Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old.
It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content and the process while also demonstrating what it looks like when we build a system with children at the centre.
With the world increasingly full of people that are acting like babies, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons that actual babies bring to the game. Babies get a bad rap.
The clock doesn’t matter. Rhythm matters. When there are babies in the room, we learn to pay attention to natural rhythms. Babies that are constantly held and cared for are very quiet and happy. The two babies we had in the room with us loved being held by others and they were looked after by their older siblings and other participants in the meeting. This of course is common in Indigenous families and large families. The babies had a blanket in the middle of the room they could roll around on and their every need was looked after. If they needed holding, they were picked up. If they needed as nap they could cuddle up with someone. If they needed feeding, they were fed, if they started getting tired at the end of the day, we closed the meeting down. If they were late in the morning, then we started once everyone was present and settled. Babies do not obey a clock, but they do very well at reminding us of healthy rhythms. Watching Kelly facilitate an hour of reflective practice with a five month old baby curled up in her arms sound asleep was beautiful.
Put the children in the centre not around the edges. We had babies in the middle and we had smaller children who were offered many options for being present including going in and out of the room, being accompanied by different adults and contributing. But there was no child care offered for our meeting. The meeting was child care and the children had a place in it. We all took turns being with the children, and they were never out of sight or out of earshot.
Babies change the conversation. The meeting we were running was not full of conflict or high emotions but it was about tricky issues like cultural safety and non-Indigenous professionals meeting with Indigenous families and so there was some nervousness in the room as we were building the container and the relationships. But babies make excellent talking pieces and excellent centres for a dialogue circle and having them constantly in our space made the conversation about them all the time. Their presence helped ground and simplify the conversation and it ensured that we spent our time well so as not to tire them out.
Babies have something to offer. Find a way to include them. Babies offer lots of things to a meeting, including feedback and insight and a kind of checking of the ego. All of the children in te meeting were included in every conversation sometimes in small groups, sometimes in the larger group. They offered their own answers to the questions we were asking because the questions were simple enough that a five year old could contribute “What do you like about your worker?” is a question everyone can answer and the children will often find ways to add to an adult’s story or tell it in their own voice. Additionally the two smaller children we had in our meeting were both excellent singers and when offered the chance to do so, they shared songs with us to end our meetings or bless the food, which is a common practice in Indigenous meetings on the west coast with adults usually offering songs before eating. There is nothing better than a child who loves singing being invited to share their gift with others in services of a genuine need rather than a cute performance.
Babies will tell you what’s happening in the room. Babies are very sensitive to the energy of a group. I learned this years ago, that they will sometimes express the emotions that are in a room in more subtle ways before the audults become aware. If things get tense they will get squirmy or begin crying from worry. It’s a signal to take it easy and take a little break. The baby is the first one to become unregulated in a setting and usually the first one to become regulated again. Babies don’t carry a lot of stories about what is happening in the room, so I pay close attention to their sounds and movements and it gives me information especially in setting like this one where the primary purpose was building a relational field and sharing and making sense of stories.
The baby reveals the truth of the system. If you are developing a model of care centered on children, watch what is actually happening with the children in the room. They way they are included and respected and lifted up so they contribute tells you a lot about how ready the people are to bring a truly child centered approach to their work. I have seen systems where the babies and the children gave us warning signs in the room that much more work had to be done. This weekend though was very special.
Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time:
“While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.”
That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over the years. Like many, when I started out as a facilitator I was really trying hard to deliver outcomes and to lead a group through a process to get to a preconceived set of ideas. It’s not that I wasn’t alos hosting some creative work, but my early forays in the field were probably brutal to sit through as I steered people through a process and, being a naturally conflict averse person, quelled differences. There would be brainstorming, but I was very much the kind of guy that seized on ideas I liked and inquired more into them, even if the group had other thoughts. Ick.
Now it’s all about the right tools for the right job, and sometimes that’s just the right tool. But not often. And definitely not in the unconscious way that I applied facilitation.
Once I trundled into the world of Open Space Technology, the Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development and the complexity world, my practice radically changed. It really did become about building containers for dialogue, creating spaces and contexts in which interesting things might happen. It took to locus of responsibility for the content off of me and put it on the participants. I became responsible for managing the constraints that would help a group do that.
If you look on my site for posts on complex facilitation, you’ll find a bit more thinking on that practice, but one things that stands out in the IAF article from 5 years ago is the commitment to difference and diversity. I recently took a Deep Democracy workshop with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson as a part of my reluctant commitment to overcome my aversion to conflict, and I walked away with the idea that we need to get good at the practice of “conflict preservation” instead of “conflict resolution.” By that I mean that we need to be able to host conversations in which conflicts are present and remain present as a source of creativity and life, and not quash them because we are afraid of their energy. That means creating a container in which conflict is productive, in which people feel free to share different opinions, different perspectives, and contribute different gifts. And, of course, being conflict averse, this terrifies me. What if someone gets hurt? What if the space isn’t safe enough? What if something really offensive gets said?
Yup. Those are the questions we have to wrestle with. Because facilitation is needed in this time to ensure that people with vastly different experience and gifts have the chance to use them. Communities and societies contain many different kinds of people, including people whose opinions and ideas I don’t like.
Feel all those questions coming up? All those fears and “what if’s?” Yup. me too. Let’s talk about it below.
The other day on the Art of Hosting facebook group, my friend Cedric Jamet asked folks for some materials about the four fold practice, which is the basic essence of the Art of Hosting. Toke Moeller weighed in with his latest posters from a session he was leading with graduate students in sustainability leadership.
Toke was, of course, one of the originals who put the four fold practice together and like all good generative frameworks, it has changed over time and it gets expressed in different ways depending on context. But the essence is that it balances self-awareness and focused practice on a life of participation in the world with the good leadership practices of hosting others and co-creating useful things. I’ve written about it alot. Upon this framework hangs a world of practices from meditation and reflection, to good dialogic practice, to facilitation and participatory leadership and decision making.
I have worked with Toke enough to know that what he probably did was to teach these four practices and then have people discuss where they show up in their own lives, and so I thought I would take his words, in bold, and reflect a little as if I was a student in the class. The prompt question Toke asked his class was “How may my personal practices enhance me and my leadership for a more peaceful and sustainable world?”
Host yourself to know yourself – be awake. These days I am finding myself on autopilot alot. Same rhythm, same kinds of activities, all done at the same desk, the same way. It has been a hard winter following on a hard year in terms of mental health, and a couple of holidays including one just ending now have served to create some breaks in my routine. I will see what i come back to, but one ritual I will be retaining is an early morning contemplative walk and 20 minute sit in a place near my house, next to the sea. To get out in the morning has been a godsend, and my physical and mental health needs this. All in service of jagging myself awake. I feel like I am in danger of a mental slumber. And so, break a pattern to awaken a pattern.
Be hosted to grow the listener and student in yourself – be a curious participant. The last two years have deprived me of one of my favourite activities, which is to sit and listen to others tell stories. I haven’t been travelling, I haven’t been sitting at the pub welcoming whoever walks in. There is no better way to develop your curiosity than to sit and listen to another person telling a story. Social media doesn’t cut it. I find myself too quick to respond, often unable to discern nuance. My curiosity gets pinched down to a small sliver and my judgement, fired by brain chemicals, gets all the fun. So practicing listening, to the forest and the sea, to the conversations of my neighbours in community, trying to figure out what to do as we come back together again, with a two year absence of joint history making. Listening to clients. I am looking forward to my first hands on facilitation gigs (not open space) where listening is a key part of what we will be doing. I’m all ears.
Step up to host others so they can grow their listener and the lifelong student in them. Years ago Toke and nI were sitting by my wood stove talking about teaching as we were preparing to deliver an Art of Hosting on Bowen Island. We were kind of humble-bragging – if I’m honest – about how we weren’t really teachers, but life long students. Caitlin, listening from the kitchen asked us a piercing question. She, who comes from a four generation line of teachers said “What is it about being teachers that makes you so afraid to be one?” I think we eventually answered that it was something to do with not wanting to lose our curiosity and learning in the role of the teacher-expert. She continued to point out that people were actually coming to the workshop to learn from us, and that we could also learn alongside them. She was being kind. There is a both-and about this. We decided to call ourselves teacher-learners and for me this practice captures that. Host other so that they become teacher-learners too.
Host together – co-create and co-lead: build capacity to build more capacity. It has been a long time since I saw Toke in person. It was, I think, many years ago during a gathering on harvesting practices in Halifax. We spent an hour together having lunch in a restaurant and talked about where our journeys were taking us. Toke was recovering from a small stroke and this was the first overseas trip he had taken. The stroke had imposed some constraints on what he could do and how his mind operated, and he and I talked about how, at a certain age, one moves into building capacity. You stop doing things for people and you build the capacity for them to do it too. And that way, you can continue being a part of the things you love doing while also being sure that those things could be sustained in a community of practitioners. That has been my life these days. “Support” is how I approach everything. I do it with money, time, opportunities, credibility, connections…whatever. I support causes and people that are important to me including lifting up Indigenous leaders and communities, younger dialogue and complexity practitioners, young and developing soccer players and many others. I have learned a lot from Toke and others and all of it was freely given, and for a gift to work it must be given away. So I give it away.
Now, if it interests you, have a go at answering Toke’s prompting question here in the comments or elsewhere on the open web, where we can share and compare.
For much of the past few years my facilitation and evaluation practice has been steadily merging together. When I FINALLY came across Cynthia’ Kurtz’s body of work, Participatory Narrative Inquiry a few years ago, I felt simultaneously validated and challenged. Validated in that the participatory facilitation work I have been doing since I stumbled on Open Space Technology in 1995 met the complexity work I have been in since 2005 and the developmental evaluation work I’ve been doing for the past ten years. Challenged in that it opened up new streams for my practice, and that has been gratifying.
Nowadays I regularly do story gathering as a part of all my projects. I use online tools like NarraFirma, Spryng or Sensemaker and sometimes pen and paper approaches. In a future blog post perhaps I’ll name some of the projects we’ve been doing with these tools and how they have contributed to our work.
Today in a conversation about getting started with stories, someone asked about how to get a bunch of perspectives from throughout to company on a new phase in a company’s evolution. I responded with a simple approach to PNI. You can use this to get started with a group.
- You want to begin by collecting stories, not running a workshop where everyone tells you what they think are the issues. That approach tends to get everyone prepared to advocate for their own position. So try this simple approach. Do a little questionnaire, using Google Forms for example. Ask participants to “share a story of something that happened lately that made you think: ‘we need to address this issue…'” Get everyone in the organization to enter one story, a few sentences. On the form then ask them a) how common do you think this is in our organization and b) what is one thing we could do to address that issue?
- Now you have a collection of grounded stories and a bunch of material you can use to host some more interesting strategic sessions. Convene some meetings and give people the stories to look at, maybe separated into common and rare, and have them look at the material and work together to create ways of addressing the issues.
- There are many things you can do with these stories, but the principle is “Use the harvest to convene the conversation.” From that the conversation can produce a harvest of things to try to address the issues you discover.
The advantage of this is that everyone’s voice gets in the mix, and everyone has a chance to interpret their own stories and then interpret what other people’s stories might mean. This generates massive engagement.
I really appreciate Cynthia’s clear writing on this and offer you this quote from work as a heuristic in your own planning and design:
In my experience, the greater the degree of participation the stronger the positive impact of any project that involves people and aims to improve some situation faced by those people. I have also noticed that some forms of participation are easier to manage than others. So I generally encourage people planning projects to think about taking one more step up the staircase of participation, wherever they find themselves now; but I order the steps so as to make the transition more feasible in practice.
If you are asking people to tell you stories, why not ask them what their stories mean?
If you already do that, why not ask people what the stories other people told mean?
If you already do that, why not ask people to build something with their stories? Why not ask them what that means?
If you already do that, why not ask people if they can see any trends in the stories that have been told?
If you already do that, why not ask people to design interventions based on the stories they have told and heard?
Then, why not ask people to help you plan new projects?And so on. As you step up, keep watching your project to see if increasing participation is making it better. If it stops making the project better (for the people you are doing the project to help), stop increasing the participation. Wherever you find yourself is participatory enough. For now.
James Gleick, the author of the classic book “Chaos: Making a New Science” has written a terrific review of Jill Lepore’s new book “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.”The book covers the origin of data science as applied to democracy, and comes as conversations about social media, algorithms, and electoral manipulation are in full swing due to the US election and the release of The Social Dilemma.
Gleick’s review is worth a read. He covers some basic complexity theory when working with data. He provides a good history of the discovery of how the principles of “work at fine granularity” helps to see patterns that aren’t otherwise there. He also shows how the data companies – Facebook, Google, Amazon – has mastered the principle of “data precedes the framework” that lies at the heart of good sensemaking. For me, both of these principles learned from anthro-complexity, are essential in defining my complexity practice.
Working at fine granularity means that, if you are looking for patterns, you need lots of data points before seeing what those patterns are. You cannot simply stake the temperature in one location and make a general conclusion about what the weather is. You need not only many sites, but many kinds of data, including air pressure, wind speed and direction, humidity and so on – in order to draw a weather map that can then be used to predict what MIGHT happen. The more data you have, the more models you can run, and the closer you can come to a probable prediction of the future state. The data companies are able to work at such a fine level of granularity that they can not only reliably predict the behaviour of individuals, but they can also serve information in a way that results in probable changes to behaviour. AS a result, social media is destroying democracy, as it segments and divides people for the purpose of marketing, but also dividing them into camps that are so disconnected from one another that Facebook has already been responsible for one genocide, in Myanmar.
Data preceding the framework means that you don’t start with a framework and try to fit data to that matrix, but rather, you let the data reveal patterns that can then be used to generate activity. Once you have a ton of data, and you start querying it, you will see stable patterns. If you turn these into a framework for action, you can sometimes catalyze new behaviours or actions. This is useful if you are trying to shift dynamics in a toxic culture. But in the dystopian use of this principle, Facebook for example notices the kinds of behaviours that you demonstrate and then serves you information to get you to buy things in a pattern that is similar to others who share a particular set of connections and experiences and behaviours. Cambridge Analytica used this power in many elections, including the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum as well as elections in Trinidad and Tobago and other places to create divisions that resulted in a particular result being achieved. You can see that story in The Great Hack. Algorithms that were designed to sell products was quickly repurposed to sell ideas, and the result has been the most perilous threat to democracy since the system was invented.
Complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable but using data you can learn about probabilities. If you have a lot of data you gain an advantage over your competitors. If you have all the data you gain an advantage over your customers, turning them from the customer to the product. “If you’re not paying, you are the product” is the adage that signals that customers are now more valuable products to companies that the stuff they are trying to sell to them.
Putting these principles to use for good.
I work with complexity, and that means that I also work with these same principles in helping organizations and communities confront the complex nature of their work. Unlike Facebook though )he says polemically) I try to operate from a moral and ethical standpoint. At any rate, the data we are able to work within our complexity work is pretty fine-grained but not fine-grained enough to provide accurate pictures of what can be manipulated. We work with small pieces of narrative data, collecting them using a variety of methods and using different tools to look for patterns. Tools include NarraFirma, Sensmaker and Spryng, all of which do this work. We work with our clients and their people to look for patterns in these stories and then generate what are called “actionable insights” using methods of complex facilitation and dialogic practice. These insights give us the inspiration to try things and see what happens. When things work, we do more and when they don’t we stop and try something else.
It’s a simple approach derived from a variety of approaches and toolsets. It allows us to sift through hundreds of stories and use them to generate new ideas and actions. It is getting to the point that all my strategic work now is actually just about making sense of data, but doing it in a human way. We don’t use algorithms to generate actions. We use the natural tools of human sensemaking to do it. But instead of starting with a blank slate and a vision statement that is disconnected from reality, we start with a picture of the stories that matter and we ask ourselves, what can we start, stop, stabilize or create to take us where we want to go.
In a world that is becoming increasingly dystopian and where our human facilities are being used against us, it’s immensely satisfying to use the ancient human capacities of telling stories and listening for patterns to create action together. I think in some ways doing work this way is an essential antidote to the way the machines are beginning to determine our next moves. You can use complexity tools like this to look at things like your own patterns of social media use and try to make some small changes to see what happens. Delete the apps from your phone, visit sites incognito, actively seek out warm connections with real humans in your community and look for people that get served very different ads and YouTube videos and recommended search results. Talk to them. They are being made to be very different from you, but away from the digital world, in the slower, warmer world of actual unmediated human interaction, they are not so different.
Postscript
Over the past few years, my work has taken shape from the following bodies of work:
- Dave Snowden’s theories of anthro-complexity, which forms the basis of my understanding of complexity theory and some of the tools for addressing it, including facilitation tools and Sensemaker.
- Cynthia Kurtz’s Participatory Narrative Inquiry, which is a developmental evaluation approach that uses stories and methods of sensemaking that she partly developed with Dave and then subsequently. I use her software, NarraFirma, for most of our narrative work now.
- Glenda Eoyang’s Human System Dynamics is a set of tools and methods for working with complex adaptive systems.
- The facilitation and leadership practices from the Art of Hosting which help us to develop the personal capacity to work dialogically with complexity.