that are played to turn failure into a way to screw the other guy so I don’t lose my job. Blame is deflected, responsibility is assigned elsewhere, and sometimes people will take credit for taking the risk but will lie the failure at the feet of someone else. It’s relatively easy to play on the expert driven culture to advance your own causes at the expense of another’s failings.

The answer to this is for leaders to be engaged in changing the architecture of fear and failure in the organization. It means hiring people into their areas of stretch, not into their areas of core competence. It means embodying risk taking, and creating and maintaining a culture of risk and trust. A single betrayal destroys the fabric of a risk taking team.

I think that means going beyond simply having corporate pep rallies to celebrate failure, or giving incentives for the “best failed idea.” It goes to creating a culture of conversation and collective ownership for successes and failures. It means standing with each other and not advancing your own interests at the expense of something that was tried. It means deeply investigating on an ongoing basis the ways in which we hold each other accountable so that we may work with grace and support, to rush in to help when things go sideways instead of lobbing accusations from the sidelines.

Without changing the architecture of fear, embracing the fear of failure is impossible.

Dealing with disruption

July 26, 2012 By BC, Being, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Emergence, Flow, Improv, Leadership

I was listening to a brilliant interview with the theologian and scholar Walter Bruggeman this morning.  He was talking about “the prophetic imagination” and using the poetry of the Old Testament prophets to make a point about a key capacity that is missing in the world right now: the ability to deal with disruption.

 

SImply, disruption is what happens when the plans we thought we had have suddenly changed.  It could be a major economic collapse – a black swan event – or something so small as your bus left early.  How we respond to disruption is a key capacity for individual resourcefulness, and how we collectively deal with disruption is a key capacity for resilience.
It is interesting, as Bruggeman notes, that our frame for understanding the future is basically consumerist.  We purchase certainty.  It’s as if we invest in the present because it guarantees a given performance of the future.  When we buy something, we expect to receive quality and a guarantee that if it doesn’t work according to plan, we can hold someone else responsible.
That understanding about the way the future is supposed to roll out infects everything we do.  When events overtake our assumptions about the future, we look for someone to blame, someone to be accountable, someone to make it right.  I can find all kinds of ways in which I expect people to OWE me something.  It’s as if our participation in the social contract guarantees that our expectations will be met.
But they never are.  We cannot all live in our ideal worlds.  Diversity and complexity means disruption.
The greatest challenge of our time I think, both individually and collectively, is how to equip ourselves for disruption.  There are many patterns that scale across dimensions of practice, and a few key ones may be:
  • Self-awareness. Knowing your own response to disruption is helpful.  Do you get stressed by unexpected change?  Do you take it in stride?  Does your community shake and shudder with fits and paroxysms or do you just give up?  All of these reactions are common and they are interesting.  And they are not anyone’s fault or anyone else’s responsibility but your own.  Learning to be resourceful with disruption begins by knowing how you deal with it.
  • Stop. When events overtake you it is wise to stop.  The worst thing to do is to continue to pursue the course of action you initiated before the disruption occurred.  As an individual, stopping is easier than doing it as a collective.  It often takes a loud voice to get a group intent on achievement to stop what it is doing, so being prepared to stop means paying attention to the small voices – the ones inside yourself and the ones inside your team.
  • Look for surprise. One of the basic operating principles of Open Space Technology is “Be Prepared to Be Surprised.”  My friend Brian Bainbridge lived this principle, even from within the relative security and certainty of his life as a Catholic priest.  As a result he welcomed surprise with delight.  Looking for and preparing for surprises isn’t just a good self-help trick though.  It’s excellent planning.  And because by definition, you can never know what will surprise you, the best way to prepare for surprise is to train your outlook to work with it rather than against it.  Lots of energy is spent beating back the results of surprise.  We would do better to be able to see it’s utility and work with it.
  • Welcome and engage the stranger. There is a Rumi poem called “The Guest House” I love that has these lines in it:  “This being human is a guest house.  Every morning a new arrival”Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honourably.  He may be clearing you out for some new delight.”  the stranger contains the answer.  When disruption occurs, it is like a door opening through which floods unfamiliarity.  That all comes with strangers and many of those strangers hold the answers to what to do next, but you have to take the time to engage with them.  And never discount the stranger among you, the person you thought you knew that suddenly becomes a different in the midst of a crises.
  • Choose wisely. Meeting the chaos of disruption with the order of stillness helps to create the space for wisdom.  Not having stillness means one gets caught up in the rush and tumble of chaotic disruption and one reacts instead of acting wisely.  Becoming still and then stopping has similar results.  Balancing chaos and order gives us the time and space to make a wise decision.  The opinions of others help here.  If you are alone when your life is disrupted, you might not have the breadth of understanding to make a wise decision.  You may end up travelling in a direction that takes you away from where you need to go.  When you make a choice, choose wisely.
  • Commit. Finally commit fully to your next move.  This is principle that is alive in the field of improvisational theatre.  The scene takes a surprising twist and as an actor you have two choices: hang on to the story you were previously developing or let the new story line change you.  You can tell an improviser that only half commits to the new story.  They become immediately stuck in a space that is too constrained to move.  They are wanting to work with the new but unwilling to abandon the old.  When disruption occurs it is already too late not to be changed by it.  So commit fully to the new world so that you can be a full participant in it.

 

On the water

July 25, 2012 By Uncategorized One Comment

I have been mostly taking off the month of July, staying home, reconnecting with my kids and partner and spending a lot of time alone, reflecting and letting the lessons of the past year sink in.  July is always a time of new practices emerging for me and this summer I have found myself on the water more.

It has taken me 11 years of living on an island (and 18 years living on the coast) to finally make friends with the sea.  I grew up on lakes, canoeing, rowing and swimming in fresh water where there are no currents, no unpredictable waves, no dangerous rips.  I have always loved swimming in the sea and snorkelling, but getting ON the water has been a challenge.

This summer though my mate Geoff Brown came to visit and got me up on a stand up paddle board and now I’m hooked.  I have been out numerous times this summer, paddling the waters around my home island.  Yesterday a friend and I went hard for about three hours, up around the north end of Bowen Island, where the view opens up to Howe Sound and Mount Garibaldi to the north.  Along the way we were tracked and followed by seals, eagles and herons, and even saw a

Today, after a stressful morning of cleaning, ferrying kids around and missed phone calls, I took my canoe out for a paddle around Kilarney Lake, the largest lake on our island.  I was after practice some solo techniques.

What does it take to make real social innovation?

July 19, 2012 By Community, Emergence, Leadership, Philanthropy 2 Comments

Very interesting little article from David Wilcox about the differences between social entrepreneurs and social innovators. Here is how he describes those differences, from a tactical perspective:

 

4 Differences Between Social Entrepreneurs & Social Innovators

Here are four reasons why social entrepreneurs are significantly different than nonprofit social innovators:

1. Two Worlds

Most foundations and many nonprofits came into existence through a significant donor or donation. The people who shepherd the outcomes for those donors must be attentive and accommodating.   Quite simply, donors drive much of the nonprofit world’s activities.

Most social entrepreneurs start with their very personal obsession to improve lives by solving a challenge or inequality, prefer to spend as little time as possible fund raising, and often bring innovations to the table that decades of nonprofit work have not uncovered.

Social enterprises typically begin with a small loan, such as the $46 that funded Professor Yunus and the invention of microfinance. As Yunus points out in every speech he gives, “When I saw a problem, I started a business to solve it.”

2. The Against Position

In branding, claiming the against position means using a competitor’s dominant spend and mindshare to carve out an anti-space–the Un-cola for example.

Social entrepreneurs are quintessential against positioners. At the New York Forum on Africa held in Gabon, Professor Yunus stated it clearly:  “I looked at how traditional banks do business and we did the exact opposite.”

In very practical terms, these stubborn, opinionated entrepreneurs frequently show up after the aid and development models have failed or at least failed to become sustainable. Their arrival on the scene is less a Kumbaya moment and more a “disruptive innovation” one.

3. Core Competencies

Successful nonprofits are either great at fundraising or great at measuring impact. The superstars are good at both. These critical capabilities assemble billions of dollars to accomplish good works and they represent an important innovation source for the world.

Social entrepreneurs fundraise too, but they hate it. Seldom do they surface innovations in fundraising. A primary goal for most social entrepreneurs is to demonstrate that appropriate capacity building enables their innovation model to solve problems profitably and reduce dependence on fundraising altogether.

4. Buying Impact/Measuring Success

Jason Saul of Mission Measurement exhorts funders to stop thinking about giving to charities and to shift to buying impact. As valuable as this change to the donor frame would be, the repercussions would also result in significant reductions in the total charity population.

Funds should flow to the organizations making and reporting measurable progress actually solving key challenges. But impact buying reinforces the prevalent tendency in the nonprofit world to spend significant dollars on measurement. Funding those added “measurement investments” makes solutions more expensive and less sustainable.

Successful social entrepreneurs create business models where measurement is integral to the normal course of solving a challenge. This one innovation actually can make the difference between a profitable and a non-profitable model. Healthpoint Services in the Punjab is the first to couple the delivery of clean water and healthcare. This disruptive innovation touches villagers each day: when they pick up their water they are also exposed to an urban quality healthcare clinic offering services at a much lower cost.

So what does Healthpoint management measure?

Here’s one: At what monthly water subscription price do half the villagers become customers in 90 days? For Healthpoint, measurement is not a separate expense, it is a core business activity.

I do a lot of work in the non-profit, social benefit sector and find that there is a real stifling of innovation there, especially in the traditional services sector.  It’s not that there isn’t an understood need for radical change in how services are delivered, but there are a number of factors weighing against these strategies being created.  Riffing on David’s observations, here are four things that get in the way of social innovation…

1. Funding Ãœber alles

Funding and the attendant accountabilities that come with it determine much of the scope of what can be offered.  Whether it is government funding or private funding, social innovators have to work within highly constrained fiscal environments.  In many cases, they cannot even raise money outside of their operations for fear of losing charitable status.  IN Canada recently, organizations that have been trying to create social innovation in the environmental sector have had their government funding revoked, their charitable status questioned and their operations audited.  In times of scarce resources, leaders are unwilling to jeopardize what little they have to take a risk on new ways of doing things.

2. The For Position.

Most who are working in the traditional and mainstream social services sector are constrained by societal expectation of what services should be.  Some exist in a regulatory environment that makes them little more than non-governmental delivery channels for government services.  In the work I have done over the years in Aboriginal child and family services this has been a huge frustration.  Agencies that want to transform the nature of these services are unable to do so because they get locked into having to deliver services the same way the Ministry for Children and Family development does it.  This is frustrating for families and communities who accuse their own community-based agencies of being little more than Aboriginal faces on non-Aboriginal government services.  Social innovation os hampered by an inability to take an Against position.

3. The wrong Core Competencies

Many mainstream social service agencies have gone to a management model of leadership that values the MBA as the primary qualification.  Increasingly, CEOs of charities are being hired from traditional business schools and they don’t even have the range of experience or innovative approach that social enterprise CEOs have.  This is the result of risk aversion…if we can hire a good manager to be careful with our money, we will survive the funding crises in the sector.  the problem of course is that the work becomes narrowly defined on operational efficiencies and strategies that are about problem solving and fixing rather than taking the long view about the complexity and disruption facing the sector. Relying too much on risk aversion constrains the ability to innovate other than incrementally.  It won’t surprise you that I believe leadership that hosts the margins of the social field for co-creation and emergence is critical to finding and precipitating real social innovation.

4. Becoming a slave to measurements

Alongside the management approach to services and the constraints on funding comes a slavish amount of accountability to targets.  These targets are often chosen because they are easy to measure but they sometimes have little or no relevance to the context.  I like Healthpoint’s metric of asking “At what price do half the villagers become customers in 90 days?”  I also like what is happening in the field of developmental evaluation, which provides a set of tools and resources for working in complexity with safe fail prototyping of new actions.  But in the current climate, with managers and funders demanding easy to see outcomes, their is a hard sell.  A group I have been working with that is trying the impact the social determinants of health finds itself often wanting to know what changes have been happening in quarterly periods.  That is simply not the right way to look at things, but without numbers, funding is held up.  The flip side is that the wrong numbers get the wrong stuff funded, and rarely are the numbers representative of innovation.

Perhaps the biggest reason why social innovation and social entrepreneurship are different is the location of power.  In social innovation power is often vested in the funder and the extend to which the funder is wedded to status quo or simply risk averse is the extend to which social innovation is constrained.  In social entrepreneurship, power rests largely with the entrepreneur and there are many more degrees of freedom to pursue radical innovation.  And it’s your money to lose!.

I think an application of more strategies from David’s list to the shadow list of problems that I’ve seen would accelerate social innovation.  Probably the best way to innovate in the social sector is to steal from social enterprise.  One leader I know makes strong recommendations for her network to watch TED talks as a daily practice, and that simple form of cross pollinating opens minds for sure.

What strategies have you experienced that have acce;erased real, deep and lasting social innovation?

Not knowing and the unnamed

July 16, 2012 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation 4 Comments

A light summer of digital production, but a few things are coming my way that have my attention.  Today, it’s a chunk of an email from my friend Kathy Jourdain who is evolving into one of the premier Art of Hosting bloggers out there.  We were in a group email conversation about safety and comfort and the hidden dynamics of groups, and Kathy’s reflection on the distinction between the unnamed and the unknown was this:

The first is this difference between the unnamed and the not knowing.  The difference is something I feel or sense and am not sure I can articulate.  In hosting work we often sit in the not knowing – not knowing what will happen next, sometimes the not knowing of what is happening in this moment.  In ourselves, as we host ourselves, we know stillness will help bring us through the not knowing into clarity.  In groups, holding the space and consciousness of the not knowing – which often looks like chaos and often is the groan zone – will host the group into the knowing or clarity that emerges. In both these cases, naming things also helps to bring clarity.  There is a subtle difference though in the naming of what’s in or emerging from the not knowing (like when we name the groan zone for a group) than how I am understanding the unnamed although this is a bit more mystifying and maybe even mystical to me.  The naming of things changes our relationship to whatever it is we have named.  I’m just wondering if there is a whole stream of things/stuff/experiences that we can’t name, will always be unnamed and allowing it to be unnamed allows a different experience of it – and maybe that’s what I mean by a spiritual experience.  And maybe mostly, in how I’m thinking about it, it happens in the silent places, the silent experiences.  It happens in connection with the divine or connection to that which is greater than us – the experiences we have that are beyond words, individually and collectively.

I find this distinction immensely helpful.  I seem to have a built in desire to name everything around me, and to label and identify what is happening, but sometimes, as Lao Tzu reminds us, what can be named is not often what is actually happening.

I have been working with many spiritual leaders lately in a variety of Churches around North America.  One of these leaders pointed to this unnamable mystery by referencing a “heresy” he holds about the Eucharist, the ritual sacred meal that evokes the last supper Jesus Christ shared with his friends.  My friend, who is a gourmet chef in addition to being an influential spiritual leader, said that his heresy is that the Eucharist is not about the elements – the bread and the wine – but instead about the unnamable moment that arises between close friends who have just shared a meal together, on the eve of the impending death of one of their closest comrades.  That sense of an electric space between us, of a rich field of love and affection and togetherness is what Jesus was pointing to when he said “do this in remembrance of me.”

Confusing the elements with the mystery is a great way to drain a moment of that ineffable quality that makes the impossible possible.  It is important to learn how to host this distinction and name what needs naming and leave the mystery alone.