Perhaps I need to curate a series of posts called “The Whatabout Chronicles.” When I’m teaching participatory leadership or sharing complexity tools, folks who are wedded to traditional linear mind and tool sets often raise objections.
“Complexity would be nice, but we haven’t got the time. We have to get this problem solved now, and we need a plan to do it.”
It’s a hard one because often it’s obvious that the problem is complex and the desire for a linear solution, while urgent-feeling, is just not possible. But if you can’t see it that way, objections get raised.
In my courses and workshops, often people who are discovering these tools for the first time have their first moment of dread when they imagine themselves trying to “sell” a participatory or complexity-informed approach to their organization, team or, worse still, their boss.
“How do you handle the naysayers?” Yup.
Recently I was asked this question and I used the Cynefin framework to answer it. Disagreement with an approach depends on the context of the problem. Broadly speaking if we look at the five domains of Cynefin, you handle naysayers this way:
Obvious problems (knowable problems, predictable, simple solutions). If a problem is obvious then you should have no trouble convincing a naysayer that you are right. Does the door open in or out? Push it and see. Anyone who disagrees with you will have the problem of never getting into the room unless they adopt to the reality of the situation.
Complicated problems (knowable problems and predictable solutions, but only with expert help and analysis). Complicated problems have multiple competing approaches that may all be right, but will all be different. Plumbing a house is not an Obvious problem, but there are only a few ways to do it. There maybe different ways to do and experts may not agree, but they can give you a plan and show you in advance how their solution is a good one. To hire an expert, give them constraints to work with (money, time, and materials) and ask for a proposal. Disagreement between experts can help you solve the problem better, but don’t pretend you know enough to challenge an expert. Ask for a few quotes and choose the person that will do the job to your specs. Make a contract that makes them accountable for the outcome, and have someone else you trust evaluate their work.
Complex problems (unknowable and ever changing problems and unpredictable but multiple emergent ways of addressing them). Here we can’t know the whole system, but we can bring in multiple perspectives and look for patterns that will helps us figure out what to do. Naysayers in complex situations are a gift. You WANT naysayers in complexity. In complex problems like addressing social, cultural and economic systemic problems, no one has the right answer. In order to act you need people who will come into the space and offering competing approaches. You have to try them out – even contradictory ones – to see what works in your context of time and place. You might even discover new ways of doing things. For sure, the worst thing you can do in addressing complexity is create an agreeable environment that stifles conflicting views and difference. Diversity is required for a resilient and collectively intelligent approach. You have to make sure that the container you are working in can hold difference without becoming a fight or a power game of domination. The system should always move towards diversity of opinion, not consensus.
Chaotic problems (unknowable and unpredictable problems and there is not enough time to think about a solution). Everything is massively dependant in this scenario, and high chaos is a high energy environment where you might only get one chance to act. You might have seen situations where someone is injured and a paramedic arrives and the patient says “I’m okay, get away from me.” The paramedic may be able to see that the patient is not in fact okay. In these situations, imposing tight constraints is how you handle naysayers: “Sir, you are wrong! Sit down now before you risk further injury!” This can be very helpful, but you have to loosen the constraint once the situation has stabilized.
Disordered problems (where you don’t know what kind of problem you have). Sometimes you just have to start by saying “What’s happening here? is this a linear system or a complex one?” Using Cynefin can help you agree upon the characteristics of the system you are working with that allows you to then make a decision about the intervention. Naysayers here can be very influential, but you really don’t get to argue with reality. No matter what you say, racism is a complex issue. Get a group of people to help you address it. However, getting sued for a racist hiring practice is complicated. Get a lawyer. You’ll need one.
I’m on the road, currently in Columbus Ohio, working my way through a two week road trip that has taken me to Ontario to visit family and to New Brunswick where I was part of a remarkable hosting team for the Art of Hosting Working Across Divides. It was a timely gathering for 70 people from government, civil society, and social enterprise to come and learn how to work with differences.
In Canada’s only bilingual province, language is a massive difference between people, and New Brunswick has a multitude of language cultures. There are 34 local French accents alone in New Brunswick and probably just as many English ones too, having to do with class and ethnicity and proximity to the sea or the woods.
In the last provincial election there, the virus of populism had its day and took these existing differences and turned them into divides. Right wing populists have a well-trod strategy for doing this. Instead of pointing to differences between people, they tap the fear that people have of people who are different than them, without naming the other. This is called “dogwhistle politics.” Once they find a fear of the other that elicits an emotional response, they double down on the fear often, but not always, with lies and misrepresentation. When their political opponents offer up diversity and difference as an asset to a healthy society, the populists accuse them of “divisiveness.” They claim that only their approach will bring “unity” typically by eliminating any conversation that recognizes the value of differences. Often their “unity” platform is basically assimilitation: “if only you were like us, we’d have unity; if you want to be different, you’re creating division.” Sometimes they outright declare such an emphasis on difference to be “racist.” If you want to see this in action, visit Rebel Media, an organization I will simply refuse to link to. They are great at this.
The pithy insight on difference and divisiveness that struck me in this Art of Hosting is this: differences are real and useful, and division is one thing you can do with them. People are different, and offer different perspectives, lived experiences, and world views on things. These differences are essential to living and working in complexity, because a homogeneous view of a situation leaves you open to crises hitting you unawares. Cultivating difference is a good strategy for surviving and thriving in a complex situation. Seeking out differences of opinion is essential, finding people who are different than you and working with them makes you all smarter.
Divisions happen when people become so afraid of the other that they stop making the effort to bridge the gap. When this happens a kind of vacuum opens up between people and that gap is the thing that populists exploit. Political power can be won and held with a very thin margin these days in Canada. You only need about 20% of the voters to vote for your party. If you get your vote out, and the opposition is split or apathetic, you can form power. In New Brunswick the current government was formed on this exact number: about 31% of voters voted Conservative, and only 67% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. The populist People’s Alliance hold the balance of power. (In Ontario, Doug Ford came to power with 23.49% of eligible voters supporting his party.)
The way to defeat populism is to not allow people to play on your fears of other people who are different from you. It means convening incredibly diverse spaces and creating the conditions for people to show up with their unique perspectives, working WITH differences. That sometimes means doing things that make differences more stark, to explore different experiences, different ideas and different stories, so we can learn from each other. And it sometimes means making differences less pronounced so that we can find common purpose or shared perspective.
Divisiveness does not come from people working with differences. Divisiveness comes from people inserting fear into the gaps between people who are different.
Five links that caught my eye over the holiday.
New Power: How it’s Changing the 21st Century and Why you need to Know
A book review from Duncan Green, whose work on power, evaluation, and complexity in international development, I much admire. Seems this new book invites a shift in thinking about power from quantity to flows:
Old Power works like a currency. It is held by a few. It is closed, inaccessible and leader-driven. It downloads and it captures. New Power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It uploads, and it distributes. The goal with new power is not to hoard it, but to channel it.’
New Power is reflected in both models (crowd-sourced, open access, very different from the ‘consume and comply’ Old Power variety or the ‘participation farms’ of Uber and Facebook) and values (informal, collaborative, transparent, do it yourself, participatory but with short-term affiliations).
Understanding the Learner and the Learning Process
I am fascinated by the connection between how we learn in complex systems and how we strategize in complexity. I think they are the same thing. And there is no better lab for understanding good complexity learning than complex sports like basketball and football. Here is an annotated interview with Kobe Bryant, in which Richard Shuttleworth makes some notes about how learners learn in complexity from Mark O Sullivan’s excellent footblogball.
Jacob Bronowski, a holocaust survivor, discusses the dehumanizing power of arrogance and certainty in a powerful clip from a video where he visits Auschwitz and reconnects with the violence of knowledge.
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. Thisis where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas — it was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible…
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo
A solid challenge to the ubiquitous application of design thinking to solve complex problems.
The political dimensions of design thinking are problematic enough on their own, but the method is particularly ill-suited to problems in rapidly changing areas or with lots of uncertainty, since once a design is complete the space that the method opens for ambiguity and new alternatives is shut down. Climate change is one such area. The natural environment is changing at an astonishing rate, in ways that are likely to be unprecedented in human history, and that we are unable to fully predict, with each new scientific discovery revealing that we have far underestimated the complexity of the systems that are at play and the shifts on the horizons may very well mean the end of our existence. Yet, design-thinking approaches, adopted with much fanfare to deal with the challenge, have offered formulaic and rigid solutions. Design thinking has allowed us to celebrate conventional solutions as breakthrough innovations and to continue with business as usual.
Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong
An antidote to the above challenges: admitting that you might be wrong as a disciplined act:
Intellectual humility is simply “the recognition that the things you believe in might in fact be wrong,” as Mark Leary, a social and personality psychologist at Duke University, tells me.
But don’t confuse it with overall humility or bashfulness. It’s not about being a pushover; it’s not about lacking confidence, or self-esteem. The intellectually humble don’t cave every time their thoughts are challenged.
Instead, it’s a method of thinking. It’s about entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning from the experience of others. Intellectual humility is about being actively curious about your blind spots. One illustration is in the ideal of the scientific method, where a scientist actively works against her own hypothesis, attempting to rule out any other alternative explanations for a phenomenon before settling on a conclusion. It’s about asking: What am I missing here?
I’ll be away for a couple of weeks, so here is the last set of links for the year. Happy New Year.
I am worried about democracy these days. Our electoral politics are ravaged by social media manipulation, an absence of policy discussion, and the influence of money. Governance affords very little opportunity for meaningful citizen participation. Harold Jarche is worried too, and in this pots he tackles the question of how to save democracy head on.
Our institutions are failing us. They were designed for the age of print, not an electrically connected one. We need new structures and the current wave of returns to tribalism manifested as populism will not save us. As the advent of the printing press helped usher in an age of inquiry, first in the Christian religion and later in the enlightenment and scientific revolutions, so we have to engage in creating new organizational and governance structures for a global network era.
If print enabled democracy, will the emerging electric/digital medium destroy it?
How Complex Whole Emerge From Simple Parts
Another stunner from Quanta Magazine. This is a great introductory video to emergence. I could listen to excellent basic introductions to complexity all day. Enjoy this one. This is the phenomenon that my life’s work is devoted to.
Maria Popova’s favourite books of 2018
Maria Popva runs Brain Pickings, which is an amazing blog. She shares some detailed reviews of a couple of dozen books that grabbed her attention this year from authors including Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, Audré Lourde, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Zadie Smth among others, including some terrific children’s books. She calls this list “New Year’s Resolutions in Reverse.”
Advice for Emerging Evaluators
My colleague Ciaran Camman, a developmental evaluator has recently revamped her blog and there are some brilliant pieces on there, including this one which provides advice to her future colleagues from five things you should learn how to do, and one Max Ehermann Desiderata which begins
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Onaubinisay at the World Parliament of Religions
Onaubinisay (Jim Dumont) is an important teacher of Anisinaabe governance and spirituality. I met him first in the 1980s when I was studying Native Studies at Trent University, where he visited as a guest during our annual Elders and Traditional People’s conference. He was an influential supporter of the effort to re-establish the Midewiwin religion in southern Ontario, an effort I got to be a small part of along with Paul Bourgeois and a little army of his students from Trent at the time.
Here is is speaking earlier this year at the World Parliament of Religions.
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.