When I was up in Whitehorse last week I got to spend time with folks from the Public Service Commission discussing a project that would see us looking at discriminations in the workplace from a complexity angle. Using Cynefin and SenseMaker(tm), we hope to understand the ways in which the landscape of discrimination shifts and changes over time so that the PSC can make wiser decisions about the kinds of initiatives it sculpts. One of the problems with diversity initiatives in the public service (in any large public organization really) is the feeling that they need to be broad based and rolled out to everyone. This usually results in a single initiative that spreads across the whole organization, but except for a little awareness raising, does little to address specific instances of discrimination. Everything from awareness raising “cultural competency training” to zero tolerance accountability measures have limited effect because a) discriminatory behaviour is highly context and situation dependant and b) the public service has a permeable boundary to the outside world, meaning ideas, behaviours and people move between the two contexts all the time. The larger your organization, the more like the real world you have to be.
At any rate, I took a bit of time to do a mini-Cynefin teaching to explain how strategy works in the complex domain. and my friend Pawa Haiyupis and I added two Ps to my concentric circles of intervention in a complex system. So to review:
- Patterns: Study the patterns in a complex setting using narrative capture and sense-making. This can be done with the SenseMaker(tm) software, and it can also be done with dialogic interventions. The key thing is to let the people themselves tag their stories or at the very least have a group of people reviewing data and finding patterns together. For example, you might notice a correlation between stressful times in an organization and an increase in feelings of discriminatory behaviour
- Probe: Once you have identified some patterns, you can make some hypotheses about what might work and it’s time to develop some safe to fail probes. These aren’t meant to be successful: they are meant to tell you whether or not the patterns you are sensing have developmental potential. Failure is entirely welcome. What if we offered stress reduction activities during high stress times to help release pent up feelings? We want to be okay with te possibility that that might not work.
- Prototype: If a probe shows some promise, you might develop a prototype to develop a concept. Prototypes are designed to have tolerance for failure, in that failure helps you to iterate and improve the concept. The goal is to develop something that is working.
- Pilot: A pilot project is usually a limited time proof of concept. Roll it out over a year and see what you learn. In Pilot projects you can begin to use some summative evaluation methods to see what has changed over time. Because of their intensive resource commitment, pilot projects are hardly ever allowed to fail, making them very poor ways of learning and innovating, but very good ways to see how stable we need to make an approach.
- Project/Program/Policy: Whatever the highest level and most stable form of an initiative is, you will get to there if your pilot shows promise, and the results are clear. Work at this level will last over time, but needs regular monitoring so that an organization knows when it’s time to tinker and when it’s time to change it.
Cynefin practitioners will recognize that what I’m writing about here is the flow between the complicated and the complex domains, (captured by Dave Snowden’s Blue dynamic in this post.) My intention is to give this some language and context in service organizations, where design thinking has replaced the (in some ways more useful) intuitive planning and innovation used in non-profits and the public service.
Since October, when I first starting sketching out these ideas, I’ve learned a few things which might be helpful as you move through these circles.
- Dialogue is helpful at every scale. When you are working in a complex system, dialogue ensures that you are getting dissent, contrary views and outlying ideas into the process. Complex problems cannot be addressed well with a top-down roll out of a change initiative or highly controlled implementations of a single person’s brilliant idea. If at any point people are working on any stage of this alone, you are in danger territory and you need another pair of eyes on it at the very least.
- Evaluation is your friend and your enemy. At every stage you need to be making meaning and evaluating what is going on, but it is critically important to use the right evaluation tools. Developmental evaluation tools – with their emphasis on collective sense making, rapid feedback loops and visible organizational and personal learning – are critical in any complexity project, and they are essential in the first three stages of this process. As you move to more and more stable projects, you can use more traditional summative evaluation methods, but you must always be careful not to manage to towards targets. Such an error results in data like “We had a 62% participation rate in our diversity training” which tells you nothing about how you changed things, but can shift the project focus to trying to acheive a 75% participation rate next cycle. This is an especially pervasive metric in engagement processes. And so you must…
- Monitor, monitor, monitor. Intervening in a complex system always means acting without the certainty that what you are doing is helpful. You need data and you need it on a short term and regular basis. This can be accomplished by formal and informal ongoing conversations and story captures about what is happening in the system (are we hearing more stories like the ones we want?) or through a SenseMaker(tm) monitoring project that allows employees to end their data with a little data capture.
- These practices are nested, not linear. An always to remember that this is not a five step process to intervening in a complex system. In a large organization, you can expect all of these things to be going on all the time. Building the capacity for that is a kind of holy grail and would constitute a 21st century version of the Learning Organization in my books.
In the complex space, Paul Hobcraft shares some very good guiding principles, but the whole post shimmers with good advice about transformation, and is applicable to movement building, network organizing and enterprise.
Today corporate transformations must be designed and executed quickly and routinely—not as once-a-decade events. Management teams are looking for best practices that increase speed and reduce the risk of pursuing business model innovation and change. That’s where minimum viable transformation comes into play. Before diving in, management teams should consider these five principles:
1. Learn how to learn. The central goal of minimum viable transformation is to learn from a true field experiment.
2. Pick up speed. There’s a reason this approach starts with the word “minimum”: The learning has to happen fast. As soon as a company executes the idea it’s pursuing, it shows its hand to competitors— who will quickly respond with their own strategies.
3. Embrace constraints. Much has been written about the counter-intuitive effect of constraints—they don’t foil creativity, but fuel it. It’s worth noting that the very constraints we’ve been talking about here—few bells and whistles and scarce time—take real creativity to address. At the very least, they compel a focus on the goal—the need to learn and reduce risk around the key objective.
4. Have a hypothesis. To succeed, transformation initiatives must clearly articulate both the need for change and its direction. Such a statement of direction helps identify key assumptions driving the change effort (assumptions that will need to be tested and refined along the way). Leaders will also need to develop metrics that measure short-term progress.
5. Start at the edge. Find an “edge” of the current business—a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.
In short, these five key principles can help bypass traditional barriers to transformation, ultimately supporting more effective response to mounting performance pressures.
via Deeper read or quick summary- finding the time | Paul4innovating’s Innovation Views.
Spending a nice New Year’s Day alone at home. Pot of tea, beautiful sunny day that I will shortly head out into for a walk, and then home maybe to play some music, restring the guitar, learn a jig or a reel or two on the flute…
Listening this morning to CBC Ideas who are doing a great show on the number “50” and, because Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species at age 50, they have just played Baba Brinkman’s rap “Artificial Selection.”
One little line stood out, something about the fact that in evolution, little differences are what provide us with evolutionary potential. This immediately rang bells for me as I’ve been thinking about this in the work of strategy, whether that means creating a ten year plan for an organization or simply exploring options for moving forward on a discrete piece of work. Finding the pathway of best evolutionary potential requires that we introduce diversity and difference into the system. Working together across difference, as my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart would say, is a strategic and evolutionary imperative. Accentuating the differences between each other is crucial for learning new things, seeing the world in new ways and finding new pathways out of complex tangles.
This is one of the reasons I like Open Space Technology so much. It brings a huge variety of exploration to a common topic to create multiple pathways forward for exploration. Buit whatever we can do to accentuate our differences and work together across them actually improves the evolutionary potential of the system we are in.
in most of our leadership training work and our strategic work with Harvest Moon, we devote at least a half day to working with limiting beleifs using a process developed by Byron Katie called simply The Work.
At its simplest, the work is a process of inquiring into limiting beliefs that are unhelpful in our work and lives. Such beliefs often include judgements, ideologies and other beliefs that prevent us from really seeing the reality we are dealing with. Some of these beliefs are so strong that we take them for granted – such as “Richard shouldn’t have punched Eric” which is an excellent example of an espoused belief that crumbles in the face of the reality that Eric was just punched by Richard. As anyone with teenagers knows, just saying something “should” or “shouldn’t” happen is no guarantee that it will or won’t, and is an utter denial of what just did happen (or didn’t!). Any statement that contains “should” is an argument with reality.
Every time we enter into complexity work with clients we confront limiting beliefs: this won’t work, we’ve already tried it, it’s impossible, the boss will kill it, we don’t know what to do, the answer has to be clear, and so on. Limiting beliefs do a couple of things. First they limit thinking by exerting a powerful constraint over the mind that, left unquestioned, makes us narrow our ability to scan of possibilities. And second, they cognitively entrain our thinking with unhelful attractors, so that when the boss enters the room, so do all our thoughts about the boss’s resourcefulness and support. Doing creative work with unquestioned beliefes in the way is near impossible.
The way to deal with this kind of thinking is, not surprisingly, informed by complexity practice. So this means that it won’t work to ask a direct question about that belief. Addressing situations head on is a good strategy for complicated problems but a poor strategy for complex ones. And entrained brains will always game the system. In practice this misapplication looks like adopting an affirmation or something like “I will be kinder towards my boss” that doesn’t shift thinking at all, and in fact can bury the resent and anger directed at the boss that will come out in some passive aggressive .form when you least expect it or least desire it.
instead we inquire into the the thought by looking at how a belief lines up with reality, and then looking at what happens when we are believing thoughts – how our body, emotions and behaviours are influenced when a belief is active in our mind. From there we engage in a powerful set of exercises called “turnarounds” in which we investigate beliefs from different angles. After that, we simply sit and let the mind settle. there is no action plan. We are not fixing problems, we are rewiring our cognition. It’s a simple practice, but it works because we take an oblique approach to addressing the constraints, attractors and solidified identities that limit our ability to do good work in complex and uncertain environments.
It has been very cool developing this practice with my partner Caitlin Frost who is a master facilitator and teacher of this work. As I have been exploring the world of complexity-based design, I have been seeing more and more how this process is a strong complexity-based approach to addressed constraints and cognitive entrainment in our thinking. It’s a key piece of strategic capacity building.
Somehow that statement is worth keeping nearby in my work. For me and everyone I work with.
I spend a lot of time working with people who need or want to do something new. And no level of new work – innovation, boundary breaking, next levelling or shifting – is possible without failure. A lot of it. Much more often than not.
Today, working with 37 leaders from human social services and government in our Leadership 2020 program, Caitlin asked a question: “How many of you have bosses that say it’s okay to fail? How many of you have said to your staff, it’s okay to fail? How many of you have given permission to yourself to fail?” No surprise. No hands up.
There are many reasons for this, the least of which is that people equate failure in this system with the actual death of a human being. When that is the thought you associate with failing, of course you will never put yourself in a position where failure is an option, let alone likely. And yet, it’s impossible to create new things that work right out of the box. You need to build testing and failing into strategy if you are to build new programs and services that are effective.
This is where understanding the scale at which you are working helps: hence probe, prototype, pilot, program, process…five incrementally more robust and more “fail-safe” (in terms of tolerance) approaches to innovating and creating something new. But just having a process or a tool for innovating – whether it is Cynefin, design labs, social innovation, agile, whatever – is still not going to give you a resilient mindset in which failure is tolerable or possible. And this is as true for leaders as it is for people working on the project teams that are supposed to be delivering new and better ways of caring for children and families.
In our programs and in our teaching, we double down on working with improvisational theatre and music techniques and especially The Work, which Caitlin teaches and leads. That process is the primary tool we use with ourselves and others to work on the limiting beliefs, patterns, thoughts and cognitive entrainment that impedes our ability to embrace failure based approaches. Without addressing patterns of thinking, it is just never safe to fail, and when a change leader is hidden behind that block, there is no way to truly enter into strategic, innovative practice.
How do you sharpen your failure practice?