In this blog post, I’m going to lift the lid on the core of my facilitation practice. I specialize in complex facilitation for addressing complex issues and this requires a special approach to working with groups. In the Art of Hosting world, we call this approach “hosting” to signify that it has its primary focus on the spaces and processes that we use to host dialogue rather than a more traditional facilitation approach that manages the content, meaning-making, and dynamics.
For me, this approach is defined by a focus on the two key dynamics of emergence and self-organization. After 15 years of trying to figure this all out, I think I finally have this down to a simple set of underlying principles that have been heavily borrowed and deeply influenced by the work of Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang.
I first learned the term “complex facilitation” from Dave Snowden. “Complex facilitation” refers to an approach to working with groups that is grounded in good complexity theory. It is an important approach to take when the work you are doing is complex. There is almost always a temptation, when confronted with the uncertainty of a complex system, to default to control in order to drive the process towards a comfortable outcome. This can often result in a process becoming so constrained that there is no possibility for the magic of emergence or self-organization to happen. The desired outcomes of good complex facilitation process are precisely these two states: emergence of meaning and understanding, and self-organization of a group.
Emergence means that a group of people leaves a room with insights that no one person brought into a room with them. When we are confronted with complex problems stemming from emergent phenomenon (culture, conflict, identity, shifting markets, new realities dictated by contexts we don’t control, interpersonal dynamics, “next level” anything…) we need to to create a process that invites emergence. Emergent problems are addressed with emergent solutions.
Self-organization means that a group of people organizes their time, attention and resources in ways that meet the urgent necessity of the moment. It is possible to create processes that allow for self-organization to occur by providing clear attractors and boundaries in a system. Self-organization represents an emergence of structure, which is what is needed to work with emergent ideas. It’s no good going away on an off-site retreat, creating a set of powerful new ideas, and then going back to the office and trying to fit them into pre-existing structures.
Creating conditions for emergence
When we work with complex facilitation Snowden gives us three clear heuristics that can inform design: work with finely grained objects, disintermediate sensemaking, and distribute cognition.
Working with finely grained objects means that groups both generate and work with lots and lots of data points. In my practice, these are generally generated from collecting a large number of small stories and anecdotes about situations. My clients can attest to the huge numbers of post-it notes we go through in group process work, for this reason. These are use to collect data grounded in reality (“tell a story of a time when you made this move…”) and such data objects can be collected together, individually or using online tools. Lately, I’ve fallen in love with Cynthia Kurtz’s approach of Participatory Narrative Inquiry, which is one branch of the work she started with Dave Snowden as they began to create methods for complex facilitation. Other methods like Liberating Structures and large group facilitation methods also help do this.
Disintermediated sensemaking refers to the principle that the people themselves should make sense of their own work. We try to create processes where people are in touch with the raw data objects, so they can find meaning and patterns themselves, without a facilitator or consultant imposing a framework on them. Interpretation of data should rest with the people who are using it. In complexity, how people make meaning of their context dictates how they will act. If a consultant writes a report with their own conclusions, it will always distort the sensemaking participants do. We help this happen in groups by having people hunt for patterns, clusters things into themes and really using tools like Glenda Eoyang’s Human Systems Dynamics and technology like Sensemaker or NarraFirma to help in this work.
Distributed cognition means decentralizing the thinking in the group so that many brains are put to work on a problem and many different perspectives can be brought to bear. This includes having groups of people working in parallel on different issues so that they can generate approaches free of influence from each other in order to enhance creativity. Creating the conditions for diverse perspectives and contradictory actions helps groups to choose general directions of travel together and to test hypotheses and learn more about what paths forward are helpful and which are not.
Creating conditions for self-organization
Complex facilitation works with “containers” which are bounded spaces and time in which emergence is enabled. Containers are made up from a set of constratints acting together to create patterns. Inside these spaces, groups must be able to self organize emergent forms of working if they are to work on emergent ideas. In complex facilitation, you can create the conditions for self-organization by working with the attractors and boundaries that make up the constraints of the container, the exchanges and differences that enable the flows inside the container, and the identities that people take on in the work.
I’ve learned all this from Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework and Glenda Eoyang’s CDE model and lately, I’ve been blending the lessons and insights from both into a general approach towards working with constraints in facilitated spaces..
In a container Attractors are things that attract and enable coherence and Boundaries are things that constrain and contain, creating separations and allowing us to categorize differences. Think about an attractor as something we all gather around: a fire, a song, a strong purpose, a centre, a meal. Attractors bring us into coherence. Boundaries contain us: a rim, walls, a fence, a roadway, a rule, a fixed amount of time or money. They draw lines between in and out, between what’s included and what’s excluded, and what is the same and different. You cross a boundary when you are no longing sharing a space with others, or when a data object is no longer functionally similar to something else. Taken together, attractors and boundaries form the basic properties of containers, and you can add more or fewer attractors, deepen or lessen attachment to them or tighten or loosen boundaries to create or shift containers.
Exchanges and Differences describe the dynamics inside a container and also act as constraints. Differences give us tensions and potentials for change. You can create more diversity or more homogeneity in a container. The potential for change lies in the differences in a container. Homogeneous systems tend to be very stable and resistant to change, massively diverse systems tend to move and change quickly. Exchanges describe the connections between things in a container and also describe the flows of resources in a system. These might include information, energy, power, and money. Exchanges can be increased or decreased, or given more amplitude or less. They can be channelled through one pipe like a garden hose or distributed through a more intricate structure like a mycelial network.
Identities influence self-organization because they can change the way people think about problems or perform functions in the system. Sometimes you need to CEO to be the most influential person in the system and sometimes you need their staff to be the important ones. Changing and disrupting identities is important for undertaking the three functions that enable emergence. Identity can often be a powerful dark constraint in a system that can hold stuck patterns in place or enable the emergence of new ones. Breaking down existing identities is key before self-organization into new emergent structures takes place. But too much undermining of identities leads to existential chaos, so sensing is critical.
Any questions?
I’ll be hosting an online course with my pals at Beehive Productions next March on this topic, so expect a few more musings over the next several months as I put together that four-week program.
A couple of days I ago I shared a link on twitter from Rob Hopkins about a community meeting held in Totnes in the UK which brought together the community to discuss what to do now that the town had declared a climate emergency. The design of the meeting was highly participatory and I’m grateful that the organizers took time to document and share the results.
The design had all the hallmarks of an effective participatory gathering, including having a well thought through harvest strategy so that the gathering was in service of the work and that it left people engaged, enthusiastic about participating in community work and more importantly trusting one another.
These kinds of gatherings are not uncommon, but it’s unlikely that you’ve ever been to one in your town or city. I’ve been lucky enough over the years to do a few really interesting gatherings in my home community of Bowen Island, including a nearly year long series of monthly Open Space events which ran parallel to our Official Community Plan update and a participatory design session for the future of some of our community lands.
This morning, when asked on twitter what I though contributed to building trust in community meeting I answered with a few thoughts. I’ve written a lot about this before, but it’s always interesting to see what I would say differently at any given time.
So here’s today’s version. As design principles, I think these should be at the centre of design for participatory processes if you want to do things that increase trust:
- Trust the people. Invite them because they care about the issues and they have something to say, and invite them to engage in questions you don’t have answers to. Don’t spend a lot of time lecturing at them. You invited them, treat them like honoured guests.
- Let them host and harvest their own conversations. My core practice here is “never touch the people’s data.” If they are recording insights and clustering themes and writing session reports simply give them the tools or the process for that and let them get on with it. Provide a clear question for them to work on, and let them use their own words to rerecord the answers and insights. Be very careful if you find yourself synthesizing or sense making on behalf of a group. Those are your insights, not theirs.
- Use small groups and mix them up. Put people in proximity to many different ideas and perspectives and let them struggle with difference and diversity. Mix them up. Not every conversation will be great. Let people move on and discover better things in different conversations.
- Work from stories and not opinions. If you want to know about the future of a community ask people to tell stories that somehow capture the change they are seeing, rather than “what do you think is going to happen?” try not to have abstract or aspirational conversations without first grounding the participants in a process that helps them to also see what’s happening in the system.
- Ask people to act within the scope of their agency. Be careful asking for recommendations for other people to do things if you don’t have the resources to undertake those recommendations. Be clear with participants about what you can support at the end of the meeting and what is theirs to do, and don’t ask them for actions that they have no ability to undertake.
If you ask me again in a few months what I would say, it would probably be different, but this is a pretty reliable set of principles to guide design.
Part seven of a seven part series on the seven little helpers for dialogue and action
- Part 1: Presence
- Part 2: Have a good question
- Part 3: Use a talking piece
- Part 4: Harvest
- Part 5: Make a wise decision
- Part 6; Act
7. Stay together.
Our final little helper in this series is maybe the most important and it perhaps brings us back to the beginning again. Quite simply, if you have taken the time to do good work, the best way to ensure that it is sustainable over time is to stay together. Important work requires a strong relationship between people that can hold the work as it moves, grows, changes, and sometimes fails. As my colleague Tuesday Ryan-Hart says, “relationship is the result.” Good work done in the absence of good relationship rarely fulfills its potential.
I remember watching an American sports broadcast of the FIFA World Cup in 2010, with German legend Jürgen Klinsmann reporting as a correspondant for ESPN from the French team’s training camp. The French team imploded that summer, a team that had squeaked into the Finals on a poor refereeing decision to begin with. The team scored only one goal in the group stages and lost all three of its games. The players revolted and brawled with coaches and administrators. It was horrible.
When asked why the team was performing so badly on the pitch by the American sports anchors, Klinsmann stared incredulously into the camera and said “because they don’t like each other; they are not friends.” The Americans blinked dumbfoundedly at an answer that seemed to come from a kindergarten teacher. But to anyone that has played a game like football, (or hockey or basketball and other “flow” sports) you will know EXACTLY what Klinsmann was saying: without good relationships, it is impossible for talent to perform at its potential. Staying together is everything.
So here are a few principles to keep that going.
Give equal attention to action and relationship. Relationship is sustainability. Developing and practicing good working relationships is essential. The fruits of good relations are borne when times get tough and if you haven’t been actively practicing as you go, it will be too late to draw on those resources when you’re in a hole. Find ways, in all of your strategic work, to also do the work of maintaining trust, respect, generosity, and honesty. Have string enough relationships that there is no fear to call each other to account, because you all know that it is for the greater good. Every planning session, every update meeting, every community consultation is a chance to generate good results and good relationship. Make sure you build in co-responsibility to care for the quality of relationship as well as the quality of results.
Check in with one another to maintain healthy relationship last based on openness, trust and support. There is a personal aspect to this, and team members should be doing their work to create productive and healthy relationships. Take time to celebrate and to socialize. Build in depth to your relationships. The best teams I have ever been on are with people who become trusted friends, and even if our work goes sideways or our working relationships crumble, we can walk away still holding each other in high esteem. It isn’t easy and that is what makes it worthy.
Whenever possible create and work with conditions for reciprocity, gifting and mutual support. The biggest lessons I have learned from healthy indigenous communities and organizations focus on this. Reciprocity, gifting, and mutual support are practically essential features of every indigenous group I have ever worked with. You simply cannot show up in these spaces self-centred, single-mindedly focused on transactional work, or unwilling to offer mutuality and support. Organizations and communities who hold a high ethic around these issues tend to be resilient and generative over time. So accept the invitation to decolonize your approach to relationships, especially when you walk into a place holding power and privilege.
I hope this series has been useful and inspiring. It’s been fun reading the comments and the additional insights. If you have more to add later but find the comments closed, please contact me and let me know.
Part six of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
- Part 1: Presence
- Part 2: Have a good question
- Part 3: Use a talking piece
- Part 4: Harvest
- Part 5: Make a wise decision
6. Act
The sixth of our seven little helpers is simple: Act. If you have taken the time to plan, talk, and harvest, you owe it to yourself and your group to honourably act on what you’ve learned.
Now it’s easy to get consumed by the cult of action, and to assume that every encounter needs to have a week defined action plan at the end of it. While that is simply not true – not every water cooler conversation results in action, but many are critically important in organizational life – when action is called for, be sure to act well. For whatever reason I find that many people have trouble with action. Perhaps it relates to the aversion and anxiety associated with decision making, but to act with clarity and commitment is kind. Here are some principles to guide your action. But be warned, these principles can take you down the road of planning to act, so be sure to keep it as simple as possible and get on with it.
Don’t confuse action planning with action. You would be surprised how many people confuse action planning with action. Often when I am contracting with a client and I ask for outputs, they will specify a document or an artifact, all the while emphasizing that they want to see action. Artifacts are pretty straightforward, and that is certainly something your consulting team can produce for you. But if you’re my client, I need you to understand that action is on you. That means thinking through how you are going to support action coming out of the work we do together. Recently I had a client place huge expectations on an off-site retreat. It needed to produce change in the organization’s culture designed over a three day gathering. I asked how the leadership was supporting people to make change (and to fail at it) and the client said “we have a really fear based culture here.” I warned her that without support from those in power to accept and even incentivize failure while people tried to change behaviours, meaningful action would be highly unlikely. She promised to go back to her Vice President for clarity and I never heard back from them. “We’re going in a different direction” is often the response I get from organizations not ready to put their money where their mouths are. That’s fine by me; I never want to be in a place of creating the conditions for merely performative action, when the people or the situations are calling for real change.
Action requires resources of time, money and attention. Don’t over promise commitments to resource action. In chaordic design, I call this work supporting the Architecture of Implementation. It seems to me that anything arising out of a participatory strategic initiative will require specific commitments of time, money, and attention to sustain it. If there is new work coming then new resources need to be in place to support it. I always caution leaders not to promise to “support all good ideas” that come out of a meeting if they can’t back that commitment with commensurate resources. How much time will your staff get to work on issues? What money do they have available to them? Who has the capacity for oversight and connection? If you fail to prepare a good architecture for implementation, you will burn out your people with added demands on their time and energy and no support. That’s cruel, and its a waste of time and resources. If you are committed to change you need to support change.
Distribute action plan and responsibility as much as possible. Use power to support self-organization and agency. It should be obvious, but participatory change should include participatory leadership. Sustained efforts to address sticky problems in organizations will often benefit from having many agents working on the project together. Use good organizational practices like the ones my friend Samantha Slate has shared in her book Going Horizontal to support leadership and action throughout the organization: share accountability, support personal leadership, give people space to work, ensure people have good conditions for collaboration, and practice good principles of equity and care
Be be mindful of PRICE. Because we love our five letter acronyms, use PRICE to design and check in with your architecture of implementation. Ask:
- How is POWER operating in this situation? Do we need more? Does is need to be more centralized or more distributed? Where is informal power and influence at work and how can we use it or mitigate it?
- What are the RESOURCES we need in order to act well? Who is in charge of these resources, and how to we get them onside to support our work early? What do they need to continue sending resources our way?
- How will we ITERATE our action? AS we try new things, what is the process for failing and trying again and improving as we go? How can we maximize support from those with power to allow for experimentation? Without thinking this through beforehand, people with power in a system are very likely to pull the plug on new initiatives the moment something goes wrong. Iteration is a crucial aspect to make things resilient.
- What CAPACITY do we need to develop? Where do people in the system need to undertake learning to work with the changes they are facing? What new skills and perspectives do we need to change the way we are working? Building organizational and community capacity is critical to sustaining creative and engaged work.
- How will we EVALUATE our work? Is our evaluation strategy in line with the kind of work we are doing? If we are working in complexity do we have good developmental evaluation and learning frameworks? If we are working with more predictable systems, do we have the right experts evaluating our work? How will we tell the story of what we are up to and communicate it well to those who need to hear about it? Evaluation is not something done in isolation at the end of a project but something done throughout. It’s how you document and share the story of what’s happening.
Taken together, these five things can support ongoing and sustained action beyond the report from the meeting or the project planning grant charts or the budget. True action needs support.
And then, when you are ready. Act.
Part five of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
5. Make a wise decision
I’ve always thought that the essence of good leadership is the ability to make a decision. It requires a certain kind of courage, especially when it seems that there is a zero sum game at stake. It also requires a high degree of emotional intelligence and compassion and empathy, especially when the decision you have to make could result in harm for others. Discernment, care, ethics, courage, and detachment all wrestle for attention in the mind of a decision maker.
As much as possible, in the world of complexity, I try to help groups make decisions together. Participatory decision making gets a bad rap for being time consuming and mired in interminable and endless conversation as groups turn over every little pebble, looking for an answer. Many complex problems produce enough data to support multiple competing ways forward, but complex problems never present predictability. You can take an informed guess, but where groups and decision makers get bogged down is in the waiting for absolute clarity. Decision makers in complexity need to be able to act with incomplete information and carefully watch the results of their decisions as they unfold, being prepared to adjust as they go.
For facilitators, hosting decision making can sometimes be a trap, especially for people who are conflict averse. Important decisions often involve making choices that pit conflicting views against each other. Where you can explore these options with small experiments, that’s a wise thing to do, like probing a couple of different paths in a dark forest to see which one looks more promising. But sometimes it comes down to one group’s preference getting chosen over the objections of others. To stay in that process and work well, you need good practice.
A strong personal practice is important, so that you don’t get triggered into making rash decisions as you are hosting a process. It is also important that the group you are working with has a clear process for making decisions. It’s even better if they are familiar with the emotional territory that leads to good decisions.
For me, Sam Kaner, Lenny Lind et. al. set the standard for this clarity with their book The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. That book gives us the well known “diamond of participation” – pictured above -which to me is the single most useful diagram to explain decision making from a group and personal process perspective. It features three zones: the zone of divergence where ideas are presented and explored; the zone of convergence where options are whittled down and decisions are made, and the zone in the middle, which I call the zone of emergence and which the authors call “the groan zone.”
The Groan Zone is the place where the group’s engagement with the content of their work gets stressful. Individuals experience cognitive overload, and they are stressed by the need to let go of ideas to which they are attached and to incorporate ideas which they find irreconcilable. Groups who get stuck in the groan zone experience conflict, impatience, and a waning sense of purpose. Facilitators who know the groan zone understand it to be the place that is necessary if a group is to discover something new and make a decision that is bigger than the decision any one person can make.
Over the years, conflict averse as I am, I have garnered many lessons and principles for practice from applying Kaner’s work and aligning it with complexity theory. Here are some key principles for hosting a group to a wise decision.
Don’t converge too early. When we are working in complexity, there is a tendency for groups to throw out lots of ideas, pick one and move on. That is a good approach when we can be certain about the right answer, but cases where real complexity is at play, prematurely converging can create more problems than it resolves. While it prevents a group from going through the groan zone it can reinforce established patterns of power and control as the loudest voice get its way. Decisions made before really considering options are almost certainly rooted in patterns of entrainment, bias, and habit. This is a good way to prolong the underlying patterns that have created the complex problem in the first place. If the decision is easy, don’t trust it.
There will be pain; build shared perspectives and relationships there. One of the best contributions of Kaner et. al. was to name the groan zone and provide a number of practices for facilitators to help the group navigate this territory. Working in the groan zone requires us to work with relationships. That can seem counter intuitive because groups get there largely because they are struggling to engage with the complexity of the content. Building shared perspectives makes sure that the infrastructure for emgernece – connection, attention, discernment, and a willingness to explore – is in place. Without this, toxic power and control patterns can have their way with the discussion and things can get “shut down.” A group that struggles together will usually make a better decision together and will usually be closer together as a team at the end.
As much as possible, try to build consensus using clear proposals, testing agreement and refining. I love working with consensus processes – and my friend Tree Bressen is a master at these – for building shared ownership over decisions. Consensus building is not a matter of opening everything up and letting the conversation drift in a thousand different directions. On the contrary, it’s about providing a high level of constraints to the process which lets the group focus on its work while holding a strong container for dissent. I’ve written elsewhere about large group processes for creating broad consensus, but it comes down to a few simple elements:
- Create a clear proposal
- Have a method for testing levels agreement and expressing specific concerns
- Deal with specific concerns with an eye to developing a more robust proposal
- Test again, refine again as necessary, and decide
If you have to vote be careful to understand what a yes and a no means. The worst decisions we can make are yes/no decisions on complex topics. This is why referenda are generally counter productive for setting large scale public policy direction. Brexit is the primary example. In Canada we have had referenda on electoral reform, transit funding and Constitutional amendments that produce results that are clear, but produce ongoing civic consternation about what they mean, because it was not possible to reduce the topic into a binary resolution. The advantage of using a gradients of agreement process in advance of a yes/no vote is that you at least know what people’s concerns are. If you can’t explore agreement before hand, conduct a yes/no vote but then have everyone write down why they voted the way they did. You’ll get lots of information pertaining to implementing your decision.
Pay attention to dissent and to patterns of dissent and have a process for understanding these. That leads me to the last point which is to acknowledge and understand dissent in a decision making process. Good leaders and well functioning groups will make a space for dissent because it can provide important weak signals for the state of the system, Dissent can hep a group escape inattention unawareness by raising “I told you so” issues early in the process. It also helps to sustain relationships when people who are on the losing side of a decision nevertheless feel included In it. Fear of dissent creates nasty power plays and exclusion that immediately renders any tricky decision unwise.