Etienne Wenger provides a useful set of principles for cultivating communities of practice as living, breathing things:
- Design for evolution.
- Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.
- Invite different levels of participation.
- Develop both public and private community spaces.
- Focus on value.
- Combine familiarity and excitement.
- Create a rhythm for the community.
Read more at the link below.
Innovation does not come without discarding ideas, trying and failing. In complex systems with complex challenges, failure is inevitable and desired. If we need to prototype to sense our way forward we have to have a mindset that can handle failure.
On Saturday at the Art of Participatory Leadership in Petaluma my new friend Shawn Berry convened a session on failure and through listening to stories ranging from small prototoyping failures to business breakdowns and even deaths, I noted a few patterns that are helpful for groups and people to address failure positively nd resourcefully
Frame it up. In North America and Europe we have a cultural aversion to failure. Failure is equated with inadequacy. Our self-esteem is tied to our success. Our compensation and status is affected by failure. Fear of failure is prevalent in the culture. In order to combat this tendency, it is helpful to work with a group to get them acquainted to failing. For more playful groups improv exercises can be an excellent way to drop inhibitions to try something and fail. More rational groups might benefit from a little appreciative inquiry where participants recall positive failing experiences. Reflecting and sharing on times of failure and survival reminds us that it is part of the process.
Support the experience. While groups are experimenting and learning, succeeding and failing it helps to have support and coaching present in the process. Depending on the kind of work being done you can offer support to keep a group resilient and unattached. I have used several different kinds of processes here including the following:
- Simply pausing for reflection periodically in the process to notice what is going on. Slowing the process down helps to gain valuable perspective on what is happening and helps a group move on quickly from failure.
- allowing failure to occur and then taking the subsequent stressful thoughts to an inquiry process using The Work of Byron Katie. We do this often when working with groups in the non-profit sector for example, where the pressure to succeed is accompanied by feelings of fear of the results of failing.
- In indigenous and other colonized cultural settings I have often had Elders and healers present who can care for the more invisible dynamics in the field, especially when our work is going to carry us into some of the sources of trauma. When you are working in a place where people are operating out of deep historical trauma, the fear of failure can be laden with many many deep seated implications. Having people in the process who understand these dynamics is essential.
- Peer-coaching is a common way to build resilience in groups where trying and failing is important. When a team is trying to learn something new it helps to also build the capacity for them to be able to rely on each other. This is why so many teams value “cross-training.” When athletes train, they often work out in ways that are not related to their sport _ a skier training by rowing for example. Doing this helps them to learn to use their body differently and builds strength that supports their core work. Similarly, work teams can learn a lot about themselves by creating situations of safe failure such as through improvisational exercises, outdoor experiences, games and other non-work focuses. The skills learned there can help support the team when they knuckle down to focus on key tasks and can support constructive failure within the work domain. Ultimately these skills will build capacity if they increase the ability of the group to support itself through stressful times.
- Developing a practice of greeting failure with joy. My friend Khelsilem Rivers taught me this one. He is – among other things – an indigenous language teacher and using the tool kit “Where Are Your Keys” Khelsilem helps people become fluent in their indigenous languages. One of the barriers to rapid fluency is a fear of “not doing it right.” Khelsilem completely transforms the experience of failure by introducing the technique called “How Fascinating!” When a person (including the facilitator) makes a mistake, the whole group celebrates by throwing their hands in the air, leaning back and declaring “How Fascinating!” While it might seem contrived at first, the technique opens up the body, and greets the failure with a collective celebration. Blame and judgement is avoided, collective support is activated and learning is grounded.
Practices like these are essential to build into the architecture of processes where failure is inevitable if innovation is to occur.
Process the grief. When catastrophic failure occurs it can leave people grieving, frightened and cynical. If there is no way to process the grief then individuals often build their next prototype out of fear. If you feel you have been burned before, you might develop your next idea by building in protection against failing again. While that can seem prudent and safe, in reality, building structures out of fear is a much riskier proposition than building structures out of possibility. Without processing grief, a group or a person can be susceptible to being “defended.” I learned much about this state from Dr. Gordon Neufeld who is a child psychologist who has described this phenomenon in children. Taking a group or a person through the grief cycle using empathy, story telling and compassion can help free the emotions that are triggered in future learning experiences.
Building a mindset to embrace failure and support the transformation of the energy of failure is critical to groups developing the capacity to lead in complexity.
I’ve also written about failure here:
Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Tim Merry, Caitlin Frost and I are just returning from a gathering of experienced Art of Hosting practitioners from around the world. One of the threads in our gathering was and exploration of how the practice of hosting and harvest conversations in the world can be applied to working with groups in ever increasing scale and influence.
This is the core inquiry of our new Beyond the Basics offering.. Being skillful facilitators of dialogue is obviously not enough to make shifts in systems, although dialogue is a powerful place for people in a system to start to understand the complexity, diversity and challenges that we are dealing with. It is also the prime vehicle for locating the innovation at the edge of the collective intelligence in the system that helps design innovations in systems of all kinds. . But alone, dialogue is not enough. Shifting systems requires us to apply dialogic practices and participatory leadership in a series of connected events throughout a system. Dealing with the complexity of shifting systems requires that we build depth in the capacity of core teams that are holding the work.
A key part of our work is nto build capacity and depth in core teams to host systems work together. Building the capacities of core teams is a marker of the success and sustainability of the kinds of participatory initiatives that achieve lasting results and outcomes. Where we have worked with systems where the consulting team retains the capacity, the initiative tends to fizzle when the contract ends.
Sustainability and lasting results lie at the intersection of depth, breadth, friendship and power. Core teams need to operate deeply, which means that they need to be engaging beyond the facilitation of hosted events. Good core teams ARE the field they are influencing and therefore they have to be practiced at going deep into their own dynamics to begin to make changes in a system. And they hold a level of depth that allows them to see and sense together strategically as an initiative unfolds.
To scale up initiatives, a team needs to then achieve breadth without sacrificing depth. More people need to be involved in core hosting of the work. But this cannot be a classical “train the trainer” model. It takes time for more practitioners to come into the field. The initial core team must not only train others in systems work but also become teachers and mentors of new practitioners and protect the work as it gets off to it’s shaky start. Going nto scale means lots of learning happening in public, so connecting people together in learning becomes crucial.
The architecture that keeps breadth connected to depth rests on trust, and so friendship becomes a powerful part of the operating system. In complex systems work there are times when formal accountabilities don’t ensure the levels of trust and commitment that is needed, and only a field of deep trust between people will sustain the practice and sustain the resilience as groups go through the difficult parts of systemic evolution.
The challenge here is that we then need a new conception of power, because power in existing systems tends to come from accountabilities for results delivered against known and predictable plans. Participatory work is a huge challenge to power because it requires everyone in the system, to work from a position of trust and uncertainty while still staying accountable for results. When working in any human system, issues of visible and invisible power and privilege are important strategic acupuncture points for change. And if we don’t pay attention to them we can find ourselves mired in simple relationship building projects or in oppositional and combative power struggles. We find trust and commitment eroding and we lose the breadth required for impact.
As a team this is our learning edge. We have many stories to share and tools and practices that help us be in this work, but we are also excited for our BtB offering to be a place where we co-discover with others the deepest challenges at these edges and perhaps even co-create new collective knowledge about how the art of hosting and harvesting can work in these domains.
Our beyond the basics offerings is informed by and structured around learning, discovering and implementing practices that integrate these approaches to working in complex environments with complex challenges. We have discovered that there are personal practices of coaching, mentoring and support that complement a deep skill set in designing, hosting and harvesting participatory process and a fierce commitment to creating architectures of implementation that respect and work with the existing power structures in a way that protects results while also building the capacity for uncertainty.
As we work towards the BtB workshops in 2014- and 2015 we will be continuing to share learnings, resources and case studies here on this blog and we invite your own questions and inquires about this practice as we move towards learning together.
Good spot from Johnnie Moore on the power dynamics of safety in groups. Hint: it comes from attending to rank, not cohesiveness:
Nancy Dixon writes about the conditions that favour good quality conversations in organisations. She uses the term psychological safety to describe the conditions that allow people to take risks in conversations. She distinguishes that safety from cohesiveness (for which it could be mistaken). The latter may feel safe but really sets everyone up for groupthink. The safety Nancy talks about allows challenging things to be said.
The essential precondition for that kind of safety is largely to do with power differences…
And from the paper he links to:
For a team to be effective and competitive it must be engaged in learning behaviors that are too often perceived as risky by members of the team. To take that risk, team members need to feel psychologically safe, that is, “have a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish members for speaking up.” The actions that help to bring about collective sensemaking are:
– reducing the power differential between leaders and members
– teams taking the time to reflect together on a regular basis about their actions, results, concerns, and innovative new ideas
– members actively providing support for each other in meetings
– holding small group discussions about appreciative topics to build relationships and enhance the knowledge of others’ competence
– engaging in shared experiences that serve as a reference point for meaning.
Playing music rather than talking about it
I’m coming back from Hahopa with simplicity ringing in my ears. I think the mantra is “put something in your hands.”
At Hahopa we cooked together, wove cedar together, trained with swords together, played lahal and sang songs. We DID a lot. And in our doing we could reflect on our being. And from our being we can create a view of what else we might do.
I spend a lot of time helping people plan things. But I am noticing that people want plans that promise a great future, but are afriad to start doing things. Heading into a set of meetings this week with some Chruches here in BC, I think I’m curious mto ask “What do you want to be doing that you aren’t doing now?” And by this question I don’t mean “What do you want other people to do?” I mean, what are you willing to start now that would help us become something that we wanted to become. Let’s do more of that and THEN we can see what we have learned.
Visioning and creating a common purpose is cool but it often assumes that we know what the future will hold or that we can guess what will be useful. We need to be more adaptable. We need to look at what is stopping us from DOING the things we want to do, and focusing on removing the barriers to that, whether those are resources or fears or time.