Innovation does not come without discarding ideas, trying and failing. In complex systems with complex challenges, failure is inevitable and desired. If we need to prototype to sense our way forward we have to have a mindset that can handle failure.
On Saturday at the Art of Participatory Leadership in Petaluma my new friend Shawn Berry convened a session on failure and through listening to stories ranging from small prototoyping failures to business breakdowns and even deaths, I noted a few patterns that are helpful for groups and people to address failure positively nd resourcefully
Frame it up. In North America and Europe we have a cultural aversion to failure. Failure is equated with inadequacy. Our self-esteem is tied to our success. Our compensation and status is affected by failure. Fear of failure is prevalent in the culture. In order to combat this tendency, it is helpful to work with a group to get them acquainted to failing. For more playful groups improv exercises can be an excellent way to drop inhibitions to try something and fail. More rational groups might benefit from a little appreciative inquiry where participants recall positive failing experiences. Reflecting and sharing on times of failure and survival reminds us that it is part of the process.
Support the experience. While groups are experimenting and learning, succeeding and failing it helps to have support and coaching present in the process. Depending on the kind of work being done you can offer support to keep a group resilient and unattached. I have used several different kinds of processes here including the following:
- Simply pausing for reflection periodically in the process to notice what is going on. Slowing the process down helps to gain valuable perspective on what is happening and helps a group move on quickly from failure.
- allowing failure to occur and then taking the subsequent stressful thoughts to an inquiry process using The Work of Byron Katie. We do this often when working with groups in the non-profit sector for example, where the pressure to succeed is accompanied by feelings of fear of the results of failing.
- In indigenous and other colonized cultural settings I have often had Elders and healers present who can care for the more invisible dynamics in the field, especially when our work is going to carry us into some of the sources of trauma. When you are working in a place where people are operating out of deep historical trauma, the fear of failure can be laden with many many deep seated implications. Having people in the process who understand these dynamics is essential.
- Peer-coaching is a common way to build resilience in groups where trying and failing is important. When a team is trying to learn something new it helps to also build the capacity for them to be able to rely on each other. This is why so many teams value “cross-training.” When athletes train, they often work out in ways that are not related to their sport _ a skier training by rowing for example. Doing this helps them to learn to use their body differently and builds strength that supports their core work. Similarly, work teams can learn a lot about themselves by creating situations of safe failure such as through improvisational exercises, outdoor experiences, games and other non-work focuses. The skills learned there can help support the team when they knuckle down to focus on key tasks and can support constructive failure within the work domain. Ultimately these skills will build capacity if they increase the ability of the group to support itself through stressful times.
- Developing a practice of greeting failure with joy. My friend Khelsilem Rivers taught me this one. He is – among other things – an indigenous language teacher and using the tool kit “Where Are Your Keys” Khelsilem helps people become fluent in their indigenous languages. One of the barriers to rapid fluency is a fear of “not doing it right.” Khelsilem completely transforms the experience of failure by introducing the technique called “How Fascinating!” When a person (including the facilitator) makes a mistake, the whole group celebrates by throwing their hands in the air, leaning back and declaring “How Fascinating!” While it might seem contrived at first, the technique opens up the body, and greets the failure with a collective celebration. Blame and judgement is avoided, collective support is activated and learning is grounded.
Practices like these are essential to build into the architecture of processes where failure is inevitable if innovation is to occur.
Process the grief. When catastrophic failure occurs it can leave people grieving, frightened and cynical. If there is no way to process the grief then individuals often build their next prototype out of fear. If you feel you have been burned before, you might develop your next idea by building in protection against failing again. While that can seem prudent and safe, in reality, building structures out of fear is a much riskier proposition than building structures out of possibility. Without processing grief, a group or a person can be susceptible to being “defended.” I learned much about this state from Dr. Gordon Neufeld who is a child psychologist who has described this phenomenon in children. Taking a group or a person through the grief cycle using empathy, story telling and compassion can help free the emotions that are triggered in future learning experiences.
Building a mindset to embrace failure and support the transformation of the energy of failure is critical to groups developing the capacity to lead in complexity.
I’ve also written about failure here:
I think there is probably nothing new under the sun. Engagement work has been tried, refined and improved all over the world in the last couple of decades that I wonder if there is anything new we can learn? It does seem to fall into “authentic engagement” and “engagement washing” – if I can coin a couple of phrases. But I haven’t seen radically new thinking or practice for a while.
What we are getting instead is some terrific collections of tools, handbooks and harvests of processes. This .pdf of a Handbook for Civic Engagement prepared for a community process in the United States is an excellent example of the kind of harvesting that is useful. It sums up lessons learned from engagement process, proceeds from practice to inform theory and provides some useful invitations for practice and application. This is an artifact which has emerged out of the space of engagement “praxis” – the gap between theory and practice. I’m interested in tis inquiry at the moment, and stumbling across things like this in my quest to understand what is useful in harvesting from initiatives that sustain the capacity and learning begun in real engagement.
“Engagement washing” initiatives don’t usually leave these kinds of documents in the places where the engagement took place. It should be a hall mark of good practice that process learnings are shared and tools are developed as well as results documented.
A long time ago I was an introverted person and over the years that has completely changed. If you know me, you’ll know I love talking to others, being around people and engaging in meaningful social interaction. I still love my solitude but I love hanging anround in my local coffee shop and pub more.
As a process designer, creating good meeting and learning spaces for introverts has long been a blind spot for me. Facilitators by definition bring people together. If we are extroverted, the processes we design can often contain an overwhelming amount of social interaction for introverts which actually alienates them from the group and marginalizes their contributions. Sometimes I have run meetings where the introverts never contributed at all. That wasn’t through their fault – it was the fault of my process design that never took their learning styles into account.
You might call it extrovert privilege.
Back in June I was on the hosting team for an Art of Hosting in northern California. A long time friend was there – Tree Fitzpatrick – one of the most deeply intensive introverts I know. She is also a long time process designer and facilitator nd she knowns her stuff. She left after the first hour of the workshop, but not without having a long conversation with me about what she was experiencing. She later made a beautiful gift of sharing her insights with me in a long email on designing processes for introverts. In the past six months, these insights have been a gorgeous gift to my own practice and have radically shifted the way I design, by actually putting the needs of introverted people at the centre of the work. The core of her message to me was this, quoting:
“Please consider integrating some introvert work into your designs. You don’t have to worry about the extroverts: while you give the group quiet time, which is giving the introverts permission to reflect inwardly, most extroverts will just go on doing whatever they want to do but the introverts will feel better if you give them permission to reflect. It only has to be a minute of reflection before speaking but it can make a huge difference to the introvert’s experience in small group talk.”
In the past six months, I have done several things to attend to this.
- Be aware of your “extrovert privilege.” You will know that you suffer from this if silence and solitude seems anaethma to you in a group setting. You will often find introverts confusing and will lose patience with their demands for personal space. You may harbour thoughts about them that are mean spirited, feeling like they are acting out or making some kind of victimization power play. These are your thoughts, and they are not reality. Work on them and recognize your extrovert privilege. I have been working over the past six months to take long periods of solitude for myself just to build up that capacity. I have come to deeply appreciate it as a learning modality
- Introverts need silence and space. When you are working with silence, make sure you build a strong container for it. Sometimes this means really enforcing the silence, but I do this by explaining why this is important and invite people who are uncomfortable with silence to see it as a challenge worthy of their leadership. It’s fierce hosting work, because extroverts are very dismissive of it, and I haven’t always been successful. In Ireland in September we had a particularly gregarious group of Irish language scholars and activists, and I learned about “Irish silence” which something of a dull roar rather than a raucous buzz! Our hosting team was highly amused at my attempts to get anything better than that in the room!
- Build in long periods of silence before asking people to engage in conversation. A minute sounds good but two minutes is better. For deeper conversations even five minutes of silence is powerful. The extroverts will get fidgety, so invite them to write their thoughts down to give them something to do with their hands.
- Provide a meaningful time for reflection at the end of a day. At Rivendell, one of our local spaces for retreat here on Bowen Island, the whole space goes into an hour of silence at 5pm. Anything happening at the facility must also go into this period of silence – it is one of the conditions for being there. For the core group that maintains the space, this is a spiritual practice, although people working there are free to see it in another way. The first time I encountered it I found it a nuisance because at the end of a day of learning usually the groups I am with are bubbly and excited to chat. But working at Rivendell over the years has exposed me to the deep wisdom of building in long periods of silent and solo reflection. It takes all of the learning from the day and plunges it deep into the heart.
- In larger learning initiatives, build in long periods of reflection time out of doors. In Theory U based change labs, the solo presencing retreat is a crucial part of the work. This is where participants spend time alone on the land reflecting. I have been building in long periods of solo time on the land recently. In Ireland our team there uses half day guided walks in The Burren to deepen relationships between people and immerse them in what the land has to offer. I have brought that approach back to Bowen Island and in recent leadership development work we have been doing here, a half day process including an hour long silent period on the land is a core part of the work. This needs to be hosted very strongly…we invite people to hold the silence together from the time we leave, through the solo time, until the time we return. This is a powerful experience for introverts and extroverts alike.
- In smaller settings, building in reflection activities is easy. The reflection toolkit from the Northwest Service Academy in Portland, Oregon is a fabulous resource to share with groups and to invite groups members to lead one or more of these exercises throughout your process. My colleague Jerry Nagel inserted this kit into a training workbook we used with the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Foundation in Minnesota and was immediately useful.
This has evolved into a really fabulous learning edge for me both personally and professionally and I am grateful to Tree for setting me on the path.
Working with a group of leaders this week all of whom are engaged in bringing their full selves to complex problems largely in the community, family and social services sector. Tonight we are co-initiating our work together and I led them through this exercise which was inspired by my friend and colleague Roq Garreau of Centrespoke Consulting:.
- Take a piece of paper and fold it in half so that you have a little book with four pages.
- On the front of the little book write your leadership challenge, something that you are called into doing, something that occupies much of your attention and that seems unresolvable, something you feel you have to DO.
- Write 12 questions down relating to this challenge. Make them open ended questions and spread out the Who, What, Why, When, Where and How. These are questions you cannot easily answer.
- Turn to a fresh page in your litle book and rewrite your challenge
- Now mill in the room and pair up with another person. Simply read your leadership challenge and listen as they offer you three questions. Don’t explain, don’t justify, just listen. Those offering questions can just offer the first three things that come to mind.
- Once you have collected nine questions, rest and rewrite your challenge one more time.
We then went around the circle and had people read these challenges out. It is a very vulnerable exercise as people shared what they don’t know how to do. And they become equipped with questions that are deeply embedded in the centre of their work and curveball questions that come from the margins. These marginal questions have a powerful effect on people and it is a useful reminder that change and challenge often comes from outside of what we think we know.
In the debrief a participant suggested a further step: she offered that embedded in every challenge is a vision of how we want things to be and that in rushing to DOING, we forget PURPOSE. This is a useful antidote to the more common complaint that “we are spending too much time thinking about PURPOSE and not enough attention on ACTION.” Purpose and Action are therefore held in a creative tension.
These challenges and questions will travel with people this week, and we have invited our participants to see these as friends.
Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Tim Merry, Caitlin Frost and I are just returning from a gathering of experienced Art of Hosting practitioners from around the world. One of the threads in our gathering was and exploration of how the practice of hosting and harvest conversations in the world can be applied to working with groups in ever increasing scale and influence.
This is the core inquiry of our new Beyond the Basics offering.. Being skillful facilitators of dialogue is obviously not enough to make shifts in systems, although dialogue is a powerful place for people in a system to start to understand the complexity, diversity and challenges that we are dealing with. It is also the prime vehicle for locating the innovation at the edge of the collective intelligence in the system that helps design innovations in systems of all kinds. . But alone, dialogue is not enough. Shifting systems requires us to apply dialogic practices and participatory leadership in a series of connected events throughout a system. Dealing with the complexity of shifting systems requires that we build depth in the capacity of core teams that are holding the work.
A key part of our work is nto build capacity and depth in core teams to host systems work together. Building the capacities of core teams is a marker of the success and sustainability of the kinds of participatory initiatives that achieve lasting results and outcomes. Where we have worked with systems where the consulting team retains the capacity, the initiative tends to fizzle when the contract ends.
Sustainability and lasting results lie at the intersection of depth, breadth, friendship and power. Core teams need to operate deeply, which means that they need to be engaging beyond the facilitation of hosted events. Good core teams ARE the field they are influencing and therefore they have to be practiced at going deep into their own dynamics to begin to make changes in a system. And they hold a level of depth that allows them to see and sense together strategically as an initiative unfolds.
To scale up initiatives, a team needs to then achieve breadth without sacrificing depth. More people need to be involved in core hosting of the work. But this cannot be a classical “train the trainer” model. It takes time for more practitioners to come into the field. The initial core team must not only train others in systems work but also become teachers and mentors of new practitioners and protect the work as it gets off to it’s shaky start. Going nto scale means lots of learning happening in public, so connecting people together in learning becomes crucial.
The architecture that keeps breadth connected to depth rests on trust, and so friendship becomes a powerful part of the operating system. In complex systems work there are times when formal accountabilities don’t ensure the levels of trust and commitment that is needed, and only a field of deep trust between people will sustain the practice and sustain the resilience as groups go through the difficult parts of systemic evolution.
The challenge here is that we then need a new conception of power, because power in existing systems tends to come from accountabilities for results delivered against known and predictable plans. Participatory work is a huge challenge to power because it requires everyone in the system, to work from a position of trust and uncertainty while still staying accountable for results. When working in any human system, issues of visible and invisible power and privilege are important strategic acupuncture points for change. And if we don’t pay attention to them we can find ourselves mired in simple relationship building projects or in oppositional and combative power struggles. We find trust and commitment eroding and we lose the breadth required for impact.
As a team this is our learning edge. We have many stories to share and tools and practices that help us be in this work, but we are also excited for our BtB offering to be a place where we co-discover with others the deepest challenges at these edges and perhaps even co-create new collective knowledge about how the art of hosting and harvesting can work in these domains.
Our beyond the basics offerings is informed by and structured around learning, discovering and implementing practices that integrate these approaches to working in complex environments with complex challenges. We have discovered that there are personal practices of coaching, mentoring and support that complement a deep skill set in designing, hosting and harvesting participatory process and a fierce commitment to creating architectures of implementation that respect and work with the existing power structures in a way that protects results while also building the capacity for uncertainty.
As we work towards the BtB workshops in 2014- and 2015 we will be continuing to share learnings, resources and case studies here on this blog and we invite your own questions and inquires about this practice as we move towards learning together.