I was working with a couple of clients recently who were trying to design powerful questions for invitations to their strategic conversations. Both organizations are dealing with complex situations and specifically with complex changes that were overtaking their ability to respond. Here are some of the questions that cam up:
- How can we be more effective in accomplishing our purpose?
- How can we create more engagement to address our outcomes?
- What can we do to innovate regardless of our structure?
- Help us create new ideas for executive alignment around our plan to address the change we are now seeing?
Can you see what is wrong with these questions, especially as they relate to addressing complexity?
The answer is that each of these questions contains a proposed solution to the problem, buried as assumptions in the question itself. In these questions the answers to addressing complexity are assumed to be: sticking to purpose, creating more engagement, innovating except structurally, aligning executives around our plan. In other contexts these may well be powerful questions: they are questions which invite execution once strategic decisions have been taken. But in addressing complex questions, they narrow the focus too much and embed assumptions that some may actually think are the cause of their problems in the first place
The problem is that my clients were stuck arguing over the questions themselves because they couldn’t agree on solutions. As a result they found themselves going around and around in circles.
The right question for all four of these situations is something like “What is going on?” or “How can we address the changes that are happening to us?”
You need to back up to ask that question first, before arriving at any preferred solutions. It is very important in discerning and making sense of your context that you are able to let go of your natural inclination to want to DO something, in favour of first understanding what we have in front of us. Seeing the situation correctly goes a long way to be able to make good strategic choices about what to do next. From there, planning, aligning, purpose and structure might be useful responses, but you don’t know that until you’ve made sense of where you are.
Two weeks ago in our Leadership 2020 program I experimented with using a signification framework to harvest a World Cafe. We are beginning another cohort this week and so I had a chance to further refine the process and gather much more information.
We began the evening the same way, with a World Cafe aimed at exploring the shared context for the work that these folks are in. Our cohort is made up of about 2/3rds staff from community social services agencies and 1/3 staff from the Ministry of Children and Family Development. This time I used prepared post it notes for the sense making exercise, which you can see here:
Our process went like this:
- At Cafe tables of five for 20 minutes, discuss the question “What is a story of the future you are anticipating for this sector?”
- Second round, new tables, same question, 20 minutes
- About ten minutes of hearing some random insights from the group, and checking to see how those resonate.
- 2 minutes of silent reflection on the question of ‘What do you need to learn here that will help us all move forward?”
- Each participants took a pink and blue post it note. On the blue post it they wrote what they needed to learn that would be immediately applicable and on the red ones, learning that is needed to prepare for the future.
- Participants filled out the post-its and then were instructed on how to signify the data on a triangle framework that helped them signify whether what they needed to learn would help them “in their personal life,” “do their jobs” and/or “make change.”
- Participants also indicated on the post-its whether the worked for the Ministry or worked for a community organization.
At the conclusion of the exercise we had a tremendous amount of information to draw from. Our immediate use was to take a small group and use affinity grouping to identify the themes that the whole has around their learning and curiosity. We have used these themes to structure a collective story harvest exercise this morning.
But there is some much more richness that can come from this model. Here are some of the ways people are playing with the date:
- Removing all the pink post-its to see what the immediate learning needs are and vice versa.
- Looking at and comparing the learning needs between the two sectors to see where the overlaps and differences are
- examining the clusters at the extremes to see what ot tells us about personal needs, and professional needs.
- Uncovering a theory of change by looking at the post its clustered around the “Making change” point and also seeing if these theories of change are different between the community and the government.
And of course because the data has been signified on each post it, we can recreate the framework easily. The next level for me will be using this data to create a Cynefin framework using the four-points contextualization exercise. Probably won’t happen in this cohort.
Big learning is the rich amount of data that proceeds from collecting finely-grained objects, allowing for disintermediated sense-making, and seeing all these multiple ways in which signified data can be used to address complex challenges obliquely, which allows you to get out of the pattern entrainment that blinds you to the weak signals and emergent patterns that are needed to develop emergent practice. This pen and paper version is powerful on its own. You can imagine how working with SenseMaker across multiple signification frameworks can produce patterns and results that are many magnitudes richer.
Just off a call with a potential client today and we were scoping out some of the work that we might do together, with a small organization facing unprecedented change. They are in a place of finally realizing that they are not in control of what is happening to them. They are completely typical in this respect.
I am constantly struck by the fact that we have so few skills, frameworks and so little language for dealing with complexity. Clients all the time approach me looking for certainty, answers and clear outcomes. It’s as if they are searching for the one person who will promise them the relief they are looking for. And no one can. Because mostly what they are FEELING is their emotional reponse to the reality of a complex world. And no amount of rational and linear planning will address that feeling. in fact quite the opposite. Sitting down and deciding on a vision, goals, objectives and plan just defers the pain, because it fools you into thinking you are in control but it sets up a false ideal against which your progress will always be measured to be short.
Confronting complexity is hard. It is not merely that we need better tools to think about it. We need better tools to emotionally deal with it. it is overwhelming, infuriating, confusing, and frightening. And almost every organization I work with that fails to address it well fails because they don’t attend to the fear. They build fears into their processes, or they build processes to avoid confronting what they are afraid of: usually that we don’t know what’s going and we don’t know what to do.
My potential client asked me if I could say what outcomes would come from working with me. In brief they are this:
- We will build the capacity to understand and work with the problems you are facing in context by confronting and changing the view we take around complexity
- We will work strategically with the content of the project, and build participatory processes together that will change the way we do the work of addressing complex problems
- We will build resilient containers for the work that will allow us to confront our fears and limiting beliefs about the work and the change we are in, and that will provide a solid strategic framework for our project.
- We will arrive at a set of strategic decisions about the present moment and be prepared to make strategic decisions about the future.
That’s it. Sometimes those outcomes are incredibly concrete, sometimes it is more about building capacity, but it is always about acting strategically, and that sometimes means learning a new language and a new set of skills. I find that it’s the learning part with which people are most impatient. They seems to want to be able to accelerate the outcomes they want without having to change their approach. But, if you found yourself teleported to rural Bangladesh and you now had to make a living as a rice farmer, do you think your current language and skill set would be applicable, if only you applied yourself harder?
There are projects that fit the ordered domain of work, in which project management and strategic planning leads to predictable outcomes. And there is work for which “learning” is both the outcome and the new organizational structure and leadership practice. It is very important not to confuse the two contexts. And it is surprising just how much we are willing to turn a blind eye to complexity (as both a friend and a foe) in favour of a stable and knowable future, no matter how impossible that idea is.
We have an Art of Hosting event coming up in February 23-26 on Bowen Island. This is my home based offering, which I have been doing for nearly ten years with friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Caitlin Frost, and lately with our new colleague Amanda Fenton. All of these folks are incredible facilitators and teachers and great humans.
Hmmm…maybe I should have let the group do this…
When I popped off to London last week to take a deep dive into Cognitive Edge’s work with complexity, one of the questions I held was about working with evaluation in the complex domain.
The context for this question stems from a couple of realities. First, evaluation of social programs, social innovation and other interventions in the human services is a huge industry and it holds great sway. And it is dominated by a world view of linear rationalism that says that we can learn something by determining whether or not you achieved the goals that you set out to achieve. Second, evaluation is an incredibly privileged part of many projects and initiatives and itself becomes a strange attractor for project planning and funding approval. In order for funders to show others that their funding is making a difference, they need a “merit and worth” evaluation of their funds. The only way to do that is to gauge progress against expected results. And no non-profit in its right mind will say “we failed to achieve the goals we set out to address” even though everyone knows that “creating safe communities” for example is an aspiration out of the control of any social institution and is subject to global economic trends as much as it is subject to discrete interventions undertaken by specific projects. The fact that folks working in human services are working in a complex domain means that we can all engage in a conspiracy of false causality in order to keep the money flowing (an observation Van Jones inspired in me a while ago.) Lots of folks are making change, because they know intuitively how to do this, but they way we learn about that change is so tied to an inappropriate knowledge system, that I’m not convinced we have much of an idea what works and what doesn’t. And I’m not talking about articulating “best practices.”
The evaluation methods that are used are great in the complicated domain, where causes and effects are easy to determine and where understanding critical pathways to solutions can have a positive influence on process. in other words, where you have replicable results, linear, summative evaluation works great. Where you have a system that is complex, where there are many dynamics working at many different scales to produce the problems you are facing, an entirely different way of knowing is needed. As Dave Snowden says, there is an intimate connection between ontology, epistemology and phenomenology. In plain terms, the kind of system we are in is connected to the ways of knowing about it and the ways of interpreting that knowledge.
I’m going to make this overly simplistic: If you are working with a machine, or a mechanistic process, that unfolds along a linear trajectory, than mechanistic knowledge (problems solving) and interpretive stratgies are fantastic. For complex systems, we need knowledge that is produced FROM the system and interpreted within the system. Evaluation that is done by people “outside” of the system and that reports finding filtered through “expert” or “disinterested” lenses is not useful for a system to understand itself.
Going into the Cynefin course I was interested to learn about how developmental evaluation fit into the complex domain. What I learned was the term “disintermediated sensemaking” which is actually the radical shift I was looking for. Here is an example of what it looks like in leadership practice.
Most evaluation uses processes employing a specialized evaluator undertaking the work. The problem with this is that it places a person between the data and experience and the use of the knowledge. And it also increases the time between an experience and the meaning making of that experience, which can be a fatal lag with strategy in emergent systems. The answer to this problem is to let people in the system have direct experience of the data, and make sense of it themselves.
There are many many ways to do this, depending on what you are doing. For example:
- When clustering ideas, have the group do it. When only a few people come forward, let them start and then break them up and let others continue. Avoid premature convergence.
- When people are creating data, let them tag what it means, for example, in the decision making process we used last weekend, participants tagged their thoughts with numbers, and tagged their numbers with thoughts, which meant that they ordered their own data.
- Produce knowledge at a scale you can do something about. A system needs to be able to produce knowledge at a scale that is usable, and only the system can determine this scale. I see many strategic plans for organizations that state things like “In order to create safe communities for children we must create a system of safe and nurturing foster homes.” The job of creating safe foster homes falls into the scope of the plan, but tying that to any bigger dynamics gets us into the problem of trying to focus our work on making an impact we have no ability to influence.
- Be really clear about the data you want people to produce and have a strategy for how they will make sense of it. World Cafe processes for example, often produce scads of data on table cloths at the centre of the table, but there is often so little context for this information that it is hard to make use of. My practice these days is to invite people to use the table cloths as scratch pads, and to collect important data on post it notes or forms that the group can work with. AND to do that in a way that allows people to be tagging and coding the data themselves, so that we don’t have to have someone else figure out what they meant.
- Have leaders and teams pour over the raw data and the signification frameworks that people have used and translate it into strategy.
These just begin to scratch the surface of this inquiry in practice. Over the next little while I’m going to be giving this approach a lot of thought and try it out in practice as often as I can, and where the context warrants it.
If you would like to try an exercise to see why this matters try this. the next time you are facilitating a brainstorm session, have the group record dozens of insights on post its and place them randomly on a wall. Take a break and look over the post its. Without touching the post its, start categorizing them and record your categorization scheme. Then invite the group to have a go at it. Make sure everyone gets a chance to participate. Compare your two categorization schemes and discuss the differences. Discuss what might happen if the group were to follow the strategy implicit in your scheme vs. the strategy implicit in their scheme.