Four things conspiring here today.
- I had lunch with a friend/student, and we had a long conversation about what it means to “hold space.”
- This post from Michelle Holliday in which she finds herself Rethinking Self-Organization.
- Working with Cynthia Kurtz, who published Confluence a couple of years ago, which is a framework that helps create a thinking space for the intersections of organization and self-organization.
- Getting ready to teach our next cohort of Complexity From the Inside Out.
So before you dive into this post, go play Horde of the Flies at Complexity Explorables. Play with the sliders. Find a way to lock all the dots in one super stable state. Find a way to ensure endless randomness. Find a way to have the dots self-organize such that patterns emerge, persist for a while, and then change. Play with trying to control the system. See if you can get desired results.
Now, what’s going on here?
There is a relationship between organization and self-organization. Systems self-organize within constraints. Without constraints, anything is possible, which makes it far more likely that complete nonsense will occur, utter chaos. But with too many constraints in a system, nothing will emerge, and the system will be locked into one steady and stable pattern with no possibility for emergence, adaptation or evolution.
This intersection between organization (the deliberate application of constraints) and self-organization (what happens inside a constrained space) is really the whole world in which facilitation and leadership play. It is the world of complexity. As Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz wrote with a nod to Alicia Juarerro in “The New Dynamics of Strategy” back in 2003:
Humans are not limited to acting in accordance with predetermined rules. We are able to impose structure on our interactions (or disrupt it) as a result of collective agreement or individual acts of free will. We are capable of shifting a system from complexity to order and maintaining it there in such a way that it becomes predictable. As a result, questions of intentionality play a large role in human patterns of complexity.
Kurtz, C & Snowden, D (2003) “The New Dynamics of Strategy: sense making in a complex-complicated world” in IBM Systems Journal Volume 42 Number 3 pp 462-483
This remains one of the critical insights about anthro-complexity that is the basis for how I look at facilitation and leadership.
Practically speaking, the implication here is clear. Anyone working with a group will find themselves creating a temporary space inside of which some degree of self-organization will take place and outside of which one’s influence is limited. The job is to manage the constraints in the system, which means primarily creating a container formed of boundaries and catalyzing attractors, which creates a context for connections and exchanges between people inside the container. Once the container is set, one monitors it and, if possible, works with the constraints to take what is happening in a positive direction of travel.
THIS IS A PERILOUS UNDERTAKING. It is fraught with power dynamics, ethical questions, moral quandaries, conflicting value judgements, surprising results and crushing failures. There is always a chance that people will have a peak experience of their life, and it’s also possible that someone will experience traumatic and lasting harm. Along the way, you might even get good work done, if the existential crisis doesn’t eat you first. If you think leadership (or facilitation, parenting, or being a citizen) is easy, you haven’t lived.
Many of us get into facilitation because we want to help create a better world. Creating the conditions for good creative work, productive dialogue, and good relations is one way that can happen. The shadow side of this is that we often get VERY attached to what happens in the containers we create. More attached than we think we are. We want things to go well, we want people to be safe, we want a good outcome, and we want every voice to matter and for people to exercise their power and leadership. We cannot guarantee any of those things, let alone that any of them will go the way we want. Too often, facilitation and leadership situations fail on the reefs of good intentions. Things grow very controlling and prescriptive. And yet…
And yet, the work of holding space is not a flakey woo-woo concept. Holding space means two things. First, it is about creating and holding a boundary, or as Dave Snowden famously puts it when describing the complexity approach to hosting a children’s birthday party: “We draw a line in the sand known as a boundary…and we say to the children ‘cross that you little bastards and you die.'”
Second, it is about creating probes inside this container that influence how people behave inside it. When it appears that one of the probes has become a beneficial attractor, we find ways to stabilize it. And when one starts producing non-beneficial behaviours, we destroy it right away because emergence and self-organization can make bad things worse, and as any parent or gardener knows, you need to learn to nip things in the bud.
That’s what facilitation is. And it’s a lifelong practice where you will get that balance wrong a lot of the time. In fact, I would say that MOST of the time, I get it “wrong” because no matter where you start, as soon as the people enter the room, shit gets real, as the kids say. It’s all about how one adjusts to the situation. Hence, you need to build flexibility and adaptability into the process design, and keep a careful watch on what is going on, both in the container around you and in the container inside you, because THAT one is often the one that creates the most trouble.
Buy and read Cynthia’s book if you want a guided tour through the very deepest implications of this simple intersection of organization and self-organization. I’m going to bring the essence of her ideas into this upcoming cohort of Complexity Inside and Out because I think it really helps us explain the terrain upon which leadership, management, facilitation and coaching all take place. And I think it also presents an honest take on facilitation and leadership and how those roles are related to issues of control, constraint, creativity, emergence and self-organization.
One of the hallmarks of a complex problem is the fact that we are confronted by paradox and polarity everywhere we turn. When a situation has a both/and in it, it is dynamic and unresolvable to one choice or the other. It needs to be managed, lived with, coaxed into a place where the positive aspects of both can coexist.
These polarities exist everywhere in human systems. On my home island right now we are going through one of our periodic confrontations of the polarities that define our place. Fundamentally this polarity comes down to an age old struggle between change and stability.
It is well captured by my friend Ron Woodall, our local cartoonist who never fails to hit issues like this square on the nose.
In island communities, there is a palpable sense of identity liked to the boundaries that encompass us, the history and culture that unfolds in a small, tightly connected community, and the state of the place when we first arrived and formed our earliest, most idealistic, and most lasting impressions. From that moment on, change continues, and longing for what was intensifies. It may grow so strong that one no longer recognizes the place and disappointment, sadness and despair takes over. “This is not the Bowen I knew.” That realization makes some changes feel existential in nature, and they are. They are a kind of evaporation of the identity that we construct and cling to. Over time, one needs to seek meaning in the changes, helping to shape them or surrendering to them so that one’s connection to the place remains meaningful. Or one leaves, either physically or emotionally.
We have many polarities active on Bowen Island. Some of the ones we live with include:
- Affordable housing and high property values
- Attracting visitors and managing the crowds
- Isloation from Vancouver and proximity to Vancouver
- Public access and private property.
- Individual and community
- Accessibility and privacy.
Polarization in communities happens when people get locked in to one side or another of a polarity and try to influence policy in their favour. Populism can easily play on this sentiment. “Vote for me and I will protect you from those people who want everything to change. Stability. Tradition. Security.” versus “It’s time to do away with the old guard. Vote for me and I will drain the swamp, get rid of the deadwood and bring us into a shiny new world.”
The reality of governance is something like “Vote for me and I will aim to preserve what’s working for us while considering changes to the way our community works that may be hard to swallow, but might take us in a positive direction, while still preserving everything we’ve been that makes us unique.” Good luck running on that platform in this age. And yet the reality of governance, and especially local governance, is that this is actually the job.
Managing polarities is a critical aspect of leadership in a community. Local government folks and the other stewards of our community have to manage these polarities constantly. The change versus stability polarity is an important case in point..Change happens and we need to respond to it so that it is beneficial as a whole, to the land, to the local economy, to the citizens and residents. But preserving traditions and identity is important too, especially in small communities where social connections are important, and where a shared sense of who we are is helpful for doing shared things, like building infrastructure, helping those in need, and fostering good relationships that can be relied upon in a crisis such as a fire or an earthquake.
There are ways of working with polarities that help folks become nuanced and strategic and adaptable to the changing nature of the environment in which the polarity exists. Barry Johnson’s Polarity Management tool is one of those tried and true frameworks that I use to help folks think through the polarities that they face. It’s a very accessible tool too, and using it allows you to see a fuller picture of what is happening. Here are some steps to follow:
- Begin by identifying a polarity. Often if there is a conflict with two sides in a community, there is a polarity at its heart. Sometimes several positions can be concentrated into an overall polarity. If you have a Ron Woodall in your community, get them to capture it in a diabolical cartoon. Lay these out on a map like the one I depict below.
- Start with identifying the highest ideal or state that both sides of the pole are trying to reach. Then identify the biggest fear or the pit of despair that both are trying to avoid. These should be broad and abstract states, captured only in a few words.
- Identify the upsides of both pole. What’s GOOD and positive about making changes? What is the benefit of stability? You are looking to identify a positive direction of travel. If you are working with a group of people who carry different opinions but are willing to consider other positions, you can even have them identify the positive aspects of the OTHER side.
- Next, identify the downsides that will happen if we tip to one side or another. It can be valuable here if people championing one side are able to identify the downsides to their position. But if they can’t, have no fear. Those who disagree with them will have lots to offer!
- Once you’ve filled out the map, the next step is to find indicators for the down sides that you can use as early warning signs of a situation that is falling too far to one side or the other. These indicators should be fairly obvious and they can be used to monitor the situation. An important skill to managing in complexity is rigorously looking for the early signs of failure. A bias towards positive outcomes will almost always create a situation of inattentional blindness, whereby the early signs of failure are ignored because mostly things are going well. With a co-created polarity map, you can put everyone’s attention to use looking for these early signs.
- Finally, identify strategies to maximize the UPSIDES of each pole. What are things we could do today that would take us in THAT direction. Deliberately focus on each upside separately. You will find that these simple strategies help right the ship when the early signs point to you tipping too far to one side or the other.
Here is the polarity map I completed around the change versus stability polarity. Click here to see a higher res version on miro.
It’s easy for local governments, committees and even citizens to complete polarity maps on their own. A completed polarity map gives you a broad strategic canvas on which to operate. For volatile situations, it’s worth reviewing the map frequently and making sure that indicators and strategies remain relevant to the context. The process of making a map can also be a very valuable exercise to build your team and enlist everyone in helping to manage the polarity. It can also be used as a process to put conflict to work for a community. For those whose job it is to actually govern, polarity maps can make visible the challenge they face as they try to meet everyone’s needs well. They can provide a degree of transparency and complexity that helps keep populism at bay and enlists more people in the very real, very thorny and very political realities of policy and governance.
I’m curious if you have used this tool in local governance and what you have learned.
That’s me, teaching something about living and dying systems from a decade ago.
Years ago, I worked on a team with a client at a large US Foundation. We were planning a participatory process for a big stream of their work, and they were nervous. Large-scale participatory group methods were new to them, and lots of the leaders were nervous about losing control. That’s not uncommon, but the one thing that stuck with me was a line that came from our direct project lead. He said, “I don’t mind the highly participatory nature of the work, and I don’t worry about the uncertainty. But there is one thing I cannot tolerate. I do not want you to tell me what experience I will have.”
This comment has stuck with me for years, and I understand where he is coming from. Since then, I have never told people up front that “this will be a great meeting… you will struggle and then enjoy…my goal is to ensure everyone is comfortable and happy….” And even after nearly three decades of facilitating meetings, this is still the toughest thing to check me on.
One of the things that many facilitators and hosts worry about with complex facilitation practices is the outcomes and the quality of the experience. It is the hardest thing to let go of and probably the last piece of “performative facilitation” that deeply experienced facilitators are able to release. Of course, we all want people to have a good experience in the meetings that we facilitate, and we want to create conditions that are safe enough for work to get done in a good way.
But that desire and drive for a particular emotional outcome can be as damaging to a meeting as a drive toward a particular material outcome. It can leave people feeling manipulated or invalidated. If a person is truly having a terrible time or is seeing something painful that needs to be addressed, trumping them with a pre-conceived mould of their emotional experience can be a devastating way to render them invisible.
The truth, of course, is that this stuff is HARD, and some of the conversations and gatherings that we all do will have anger, irrational behaviour, sadness, stress, anxiety, trauma and grief. The work of a facilitator, especially in complexity, is always to create the conditions for the work and not to do the work. In the words of Viv Read, writing in her excellent chapter on complex facilitation in the book Cynefin: weaving sense-making into the fabric of our world, “the intent of complex facilitation…is to sustain an environment for a group of people that enables a socially constructed shared understanding of complex issues to emerge with sufficient agreement to take action.” That means making a thousand little decisions beforehand and during a meeting that ensures that people can struggle together in the service of whatever the work is or needs to become.
So do that. Don’t tell people what they will experience. Don’t pre-determine their outcomes or their emotional journey on the day. Let go of that control and enable the environment.
Working with Complexity Inside and Out
We are getting excited about our Complexity Inside and Out program which starts on April 13 and runs to June 15, every Thursday in the afternoon for the Pacific timezone, early evening in the Eastern time zone and late evening in western Europe. The course will cover:
- Characteristics of complexity and foundation practices for working with them
- Identifying and working with patterns
- Working with constraints to shift sticky situations and unsolvable problems
- Complexity-based tools for shifting inner systems (limiting beliefs, fears other mental gymnastics that keep us locked in unhelpful patterns)
- Evaluation and participatory narrative inquiry
- Using the Cynefin framework for decision making
…and more. This program will serve you well if you are a facilitator working with groups in complex situations, a leader, a community worker, a strategist, a researcher, or a teacher. Or just a human who is curious about how the world works and is developing a practice for working with it.
We have some great folks coming into the cohort from around North America including people working on racial equity in public health and people responsible for quality and change in a province-wide child and family services system. The conversation and practice opportunities will be rich. Come and learn together! Come with a team and we’ll give you a discount!
You can register here. Drop me an email if you want more information.
The Art of Hosting
Our annual west coast Art of Hosting is taking shape for the fall and we are hoping to return it to Bowen Island. The team of Caitlin Frost, Kris Archie, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and I are looking forward to welcoming you back here. Get on the waitlist now, as space is limited and tends to fill quickly. We’ll announce the dates soon. Sign up here.
Other training from friends
I have many great colleagues out in the world doing cool stuff. here’s a listing of some other upcoming learning opportunities
March 18
The global Art of Hosting practitioner community has a full 24-hour day of events that will be happening online. I’ll be participating and you should come too. It’s free. Check it out here.
March 30
My colleague Amanda Fenton, who is one of the best I know of in using online tools for harvesting is offering a two-hour introduction to the current state of online harvesting tools. This is not to be missed if you want to level up your harvesting game.
June 2
Amande will be joining Michelle Laurie for Engaging Beyond Words (in BC, Canada or online option, it’s a hybrid offering). The focus is on using visuals to help increase understanding and learning; retain information.
July 13-14
Michelle will be leading her annual Graphic Facilitation intensive in Rossland, BC, Canada. If you want to increase engagement at your meetings, help plan with people in a collaborative way, be more creative and generally help people make sense of complex ideas, and see the bigger picture, this hands-on workshop does this!
A photo of the navigation system on my flight back from Hawai’i
Flying over the Pacific always conjures up the idea that I’m in a low earth orbit. It is a bizarre notion to climb into the sky and have the earth turn below you and then few hours later to drop one sixth of the world away.
On long haul flights there is very much a feeling of relativity. We are together, a couple of hundred of us, in a tube in the sky. There is very little feeling of speed. There are no cues to tell you where you are, especially at night and especially over the Pacific Ocean. Each moment is much like the others until you make landfall and suddenly land rises out of the sea.
The term “raising islands” comes to me though the art of Polynesian navigation. This past week I immersed myself in Sam Low’s book Hawaiki Rising which documents the first six or seven years of the Polynesian Voyaging Society who built a double-hulled sailing canoe called Hokule’a and, under the guidance of a Micronesian navigator called Mau Pilliag, sailed it from Hawai’i to Tahiti.
On the return voyage the navigation was taken over by Nainoa Thompson, and the book recounts two successful and one tragic voyages under his guidance between 1976-80
Polynesian navigation combines a deep and intense attentiveness to every possible source of information available to the navigator. This includes, principally, stars, swells, clouds and light. Getting from one island to another over 2400 miles of open ocean requires a navigator to be present and attentive for the entire voyage. You must know where you have come from in order for your present position to make and sense and in order for accurate decisions to be taken about your course. This means mostly staying awake for almost the entire trip of a month or more with only brief sleeps allowed
When land comes into sight it is said that the navigator has “raised it out of the sea. “ when your whole life takes place inside a small container for a month with nothing but open sea all around, there must develop a very intense sensation of being essentially stationary and instead turning the world below you.
I’m having that same feeling tonight, returning home. Noting that we are 24 minutes from landing and still out of sight of the west coast of Vancouver Island. If you were a Tshshaht navigator perched on an island in Barkley Sound for the night, in a few minutes you might catch our lights rising up over the dark western horizon. And although we will have started our descent, you might not hear us over the surf crashing on the reefs as we skim about 10,000 meters overhead landing in Vancouver which still lies 250 kilometres to the east. It is a journey that would take a week or more in a Tseshaht canoe. But now that we have raised Vancouver Island, we’ll be on the ground before you know it.