Analyse this...!
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.
I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.
Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.
Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.
The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.
In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.
Viv McWaters posts her thoughts on how to connect people in large group settings. This post is a great start:
I learnt from one of my facilitation mentors, Antony Williams, that individuals generally come to groups with the need to be seen as an individual within the group (everyone likes to be recognised for being themselves first, a member of the group second) and to understand the connections. One of the first things I like to do when attending an event is to see who else will be there, and who I know, or people I’d like to meet in person. I don’t think I’m alone. Antony helped me understand that individuals are making choices and connections in groups all the time, whether conscious or not: where to sit and with whom, who to talk to, what questions to ask.
To add to this list, an activity I picked up along the way that Viv and I used with The Slips last year in Australia: have people turn their name tags around and write a question they have or a gift they have to offer on the blank side. That way, as people travel around during the conference, they can meet each other in their questions, and find out their names later.
A lovely description of what happens when the magic of conversation flows.
This past weekend I had the opportunity to be part of a Quaker-style “clearness committee” with a few twists thrown in. I have done a few similar sessions in the past, though it has been a while, and once again it proved to be a remarkable experience. The impetus for the session was a friend who, acknowledging that she is at a crossroads in her life and career, reached out for help with discernment. My wife, Emily, and I suggested convening a small group of people who know her well to lovingly listen to the core question with which she is wrestling. Over the course of the two and a half hours we were together, there was an amazing peeling away of layers that occurred as we asked questions and watched for what either brought our friend to life or weighed her down. By the end of the evening, she was excitedly looking at very real and enlivening opportunities in what she had previously perceived as being frivolous or “once I win the lottery” kinds of scenarios.
via Clarity Through Community « Interaction Institute for Social Change Blog.
In this video piano soloist Maria Joao Pires is confronted with a nasty situation. As the conductor begins the piece of music they are to play, she discovers that it is not the piece she prepared. She has left her music at home Imagine that.
Undaunted, she engages in a short conversation with the conductor who encourages her to play it any way – she played it last season, she knows the piece well.
Pires digs ddep – you can see it in her face – and conjures up Mozart’s D minor concerto form the depths of her mastery.
There have been times when I am working with a group, when a similar feeling has overcome me. For whatever reason – the invitation was wrong, the situaion had changed, people were expecting something different – everything I had prepared was wrong for the moment. In such moments the only thing that saves you is an ability to improvise, to draw on your experience and to attend to the present needs of the group. This is what I strive to be able to do. This is why practice is so important.
Nice post on using the Cynefin framework to design an ideas generation workshop:
At a workshop I facilitated last week – the challenge was helping a team to generate new ideas for innovating their business – I used Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework to great effect. This was a smart crowd, who were willing to go along with our approach on helping them see new directions through a process of emergent discovery – but they wanted to understand why we were following this approach. For the many cerebral folks in this crowd, I explained the Cynefin framework – and they got it! We could have studied ‘best practices for establishing an innovation culture’, or we could have thoroughly analysed successful innovations of the past for ‘good practices’ and for discovering cause-effect relationships between new ideas and successful outcomes. But we didn’t. And they were ok with it once I explained to them why innovation and ‘best practices’ or ‘analytics’ don’t go well together, using the Cynefin framework. In short, I argued that innovation – the activity they wanted to engage in – has many characteristics of a complex adaptive system: cause and effect are not linked in a linear way, many agents are interconnected and interacting, etc.