The people at work
Tonight in Vancouver I’m acting as a provocateur at an event sponsored by my friends and colleagues at Waterlution. Water City 2040 is a ten-city scenario planning process which engages people about the future of water across 10 Canadian cities. Tonight’s event is part of a pilot cohort to see what the process can offer to the conversation nationally.
What’s powerful about this work is that it’s citizens convening, hosting and engaging with one another. This is not a local government engagement process or a formal consultation. This is a non-profit organization convening deliberative conversations. The advantage of that is that the process is free from the usual constraints that governments put on engagement. So tonight we are thinking about possibilities that push out 25 years into the future and absolutely everything is one the table. In fact I’m asking people to consider that in these kinds of complex systems the biggest problem you have in addressing change comes from your assumptions about what will remain the same. It’s one thing to confront demographic, economic and environmental change, but are we also questioning things we take for granted like governance models, planning mindsets, innovation processes, value systems and infrastructure?
Organizations like Waterlution offer an unconstrained look at the future and if local governments are smart, they will pay attention to what’s happening here. (And they are – Metro Vancouver has sent a film crew to document the evening!).
Waterlution teaches these skills to citizen practitioners, government employees and private sector staff through our Waterlution Art of Hosting Water Dialogues workshops. We have workshops happening in April 20-22 on Bowen Island and April 27-29 near Toronto. If this is work you want to do more of, think about joining us. And if you contact me to inquire, you might get a little incentive…
I was working with a couple of clients recently who were trying to design powerful questions for invitations to their strategic conversations. Both organizations are dealing with complex situations and specifically with complex changes that were overtaking their ability to respond. Here are some of the questions that cam up:
- How can we be more effective in accomplishing our purpose?
- How can we create more engagement to address our outcomes?
- What can we do to innovate regardless of our structure?
- Help us create new ideas for executive alignment around our plan to address the change we are now seeing?
Can you see what is wrong with these questions, especially as they relate to addressing complexity?
The answer is that each of these questions contains a proposed solution to the problem, buried as assumptions in the question itself. In these questions the answers to addressing complexity are assumed to be: sticking to purpose, creating more engagement, innovating except structurally, aligning executives around our plan. In other contexts these may well be powerful questions: they are questions which invite execution once strategic decisions have been taken. But in addressing complex questions, they narrow the focus too much and embed assumptions that some may actually think are the cause of their problems in the first place
The problem is that my clients were stuck arguing over the questions themselves because they couldn’t agree on solutions. As a result they found themselves going around and around in circles.
The right question for all four of these situations is something like “What is going on?” or “How can we address the changes that are happening to us?”
You need to back up to ask that question first, before arriving at any preferred solutions. It is very important in discerning and making sense of your context that you are able to let go of your natural inclination to want to DO something, in favour of first understanding what we have in front of us. Seeing the situation correctly goes a long way to be able to make good strategic choices about what to do next. From there, planning, aligning, purpose and structure might be useful responses, but you don’t know that until you’ve made sense of where you are.
This afternoon I’m coming home after a morning running a short process for a church in Victoria, BC. The brief was pretty straightforward: help us decide between four possible scenarios about our future. Lucky for me, it gave me an instant application for some of the stuff I was learning in London last week.
The scenarios themselves were designed through a series of meetings with people over a number of months and were intended to capture the church’s profile for its future, as a way of advertising themselves for new staff. What was smart about this exercise was the fact that the scenarios were left in very draft form so there was no way they could be confused for a “vision” of the future. It is quite common in the church world for people to engage in “visioning exercises” to deal with the complex problems that they face, but such visions are doomed evermore to failure as the bigger organization is beginning to enter into a period of massive transformation and churches are suffering from all kinds of influences over which they have no control.
Visioning therefore is not as useful as selecting a lens through which the organization can make some decisions.
Each scenario contained some possible activities and challenges that the church would be facing, and the committee overseeing the work was charged with refining these down to a report that would, to use my own terms, be a collection of heuristics for the way the organization would act as it addressed future challenges.
Our process was very informed by some thinking I have been doing with Dave Snowden’s “Simple rules for dealing with complexity.” Notably principles about avoiding premature convergence, distributing cognition and disrupting pattern entrainment. Furthermore, the follow up work will be informed by the heuristic of “disintermediation” meaning that the team working on the project will all be working with the raw data. There is no consultants report here. The meaning making is still very much located with the participants.
So here was our process.
- At small tables of four, participants were given 5 minutes to read over the scenarios silently.
- We then entered a period of three 15 minute small group conversations on the topic of “what do you think about these scenarios?” Cafe style, each conversation happened with three different groups of people. I was surprised how much introduction was going on as people met new folks. The question was deliberately chosen not to be too deep or powerful because with a simple question, the participants will provide their own depth and power. When you have a powerful need, you don’t need to contrive anything more powerful than what people are already up for.
- Following the cafe conversations, a round of silent reflection in which people were given the following direction. “Express your preference for each of the scenarios on a scale of 1-7. Seven means “Let’s do it” and one means “No Way.” For each scenario write your preference on your post it and write a short sentence about the one concrete thing that would make your vote one point higher.” So there is lots in this little exercise. First it’s a way of registering all of the objections to the scenarios without personalizing them. Secondly it gets at concrete things that the team can do to improve scenarios and third it harvest preferences and not simple yes/no decisions which are not appropriate for this kind of work.
- At each table someone gathered all the posts its of the same colour and by colour folks came to the front and placed them on the scale. Doing it this way meant that no one was sure whose preference was going where and it also meant that people couldn’t revise their post its once they saw how the preferences were being expressed.
The whole thing took about 75 minutes.
The result of this sense making was the chart you see above. Two hundred pieces of finely grained information ordered by the people themselves. The project team now has at least three things they can do with this material.
- They can recreate the scale, as each post it is colour and preference coded. That way they have a rough idea of the scenario with the greatest support, and they can show anyone who wants to see metrics where we stand on the proposals.
- They can cluster post its for each scenario according to “work that will make it better” which means they don’t have to pay attention to the scale. The scale is completely subjective, but each of these post-its contains one piece of concrete information to make the scenario better, so in some ways the numbers don’t really matter. They can cluster these ideas by each scenario AND they can re-cluster them by each topic to give an idea of overall issues that are happening within the organization.
- If we wanted to go a step further, we could use these post it notes to do a number of Cognitive Edge exercises including a Cynefin contextualization (which would tell us which things were Obvious, Complicated and Complex (and maybe Chaotic) and we could also do some archetype extraction which might be very useful indeed for constructing the final report, which would stand as an invitation to thier new personal and an invitation to the congregation.
Have a listen to this piece from a recent segment on CBC’s current affairs show “The Current.” It is a discussion about Canada’s commitment (or lack of it) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In it you will hear Keith Stewart from Greenpeace (Disclaimer: an old friend, by the way) arguing for a policy and fiscal framework that helps Canada make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. You will hear him discussing the issue with Ron Liepert, who comes from the petroleum sector in Alberta and was the former Alberta Energy Minister. And who is running for the Conservatives in the next federal election, after defeating the Conservative Party’s most loony MP in recent years, Rob Anders.
The conversation is, in the parlance of my teenage kids, a shitshow. The first sentence out of Liepert’s mouth is full of accusations, unsubstantiated claims and he uses the word “extremist” to characterize Keith’s points and his character. Keith is one of the smartest energy policy minds I know and I daresay he has been at this work longer than Liepert has and for more honest reasons. What was going to be an interesting conversation quickly becomes sidelined by Annamaria Tremonti’s inquiry about Liepert’s terms. Liepert is campaigning for election. Keith is trying to get a conversation going.
That sideline was not helpful to my understanding of how we are going to need to use fossil fuels to create the new renewable energy system for the planet. There is a very important conversation here about policy, economic incentives and transformation and there are people in the fossil fuel industry who are capable of having that conversation. Liepert was a ridiculous and buffoonish choice to represent the status quo. He clearly doesn’t take the challenge seriously. I’m much more interested to see petroleum producers who do, and I know they exist because over the years I have encountered them. They work in the long term strategic planning units in the oil companies, and they are realistic about how to position their companies as energy companies who need to develop and active interest in creating and owning significant stakes in renewable energy if they are to survive and service the debt they will have incurred for a century or more of development of a resource that runs out, or becomes too pricey to use.
This is a conversation we need to have. Keith is inviting a 100 year view of how we are going to do this. There is no oil company out there that is not thinking about this issue too, and although they are also happy to have shills like Liepert doing their dirty work, they KNOW that we need to come off fossil fuels in this century. Scarcity, pricing and climate change will ensure this. Whether we can make this transition well will be the determinant of the quality of life humans will have on this planet when my kids are old people. Avoiding the conversation by these silly short term election tactics costs us all.
For the past few weeks I have been trying an interesting experiment in civic dialogue.
Here on Bowen Island we are in the midst of local elections. We are a small community of 3500 living on a liece of land about the same size as Vancouver, with fairly limited resources in terms of being able to fund local services. It is a beautiful and inspiring place to live, a place that almost wills one to dream about it. It inspires people to move here, to build, to steward, to preserve, to write. Folks run for election because deep down they love this place and they want to do something about that.
We are close to each other on Bowen. We are a pretty homogenous place. We live close to the land and the sea, and close to each other’s dreams and frustrations. The major difference between us is our opinions of the way the world should be. And, ike most small communities, I think we suffer from what Freud once called the narcissism of small differences. We project a lot on to each other and it surprises me that some of the vitriol that is produced at keyboards and published online and in print does not translate into real life all that often. I have seen neighbours who seem to be at war with each other online greet each other cordially in the street. Relationship seems, in most cases, to trump things.
This anger and frustration is not surprising. Even in a country like Canada there is an increasing dissociation between citizenship and government. There are massive global entities that operate beyond the influence of many of us, massive blobal issues that affect our daily lives that we have no say over and our democratic governments don’t give us many effective ways to be heard, although we can still cast a vote for them. We seem to be subjected to arbitrary decisions all the time, whether it is what is poured into our land and air and sea or what time the ferry runs. It doesn’t seem to matter what we think.
In that sense, local politics feels like the last place we can actually make a difference. And when it feels like the only way to make a difference is to shout, that’s what we do. We shout at each other. We lose ourselves in the thought that our enemies have to be defeated, that ideas have to be extinguished, that worldviews and ways of seeing and being held by other people are invalid. And maybe by extension that others are invalid. It’s just a little to easy, when you live on an island, to suggest that other people love it or leave it.
And I have been as guilty as others in the past, so I’m nothing special. And I facilitate dialogue for a living. Being human is hard.
So I wondered if this election cycle would be different, because in the past 10 years or so we have had some unbelievably bad civic conversation about major real estate developments, amenities, by-laws and community plans, ferry marshalling, village planning, a proposal to establish a National Park, and suspicions of conspiracies, conflicts of interest and nefarious motives of our neighbours. I wondered if this cycle was to be different. And I wondered if we could do anything to make it different.
For me, when voting for people, I’m not interested in their position. Anyone can write down a list of things that are good and true and ask if others agree with them. What I want to see is how you think about stuff that is not so easy to reduce into a yes/no polarity. I want to see how you confront complexity and how you work with others to figure stuff out. I saw glimpses early on between a few rookie candidates running for office who started engaging in an online discussion about transportation options for our island. I saw people doing two things well: admitting that they didn’t know something and sharing information with each other. It was fascinating. It gave me a glimpse into how these people might act if they were elected to serve with one another.
I wanted to see more, and regretted that I hadn’t set up a forum for this very function, until one of the candidates on his own set up a facebook page and invited me to moderate it. And so I stepped in. Here are the guidelines I posted (if you are on facebook you can see the forum):
1. If you want the candidates to consider a question, either have one of them post it here, or send it by facebook message to me.
2. If your question is a yes/no question, and you send it to me I’m going to ask you to rephrase it because the world is more complicated than that, and dialogue is encouraged by asking questions we don’t know answers to. If you want to see the candidates’ POSITIONS on things, go to their pages. If you want to see them DISCUSSING things together, hang around here. Candidates: please feel free to engage with each other. It’s more interesting to see you discussing things than it is just to read a statement.
3. I’m not sure if we have the setting right, but the intention here is to only have candidates post and respond in the comments. I’m not going to go around deleting comments, but if you are not a candidate and you want your say head over to the Bowen Online Forum. Feel free to “like” things. This space is primarily intended for us to watch candidates working together to figure stuff out.
4. Candidates are allowed to and enouraged to say things like “I don’t know” and “what do you think?” and other admissions of vulnerability, humility and discernment.
5. As things become busier, I’ll prioritize questions from those that haven’t asked any yet. It’s always better to send one great question to get the candidates talking than it is to send a bunch in all at once.
6. Nobody’s perfect. Let these guidelines be good enough to get things going. Message me if this doesn’t work for you.
7. And yes, not everyone is on facebook and there is no way to share this page if you’re not signed on. Perhaps next time we’ll choose a better forum for this conversation. in the meantime, you can certainly cut and paste what you are reading here and email it to others.
Smile. Democracy is more than just voting.
I have to say that it has been a great experience and it has stood in contrast to the Bowen island Forum which is where the rest of the citizenry works out its opinions of one another with a lot of vigour, spontaneity and sometimes quite hurtful attacks. It gives me a clue to what is possible when we change the way we frame conversation in the public sphere. Here’s what I learned:
1. The hardest policy questions do not have yes and no answers and we are not served by reducing them to a binary resolution.
2. We need a public conversation that allows us to be wrong or unsure and allows us to share information with each other to make skillful decisions.
3. Everyone needs help to ask good questions and to get away from “gotcha” politics. (It is interesting how a few people have told me that the facebook page is for “softball” questions because the conversation there has been civil, nuanced and searching. I have responded that this is because we were trying to deal with real issues rather than gather future ammunition for “i told you so” campaigns. There is no shortage of material for those searching for conspiracies and nefarious motives, if that is how you choose to view people.)
4. Radically different opinions can actually add nuance and value to a decision if we are able to see the differences and not dismiss people out of hand. In fact we need this difference. But learning to live WITH this difference is what qualifies you to a position of stewardship in a community. Demanding the elimination of difference either by saying that “we should all get along” or “you are fundamentally wrong” erodes community.
5. Facilitating this middle ground requires a commitment to a process, to principle and to boundaries and it requires working with people kindly and respectfully to help them ask the questions they want answers to in a way that opens them for the possibility that they might not get the simple answer they are looking for. People have responded positively to my private chats with them as we have added more nuance to questions. We all need help to participate well in the public sphere.
6. Local governance is hard. We do well as citizens to remember this. Those who will get elected on Saturday are about to take on a job that is many pay grades above what they are going to earn doing it and they will all be confronting novel situations, problems and ideas and will be required to navigate in a good way through difficult waters. No one knows how to do this perfectly, and I think we owe a little grace and latitude to those who will be entrusted with our future. And I say that even as I have had significant differences in the past with some of the people likely to be elected.
I have a lot of respect for the candidates that were able to show up in the forum over the last couple of weeks and I have enjoyed the process of putting my money where my mouth is. It feels to me like I can trust the folks who WILL get elected to carry this tenor of collaboration across and with differences into their four year terms on Council and I hope we have chances to continue to have these kinds of civic conversations face to face. I am willing to continue exploring forums for better civic dialogue and participating as I can to host and encourage this kind of exploration and collaboration to continue.
Good luck to all on Saturday.