My friends at Bring on the Zoo in The Netherlands publish a little series of bookmarks with resources for their clients and workshop participants. The asked me for a recommendation of 10 books to help you work with complexity and here’s what I came up with. I hope some of these are new to you.
Accessible Theory (Because you need theory)
Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown
A personal and vulnerable account of working in complexity with inspiration and resources you may have never seen before.
Simple Habits for Complex Times, Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnson
Accessible theory situated in stories that will help you relate to the leadership challenges posed by complexity.
Adaptive Action, Glenda H. Eoyang and Royce J. Holladay
Practical models and tools for understanding complex systems and shifting patterns
Facilitation (Because you need tools)
The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless
33 group methods grounded in good theory and practice which engage total participation
The Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision Making, Sam Kaner, et. al.
The classic text for working through the stages of emergence in groups.
Going Horizontal, Samantha Slade
Applying participatory practices and methods to everyday organizational life.
The Circle Way, Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea
The mother of all meeting methods, and the core of good facilitation practice.
The World Cafe, Juanita Brown et. al.
Beyond the method, and into the power of conversational leadership to transform.
Personal Practice (Because you need to keep it together)
Loving What Is, Byron Katie
A simple and profound practice for transforming your limiting beliefs
Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödron
Short teachings on how to stay present with compassion and courage when you don’t know what’s happening.
So there you go, that will get you started. And if you want to come over to Bowen Island to read them, and you want the view pictured above, come visit Zack and Renee at Tell Your Friends Cafe, on the pier.
Recently I have had several jobs that have required large group complex facilitation. Sometimes this work involves using methods like Open Space Technology or World Cafe, and other times it requires new designs and processes customized for the work.
When I say “complex facilitation” I mean running group processes that are grounded in complexity theory and intended to move a group towards emergent outcomes. I first heard this term used by Sonja Blignault and Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge, to describe this kind of facilitation. (Sonja has a great post on this stuff!) These are facilitation techniques and approaches that are required for large groups of people to engage in strategy, sensemaking, planning, and evaluation when the direction forward is unclear and the outcomes are unpredictable or unknown. It is a basic feature of all my facilitation practise, but when I’m doing new things with new designs, methods and processes, I’m most keenly aware of the nature of the work. So over the past few weeks, I’ve been able to reflect on both what complex facilitation is and what is required to do it well.
Here are a few thoughts.
Complex facilitation is highly participatory. Even in a large group setting, complex facilitation requires the active participation of everyone in the room. You will rarely find a meeting I’m running where you have the time to check your email, or just observe. I create exercises and use processes that require active and relatively equal participation. This begins with the invitation process, where we work hard to ensure that there is a diverse group of people, experiences, and perspectives involved in the project. It requires participants to be prepared to work in a participatory way, and it requires processes that ensure that everyone has a chance to meaningfully contribute to the outcomes. This means designing and using structures that move between large and small group sessions, and never leave people sitting and listening in plenary too long.
Outcomes are emergent and therefore unknown at the beginning. There is no pre-determined destination in complex facilitation. We may have the purpose of making a decision, producing a report, or assembling a plan, but the basic content of those outputs is emergent. It arises from the interactions between the participants. As a facilitator, I have to be very careful not to influence the outcomes of the work, especially when the work is making meaning of patterns that are important to the group. I have to avoid using examples to illustrate the exercises drawn from the group’s context. I spend a lot of preparation time thinking of examples to use that won’t colour the group’s sensemaking work. During the work, I have to be deeply conscious of the way I talk and interact with the group, so as not to impose my view of things on them.
Use stories and base the work in reality. One thing I have learned from my work informed by complexity practitioners like Dave Snowden, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Cynthia Kurtz, and Glenda Eoyang is to base your strategic work in reality. This means prepping strategic work with a process to collect stories and narratives from the organization or community. Over the past couple of years, I have started using tools like Sensemaker and Cynthia Kurtz’s NarraFirma to do this work. These tools have the advantage of collecting data from people in their context which means that when they come to a large group meeting, they are able to work with material that has been collected rather than generating stories in a workshop context that can sometimes be influenced by bias, habit, and other kinds of cognitive entrainment. I also work with methods that can generate narratives in the workshop itself, but if it’s possible, undertaking a narrative capture beforehand makes the work more meaningful.
Remember that all complexity work is about patterns. When working with complex facilitation techniques, I’m constantly designing processes and shifting them based on pattern intelligence. In designing and working with patterns, I rely on my version of the ABIDE heuristic: I pay attention to Attractors, Boundaries, Identities, Differences and Exchanges in a process. When the group needs shifting, these are the basic areas I get to influence. If unhealthy issues are arising in a group, my job is to try to shift the patterns to bring the group to emerging health and coherence (note: this does not mean suppressing dissent or conflict!). Work with patterns and you’ll avoid the temptation to meddle in the content.
Work with cognitive stress and overload. The word “facilitation” comes from the Latin word facilitare which means “to make things easy.” That is not the goal of complex facilitation. Instead, the facilitator works with cognitive overload and stress, deliberately shifting the process between mentally heavy activities and things that are lighter and allow for cognitive recovery. The reason for doing this is to ensure that participants are constantly challenging their patterns and biases. Especially in sensemaking sessions, participants who simply go to the easy answers are not finding the novel. Innovation is very hard work and requires people to both think and act differently. I’m sure many folks who have worked with me will testify about how much they struggled in sessions when we were trying to do new things. That struggle is brains wrestling with habits and preferences. Facilitators need to be skillful in introducing good stress and overload that doesn’t break a group but causes people to authentically find new things. Work hard and eat avocadoes and blueberries.
Not everyone will enjoy it. As a result of cognitive overload and the messiness of the room strewn with markers and posit it notes, you will find that not everyone will enjoy a complex facilitation session. I try to prepare people as much as possible for the work, and almost always warn them ahead of time that the day will be challenging, and they are invited to stay in it. But in a large group of folks, there will always be people who have a crappy time. Try not to create processes that have this result, but also learn and remember that not everyone is going to be thrilled to work in this way. I’ve been in this situation both as a participant and as a facilitator, and I’m okay with it.
You don’t have a safety net. The more experienced one gets at complex facilitation, the more frequently one operates without a safety net. It can feel risky facilitating in this way, even with a couple of decades of experience under one’s belt. I still often get nervous and fearful in these kinds of workshops, and I’m on high alert. I have developed good self-awareness practices to know when my anxiousness is seeping into my facilitation. This is critical for facilitators of all kinds but especially those who engage in this kind of work. It is not uncommon to find oneself receiving criticism and mistrust, especially as a group is going through a groan zone together. Have a good practice and you can remain a resourceful facilitator. That is the only safety net you get!
For many years I have been teaching Cynefin as a foundational framework in complexity and participatory leadership workshops and retreats. For me it’s the best and most accessible way to explain the differences between complex problems and other kinds of problems and why we need to make complexity-based interventions in complex systems.
And while there are great ways to start learning about ontology in a lecture format, or using te examples of a children’s birthday party, I’m rather inclined to playing games as a way of understanding different types of systems before we do any teaching at all. Especially when you are teaching Cynefin by referring to constraints, games are super useful because a game is really just a constrained system.
My go to games involve movement and various challenges inspired by theatre exercises, and I’ve documented them before. This morning I needed to create a new suite of games for a context in which free movement was itself constrained (two participants in wheelchairs and a room that was not big enough for good and open movement.) I went to my arsenal of improvisation games and came up with these three games. We did these in groups of about 6-7 people.
- In your group, recite the English alphabet in order one letter at a time. Go around the circle, with each person saying one letter at a time.
- In your group, this time you will construct a 26 word story by each person contributing a word that starts with the next letter in the alphabet. Go in order around the circle, one word from each person. The theme of the story is “Our journey to the retreat centre.”
- In your group you have 3 minutes to tell a one word story about a mythical and legendary community event. Each person contributes one word at a time and you go clockwise around the circle. I will let you know when you have 30 seconds left to wrap up your story.
You can see that these three games map on to the Obvious, Complicated and Complex domains of Cynefin and although they are variations of the same process, the way we use constraints is what dictates the nature of the game.
In the first game, there is a rule: recite the alphabet in order, one person at a time. There is no room for creativity and in fact a best practice – singing The Alphabet Song – help you to do it. If anyone in the group doesn’t know the alphabet, it’s easy enough to google it and show them so they don’t lose their place.
In the second game, there was more latitude for participants to ad something, but they were still constrained by the alphabet scheme and the rule of one word at a time, going in a circle. Again, expertise helps here, as people can remind others that they skipped a letter for example, but increasingly the story is emergent and there is more unpredictability in the exercise. It’s also worth pointing out how people game the system by schoosing words that fit the rules rather than words that contribute to the story. The rules are far more influential constraints than the purpose of the exercise. This leads to all kinds of discussion about why it’s easy in large system to justify your work by just doing your part rather than by what you added to the whole. This is a good example of governing constraints.
In the third game we free the participants from all constraints except one word at a time, in a circle. The theme of the story becomes more important, because word choice is ENABLED by the theme which constraints options. Enabling constraints are at play, and I offered people a couple of heuristics from the improve world in order to hep them if they were stuck:
- Accept the offer and be changed by it
- Make your partner look good by building on the offer
- Don’t be afraid to fail
One word at a time stories can sometimes be very powerful and moving as they emerge from people co-creating something together. You can see how small changes cause the story to go in a radically different direction and participants can often feel their desire to control the narrative dashed on the rocks of different offers. With fewer GOVERNING constraints in place, people feel freer to make mistakes and fail, especially knowing that others may be waiting to work with their material anyway.
So there you go: a new way to experientially learn ontology before diving into Cynefin to explain and make sense of what we just did.
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.
I live on a small island in the sea with a very complicated water supply. We have some community water systems, and a complex geology that means that many people are on wells, and nearly every well seems different. As our population increases, and as the moisture decreases, we are finding ourselves subject to more and more restrictions on what we can do with water. This is as it should be. We cannot live on our island beyond our limits, with a bigger water footprint than the water we have available to us. In the past, you were free to run taps as long as you want. Now we are metered and in some neighbourhoods there are daily sue restrictions. Signs at the entrance to these areas say “Converse Water Or Have None.” It’s not an alarmist message. It is true.
One of the arguments I often hear people using against things like climate change mitigation is that it will somehow restrict their freedom. Libertarians, for whom all taxation is theft, protest against carbon pricing as a tax grab, even though it was always the preferred mechanism of free market economists. Oil companies and manufacturers complain about excessive regulation of fuel standards and emissions, and consumers object to high prices which limit what they are able to do.
Climate change requires a radical shift in the way economies and societies work, and it’s interesting to look at this from a complexity perspective. Ideally in a society you want to manage complex dynamics with complexity based policy solutions. In other words, instead of dictating behaviours, it’s better to influence behaviours by incentivizing things that lead in a positive direction and dis-incentivizing things that lead in a negative direction. This can be done with laws, regulations, pricing incentives, policies, and taxation. These attractors and boundaries create the conditions for behaviour change.
The free market is indeed a self-organizing mechanism, but it is also amoral. There is a reason why, even in the United States where gun ownership is a right, there are plenty of weapons and firearms that are highly restricted and outright banned. There is a good reason why it illegal to dispose of PCBs and dioxin in the atmosphere, despite the fact that for years companies used the fact that air wasn’t taxed to dump their waste products. So markets are regulated and behaviours change. That is a complexity based approach to trouble.
In chaos, the only response is a massive imposition of constraints and restriction of people’s freedom. Think of situation in which you might have required a first responder like a paramedic. If you are injured, you will accept a high degree of control over your life in order to stabilize the situation. First responders impose sometimes extreme levels of command and control to manage a situation. When things are more stable and heading out of chaos, the constraints relax and the complex task of healing or rebuilding or moving on can begin.
The argument I find myself making with folks who object to climate solutions is this: if you think that a simple carbon tax is an infringement on your freedom now, are you willing to live with that freedom now in exchange for much more brutal constraints on your freedom later? As climate emergencies continue to increase, it is very likely that people will be told where they can live and where they cannot, how they are allowed to travel, how much water they can use, what they can do with their land. The increase of control over people increases with the level of crisis and chaos. At a certain point you simply cannot live free beyond the limits of your bio-physical system to maintain you. The system imposes the constraints, and you will have no choice but to be told what to do.
For libertarians and others who value personal choice, now is actually the time to get on board with the complexity tools that can help us make choices that limit our impact on the climate. If we fail to influence populations into positive choices now – and it may already be too late – we will find ourselves increasingly being subjected to highly controlled environments later. One way or the other, our freedom to do whatever we want needs to be curtailed. We have lived for decades in unmitigated commercial and economic freedom on the backs of future generations, and the planet is telling us that it’s over. Choose differently now, or be told what to do later.