A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”
My answer was that it depends on so much. Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle. The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest” The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.
A story. Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed. It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work. We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us. From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns. The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.
So it depends. If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools. So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..
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From Kelly’s excellent new book “What Technology Wants”:
“The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same number of neurons in you brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain. It has three billion artificial eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in, it processes keyword searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz (a barely audible high-pitched whine), and it is so large a contraption that it now consumes 5 percent of the world’s electricity. When computer scientists dissect the massive rivers of traffic flowing through it, they cannot account for the source of all the bits. Every now and then a bit is transmitted incorrectly, and while most of those mutations can be attributed to identifiable causes such as hacking, machine error, or line damage, the researchers are left with a few percent that somehow changed themselves. In other words, a small fraction of what the technium communicates originates not from any of its known human-made nodes but from the system at large. The technium is whispering to itself.”
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[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.
A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent. The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale. Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered. But it will depend on “ways.”
Ways are roads. We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time. While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system. Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile. Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern. His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.
In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future. If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens. Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.
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I continue to learn about the effect of the feminine. Today I was walking with friends by Bridal Falls on Bowen Island where I live and we stopped at the waterfall to reflect on the nature of flow. This standing wave caught our attention and it immediately drew me into thoughts on the complementarity of the masculine and feminine.
For a long time I have been a student of the Tao, understanding the relationship between yang and yin. In Taoist thought, these two conditions exist in everything and are in constant and dynamic relationship. Yang is usually thought of as raw force, flow, life or energy, and yin is idenitfied with receptivity, structure, container. The two are also associated with masculine and feminine but not in a gender way, more in an archetypal fashion.
This video illustrates the power of having these two forces acheive some kind of balanace. You have the strong yang of the water flowing over the strong yin of the rock and it is shaped by what it is flowing over. We are looking at a remarkable thing here: a stable structure in which every element of its composition is changing in every minute. This flow structure perfectly illustrates what happens when yin and yang meet in balance, when the strong masculine is shaped by the contours of the feminine. We are seeing the effect of the feminine on the masculine, but we are looking at a structure that would not exist without a balance between the two.
Think about this in terms of organizations. We are surrounded in our social world by these kinds of flow structures, in which elements move through but the structure remains. Traffic jams, cities, organizations, schools…Notice that the stability in these structures comes not from what is flowing though them – not the people – but by the underlying architecture that shapes people’s behaviour in those moments. The flow of bodies and behaviours is influenced by the yin of the structure.
This is one way the feminine works with power: by being the channel though which power works, influencing it’s outcome. People who seek power with a strictly masculine perspective go for the flow itself: control of the money, people, water, oil. People who seek to stabilize the effect of power know that the contours of the flow channels influence everything, so they run banks and financial systems, management consulting firms, hydro power projects and fossil fuel economics respectively.
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Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton. We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.
Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems. We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.
For me, lots of good insights are coming up. A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:
- The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW. How can we deliver services differently? How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate? How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us? These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up. Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
- New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place. But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old. Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies. While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old. Ignoring power is naive.
- A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.
Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur. That alone is not innovation. The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level. The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families. Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues. Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.