Today, I was working with a client designing a one-day conference for their members. As always, my focus was on the chaordic stepping stones as a way to design, which defers decisions about structure, agenda and logistics until after we have focused the groundwork of the event.
Participatory events are not highly engaging without tapping into the group’s urgent necessity and a clear sense of purpose for the gathering. From that point, design becomes easier, and invitation becomes alive.
Today, we focused on necessity and purpose. I kicked us off by asking, “What is happening that makes this gathering important? What conversations are you expecting to have?” in this sense, the question places people at the centre of the participant experience. Immediately, they feel the emotions of the gathering and connect with the obvious sensations present in the current context. That helps them to find the language to invite others into a gathering that will address the energy of the current moment.
For the second exercise, I had them tightly constrain their purpose statements for the gathering. I asked them to give me one word describing the purpose of the gathering given the context conversation we just had. Each of the six people typed a single word into the chat and we went around and had each person describe what that word meant and how they saw us doing that at the conference.
This led to a set of really focused insights on what we should be doing and how, and it helped to flesh out some of the other stepping stones: the outputs, architecture of implementation and some of the preliminary structure.
As I considered this technique, I reflected on how I study jazz language. I love learning licks and phrases of melody that people use to express different things. On their own, licks are just the building blocks of bigger phrases of meaning (although some licks, like the Salt Peanuts lick, convey A LOT of information). But a lick opens up possibility. It suggests something else, it even recalls past experiences. It comes from what your fingers or voice has done before, what is natural, what is top of mind.
The point is that licks are small units of language that an improviser can use to expand upon. Starting small and simple is incredibly helpful. From a one or two-bar phrase, you can develop variations and different kinds of tension and release. Writers know this from the prompts that are used to stimulate creativity. No one gets activated staring at a blank page. But give me a prompt, and we’re off.
In our meeting today, starting from a one-word purpose helped develop a grounded rather than abstract purpose for the conference. After an hour and a half together, we had a lot of good material for an invitation, some ideas for how to be together and the stuff we would create together, and the beginnings of a structure. It was a lovely improv session.
A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting.
So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like North America and Europe. All I seem able to grasp are fragments of patterns. Because I work with all kinds of clients in all sorts of different sectors and locations and situations, I do find myself getting struck with similar patterns that seem to transcend these differences, and it makes me wonder a bit about what is creating these patterns.
One of those repeated patterns is “we don’t have time” or “I’m too busy.” The effect of this is that convening people together is becoming increasingly difficult. I used to do lots of three-day planning sessions or organizational retreats where folks would come together and relax in each other’s company and open up a space for dreaming and visioning and building relationships. It was not uncommon for three or four-day courses to take place. Between 2011 and 2019, When we ran the nine-month Leadership 2020 program for the BC Federation of Community Social Services, we began and ended with five-day residential retreats on Bowen Island. We had two-hour webinars every fortnight. While some organizations found it hard to give up that amount of time (10 days away from the office on professional development training in a year!), we nevertheless put nearly 400 people through that program. Nowadays, when we do similar programs, the most we can get are three-day in-person retreats, and usually only one throughout the time together.
This is costing us big time. I am working with organizations where folks are meeting constantly but only spending time together a couple of times a year. The pandemic threw us into an emergency stop-gap approach to remote work that served the purpose of the times: to keep things going while we remained isolated. However, much of what happened throughout 2020 and 2021 was just stabilizing and concretizing these emergency measures. There wasn’t much thoughtfulness to how to make remote work and schooling work well. As a result, I think that many organizations made an over-compensation to being back together in person, and we are seeing some of that backlash now. Some people are six and seven years into their working careers who have only ever really known remote work. Their engagement patterns are radically different from those of us who came up in the days of long off-sites, of days spent in offices and work sites developing relationships and figuring things out together. And that isn’t even to mention schooling. Before the pandemic, there were some excellent programs in BC to support distance education for elementary and high school students, thoughtfully prepared and designed. When the pandemic began, teachers and professors were thrown into a completely new pedagogical context, and very, very few had any practiced ability to work in these contexts.
Of course, what makes this even worse is that we did a terrible job of managing the pandemic. Had we been able to return to office in the summer of 2020, with the virus squashed by a good public health response, it would have been an interesting time. We would have been equipped with experiences of different ways of being, what it felt like to work from home or support communities with a universal basic income. We would have run an experiment without entrenching structural constraints that made it hard to un-run the experiment. Instead, as the pandemic dragged on, temporary structural changes took hold. People moved away from their homes near their offices into cheaper and more distant communities. Public transportation funding shifted as ridership disappeared, and office leases were let go as companies and organizations realized that they could save on overhead and facilities costs. It is now far too late to be thoughtful about integrating the lessons of a global three or four month experiement into an existing society.
It feels to me that the urgency hasn’t gone away. Every day is a slew of online meetings, stacked back to back and on top of each other without any rest between sessions. Work hours are extended beyond a reasonable day, and those of us who are neuro-divergent are tipped into a world of near-constant distraction and dysregulation from the various and persistent demands on our time and attention. My first wide open day on my calendar for which I have no work committments at all is November 27, two months away. Since I turned 55 I have started taking Fridays off which means that I occasionally book full day sessions for that day. And I can move calls around and make time and space when I need to, but in general, I think my calendar probably reflects yours.
Our time and attention has been divided into hour long units, largely dictated by the default setting on our videoconferencing software. A half hour meeting feels like a blessing, as does a three hour session when we can take breaks and slow down.
My relationship to time is changing. Our relationship is changing.
I’m lamenting the loss of deep long engagement. Pre-pandemic we used to even have great online meetings that were rich and deep. People saw them as special and treated them like face to face meetings, giving the work it’s full attention. Cameras were always on.
Nowadays I bet there are heardly any meetings where everyone is focused on the task at hand. There are browser tabs open, phones to play with, tasks to accomplish while the meeting is going on. In some cases when we are doing workshops in organizations, and people have simply accepted the calendar invitation without giving any thought to how participatory it is, folks will just ghost the whole meeting. We have presented to zoom rooms full of black boxes with names in them, every camera off, every mic muted. One meeting I was involved – with elected officials no less, on the subject of engagement – I simply cut it short. No one was paying attention, no one was participating. There was nothing to do. Clearly the work wasn’t important enough, and so I just said something like “Instead of pulling teeth, I’m just going to suggest we finish this session.” A couple of people took a moment to say goodbye, and most just blinked off. I billed them my full rate.
I reallize that my life history as a facilitator has left me ill equipped for these kinds of meetings where attention is splintered into shards and no one seems to have the time to prepare or follow up becasue the next task is coming right up. Instead what I end up doing is focusing deeply on the invitation to the gathering so that everyone who comes has placed the time we have together at the top of their list. Sometimes this means shortening the meeting from two days to one day, or a half day to an hour and a half. I always warn clients that we can’t do the same quality work in half the time, so we make do. If we need a large amount of time together, we will plan something for a few months out so folks can clear their schedules. It’s now all about invitation and preparation, even more so than it ever was.
So…how are you with time and attention? What adjustments are you making to deliver quality in the meetings in which you are participating?
PS. If you want to read a good literature review on this stuff, check out “Remote work burnout, professional job stress, and employee emotional exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic.” i need not remind you that we are still in the pandemic; we are just pretending we aren’t.
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.
Back in the late 1990s, when Toke Møller and Monica Nissen were mentoring a group of Kaos Pilot students, they went to visit Dee Hock in California to learn about his ideas of the chaordic organization and the chaordic lenses that help organizations stay focused on a minimal necessary structure that allows for coherence and emergence. It was a useful contribution to the budding set of participatory leadership practices that were emerging amongst the early Art of Hosting developers.
After that, Dee Hock’s chaordic lenses got expanded a little and became the “Chaordic Stepping Stones” which we have developed further in the Art of Hosting community, so-called because they slow down the planning conversation and allow one to find secure places to stand in the flow and swirl of planning in complexity. The stepping stones give you places to rest and look around with a little bit of intention and provide you and the people you are working with with a set of conversations that help to make some decisions/ I’ve often described it as a project management tool for the times when “you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know where you’re going.”
One of the things that distinguishes it from other planning processes is that we don’t start from vision or purpose; instead, we start from a sense of the current moment, what was called the need, and what I now call “the necessity.” Naming this is critical because current conditions limit what is possible. Too often, strategic planning starts with aspirations, which can either be so abstract that they are useless for guiding concrete action and decisions, or they are aspirations without paying attention to whether it is even possible to move from here to there.
Necessity is embedded in the present moment. When someone feels like “we have to do something,” they are responding to something in the present moment. It is always the first conversation I have with a client: what is happening right now that compels us to do something? In this sense, necessity is truly the mother of intention – a phrase that came to me this morning and is too good not to comment on. Intention – what we mean to do, what we think should happen, and what we want to commit to, provides the affordances that make a purpose concrete and avoids the aspirational aspect of purpose statements that avoid the reality of the situation and take us into a process that is too vague and diffuse to be effective.
PS: I have an online course on chaordic design you can take on-demand that goes into this planning tool in more detail.
Someone asked me the other day about how to use constraints in facilitation and I thought I’d jot some quick thoughts down here.
Let’s start using terms from Cynefin. Group work falls on a scale between ordered tasks and unordered tasks (or complicated and complex). The first question I ask myself in designing a container for facilitation is, “how much emergence is desired in this field?” In most of my work, I’m working in highly emergent situations, but for folks working around issues like safety or legal issues, there may be a prescribed outcome that the group needs to work towards. And of course, there is a mix along the way, and a lot of work happens in the liminal spaces between these two kinds of work.
If the purpose of the gathering is emergence, then you use enabling constraints to create the conditions for emergent outcomes. If the purpose of the gathering is a fixed goal or target, then you use governing constraints to discourage emergence.
All group work is constrained. In other words it is not possible for “anything” to happen in a group, and every choice we make with the power we have has hosts/facilitatiors or leaders in a situation constrains the work. It behooves us to make ethical decisions about the constraints we use to structure group work. NOT thinking about these constraints, or not thinking enough about them, can result in a fatal lack of awareness. We can end up over-or under-structuring a meeting such that unintended consequences become quickly catastrophic to the purpose of the gathering.
What do constraints look like? Here’s a short set of lists of the thing facilitators typically make choices about when they are setting the conditions for a container.
Connections
- Who are the people in the room and how do we connect them together? How do we break or lessen connections? How can we diversify connections?
- What information, resources or artifacts are important to connect to people and the purpose of the work? What do folks need to know to participate well?
- How much should folks in the gathering be connected to the outside world? How deeply do they need to be connected inside the gathering?
Exchanges
- What are the ways in which we will share information in the gathering? Stories, data, opinions, interests, facts, dreams, experiences?
- How does power work in this space? Who has it and who does not? What do we need to do to work with it well?
- What is the nature of exchanges in the system? Collaborative, learning, debate, confrontation and conflict, appreciative, critical, supportive, dismissive?
- Which media will enable exchanges in the space? Writing, drawing, body movement, song, play, reflection…
Attractors
- What purpose is at the centre of the work?
- What questions will we use to guide conversations? How open or close are those questions?
- Do we need a single focus for the meeting or the conversation, or is this a space for multiple foci? How will we enable those conversations to happen?
- What hidden attractors are in the room that may cause the group to self-organize in unhelpful ways? These are things like status, privilege, history and so on that form powerful centres around which people will make choices about their participation. Left unspoken, these attractors are powerful dark constraints in the system that can produce surprising results.
Boundaries
- What are the time and space requirements that limit our work, for the meeting as a whole and for specific parts of it?
- Who is in and who is out, and how do we make that determination?
- What are the barriers to participation, and how are they helpful or hindering?
- What topics are allowed or not allowed to be raised?
- What personal and social boundaries need to be created or maintained or dissolved?
- What safety needs have to be met for physical, emotional and psychological safety? How do we create the conditions for resilience in the container if people are required to stretch themselves away from their comfort zone or into a space that starts to feel challenging to them?
Where there are degrees of complexity or emergence in the container in which you are working (which is a lot of the time for most of us), your initial design choices will inevitably adopt and evolve over the course of the meeting. Each of these constraints is emergent and while we can start with choices, changes to those choices come fast and think. Sometimes you need to tighten a constraint by, for example, shortening the amount of time needed for an activity. Other times you need to break up groups that are falling into premature convergence together and perhaps getting “too cliquey” for the work at hand. In other cases, what looks like a “clique” is actually a group taking responsibility for its own safety, and in fact, you shouldn’t break it up.
There is so much more to say on all of this, but by way of tying the notion of my four kinds of constraints to facilitation, does that provide some clarity?
About HOW to do that? Consult my post on some of the basic competencies one needs to develop to work with complex facilitation. It ain’t easy.