Just off a call with a potential client today and we were scoping out some of the work that we might do together, with a small organization facing unprecedented change. They are in a place of finally realizing that they are not in control of what is happening to them. They are completely typical in this respect.
I am constantly struck by the fact that we have so few skills, frameworks and so little language for dealing with complexity. Clients all the time approach me looking for certainty, answers and clear outcomes. It’s as if they are searching for the one person who will promise them the relief they are looking for. And no one can. Because mostly what they are FEELING is their emotional reponse to the reality of a complex world. And no amount of rational and linear planning will address that feeling. in fact quite the opposite. Sitting down and deciding on a vision, goals, objectives and plan just defers the pain, because it fools you into thinking you are in control but it sets up a false ideal against which your progress will always be measured to be short.
Confronting complexity is hard. It is not merely that we need better tools to think about it. We need better tools to emotionally deal with it. it is overwhelming, infuriating, confusing, and frightening. And almost every organization I work with that fails to address it well fails because they don’t attend to the fear. They build fears into their processes, or they build processes to avoid confronting what they are afraid of: usually that we don’t know what’s going and we don’t know what to do.
My potential client asked me if I could say what outcomes would come from working with me. In brief they are this:
- We will build the capacity to understand and work with the problems you are facing in context by confronting and changing the view we take around complexity
- We will work strategically with the content of the project, and build participatory processes together that will change the way we do the work of addressing complex problems
- We will build resilient containers for the work that will allow us to confront our fears and limiting beliefs about the work and the change we are in, and that will provide a solid strategic framework for our project.
- We will arrive at a set of strategic decisions about the present moment and be prepared to make strategic decisions about the future.
That’s it. Sometimes those outcomes are incredibly concrete, sometimes it is more about building capacity, but it is always about acting strategically, and that sometimes means learning a new language and a new set of skills. I find that it’s the learning part with which people are most impatient. They seems to want to be able to accelerate the outcomes they want without having to change their approach. But, if you found yourself teleported to rural Bangladesh and you now had to make a living as a rice farmer, do you think your current language and skill set would be applicable, if only you applied yourself harder?
There are projects that fit the ordered domain of work, in which project management and strategic planning leads to predictable outcomes. And there is work for which “learning” is both the outcome and the new organizational structure and leadership practice. It is very important not to confuse the two contexts. And it is surprising just how much we are willing to turn a blind eye to complexity (as both a friend and a foe) in favour of a stable and knowable future, no matter how impossible that idea is.
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One has to be very careful attributing causes to things, or even attributing causality to things. in complex systems, causality is a trap. We can be, as Dave Snowden says “retrospectively coherent” but you can not know which causes will produce which effects going forward. That is the essence of emergent phenomena in the complex world.
But even in complicated problems, where causality should be straightforward, our thinking and view can confuse the situation. Consider this example.
Imagine someone, a man, who has never seen a cat. I know, highly implausible, but this is a hypothetical from Alan Watts’ book, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, which was written in the sixties; pre-YouTube. Watts uses this fictional fella to illustrate the unfelt influence of perspective and the dangers inherent in our strong inclination to seek cause-and-effect relationships.
“He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side a cat walks by. [The man] sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head and a little later the tail. The sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again the cat turns round and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail which is the head’s effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see the head and tail go together; they are all one cat.”
We often create and embed the wrong patterns because we are looking through a slit. As Watts says, by paying very close attention to something, we are ignoring everything else. We try and infer simple cause-and-effect relationships much, much more often than is likely in a complex world. For example, making everyone in an organisation focus on hitting a few key performance indicators isn’t gong to mean that the organisation is going to get better at anything other than hitting those key performance indicators. All too often this will lead to damaging unintended consequences; absurd and confusing gobbledygook.
via abc ltd.
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Our traditional Boxing Day movie this year was The Imitation Game, the new film about Alan Turing and his team’s efforts to break the Enigma code used by the German Navy in the Second World War. While the film itself was good it was full of fictional scenes that were intended to point at some of the interesting things that happened at Bletchley Park during that war. Having done a bit of reading on the subject, it’s clear that the film simplified many things, took liberties with others and glossed over what is a really interesting story, but the movie itself still holds up, even if Cumberbatch basically turns Turing into his Sherlock Holmes.
At any rate there were a few things in the fils that provided interesting reflections on some of the ideas I have working with a learning about both through my study of Cynefin dynamics (the way problems and solutions move through the Cynefin domains) and with the two loop theory of change which I am using a lot. So here are a few examples.
Solving problems obliquely. Complex problems can’t be solved by taking a head-on, brute force approach to the solution. The film is basically about this writ large, but one vignette stands out as interesting. When Turing needs new staff he devises a way to find them by running a crossword contest in a newspaper. Anyone who solves the problem in under ten minutes gets contacted by MI6 and invited to come and write a test. Although this is not how Joan Clarke joined the project, it was a good way of sorting out the talent from the confirmation biases that riddled the intelligence establishment (in this case gender bias).
Disintermediated sensemaking. The idea of letting everyone have the data and find patterns there is an important aspect of working with complexity. While the problems that the team were solving were indeed complicated, they needed to exploit complex human behaviours in order to have a chance to solve them. A complex problem is solvable with enough expertise, and indeed making a code HAS to be solvable if it is to work. If you don’t want others to solve it you simply make the encryption keys so elaborate that there isn’t enough time in the history of the universe to solve the problem. So while in theory, code breaking is a merely technical problem, in order to solve it, you have to narrow down the permutations to make it possible for the technical solutions to be applied. At Bletchley Park, this came down to reading human factors, which is something only the human operators could do. But they could only do that by having access to the raw data and by creating safe-to-fail probes of the system (by using these factors to solve the codes). When they worked, they were exploited.
There are some incredible stories about the way which the women who were intercepting messages came to know their counterparts in Germany. Each German communications officer had his own style, his own signature. And human error in creating predictable procedures meant that people could use these patterns as weak signal detection in order to break some messages, in the case of the Polish codebreakers that did much of the early work on cracking Enigma, even discern the wiring of the machines themselves. This is a classic pattern of what Dave Snowden calls Cynefin dynamics, specifically how we move from safe-to-fail probes in the complex domain to exploiting findings using complicated and in some cases obvious solutions.
This is a really interesting story, and I’ve ordered a couple of books to read in further. I’m very interested to see how the human factors were sensed, discerned, exploited. Combining that capacity with the incredible engineering talents of Turing and his crew provides some excellent stories and examples of Cynefin dynamics at work.
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In a complex and interconnected world it is hard to be an activist against things. One of the easiest ways that your opponents can neutralize your opposition to things like oil and slavery is to say “we” you depend on oil and slaves, so that makes you a hypocrite.”
So this is tricky – solving global problems of labour, energy, economics and justice are the very definition of complex problems. There is no simple solution, there is a frustrating degree of progress and even large shifts in public consciousness (think land mines or climate change) are met with initial enthusiasm but later are eroded by commercial or power interests that have a stake in the status quo and way more influence than activists.
So what to do?
Consider the slavery question. All of us in North America depend on slave labour to support our lifestyles. As with the issues of oil dependance, our very existence creates an impact that is measurable, real and negative against our social justice agenda. Affordability usually is usually the result of slave labour. Real slave labour.
So how does one deal with this?
First it’s important to remember that you are part of the problem. To quote Adam Kahane:
Bill Torbert of Boston College once said to me that the 1960s slogan “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” actually misses the most important point about effecting change. The slogan should be, “If you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution.” If we cannot see how what we are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way that they are, then logically we have no basis at all, zero leverage, for change the way things are — except from the outside, by persuasion or force.
The good news and bad news is that it is impossible to influence change from outside the problem. Such self-righteousness is easily dismissed. In addition, it is very difficult to advocate an end to slavery while at the same time not being prepared to pay a lot more for your food and clothes. Change must be made from within the problem. And to do that you have to work with others who are part of the problem.
In general for large scale global neo-liberal problems, there are three players: governments, capital and markets. All three of these create the conditions for problems and leverage is needed on all three to create the conditions for solutions, especially at the level of transformative change. Consumers demand cheap products, capital creates the flow of materials to meet the need and governments regulate to ensure that things happen (usually for those who have the best ability to keep governments in office). The hardest of these to change is the market because market behaviour is completely emergent. Think of the last time you saw a damaging industry collapse because the market changed overnight. IN general shifts in demand are prompted by better products in the market – things that will help people do things in a better way, at a competitive price. There is no question that there is a demand to end slavery, but the demand for cheap clothes outweighs it.
Markets can be influenced by capital and government. Capital influences markets by controlling what is offered out there. If you have billions of dollars, you can do things like buy up your cometeitors patents for clean energy for example, or in the case of companies like Wal-Mart, use you economy of scale to provide loss leader products that bring people into your store to buy cheap things at the expense of local manufacturing. And if you are in government you can regulate to eliminate bad things in the market, such as slavery as a labour practice. But if you also sign international agreements that allow the free flow of capital, you box yourself in to accepting slavery as a practice because capital will always seek the lowest expense climate.
So to affect change requires an engagement of all three. It begins with a personal practice and commitment to a trajectory of social and economic justice. It requires that personally I commit to “better.” Will we ever have a world where slavery is abolished? No. Can I live my life without any dependance on slaves? Doubtful, and certainly if I was to live that life I would be far from the ability to influence power in anyway.
So it is commitment to a trajectory rather than a finish line. Complex problems are not “solvable.” You have to get good with living with this uncertainty and get good at accepting the gift and the curse of emergence.
Second, people have to affect change with powerful narratives. Governments have coercive power and large corporations have the power of manipulation using capital. All people have are narrative power – the power of a better story. Almost always this story “fails” against the coercive power of force and capital – think Occupy, Arab Spring, Idle No More and so on. But while they failed to achieve their specific goals, these kinds of movement are very important. It is important that citizens try and try again to advance the narrative of justice. Because from time to time these narrative movements succeed. Think gains like gay marriage and civil rights in North America. Think about what happened in places like Estonia, Czechoslovakia and India and South Africa. When the narrative wins, that one time in 1000, things transform.
And it would be nice to know that any intervention we choose will have the system changing effect that we want, but we can’t have that certainty. We need to work towards change from inside the place of the problem.
So, what is your experience in affecting change from inside the problem? How do you work towards justice while recognizing your complicity in the very problems you are addressing? How does a complexity-based world view and skill set enable good work to happen?
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“Tell everyone you know: “My happiness depends on me, so you’re off the hook.” And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they’re doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel – and then, you’ll love them all. Because the only reason you don’t love them, is because you’re using them as your excuse to not feel good.”
– Esther Abraham-Hicks
via whiskey river.
Heading to Hahopa today. Hahopa is an idea. It is a place of the heart and the imagination which is rooted in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “teaching and learning with love and kindness.” You might say that it is a place of grace, an ideal place where we can ground our happiness in an experimental way of being.
Hahopa is the dream of my friend Pawa Haiyupis. Pawa’s full name is Pawasquacheetl which means “she gives in the feast with the energy of bees coming out of a hive.” For years she has wanted to give the world a place where Nuu-Chah-Nulth teachings can be offered to anyone who feels that they are useful. Inspired by our friends at Kufunda village in Zimbabwe, Pawa and her family this week are embarking on an incredible dream. The work we do together this week will set in place a lifetime of contribution to the world.
So I am off to Tofino where we will initiate this endeavour being hosted by the land, the beach and the sea. We are open to seeing what will come of it and how it will flow.
If you would like to support this dream, please consider donating to the Indiegogo campaign and follow along here and on the facebook page where I will be helping to harvest what we learn.