My friend and colleague Bronagh Gallagher and I are in the early stages of creating a learning offering around complexity, facilitation and activism, whereby we try to bring complexity and participatory tools to the work of social change. We’ve been assembling some very interesting sources for our work and she recently introduced me to the work of Micah White who has written about protest and activism from a complexity perspective. I’m working my way through some interviews he gave in support of his book, The End of Protest. Here is one juicy line:
This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest are illegal until they succeed. All revolutions are illegal until they succeed, and then they become the government and all of the sudden these people are celebrated as heroes and all that kind of stuff. What we’re talking about is very real. This is what distinguishes fake protest from real protest. Fake protest is underpinned by the idea that our actions don’t need to be illegal, that we can get permits from the government, that we can have “free speech zones” or we can do scripted arrests; it doesn’t need to be illegal or dangerous or disobedient. I think that’s completely misguided. We didn’t get a permit for Occupy Wall Street. We asked people to bring tents knowing that it was illegal for people to set up tents. We did these behaviors because the legal regime doesn’t matter when you create a protest. You operate outside of the law.
It doesn’t mean they have to be violent. There are lots of different ways to be illegal. But it does mean that you have to say, “I’m trying to change a situation that is so important that I will disobey the law. My protest stands above the law.” And you also have to accept the consequences of that. For Occupy Wall Street seven thousand people were arrested. That’s an astounding number. People had their bones broken. People lost their jobs.
Absolutely. Real protest is always illegal. For sure.
There is an interesting observation here, that the socially acceptable forms of protest, innovation and radical change are only helpful in terms of creating incremental and socially acceptable change. You may shift things but they will be shifted WITHIN the acceptable boundaries. When you start pushing on the boundaries, or fundamentally breaking the boundaries, you will be operating outside of the law. In society, this takes the form of illegal activity. In organizational life this means fundamentally violating the organization’s norms and policies, some of which are unwritten and my not even be visible until you start acting in ways that make them visible.
It is this way with colonizing mindsets embedded in the ways that social institutions, governments and businesses operate in Canada, where there is hardly ever a fundamental challenge to some of the core ideas of colonization, such as the assumption that all private land was legally obtained or that all public land is owned by the Crown. In a society based on colonial power structures, everything goes along fine until some First Nation somewhere stands up to a Canadian law and challenges it’s authority. The act needs to be law-breaking in order for the laws to be rewritten. This is how Aboriginal title has entered Canadian Constitutional law as a valid, binding and important legal concept.
Likewise as organizations and businesses are trying to fundamentally change core practices, they are largely constrained by doing by having such change championed by an approved panel of change makers. Fundamental change comes to organizational life from the outside. It is disruptive. It calls into questions sacred cows about power, management policies, core purposes and priorities. Like activists, change agents are marginalized, dismissed reassigned, and often fired. At best if you are championing fundamental change within an organization you may suddenly find yourself without access to decision makers, left out of strategic cnversations and not allowed to work with and mentor junior staff.
Fundamental change is a threat. As I grow older as a middle class white skinned man, I have found myself on the receiving end of more and more challenges from younger people who don’t look like me. They challenge my assumptions and my ideas. I am beginning to discover that, despite having lots to offer, the way the world is changing around me must necessarily overturn the assumptions I make about the world, the ones that have allowed me to work relatively close to the core of social stability. I aspire to be an ally to those making change from the far margins, but it is not my place to declare myself an ally. People are given status as allies of fundamental change makers. It is not a title you can claim for yourself, no matter how well intentioned you are.
Social change, innovation and reorganization requires a kind of leadership at every level that works at the margins to provoke and overturn and works from the centre to, in effect, not defend the status quo too much from the “threats” from outside. There is no “other side of the fence” in the work of social change. While I’m not sure that there has ever been an orderly revolution in the world,the question for all of us is which side of the revolutionary Möbius strip are you on and what can you do to help what wants to be born?
Evaluation is such an influential constraint in organizational and community life. When resources and attention are tied to evaluation results, a kind of tautology gets set up. One begins managing projects towards the evaluation outcomes, in order to give the best chance of an initiative surviving and continuing to attract resources. One of the things I appreciate about developmental evaluation is its deliberate engagement with emergence. Making sense of emergence however can be a really time consuming affair, and so I’m thinking about how we can use good use of time to use dialogue and collective meaning making to help make sense of data and direction.
Developmental evaluation is for the complex domain. That means that we are not working with evaluating actions against desired end states, but instead noticing and paying attention to vectors and directions – intentions and hypotheses that help shape emerging strategy. Developmental evaluation is the process of gathering information about our work to give us some intelligence about what we are doing.
Think of the information needs of two different kinds of athletes. A golf player relies on solid objective data (how many yards to the hole, where the wind is coming from, the nature of the lie of the ball and so on) and interprets that data through her own self-knowledge (I hit a five iron 160 yards. Adjusting for wind and lie and the target topography, I should hit a 4 iron with backspin…) Of course the better a golfer one is, the easier it is to execute a plan and understand exactly where one succeeded or failed.
By contrast soccer players work in a dynamic environment. The information available to them only becomes apparent as they begin to play the match. They may know something about the other team, but they learn rapidly in the first ten minutes or so how the game is going to go. A team will discover where the opposition’s weakness is, or what its attacking strategy is, or where the open spots are on the pitch. Making good use of this information requires excellent communication in real time to share what is being learned. It requires players to play with potentials and patterns rather than certainties. Every move provides yet more information. The better a team works together, the faster they can adjust their strategy to take advantage of potentials.
When we are evaluating work there is a mix of these two types of approaches at play. Summative evaluation will look at the gap between expected outcomes and what actually happened and suggest how to adjust for next time. Budget planning and auditing is a good example of this technical kind of results based evaluation. Count the money and compare against projections. Look for causes. Some of these causes will be technical and some will be down to culture.
Developmental evaluation requires a different strategic approach, and simply put, it might fall into these four things (I’m trying for simplicity here, to try to be able to describe this in an easy way):
- Data points that give us the ability to capture information about a current state of an evolving system. This can render a series of pictures that will allow us to see patterns and trends. You need multiple snapshots over time to make sense of what is happening. One photo of a soccer game in progress tells you nothing. You need to monitor indicators not manage end points. Soccer is much more than just putting the ball in the net, even though that is the desired end result.
- Feedback loops from data to human sensemaking so that data can be used in real time to develop strategy and adjustments to the directionality of work.
- A facilitated sensemaking process to bring together multiple perspectives to interpret what is happening. In a complex system the data won’t give you answers. It will provide information to form hypotheses about the patterns that are emerging, and that information can give you guidance for action.
- A way of acting that doesn’t over commit resources to emerging potential strategies, but which gives enough momentum to see if we can shift things in a desired way. Snowden calls this “safe-to-fail.” This is tricky and calls for good context dependant leadership, but it is the essence of good decision making.
There are all kinds of ways of implementing these strategies. You can use surveys to discover what people are accessing on your website and you can use interviews or sensemaking tools to find out HOW they are using that information. You can use a strategic group to interpret these results and see how they are either coherent with our intentions, or at odds with them. You can then create new initiatives that support what is emerging or figure out ways to abandon what is not working. There are thousands of dialogue methods and processes to use to ask questions about and develop action around the data that is emerging.
Importantly, developmental evaluation needs to be a part of the way you work strategically. It needs a rhythm and a cadence to it, so that you know you are coming back on a regular basis to the emerging picture of what is happening. You need outsiders occasionally to come in and disrupt your point of view and offer alternative views of the patterns, and you need to choose a longer rhythm to continue to develop and refine your evaluation strategy as a whole.
I want this to be simple as a process to use. Strategy without information is just a wild guess. But if we tie our decisions too closely to the data emerging from dynamic systems we can get equally stuck making decisions that try to game the system towards desired results, with sometimes disastrous results for clients, customers and ultimately, organizational integrity. It’s a balance and a practice. How can we make this easy?
This morning we began our Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking online course. Rowan Simonsen, Amy Lenzo and I were really excited to be able to share our first little insights with people, and especially this new mnemonic that we created to capture five key principles of harvesting practice: PLUME. We are excited to introduce this into the world.
When I was up in Whitehorse last week I got to spend time with folks from the Public Service Commission discussing a project that would see us looking at discriminations in the workplace from a complexity angle. Using Cynefin and SenseMaker(tm), we hope to understand the ways in which the landscape of discrimination shifts and changes over time so that the PSC can make wiser decisions about the kinds of initiatives it sculpts. One of the problems with diversity initiatives in the public service (in any large public organization really) is the feeling that they need to be broad based and rolled out to everyone. This usually results in a single initiative that spreads across the whole organization, but except for a little awareness raising, does little to address specific instances of discrimination. Everything from awareness raising “cultural competency training” to zero tolerance accountability measures have limited effect because a) discriminatory behaviour is highly context and situation dependant and b) the public service has a permeable boundary to the outside world, meaning ideas, behaviours and people move between the two contexts all the time. The larger your organization, the more like the real world you have to be.
At any rate, I took a bit of time to do a mini-Cynefin teaching to explain how strategy works in the complex domain. and my friend Pawa Haiyupis and I added two Ps to my concentric circles of intervention in a complex system. So to review:
- Patterns: Study the patterns in a complex setting using narrative capture and sense-making. This can be done with the SenseMaker(tm) software, and it can also be done with dialogic interventions. The key thing is to let the people themselves tag their stories or at the very least have a group of people reviewing data and finding patterns together. For example, you might notice a correlation between stressful times in an organization and an increase in feelings of discriminatory behaviour
- Probe: Once you have identified some patterns, you can make some hypotheses about what might work and it’s time to develop some safe to fail probes. These aren’t meant to be successful: they are meant to tell you whether or not the patterns you are sensing have developmental potential. Failure is entirely welcome. What if we offered stress reduction activities during high stress times to help release pent up feelings? We want to be okay with te possibility that that might not work.
- Prototype: If a probe shows some promise, you might develop a prototype to develop a concept. Prototypes are designed to have tolerance for failure, in that failure helps you to iterate and improve the concept. The goal is to develop something that is working.
- Pilot: A pilot project is usually a limited time proof of concept. Roll it out over a year and see what you learn. In Pilot projects you can begin to use some summative evaluation methods to see what has changed over time. Because of their intensive resource commitment, pilot projects are hardly ever allowed to fail, making them very poor ways of learning and innovating, but very good ways to see how stable we need to make an approach.
- Project/Program/Policy: Whatever the highest level and most stable form of an initiative is, you will get to there if your pilot shows promise, and the results are clear. Work at this level will last over time, but needs regular monitoring so that an organization knows when it’s time to tinker and when it’s time to change it.
Cynefin practitioners will recognize that what I’m writing about here is the flow between the complicated and the complex domains, (captured by Dave Snowden’s Blue dynamic in this post.) My intention is to give this some language and context in service organizations, where design thinking has replaced the (in some ways more useful) intuitive planning and innovation used in non-profits and the public service.
Since October, when I first starting sketching out these ideas, I’ve learned a few things which might be helpful as you move through these circles.
- Dialogue is helpful at every scale. When you are working in a complex system, dialogue ensures that you are getting dissent, contrary views and outlying ideas into the process. Complex problems cannot be addressed well with a top-down roll out of a change initiative or highly controlled implementations of a single person’s brilliant idea. If at any point people are working on any stage of this alone, you are in danger territory and you need another pair of eyes on it at the very least.
- Evaluation is your friend and your enemy. At every stage you need to be making meaning and evaluating what is going on, but it is critically important to use the right evaluation tools. Developmental evaluation tools – with their emphasis on collective sense making, rapid feedback loops and visible organizational and personal learning – are critical in any complexity project, and they are essential in the first three stages of this process. As you move to more and more stable projects, you can use more traditional summative evaluation methods, but you must always be careful not to manage to towards targets. Such an error results in data like “We had a 62% participation rate in our diversity training” which tells you nothing about how you changed things, but can shift the project focus to trying to acheive a 75% participation rate next cycle. This is an especially pervasive metric in engagement processes. And so you must…
- Monitor, monitor, monitor. Intervening in a complex system always means acting without the certainty that what you are doing is helpful. You need data and you need it on a short term and regular basis. This can be accomplished by formal and informal ongoing conversations and story captures about what is happening in the system (are we hearing more stories like the ones we want?) or through a SenseMaker(tm) monitoring project that allows employees to end their data with a little data capture.
- These practices are nested, not linear. An always to remember that this is not a five step process to intervening in a complex system. In a large organization, you can expect all of these things to be going on all the time. Building the capacity for that is a kind of holy grail and would constitute a 21st century version of the Learning Organization in my books.
One of my favourite concepts from the complexity world is the fallacy of thinking that comes from the truth of retrospective coherence. The mistake is that, because we can look back in time to understand causes of our current condition, we can therefore see forward in time and affect the causes of a future condition. Complex systems are emergent, so we can never be sure what the future holds, regardless of how well we can trace how we got here.
Despite the fact that it is illegal to sell an investment instrument without the warning that “past performance does not guarantee future results” falling for the trap that retrospective coherence gives you a reliable path forward is basically a feature of doing any strategic work at all. It leads to planning that puts out a future preferred state and then backcasts a set of steps that, if we follow them, will take us there or nearly there.
So there are all kinds of issues with this, and the Cynefin framework’s greatest gift is that it helps us create strategy to avoid to pitfall of retrospective coherence.
Today though, a surprise in my morning reading. A lovely article on Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” We all think we know what that poem is about: about the adventure that will ensue if we just take the less beaten path. But you might be surprised to learn that the poem is actually about retrospective coherence and not adventures strategic planning (emphasis mine):
Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Brilliant.