I was back at St. Aidan’s United Church in Victoria yesterday, hosting another conversation in their continued evolution into their next shape. Last December we worked together to explore four possible scenarios that were being proposed for the congregation. In the past few months they have been working on implementing one of these scenarios – the one which featured a plan to develop a Spiritual Learning Centre. Yesterday was a short strategic conversation called to explore the shape of what that Centre could be and how it will change life at the church.
Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and I are snuggled into the attic rooms at the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B in downtown Denver, listening to some jazz, eating some pasta and salad and finishing up a productive design day together. We are preparing to teach the Art of Hosting to 60 leaders from the community at St. John’s in the Wilderness Cathedral in Denver. St. John’s is a high Anglican Gothic Episcopalian cathedral in the heart of Denver. We have been working with the cathedral community over the past couple of years to build the capacity among the 1700 members to be able to host and engage in conversations that matter.
As we’ve done this work, I’m struck at once by how simple it really is and how little space we make for it in our lives. People are busy, rushed and worried about deadlines and results and as a collective society we tend to defer the slow and clear attention to the quality of how we are together. Quality gets sacrificed at the alter of timely outcomes.
And of course this is no more ironic than in the myriad church communities we have been working with over the years, which, at their best, host a place to slow down and consider the nature of the relationship between peoples and to attend to the sacred quality of the spaces in between.
For me there is something in the richness of returning to the simplest way we know of to slow down and host good conversations. This evening as I write by the fire, Caitlin and Tenneson are preparing a simple teaching of Circle practice. Earlier we were thinking about the simplest way we know of to discuss the relationship of our traditional notions of chaos and order.
While I have been diving deep into the nuanced explorations of the Cynefin framework, it is becoming necessary to find ways to invite people easily into the mind shift that complexity requires. In the Art of Hosting community we have, for a long time, been inspired by Dee Hock’s work on chaordic organization. At the simplest level noticing the polarity of chaos and order, and noticing how our reactions to chaos and uncertainty often take us to high levels of control becomes an entry way into a different way to think about strategies for achieving goals in the complex domain.
So tomorrow, I’m looking forward to Tenneson’s leading on the chaordic path, a simple teaching worth returning to.
Later this spring, Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak will be publishing a new text on Dialogic Organizational Development. It is a book that is a mix of theory and mpractice, written by both academics and practitioners. I contributed a chapter on holding containers.
There are several events happening in the next few months in connection with the launch of what we hope will become the standard text in a new field. This includes a full day pre-session before the Academy of Management conference in Vancouver in August
Here is what Gervase sent along this morning:
Bob Marshak and I are hosting a conference on Dialogic OD in August in Vancouver. Bringing together an international cast of experts who have all contributed to the soon be released Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change(Berrett-Koehler, May 2015), this should be an outstanding day of colleagueship and learning for anyone interested in transformational change in organizations. Conference brochure attached and at: http://www.dialogicod.net/DOD_Conference.pdf
Please pass it on to anyone in your network you think would like to know about it. Note that Ed Schein’s opening address will be by video.
If this is the first you are hearing about Dialogic OD, you can learn more about it and the book at www.dialogicod.net
For consultants, a good short overview is http://www.gervasebushe.ca/practicing.pdf
For managers, a good short overview is http://www.dialogicod.net/ATC.pdf
For academics, a good scholarly over is http://www.gervasebushe.ca/mindset.pdf
We certainly hope you will be able to join us at the Academy of Management in Vancouver this summer. Failing that, keep an eye out for the book this spring.
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.