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Why Obama matters

March 19, 2008 By Flow, Invitation, Leadership 6 Comments

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Photo by jurvetson

Being a Canadian means watching US politics like most people watch major sporting events. You admire the players, ooo and ahh at the spectacular moves they make, but ultimately you know you will never have a chance to play. It’s all entertainment.

Except that it isn’t. The President of the United States is often styled as the “leader of the free world” which is true in some ways, although the leader the rest of us in the “free world” might choose for ourselves is very often not the ones Americans choose for us. So, in case any of my many American friends and colleagues are curious about the opinions of those of us who have to live with whoever you elect, here is my most concise redux on Barak Obama.

Obama matters because he is inviting us to see the world differently. He is bucking the trend of western society by offering hope instead of hate, by challenging us to be better rather than to be afraid, but encouraging responsibility rather than dependancy. And if we needed any further evidence of that, along comes his masterful speech of yesterday in which he addressed the real life racism and divisiveness that plagues American society and rests just beneath the surface.
The world right now is about segmenting everything – market share, demographics, political polarities. In the corporate world, we are subjected to team building exercises that using various typologies to label what kind of thing everybody else is. We are not seeing each other clearly. Prejudice, be it economic, racial, demographic or whatever, fuels everything. Companies and campaigns reach out to different groups in different ways to get them to buy into the same thing, leaving people divided, bitter and suspicious about the “other” even as we all end up drinking Coke.

If Obama is doing anything – inviting anything – he is inviting us to rise above the ways in which we have been segmented, and the ways in which we segment ourselves and find partners, collaborators, creative sources of tension and cohesion by USING the diversity that exists everywhere. Diversity and multiculturalism in the America I know currently holds that country back. It is exploited for gain, whether political, social or economic. Obama is calling for it instead to take the country forward, and as a citizen of America’s closest neighbour, I applaud that call and hope it resonates in November.

I think Obama is raising the stakes with the magnificent speech. If his campaign dies because his message is destroyed by the very things he is calling out, it will represent a Pyrrhic victory for the the winner, be it Clinton or McCain. Whoever defeats that message of hope and cohesion will have inherited a country which glimpsed the light of possibility and lowered the shades against it.

So I invite my American friends to think about the kind of leadership that is being offered in this moment and imagine what it will mean not only for your country but for the rest of the world as well. If I was voting, I’d throw it to Obama. To the extent that any of these three candidates can, he has the best chance to really help things shift. That shift, as I see it, can only be a good thing for America and the rest of the world.

One secret to good facilitation design: work with maps not tools

March 17, 2008 By Facilitation

Design

A design for a recent workshop, based on Theory U.

Three years ago, I spent some time reflecting on the principles that underly my work in an effort to describe authentic facilitation practice. Lately I have revisited this question because I have been asked to design and deliver several facilitation training workshops and I have found myself wanting to go deeply into the core of facilitation practice, rather than focusing on tips and tricks. As a result, I have been reflecting a lot on what is at the core of my practice: how to I design and then sit in the flow of a group’s process in a way that can be useful to the group’s needs?

Thanks in large part to some prodding by my friend Ashley Cooper, who asked me something about how I do what I do, I have been thinking about this question in detail over the past couple of weeks and I’m reaching the following conclusion: I work primarily with maps, and secondarily with tools.

When I first began facilitating groups, I started collecting exercises and methodologies and practices that help groups do certain things. This “toolkit” seemed to be essential to my practice. In truth, these tools are important, but it didn’t take long to realize that tools themselves are not all that is required to do good group work. I learned that you have to have a few other things as well, including a basic underlying theory and some maps that seem to help us transect the terroitory between where we are and where we want to go.

My basic underlying approach to facilitation is rooted in these assumptions:

  • The wisdom we need right now is in the room.
  • Facilitation is not a directive practice, but rather a practice of creating and holding a container for the group’s wisdom to emerge.
  • To get to truly creative solutions we must invite chaos and order to play together.
  • Leadership is about inviting passion and responsibility into the process and supporting connections for action.
  • The process serves the group and needs to be carefully planned but should remain totally invisible.
  • Co-creation is the best way to get to wise action
  • Process and content are equally important.
  • For a system or a group to function well it needs to be learning from its experience.
  • Groups are living systems, not mechanical systems.
  • All good work done in the world depends on good collaboration. Good work therefore is about both quality content and quality process.

I also have an assumption that any group I am working with is trying to get to “better” whether that means a better set of services, a better product, better relations, better work. This is an important assumption, and it is the basis for my utilizing an appreciative worldview in general, a worldview that seeks to build on what works rather than remain stuck in problem solving.

Once you have a handle on your worldview, it becomes very useful to have a map to understand the journey that any group is on. Over the years I have worked with many maps, using them for different reasons. Some of my current favourites include:

  • Sam Kaner et. al.’s Diamond of Participation for groups that are moving from a question to emergent insight or learning.
  • Otto Scarmer’s Theory U for working with groups who are trying to lead from the emerging future.
  • The emergence of the inviting organization, Michael Herman’s take on Ken Wilber’s integral quadrants to chart how action emerges from purpose using invitation as a carrier.
  • Appreciative process design through the four-D cycle of apprecitive inquiry.
  • Chaordic stepping stones, a take on the chaordic lenses for designing organizational structures that are as light as they have to be to work in a complex world.
  • The five breaths of large scale change, a map that helps us find our way through large scale projects.

Most of these I have integrated in a “mother map” which links together several of these maps, even as I continue to use them each more specifically for designing precise meetings.

Now, why are these maps important? The maps I use are generative. They invite us to consider evolving in specific ways and they create design conversations that bring some real clarity to the tools we might employ in the service of the group’s needs. When I design with a group using this map, it helps us choose exercises that allow us to be in th emoment while having our sights set on where we are going. If we need to change our work mid-stream, having a map helps us to figure out where to move in the moment. When I facilitated an appreciative summit in 2005 on Aboriginal youth suicide in Prince Rupert, we were confronted with a problem of keynote presentations and introductions going way over time. We needed to change mid-stream on the day to allow the voices of the youth to be heard. Knowing that our process was intended to take us on an appreciative journey towards designing and destiny helped us to pare away what was not essential to the gathering, so that the youth could offer their dreams in a way that made sense. Without that map, we would have been lost, probably tied to our process and tools and unable to let go in the moment.

Having a map allows you to be incredibly flexible because you can abandon a path that is no longer serving your journey and pick a new one. If conditions change, you can adapt. This doesn’t mean you don’t need to know your tools – being a skillful practitioner of group process is an art that becomes a life time learning practice. It does mean however, that you can become more skillful in selecting which of those tools to use and when. It makes you a better improviser, and more importantly, of much higher service to the group.

So while I would continue to advocate for aspiring facilitators to learn tools and processes and practice them as much as they can, I want to also send a strong recommendation to any and all that you also explore some of the maps that are out there that describe specific kinds of journeys that groups take. Use these as your basis for designing group work and the tools will fall into place. The more tools you know and are capable of using, the more flexible you will be.

For those of you that use maps, which ones are valuable for you these days?

Presencing in a small strategic planning workshop

March 15, 2008 By Appreciative Inquiry, Facilitation, First Nations, Flow One Comment

I ran a workshop last week for the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association of British Columbia. The taske was to to spend a day and a half reviewing the high level vision and direction of the organization and to come up with some streams forward to present to the organization’s membership at the AGM. In thinking about the design of the gathering, I chose to consciously use Theory U to help structure a series of exercises. I proposed a five phase process for the day:

IAHLA Presencing process design
  • Sensing needs and purposes and reviewing the world outside
  • Appreciative Evaluation of the organization’s path over the past five years
  • Presencing the vision for the near future
  • Crystallizing the intention of the emerging visions
  • Harvesting forward to present to the AGM

For the first three phases I created a series of reflective exercises, based in part by some of the exercises Otto Scharmer has been using in his work. The list of questions went as follows:

Sensing

  • What are the voices tapping us on the shoulder? What are the forces competing for our attention?
  • What are our sources of frustration in the world?
  • What are our sources of joy?
  • Think of the diversity of IAHLA membership. What are they facing that is coming through you in this moment?

Each person journalled individually on these questions and then we went around the circle of six and harvested what was in the field. At the end of the exercise we had a harvest that represented an environmental scan that was presenced through the minds and hearts of each Board member.

Appreciative evaluation

  • Thinking of IAHLA’s journey as a canoe trip on a river, five years ago, when IAHLA began, what caused the founders to put the canoe in the river?
  • What landmarks have we passed on our journey over the past five years?
  • Who has been there with us, in the boat or on the shore?
  • If we imagine the journey extending through where we are now, what does our past and present say about where we are going?
  • If you received news this afternoon that IAHLA’s funding were to disappear what would your initial reaction be? What would you fear for first?

In the same fashion I led the group through these questions, with each person journalling individually. The result was a harvest, drawn on the frame of a canoe journey that recorded the founder’s vision as we have inherited it, the work that we have done, a sense of where we are going, a list of people and organizations that have been instrumental in getting us there and, most interestingly from the last question, a list of what is essential. Many of the board members remarked that this exercise was powerful in that it connected the current board to the legacy of the founders and those that came before, who started the entire movement of offering this type of learning centre in Aboriginal communities. This exercise resulted in a powerful sense of stewardship for the movement.

Presencing vision

For this exercise we used a framework document that describes the work of IAHLA and captures the overall intention and purpose of the organization. Participants were invited to spend nearly an hour on a learning journey with this document, using the following questions as a guide:

  • Inspired by the framework, what are three shifts in the world you can see IAHLA spearheading?
  • For each of these shifts, imagine being in that changed future and note down how we might have arrived there.
  • Find and circle parts of the framework that will have contributed to that shift.

The harvest from this was a fantastic conversation in which we identified eight areas of shift and some of the major strategic landmarks that would appear on those paths. In the subsequent conversation as we crystallized the intent of these directions we talked extensively about some of the priority areas, the work that might have the most impact, and that which the organization’s members might be most excited in.

We will capture these results in a large graphic harvest for the AGM, at which time we will be inviting the membership in a cafe to reflect on these eight shifts and contribute another level of collective strategic thinking to the work.

Art of Hosting in Tampa Bay Flordia, May 7-10

March 13, 2008 By Art of Hosting

For those of you curious about exploring the Art of Hosting, our emerging pattern language on leadership and facilitation in living systems, you are invited to join me, Tenneson Woolf, Peggy Holman Sharon Joy Klietsch and Francis Baldwin in Tampa Bay, Florida from May 7-10.   We’ll spend three plus days learning about chaos and order, living systems, the role of group work with Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry and World Cafe, and many other aspects of working with human relations to do good things in challenging and complex times.   This will be our first Art of Hosting in the southeastern United States.
You can download the invitation here: AoH Tampa Bay Invitation.pdf.

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March 9, 2008 By Uncategorized

I have succumbed to Twitter.