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.
Came across a Medium piece by Sahana Chattopadhyay today in which she discusses facilitation competencies for working in emergence and complexity. She points out in the article that this kind of facilitation practice is different from what passes for facilitation in many more familiar and simpler contexts:
Facilitation is often mistaken for some methods and processes that experienced trainers use during workshops to run successful sessions. I am not talking about that kind of facilitation, which is an important skill by itself.
I am talking about Facilitation as a way of being that offers safe space, creates a container for exploration, makes way for emergence, enables collaboration and co-creation, builds a culture of inclusion, and helps to align discrete actions with and towards a larger purpose.
I might have a quibble with the “align discrete actions towards a larger purpose” as this can sometimes be taken as license for a facilitator to direct a group’s choices towards a particular future state, as if that is a knowable thing. In complexity, you really want to help group explore emergent pathways, some of them often quite divergent in nature, but that drive in a chosen direction of travel.
Nevertheless, she has a short list that is actually quite good, and can form the basis of some focus for learning. These are practice competencies, and so you will always find yourself learning and growing along these. Hers are:
- Hold space for complexity and emergence
- Stay centered on the participatory process
- Tap into the potential present in the room
- Be aware of the different capacities of individuals
- Help the system see itself.
To these I might add something like:
- Practice seeing your limiting beliefs and unconscious biases that influence your choice of methods.
- Understand the theory beneath the problems you are working with.
What else would you add as a way of developing a list of complex facilitation competencies? A friendly warning, I’ll challenge and engage you in the comments! Let’s see what we can make.
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?