I’m just coming home from a couple of days in Victoria where Caitlin and I were with colleagues Rebecca Ataya, Annemarie Travers, and Kelly Poirier. We spent two days working on what I can only call “polishing the core” of the Leadership 2020 program that we offer on behalf of the Federation of Community Social Service of BC. We have run this leadership program for 8 years now, putting around 400 people through a nine month intensive program of residential and applied learning. The program has built collaboration, trust, and connection between the Ministry of Children and Family Development, indigenous communities and organizations and people working in the social services sector.
The program has evolved with every one of the 13 cohorts that has come through. Our core team has changed and this new configuration is our latest version. We are playing with a new set of constraints and ideas as we take the core need and purpose of the program and discover other ways we can offer it to meet the demand in the sector for leadership training that strengthens resilience, creativity, and the ability to thrive in complexity.
When we arrived on Thursday morning to begin our work, we had no agenda on tap, but instead had a compelling need. We started talking and discovered the path as we went being very careful to harvest. Our insights emerged in very deliberate conversation. As skilled dialogue facilitators, we are also skilled dialogue practitioners and we have a refined practice of hosting and harvesting our own work. When we get in flow, it feels like ceremony. With attention to a practice, working this way is extremely productive. Here are a few principles that I observed in working this way:
- Tend to relationships. As we were both building a new team and developing new ideas and products for our work, the most important focus in on relationships. We always build in social time in our work, and enjoyed a nice dinner out at 10 acres bistro, an excellent local foods restaurant in Victoria.
- Nourish bodies and minds. Working like this is physically and mentally draining, and we are very careful to nourish each there when we are working. This meant good snacks (bananas, nuts, and chocolate), ample time for tea and coffee breaks, a lovely prepared lunch by Rebecca and physical breaks to walk, or maybe even dance to Beyonce songs a little!
- Don’t silo the conversation, but structure the harvest. Our conversation wandered from program content, to context, to history, to practicalities, to new ideas for structure. We were all over the map. But as we went, Caitlin made good use of our supply of post it notes and we harvested into the Chaordic Stepping Stone categories that we are using the structure the evolution of the program. Sometimes the best hosting is good harvesting, and Caitlin took on that role beautifully.
- Don’t control the outcome. It sounds almost absurd to think that we would have controlled the outcome. Pure dialogue is about following the energy of the conversation and seeing what emerges. There was no facilitation tool used beyond the ability to listen carefully and address the need and purpose of our work. We stumbled on many beautiful ideas over these past few days and we constantly look for ways to incorporate them in our work. This leadership program has the quality of a polished gem, reflecting years of attention to what is needed, and what is no longer needed.
- Stay with the flow until it doesn’t flow anymore. In Open Space we talk about the principle of “When it’s over it’s over” meaning that all creative work has a rhythm and flow to it. When the brains are no longer engaged and the mental and cognitive tiredness sets in, it’s time to stop. Two intense six hour days of work can produce tremendous results, but when the flow stops, there is no point forcing it. Wrap it up, make a date for some next steps and celebrate the work.
Working like this has the feeling of working with the simplest and most ancient way of talking about what to do. For tens of thousands of years, this is mostly how humans have talked about need and purpose in the world. Long before there were professional facilitators and methods for strategizing, decision making and evaluating, there was dialogue.
Sometimes all you need is a powerful need and purpose, solid relationships, a good way to listen, and time. When it takes on the feel of ceremony, you know you’re getting it right.
I’m continuing to refine my understanding of the role and usefulness of principles in evaluation, strategy and complex project design. Last week in Montreal with Bronagh Gallagher, we taught a bit about principles-based evaluation as part of our course on working with complexity. Here are some reflections and an exercise.
First off, it’s important to start with the premise that in working in complexity we are not solving problems, but shifting patterns. Patterns are the emergent results of repeated interactions between actors around attractors and within boundaries. To make change in a complex system therefore, we are looking to shift interactions between people and parts of a system to create a beneficial shift in the emergent patterns.
To do this we have to have a sufficient understanding of the current state of things so that we can see patterns, a sense of need for shifting patterns and an agreed upon preferred and beneficial direction of travel. That is the initial strategic work in any complex change intervention. From there we create activities that help us to probe the system and see what will happen, which way it will go and whether we can do something that will take it in the beneficial direction. We then continue this cycle of planning, action and evaluation.
Strategic work in complexity involves understanding this basic set of premises, and here the Cynefin framework is quite useful for distinguishing between work that is best served by linear predictive planning – where a chain of linked events results in a predictable outcome – and work that is best served by complexity tools including pattern finding, collective sensemaking and collaborative action.
Working with principles is a key part of this, because principles (whether explicit of implicit) are what guide patterns of action and give them the quality of a gravity well, out of which alternative courses of action are very difficult.. Now I fully realize that there is a semantic issue here, around using the term “principles” and that in some of the complexity literature we use, the terms “simple rules” or “heuristics” are also used. Here I am using “principles” specifically to tie this to Michael Quinn Patton’s principles-based evaluation work, which i find helpful in linking the three areas of planning, action, and evaluation. He defines an effectiveness principle as something that exhibits the following criteria:
- Guides directionality
- Is useful and usable
- Provides inspiration for action
- Is developmental in nature and allows for the development of approaches (in other words not a tight constraint that restricts creativity)
- Is evaluable, in that you can know whether you are doing it or not.
These five qualities are what he calls “GUIDE,” an acronym made from the key criteria. Quinn Patton argues that if you create these kinds of principles, you can assess their effectiveness in creating new patterns of behaviour or response to a systemic challenge. That is helpful in strategic complexity work.
To investigate this, we did a small exercise, which I’m refining as we go here. On our first day we did a sensemaking cafe to look at patterns of where people in our workshop felt “stuck” in their work with clients and community organizations. Examples of repeating patterns included confronting aversion to change, use of power to disenfranchise community members, lack of adequate resources, and several others. I asked people to pick one of these patterns and asked them to create a principle using the GUIDE criteria that seems to be at play to keep this pattern in place.
For example, on aversion to change, one such principle might be “Create processes that link people’s performances to maintaining the status quo.” You can see that there are many things that could be generated from such a principle, and that perhaps an emergent outcome of such a principle might be “aversion to change.” This is not a diagnostic exercise. Rather it helped people understand the role that principles have in containing action with attractors and boundaries. In most cases, people were not working with situations where “aversion to change” was a deliberate outcome of their strategic work, and yet there was the pattern nonetheless, clear and obvious even within settings in which innovation or creativity is supposedly prized and encouraged.
Next I invited people to identify a direction of travel away from this particular pattern
using a reflection on values. If aversion to change represents a pattern you negatively value, what is an alternative pattern, and what is the value beneath that? It’s hard to identify values, but these are pretty pithy statements about what matters. One value might be “Curiosity about possibility” and another might be “excitement for change.” From there participants were asked to write a principle that might guide action towards the emergence of that new pattern. One such example might be “Create processes that generate and reward small scale failure.” I even had them take that one statement and reduce it to a simple rule, such as “Reward failure, doubt
The next step is to put these principles in play within an organization to create tests to see how effective the principle is. If you discover that it works, refine it and do more. If it doesn’t, or if it creates another poor pattern such as cynicism, stop using it and start over.
All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds. When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community.
Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process. They participate and co-create. In order to do this, participants need to make a conscious step over a threshold into the container.
Thresholds are as old as humanity. The boundary between in and out is ancient. Being welcomed into a home, a family, a structure or a group comes with ritual behaviours to let you know that you have left one world behind and entered into another.
In meetings, these thresholds are multiple and nested. My friend Christie Diamond once said “the conversation begins long before the meeting starts, and continues long after the meeting is over.” That has rung true for the thousands of conversations I have hosted and participated in over my life. And on reflection, I can trace a series of threshold that are crossed as we enter into and leave a conversational space. At each step, my “yes” becomes more solid and my commitment to the work becomes more important and concrete. See if this scheme makes sense:
- Invitation is noticed
- Engage with the call, connect it to my own needs
- Making time and space to engage (committing my resources)
- Physically moving to the space
- Arriving in the field of work
- Entering the physical space
- BEGINNING THE WORK
- PARTICIPATING IN SUB-CONTAINERS WITHIN THE MEETING
- FINISHING THE WORK
- Leaving the space
- Exiting the field of work
- Returning home
- Reorganizing resources to support the change
- Re-engaging with the world
- Working from a changed stance
Each one of these crossings happens whether you are coming into someting as mundane as a staff meeting or something as important as attending your own wedding. Often time facilitators pay attention only to numbers 7-9 and many times 7 and 9 are given short shrift.
I’m curious to hear about your own experiences of crossing thresholds for important meetings.