It’s good to have Dave Snowden back from his treks in the Himalayas. He’s been a big influence on my thinking and practice over the past few years and his near daily blog posts are always rich, irreverent and practical. He is in the process of creating an important body of theory and practice that is useful even if the language and the concepts are sometimes a lot of work to grasp. The payoff from wrestling with his ideas is rich.
Today he’s discussing “dispositionality” which simply means that making change in a system is much easier when you have a sense of what the system is pre-disposed to do (and what it is NOT pre-disposed to do…)
Back in the summer Caitlin and I led a learning lab for the board and staff members of various community foundations from around British Columbia. The five principles that Dave articulated today were very much embedded in our work and they are becoming very much the basis for any change and planning work I do. Here’s how we made it work, pen and paper style.
1. Map the current state of the system, including its dominant flows, eddy points and whirlpools.
We began with a World Cafe design based on small stories of change. It is always good to ask people about actual decisions or stories that they remember to ground their experience in discovery. If you run a cafe on “What are the big sources of change in our sector?” you get a data set that is divorced from reality, meaning that it is subject to being gamed by the participants. I can just insert the things I want to see in there. But if I am asked to tell a story about a particular decision I had to made, the data set is richer and we have a good chance to see emerging patterns.
And so our Cafe ran like that: “Tell a story of a time when you knew things needed to change?”
Each person told a story and the other three at the table listened and wrote down what they heard was the impetus for change, with one data point on a post-it note. We did several rounds of story telling. At the end of the round, we asked people to give the post-its to the story teller, and we gave the story tellers time to rank each post it note on a scale of 1-3. A one meant that the impetus for change was just known to me (a weak signal), two meant that a few other people know about this impetus, and a three meant that this change trigger was known by everybody.
We then had the group cluster all the post-its to find major categories, and we sorted post it notes within the categories to produce a map that was rendered by our graphic recorder, Corrina Keeling. You can see that above.
2. Identify the energy gradient associated with existing dominant patterns and what adjacent possible states to any undesirable pattern present themselves.
The resulting map shows the major areas for change making, specific “acupuncture points” and the “energy gradients associated with the dominant patterns.” Practically what this means is that items marked in yellow were very weak signals and could be candidates for a change initiative that would appear out of left field for the dominant system. Not a bad thing to do, but it requires a lot of resources and political capital to initiate. The red items were things that EVERYBODY was talking about, which meant that the space for innovation was quite closed down. There are a lot of experts, large consulting firms, influential funding pots and politically committed people tackling change at this level because it is perceived to be an influential place to play. As a result it is generally a zone that is not failure tolerant and so these items are not good candidates for a probe or prototyping approach.
But the orange items were in a kind of Goldilocks zone: there are a few people who know that you can make change here, so you have allies, but the field is not cluttered with competing experts trying to assert their ideological solutions.
The whole map allows you to make choices.
3. Engage in safe-to-fail experiments in parallel either to change the energy gradient or to nudge (or shift) a dominant pattern to a more desirable state ideally through action rather than platitude.
This is of course the best approach to making change within complex systems. We took time to develop prototypes that were intended to tell us something about the system. A bonus would be that we might might create ideas that would turn into interesting new initiatives, but the primary function of running prototypes is to probe the system to tell us something about what is possible. Making tentative conclusions from action inspires people to try more, on a path that is a little more blazed. Just creating platitudes such as “Let’s build networks for knowledge transfer” doesn’t do enough to help change makers poke around and try things that are likely to work.
Each participant in the group created one or two prototypes which they rolled out, seeking to make a bit of change and learn about what helped or hindered change making in a relatively conservative sector of civil society.
4. Monitor the impact in real time and take multiple small actions to reinforce the good and disrupt the bad.
We kept the group together over a few months, having them check in over webinars to share the progress on their prototypes. We deliberately created a space where things were allowed to fail or radically change and we harvested learning all the way along. Where things were working, prototypes evolved in that direction, and we had a little funding to help accelerate them. By simply starting, participants discovered oblique strategies and in some cases entirely new ways to address their basic desire for changing some element of their environment. Without engaging in a deliberate yet loosely held action-based project, it is very difficult to see the opportunities that lie in the blind spots.
This learning was summarized in a report, but the bigger harvest was the capacity that each participant built to take steps to sense, design and implement change initiatives with a better informed complexity approach.
5. At all costs avoid any announcement of a change initiative or idealistic outcome based targets
I think this goes without saying. Change making in the complex space is essentially learning on overdrive. When we are truly stuck and yet we have a sense that “this might just work” we need good support to explore that instinct. Being deliberate about it helps. But announcing that “this is what we are doing and here are the targets we have to meet” will collapse people’s inherent creativity down to narrowing the focus of their work on achieve the pre-determined outcomes. That is a perfect strategy for destroying the capacity to engage with complexity, and it can result in a myopic approach to change that guarantees “black swan events” and other nasty surprises.
Just finished out first day of work with Navajo Area Health Promotion practitioners and 30 community wellness workers, Elders and healers from across the Navajo Nation. We are blending an Art of Hosting workshop with content and process from some recent research in neuroscience, epigenetics, and adverse childhood experiences and with wellness and leadership models from our Navajo colleagues with whom we have a ten year relationship.
One of the pieces of work we are doing is supporting these folks in launching or accelerating some community based projects using the social networks they have in place here. This will involve us spending time in Open Space tomorrow and on Friday running a ProAction Cafe in which 6-8 projects will be able to to be developed. As a way of grounding these projects in patterns that are useful for this context we spent this afternoon generating a Navajo pattern language for resiliency. We did this with a two round World Cafe in which we asked for stories of supporting resiliency and stories of leadership challenges. This is a kind both/and appreciative inquiry. At the conclusion of the Cafe, I asked people to reflect on one teaching or piece of advice that would be useful based on the discussions. I invited them to write a word or a phrase on one side of an index card and write some explication on the back.
The attached collection of 27 or so patterns include both expected patterns such as “Presence” and “Listening.” They also include some Navajo principles like “Ádáhodí?zin” meaning ‘Letting our children go, to learn and discover who they are.”
On Friday we will use these principles to help design projects. I’ll hand a few out to each project proponent and ask them to take a few minutes to brainstorm how to incorporate these pieces of ground tested advice in their project design.
Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle. The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with. Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.” I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing. But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:
This morning we began our Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking online course. Rowan Simonsen, Amy Lenzo and I were really excited to be able to share our first little insights with people, and especially this new mnemonic that we created to capture five key principles of harvesting practice: PLUME. We are excited to introduce this into the world.
Courtesy WRme2 on flickr
Entraining your mind to outcomes is the hardest practice to beat as a facilitator working in complexity. Whether it is learning, strategy or design, if you are in the complexity domain your attachment to an outcome is highly dangerous. It will shape your process, and cause you to harvest only what you are looking for, missing out on the juiciest, most powerful places of potential in a system.
Over the past week I managed to watch the entire 10 part series on the trials of Steven Avery on Netflix called Making a Murderer. Regardless of whether you think Avery is guilty or innocent of the murder, the series is a brilliant case study in what happens when we enter processes with our minds made up about the outcomes.
At one point in the final episode, Avery’s lawyer Dean Strang talks about the fact that people hardly ever set out to frame innocent people. Instead what they do is try to find the evidence to prove the guilt of those that they believe are guilty. When you believe someone is guilty you will look for evidence that proves that. And when you are an investigator that is a completely focused on a single outcome, you are going into the work with the problem already solved, and no amount of contrary evidence will change your mind.
Strang is gracious is labelling this a feature of the human condition: we are built this way. And it is that human failing is what makes justice sometimes an unattainable ideal.
Making A Murderer is an incredible portrait of how the entrained mind works. It illuminates a problem we all have to confront when problem solving, harvesting data and dealing with complexity: how do we let go of a pre-conceived outcome so that we can truly learn what’s going on and make decisions based on good information? And how do we do that while still holding on to a higher ideal. In other words, everyone in the case was motivated by justice (and justice what SHOULD have led everyone in the case), but the evidence that was collected and presented seemed to have motivated by a pre-conceived outcome to the trial.
In the world of practical complexity work there are a number of principles I have been using in harvesting and working with data, many of them informed by Dave Snowden’s work. These include:
Gather information with open questions that do not embed assumptions in them (the interrogation of Brendan Dassey is a perfect example of the very opposite of this – fishing for answers). In truly complex situations don’t ask direct questions, rather ask indirect questions about a person’s activities so they can’t game the system (or confirm your bias).
- Work at a very fine level of granularity – the more data you have the more ambiguous the conclusions will become, which is a good thing if you’re trying to learn the truth rather than trying to pre-determine an outcome.
- Use a diverse group of people to make sense of the data as they see it by looking for patterns in the data and asking questions that can be answered by further sensemaking. (The bones were in the firepit? How did they get there? Where were the people that could have moved them? What was happening during the time the body was burning?)
- When you discover a pattern check and see if it makes sense by looking for data that supports the pattern AND look for data that refutes the pattern. The human brain loves being validated so you have to make a special effort to invite a theory to be disproven.
- When you make a decision based on a pattern, lead by doing what you can to move towards the higher ideal, even if the path you choose is not the outcome or the pre-conceived notion you started out with. Leading and acting in this way, providing you have worked well with the data, results in BETTER ways to help build just socieities, make good things, improve organizational life or look after children and families.
These are good practices in and of themselves, and in my experience they also stand out as red flags if I see people engaging in teh OPPOSITE of these activities. If we are faced with closed questions, very small numbers of meaning makers, a refusal to hear dissent or a desire simply to see the big picture rather than the minutae, it causes me to explore in more detail the motivations and assumptions that people have. And like Dean Strang says, most people are not consciously out to commit an injustice, they are just unconsciously out to prove what they think they already know. That can have devastating consequences.