Part five of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
5. Make a wise decision
I’ve always thought that the essence of good leadership is the ability to make a decision. It requires a certain kind of courage, especially when it seems that there is a zero sum game at stake. It also requires a high degree of emotional intelligence and compassion and empathy, especially when the decision you have to make could result in harm for others. Discernment, care, ethics, courage, and detachment all wrestle for attention in the mind of a decision maker.
As much as possible, in the world of complexity, I try to help groups make decisions together. Participatory decision making gets a bad rap for being time consuming and mired in interminable and endless conversation as groups turn over every little pebble, looking for an answer. Many complex problems produce enough data to support multiple competing ways forward, but complex problems never present predictability. You can take an informed guess, but where groups and decision makers get bogged down is in the waiting for absolute clarity. Decision makers in complexity need to be able to act with incomplete information and carefully watch the results of their decisions as they unfold, being prepared to adjust as they go.
For facilitators, hosting decision making can sometimes be a trap, especially for people who are conflict averse. Important decisions often involve making choices that pit conflicting views against each other. Where you can explore these options with small experiments, that’s a wise thing to do, like probing a couple of different paths in a dark forest to see which one looks more promising. But sometimes it comes down to one group’s preference getting chosen over the objections of others. To stay in that process and work well, you need good practice.
A strong personal practice is important, so that you don’t get triggered into making rash decisions as you are hosting a process. It is also important that the group you are working with has a clear process for making decisions. It’s even better if they are familiar with the emotional territory that leads to good decisions.
For me, Sam Kaner, Lenny Lind et. al. set the standard for this clarity with their book The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. That book gives us the well known “diamond of participation” – pictured above -which to me is the single most useful diagram to explain decision making from a group and personal process perspective. It features three zones: the zone of divergence where ideas are presented and explored; the zone of convergence where options are whittled down and decisions are made, and the zone in the middle, which I call the zone of emergence and which the authors call “the groan zone.”
The Groan Zone is the place where the group’s engagement with the content of their work gets stressful. Individuals experience cognitive overload, and they are stressed by the need to let go of ideas to which they are attached and to incorporate ideas which they find irreconcilable. Groups who get stuck in the groan zone experience conflict, impatience, and a waning sense of purpose. Facilitators who know the groan zone understand it to be the place that is necessary if a group is to discover something new and make a decision that is bigger than the decision any one person can make.
Over the years, conflict averse as I am, I have garnered many lessons and principles for practice from applying Kaner’s work and aligning it with complexity theory. Here are some key principles for hosting a group to a wise decision.
Don’t converge too early. When we are working in complexity, there is a tendency for groups to throw out lots of ideas, pick one and move on. That is a good approach when we can be certain about the right answer, but cases where real complexity is at play, prematurely converging can create more problems than it resolves. While it prevents a group from going through the groan zone it can reinforce established patterns of power and control as the loudest voice get its way. Decisions made before really considering options are almost certainly rooted in patterns of entrainment, bias, and habit. This is a good way to prolong the underlying patterns that have created the complex problem in the first place. If the decision is easy, don’t trust it.
There will be pain; build shared perspectives and relationships there. One of the best contributions of Kaner et. al. was to name the groan zone and provide a number of practices for facilitators to help the group navigate this territory. Working in the groan zone requires us to work with relationships. That can seem counter intuitive because groups get there largely because they are struggling to engage with the complexity of the content. Building shared perspectives makes sure that the infrastructure for emgernece – connection, attention, discernment, and a willingness to explore – is in place. Without this, toxic power and control patterns can have their way with the discussion and things can get “shut down.” A group that struggles together will usually make a better decision together and will usually be closer together as a team at the end.
As much as possible, try to build consensus using clear proposals, testing agreement and refining. I love working with consensus processes – and my friend Tree Bressen is a master at these – for building shared ownership over decisions. Consensus building is not a matter of opening everything up and letting the conversation drift in a thousand different directions. On the contrary, it’s about providing a high level of constraints to the process which lets the group focus on its work while holding a strong container for dissent. I’ve written elsewhere about large group processes for creating broad consensus, but it comes down to a few simple elements:
- Create a clear proposal
- Have a method for testing levels agreement and expressing specific concerns
- Deal with specific concerns with an eye to developing a more robust proposal
- Test again, refine again as necessary, and decide
If you have to vote be careful to understand what a yes and a no means. The worst decisions we can make are yes/no decisions on complex topics. This is why referenda are generally counter productive for setting large scale public policy direction. Brexit is the primary example. In Canada we have had referenda on electoral reform, transit funding and Constitutional amendments that produce results that are clear, but produce ongoing civic consternation about what they mean, because it was not possible to reduce the topic into a binary resolution. The advantage of using a gradients of agreement process in advance of a yes/no vote is that you at least know what people’s concerns are. If you can’t explore agreement before hand, conduct a yes/no vote but then have everyone write down why they voted the way they did. You’ll get lots of information pertaining to implementing your decision.
Pay attention to dissent and to patterns of dissent and have a process for understanding these. That leads me to the last point which is to acknowledge and understand dissent in a decision making process. Good leaders and well functioning groups will make a space for dissent because it can provide important weak signals for the state of the system, Dissent can hep a group escape inattention unawareness by raising “I told you so” issues early in the process. It also helps to sustain relationships when people who are on the losing side of a decision nevertheless feel included In it. Fear of dissent creates nasty power plays and exclusion that immediately renders any tricky decision unwise.
My last blog post here was back in March, at the beginning of a colossal few months of travel and work during which I was away from home and working in the Netherlands, Germany, northern Ontario, New York City, Vancouver Island, and several locations in Japan. In the course of my travels I was away from home for 64 days, had two major airline cancellations (one airline went bankrupt, one couldn’t get me home without massively creative re-routing). I probably doubled the number of foods I’ve tasted in my life, just from the 28 day trip to Japan alone, and I’ve come back to find myself taking stock of where I am these days.
Summer is good for that.
In reflecting on my work offerings these days, I find myself doing these kinds of things:
- Helping organizations and communities by facilitating large scale meetings and participatory processes to understand and act in complexity. I do this through meeting design and facilitation. That’s the bread and butter.
- Using technology to support strategic work in complexity. This year I’m working with both Sensemaker and NarraFirma in different projects to help groups collect, analyse, and act from stories. I love this work and it has taken me into the realm of deep developmental evaluation. The software is helping us to be able to generate deeply informed strategic insights with our clients and to create innovative ways to address stuck problems. It’s amazing and powerful participatory research and support for strategy.
- To that end, I have been also been working closely with evaluators in some interesting emerging community projects as well as developing teaching modules to run workshops on participatory methods and evaluation.
That’s the basic strategic work. There is lots of capacity building work I’m doing as well. For me that focuses on teaching, first and foremost:
- Teaching Art of Hosting workshops, including upcoming ones in the next year on Bowen Island, and in the Whitehorse, Montreal, and Calgary.
- Teaching complexity courses. One with Bronagh Gallagher focused on complexity for social activists, and one with Caitlin Frost on complexity basics, using Human Systems Dynamics, Cynefin, The Work and dialogue methods. I’ve taught several one and two day complexity course this past year, and feel like we’ve really got a good introductory course.
- A one day workshop on dialogic containers that I gave to good reviews at Nanzan University in Japan. It is based on two papers I wrote over the past few years on Hosting and Holding Dialogic Containers, and one Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework (now mooshed with Glenda Eoyang’s CDE framework) as a way of using containers to work with complexity. At Nanzen, Caitlin added a neat little piece on Self as Container as well.
- A course on evaluation, which I first offered online with Beehive Productions this past winter, and then has developed into a two day course offered in New York with Rita Fierro and Dominica McBride. That might morph again and meet the Art of Hosting, so if you’re and evaluator, look out for an offering that joins up those two worlds.
- Leadership 2020, a nine month participatory leadership program for leaders in the Social Services Sector and child and family services ministries in British Columbia. We are coming up on ten years of this work, with a redesigned program so that we can get more leaders through it in a slightly compressed time frame.
- I continue to offer a one-day course at Simon Fraser University on World Cafe and Open Space Technology as part of the certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. You can come to that if you like.
- And I have a few coaching clients as well, folks I spend an hour or so with here and there, thinking through issues in their own practice, working on workshop designs and supporting their confidence to take risk.
As for writing, I have long promised a book on Chaordic Design, and that may still come to pass, but I can see it now being a joint effort with my partner Caitlin Frost. We have been using the Chaordic Stepping Stones tool in every context imaginable and have a ton of stories of application to share. The basic model on my website is due for a revision as well, so perhaps I’l have a chance to do that in the coming few months. When Caitlin and I can find some time to go away and write, we might actually get some stuff on the page.
And here is the blog, my old friend, the place I have recorded thoughts and insights and ideas and events over the past 17 years or so. It needs a bit of attention and it needs to be used, so look for more blog posts more frequently. And they won’t all be well crafted essays – could be just more musings, things that are longer than tweets, and that properly belong free in the world and not locked into the blue prison of facebook. Maybe you’ll even see something of the other passions that are in my life, including my love of soccer, music, and some of the local community projects I’m up to.
Does any of that grab your interest? Is there anything you’d like to hear more about? Can I support your organization or community, or individual practice in any way? Wanna play?
On the Art of Hosting email list last month, there was an inquiry posted by Monica Nissén asking about scaling the Art of Hosting as a leadership practice through levels of engagement. By “Art of Hosting” Monica means the four fold practice, which is the basic framework for leadership that gives our community a coherent centre of practice, around presence, participation, hosting others, and co-creation. Monica asked whether hoping these practices would just go viral in a networked way is enough, and I replied with the following, tracing a couple of long term projects I have been involved in that have supported systems change in child and family services in British Columbia.
It’s definitely deliberate and networked. For me, it’s about building capacity. Our biggest work the last 9 years has been providing the Leadership 2020 program to social service workers in British Columbia working with children, youth and families in agencies, indigenous communities and government.
(You can read a summary of our five year evaluation of this program here)
We continue to developmentally evaluate as we go, and as a result, each cohort is different, each curriculum is slightly changed and we find new and more relevant ways to introduce people to this practice.
The basis of that program is a leadership approach that is very similar and deeply informed by what we in the Art of Hosting community know as the four-fold practice: that great leadership is personal, practice-based, participatory and perceptive. The program is structured in cohorts made up of people that have to apply. We mix “legacy” leaders with experienced and emerging leaders to show that learning never ends. Each cohort participates in two 5 day residencies – which are basically extended Art of Hosting workshops – and a nine month program of learning in between, featuring webinars and coaching and peer support for the application of tools and methods.
Over the past eight years we have brought about 450 people through the program. While it’s about learning in participatory ways, the program has a kind of hidden agenda. We are very clear that, about every 20 years or so, the child welfare system in our province goes through a massive restructuring, often provoked by a crisis, but not always. We have always invited our participants to both practice their leadership on the issues that are immediately in front of them, but to do it in a way that builds their capacity to respond when that later transformation happens. We want them to be the first to run to the centre when the old system is dying, eager to use their capacity, relationships, and practice to create the new.
In these days, the system is now beginning that deeper transformation, and fortunately it hasn’t been preceded by a crises. Instead, the woman who founded the Leadership 2020 program, Jennifer Charlesworth, was appointed to a five-year term as the Representative for Children and Youth in British Columbia, a very powerful position that is independent of the government and that can make powerful recommendations about systems change, usually as a result of different issues or events. Jennifer is bringing a collaborative approach to her work and to be successful in that, she is partly relying on the 450 Leadership 2020 graduates that are spread all through the system. There is a built-in capacity that is being invited into its biggest calling, reaching across traditional divides of indigenous/non-indigenous and government/community. Jennifer’s appointment to the position was received with widespread enthusiasm and optimism. We are hoping to see that the system is able to evolve faster with this capacity embedded in a way that is less painful than a collapse and transformation.
Participatory practices have been used for a long time in the field of social work and child and family services. In 2003 I started working with David Stevenson to use Open Space, Cafe, Circle, and the four fold practice to begin to build an indigenous governance systems for child and family services in BC. Our colleagues Kris Archie and Kyla Mason, Pawa Hayupis and many other indigenous Art of Hosting practitioners came into and out of that work. Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen and Patricia Galaczy joined us to teach Art of Hosting to families and community members who were participating in that work: http://www.turtleisland.org/healing/healing-cousins.htm. Between 2003 and 2009 we did something important on Vancouver Island. We started something and then had to abandon it for a different form, because not every idea works. But David later took that work with him into his work in executive positions in government. Kris has now become the CEO of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and Kyra has become an extraordinary executive director of Usma, a Nuu-Chah-Nulth agency on Vancouver Island. Pawa is currently doing her Masters of Arts in indigenous governance and she and David continue to offer Art of Hosting trainings locally, as do Caitlin and I. In each of these new settings capacity building for participatory leadership has been used.
Meanwhile, Jennifer and a small group of us began Leadership 2020 in 2011. It has taken 15 years of developing leadership at the grass roots level and seeing that leadership grow into positions of power that has allowed us to work with the system this way. There is capacity in BC now, hopefully enough to take the system through the changes that are now coming, the ones we have prepared for, the ones we are waiting for, the ones we are making, and the ones that will surprise us.
It takes courage, patience, time, power, stewardship, relationship, and community to do this work. It takes a common language and shared perspectives and it takes massive diversity and difference to build resourcefulness and resilience. It is costly, politically, emotionally and materially, and it is not easy work. It requires a fierce commitment to relationship and a willingness to be at the edge of safety, with one foot out into the dangerous world. You get uplifted, hurt, angry, and joyful. But it’s a long game and you cannot sacrifice the depth of the work for ease and comfort. And no one person or team can do it alone.
It is not enough to do some trainings and walk away. The viral network does not just magically appear. Beautiful workshop experiences are only useful for systems change if they are connected to power. It requires staying in.
I just realized a few weeks ago that, although I never intended to work in the field of child and family services, that this may indeed be my life’s work. It has been nearly 20 years since I first walked into Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services to take on a job organizing their negotiations to become a “delegated agency” able to make decisions for and with indigenous children and families instead of government doing it. I think in that time I’ve learned a bit about what it takes to create the capacity in a large system that gives us a chance. That’s all I can say we’ve done at the moment, but I’m an optimist, so I live with the hope and gratitude that the legacy of the work we have done will make the world better for the kids who suffer the most in it.
Many times when clients contact me they ask if I can help them come to consensus or alignment on their shared purpose or desired outcomes. They expect facilitation will help them to do this.
Sometimes this is a good idea. If we are working in a highly constrained project, like building a new building, getting everyone on the same page is important. But it’s also easy. All you have to do is bring in the experts, design a good implementation plan for a good solution and have project managers keep everyone on track, step by step. Most organizations are good at that, and if they aren’t they can easily learn the skills to do it.
Its not the linear project managers that are the problem. Its the problem that is the problem.
Conditioned to planning and implementing in this linear fashion, many organizations get flummoxed when they confront a problem with no obvious solution and no clear pathway forward. There may be multiple ways to think about the issues, multiple experiences of what is happening, and divergent and even contradictory desires around where we should be going. These kinds of wicked, seemingly intractable problems breed conflict, and the only recourse for leaders is to tolerate it for a while and then impose a solution with no guarantee that folks will be happy, or even that the solution is the best one possible.
These kinds of problems are complex: wicked, sticky, intractable, Volitile Uncertain Ccomplex and Ambiguous. Tough nuts to crack. There are lots of ways to describe them and lots of ways they drive frustration and conflict.
The common reactive response to these situations seems to be to first gather more information and try harder to find the obvious answer and try to get everyone on the same page. When I’m first working with clients experiencing these kinds of issues, I try to steer them away from certainty and alignment. I point out that in complex environments you don;t get to predict outcomes and you need to look for emergent practices and emergent solutions. Innovation never looks like something you’ve ever done before. Studying the present for the answer will not turn up the gold lying just out of eyesight under a rock. Complex solutions are for all practical purposes, infinitely unpredictable.
So what is the answer? Throw a bunch of ideas at teh wall and see what sticks?
Well, sometimes that can work, especially if you are truly out of ideas. But generally you have something to go on: a sense of direction, a sense that HERE isn’t where we want to be and that there is probably a better THERE that we should get to.
The issues is that, if we truly knew how to get from the undesirable HERE to the much coveted THERE, we probably would have done it by now. In complexity work, the first step here is admitting that trying to achieve pre-planned outcomes simply won’t work. Instead we need to go in a direction of travel towards a better place.
There are a couple of key ways to get started here. First, I always have groups spend time describing their current situation. We are looking for the patterns and dynamics that keep the system stuck in a place that isn’t working. Sometimes this can involve sophisticated research and narrative capture and other times it’s a simpler process of observation and pattern detection. Understanding the state of play helps us to discover an important secret, and that is, the inclination of the system to change.
Imagine an organization whose culture is fragmented and siloed with petty conflicts and turf wars over resources. Politics is rampant and some people seem to be at work only to stir the pot and not actually do the work. If you are a leader you might want to try to ay down the law and tell everyone to smarten up and focus on the organization’s mission. That never works. You can’t simply command a culture to change.
Instead you might convene a group of people to talk about what would be better. And people may say that they want a place that is more collaborative, more connected, and more fun to be at. What you have there is a group of people describing a preferred direction. It’s different from an outcome. It is instead a starting place, a place to orient their inquiry and their work to change things.
One thing you can do is begin by looking for places of positive deviency in the system. Bad as it is, there may well be people that are nevertheless already working in the preferred way, even in small ways. Those stories give you something to experiment with, and they reveal an inclination in the system that might lead to change. Conversely you may find that literally no one is working in this way and that the organization is truly mired in a pattern of deep dysfunction. In this case, the way forward is a radical breaking of the patterns that keep it in place.
Doing both of these things is a wise way to get started. INstead of requiring everyone to work together towards a common goal, you give space to people to work in small and diverse ways to discover how they might nudge the system towards a better THERE.
If you watch a river for a while you will notice that the river flows in both directions at once. Little obstacles in the river, like logs and rocks, create eddies that cause the current to turn back on itself. A living river is full of these back eddies and contradictory currents. Small creatures take refuge there, food and nutrients get trapped there and don’t all wash away to the sea. At the finest granularity of scale, it may even seem that the river is flowing backwards.
And yet the direction of the water i undeniable. It flows down, towards the sea and will always find the low point in its terrain.
That’s how strategic direction looks in complexity. Choose a direction, try multiple things that might work or might not. Contradict each other. Find the places where someone is working against the current and thriving in that little back eddy. Commit to a direction and see what can get you to go that way.
Rivers sit in a topography and changing the landscape is very hard. But changing the culture of a team or and organization can be easier if you work at the level of patterns. Find the patterns that hold behaviours in place and try small things to shift them . See what happens. In organizations you do get the shift the river banks.
It’s more work than making everyone sign your pledge of values, but it’s more meaningful, because the change you get is creative, co-owned and sustainable.
Some interesting links that caught my eye this week.
Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever
Leonard Susskind has linked the growth of black holes to increasing complexity. Is it true that the world is becoming more complex?
“It’s not only black hole interiors that grow with time. The space of cosmology grows with time,” he said. “I think it’s a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity. And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I don’t know the answer.”
With a Green New Deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation
This is the vision I have been asking for from our governments. This vision is the one that would get me on board with using our existing oil and gas resources to manufacture and fund and infrastructure to accelerate this future for my kids. The cost of increasing fossil fuel use is so high, it needs to be accompanied by a commitment to faster transition to this kind of world. Read the whole thing.
Why we suck at ‘solving wicked problems”
Sonja Blignault is one of the people in the world with whom I share the greatest overlap of theory and practice curiosities regarding complexity. I know this, because whenever she posts something on her blog I almost always find myself wishing I had written that! Here’s a great post of five things we can do to disrupt thinking about problem solving to enable us to work much better with complexity.
Money and technology are hugely valuable resources: they are certaintly necessary but they are not sufficient. Simply throwing more money and/or more advanced technology at a problem will not make it go away. We need to fundamentally change our thinking paradigm and approach things in context-appropriate ways, otherwise we will never move the needle on these so-called wicked problems.
rock/paper/scissors and beyond
I miss Bernie DeKoven. Since he died earlier this year I’ve missed seeing his poetic and playful blog posts about games and fun. Here is one from his archives about variations on rock/paper/scissors
The relationship between the two players is both playful and intimate. The contest is both strategic and arbitrary. There are rumors that some strategies actually work. Unless, of course, the players know what those strategies are. Sometimes, choosing a symbol at random, without logic or forethought, is strategically brilliant. Other times, it’s just plain silly.
So they play, nevertheless. Believing whatever it is that they want or need to believe about the efficacy of their strategies, knowing that there is no way to know.
The longer they play together, the more mystical the game becomes.
They play between mind and mindlessness. For the duration of the game, they occupy both worlds. The fun may not feel special, certainly not mystical. But the reality they are sharing is most definitely something that can only be found in play.
How Evaluation Supports Systems Change
An unassuming little article that outlines five key practices that could be the basis of a five-day deep dive into complexity and evaluation. I found this article earlier in the year, and notice that my own practice and attention has come back to these five points over and over.
While evaluation is often conducted as a means to learn about the progress or impact of an initiative, evaluative thinking and continuous learning can be particularly important when working on complex issues in a constantly evolving system. And, when evaluation goes hand in hand with strategy, it helps organizations challenge their assumptions, gather information on the progress, effects, and influence of their work, and see new opportunities for adaptation and change.