I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health and well being in their communities. I loved the idea of culture as the ground for this work and loved watching people work with it, and indeed being a part of cultural shifts and and catalysis. Culture was like magic. It appeared bigger than all of us, it shifted and changed and it enabled things to happen. Or not.
I so fell in love with culture that I did an honours thesis in my fifth year that compared two national Indigenous organizations in their attempts to root their operations and structures in traditional cultures. One did it by using artifacts and trappings and firm structures that ended in arguments about orthodoxies and heartbreak, and the other did it by creating a relational, caring, and connected context in which a unique but thoroughly Indigenous way of being emerged.
So early on I learned that culture is emergent, that it transcends individuals and specific artifacts and practices, that it is a context that shapes relationships and behaviours and that it is the product of relationships and interactions over time. Norms of behaviour can’t be dictated, they can only arise.
Since then I would say that the heart of my work with organizations and communities has been working with culture. The sources of joy and the sources of pain are the multiples contexts in which we live our lives. I’ve worked in one-off settings and multi-year large scale systemic settings. I’ve worked with large teams and with little groups of change-makers. And we’ve tried it all, from magic methods to the “this will finally solve it” conference, to multi-year narrative sense-making projects. I’ve spent decades surfing the rise and fall of supporter culture around the soccer teams I’ve been a part of. I’ve spent nearly 25 years living on an island with its own unique slant on the world, creating social enterprises, supporting community economic development and making community through music and play.
About a year ago on the Art of Hosting Facebook group someone asked about changing culture in a very large organization and which methods are best. For some reason that post appeared in the feed that I rarely check, and I responded to it. But because I’m never going to send you to Facebook, I thought I would catch this sketchy set of insights and share them here. This is a back of the napkin kind of list, but these are truths that I will no longer doubt in my work with organizations and communities. So here’s what I’ve learned about “culture change.”
- It takes years.
- Your work will be non-linear and unpredictable.
- All states are temporary.
- If it is necessary for senior leaders champion and support change work, it will only be sustained as long as they don’t succumb to their anxiety and fear of uncertainty and unpredictability.
- You cannot change culture directly, but you can work to change the way people interact with one another and see what kind of culture emerges as a result.
- Learning together is often a good way to approach many different strategic and cultural issues in an oblique and open way.
- If change of any kind in the organization or sector is predicated on the people needing to transform and be different then you are colonizing people. Don’t do that.
- Whatever you think is happening is only ever a part of the full picture.
- Whatever you think you have accomplished is only ever a piece of what you have actually done.
- It will never go according to plan.
Here is my monthly summary of some interesting finds from around the web from November and posted on my Mastodon page.
- November 1 was All Souls Day. What does that mean now?
- Christine Sinclair, the greatest international goal scorer in world football, played her last regular season game for the Portland Thorns tonight. Needing a win to clinch a playoff spot, she did the deed for her club team, scoring the opening goal. Watch these highlights and listen to the sheer noise with every Thorns entry to the box. The passion and love for these players – for this player – is astounding.
- Cory Doctorow on the inevitable enshittification of Bluesky and why only Mastodon is worthy of social investment.
- Listen to Esperanza Spalding and Robert Glasper: Didn’t Find Nothing in my Blues Song Blues
- My friend Sarah Jane Scouten, a fellow Bowen Islander, has released a new album of her songs called Transmutations.
- A really good analysis of where Conservatism is going in the UK which makes me think about what might happen here if the Conservatives are elected.
- Indigenous tribes engineered British Columbia’s modern hazelnut forests more than 7000 years ago.
- I use a little ritual for closing workshops that comes from the Soweto Mountain of Hope in South Africa. It is a simple set of nine claps that honors ourselves, our communities, and our work in the world.
- Chelsey Vowel has updated her excellent 2016 article on territorial acknowledgements.
- Canada’s first-ever supporter-owned soccer club – my club – TSS Rovers is offering shares again! Join us in investing in the future of Canadian soccer. And read Corey Almond’s terrific piece on our endeavour
- A beautiful podcast that tracks the experience of being hosted by The Circle, a national organization in Canada that is transforming philanthropy.
- A Firsthand Account of What Homelessness in America Is Really Like.
- A Matt Webb contemplation on list songs and endings.
- Why did Swannanoa become Helene’s ‘ground zero’? Deadly combination of topography, development and a tidal wave of water.
A detail from a surf board on display at the Nazare Surf Museum, Nazare, Portugal.
If you have been working with me over the past five years or so you will have heard me reference and use the work of Cynthia Kurtz in the work we are doing. Among other things Cynthia is the originator of NarraFirma, the software I most often use for narrative work on complex topics. She is the author of one of my favourite papers on Cynefin, The New Dynamics of Strategy which she wrote with Dave Snowden back in 2003. She wrote her own books on Working With Stories and Confluence a brilliant book about her own approach to working with complexity. Last month she posted some news about her current work and life. She is in the process of downloading her work into four different versions of Working with Stories, and thinking deeply about a transition in her life and work. I encourage to read her post.
Cynthia has been a key mentor in my own life and work, especially as the pandemic changed our approach from in person to online. Last year I took her practicum course on PNI which deepened my appreciation for the depth of these tools that she shares. NarraFirma in particular has been a godsend as a tool for me to work with my clients. Because it is open source and Cynthia and her husband Paul have their hands on the code, any updates or bugs I have experienced with the software get corrected right away.
So I thought I would take a moment to offer folks an introduction to her work and point you to the resources that she has shared. Cynthia is an incredibly deep and generous thinker and has made it her life’s work to provide accessible tools to people struggling with complex challenges because at the core of human community should be the delight in the way we work with our stories.
Her work on complexity
Cynthia began her work in the world as a biologist studying social behaviour in animals until an injury in the field prompted a career change. Already pre-disposed to curiosity about complexity and with some skills as a programmer, she teamed up with her husband Paul Fernout to write environmental simulation software to help people learn more about the natural world. Later, seeking more security, Paul took a contract job at IBM and showed Cynthia a job posting relating to organizational storytelling and she applied. Her skills as a researcher, and knowledge of social dynamics through her science background quickly became the foundation of her work.
Cynthia worked at IBM as the company was discovering complexity and the role of storytelling and her ideas found a rich ground alongside many other researchers and thinkers who were helping to explore and develop the field. The paper she wrote with Dave Snowden from this time, The New Dynamics of Strategy, starts with a deep dive into theory and why complexity challenges conventional forms of decision making. It then goes on to describe the Cynefin framework in detail and discusses how to use it with a series of practices and applications. Together this represents a pretty comprehensive foundation for understanding the role of Cynefin and the methods for using it when it comes to strategy and decision making. The paper itself contains Cynthia’s ideas on control and connection which are key aspects of her own sense making framework
Although her work is deeply informed by theory, it wasn’t until 2021 that she finally published a book that describes her approach to understanding complexity, or more precisely, the relations between self-organization and intentional organization. The book is called Confluence and it describes a set of tools and approaches for thinking about the intersection of organizational planning in a self-organizing world. True to form, it is not just a theory book, but a book of well-documented thinking tools illustrated by stories and knowledge gleaned from a wide swath of human experience. It’s a delicious and lingering read. It cuts close to the bone. The last section addressing conspiracy theories might be one of those things that saves democracy. (It also helpfully addresses jargon and complexity theory in an incredibly thought provoking way!)
While it took her a long time write Confluence, she has been a productive and generous blogger for decades and her thoughts, ideas, ramblings and clear gems of wisdom are collected at her blog, Story Colored Glasses.
Working with stories
Cynthia’s focus in the world has been consistently on the role of stories and narrative and so her work has been driven towards the deeply practical. She has created, co-created or piloted dozens of methods for working with stories in groups, many of which are standard practice in our field now. Her magnum opus is Working with Stories in your community or organization and is a comprehensive introduction to her own research method, Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). Working With Stories (WWS) has a whole website devoted to this book and some of her latest iterations, which include a simplified version and an advanced version, a collection of story forms and will soon also include the fourth edition, which she is currently preparing.
WWS is a constant companion on my desk and there is a lifetime of learning in this book. I’m astounded at Cynthia’s capacity to document her own process and her knowledge and present it in accessible ways. That isn’t to say that the material isn’t dense and rich. This approach is not simple to understand or work with until you have unschooled yourself a bit in research methods, epistemology and facilitation. But as a body of work it is immensely transformative for research, engagement and strategy.
WWS is a worthy investment of time and money and is a useful guide to anybody seriously working with story, social patterns and change making in complex settings.
Software for working with stories
Cynthia’s interest in uncovering patterns and connection in stories along with her training in statistics and her experience in programming led her to create the early programming behind Sensemaker Explorer while she was at Cognitive Edge. Later she and Paul Fernout created their own software for gathering stories and discovering patterns. Eventually their efforts became NarraFirma, an open source software package that is really a project management tool. NarraFirma includes hundreds of screens and tools to plan and carry out a PNI project, including the ability to create story gathering surveys, perform catalysis on the results, prepare materials for sense making sessions, and reflect on and report on projects. One of the best features of NarraFirma is the context specific help screens that enable users to not only navigate the software but learn about the practice as they are doing so. I’ve never seen anything quite like NarraFirma.
Although the software is free to use and requires only a WordPress site to install as a plug in (my preferred option) it takes several days to really learn how to use properly and years of experience to use well. When you use NarraFirma you are not just building a survey tool for story collection, but you are immersing yourself in Participatory Narrative Inquiry. I have done probably thirty or more projects, from one time story collections for strategic planning or engagement around complex issues like opioid use and crisis response to a four year long inquiry into changing workplace culture. Every time I dive in I learn more about how to work with this approach. The software not only helps me run my project, it makes me a better practitioner as I’m doing so.
I’m immensely grateful to Cynthia for putting her work out in the world and I highly recommend anyone interested in this field explore her thinking, offering and tools.
A systems change initiative I witnessed on the weekend.
I think my nomination for LinkedIn post of the year goes to Cameron Tokinwise for this one:
Good reminder for those extolling Systems Thinking from Pelle Ehn at the beginning of his still remarkable 1988 book, _Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts_ – that systems are only ever ensembles considered as systems. Systems are not things in the world, but ways of understanding how things in the world relate to each other. Systems Thinking is a choice to interpret the world as sets of systems.
Cameron Tokinwise on LinkedIn, October 2023
To be concerned about trying to effect system change does not mean that there are systems out there needing to be changed, but that one way to explain why change might be proving difficult is to observe aspects of the status quo as systemically interrelated, and so to try to make (design) a new system, that is, new ways in which those things interrelate.
This is important because systems risk being reified into big, solid things that seem to be unchangeable if you think of systems as really existing out there in the world. The classic example is that Babadook we consider to be Capitalism (as opposed to a variety of social relations – and not all social relations [see https://lnkd.in/gPJ8bdnQ] – we perpetuate).
(And yes, things are bit more complicated when observations of systems are considered to be themselves operations of other systems (the ones doing the observing), making such observations performative, constituting the reality of what is observed, at least in the world of/as experienced by the observer and those other systems with whom/which that observer is in an interdependent (or structurally coupled) relation: von Foerester > Maturana > Luhmann > Wolfe.)
I have just today had occasion to bring that up again, talking with a friend about systems change. Like, what is the system? Who says? What are the parts of it we say are the system and why are some things not considered part of the system? And what are we really seeking to change? And what does change even look like?
I continue to mull over this quote and its implications because so much work in the field I am involved in is about “systems change” or “systems transformation” and as long as I have been doing this work, I can see that saying I’m involved in systems change hasn’t really made anything more clear to me. I reject “root causes” of complex problems because, well, complexity tells us that causality is non-linear and effects are emergent so simply addressing “root causes” doesn’t get a predictable change. The root cause of poverty is simply another problem to address, the root of which is something else. The complex world is made of interrelated and interconnected things that aren’t ranked in a discernable hierarchy and that interact constantly in unpredictable ways.
And yet.
We know that there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “unjust” and we know there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “more just” (one feature of complexity work is that you can never know if you made the best move, but you can usually know that you’ve made a wrong move).
And so, in a conversation with a friend today, I suggested that instead of saying, “We aim to change systems,” why don’t we just say, “We think a just world looks like THIS, and so this is what we will do more of.” You can’t solve all the problems, even if there was a magical root cause that, if we just zapped it with enough transformation, would result in a just world. All that would happen is that competing forces would arrange themselves around other attractors, and new stable patterns would emerge. It might be that, in the battle between individual greed and social compassion for example we get a period of stability for social compassion for a time until individual greed figures out how to tilt the game in its favour again.
In my personal life, I think the world I want to live in has things like organizations and projects done by teams full of people who love and trust one another and that we make things together that people are generally happy with and that we are participating more in the community by singing together, sharing resources and supporting each other. I don’t have a root cause analysis for how I live my life. I don’t sing in choirs because a root cause of alienation and social anxiety is the collapse of co-creative community institutions, and the more spaces for community co-creation that exist, the more felt sense of belonging happens in the world. No. I sing because I love to sing, even when it’s hard and we make mistakes and dry up in performance and slam our foreheads in frustration because it’s hard to sing a minor seventh interval by ear, and I missed my cue again.
The need for theories of change has always struck me as an unnecessary step to making change. There is no perfect theory of change. I’m fond of quoting Micheal Quinn Patton, who said one day, to my delight, “Complexity IS a theory of change!” Good enough. Now get after it, and if things you do create what you think is a more just and caring world, find ways to sustain those things. And if they don’t, stop doing those things immediately. And you can’t do it all, so pick the things you want to do, that are maybe yours to do uniquely, perhaps informed by what others have said are good things to do and do them. Keep an eye on what happens, but trust that your work will travel well in the world. Once it’s out there, you cannot get it back.
I asked DALL-E to make this image, because I can’t find the great photo i took of streams converging on a beach.
This is one of the things I love about my daily RSS feed. The first thing I see today on my NetNewsReaders list is this blog post from my fiend Mark McKergow in Edinburgh who shares his framework of time, which he has articulated in the Uers Guide to the Future. I like this conception of time, because of the big hole in the which he calls “Ant Country”. Ant Country is that time when the context you are in is important. Mark describes it as the “least useful zone” for planning, becasue it is too far away to predict wat will happen there, but not far enough away that it provides the somewhat reassuring clarity of a vision or a destination. It’s where anything can happen, where life is going to self-organize around your efforts in unpredictable ways, knocking you off course or delivering the resources you need right when you least expect them. “Planning” is rarely helpful here – think about the five year plans we all made in 2019 – but you can and should be prepared for this zone.
Here’s the framework:
User’s Guide to the Future Framework, originally published in McKergow and Bailey, Host, 2014.
I am working with a couple of clients right now looking at their future and it strikes me that there is always an oscillation between that far future and the immediate here and now, and many people can’t actually distinguish between the two, or worse set, they see them as closely connected. Here it is useful to distinguish once again between ordered systems and unordered systems, which helps us distinguish between knowable future and unknowable ones. In his article, Mark talks about ascending Everest, and also uses the metaphor of taxi drivers getting passengers to knowable destiations. These are “knowables” even if the route from here to there is yet to be discovered.
In many ways the near future zones and the far future zones are equally easy to identify. What is right in front of you is yours to do, and you can see what you’re doing when you take a step forward. For the far future it is easy to identify where you want to go, whether that is a knowable and fixed place like a peak or an address, or a hoped for dynamic state, like a generally productive and meaningful work culture, one which might look very different from where we are today. The more knowable and fixed the future state is, the more you can concentrate on backcasting, using experts perhaps who can advise you how to get there (like a map or a cabbie with The Knowledge), or who can help you deal with the technical challenges (like a Sherpa). Linear planning can be very helpful in these cases, as the act of moving into that future is a process of discovering knowable information. Much of that information might already be available, and if it isn’t there are probably people around who can help you find it in a good and accurate way. That doesn’t take the influence of context out of the Ant Country stage, but staying true to the line you have marked through that country will give you a strong sense of direction and a robust plan to get where you are going. One must be careful to pay attention to the vagaries of Ant Country, but in general fidelity to a well put together plan is what you need.
But in the case where you are trying to shift a culture or engage in other highly emergent kinds of work, two things come into play that will help you through Ant Country. The first is knowing that your present state does indeed matter. A lot. Even though you might still be making adjustments and evaluating your immediate need, the history of the system you are in and then nature of the current state actually liit what is possible if you intend to make a move from a current place (overwork, poor morale, a sense of purposelessness) to a more desired state (ease, support and connection, meaningful work). Identifying that far off horizon is important because it orients you in a direction of travel. Instead of worrying about what needs to be in place before getting over the horizon, essentially everything from here to there is ant country. What I typically advise then is to look for patterns in our surrent state of being that provide us with information about what is more possible. That could ean looking for examples or patterns where small hints of our desired future are present. If what you want already exists somewhere in the system, it might be easier to try to grow more of that than to start fresh. This is what we call “affordances.” And it also means looking at the reason why these things never seem to take off, because that gives us some sense of things that we might try in the here and now and the near future. When we are heading in a direction with an unknowable future state, playing with emergence is the goal.
This means that we need to drive directly into Ant Country. We can start doing some things and then open ourselves up to the influences of context and the swirls of randomness that alter our course. Ant Country suddenly becomes the source of creativity and outside knowledge that helps break us out of the patterns that have hindered us and starts giving us options for new ways to get to the better place we have been aiming at. Instead of our plans, especially when we are trying to discover new things and break old habits, we need to get good at participatory leadership and iterative Adaptive Action…what? so what? now what?…probe, sense, respond…observe, orient, decide, act…all the little heuristics that help guide us in this zone are about making sense of the present moment and holding on to the desired future. And then comes the Deep Breath Moment.
Mark’s piece talks about the Deep Breath Moment:
This dynamic steering and adjustment is fine… until, sometimes, a more fundamental adjustment is called for. I call this a ‘deep breath moment’. It’s the time when the far future is re-examined, hopes and aspirations are revised, and a new direction is set.
I’ve experienced this several times in my life and work. What surprises me is that it can creep up without being noticed and appear suddenly, a realisation that something needs to change. Other times it can be a dawning realisation, something that starts as a quiet idea, keeps coming back and seems to get louder and louder until it’s inescapable. But when you do a re-set, a revision of hopes and set a new direction, the effect can be dramatic. Often previously stuck things start to move quite quickly – like pushing on the (push) door when you’ve been fruitlessly pulling and getting nowhere. Things fall into place in different ways. New connections get made. New possibilities arrive. And what was a frustrating stuckness becomes once again a moving and flowing process.
The first thing to say is that this is not a sign of bad planning. On the contrary; it’s a sign that the User’s Guide to the Future is being used well. One of the wonders of viewing the world as emergent is to acknowledge that the unexpected will sometimes happen, and that’s just how it is. The key thing is not to totally prevent the unexpected (which would be futile) but to respond to it well and to use it constructively.
In complex work, I recognize this deep breath moment as one of two things happening. First, it may be that I have found myself in a productive channel flowing towards that desired future. That is a sweet place to be in, but it means, like all affordances, that other options are now closed off to me. I am clearly committed to this path. Deep breath. “We all choose our regrets” as Christopher Hitchens was reported to have once said. Even in the service of the good and right thing that you wanted, possibilities are now forever gone. I find this an important moment of threshold crossing: especially the older I get. It’s poignant. I want my kids to grow up and be strong, but that means there will be that one moment when I picked them up and held them in my arms for the last time. Sigh.
The other deep breath moment I have experienced is the one where I have reached a dead end and I have to move out of the deep channel I am in and make the trek up and over a ridge to a better valley. In our lives perhaps we experience that with relationships that don’t work out businesses that fail, ideas that never take off. We put a ton of time and energy into them and they are over. Sometimes we double down, engaging in sunk cost redemption until someone takes a hold of us in the wilderness of Ant Country and says: “buddy, you’re done. Use your lats amount of energy to get up here and we’ll carry on.”
Working with clients, there is always a temptation to reassure them that the path from here to there is knowable, if we just study things are little more and make a good choice. But remember, the moment of a decision is a madness. Entering Ant Country is inevitable, and it’s going to require a deep breath, some keen awareness of where you are and where you have come from and some solid personal practice to stay in it.