Meg Wheatley on great questions to ask as we think about measurement, especially in complex living systems (like human communities):
Who gets to create the measures? Measures are meaningful and important only when generated by those doing the work. Any group can benefit from others’ experience and from experts, but the final measures need to be their creation. People only support what they create, and those closest to the work know a great deal about what is significant to measure.
How will we measure our measures? How can we keep measures useful and current? What will indicate that they are now obsolete? How will we keep abreast of changes in context that warrant new measures? Who will look for the unintended consequences that accompany any process and feed that information back to us?
Are we designing measures that are permeable rather than rigid? Are they open enough? Do they invite in newness and surprise? Do they encourage people to look in new places, or to see with new eyes?
Will these measures create information that increases our capacity to develop, to grow into the purpose of this organization? Will this particular information help individuals, teams, and the entire organization grow in the right direction? Will this information help us to deepen and expand the meaning of our work?
What measures will inform us about critical capacities: commitment, learning, teamwork, quality and innovation? How will we measure these essential behaviors without destroying them through the assessment process? Do these measures honor and support the relationships and meaning-rich environments that give rise to these behaviors?
These are great questions to consider at the Show Me The Change conference in Melbourne as we dive into questions on the implications for complexity on the measurements used to evaluate change in living and complex systems.
From a recent Art of Hosting in Sweden comes a learning from some young leaders thinking about how to lead in networks:
1. Open and transparency of decision making process and “organizational” structure, even if it’s dynamic. No Taboos or un-written rule. The aim should be to make the system as visible as possible.
2. Empowers loads of action (systemically): What is the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing and action?
3. Good communication culture (this is the real challenge I guess)
4. Clear process of creation and updating the leading thoughts
5. Low entrance step, it’s easy to join, accessible.
6. Inclusive, nobody is left out if they want to contribute and participate.
7. Purpose large enough but clear enough. People should feel that I want to be part of this. Purpose is container both for action and expansion. Case: 350.org brought together many networks, as did Survival Academy.
via How to lead a network well? ideas from AoH Karlskrona | Monkey Business.
The view from the Rockefeller Foundation meeting room, looking south towards the Empire State Building. Today I worked in this location with friends Willie Toliver and Kelly McGowan supporting the work of a group of executive leaders in the New York City municapl administration. I was struck by how, despite the responsibility and magnitude of influence these people have, that they are nonetheless human beings – vulnerable, falliable and authentic as the rest of us.
Here is the poem that was created from the checkout.
We are just poor weak human beings,
Resisting the call
Because we cease and desist
our belief in all we can offer
Somehow we have created
single places upon which everything hinges
and when we are put in those spaces
we confront our smallness, see it in
perspective because none of us are
big enough to be the change others expect
and we have long stopped fooling ourselves.
To confront our own smallness is terrifying
especially when people project bigness on us –
the scale of challenge, the scope of our capability.
The I we are through other people’s eyes
is never the me we see through our own.
Know this – you have been chosen only to live.
It is never over until you leave.
the only line you ever cross
is the one you choose to draw..
And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling. Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue. The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood.
The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me to Penelope, a great little breakfast place at E 30th and Lexington Ave, where I have just downed a great tasting egg and pesto sandwich on a croissant, surrounded by people talking about real estate deals, high blodd pressure medication and book promotion tours.
It’s a huge difference in some ways and just another city in other ways. I am reminded how much I love being in New York City, and how much I love eastern North American cities in general in the winter – New York, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa. All places I have some lingering presence in, some impression left on me from the dark and blustery days of winter, the days when, as a young man, I crept away to late night coffee shops to read and write poetry, or out to hear jazz and blues muted behind closed doors and windows dripping with condensation.
Just as languishing over the weekend in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg brought me to my childhood growing up in Toronto – and to my partner’s childhood in South Africa – being here in new York this morning evokes a kind of nostalgia and a kind of energy for exploration. I feel like a young man again, half my age, a free day in New York, bracing air and bright eyed people. Somehow cleansed from my trip. Clear eyed.
It’s Groundhog Day in the United States, a strange holiday. The day in which one solitary animal in Pennsylvania awakes from his winter hibernation, takes a look out of his burrow and gauges what he sees. If he sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter.
Somehow this captures what it is like to have arrived here in the United States from Africa. Today is a good day to wake up and see our shadows. Can we see the connection between the the crime and poverty and disparity of wealth and the apartheid-by-another-name of South Africa and daily life on the streets of midtown Manhattan? A cab driver dreams of returning to Africa to work for a democratic solution to the turmoil in Guinea, a country that hasn’t known the ethnic conflicts and civil wars of its neighbours. he worries that unless people get to work, that might change and Guinea could descend into bloodshed because the bigger powers in the world, some of them in the office buildings above us, may decide to act ruthlessly for the oil and resources that the country is endowed with.
North America and Europe has a nearly trillion dollar arms industry, much of which, in the form of small arms, ends up in Africa. the hands of despotic leaders, paramilitary death squads, gang leaders and petty criminals are filled with this deadly engineering that generates huge amounts of wealth for the North. The oil and precious metals that power our economies are extracted from the coastal platforms of Senegal, the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the diamond mines of Kimberly. Whatever we want in North America we can have. Cross some palms with dollars and ammunition and turn away from the shadow. A bright day dawns.
Our shadows are all around us, and to see them this clearly means two things. First, it means more winter – that the hard times are not yet done that weeks complicated and mindful living still lie between now and the promise and ease of spring. Second, it means that the sun is shining, something is warming my back, throwing my silhouette on the ground. And that the winter continues.
What a complicated world! What an untidy conclusion! What a way to try and capture the truth of this strange trip I’ve been on!
On the way into Manhattan today my cab driver, Bubu, asked me what my impression of Africa was. I admitted that it was limited – I had only spent a week there, most of it in a middle class suburb or on a safari ranch and all of it in the company of middle class people. But I said that the overwhelming impression was that Africa differed from North America in a key way: in Africa, the truth is valued above everything else. Here in North America we are quick to sacrifice truth at the alter of a happy ending but African stories would never do that. To do so is the ultimate betrayal of promise. To tell the story of South Africa as a successful miracle of transition to democracy would be to betray the promise of what the struggle was all about. It was about truth. Clear, shiny, complicated, messy, dark truth.
Bubu, my driver, smiled widely. “Exactly,” he said.
Been here nearly a week now and I’m starting to get a very limited sense of this incredible place. I have a few random thoughts and notes, offered up as they come to mind.
***
I visited The Apartheid Museum today. The museum sits next to a small amusement park with roller coasters and helicopter rides. The screams from the roller coaster and the thwapping of the helicopters could be heard at the museum and had the unnerving effect of recreating the soundscape from the late 1980s when the state of emergency was in effect here and helicopters and screams were a part of daily life in many parts of Johannesburg and the surrounding townships.
The museum really traces the history of apartheid from 1948 until the Constitution was completed in 1996, with a post script about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and modern day South Africa. I was struck by the section on the 1940s and how there was one huge wall full of all of the laws that went into setting the legal framework for apartheid. Many of them are echoed in Canada’s Indian Act of the time, including laws about everything from owning land, to pass laws to drinking liquour and entering into contracts.
The museum pulls no punches. There are hours of video presentations with brutal violence perpetrated against both blacks and whites, with scenes of police brutality, torture, right-wing white terrorism, necklacing and murder. One room, devoted to the legacy of execution of political prisoners contains dozens of nooses hanging from the ceiling, one for each person who was killed by the state. There is a whol gallery focused on the violence of the early 1990s that almost took South Africa to the point of no return. If you had any illusions that the legacy of apartheid can just be wished away, they are dispelled in this place. It makes the subsequent work of constitution, nation building and reconcilliation seem miraculous.
I spent a great deal of the morning in tears, and when I emerged from the museum after three hours of intense learning, I sat quietly in the garden and sobbed. When I was a young man in the 1980s I was active in anti-apartheid support groups in Canada, calling for sanctions and insisting that my Church, the United Church of Canada divest itself from the country. Today I was reminded of the conviction I felt back then and it came back in waves of anger, grief and astonishment. What a place.
***
The Apartheid Museum is interesting in another way too. It doesn’t have a typical story arc: peace – crises – resolution. There is no happy ending here, just the ongoing struggle for balance, justice and peace. And no one is under any illusions in this country that that struggle has ended. Over the past week I have noticed that South Africans do not tell stories with happy endings. Instead they tell stries with a much more real structure, stories that live in the cyclical nature of time, of events repeating themselves, of small choices taken with large implications at every turn. I have been inquiring a little about this as a particular African form of storytelling. In North America we like the Hollywood ending. Here, they smell bullshit a mile away.
***
The other day my friends Busi Dlamini and Vanessa Sayers and I were having dinner which included ostrich neck stew by the pool where the zebras were drinking and we were talking about unusual foods. I was sharing some of the North American standbys like oolichan grease and fermented seal meat and they were returning the favour with fried grubs and goat hoofs, they told me about a special dish that is made from the head and feet of a chicken. The dish is called “walkie-talkie.”
***
There is a brilliant film that I saw on the way here called Jerusalema about a gangster/community organizer in Hillbrow, the roughest part of Johannesburg. At one point as he is flirting with a life of crime he gest out only to run into his former boss at a gas station. The boss says “crime is the fastest growing industry in the new South Africa” to which our hero replies that actually private security is.
There is no doubt that this is a dangerous city, although I have been staying in affluent suburbs and have perhaps a false sense of security about the place. On these suburbs, the sidewalks are lined with walls which in turn are topped with either razor wire, spikes, barbed wire or, increasingly, high voltage electrical fencing. The walls have doors in them that lead to courtyards and gardens, but the streetscape looks like a corridor, covered over with trees. Occasionally instead of walls you see “palisades” – tall fences topped with three or seven spikes and sometimes with razor wire on top. Most streets have a roaming security guard whose job it is to immediately report suspicious behaviour which is met with “armed response.” The largest security firms are ADT and the curiously named “NYPD.” In the public parking lot across from the “Wollies” where we have been buying food, there are three or four car guards patrolling the lot. The take note as you park and presumably also call for armed responses if someone else leaves in your car. All of these security folks are really nice. They chat and say “howsit” as you pass by and they are friendly. But these guys are on the low rungs. The armed security guys around are tough looking and aloof.
***
Everything is privatized here, not just the police. The public transportation system is terrible, largely due to the fact that there is a huge fleet of “minicabs” private vans that run on largely predetermined routes. The minicab lobby is so strong that any attempts to build new public infrastructure are met with threats and actual strikes from the minicab operators and the whole city comes to a halt. Minicab trf wars break out frequently, wth shooting and murder and maiming a part of business, rendering the services effective on the one hand but insanely dangerous on the other.