From time to time I have conversations that remind me of the principles that guide my own work in different aspects of facilitation and engagement. Today, in two different design conversations, I was reminded of these again, and I took a few notes as we were talking. These aren’t the be-all and end-all of good practice, but they are things that roll off the tongue and are basic heuristics for how I structure and facilitate public engagement sessions.
- Ask constructive questions. One of my pet peeves is when folks want to structure a public engagement with a presentation of a half- or well-formed policy proposal and ask “What are we missing?” In most cases once a piece of legislation or a plan reaches the consultation stage, the decision is already made that we are going in THIS basic direction. The “What is missing?” can imply that there is room to throw the whole thing out, or it invites ideological contributions that can derail the conversation. Instead, share material and then ask “what would make this stronger?” or “What would make this fail if we didn’t’t address it now?”
- Foster participant ownership: Real transparency can demand of us that we ask participants to share information with us in their own words, in their own handwriting, and in their own voice. As much as possible, have your participants shape their own input, and make sense of it together. The extent to which you are coding data, making summaries, and writing reports and responses alone and outside of the group’s work, is the extent to which they are being left out of the process. So think very consciously about that.
- Ask authentically curious and open-ended questions: in North American culture we have a pre-disposition to asking yes/no questions. We can often appear very curious in doing so, but a question that leaves only two or three possible answers doesn’t actually allow a person to fill it with their wisdom. A simple example is something like “Do you think this proposal will work?” questions that start with verbs and ending question marks usually logically invite a yes or no answer. So practice crafting a question that allows for thoughtful reflection, and provides answers that you cannot yet see such as “how can you see this proposal working?” or “what is your reaction to what we just shared?” Also, avoid questions like “do you think we should go with this proposal or something different?” which still invites a binary choice even though people may choose to answer it with more detail. If you require a follow up question to make a person’s answer more clear, then ask that question in the first place.
- Clarify how responses are to be used: There is nothing worse than being invited to a public consultation meeting only to have your ideas dismissed or ignored. Perhaps the only thing worse is being invited to a process where you believe you are helping to make a decision when in reality the decision is being made elsewhere. I call this “engagement washing.” It’s so important to frame public meetings so that participants are clear about what is happening and what is not happening so that they can make an informed choice to participate and how to participate.
- Facilitate difference, not consensus: Most public engagements are not decision-making processes. Many times in my career I have had to hold decision-makers accountable for making decisions and not outsourcing them by saying “the community needs to agree on this before we implement it.” The role of the community is to be a difficult, diverse, conflicted, heterogeneous, mass of opinions and ideas. Decision makers are elected to make decisions in that context. When facilitating public engagement, I tell my clients that our job will be surfacing differences and not arriving at consensus. Illuminating differences helps decision-maker make good strategic choices and helps them to understand the costs and impact of their decisions.
- PAvoid the tyranny of inclusion. Many engagement processes suffer from what I call the tyranny of inclusion. This operates when we believe we need to respond to every single comment and piece of advice equally. Practically speaking, that requires us to respond to a focus group or expert panel in the same way as we might respond to an anonymous troll who left a comment in passing on a survey form or in a social media thread. When structuring engagement processes, I usually shape circles of engagement that make it clear that the more responsibility you have for the outcome. The tighter the feedback loop for your advice. This principal goes hand-in-hand with design principles of equity of voice and inclusion of different lived expertise in engagement and decision-making, and there is no perfect balance.
- Engagement practice can sustain or undermine democracy: in the courses I teach on engagement I stress this point constantly: how we engage affects people’s feelings and trust of democratic processes. Engagement processes that are restrained, restrictive, or opaque signal and unwillingness to engage with the messy realities of community and citizen. Open, validating and meaningful engagement that can help shape public policy. Decisions helps build, and strengthen democratic participation. This should go without saying, but seeking efficiencies in engagement processes can have the effect of smoothing over all the tricky bits that make democracy and participatory life rich, creative, and co-owned. So be conscious about the choices you make when structuring engagement.
So those are a few. There are many more besides these, not to mention rigorous thinking about power. But these are among the most important ones to begin with for me.
Context changes everything. This used to be a forest.
Alicia Juarrero is the source of so much great thinking on the role of constraints in complex systems. Her two books, Dynamics In Action and Context Changes Everything are brilliant discussions of the role of intention and how constraints shape complex phenomena. They are philosophical texts, and so are slow reads, but well worth the effort. You can find many videos of her sharing her insights on You Tube and elsewhere. She is generous with her time and enthusiastic about her work.
Last week I sat in on a seminar she gave for The Prometheus Project. I expect the video will be up on their “Past Voices” page soon. Here are a few thoughts that struck me from that session.
Dr. Juarrero’s work has been deeply concerned with how intention works as a constraint on action in complex systems. Her thinking underpins much of the way I have learned to think about complexity through Dave Snowden’s work, and most of us who are not philosophers have likely come to her work through Dave.
She used a term in the seminar which I have overlooked in her writings to described stable or coherent phenomena in complex systems: a “constraint regime.” Constraint regimes are phenomena which display coherence even in a dynamic and changing system. Disspative structures like whirlpools are good examples. There is a higher level order imposed on all the water molecules that enter the constraint regime of a whirlpool and they are entrained into becoming a part of that shape. There is nothing inherent about the shape of a water molecule that determines that it would eventually become a part of a whirlpool. This high level order is imposed by constraints on the system that cause the molecules to create a whirlpool shape until they flow through the constraint regime and down the drain. The whirlpool maintains a stable presence until all the water is gone, despite the parts of the system being in constant exchange. Watch some videos of laminar flow to see this stability in astonishing clarity.
This is not a new observation, but Dr. Juarrero’s contributions to this field place the influence of context on constraint regimes into the order of causes for behaviour in a complex system, which bucks the general trend in sciences that only forces between external bodies can cause action. Constraints create coherence in complex systems. Coherence can also look like identity. We are different people in different places. I’ve often used the example that, when gathered with our families, we are very different people than when we are in a business setting or a social setting with friends. There are actions available to us in one context that are not available in another. So context changes everything.
My own work with dialogic containers seeks to understand these phenomena as essentially constrain regimes that emerge out of encounters between people who are making meaning together. When those containers become stable over time – such as in a family for example – they can create dynamics in which our behaviour is highly path dependant, and the paths on which it depends can include the neurological pathways that are activated when we are in a particular context. What we are learning about the neurology of trauma and epigenetics confirms this. Our brain is wired by trauma and influenced by its interactions with environments to produce an identity that has a particular coherence, if not static stability, in particular contexts. When my father was alive and I was in his presence, I was the son of a father, in a relationship that grew and changed over time but had a certain stability. When my father died, I found myself at a loss as the son as a father. Who am I now? And who am I in a teaching environment, singing in a choir, sitting on my own, in the supporter section of my football team? All of these are different containers – constraint regimes – and when we are meaning-making in these places with others I call those dialogic containers.
I like the idea of constrain regimes to describe the class of structures that impart top down causality on a complex system. Dialogic containers are one kind of constrain regime.
In the seminar last week Dr. Juarrero talked about how we make change in complex systems by working with constraints. She had a few great answers to questions about working with constraints. She avoided going down the rabbit hole of working with a definition of complexity, because there simply isn’t one that works all the time, but she did say that the way to work with emergence is through FEEL. We feel when something isn’t right or needs changing and we take action on what feels better. Her pithy advice for leaders is helpful: if things are stable you need to stay in the centre and maintain stability with fail-safe processes. But fail-safe process DO fail, and when they do it is a catastrophic failure, as Dave Snowden says. So when things grow turbulent and more complex (or indeed chaotic) you need to move to the edges and manage in a safe-to-fail way from there, looking for what is coming, working from principles rather than procedures, and attending to the uncertainty. Leadership is context dependant. This is the great lesson of Cynefin as well.
Dr. Juarrero addressed the urge to map systems and try to understand root causes. When presented with a systems diagram – a picture of nodes connected by arrows – she said that such diagrams have some very limited usefulness but they have to be actively interrogated with questions such as:
- What is in the white space in which the diagram is situated?
- What is NOT mapped?
- What is the nature of any given connection between the nodes?
- What are the nodes? Do they change? How?
- Is everything I am looking at stable?
Such diagrams also have a very short time limit. Try mapping the traffic on the street in front of you, or a given moment in a soccer game and then drawing certain conclusions from that.
The advice for dealing with turbulence in stability is to develop relational safe-to-fail practice into your system. That makes you better equipped to sense and notice what is happening in the context that surrounds you. The context is so important to the system in which you are working. If things are collapsing inside your system, but the context is stable, you might bring stability to your system from the high order. For example, emergency response relies on stable and predictable interventions being imposed from outside the place of immediate collapse. If your system is stable and the context is unstable, you may find yourself losing your stability quickly and in surprising ways. The fall of the Assad government this week is an example of that. No amount of order and control could overcome the contextual turbulence that caused his family’s regime to fall. Establishing institutional order in Syria is now the challenge facing that country and the region as a whole, because instability exists at nearly every scale in the Middle East at the moment.
If you are working in a stable system that is embedded in a stable context, making change is going to be very hard. Change needs to proceed along the vectors of rule and policy making. Financial systems are an example of this. A chartered bank in Canada operating inside of a well regulated legislative regime, which itself is embedded within a global financial order is essential for the stable smooth functioning of financial systems. Making changes to that system are very difficult and they are highly ordered. Catastrophic change is held at bay by this incredibly stable set of constrains regimes, but when it comes, it comes like a tsunami.
Finally change making in a turbulent system held within a turbulent context is hard, because what you are probably trying to do is seek some order and predictability and it isn’t available. The lives of refugees and migrants and chronically homeless folks who are in motion are like this. With no power to create order, they are at the whims of those that do have the ability to impose order and control. For them, life is a constant state of chaos, sustained that way by a constraint regime that constantly undermines their stability, in some cases out of pure cruelty.
Some of this is new to me, some of it is stuff I know, but am just being reminded of. People like Alicia Juarerro continually keep me learning.
I have time to integrate think about this stuff and will be bringing it into our course on Working in Complexity Inside and Out, where we introduce new material as we learn, test and stabilize ideas about how to work with complexity. The next offering of that course starts in February.
Tenneson, Caitlin and I are running a three day leadership course for MacEwan University here in Edmonton. It starts tomorrow and we are having a great conversation at Remedy chai cafe about why meetings matter for folks studying leadership. Here are some of the insights.
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Meetings are microcosms for leadership practice. They are places to encounter one’s own leadership gifts and leadership challenges. What you learn when you host a meeting is very much related to how you lead a team or and organization or a board. Meetings are a place to confront what’s real and meaningful. They contain all of the patterns the give life or deplete it in organizations. They are places of immediate practice because they can be places of both pain and healing and so they demand attention and consideration.
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We are after teaching how to host conversations that matter. “Matter” because they more things matter to people the more engaged people are in the work. The number one question I get asked about is “how to I get people to engage?” And the answer is “make the work meaningful to them.” If your work is less meaningful than what folks have going on in the rest of their lives they won’t engage. Sometimes you don’t get to work with everyone you want to. But start with those who see why the work matters.
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If you want good effort to be sustained you need to build connection between people and connection to the work. Sustainability requires connection. Stewardship (or good governance) requires a long term and generative relationship to what is being cared for: people, work, place…Once you know that your future and wellbeing is tied up in the sustainability and health of the people and work and places that sustain you, sustainability and stewardship becomes a way of being.
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What needs time in a meeting? Einstein’s famous quite about using 55 minutes of a hour to come up with the right question is good. But I might use that time to build resilient relationships instead. Because then if we don’t figure out the question, or the answer, we will at least have to commitment to keep looking.
(Pssst. You can build resilience while you are finding the question, by the way).
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One of my teachers Birgitt Williams teaches that there is always grief in the room. To which I would add “there is always trauma and always inequity in the room too.” And so hosting rooms is also a space to host restoration and repair and dignity. It’s not therapy. It’s not even healing, per se. It’s just leaving things better than you found them, as much as possible.
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Be thoughtful in how you host, even if it’s a short conversation. The absence of design is a kind of design choice. It often defaults to “the way we always do things” and that isn’t always a good thing. So be thoughtful. Add something slightly different. Take away something you don’t need.
Sometimes a line runs right through people and communities, and sometimes that line is in the middle of road we are all travelling on.
…how to address the polarization that is currently plaguing our world.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I have some ideas, maybe only one idea. But I’m not sure that there is much work that can be done in facilitating conversations across political divides. Instead, I think we need to focus on shared work.
This isn’t a new idea to me. I first saw Tuesday Rivera (Ryan-Hart) grapple with this reality back in 2011 when we were working with a group of social justice activists in New York, in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, and back when the Obama Administration was starting to suffer from weird attacks of The Tea Party, the movement that eventually took the US Republican Party off of the edge of rationality and into outrage, delusion and violence. For most of this century, polarized conversations between populists and policy wonks have been a feature of North American politics. It’s happening in Canada right now, and of course, we are all aware of what’s going on in the USA.
But here’s the thing. I think that these weird ideas that have plagued the social discourse for the past 15 years in earnest are down to folks who are doing very little else with their lives other than amplifying propaganda, hatred and inciting violence. In other words trolling. I have recently, finally, left Twitter because their CEO is one of those guys now, and that place, like much of social media, including Facebook, is a cesspool of delusion and hatred and bots and algorithms. There are so many bad-faith actors, bots and algorithms at work in those places that the discourse is now useless for doing anything other than getting populist politicians elected or inciting genocides. We’ve known this since 2016 when it was revealed how much Cambridge Analytica was influencing elections and politics in dozens of countries, and we’ve seen the result in places like the USA, Burma, Trinidad and Tobago and the USA. Other countries are now actively influencing domestic elections by poisoning the discourse between citizens. Canada’s populist right-wing is thoroughly infected by Kremlin-based operations now. There is no polite dialogue that will compete with the misinformation and hormone-fueled rage-baiting of these operations. Facebook and Twitter have built a fortune for their owners on the rage induced by this discourse, and they have used that money to invest deeper and deeper in the kinds of tech tools that continue to fuck us over.
I’m not being polite about this. Facebook, Twitter, and the like have poisoned everything from global policy making about climate change to local politics. These aren’t good places, and they don’t make us into good people.
That’s the preamble. But if you know me, you know I’m a bit of an optimist, and I’m always looking for places where possibility can take root. Lately, I’ve seen it in the work I’ve been supporting in community health care in the USA and practical reconciliation with First Nations in Canada.
Basically, it all comes back to Tuesday’s idea that shared work is more powerful than an abstract purpose or a set of shared values. When there is real work to do and urgency is in play, my experience is that people are much more willing to work together despite their politics and rhetoric. This isn’t to say that hate isn’t an important force to combat in our society; I believe it is. But my experience says that when folks roll their sleeves up to work on something that no one has the faintest idea how to solve, we can create something that transcends the abstract nonsense that social media drives amongst us.
If you’re tired of the rhetoric, get to work on a local need that is stumping your community. You will need to pull together diverse folks. You will have disagreements and arguments. But if you are committed to doing work together, a centre might emerge between you all that holds your efforts together, even if those with nothing better to do try to yank you apart.
There is real suffering in the world right now, and there is a real need to address it. If polarization is getting to you, get out there and do some concrete work with people who also care to alleviate it. They will not be the same as you. You will have deep disagreements about some things and deep commitments about other things. You have to learn to work together. There are no perfect partners.
And a reminder: This is a blog. It’s just a place where I share half-formed thoughts and ideas. Sometimes, they work, and sometimes, they are naive. However you react to this idea, I’d love to hear your affirmation or your alternatives, as long as they don’t require me to go back to Twitter and engage there.
Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world.
Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there.
(PS…the headlines are links! Click for more)
John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.”
I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that Bach created (it is the season of the Passions, after all) and it so perfectly captures Coltrane’s theology and perhaps every artist’s theology. This article is worth a look for how Coltrane thought about the work and the way he used form as prayer.
Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences
An interesting paper about the contrast between The Golden Rule and the idea and practice of what Eric Schweitzgebel calls “extension.” In the paper, Schweitzgebel writes:
“A different approach [to The Golden Rule] treats concern for nearby others as a given and as the seed from which care for more distant others might grow. If you’d care for a nearby child, so also should you care for more distant children. If you’d want something for your sister, so also should you want something similar for other women. This approach to moral expansion differs substantially from others’ shoes / Golden Rule thinking, both in its ethical shape and in its empirical implications.”
This reminds me of the Buddhist practice of Metta, and is food for thought for someone like me who places stock in The Golden Rule.
Every Dr. Johnny Fever DJ break woven into a single show.
If you were a music fan and maybe also if you were involved in radio in the 1970s and 1980s (both of which are true for me), then WKRP in Cincinnati was a must-listen to show. And you had to see the original versions, because the music they played was great but the producers couldn’t afford to syndicate it all, so in re-runs, all the original tracks are just filler tunes and not the originals.
But here is some genius. Someone has taken all of Dr. Johnny Fever’s DJ breaks and announcements and cut them into a three hour show. It contains the live audience laugh track, but it is otherwise a BRILLIANT project and elicits much loving nostalgia for me.
The Implosion of the Retirement Contract
I love a good policy discussion. I admit to being at a loss about how to address inequality and inaccessibility to basics like food, housing and education in a country that thinks of itself as “an advanced economy” and has no political party that is willing or able to make fundamental changes. But policy choices dictate the constraints that create outcomes like unaffordable good food, inaccessible housing and clipping student debt. This paper talks about an interesting underlying assumption that keep property prices high (and therefore also rents).
In nearly all liberal democracies, it is quite normal to treat “property” as “the ideal retirement asset for homeowners, with high house price growth helping downsizers release cash to fund their golden years.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto was a gamechanger for the early web. Those of us that were blogging back at the beginning of the century all knew about it and if your work extended into the organizational world, reading Cluetrain just laid bare how poorly prepared your company or agency or government was to deal with the oncoming onslaught of conversation, creation and disruption to the ways communications, marketing and organizations worked. Cluetrain is 25 years old now and it’s interesting to think about what is different now. Community is largely gone, for one thing.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ritual
Ted Gioia should be a must-read on everyone’s list. He writes on music and culture, and everything he says is thoughtful, skillfully economical, and insightful. He points you to pieces of music you would have never found. He provides takes on culture that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. This piece is so insightful about what it takes to live with boundaries that make our lives meaningful in an era where our attention has been nearly completely colonized.
The Origin of Last Summer’s Maui Wildfire
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the fire that destroyed Lahaina on Maui last summer. Having been there in February and witnessed the destruction myself, it is profoundly sad. To make matters worse, the fires ripped open a wound on Maui that private interests have rushed in to heal. The community is now in serious danger of being lost to outside owners and investment companies who have predatory designs on the land and property that was destroyed by the fire. Locals are in danger of forever losing their home places because there is no public support that can compete with what the wealthy interests are offering. It’s a shit show. In this article, Cliff Mass undertakes an analysis of the causes of the wildfire.
Raise energy and reduce ‘meeting fatigue’ by making meetings optional
My mate Mark McKergow has a research-supported idea for lowering cognitive fatigue for online meetings. It’s simple enough, but it requires managers to let go of control and let the work speak for itself. And it requires organizations to loosen up on the samara of accountability culture that is killing many of the workplaces I am working with.
Evaluation is one of those things that become a massively problematic constraint on a project if one doesn’t understand it, or worse, fears it. My friend Ciaran Camman is offering his course on Evaluation called “Weaving it In” and you should go to that. To get ready for that though, let this whimsical discussion whet your palate.