One of the earliest maps I ever discovered in my facilitation career was Sam Kaner et al.’s Diamond of Participation. It has been a stalwart companion for more than 20 years in my work. It forms a key part of the way the Art of Hosting community talks about process architecture, usually referred to as “the breath of design,” owing to its pulsation between divergence and convergence.
I realize I don’t have much on the blog about this map. So I thought I’d share my summary of Kaner et al.’s seminal work, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. If you don’t yet own this book, buy it now. It is an essential resource for all facilitators.
The Diamond of Participation
The Diamond of Participation is a map of the group process created by Sam Kaner and colleagues that identifies several phases a group goes through to create participatory decisions.
As groups engage with complex decisions, a very common journey goes through emotional and creative phases. Our ability to stay open to this journey enables us to discover new ideas, enter into the unknown, engage with difficult dynamics and make sustainable decisions. As a map, the diamond of participation helps us navigate the terrain of participatory decision-making and can help a group identify common traps, pitfalls and opportunities. Alongside personal leadership capacities to host and participate with presence and openness, this map, with tools and practices to help move through each stage, can support engaging, creative, participatory decision-making.
The diamond is divided into five zones or phases that groups go through. In each of these zones, leaders can help groups make good decisions by paying attention to the emotional terrain and using good tools at the right time.
Zone 1: “Business as usual”
Most decisions and conversations go quickly. You might need a few ideas and a couple of options, but the pathway is clear, and there is little or no controversy about what to do. Because we are conditioned to make decisions this way, it is common for groups to close a conversation down early, and for complex conversations this can have the effect of both avoiding conflict and limiting choices and possibilities.
When important decisions are on the table and there is no easy or obvious solution, groups enter the diamond of participation. Good leaders, with an awareness of the underlying patterns the diamond illustrates, can help guide a group through these stages toward more effective participatory decisions.
Business as usual involves:
- Quick decisions
- Debate over dialogue
- No focus on relationships
Zone 2: The Divergence Zone
Once it is clear that there is no obvious or clear decision, groups enter the Divergence zone. Familiar opinions get bandied back and forth and diverse perspectives on the problem begin to surface. This can be an enlivening time as a group searches for options and brainstorms possible paths forward. In the early stages of the divergence zone leaders can invite teams to explore different points of view and perspectives and introduce three key types of thinking: Surveying the territory, searching for alternatives and raising difficult issues.
Surveying the territory is done with methods that collect stories, perspectives and data and share them between the group members to build a shared picture of the diversity that the group is working with.
As a group searches for alternatives, holding intentional dialogue interviews, undertaking learning journeys or gathering stakeholders together can provide valuable information and insight.
But in truly complex processes, the answers are still not evident, and emotions can turn negative, with frustration and impatience beginning to appear. At this time, leaders need to be able to host the difficult conversations that come up so that diversity and difference don’t turn into unproductive conflict. In these moments, working with limiting beliefs and taking the time to sit in processes like circles and hear feelings and emotions becomes an important part of the work.
From this point, the group enters the Groan Zone, a sometimes painful part of the journey that can lead to fresh thinking and innovative decisions if it is well-hosted.
Zone 3: The Groan Zone
As a group enters the groan zone, people begin to struggle in the service of integration and in releasing their attachment to their own perspectives. Creating something new requires mixing, combining, and letting go. This can be a fraught experience rife with confusion, irritation, discouragement, anxiety, exasperation, pain, anger, and blame. It is no surprise that we want to avoid the groan zone, but for a group to discover new things, leaders can help people through the groan zone by engaging two types of thinking: creating shared context and strengthening relationships.
Creating shared context helps to re-ground a group in their work. This can take the form of paired interviews or group conversations where people explore different perspectives with a deliberate intention to listen for differences and where each other is coming from. Focusing on need and purpose can be valuable here as it gets a group “out of the weeds” and into remembering the deeper intention and the bigger picture.
Strengthening relationships is important in the groan zone, because frayed relationships will undermine the sustainability of a decision. Practices as simple as sharing stories, or going for a walk together can alleviate acute conflict and give people a chance to shift out of positions and reconnect to each other.
Work in the groan zone is heavily influenced by emotions and it is a lifelong practice for leaders to work on their own comfort and resourcefulness around conflict and strong emotions if they are to hold a group through this work.
Personal leadership practices are key to developing the ability to stay present and host process effectively in the groan zone. Developing deep self-awareness and presence, and using self-inquiry practices to shift reactive patterns can be helpful.
Zone 4: The Convergence Zone
When a group has worked through the groan zone, it comes time for convergence. This is where new ideas, fresh thinking and innovation can rise to the fore. The convergence zone precedes decision making as options are weighed, paths forward are discerned and, in larger processes, prototypes are designed for the purpose of testing new ideas.
When working towards a decision, three types of thinking are helpful: applying inclusive principles, creative reframing and strengthening good ideas.
Moving through the transition from groan zone to convergence requires a change in the container and the work. Inclusive solutions require a commitment to an inclusive decision making process, so it can be good practice to have the group design and adopt a set of inclusive principles to guide their work. These can be used later in the decision making phase as well.
Creative reframing invites the group to look at the work with new eyes. Having come through the groan zone together, all of the ideas that were gathered and discussed in the divergence zone take on new life. Looking at solutions with creative processes like scenario planning and TRIZ helps to introduce new ideas and perspectives to strengthen proposals.
And strengthening good ideas is the way towards making a sustainable agreement. Once ideas are contested, experimented with and considered it comes time to strengthen them through prototyping and piloting. The idea is to move the new ideas towards a decision by working with them through various scenarios first. Whatever can be done to strengthen an idea helps.
Zone 5: The Closure Zone
In participatory decision making processes closure usually involves making a decision together. This could be through a vote, or a consensus process, or it could even mean that the leader takes the decision alone with the consent of the group. Regardless of how closure comes about it is useful to agree together on the rules of decision making and then facilitate a decision.
Starting with agreeing on the rules and process gives you a chance to have a dry run through decision making with your group and this is especially useful if the decision you are making is contentious. Start by agreeing what would constitute a good decision and what a good, robust process is for making that decision. There are different versions of what consensus decision making can mean. You can research and try different approaches that best suit your context. For example, you may want to test consensus and have a rule that if someone is opposed to a proposal that they must bring an alternative to consider. You also might want to make some rules about timeliness of the decision or the maximum amount of resources available. When the group owns the process, it goes a long way to having them own the outcome.
Facilitating a decision can take various forms but typically goes through four stages: First, prepare a proposal that is simple and clear and that ensures that everyone knows what they are voting on. In some cases you might prepare two or three proposals in order to poll the group of options. Regardless, a proposal for a decision should be something taht is easily understood and easy to compare against other options.
Second, test the group for consensus. See who agrees with the proposal and who has questions or other things they would like to add. This process allows for a final set of conversations to strengthen the proposal. If you experience blocks and vetos at this stage of the process, this can give you good information about changes that need to be made or ongoing relationships that will need to be tended after the decision is made.
Third, iterate the proposal and review it again. Focusing on the major issues and questions means that the iteration process can be focused and aimed at creating a stronger proposal. Finally, make a final decision. That may be a vote or a consensus decision depending on what is required of the process.
Once the decision is made, the process is closed and the work continues. It can be important to give some thought to how the decision is communicated and implemented as part of your next steps.
I think I’m definitely feeling like my work is online for the foreseeable future. While I do have some face-to-face sessions lined up for the fall and winter, most of what I am going to continue to do is host meetings and learning online.
Even though I have been doing that since probably 2004 or so when I first started using Skype I continue to learn about how to make online environments more interesting and, most importantly, more accessible. From time to time I put out a call to help me learn about people’s needs and experiences. Back in June I asked folks with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) how to help them participate at their best and I got lots of useful answers. I trust that the people who answered self-identified as folks with ADHD.
Here’s what I learned:
Preparation
Right off the top folks said that it helps to have lots of advance notice of what is going to happen in the meeting. Now, this is a hard one for me, because I tend to improvise a lot and respond to the direction the group is going in. That’s fine for me because I’m the one with agency and I can control how much bandwidth I have and choose the stop the work for a break when it feels good to me. But for folks that regulate their participation and attention through structure and preparation that can be a tiring ride and quickly erodes their ability to absorb material, and participate in discussion. To that end, I’ll be trying these strategies:
- At the outset, let participants know how the day will unfold, what the break times are and what the discussion questions are likely to be. This helps people to think through material and to prepare and how to measure out their attention and participation.
- Help ground the meeting in a strong purpose. Let people know why this work is relevant to them. That helps folks stay engaged in the session. This is good invitation practice.
In-meeting participation
Working online is very hard on the attention span for most people. It asks a lot of us to stay in one place, watching a grid on a flat video screen, engaging in activities that seem repetitive. If something is going on too long, it’s easy for attention to wander and the brain to start focusing on other things. Good facilitation in general should be avoiding these situations, but for folks with ADHD, specifically these strategies were offered.
- In the session, provide a mix of activities to generate and support thinking. This could include a few minutes of silent reflection at the outset of a conversation so participants can think about the question before responding or engaging in dialogue and exploration.
- Present material in smaller chunks and allow for some time to absorb and for participants to ask themselves “what is new here?” Longer presentations start to lose the viewer especially if the material is dense or full of new terms and concepts. I’m massively guilty of this and so going forward I’m going to try to present material in short, ogical, connected chunks that allows for integration.
- For learning exercises, provide activities that invite people to explore a concept and even provide a little challenge that allows for a safe-to-fail probe and a little dopamine reward. This little post from Nadia is one that inspired “the creative challenge” as a part of my facilitation practice.
- Don’t allow a few people to go down rabbit holes at the expense of everyone else’s learning. This can often happen in a plenary session, so I try to have people go into small groups to process some of the things they are hearing and learning.
- Sticking to commitments is important. If there is a break at 10:30, break at 10:30. I know already from years of working with folks with diabetes that scheduled meal times are essential and can’t be missed. This is true of folks with ADHD as well.
- Provide visual maps for the content that is being discussed. How does this link to other stuff we have been doing? My partner Caitlin is really good at doing this, and contextualizing our current learning in a larger landscape of what we are doing. It’s like those recaps that come before TV episodes…”previously on Star Trek…”
- Use tools like polls to engage people’s thoughts in plenary and then open the floor for comments based on that. Using tools like Menti gives people a chance to reflect and offer some text and so you can hear from everyone and not just the one or two who manage to get their voices heard.
What to do afterwards
As my friend Christie Diamond reminded me years ago, “the conversations starts long before the meeting begins and it ends long after the meeting is over.” To that end, it’s helpful to have a few plans for how to continue to participate after the meeting is done. For many people, the brian keeps sparking and having somewhere to contribute insights that come later is helpful. To that end it’s useful to let participants know what they can do afterwards with their insights. If there is a way to contribute, provide an email address and let them know how long that channel is open for. In our courses we use Kajabi as a learning platform that allows for discussion to take place in a forum at a later date. For programs like Complexity From the Inside Out which runs over nine weeks, these spaces are useful for asynchronous contributions.
So those are good strategies to use. I myself have never been diagnosed with ADHD, but when I look at symptoms I recognize many of the ways my brain works in those lists. Certainly the suggestions that my twitter correspondants provided would make MY own participation work better. I will leave you with a good short list from the UK National Health Service that provides some useful strategies for living with ADHD, many of which are simply good design principles for well delivered and accessible participatory events in general.
Thanks to all who contributed. What OTHER strategies should we add?
Finished a lovely week with my brother and niece visiting from Ontario. We’ve been in a wicked heat wave here, with temperatures in the mid to high thirties and the humidity increasing every day. It’s still not Ontario muggy and the sea is lovely for swimming in, but in a place where air conditioning is less common and extreme heat is usually unplanned for, it’s been a lugubrious week for sure.
The smog from the city and some small traces of wildfire smoke filter the light so there is some ironic beauty in it all.
My friend Marcus Jenal published his latest weekly newsletter in which he muses over a few questions related to complexity, strategy and taking a stance. He doesn’t have a comments section enabled on his blog (hint! hint!) so I’m going to respond a bit to what he wrote here and we can have a conversation in this space.
Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature of being human we will never reach a place of ‘pure’ unbiased understanding. So we need to strike a balance between self-critical reflection and believing that we found some ground that is solid enough to step on and move forward.
It’s like the metaphor of crossing a river on foot. We make a careful step to check if the next stone is stable enough to step on or not. If it is, we make the step and then check which direction we can go from there. If we get stuck, we move a few steps back. But if we never trust the stability of the next stone, we will not move at all. And yes, sometimes we might fall into the water but that’s ok. We can pick ourselves up and start again.
This is one of the biggest blocks I see with folks who are new to complexity work. There is a tension – a polarity even – between needing to move and needing to know. I think that tension is generated by standard problems solving practices that begin with the Cynefin framework’s Ordered Systems formula of “SENSE – ANALYSE – RESPOND.” You start by gathering information you can about the system, have an expert analyse the data and tell you what to do, chart out a path forward and then execute. That is what most problem solving in business and organizational life looks like and it permeates design thinking and action practice.
When I’m teaching people to work in complexity, it’s good to use tools and metaphors that draw on their own experiences in the rest of their life. I am firmly of the belief that human beings are innate complexity workers but our organizational life squishes those capacities out of us, or relegates them to the sidelines of our non-work lives, to hobbies, games, parenting, gardening, cooking, art, and other activities of daily life. In places where we are safe to fail, we can try all kinds of things at our own pace and comfort. We are not paralysed by the fear that someone will yell at us for getting it wrong, or worse, we will be fired, demoted, or thought less of. So many organizations and leaders I work with are paralysed by fear. Ofet they figure out how to download that fear on to their teams and always have someone else to blame if things go wrong. That’s a lot of the work we do when trying to open up leadership practice.
“Why are we stuck?” ask many leaders. “How do you reward failure?” I ask in return. And thus begins the conversation.
These days I just point people to this EXCELLENT Liz and Mollie cartoon to illustrate this:
So yes. We need to act without information. We take up some, have a sense of where we want to go, and then move and the cycle begins.
That leads to the second part of Marcus’s post:
I am re-watching the two conversations between Nora Bateson and Dave Snowden on ‘When meaning looses its meaning’ (Session 1, Session 2) together with a group of friends who are both interested in Nora’s and Dave’s work. We are having fabulous discussions after watching bits of the conversations. While Nora and Dave try hard to agree with each other, of course they have their differences. And these differences are somehow reflected in my own thinking about how to be and act in the world, which I’m expressing in my weekly emails – particularly the dilemma of if/when/how to act. In very strongly simplified terms, Nora advocates for broad, open, purposeless spaces to make connections and relationships that will then sprout into change in whatever way, while Dave sees the possibility of catalysing certain attractors and shifting certain constraints in a more intentional / purposeful way so that new, more desirable things emerge (he calls this ‘nudging’ the system). While it is more obvious with Dave, both have an idea of how a more desirable world would look like: more people would accept that ecological and complexity thinking are better ways to engage with the world than industrial linear thinking. Both, Nora and Dave, take a stance, which allows them to become thought leaders.
It has been lovely watching Nora and Dave dance together and as Marcus rightly identifies, the differences, held in a generative tension, are the interesting bits. I think the tension about direction of travel that Marcus has seized on here is an important polarity to navigate in complexity work.
Direction of travel matters. Call it a moral compass, call it a shared purpose, a shared vision, or a sense of what is right and good, but INTENTION, as Alicia Juarerro will tell you, matters. It serves as an attractor for action and so if you are planning to move, you better be aware of your intention, especially if you think you are just hanging out in a purposeless space. In complexity, there is no space that is free from context. If I am just hanging around with a soft gaze waiting to explore something, that is not an empty space of thinking. My eyes and ears and heart are conditioned and constrained by my history. And that is why Nora’s ideas of “warm data,” as I understand them, are helpful. It helps to populate the purposeless space with enough diversity and possibility that it can be intentionally purposeless.
I learned that a long time ago when I was thinking about Bohmian dialogue in the context of alos developing my practices of invitation. Bohmian dialogue is intentionally open, and, as Harrison Owen once said, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.” That is true and it is alos true that there is always intention in the invitation, and whoever comes has arrived there by virtue of the history of connections that led them to discovering and responding the the invitation. Spaces can be open, but they are never unbounded. Awareness of the boundary conditions is helpful for understanding what is possible and why what happened was “the only thing that could have.” Complex systems have history and that history matters.
So I think this difference that Marcus has found presents us with a nice space to manage within when we are working in complex systems. A range of openness of direction of travel from broad to narrow. At a certain point if you treat the direction of travel like a target you have drifted into the complicated domain in Cynefin, which is fine, if that is truly what you are doing. But targets are not the same as vectors and they inspire very different patterns of behaviour.
Oh and on Marcus’ last question…
PS: I’m not 100% sure what the difference is between ‘taking a stance’ and ‘taking a stand’. Even English native speakers could not really explain it to me consistently.
…I answered him by email saying essentially that a “taking a stance” is a position that you take to prepare for action, and you optimize your ability to engage well to whatever is coming. It’s preparing to move. “Taking a stand” is getting ready not to be moved, to dig in and resist whatever is coming. One could even say it’s another way of thinking about the resilient vs. robust form of dealing with change.
… i search for a form of reconciliation ecology … inventing, establishing and maintaining a new habitat designed for a diversity of living, working and playing … a place which possesses anima meaning breath, spirit and soul … at first, in the leaving, i imagined a radical break … on arrival have learned to accept a certain amount of conservation of the past needs preservation … perhaps even restoration … the challenge is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are required … i consciously accept the self-organizing complexity of this odyssey …
… i once dreamed of a place for a vibrant exchange of active creation and researching ingenuity … my formative experiences in Wroclaw & Vienna helped grow roots in my beloved prairie … the dream was transformed in a beautiful way yet in time a restless disquiet emerged … even discontent & disconnect … rootlessly committed to this place accompanied with my dearest companion i wander the communities …
He is writing here on a reflection about moving to Korea. And his reflections prompted some reflections from me too, about what is essential to preserve, what we see, what choices we make.
Here in Canada there is an interesting phenomena of preserving “heritage” buildings for some level of posterity. It’s interesting to think about what “heritage” means, and whose heritage we are talking about. In the urban environment it usually refers to examples of historical architecture but, as is the case here in Vancouver, that is largely settler architecture from a certain time period, usually between 100 and 150 years ago. There is an underlying assumption that we should protect these buildings, which means really restricting their uses. There is an underlying assumption about what “heritage” means and whose heritage we are talking about.
Where I live, on a small island, there is a heritage group that works to protect structures and the character of the place dating back to the period of the early 1900-1960s. This is a period folks call “the Union SteamShip Company era” in which the Union SteamShip Company not only serviced the island, but owned a resort and delivered hundreds of tourists and cottagers on the summer to what was known as “The Happy Isle.” There are a few structures and an orchard preserved from that time including our magnificent library building and a number of cottages that were used by families and later by a vibrant community of hippies and squatters in the 1960 and 70’s before they were all finally evicted in the 1980s. Following the end of the USSC era, the island fell very quiet and was just a bit too far away for a regular commuter community. A few hundred people were left, working hard to preserve the school and the post office. Many of them were formerly residents of the now abandoned cottages and they were the ones that seeded what has become the most recent era of Bowen Island history that began with a concerted effort to save the island from rapacious growth and then bring in essential services and finally incorporate as a municipality, which happened in 1999.
How does heritage act as a mirror? What image does it return to me when I gaze into it? What parts of it are relevant to my life today?
There are no permanent Squamish villages here today, but there are some unmarked and unprotected architectural sites on the island. A few descendants of some of the original settler families still live here, but for most of us our “heritage” is really an experience of gazing into a past we were never a part of. It’s not a mirror of my personal history but it is a reminder of the layers of history upon which I am living and from which I derive my life. I have only been here 21 years. What I have done is lived atop the infrastructure and history that has preceded me in this place and that includes the outright theft of the land from the original owners who were sustained completely by this land and sea for more than 10,000 years, and the establishment and building of infrastructure by settlers to eek out a living which feels now like it may actually become too much for us to afford, being a small population of 4200 living in a serviced community that is about the same area as Vancouver, with pipes and systems that were haywired together 50 years ago.
So as a settler, it’s important to me that we acknowledge the historical Squamish presence and continued contested ownership of this island. They have never sold it, ceded it, given it away, lost it in a war or otherwise allowed another people to claim it. In that sense, the history of squatting here is pretty interesting!
In places I have travelled to and lived in like the UK and Estonia, heritage of the everyday is about the continued use of a place. In the UK as a kid I lived in a 400 year old cottage (pictured above) that had been added to and renovated at least four times, including the complete incorporation of the hayloft on the adjacent barn in the 1970s as a master bedroom. The structure just grew along the lot adding indoor bathrooms, a few extra bedrooms, a modern kitchen and a garden. In other places, like Estonia, where the medieval city in Tallinn is intact at 800 years old, every building is used and changed. Coffee shops punch holes through walls to expand their space, the apothecary still exists, but with modern technology in place, and the medieval feast hall is an overpriced tourist restaurant that operates within the bones of the old structure with up to date kitchen equipment.
Conservation is a question of morals and ethics. Here in Squamish territory, I think the restoration of Howe Sound’s natural environment is a powerful statement that shows that we have a choice in what we declare “heritage” and worth of conservation. There is a contested view that says that Howe Sound was an industrial area and should remain so, by building an LNG plant or a gravel quarry at the mouth of a critical salmon stream, for example. And there are those of us who feel like not everything should be preserved. The mine at Britannia Beach almost completely destroyed the ecosystems of this place and it took decades of citizen action with occasional government support (and complete neglect by the companies that were just allowed to pollute take the profits and leave) to restore healthy marine ecosystems here.
Conservation and preservation is first and foremost, as Raymon says, “is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are required …” We have to answer questions about whether preserving is about stability of structure or continuation of use and by whom ein what way. These questions never leave us, and the choices we make reflect how we see who we are and who we will become, based on the history we choose to preserve or transform.