I’m continuing to refine my understanding of the role and usefulness of principles in evaluation, strategy and complex project design. Last week in Montreal with Bronagh Gallagher, we taught a bit about principles-based evaluation as part of our course on working with complexity. Here are some reflections and an exercise.
First off, it’s important to start with the premise that in working in complexity we are not solving problems, but shifting patterns. Patterns are the emergent results of repeated interactions between actors around attractors and within boundaries. To make change in a complex system therefore, we are looking to shift interactions between people and parts of a system to create a beneficial shift in the emergent patterns.
To do this we have to have a sufficient understanding of the current state of things so that we can see patterns, a sense of need for shifting patterns and an agreed upon preferred and beneficial direction of travel. That is the initial strategic work in any complex change intervention. From there we create activities that help us to probe the system and see what will happen, which way it will go and whether we can do something that will take it in the beneficial direction. We then continue this cycle of planning, action and evaluation.
Strategic work in complexity involves understanding this basic set of premises, and here the Cynefin framework is quite useful for distinguishing between work that is best served by linear predictive planning – where a chain of linked events results in a predictable outcome – and work that is best served by complexity tools including pattern finding, collective sensemaking and collaborative action.
Working with principles is a key part of this, because principles (whether explicit of implicit) are what guide patterns of action and give them the quality of a gravity well, out of which alternative courses of action are very difficult.. Now I fully realize that there is a semantic issue here, around using the term “principles” and that in some of the complexity literature we use, the terms “simple rules” or “heuristics” are also used. Here I am using “principles” specifically to tie this to Michael Quinn Patton’s principles-based evaluation work, which i find helpful in linking the three areas of planning, action, and evaluation. He defines an effectiveness principle as something that exhibits the following criteria:
- Guides directionality
- Is useful and usable
- Provides inspiration for action
- Is developmental in nature and allows for the development of approaches (in other words not a tight constraint that restricts creativity)
- Is evaluable, in that you can know whether you are doing it or not.
These five qualities are what he calls “GUIDE,” an acronym made from the key criteria. Quinn Patton argues that if you create these kinds of principles, you can assess their effectiveness in creating new patterns of behaviour or response to a systemic challenge. That is helpful in strategic complexity work.
To investigate this, we did a small exercise, which I’m refining as we go here. On our first day we did a sensemaking cafe to look at patterns of where people in our workshop felt “stuck” in their work with clients and community organizations. Examples of repeating patterns included confronting aversion to change, use of power to disenfranchise community members, lack of adequate resources, and several others. I asked people to pick one of these patterns and asked them to create a principle using the GUIDE criteria that seems to be at play to keep this pattern in place.
For example, on aversion to change, one such principle might be “Create processes that link people’s performances to maintaining the status quo.” You can see that there are many things that could be generated from such a principle, and that perhaps an emergent outcome of such a principle might be “aversion to change.” This is not a diagnostic exercise. Rather it helped people understand the role that principles have in containing action with attractors and boundaries. In most cases, people were not working with situations where “aversion to change” was a deliberate outcome of their strategic work, and yet there was the pattern nonetheless, clear and obvious even within settings in which innovation or creativity is supposedly prized and encouraged.
Next I invited people to identify a direction of travel away from this particular pattern
using a reflection on values. If aversion to change represents a pattern you negatively value, what is an alternative pattern, and what is the value beneath that? It’s hard to identify values, but these are pretty pithy statements about what matters. One value might be “Curiosity about possibility” and another might be “excitement for change.” From there participants were asked to write a principle that might guide action towards the emergence of that new pattern. One such example might be “Create processes that generate and reward small scale failure.” I even had them take that one statement and reduce it to a simple rule, such as “Reward failure, doubt
The next step is to put these principles in play within an organization to create tests to see how effective the principle is. If you discover that it works, refine it and do more. If it doesn’t, or if it creates another poor pattern such as cynicism, stop using it and start over.
All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds. When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community.
Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process. They participate and co-create. In order to do this, participants need to make a conscious step over a threshold into the container.
Thresholds are as old as humanity. The boundary between in and out is ancient. Being welcomed into a home, a family, a structure or a group comes with ritual behaviours to let you know that you have left one world behind and entered into another.
In meetings, these thresholds are multiple and nested. My friend Christie Diamond once said “the conversation begins long before the meeting starts, and continues long after the meeting is over.” That has rung true for the thousands of conversations I have hosted and participated in over my life. And on reflection, I can trace a series of threshold that are crossed as we enter into and leave a conversational space. At each step, my “yes” becomes more solid and my commitment to the work becomes more important and concrete. See if this scheme makes sense:
- Invitation is noticed
- Engage with the call, connect it to my own needs
- Making time and space to engage (committing my resources)
- Physically moving to the space
- Arriving in the field of work
- Entering the physical space
- BEGINNING THE WORK
- PARTICIPATING IN SUB-CONTAINERS WITHIN THE MEETING
- FINISHING THE WORK
- Leaving the space
- Exiting the field of work
- Returning home
- Reorganizing resources to support the change
- Re-engaging with the world
- Working from a changed stance
Each one of these crossings happens whether you are coming into someting as mundane as a staff meeting or something as important as attending your own wedding. Often time facilitators pay attention only to numbers 7-9 and many times 7 and 9 are given short shrift.
I’m curious to hear about your own experiences of crossing thresholds for important meetings.
Nadia has a small piece this morning on one element of good design, reflecting on a book review by Ian Pinasoo. I like the way she puts this:
Great workshops are based on a creative challenge. A creative challenge is real and not fake. It matters. A creative challenge engages, pulls us in and takes us on a discovery tour. Responding to a creative challenge is like the hero’s journey of accepting a call, going through the process of revelation and returning with deep insights.
I would add that if the challenge is anchored to a common need, and the people you have identified and invited are the ones with enough agency to take on the challenge, you really start cooking.
I think that doing strategic work with organizations and communities is really about learning. If a group is trying to confront newness and changes in its environment and needs to come up with new strategies to address those changes, then it needs to learn.
I love the term “desire lines.” Most of my initial work with organizations tries to get at the desire lines in the organization; the patterns embedded in the culture that help or hinder change and resilience. Naming and making visible these entrained desire lines (including the ones that that group takes into the darkness of conflict and unresourcefulness) is a helpful exercise in beginning to first reflect and then disrupt and develop capacity. When a group can see their patterns, and see which are helpful and which are not, they can make the choice to develop new ones or strengthen the stuff that works.
When problems are complex, then the people in the group need to focus on learning strategies in order to discover and try new things, rather than adopt a best practice from elsewhere. It is, as Steve Wheeler says in this video, the difference between designed environments and personal choice:
“Students will always find their own unique pathways for learning. They will always choose their own personal tools and technologies. Our job is not to try and create pathways for them, but to help them create the pathways for themselves and the scaffold and support them as they go through those pathways.”
Hosting groups is always about learning – in fact one core question of the Art of Hosting community is “what if learning was the form of leadership required now?” To support learning, help groups find the desire lines for learning and good strategic work to address change that is owned by the group will follow. That is how learning builds capacity and capacity builds sustainability.
My friends over at the Social Labs Revolution website have been fielding questions about the prototyping phase of labwork and today published a nice compilation of prototyping resources. It’s worth a visit. It got me thinking this morning about some of the tools I use for planning these days.