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Working across the political divide in the USA

May 18, 2016 By Collaboration

One of the things I see as a Canadian working in the USA in these times is that politics takes a second seat to actually working on problems at the local and community level.  

My experience in the past few years has been working with diverse groups of people people on issues such as disability inclusion, the future of churches, anti-violence, social justice, immigrant and refugee services, health promotion, public education alternatives, fisheries policy engagement, and palliative care.  Some of these groups have been made of of folks with shared politics, but many have included people from across the spectrum. I have been working with groups of people that are diving in together on some important shared work for their communities. The divisiveness that everyone associates with American civic dialogue is usually highly muted when there is actual work to do.  I find that on the ground, our work has not been hampered or even really affected by the political divisions that are appearing in the public conversation.  At the least there is some smoke and heat, but then we just get down to work.

This is interesting to me because it suggests that while people might hold a firm ideology about what direction the country SHOULD be going in, there is very little impact of that ideology in the grounded work of day to day problem solving.  We run into the ideology when work we are doing begins to require political support, and the elected officials, who are more and more guardians of a mindset rather than stewards of possibility, apply their lens to support or stop things.  I have witnessed many times people frustrated by their own elected officials, from their own parties who stop good work on the basis of ideology. And yet these same people, outside of their own projects, demand a kind of ideological test of integrity for anyone wanting to run for office.

So this strikes me that the divide is not left/right in the US so much as it is ideological/practical.  Americans are at heart very practical people. If you have a decent project and a compelling need, Americans will roll their sleeves up and get to work on it with very little ideological bickering.  (This is in stark contrast to some work I have done in Europe, where ideology often needs to be negotiated before getting down to brass tacks.)

The cost of the divide is that good work at the community level often gets blocked at the policy and governance level.  

The antidote therefore I think to the “divide” such as it is, is to work obliquely to the problem by inviting people into shared work together where they can see that actual problems and real humans are more complex than the projections everyone throws up against their “enemies.”  

I think addressing the “divide” question head on actually results in the divide become more and more real and more and more debilitating.  I’m not saying that you should ignore it, but I am suggesting that people’s passion and attention are better used solving actual problems, and when they sit down and work together, it is remarkable to me how unified Americans can still actually be.

Some good reads

May 16, 2016 By Complexity, Links, Philanthropy One Comment

I’m in a period of recovering from travel and work, over what has been a very busy spring.  This weekend I just took right off and did some reading, cleaning and planning for a major kitchen renovation we will be doing this spring.

Reading-wise, it has been a luxury to sit on my front porch and spend hours in a book. My choice this week has been Kim Stanley’ Robinson’s “Aurora” which is a story about a human voyage to colonize a planet 11 light years away. It is an amazing book about problems solving and ontology and should be on every reading list for those who are trying to understand the kinds of philosophy, thinking skills and patterns that make it possible to live with complexity. It’s also a lovely meditation on the difference between technical and adaptive problem solving and leadership.  Yes, this is a relaxing piece of fiction for me! I’m lucky to enjoy my work!

On other notes, several interesting links and articles have come my way through different sources this week.  Here are a few of note:

So, you don’t think you directly benefit from nonprofits? / Nonprofit With Balls . On why you actually do.

Some Corals Survive Environmental Assault: Scientists Want to Know Why – Plexus Institute. An interesting summary of some of the ways that corals are beginning to demonstrate resilience in the face of massive environmental changes to their habitat. If you’v read Aurora, you’ll appreciate why this article in particular interests me.

Creative Leadership Workshop | Johnnie Moore . A pitch for a cool looking course from my friends Johnny Moore and Viv McWaters in Cambridge this summer.

A Modern-Day Viking Voyage | Hakai Magazine . A few years ago I was staying in Montreal with a Manx friend and learned about this form of governance. My maternal great grandmother’s family is Manx so I’ve always had a passing interest in the little country in the Irish Sea. But the viking connection and the form of council used to govern the country is fascinating.

Complexity Labs . A very interesting new site on complexity, featuring a lot of learning resources.

Saving the planet from governments and markets | Henry Mintzberg. This is the quote that you never expect to see from a business school professor, unless it’s Henry Minstzberg: ”

“It is not plans from some elite “top” that will begin the world over again, but actions on the ground. We are the feet that will have to walk all the talk, connected to heads that will have to think for ourselves. We shall have to confront the perpetrators of climate change—and that includes ourselves—not with violent resistance or passive resistance, but with clever resistance. Some years ago, the angry customers of a Texas telephone company paid 1 extra cent on their telephone bills. This tied the company in knots. It got the message.

Beyond resistance will have to come the replacement of destructive practices by more constructive ones, as has been happening with wind and solar energy. There will be more of this when we “human resources” pursue our resourcefulness as human beings. Imagine, for example, an economy based on growth in qualities instead of quantities, of better instead of more—in education, health care, and nutrition.”

 

The Secret History of Bioluminescence | Hakai Magazine : Hakai Magazine is one of my favourites, because it’s funded locally but covers global ocean issues. And because I live on an island in the global ocean, that matters.  This article is a beautiful meditation on the natural and social history of bioluminecense, one of the many incredibly beautiful things that happens in the ocean here.

Exploring future possibilities by mapping “dispositionalities”

April 25, 2016 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Complexity, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, Learning, Philanthropy, Uncategorized, World Cafe 5 Comments

It’s good to have Dave Snowden back from his treks in the Himalayas. He’s been a big influence on my thinking and practice over the past few years and his near daily blog posts are always rich, irreverent and practical. He is in the process of creating an important body of theory and practice that is useful even if the language and the concepts are sometimes a lot of work to grasp. The payoff from wrestling with his ideas is rich.

Today he’s discussing “dispositionality” which simply means that making change in a system is much easier when you have a sense of what the system is pre-disposed to do (and what it is NOT pre-disposed to do…)

Back in the summer Caitlin and I led a learning lab for the board and staff members of various community foundations from around British Columbia.  The five principles that Dave articulated today were very much embedded in our work and they are becoming very much the basis for any change and planning work I do.  Here’s how we made it work, pen and paper style.

1. Map the current state of the system, including its dominant flows, eddy points and whirlpools.

We began with a World Cafe design based on small stories of change. It is always good to ask people about actual decisions or stories that they remember to ground their experience in discovery. If you run a cafe on “What are the big sources of change in our sector?” you get a data set that is divorced from reality, meaning that it is subject to being gamed by the participants. I can just insert the things I want to see in there.  But if I am asked to tell a story about a particular decision I had to made, the data set is richer and we have a good chance to see emerging patterns.

And so our Cafe ran like that: “Tell a story of a time when you knew things needed to change?”

Each person told a story and the other three at the table listened and wrote down what they heard was the impetus for change, with one data point on a post-it note.  We did several rounds of story telling.  At the end of the round, we asked people to give the post-its to the story teller, and we gave the story tellers time to rank each post it note on a scale of 1-3. A one meant that the impetus for change was just known to me (a weak signal),  two meant that a few other people know about this impetus, and a three meant that this change trigger was known by everybody.

We then had the group cluster all the post-its to find major categories, and we sorted post it notes within the categories to produce a map that was rendered by our graphic recorder, Corrina Keeling. You can see that above.

2. Identify the energy gradient associated with existing dominant patterns and what adjacent possible states to any undesirable pattern present themselves.

The resulting map shows the major areas for change making, specific “acupuncture points” and the “energy gradients associated with the dominant patterns.”  Practically what this means is that items marked in yellow were very weak signals and could be candidates for a change initiative that would appear out of left field for the dominant system.  Not a bad thing to do, but it requires a lot of resources and political capital to initiate.  The red items were things that EVERYBODY was talking about, which meant that the space for innovation was quite closed down.  There are a lot of experts, large consulting firms, influential funding pots and politically committed people tackling change at this level because it is perceived to be an influential place to play.  As a result it is generally a zone that is not failure tolerant and so these items are not good candidates for a probe or prototyping approach.

But the orange items were in a kind of Goldilocks zone: there are a few people who know that you can make change here, so you have allies, but the field is not cluttered with competing experts trying to assert their ideological solutions.

The whole map allows you to make choices.

3. Engage in safe-to-fail experiments in parallel either to change the energy gradient or to nudge (or shift) a dominant pattern to a more desirable state ideally through action rather than platitude.

This is of course the best approach to making change within complex systems.  We took time to develop prototypes that were intended to tell us something about the system. A bonus would be that we might might create ideas that would turn into interesting new initiatives, but the primary function of running prototypes is to probe the system to tell us something about what is possible.  Making tentative conclusions from action inspires people to try more, on a path that is a little more blazed.  Just creating platitudes such as “Let’s build networks for knowledge transfer” doesn’t do enough to help change makers poke around and try things that are likely to work.

Each participant in the group created one or two prototypes which they rolled out, seeking to make a bit of change and learn about what helped or hindered change making in a relatively conservative sector of civil society.

4. Monitor the impact in real time and take multiple small actions to reinforce the good and disrupt the bad.

We kept the group together over a few months, having them check in over webinars to share the progress on their prototypes. We deliberately created a space where things were allowed to fail or radically change and we harvested learning all the way along. Where things were working, prototypes evolved in that direction, and we had a little funding to help accelerate them. By simply starting, participants discovered oblique strategies and in some cases entirely new ways to address their basic desire for changing some element of their environment.  Without engaging in a deliberate yet loosely held action-based project, it is very difficult to see the opportunities that lie in the blind spots.

This learning was summarized in a report, but the bigger harvest was the capacity that each participant built to take steps to sense, design and implement change initiatives with a better informed complexity approach.

5. At all costs avoid any announcement of a change initiative or idealistic outcome based targets

I think this goes without saying. Change making in the complex space is essentially learning on overdrive. When we are truly stuck and yet we have a sense that “this might just work” we need good support to explore that instinct.  Being deliberate about it helps.  But announcing that “this is what we are doing and here are the targets we have to meet” will collapse people’s inherent creativity down to narrowing the focus of their work on achieve the pre-determined outcomes.  That is a perfect strategy for destroying the capacity to engage with complexity, and it can result in a myopic approach to change that guarantees “black swan events” and other nasty surprises.

Making a rough and ready pattern language as a creativity tool

April 20, 2016 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, World Cafe One Comment

Just finished out first day of work with Navajo Area Health Promotion practitioners and 30 community wellness workers, Elders and healers from across the Navajo Nation.  We are blending an Art of Hosting workshop with content and process from  some recent research in neuroscience, epigenetics, and adverse childhood experiences and with wellness and leadership models from our Navajo colleagues with whom we have a ten year relationship.

One of the pieces of work we are doing is supporting these folks in launching or accelerating some community based projects using the social networks they have in place here.  This will involve us spending time in Open Space tomorrow and on Friday running a ProAction Cafe in which 6-8 projects will be able to to be developed. As a way of grounding these projects in patterns that are useful for this context we spent this afternoon generating a Navajo pattern language for resiliency.  We did this with a two round World Cafe in which we asked for stories of supporting resiliency and stories of leadership challenges.  This is a kind both/and appreciative inquiry.  At the conclusion of the Cafe, I asked people to reflect on one teaching or piece of advice that would be useful based on the discussions.  I invited them to write a word or a phrase on one side of an index card and write some explication on the back.

The attached collection of 27 or so patterns include both expected patterns such as “Presence” and “Listening.”  They also include some Navajo principles like “Ádáhodí?zin” meaning ‘Letting our children go, to learn and discover who they are.”

On Friday we will use these principles to help design projects.  I’ll hand a few out to each project proponent and ask them to take a few minutes to brainstorm how to incorporate these pieces of ground tested advice in their project design.

Asking for help

April 18, 2016 By Collaboration, Featured, Leadership, Learning One Comment

I’m in New Mexico this week where we will be back together with our colleagues from the Navajo Nation, working together to keep finding collaborative ways to address health and wellness and community resilience in the Navajo Nation.  Doing this is an ongoing skill and practice.  There are no answers, only different situations that require us to keep working together.

A key skill in being able to address issues you don’t know anything about is to stop and ask for help. My friend Tenneson Woolf, with whom I spent the last weekend in Salt Lake City, sometimes tells a useful story about this. He once asked his then  four year old son Isaac what advice he give if someone found themselves not knowing what to do next.  Isaac said: “Sit down. Think. Ask for help.” Which, if you have ever worked on a building site, you will know is perfect advice.

I value people that can do that. I think the ability to ask for help is significantly devalued in our society, where status and competence hinge on having the right answer. We all probably have stories about times we pursued the “right answer” well past the point of its usefulness, because the vulnerability of not knowing was a bigger risk that screwing something up.

And yet, we are faced with problems as leaders and decision makers to which we have no answers. And we are often faced with a public or employees or colleagues who hold us to account, unfairly I think, for not having the right answers.

Two years ago during a local election on Bowen Island I worked with a candidate in the local election to create a forum on facebook where the only questions asked would be unanswerable ones, and where the candidates had to work together to understand and address these questions.  It provided a safe space for candidates to say “I don’t know” and to go out and share links and find resources.  Many of the candidates that were most active in that forum ended up getting elected and I like to think that their ability to work well with others was one of the reasons why they received the trust of voters.

This sounds good, but last week there was an incident that showed how allowing this kind of public conversation is still and uphill battle.  In the USA Presidential primary campaigns, Donald Trump was asked a question about what he would called the west bank of the Jordan River.  Is it Israel? Palestine? Occupied Territories? Colonized Land?  The question is fraught and of course if a guy like Trump can weasel out of answering it, he will probably find a way. Perhaps he did when he turned to one of his advisors and said “Jason, how would you respond to that?”

Now you might argue that he was dodging the question, but what was most illuminating was the vitriol and backlash that came to Donald Trump criticizing his inability to have an answer.  There was a lot “gotcha” kinds of comments on social media, implying that Trump must be a fool if he doesn’t know the answer to the question. A New York Times blog captured a muted version of some of the general tenor of criticism this way:

The moment evoked a similar reach-for-an-aide episode, when, in an interview with reporters in September 2003, the retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate, struggled to answer questions about whether he would have supported the congressional authorization for the Iraq invasion that year.

“Mary, help!” Mr. Clark called out to his press secretary as they rode in his campaign plane. “Come back and listen to this.”

Mr. Trump did not make such an overt plea. But he struggled to answer a basic question about a tumultuous issue.

Of course it is not at all a basic question and not just a “tumultuous issue.” It is a loaded question about one of the defining international issues of our time, an issue that in fact suffers terribly from simple and reductionist perspectives.  Taking time to stop, think and ask for help is a pretty good strategy.

I’m no fan of Donald Trump and this is not about the way he handled the question. It is about how quickly his critics rose to attack him for not having an answer. It is a call to citizens to hold our public officials and decision makers not to a high level of expertise, but to a higher level of collaborative instinct.  I don’t want Donald Trump to be President, primarily because he is a dishonest, racist know-it-all who generally takes pride in taking his own advice.  But at the same token I urge us all to be responsible for creating the conditions in which candidates can show that when they don’t know answers, asking for help is a good strategy.   This is the most important decision making skill for facing  the complexity of our present and immediate future.