I’m in trouble. In the best way. So get ready for a long and rambling post about geeky dialogic philosophy and complexity practice.
I’m a little bit known in some communities as a person that is writing and working with the notion of “container” in dialogic organization development. The word and concept itself comes from a lineage of thinking about the spaces inside which dialogue takes place, and there is certainly lots written about that. I think I first learned the term from the work of William Isaacs whose classic work, “Dialogue,” is a seminal reference in this field. He describes a dialogic container as the “sum of assumpitions, shared intentions, and beliefs of a group.”
While that was the first place I learned of the concept of container in dialogue, my learning about it was also informed by reading about complexity science, and especially learning about dissipative structures and autopoiesis, two key concepts in self-organization in living systems. Furthermore, I learned of the notion of sacred space in both Christianity and indigenous ceremonies, especially the Midewiwin, to which I was exposed in my University years. Finally, my thinking about container with respect to complexity has been heavily influenced by both Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang‘s work, as they have explored how these concepts and dynamics from the natural sciences show up in human systems. In this context, Dave’s work on enabling and governing constraints is incredibly useful and Glenda’s broad palette of tools helps us to illuminate and work with containers.
So that is a brief survey of where my understanding has come from. I find the concept incredibly helpful in understanding the dynamics of self-organizing systems and it helps us to find places to intervene in a complex system with a rigorous approach to explore and change the patterns of self-organization and emergence.
So I use the word “container” with a very specific meaning, but it’s not a meaning that is shared by everyone and it definitely not a meaning shared by folks who have a history of being contained. Occasionally I get scolded for using the word, and I own that. We must be VERY thoughtful about language in this work so this is a long post where I think about the implications of this troublesome word which is used to describe a useful concept badly.
The word and concept are useful in understanding and describing dialogic practice. But it has some SERIOUS baggage because in contexts of oppression and colonization the history of colonization, enclosure, and imprisonment is entirely the history of containing people; on reserves, in jails, in schools, in groups defined by race and marked by lines, in ghettoized neighbourhoods, in a million places in which people are contained, enclosed and deprived of their agency and freedom to create and maintain boundaries.
In these contexts, the word “container” is often heard as a reference to places that are created by people with the power to contain others, and very often they contain people who have a lesser amount of power to change or free themselves from that container.
It is true and important to note that any discussion about how to manage dialogic spaces – containers – is entirely dependant on the power one has to create and influence the boundaries, and manage the connections and exchanges. Creating a dialogic container is an act of privilege. Using the word “container” will almost always trigger a negative reaction in people that have been SUBJECTED to containment, against their wills, against the interests, and in the service of depriving them of power.
Liberation movements all over the world in all moments of history are about creating alternative spaces to the oppressive culture and conditions of the present. These are expressed in all kinds of ways. In land reform movements, for example, colonized lands are recovered and returned to their original owners. In movements to free people from enclosed and coercive spaces like exploitative labour, prisons, residential schools, oppressive child welfare practices, or human trafficking, alternative spaces are built for equality, justice, freedom, learning, self-actualization and growth. And the metaphor and reality extends to spaces where people change the language to talk about their conditions and create spaces where conversation, dialogue, and organizing can happen in a way that draws a line between the oppressive practices of the past and the liberating spaces of the future. Socially constructed narratives can provide alternative stories that begin to link, connect, and differentiate people in a way that helps them organize their conditions of freedom.
So one major problem with this troublesome word is how it works in English. The word “contain” can be brutal, because in English it is a transitive verb that is not continuous, meaning that it implies an action conducted upon a object and then arriving at a resting place, where the object is contained and the action is done. That is a troubling truth of the word “container” and partially explains why it rests so uncomfortably on a dialogic practice that is intended to create spaces of generatively, creativity and life. It objectifies the object of it’s action and it acts upon that object to bring about a final conclusion. There is a lot buried in the particular grammatical function of the word. There is no room in the English definition of the word for self-organization and emergence.
Truthfully, the space required for dialogic practice needs a type of verb that doesn’t come so easily to English: a collectively transitive verb that is generative, continuous, and describes something that changes in its use. I suspect, having been a poor student of Anishinaabemowin and a bit of Skwxwu7mesh snichim, that there are maybe such verb forms in these languages. In my long study of the Tao te Ching, I’ve come to understand the concept of “yin” to be this: the form that life takes, in which creative energy is contained so it can do it’s work. It is created and changed in its interdependent relationship to what happens within it, like the way a river bed both holds the river and gives water its form of “river” instead of “lake” and is changed by the river being in it. It implies “receptivity” to creative energy. In Japanese where there is a sophisticated vocabulary for these kinds of spaces, “ma” (?) might be the word I’m looking for: a word that my friend Yurie Makihara defines this way: “Ma is the time concept expressing the time between something and other thing. We say how to create Ma is really important to encourage you to speak or “it’s kind of nice to have this kind of Ma.” For me Ma is the word to include some special sense to say, so we don’t use it just to express the time and the place.” Even though Yurie’s English is quite good, it’s clear that translating this into English is nearly impossible! But I think you get a sense that Ma is a collective sense about the shared time and space relationships that create a moment in which something is possible. Ma describes that moment, in a spatial way.
So. As is often the case, I’m left with the hidden poverty of English to give me a word that serves as both verb and noun and that is highly process-dependant. Over the years folks have suggested words like “nest” “hearth” and “field” to describe it. These are good, but in some ways they are also just softer rebranding of the word “container” to imply a more life-filled space. The terms still don’t ask the question of who gets to create, own and maintain the container nor do they fully capture the beauty and generativity of a complex adaptive structure in which meaning-making, relationship, healing, planning, dreaming both occur and act to transform the place in which they occur.
If we cast our eyes about the culture a bit wider, they quickly land on the word “space.” We use the word “space” a lot in social change circles, but it has its own troublesome incompleteness. The problem with “space” is that it often tends to turn attention towards what is between us and away from the boundary that separates us from others. This can be the way in which creating space for social change can fall victim to an unarticulated shadow: inclusion always implies a boundary between what is included and what is not included. Many social change initiatives falter on an unresourceful encounter with the exclusion that is implied by radical inclusion. A healthy social system can speak as clearly and lovingly about this boundary as it can about the relationship within the system. And for me this is the important part of talking about dialogic practice. So I can understand the helpful neutrality of the term “space” because it can be a result of a tight and impermeable boundary or it can simply be what we give our attention too as we come into relationship around attractors like identities, ideas, purposes, or needs. It can beautifully describe the nature of the “spaces in between.” But it still doesn’t do enough for me to describe the relationship between the spaces and the forces – or constraints – in the system that give rise to a space and enable self-organization and life. Still, it’s a pretty good word.
So perhaps what is needed is a true artistic view of the problem, to look away from the problem and towards the negative space that defines it. That is indeed what I have started doing in my work, by focusing more on the factors that influence self-organization and emergence and less on naming the structure that is created as a result of those factors. This is a critical skill in working with complexity as a strategist, facilitator, manager, and evaluator. These constraints include the interdependent work of the attractors and the boundaries which help us create a “space” for sensemaking and action, whether dialogic action or something else. There is a place where you are either in or out, and there can be a transition zone that is quite fluid and interesting. There is also an attractor at play, which can be a shared purpose, a goal, a shared identity, a shared rhythm or something interesting and strange and emergent that brings us into relationship. Anywhere you find yourself, in any social space, you can probably identify the attractors, the boundaries and perhaps even the nature of the liminal space between completely in and completely out.
This brings us back to the power conversation, rather more helpfully I think. If we let go of the “container” and focus instead on the factors that shape it, we can talk about power right upfront. Attractors and boundaries are VERY POWERFUL. They are created by power and maintained and enforced by power and the negotiation about their nature – more or less stable, more or less influential, more or less permeable and mutable – is by definition a negotiation about power. As a facilitator one carries a tremendous amount of power into the design of dialogic spaces. The most energetic resistance I have ever received in my work is always around the choices I made and the nature of the attractors and boundaries I am working with. I have been told I am too controlling, or not controlling enough. I have been told that we aren’t asking the right question (“who are you to say what we should be talking about?”). I have been removed from my role because what I was doing was far too disruptive to the group’s culture and norms of how they work, and in enforcing the disruption, I was actually depriving people of accessing the power they needed in the work.
(See the stories from Hawaii here and here and this story from Nunavik. Being an outsider with this power is perilous work.)
So yes, the terms we use to describe dialogic spaces matter. Finding a word to describe these spaces is important, and this is an important piece of critical pedagogy for anyone teaching dialogue and facilitation.
But don’t let your work rest on the definition of the space. Understand where these spaces come from. Actively work to invite more self-organization and emergence into these spaces that are in service of life, love and liberation. Become skillful at working with boundaries and attractors, limits and invitations, constraints that enable life rather than govern outcomes, and get good at knowing what kinds of relationships and constraints are the best fit for what is needed. That is what we need as we co-create spaces of radical participation and liberation and to transform the toxic use of power and control so we get more and more skillful at inviting us all into life-affirming moments and futures.
What do you think?
Part three in a series:
Part three: a collection of patterns for design and facilitation.
As I heard the story, the four fold practice was something of a flash of insight tied in with the original Art of Hosting offering made by Toke, Jan, and Monica. Somewhere in the forests of Northern California as the team was preparing to offer its first Art of Hosting training, somebody woke up one morning, after a few days of discussion and design with the strong sense that meaningful conversations had four things in common: people were present to the work, everyone was participating, the conversation was hosted in some way, and people co-created together. That’s it. It was, as the legend goes, drawn on the back of a napkin, which is the test of all useful frameworks, and it became the subject of an inquiry: so if these are the patterns that make up a meaningful conversation, what would the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations look like? Could we anchor our hosting practice on that? Could we teach that?
This simple observation and the subsequent inquiry has become a generative framework that holds together a global community of practitioners and theorists. We have seen that what constitutes a “meaningful conversation” in a huge variety of cultural and linguistic settings on every continent is a process that more or less exhibits these four characteristics. When brought together in the service of meaningful work these four patterns bring life and effectiveness to collective sense-making, problem-solving, and action. When attended to with good design and facilitation, these patterns become basic elements of the best kind of dialogue.
The ART of using these practices is being able to use them fluidly and fluently in many different contexts. Each of these four patterns looks different depending on the group you are working with and the work you are doing with them. It is very important that each group experience these patterns in ways that make sense to them. As skillful hosts we are trying to build containers for important and meaningful work. These containers are not the product of our role, rather they are themselves instruments that help good work to be done. The Art of Hosting is purely instrumentalist, in the sense that if the hosting is not practical and pragmatic and not in the service of something else, then it is not appropriate. Our goal as practitioners is not to simply create good dialogues for their own sake but to do so to have an effect, so we can be of service to a group.
Over the past 15 or so years of teaching and working with this art I have thought a lot about the connection between these patterns of experience and the practice of hosting. For me now, these four patterns have become the enabling constraints of my work with groups, in that I try to ensure that my designs meet the group’s purpose using this practice. The practices are broad enough that they allow for a vast array of approaches to be used so that designs can be tailored to context, but at the end of the day, it’s important to ask myself these questions:
- Are participants present?
- Is everyone participating?
- Is the space being held and hosted?
- Is the group itself co-creating its work?
In my experience, the extent to which these four conditions are true is directly related to the extent to which the group is doing good dialogic work. When I see goops faltering in their work, it is usually because one of these four patterns is crumbling. A group may lose its focus, some participants might be dominating in a way that causes others to become redundant to the process, the facilitation may be too tight or too loose, or the group may be having its work done by someone else. All of these conditions have the effect of undermining ownership, capacity, engagement, and participation. In general, when we are working with uncertainty or unknown futures, the four-fold practice is a useful checklist to enable groups to work together in complexity to understand what’s happening, make sense of their situation and make some decisions about what to do next, all the while staying connected and in relationship.
That’s a pretty big return on investment for such a small and portable practice.
Being Present
When I think back to the original learning I did around hosting and facilitation with the Elders of the National Association of Friendship Centres, and indeed before that in the governance processes of the United Church of Canada in which I was involved as a young man, I notice that important conversations were always preceded with a prayer or an invocation, or even a moment of silence before we got to work. For a conversation to be meaningful, every participant must be present to the task at hand. That means each one needs to have the time and resources to be able to participate. The work of the moment must be the only thing that holds people’s attention and so focus is important.
In later years, through the playing of Irish traditional music, which itself is a kind of social ritual and through spiritual practice influenced by both my indigenous teachers and the stream of practice that comes from Celtic monasticism, I observed and thought deeply about the nature of thresholds, which are those edges we cross that help us understand that we are in a different space, set aside for particular collective work that requires a little more depth of attention than our day to day activities. Practices to cross the threshold are very important in these kinds of spaces because they help us understand that we are in a different place and we are asked to bring a different awareness to what we are doing.
This is true of dialogue.
So whatever helps people come present to the work is a useful way to build the container for dialogue. It becomes almost ceremonial, and indeed the importance of ritual of some kind cannot be overstated. Even something as simple as taking a moment of silence before beginning, or having people silently read the relevant document together is a useful way to begin. Of course, more elaborate processes can involve more elaborate ways of bringing people to presence, but I have never been let down by a moment of silence. Even in the middle of meetings, when things are going sideways and conflict has become unproductive, a moment of silence can have a powerful effect in bringing people back to the problem or the purpose.
Whatever helps the group cross the threshold – be it physical or immaterial – will help participants come to the presence necessary to do deeper work.
Participating
In my own journey to develop the art of hosting in myself, one of the biggest mountains to climb was the idea that the facilitator is the one in charge of the room. For years I stood at the front of rooms full of people struggling with problems, asking questions, guiding discussions, commenting on ideas and writing them on flip charts. I was an influential part of the discussion, mostly unconsciously influencing decisions and discussions towards ideas and actions that grabbed my attention and excited me. It was all about me. Even though I was schooled on participatory research and Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I was also raised and mentored by people who were training me to be a preacher in the United Church of Canada and the promise to the ego of commanding an audience was the hardest thing that I had to overcome. Indeed it is still the hardest place of my own facilitation practice.
Discovering Open Space Technology was an absolute revelation to me. It allowed me to see what was possible when the facilitator radically trusted the group and let them take full responsibility for the conversations and the outcomes of their work. Radical participation is at the heart of the Art of Hosting, and the practice itself is intended to constrain leaders and hosts in such a way that the groups do theor work within constraints but with a minimum of influence from the facilitator. This is often the hardest practice for facilitators to learn when they shift their style to hosting: we are generally imprinted its the idea that facilitation means the facilitator is taking control of the space, ensuring safety, managing the agenda, keeping things moving along and dealing with conflict. Many times clients have asked me to solve interpersonal problems for them, because we have an idea that we can outsource these kinds of things to a facilitator.
But we know that when a group takes responsibility for its own work when everyone is actively participating and making sense of their own situation, we get a much more sustainable and resilient outcome from dialogic processes. The job of the host is to enable participation through careful attention to the constraints and methods that make it possible. This means first of all that hosts themselves must have a practice of participation, meaning that they must be good at engaging in dialogue themselves: sharing Ideas, listening to others, being aware of their impact in systems. It means that hosts must understand that they are never neutral in a system, that the privilege, power, and influence they bring is significant and important. Learning more about complexity, power, and privilege has made me a better host and has deepened my practice of participation in the world.
There is a reason that methods like Circle, Open Space Technology, World Cafe, and Appreciative Inquiry have been fundamental to the practice of the Art of Hosting in strategic settings. These methods have full participation built into them, and participants actively share the responsibility for the quality of the conversation and the harvest of the outcomes. Furthermore, when practitioners in the Art of Hosting global community have created methods, they also ensure full participation from all, including methods like Pro-Action Cafe, Collective Story Harvesting, and Design for Wiser Action.
Participation is at the heart of the four fold practice.
Being Hosted
In the practice of Dialogic Organization Development, of which the Art of Hosting is one expression, there is a great deal of attention given to the “container.” Participatory conversations take place within a described time and place and a set degree of freedom. The container is formed from attractors like a core purpose, a calling question, or a felt need. It is constrained by boundaries like time, space, resources, and degrees of influence. The role of the host is to pay attention to the container so that participants can operate within this space. Sometimes this involves tightening constraints or destroying them altogether. It might mean inviting attention on a shared purpose again or moving with the energy of the group and changing course. It is a dynamic and ever evolving practice.
And yes, it is different from what most people understand as “facilitation,” which is that person standing at the front of the room managing the conversation ad scrawling away on flip charts. Years ago I wrote a blog post that sought to make a clear distinction between the two terms but it was really too stark a distinction. These days I’m not so precious about this and I use the terms interchangeably. The essence of the art of hosting for me though is attending to the properties of the container so that the group itself can do the work. I see the host as a part o the system but a part with a very specific role of managing constraints. Most often in my work, this is done as a consultant, with the power and responsibility to do this, but there are times when I am a part of a group that needs hosting and I turn my attention from the work at hand and focus on the quality of the container instead. It is, as my friend Tenneson Woolf often says, a gift to host and a gift to be hosted.
Being hosted well is indeed a gift, and is not that common. Think of how many meetings you have been to where your irritation with the facilitator has gotten in the way of the work you came to do. Some of those times may even have been with me as your host! Alos, think of the times when you were acutely aware that the LACK of hosting was a real problem, impeding the ability of the work to get done. Reflect on these experiences and contrast them with the experiences you had of the most meaningful work in your life. It is an almost certainty that these experiences were hosted – that is they happened inside a container that was built around mutual purpose,a common challenge, a relationship, or an opportunity to do something relevant. The hosting may have been extremely light, or it may have involved a tightly scripted flow. It may have been held by another person, or the group itself may have played the role of the host. Regardless, I am willing to be that the most meaningful conversations humans are involved in – and the most meaningful work – comes inside just the right enabling constraints. It is hosted.
Sometimes when I am talking about the four-fold practice I will say that this pattern is about enabling contribution, and I truly think that a well-hosted meeting sets up a kind of gift economy, where participants are offering and receiving in the best way. This doesn’t mean that folks are always getting along well, but it does mean that difference, dissent and conflict can be offered and received in the service of something bigger and not as a back and forth tennis match of accusation and closing down. Hosting is not something that happens without intention and a commitment to the role and so in spaces where hosting will benefit, to step up and do the work is to contribute to the emergence of this pattern.
Co-creating
The fourth pattern of meaningful conversation acknowledges that the best dialogues leave the participants with the knowledge and evidence that they have been creating something together. When things are truly participatory, participants can point concretely to the way that they contributed to the outcome. This is a rare feeling these days where both organization and community life is dominated by accountabilities that are more often than not pointed towards people in power or responsibility and not towards oneself or to the group of folks to which one belongs. There is of course some truth to this, but complex challenges require the participation and ongoing ownership of all in order to be sustainable. The feeling of having co-created something brings tremendous meaningfulness to a task and ongoing commitment to the relationship that will extend and sustain the effort.
Co-creation for me is a key piece of design in every way. I recently hosted a meeting with drug users, community members, service providers and non-profit leaders where we were looking at the stories collected about opioid use in a sensemaker project. It was obvious to me that the meeting needed to be co-created with people from all of these groups in order for it to be something that had some real efficacy. In the end, a network of peers offered the four main tasks for the day (review the stories to find patterns, discuss them with others, come up with bigger solutions, and leave with something concrete) and they also took responsibility for setting up safe space where people could use drugs or be supported if the stories triggered trauma. This was something I couldn’t do at all, and so I stuck to hosting the process and the peer network hosted the space. That is co-creation.
Likewise, when I am hosting, the group itself will be largely responsible for its own harvest of the gathering. That means data written or recorded in their own hands and voices, and it means that they make sense of the conversations they have had and even create the substance of the report of the proceedings. My basic principle is “never touch the data” and if there is ever a time I have to move post-it notes or write words about the event, I think very carefully about whether or not it is my place to do so. It is tempting for facilitators to show their prowess by synthesizing data, writing reflections and telling the group what happened in their reports. All of that, useful as it may appear to be, has a cost. It is your job to find that cost and determine whether it is a price you are willing you to pay!
So these patterns translate into a useful set of design and planning guidelines. They help us practice the art of hosting and keep meetings as participatory as possible. They also often guideposts for the development of practice of both facilitation and, at bigger scales, leadership.
One of my mantras that helps keep me focused when I’m designing a process is “I’m not planning a meeting, I’m planning a harvest.” This helps me focus on need and purpose and helps me choose or create processes that make good use of our time together.
Facilitators can be guilty of the sin of falling in love with their methods and tools. Especially when we learn a new thing, we are desperate to try it out, sharing our zeal for this fresh thing we’ve discovered. In my own experience, many times that results in the meeting being about my needs and not the needs of the group. If I design a session based solely on the method – even if it is ostensibly in services of outcomes – I can find myself suffering from intentional unawareness and missing what the group wants or needs.
Because I am a process geek and love my tools and methods, I have found it necessary to disrupt the tendency to suggest a structure before fully fleshing out what is needed. This is why I organized the planning tool I use, the chaordic stepping stones, in a way that saves final decisions about structure until the very end of the planning process.
While it is essential to start the design with need and purpose, equally important is having a strong sense of the outputs, or the harvest of a process. In participatory work, outputs are not merely the tangible record and artifacts of the meeting. They are also intangible. Another design principle I use is “leave more community than you found” which demands that whatever we are doing, we build relationships and social connections in a group as much as possible and at the very least do no harm to social relationships. Building relationships is essential if the outputs of group work are to be sustained after the meeting is over.
Keeping these principles straight is aided by this handy framework I helped develop years ago, inspired by Ken Wilber’s integral theory. It recognizes that every meeting produces outputs that are both tangible and intangible, as well as individual and collective.
Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking
Tangible collective outputs include meeting artifacts, such as data, reports, visible shared purpose, decisions action plans, structure and organization, and records of the event. Intangible collective outputs include social relationships, collective learning, and social cohesion.
Tangible individual outputs can be skills, personal takeaways, a clear personal workplan, or a knowledge of one’s role and responsibilities. Intangible individual outputs can include belonging, encouragement, clarity of purpose, enjoyment, and a sense of purpose.
All facilitators spend time working on the tangible collective outputs of a meeting, but sometimes we give the other three quadrants short shrift. If we don’t pay attention to these things, especially the intangible outputs, we can often create good artifacts but at the expense of relationships or trust. How many times have you been a part of the process where the facilitator delivered on the work, but everyone felt worse afterwards? Harvesting needs to be reciprocal, not extractive.
I use this framework by asking my clients to choose two or three desired outputs in each quadrant. These are things we want to happen as a result of the meeting and they become constraints for choosing our tools and designing a flow for the process.
Recently I helped design a meeting process for the First Nations Technology Council to invite First Nations social development managers to come together and work on an investment strategy to improve the use of technology in their work of providing income assistance to individuals in their communities. It would be easy to make this an extractive consultation, but my client was clear that we needed to build community between these people, encourage learning and peer coaching and ensure that going forward the work was supported and stewarded by the participants themselves..
When I came on to the project, we had a good draft agenda that was tailored towards getting information from the participants to include in an investment strategy being prepared for the federal government. But in checking against the intended intangible outputs, we realized that the process was too dependant on the facilitator and presentations from the front of the room. We made some significant changes to build more community, more peer support, and more ownership of the work. These included:
- Changing an environmental scan to a world cafe in which participants shared their stories about their work and the way they were able to provide services in spite of the technological challenges they faced.
- Moving from a sterile user profile process to a peer process in which participants interviewed each other on the steps that each manager goes through in meeting, processing and reporting on income assistance. We made a process timeline and participants coded their work to show where they used technology, where frustration existed in the system and where the process was bottlenecked. These became key points for the investment strategy.
- Instead of the FNTC writing the strategy themselves, each of the five consultations will appoint two participants to be a part of a sense-making group whose job is to review the work of the entire process and design the investment strategy alongside the Technology Council. This group of ten will convene to produce the final product, and hopefully deliver it to Ottawa, preserving the voice of participants in the work.
The meeting took participants by surprise and many were thrilled to be engaged in a participatory way and have their knowledge honoured. Because these people don’t often get a chance to meeting others in the same job, they were hungry for network building and sharing solutions with each other. Supporting this community will be an important part of the work going forward.
Focusing on the harvest in all of its aspects helps to create a set of enabling constraints that helps me to be a better process designer and provide a better overall experience for participants. Give the tool a try and let me know how it changes your practice.
I travel around many different kinds of organizations. Many of them preach the mantra that goes something like “it’s okay to fail here. Please take risks and try new things!” Unfortunately, when I look around I can’t see much infrastructure in place that allows the work context to be safe enough to fail.
An organization needs to build learning and experimentation into its operations, especially if it is required to respond to changing conditions, improvements in services, or new ideas. And so the idea that “we want people to take risks” is promoted, often alongside an exhortation to do so prudently but really with no further direction than that.
Anyone who has worked in a large organization will know that risk-taking is perilous. There are many ways to be punished for doing something wrong, and the worst punishments are the invisible ones: shaming, exclusion, a tattered reputation, eroded trust, political maneuvering that takes you away from access to power and influence. Not to mention the material punishments of reduced budgets, demotions, poor performance reviews, and limited permission to try new things in the future.
Failure in context
Before going any further, let’s talk about what I mean by failure. Using Cynefin, we can focus on the difference between failure in complicated contexts and failure complex contexts. When we have a complicated failure in a stable and linear and predictable system, the answer is to fix it right away. Ensure you have the right experts on tap, do a good analysis of the situation and apply a solution.
In complex adaptive systems, failure is context-dependent. Here failure is an inevitable part of learning and doing new things. Because complex problems demand us to create emergent solutions, we are likely to get somewhere when we can try many different things and see what works and what doesn’t. Dave Snowden calls this “safe-to-fail” and it means taking a small bet, based on a hunch that what you are doing is coherent with the nature of the system and where you want to go, and acting to see what happens. If it fails, you stop it, and if it works, you support it.
I think I once heard Dave say something like “probes in a system should fail 8 out of 10 times or you aren’t trying to find emergent practice.” That is certainly a rubric I find helpful. This means that in developing new things, you should expect to fail 80% of the time and to do that requires that you put into place a system for supporting failure and learning.
Stuck on a cliff
Imagine you are free rock climbing – no ropes or belyaing – and there is a handhold you are reaching for that requires you to do something you’ve never done before. Your partner says “you’ll never learn to solve this problem if you don’t try something. Don’t be afraid to fail.” Far from being imbued with confidence, you are likely to be frozen with fear, seeing all the ways that things could go wrong. Better to just stick to what you know, and don’t try the move.
If however, you are in this same scenario, but you are roped up and belayed by someone you trust, you can feel safe to try the move knowing that if you fail, you will be caught and you will have a chance to try a different strategy. As you develop mastery in the move, you can use it more and more in your rock climbing life, and you may loosen the safety constraints as you develop more capability
Implications for facilitation and leadership
Safety is about creating good constraints so that your people can take risks and know they will be safe if they get it wrong. The job of leaders is to set the constraints for action in such a way that a safe space is available for work. This can take the form of limited time, money, the scope of action, or other things so that folks know what they can and cannot do. Within that space, leaders need to trust people to do their learning and create feedback loops that share the results of experiments with the bigger system. If you can have people all working separately on the same problem – working in parallel as we would say in Cognitive Edge-speak – then you increase the chances of lots more failures and also of finding lots of different ways to do things. This is called “distributed cognition” in complex facilitation and keeping people from influencing each other increases the creative possibilities within constraints.
The next level of this practice is to honestly incentivize failure. Give a reward to a person or a team that has the best report of their failure, the one that helps us all to learn more. You could easily do this in an innovation meeting by having different groups work on a problem in a fixed amount of time. Watch for the group that fails to get anywhere by the end of the time and ask them to share WHY they failed. Their experience will be a cautionary tale to the whole system.
Almost every organization I work with says that they embrace learning, tolerate failure, and want their employees to take more risks. When I ask to see how they do this, it’s rare to find organizations that have a formal process for doing so. Without that in place, employees will always respond to these kinds of platitudes with a little fear and trembling, and in general, take fewer risks if it clashes with their stated deliverables.
Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University.
In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes:
In disciplines as diverse as genetics, psychology, sociology, disaster management, public health, urban development, and environmental science, there is movement away from research on the factors that produce disease and dysfunction to analyses of capacity building, patterns of self-organization, adaption, and in the case of human psychology, underlying protective and promotive processes that contribute to the resilience of complex systems.
The same is true for my own practice and development around complex facilitation. From a resilience standpoint, my inquiry is, what are the facilitation or hosting practices that help create containers that foster resilience and capacity building?
Ungar’s principles are as follows:
- (1) resilience occurs in contexts of adversity;
- (2) resilience is a process;
- (3) there are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience;
- (4) a resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex;
- (5) a resilient system promotes connectivity;
- (6) a resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning; and
- (7) a resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation.
I think it’s a moral imperative to build resilience into strategic dialogue and conversations, whether in a short hosted meeting or in a long term participatory process. Participatory work is always a chance to affirm the dignity of human beings. Furthermore, many people come into participatory processes suffering the effects of trauma, much of it hidden from view. While facilitation is not therapy, we cannot practice a “do no harm” approach if we don’t understand patterns of trauma and the way resilience strategies address the effects. Creating “safe enough” space for people to engage in challenging work is itself a resilience strategy. Do it well, and you contribute to long term capacity building in individuals and collectives.
I find these principles inspiring to my complex facilitation practice, because they help me to check designs, and make choices about the kinds of ways I intervene in the system. For example, just off the top of my head, here are some questions and insights we could use to embed our processes with more resilience, related to each principle.
Resilience occurs in contexts of adversity
- Ensure that a group struggles with its work. Don’t be afraid to overload individuals for short periods of time with cognitive tasks (evidenced by confusion, contorted faces, and fatigue). But don’t let that cognitive overload create toxic stress in the system. Your boundary is somewhere between those two points.
- Avoid premature convergence (a Dave Snowden and Sam Kaner principle). Create the conditions so that people don’t simply accept the easy answers without going through the struggle of integrating ideas and exploring emergence.
Resilience is a process
- A resilient system is constantly growing and changing and achieving new levels of capacity, and able to deal with harder and harder stresses. Build-in some adversity to every aspect of organizational life, and you will build capacity building into the organization.
- There is no “final state” of capacity that is acceptable, and so good leadership and facilitation continue to design processes that work the resilience muscle.
- Don’t undertake a “capacity-building project.” Instead, make capacity-building a collateral benefit of engaging in a participatory process.
There are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience
- Watch for the way resilience begins to shift power dynamics and authority in a system. When a group can manage itself well, it requires different support from leadership and different methods of management.
- If the “operating system” of the organization in which a resilient team doesn’t keep pace with the capacity built in the team, a break can occur. Attend to these connections between the resilient parts of the system (that survive by being changed) and the robust parts of the system (that survive by being unchanged).
A resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex
- To my point in a previous post on complex facilitation, you have to work in a complex system with a complexity approach. That means eschewing tendencies to control, closed boundaries, fixed approaches and known outcomes.
- Work with the properties of containers to encourage emergence and self-organization
A resilient system promotes connectivity
- Many of the dialogic methods we use with the Art of Hosting are premised on the fact that everyone in the system is responsible for participating and that relationship is as important an outcome as productivity.
- Working with stories, shared perspectives, diverse identities, and multiple skills in the same process builds connection between people in a system. Solving problems and overcoming adversity together helps individuals become more resilient and connected to each other.
- Any process hoping to survive over time needs to have explicit attention paid to the connections between the parts in the system.
A resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning
- The very first inquiry of the Art of Hosting community was something like “What if learning together was the new form of leadership we need now?” A good marker of a resilient team or organization is its ability to fail, recover, and learn. Many organizations say they do this. but few actually pull it off.
- Create work in which individuals enjoy solving problems and take pleasure in getting things wrong.
A resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation
- A forest without these features is a tree farm. An organization with these features is a machine.
- Diverse perspectives and lived experiences present opportunities for change and development. They challenge existing ways of doing things and disrupt in helpful ways.
- Redundancy is a feature of living systems. Never be afraid to have the same conversations twice. Or three times.
- Aim for full participation in every meeting. If a person is not participating, the group cannot benefit from their knowledge, experience, or curiosity.
These are just my initial musings on Ungar’s work. They validate many of the practices and methods used in the world of participatory leadership and the Art of Hosting. They also challenge us to make braver choices to create spaces that are harder than we might want them to be so that participants can struggle together to build capacity for change. I truly believe that communities, organizations, and people that develop resilience as a by-product of their work together will be best equipped to face increasing levels of uncertainty and emergence.