
Part three in a series:
Part three: a collection of patterns for design and facilitation.
As I heard the story, the four fold practice was something of a flash of insight tied in with the original Art of Hosting offering made by Toke, Jan, and Monica. Somewhere in the forests of Northern California as the team was preparing to offer its first Art of Hosting training, somebody woke up one morning, after a few days of discussion and design with the strong sense that meaningful conversations had four things in common: people were present to the work, everyone was participating, the conversation was hosted in some way, and people co-created together. That’s it. It was, as the legend goes, drawn on the back of a napkin, which is the test of all useful frameworks, and it became the subject of an inquiry: so if these are the patterns that make up a meaningful conversation, what would the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations look like? Could we anchor our hosting practice on that? Could we teach that?
This simple observation and the subsequent inquiry has become a generative framework that holds together a global community of practitioners and theorists. We have seen that what constitutes a “meaningful conversation” in a huge variety of cultural and linguistic settings on every continent is a process that more or less exhibits these four characteristics. When brought together in the service of meaningful work these four patterns bring life and effectiveness to collective sense-making, problem-solving, and action. When attended to with good design and facilitation, these patterns become basic elements of the best kind of dialogue.
The ART of using these practices is being able to use them fluidly and fluently in many different contexts. Each of these four patterns looks different depending on the group you are working with and the work you are doing with them. It is very important that each group experience these patterns in ways that make sense to them. As skillful hosts we are trying to build containers for important and meaningful work. These containers are not the product of our role, rather they are themselves instruments that help good work to be done. The Art of Hosting is purely instrumentalist, in the sense that if the hosting is not practical and pragmatic and not in the service of something else, then it is not appropriate. Our goal as practitioners is not to simply create good dialogues for their own sake but to do so to have an effect, so we can be of service to a group.
Over the past 15 or so years of teaching and working with this art I have thought a lot about the connection between these patterns of experience and the practice of hosting. For me now, these four patterns have become the enabling constraints of my work with groups, in that I try to ensure that my designs meet the group’s purpose using this practice. The practices are broad enough that they allow for a vast array of approaches to be used so that designs can be tailored to context, but at the end of the day, it’s important to ask myself these questions:
- Are participants present?
- Is everyone participating?
- Is the space being held and hosted?
- Is the group itself co-creating its work?
In my experience, the extent to which these four conditions are true is directly related to the extent to which the group is doing good dialogic work. When I see goops faltering in their work, it is usually because one of these four patterns is crumbling. A group may lose its focus, some participants might be dominating in a way that causes others to become redundant to the process, the facilitation may be too tight or too loose, or the group may be having its work done by someone else. All of these conditions have the effect of undermining ownership, capacity, engagement, and participation. In general, when we are working with uncertainty or unknown futures, the four-fold practice is a useful checklist to enable groups to work together in complexity to understand what’s happening, make sense of their situation and make some decisions about what to do next, all the while staying connected and in relationship.
That’s a pretty big return on investment for such a small and portable practice.
Being Present
When I think back to the original learning I did around hosting and facilitation with the Elders of the National Association of Friendship Centres, and indeed before that in the governance processes of the United Church of Canada in which I was involved as a young man, I notice that important conversations were always preceded with a prayer or an invocation, or even a moment of silence before we got to work. For a conversation to be meaningful, every participant must be present to the task at hand. That means each one needs to have the time and resources to be able to participate. The work of the moment must be the only thing that holds people’s attention and so focus is important.
In later years, through the playing of Irish traditional music, which itself is a kind of social ritual and through spiritual practice influenced by both my indigenous teachers and the stream of practice that comes from Celtic monasticism, I observed and thought deeply about the nature of thresholds, which are those edges we cross that help us understand that we are in a different space, set aside for particular collective work that requires a little more depth of attention than our day to day activities. Practices to cross the threshold are very important in these kinds of spaces because they help us understand that we are in a different place and we are asked to bring a different awareness to what we are doing.
This is true of dialogue.
So whatever helps people come present to the work is a useful way to build the container for dialogue. It becomes almost ceremonial, and indeed the importance of ritual of some kind cannot be overstated. Even something as simple as taking a moment of silence before beginning, or having people silently read the relevant document together is a useful way to begin. Of course, more elaborate processes can involve more elaborate ways of bringing people to presence, but I have never been let down by a moment of silence. Even in the middle of meetings, when things are going sideways and conflict has become unproductive, a moment of silence can have a powerful effect in bringing people back to the problem or the purpose.
Whatever helps the group cross the threshold – be it physical or immaterial – will help participants come to the presence necessary to do deeper work.
Participating
In my own journey to develop the art of hosting in myself, one of the biggest mountains to climb was the idea that the facilitator is the one in charge of the room. For years I stood at the front of rooms full of people struggling with problems, asking questions, guiding discussions, commenting on ideas and writing them on flip charts. I was an influential part of the discussion, mostly unconsciously influencing decisions and discussions towards ideas and actions that grabbed my attention and excited me. It was all about me. Even though I was schooled on participatory research and Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I was also raised and mentored by people who were training me to be a preacher in the United Church of Canada and the promise to the ego of commanding an audience was the hardest thing that I had to overcome. Indeed it is still the hardest place of my own facilitation practice.
Discovering Open Space Technology was an absolute revelation to me. It allowed me to see what was possible when the facilitator radically trusted the group and let them take full responsibility for the conversations and the outcomes of their work. Radical participation is at the heart of the Art of Hosting, and the practice itself is intended to constrain leaders and hosts in such a way that the groups do theor work within constraints but with a minimum of influence from the facilitator. This is often the hardest practice for facilitators to learn when they shift their style to hosting: we are generally imprinted its the idea that facilitation means the facilitator is taking control of the space, ensuring safety, managing the agenda, keeping things moving along and dealing with conflict. Many times clients have asked me to solve interpersonal problems for them, because we have an idea that we can outsource these kinds of things to a facilitator.
But we know that when a group takes responsibility for its own work when everyone is actively participating and making sense of their own situation, we get a much more sustainable and resilient outcome from dialogic processes. The job of the host is to enable participation through careful attention to the constraints and methods that make it possible. This means first of all that hosts themselves must have a practice of participation, meaning that they must be good at engaging in dialogue themselves: sharing Ideas, listening to others, being aware of their impact in systems. It means that hosts must understand that they are never neutral in a system, that the privilege, power, and influence they bring is significant and important. Learning more about complexity, power, and privilege has made me a better host and has deepened my practice of participation in the world.
There is a reason that methods like Circle, Open Space Technology, World Cafe, and Appreciative Inquiry have been fundamental to the practice of the Art of Hosting in strategic settings. These methods have full participation built into them, and participants actively share the responsibility for the quality of the conversation and the harvest of the outcomes. Furthermore, when practitioners in the Art of Hosting global community have created methods, they also ensure full participation from all, including methods like Pro-Action Cafe, Collective Story Harvesting, and Design for Wiser Action.
Participation is at the heart of the four fold practice.
Being Hosted
In the practice of Dialogic Organization Development, of which the Art of Hosting is one expression, there is a great deal of attention given to the “container.” Participatory conversations take place within a described time and place and a set degree of freedom. The container is formed from attractors like a core purpose, a calling question, or a felt need. It is constrained by boundaries like time, space, resources, and degrees of influence. The role of the host is to pay attention to the container so that participants can operate within this space. Sometimes this involves tightening constraints or destroying them altogether. It might mean inviting attention on a shared purpose again or moving with the energy of the group and changing course. It is a dynamic and ever evolving practice.
And yes, it is different from what most people understand as “facilitation,” which is that person standing at the front of the room managing the conversation ad scrawling away on flip charts. Years ago I wrote a blog post that sought to make a clear distinction between the two terms but it was really too stark a distinction. These days I’m not so precious about this and I use the terms interchangeably. The essence of the art of hosting for me though is attending to the properties of the container so that the group itself can do the work. I see the host as a part o the system but a part with a very specific role of managing constraints. Most often in my work, this is done as a consultant, with the power and responsibility to do this, but there are times when I am a part of a group that needs hosting and I turn my attention from the work at hand and focus on the quality of the container instead. It is, as my friend Tenneson Woolf often says, a gift to host and a gift to be hosted.
Being hosted well is indeed a gift, and is not that common. Think of how many meetings you have been to where your irritation with the facilitator has gotten in the way of the work you came to do. Some of those times may even have been with me as your host! Alos, think of the times when you were acutely aware that the LACK of hosting was a real problem, impeding the ability of the work to get done. Reflect on these experiences and contrast them with the experiences you had of the most meaningful work in your life. It is an almost certainty that these experiences were hosted – that is they happened inside a container that was built around mutual purpose,a common challenge, a relationship, or an opportunity to do something relevant. The hosting may have been extremely light, or it may have involved a tightly scripted flow. It may have been held by another person, or the group itself may have played the role of the host. Regardless, I am willing to be that the most meaningful conversations humans are involved in – and the most meaningful work – comes inside just the right enabling constraints. It is hosted.
Sometimes when I am talking about the four-fold practice I will say that this pattern is about enabling contribution, and I truly think that a well-hosted meeting sets up a kind of gift economy, where participants are offering and receiving in the best way. This doesn’t mean that folks are always getting along well, but it does mean that difference, dissent and conflict can be offered and received in the service of something bigger and not as a back and forth tennis match of accusation and closing down. Hosting is not something that happens without intention and a commitment to the role and so in spaces where hosting will benefit, to step up and do the work is to contribute to the emergence of this pattern.
Co-creating
The fourth pattern of meaningful conversation acknowledges that the best dialogues leave the participants with the knowledge and evidence that they have been creating something together. When things are truly participatory, participants can point concretely to the way that they contributed to the outcome. This is a rare feeling these days where both organization and community life is dominated by accountabilities that are more often than not pointed towards people in power or responsibility and not towards oneself or to the group of folks to which one belongs. There is of course some truth to this, but complex challenges require the participation and ongoing ownership of all in order to be sustainable. The feeling of having co-created something brings tremendous meaningfulness to a task and ongoing commitment to the relationship that will extend and sustain the effort.
Co-creation for me is a key piece of design in every way. I recently hosted a meeting with drug users, community members, service providers and non-profit leaders where we were looking at the stories collected about opioid use in a sensemaker project. It was obvious to me that the meeting needed to be co-created with people from all of these groups in order for it to be something that had some real efficacy. In the end, a network of peers offered the four main tasks for the day (review the stories to find patterns, discuss them with others, come up with bigger solutions, and leave with something concrete) and they also took responsibility for setting up safe space where people could use drugs or be supported if the stories triggered trauma. This was something I couldn’t do at all, and so I stuck to hosting the process and the peer network hosted the space. That is co-creation.
Likewise, when I am hosting, the group itself will be largely responsible for its own harvest of the gathering. That means data written or recorded in their own hands and voices, and it means that they make sense of the conversations they have had and even create the substance of the report of the proceedings. My basic principle is “never touch the data” and if there is ever a time I have to move post-it notes or write words about the event, I think very carefully about whether or not it is my place to do so. It is tempting for facilitators to show their prowess by synthesizing data, writing reflections and telling the group what happened in their reports. All of that, useful as it may appear to be, has a cost. It is your job to find that cost and determine whether it is a price you are willing you to pay!
So these patterns translate into a useful set of design and planning guidelines. They help us practice the art of hosting and keep meetings as participatory as possible. They also often guideposts for the development of practice of both facilitation and, at bigger scales, leadership.
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Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University.
In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes:
In disciplines as diverse as genetics, psychology, sociology, disaster management, public health, urban development, and environmental science, there is movement away from research on the factors that produce disease and dysfunction to analyses of capacity building, patterns of self-organization, adaption, and in the case of human psychology, underlying protective and promotive processes that contribute to the resilience of complex systems.
The same is true for my own practice and development around complex facilitation. From a resilience standpoint, my inquiry is, what are the facilitation or hosting practices that help create containers that foster resilience and capacity building?
Ungar’s principles are as follows:
- (1) resilience occurs in contexts of adversity;
- (2) resilience is a process;
- (3) there are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience;
- (4) a resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex;
- (5) a resilient system promotes connectivity;
- (6) a resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning; and
- (7) a resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation.
I think it’s a moral imperative to build resilience into strategic dialogue and conversations, whether in a short hosted meeting or in a long term participatory process. Participatory work is always a chance to affirm the dignity of human beings. Furthermore, many people come into participatory processes suffering the effects of trauma, much of it hidden from view. While facilitation is not therapy, we cannot practice a “do no harm” approach if we don’t understand patterns of trauma and the way resilience strategies address the effects. Creating “safe enough” space for people to engage in challenging work is itself a resilience strategy. Do it well, and you contribute to long term capacity building in individuals and collectives.
I find these principles inspiring to my complex facilitation practice, because they help me to check designs, and make choices about the kinds of ways I intervene in the system. For example, just off the top of my head, here are some questions and insights we could use to embed our processes with more resilience, related to each principle.
Resilience occurs in contexts of adversity
- Ensure that a group struggles with its work. Don’t be afraid to overload individuals for short periods of time with cognitive tasks (evidenced by confusion, contorted faces, and fatigue). But don’t let that cognitive overload create toxic stress in the system. Your boundary is somewhere between those two points.
- Avoid premature convergence (a Dave Snowden and Sam Kaner principle). Create the conditions so that people don’t simply accept the easy answers without going through the struggle of integrating ideas and exploring emergence.
Resilience is a process
- A resilient system is constantly growing and changing and achieving new levels of capacity, and able to deal with harder and harder stresses. Build-in some adversity to every aspect of organizational life, and you will build capacity building into the organization.
- There is no “final state” of capacity that is acceptable, and so good leadership and facilitation continue to design processes that work the resilience muscle.
- Don’t undertake a “capacity-building project.” Instead, make capacity-building a collateral benefit of engaging in a participatory process.
There are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience
- Watch for the way resilience begins to shift power dynamics and authority in a system. When a group can manage itself well, it requires different support from leadership and different methods of management.
- If the “operating system” of the organization in which a resilient team doesn’t keep pace with the capacity built in the team, a break can occur. Attend to these connections between the resilient parts of the system (that survive by being changed) and the robust parts of the system (that survive by being unchanged).
A resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex
- To my point in a previous post on complex facilitation, you have to work in a complex system with a complexity approach. That means eschewing tendencies to control, closed boundaries, fixed approaches and known outcomes.
- Work with the properties of containers to encourage emergence and self-organization
A resilient system promotes connectivity
- Many of the dialogic methods we use with the Art of Hosting are premised on the fact that everyone in the system is responsible for participating and that relationship is as important an outcome as productivity.
- Working with stories, shared perspectives, diverse identities, and multiple skills in the same process builds connection between people in a system. Solving problems and overcoming adversity together helps individuals become more resilient and connected to each other.
- Any process hoping to survive over time needs to have explicit attention paid to the connections between the parts in the system.
A resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning
- The very first inquiry of the Art of Hosting community was something like “What if learning together was the new form of leadership we need now?” A good marker of a resilient team or organization is its ability to fail, recover, and learn. Many organizations say they do this. but few actually pull it off.
- Create work in which individuals enjoy solving problems and take pleasure in getting things wrong.
A resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation
- A forest without these features is a tree farm. An organization with these features is a machine.
- Diverse perspectives and lived experiences present opportunities for change and development. They challenge existing ways of doing things and disrupt in helpful ways.
- Redundancy is a feature of living systems. Never be afraid to have the same conversations twice. Or three times.
- Aim for full participation in every meeting. If a person is not participating, the group cannot benefit from their knowledge, experience, or curiosity.
These are just my initial musings on Ungar’s work. They validate many of the practices and methods used in the world of participatory leadership and the Art of Hosting. They also challenge us to make braver choices to create spaces that are harder than we might want them to be so that participants can struggle together to build capacity for change. I truly believe that communities, organizations, and people that develop resilience as a by-product of their work together will be best equipped to face increasing levels of uncertainty and emergence.
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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.
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Recently I have had several jobs that have required large group complex facilitation. Sometimes this work involves using methods like Open Space Technology or World Cafe, and other times it requires new designs and processes customized for the work.
When I say “complex facilitation” I mean running group processes that are grounded in complexity theory and intended to move a group towards emergent outcomes. I first heard this term used by Sonja Blignault and Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge, to describe this kind of facilitation. (Sonja has a great post on this stuff!) These are facilitation techniques and approaches that are required for large groups of people to engage in strategy, sensemaking, planning, and evaluation when the direction forward is unclear and the outcomes are unpredictable or unknown. It is a basic feature of all my facilitation practise, but when I’m doing new things with new designs, methods and processes, I’m most keenly aware of the nature of the work. So over the past few weeks, I’ve been able to reflect on both what complex facilitation is and what is required to do it well.
Here are a few thoughts.
Complex facilitation is highly participatory. Even in a large group setting, complex facilitation requires the active participation of everyone in the room. You will rarely find a meeting I’m running where you have the time to check your email, or just observe. I create exercises and use processes that require active and relatively equal participation. This begins with the invitation process, where we work hard to ensure that there is a diverse group of people, experiences, and perspectives involved in the project. It requires participants to be prepared to work in a participatory way, and it requires processes that ensure that everyone has a chance to meaningfully contribute to the outcomes. This means designing and using structures that move between large and small group sessions, and never leave people sitting and listening in plenary too long.
Outcomes are emergent and therefore unknown at the beginning. There is no pre-determined destination in complex facilitation. We may have the purpose of making a decision, producing a report, or assembling a plan, but the basic content of those outputs is emergent. It arises from the interactions between the participants. As a facilitator, I have to be very careful not to influence the outcomes of the work, especially when the work is making meaning of patterns that are important to the group. I have to avoid using examples to illustrate the exercises drawn from the group’s context. I spend a lot of preparation time thinking of examples to use that won’t colour the group’s sensemaking work. During the work, I have to be deeply conscious of the way I talk and interact with the group, so as not to impose my view of things on them.
Use stories and base the work in reality. One thing I have learned from my work informed by complexity practitioners like Dave Snowden, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Cynthia Kurtz, and Glenda Eoyang is to base your strategic work in reality. This means prepping strategic work with a process to collect stories and narratives from the organization or community. Over the past couple of years, I have started using tools like Sensemaker and Cynthia Kurtz’s NarraFirma to do this work. These tools have the advantage of collecting data from people in their context which means that when they come to a large group meeting, they are able to work with material that has been collected rather than generating stories in a workshop context that can sometimes be influenced by bias, habit, and other kinds of cognitive entrainment. I also work with methods that can generate narratives in the workshop itself, but if it’s possible, undertaking a narrative capture beforehand makes the work more meaningful.
Remember that all complexity work is about patterns. When working with complex facilitation techniques, I’m constantly designing processes and shifting them based on pattern intelligence. In designing and working with patterns, I rely on my version of the ABIDE heuristic: I pay attention to Attractors, Boundaries, Identities, Differences and Exchanges in a process. When the group needs shifting, these are the basic areas I get to influence. If unhealthy issues are arising in a group, my job is to try to shift the patterns to bring the group to emerging health and coherence (note: this does not mean suppressing dissent or conflict!). Work with patterns and you’ll avoid the temptation to meddle in the content.
Work with cognitive stress and overload. The word “facilitation” comes from the Latin word facilitare which means “to make things easy.” That is not the goal of complex facilitation. Instead, the facilitator works with cognitive overload and stress, deliberately shifting the process between mentally heavy activities and things that are lighter and allow for cognitive recovery. The reason for doing this is to ensure that participants are constantly challenging their patterns and biases. Especially in sensemaking sessions, participants who simply go to the easy answers are not finding the novel. Innovation is very hard work and requires people to both think and act differently. I’m sure many folks who have worked with me will testify about how much they struggled in sessions when we were trying to do new things. That struggle is brains wrestling with habits and preferences. Facilitators need to be skillful in introducing good stress and overload that doesn’t break a group but causes people to authentically find new things. Work hard and eat avocadoes and blueberries.
Not everyone will enjoy it. As a result of cognitive overload and the messiness of the room strewn with markers and posit it notes, you will find that not everyone will enjoy a complex facilitation session. I try to prepare people as much as possible for the work, and almost always warn them ahead of time that the day will be challenging, and they are invited to stay in it. But in a large group of folks, there will always be people who have a crappy time. Try not to create processes that have this result, but also learn and remember that not everyone is going to be thrilled to work in this way. I’ve been in this situation both as a participant and as a facilitator, and I’m okay with it.
You don’t have a safety net. The more experienced one gets at complex facilitation, the more frequently one operates without a safety net. It can feel risky facilitating in this way, even with a couple of decades of experience under one’s belt. I still often get nervous and fearful in these kinds of workshops, and I’m on high alert. I have developed good self-awareness practices to know when my anxiousness is seeping into my facilitation. This is critical for facilitators of all kinds but especially those who engage in this kind of work. It is not uncommon to find oneself receiving criticism and mistrust, especially as a group is going through a groan zone together. Have a good practice and you can remain a resourceful facilitator. That is the only safety net you get!
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For many years I have been teaching Cynefin as a foundational framework in complexity and participatory leadership workshops and retreats. For me it’s the best and most accessible way to explain the differences between complex problems and other kinds of problems and why we need to make complexity-based interventions in complex systems.
And while there are great ways to start learning about ontology in a lecture format, or using te examples of a children’s birthday party, I’m rather inclined to playing games as a way of understanding different types of systems before we do any teaching at all. Especially when you are teaching Cynefin by referring to constraints, games are super useful because a game is really just a constrained system.
My go to games involve movement and various challenges inspired by theatre exercises, and I’ve documented them before. This morning I needed to create a new suite of games for a context in which free movement was itself constrained (two participants in wheelchairs and a room that was not big enough for good and open movement.) I went to my arsenal of improvisation games and came up with these three games. We did these in groups of about 6-7 people.
- In your group, recite the English alphabet in order one letter at a time. Go around the circle, with each person saying one letter at a time.
- In your group, this time you will construct a 26 word story by each person contributing a word that starts with the next letter in the alphabet. Go in order around the circle, one word from each person. The theme of the story is “Our journey to the retreat centre.”
- In your group you have 3 minutes to tell a one word story about a mythical and legendary community event. Each person contributes one word at a time and you go clockwise around the circle. I will let you know when you have 30 seconds left to wrap up your story.
You can see that these three games map on to the Obvious, Complicated and Complex domains of Cynefin and although they are variations of the same process, the way we use constraints is what dictates the nature of the game.
In the first game, there is a rule: recite the alphabet in order, one person at a time. There is no room for creativity and in fact a best practice – singing The Alphabet Song – help you to do it. If anyone in the group doesn’t know the alphabet, it’s easy enough to google it and show them so they don’t lose their place.
In the second game, there was more latitude for participants to ad something, but they were still constrained by the alphabet scheme and the rule of one word at a time, going in a circle. Again, expertise helps here, as people can remind others that they skipped a letter for example, but increasingly the story is emergent and there is more unpredictability in the exercise. It’s also worth pointing out how people game the system by schoosing words that fit the rules rather than words that contribute to the story. The rules are far more influential constraints than the purpose of the exercise. This leads to all kinds of discussion about why it’s easy in large system to justify your work by just doing your part rather than by what you added to the whole. This is a good example of governing constraints.
In the third game we free the participants from all constraints except one word at a time, in a circle. The theme of the story becomes more important, because word choice is ENABLED by the theme which constraints options. Enabling constraints are at play, and I offered people a couple of heuristics from the improve world in order to hep them if they were stuck:
- Accept the offer and be changed by it
- Make your partner look good by building on the offer
- Don’t be afraid to fail
One word at a time stories can sometimes be very powerful and moving as they emerge from people co-creating something together. You can see how small changes cause the story to go in a radically different direction and participants can often feel their desire to control the narrative dashed on the rocks of different offers. With fewer GOVERNING constraints in place, people feel freer to make mistakes and fail, especially knowing that others may be waiting to work with their material anyway.
So there you go: a new way to experientially learn ontology before diving into Cynefin to explain and make sense of what we just did.