Sonja Blignault has been blogging some terrific stuff on Paul Cilliers’ work on complexity. Specifically she has been riffing on Cilliers’ seven characteristics of complex systems and the implications of complexity for organizations.
Yesterday I was teaching an Art of Hosting here in Calgary, where we were looking at Cynefin and then followed with a discussion about how the nature of complex systems compels us to make important design choices when we are facilitating participatory processes to do work in organizations.
This is a cursory list, but I thought it would be helpful to share here. Cilliers’ text is bold.
Complex systems consist of a large number of elements that in themselves can be simple.
If you are planning participatory processes, don’t focus on working on the simple problems that are the elements in complexity. Instead, you need to gather information about those many simple elements and use facilitation methods to look for patterns together. We talk about describing the system before interpreting it. Getting a sense of the bits and pieces ensures that you don’t begin strategic process work with high level aspirations.
The elements interact dynamically by exchanging energy or information. These interactions are rich. Even if specific elements only interact with a few others, the effects of these interactions are propagated throughout the system. The interactions are nonlinear.
Non-lienarity is truly one of those things that traditional planning processes fail to understand. We want to always be heading towards a goal, despite the fact that in complex systems such controlled progress is impossible. What we need to be doing is choosing a direction to move in and make decisions and choices that are coherent with that direction, all the while keeping a careful watch on what is happening and what effect our decisions have. Participatory processes help us to make sense of what we are seeing, and convening regular meetings of people to look through data and seen what is happening is essential, especially if we are making decisions on innovative approaches. Avoid creating processes that assume casualty going forward; don’t make plans that are based on linear chains of events that take us from A to B. Traditional vision, mission goals and objectives planning has little usefulness in a complex system. Instead, focus on the direction you want to move in and a set of principles or values that help you make decisions in that direction.
There are many direct and indirect feedback loops.
The interactions between the parts of a systems happen in a myriad of ways. To keep your strategy adapting, you need to build in feedback loops that work at a variety of time scales. Daily journalling, weekly sense making and project cycle reporting can all be useful. Set up simple and easily observable monitoring criteria that help you to watch what you are doing and decide how to adjust when that criteria are triggered. Build in individual and collective ways to harvest and make sense of what you are seeing.
Complex systems are open systems—they exchange energy or infor- mation with their environment—and operate at conditions far from equilibrium.
You need to understand that there are factors outside your control that are affecting the success or failure of your strategy. Your and your people are constantly interacting with the outside world. Understand these patterns as they can often be more important than your strategy. In participatory process and strategy building I love it when we bring in naive experts to contribute ideas from outside our usual thinking. In natural systems, evolution and change is powered by what happens at the edges ad boundaries, where a forest interacts with a meadow, or a sea with a shoreline. these ecotones are the places of greatest life, variety and influence in a system. Build participatory process that bring in ideas from the edge.
Complex systems have memory, not located at a specific place, but distributed throughout the system. Any complex system thus has a history, and the history is of cardinal importance to the behavior of the system.
Complex systems are organized into patterns and those patterns are the results of many many decisions and actions over time. Decisions and actions often converge around attractors and boundaries in a system and so understanding these “deep yes’s and deep no’s” as I call them is essential to working in complexity. You are never starting from a blank state, so begin by engaging people in understanding the system, look for the patterns that enable and the patterns that keep us stuck, and plan accordingly.
The behavior of the system is determined by the nature of the interactions, not by what is contained within the components. Since the interactions are rich, dynamic, fed back, and, above all, nonlinear, the behavior of the system as a whole cannot be predicted from an inspection of its components. The notion of “emergence” is used to describe this aspect. The presence of emergent properties does not provide an argument against causality, only against deterministic forms of prediction.
So again, work with patterns of behaviour, not individual parts. And of course, as Dave Snowden is fond of saying, to shift patterns, shift the way the actors interact. Don’t try to change the actors. Once, when working on the issue of addictions stigma in health care, the health authority tried running a project to address stigmatizing behaviours with awareness workshops. The problem was, they couldn’t find anyone that admitted to stigmatizing behaviours. Instead, we ran a series of experiments to change the way people work together around addictions and people with addictions (including providing recognition and help for health care workers who themselves suffered from addictions). That is the way to address an emergent phenomenon.
Complex systems are adaptive. They can (re)organize their internal structure without the intervention of an external agent.
And so your strategy must also be adaptive. I’m learning a lot about Principles Based Evaluation these days which is a useful way to craft strategy in complex domains. Using principles allows people to make decisions consistent and coherent with the preferred direction of travel the strategy is taking us in. when the strategy needs to adapt, because conditions have changed, managers can rely on principles to structure new responses to changing conditions. Participatory processes become essential in interpreting principles for current conditions.
This is a bit of a brain dump, and as usual it makes more sense to me that perhaps it does to everyone else. But I’d be very interested in your reflections on what you are hearing here, especially as it relates to how we craft, design and deliver participatory processes in the service of strategy, planning and implementation.
In the Cynefin framework, the domains are really shades with some clear boundaires. Strategic work using Cynefin is about making various moves between different domains for different reasons. This is called Cynefin dynamics, and there’s an old but good paper on it here.
In Cynefin dynamics there is a strategic move of “taking a shallow dive into chaos” which is useful for strategic purposes when one needs to break pattern entrainment. It is a very useful move in teaching contexts when we are trying to get people to let go of some of their fixed ways of seeing and doing things. Even putting a group in a circle can be a shallow dive into chaos. The idea here is that in complexity you have a system with a permeable boundary with lots of connections between the elements in the system (people, ideas, resources). That allows for emergence to happen. In chaos, the connections break down and you need to hold a tight container – nothing is emerging, everything is breaking. So if you want to take a shallow dive into chaos, the container needs to be very tight, very constrained, and the relationships between people and ideas that are within that container are very open. That’s how you break patterns without creating a deep experience of chamos, which would be when everything breaks down, including the container. Sometimes that is required, but there is a much lower likelihood of recovering from that kind of thing. I wouldn’t call that “leadership.” It’s more like “abandonment.” No one wants to create a deep dive into chaos unless you want to create a civil war or a revolution, and even then you have no right to expect you’ll survive it.
Chaos is a very high energy state, and it costs a lot to be in it. As a result systems (or learners) that are in a state of chaos won’t stay there for long. Typically they will respond to the first person that comes along and applies tight constraints (think about a paramedic arriving on the scene of an accident). From the perspective of the person in chaos, anything that helps stabilize the situation is welcome.
This can make chaos in systems VERY VERY vulnerable to unchecked power. In times of war, fear or conflict, it is very easy for people to choose and trust despotic leaders that bring tight constraints to the situation, because bringing constraints is actually the right move. I have seen meetings and gatherings happen where chaos was deliberately triggered (sometimes under the guise of “there’s not enough happening in this container”) and then people come in and hijack the agenda and apply their own power. In my experience, very few people are deeply skilled at initiating deep levels of chaos to break patterns and then creating complexity responses (rather than imposing their will), but on the national scale perhaps Iceland is an example.
In workshops sometimes participants want to question or check the power of the facilitators. This has happened twice to my colleague Tuesday Ryan-Hart and I when we have taught groups of activists who seized on her power teaching to question the power dynamics of teacher/student within the workshop. In both cases we took responsibility as hosts to hold a tight container in which the relationships could dissolve and so that the group itself could discover what to do next. We did this by suspending the agenda and hosting a circle and a Council. The decisions that came out were both group owned and I think made the workshop a better learning experience for everyone AND proved the efficacy of our tools and processes. I have seen other examples where the hosts did not take that responsibility and instead the participants were left designing their own gathering. That kind of thing is poor strategy in chaos, unless you are planning on just abandoning the situation and letting others take over, in which case it’s an excellent strategy to ensure you’ll never be invited back (I have also done this sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally.)
So that is the kind of decision that you have to make from time to time. Working with constraints is what leaders and teachers do. Being conscious about that is good practice.
At his two day class last week in Vancouver, Dave Snowden presented this constraints based take on Cynefin and shared the evolution of the framework. There is now a new version of this known as “liminal Cynefin” that explores the boundary conditions between complicated and complex and complex and chaotic. I like this because it begins to highlight how dynamic the framework is. I use Cynefin to explain systems and I use the Chaordic Path to talk about developing the leadership capacity to stay in the dynamism of flows around these types of systems.
One of the things I am learning reading Stuart Kauffman’s book “Reinventing the Sacred” is just how powerful and pervasive the phenomenon of creative emergence is at every level in our world. From the very tiny chemical interactions that begin to define what life is, up to the order of the planetary biosphere and noosphere to the cosmic scale, emergence from pre-adaptions is a pattern that is everywhere, that offers a counterpoint to the reductionism of physics and yet does not violate the laws of physics at all. This paragraph sums up his premise:
“We are beyond the hegemony of the reductionism of half a century ago. We have seen that Darwinian natural selection and biological functions are not reducible to physics. We have seen that my law of collectively autocatalytic sets in the origin of life is also not reducible to physics. We have seen creditable evidence that science is moving forward towards an explanation for the natural emergence of life, agency, meaning, value, and doing. We have, thus, seen emergence with respect to a pure reductionism. Thanks to the nonergodicity and historicity of the universe above the level of atoms, the evolution of the biosphere by Darwinian preadaptations cannot be foretold, and the familiar Newtonian way of doing science fails. Such preadaptations point to a ceaseless creativity in the evolution of the biosphere. If by a natural law we mean a compact prior description of the regularities of the phenomena in question, the evolution of the biosphere via preadaptations is not describable by law. We will soon find its analogues in economic and cultural evolution, which, like the biosphere, are self-consistently self-constructing but evolving wholes whose constituents are partially lawless. This is a radically different scientific worldview than we have known. I believe this new scientific worldview breaks the Galilean spell of the sufficiency of natural law. In its place is a freedom we do not yet understand, but ceaseless creativity in the universe, biosphere, and human life are its talismans. I believe this creativity suffices to allow us to reinvent the sacred as the stunning reality we live in. But even more is at stake. Our incapacity to predict Darwinian preadaptations, when their analogues arise in our everyday life, demands of us that we rethink the role of reason itself, for reason cannot be a sufficient guide to live our lives forward, unknowing. We must come to see reason as part of a still mysterious entirety of our lives, when we often radically cannot know what will occur but must act anyway. We do, in fact, live forward into mystery. Thus we, too, are a part of the sacred we must reinvent.” (from “Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion” by Stuart A. Kauffman)
Now I want to be clear that despite my interest in theology, I am not reading this book from a theological perspective. In fact I am wondering a bit why Kauffman insists on tying his amazing proposition to the idea of “the sacred” because it actually makes for something of a distraction in his narrative. And as we get into the extension of his ideas into the economic and cultural realms, the idea of the sacred seems less and less interesting. What is more interesting is to see the parallels between the physical and biological acts of creative emergence and the way in which our cultural, social and economic lives are intertwined with natural processes.
To me this is the good part about this book. It validates that approaches to complexity and emergence are necessary parts of human social life and we need to relearn them (perhaps even re-place them as sacred epistemologies alongside the religion of reductionism) and put them to use to counter the dark stuff that has crept into our human world through our cleverness and addiction to a method of analysis that reduces the world and it’s problems to mere parts.
If you are as much as a complexity theory geek as I am becoming, you might appreciate this map by Brian Castellani that links to the founders of the various branches of complexity science. The map is described as “s a macroscopic, transdisciplinary introduction to the complexity sciences spanning 1940-2015. ” It is a fantastic resource because each of the founders of a branch of this science are represented by links to archives of their work. You could read for hours. Days even.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post that was critical of the way in which the Representative for Children in Youth in British Columbia drove practice changes among social workers. In short the reason had to do with apply too much order (rules and checklists) in a complex space (social work practice). At a certain point, when you are trying to prevent deaths that have occurred in the past, you end up outlawing all but the deaths that will surprise you in the future. We look at reviews of child deaths as if they were expected and predictable and create highly ordered accountability mechanisms to prevent them from happening again. The problem with this, as anyone knows who works with complexity, is that you create a break between good social work practice which is sensitive to nuance and context, and rigorous accountability standards. While no one is arguing that social workers should not be accountable, what is required is the ability for social workers to develop and rely on their practice, because no amount of rules will prevent children from dying in novel ways, but good social work practice does have an effect. In fact, checklists over practice almost ensure children will die in increasingly novel ways because as social work becomes constrained simply to what is on the checklist, social workers narrow their gaze too much and are unable to detect the weak signals in a situation that would otherwise anticipate a problem before it happens. This is the dilemma between anticipatory and predictive awareness and getting it wrong is costly.
It’s a brutal example, but I do believe it points to the the consequences of accountability models that assume that all outcomes are predictable and negative effects can be prevented with best practices even when its proven that they can’t be. (the confusion in that link is perfectly illustrative, by the way. “Child deaths are preventable” on the one hand and “we lack the most basic information about why children die” on the other.) That can be true in ordered systems but not in complex ones. This particular problem has a major implication for philanthropic organizations that are seeking to have “impact.” In many cases, the impact is a pre-defined outcome of a process taken largely in a narrowly defined strategic context. Real life is messy but logic models are sweetly and seductively clean.
Messiness is important and working in messy ways is a critical skill of philanthropic workers, donors and directors. In this recent article Martin Morse Wooster argues for a loosening of constraints on philanthropic work and although he doesn’t provide a solid theoretical basis for his assertions, but good theory on the limits of managing and measuring impact backs him up.
Many front line philanthropic workers – grants administrators, programs staff and consultants – know this approach but they are often constrained by donors, Boards and executives who demand simple outcomes, simple metrics and clear impact. I’m increasingly interested in putting together specific trainings and learnings for boards and donors that will increase their literacy of messiness in support of making smart changes and supporting good in a way that is much more aligned with how community actually works.
One such offering is currently open for enrolment. We are gathering in June in Glasgow and will be repeating the workshop in October in Vancouver. If you’d like it in your neck of the woods, let me know.