If you are as much as a complexity theory geek as I am becoming, you might appreciate this map by Brian Castellani that links to the founders of the various branches of complexity science. The map is described as “s a macroscopic, transdisciplinary introduction to the complexity sciences spanning 1940-2015. ” It is a fantastic resource because each of the founders of a branch of this science are represented by links to archives of their work. You could read for hours. Days even.
We are embarking on a innovative approach to a social problem and we need a framework to guide the evaluation process. As it is a complex challenge, we’re beginning with a developmental evaluation framework. To begin creating that,I was at work for most of the morning putting together a meta-framework, consisting of questions our core team needs to answer. In Art of Hosting terms, we might call this a harvesting plan.
For me, when working in the space of developmental evaluation, Michael Quinn Patton is the guy whose work guides mine. This morning I used his eight principles to fashion some questions and conversation invitations for our core team. The eight principles are:
- Developmental purpose
- Evaluation rigor
- Utilization focus
- Innovation niche
- Complexity perspective
- Systems thinking
- Co-creation
- Timely feedback
The first four of these are critical and the second four are kind of corollaries to the first and the first two are essential.
I think in the Art of Hosting and Art of Harvesting communities we get the first principle quite well, that participatory initiatives are, by their nature, developmental. They evolve and change and engage emergence. What I don’t see a lot of however is good rigour around the harvesting and evaluation.
All conversations produce data. Hosts and harvesters make decisions and choices about the kind of data to take away from hosted conversations. Worse, we sometimes DON’T make those decisions and then we end up with a mess, and nothing useful or reliable as a result of our work.
I was remembering a poorly facilitated session I once saw where the facilitator asked for brainstormed approaches to a problem. He wrote them in a list on a flip chart. When there were no more ideas, he started at the top and asked people to develop a plan for each one.
The problems with this approach are obvious. Not al ideas are equal, not all are practical. “Solve homlessness” is not on the same scale as “provide clothing bundles.” No one would seriously believe that this is an effective way to make a plan or address an issue.
You have to ask why things matter. When you are collecting data, why are you collecting that data and how are you collecting it? What is it being used for? Is it a reliable data source? What is your theoretical basis for choosing to work with this data versus other kinds of data?
I find that we do not do that enough in the art of hosting community. Harvesting is given very little thought other than “what am I going to do with all these flipcharts?” at which point it is too late. Evaluation (and harvesting) rigour is a design consideration. If you are not rigourous in your data collection and your harvesting methods, others can quite rightly challenge your conclusions. If you cannot show that the data you have collected is coherent with a strategic approach to the problem you are addressing, you shouldn’t be surprised if your initiative sputters.
In my meta-framework the simple questions I am using are:
- What are our data collection methods?
- What is the theoretical basis and coherence for them?
That is enough to begin the conversation. Answering these has a major impact on what we are hosting.
I high recommend Quinn Patton et. al.’s book Developmental Evaluation Exemplars for a grounded set of principles and some cases. Get rigourous.
I’ve begun Stuart Kauffman’s latest book, which will be a little heavy summer reading, and he states his purpose very clearly in the preface:
“If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin phrased it, arose all on its own. This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. So, too, are human history and human lives. This creativity is stunning, awesome, and worthy of reverence. One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know.” (from “Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion” by Stuart A. Kauffman)
For most of my carreer I have worked with complex systems. I am not an engineer or a planner. I have taken to calling myself a strategist and a host of strategic conversations. In other words, I use dialogue to help people with processes to make sense of the emergent complexity that they are dealing with. Enough sense that they can make decisions about what to do next.
The problem with complex problems though is this unknowability and unpredictability. This can create a kind of cognitive stress. We like to be in control, and to know what we are doing. Our image of competence is founded not only on our ability to take action in the present but to know what to do in the near future. The truth is of course that we cannot know what to do because the future is possibly surprising on a level of novelty that challenges everything we know. That seems to have been the lesson of 2016, anyway: we never really saw it coming.
Living with this uncertainty can elicit a kind of existential crises, and I speak from experience. One can become depressed and hopeless and despairing that one’s contributions are meaningless. I’m working through those feeling now in my own life and work (and not in any way fishing for validation). It is partly down to having inherited an excellent grounding in a rational world view that I find myself struggling for Kauffman’s imperative: that we must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world that we can never fully know.
I’m curious how many of you struggle with that, and realize that when the scales fall from your eyes, your attachment to reason becomes inadequate to face what life and work is handing to you. Our desire to be in control and competent blocks the surrender we need to fully enter into the promise of this creative and unfolding world. I’m working through it, but the promise of an emerging and ever creating world is a hard one to appreciate when my own mind desires a lock on certainty. How’s it go for you?
Detail from Richard Shorty’s work “Genesis 1:20-25”
Wednesday is National Aboriginal Day and ten days later, Canada commemorates its 150th birthday. Since the centenary in 1967 and even since Canada 125 in 1992, the whole enterprise of Canada has become deeply informed by the need for reconciliation between indigenous people and communities, and settler people and communities.
We are all treaty people. Everyone in Canada who has citizenship is also a beneficiary to the treaties that were signed and made as a way of acknowledging and making binding, the relationship between settler communities and indigenous nations. The ability to own private land, for example, is one way in which settlers benefit from treaties that were signed long ago, even if those treaties were made hundreds of years ago in other parts of the country. Canadian society depends on the ability of governments to provide access to land and resources, and that access flows directly from treaties. Not from conquering and taking. From legally binding agreements. You are a treaty person.
The promise of Canada has never been properly delivered to indigenous communities. Over decades courts have declared this. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared this. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples declared this. It is evident in data and research and popular culture.
The need for reconciliation is long overdue.
For thirty years I have worked in this space, and lately I have been working with a small set of principles, when settlers ask me about reconciliation. Here they are:
- Reconciliation requires restitution. For reconciliation to be real it must be accompanied by restitution. Reconciliation efforts aimed at increasing awareness are fine, but they should have a direct and material benefit to indigenous people and communities, When indigenous communities do well, we all do well. Restitution can happen in all kinds of ways including the return of lands and property, but it also requires the honouring of the ongoing relationships embedded in the treaties in which mutual benefit was supposed to flow for the future.
- Reconciliation is unsettling. My friend Michelle Nahanee talks about “emotional equity” which is one way of thinking about what it costs for indigenous people to interact in non-indigenous contexts. It is inherently unsettling. For non-indigenous people a true commitment to reconciliation means unsettling notions of what you take for granted. Just understanding how you are a treaty beneficiary is one way to suddenly become unsettled. And I have often said that the only job for settlers in reconciliation is to be unsettled. It is from that place that we can all meet and work on a different set of ideas than colonization.
- Settlers need to make the first move. Still with the idea of emotional equity, it is important that settlers make the first move in a reconciliation initiative. Indigenous people cannot be expected to be the ones to make it easy for everyone to do reconciliation. Settlers must make the first moves, and must do so in all the vulnerability and fear that comes from making the first move. Do something, do it badly, be open to learning and keep going.
- Reconciliation is a verb. The right term is “reconciling” because we aren’t ever going to acheive a place wher ethe world is reconciled. It is an ongoing project. If the project of the last 150 years was about creating a Canada where there were once only dozens of nations, perhaps the project of the next 150 years should be about figuring out how to make a country possible that reconciles the interests, duties and obligations of it’s history and privilege with the results of the colonization that enabled that privilege. There is no certain answer, but I have faith that together we can create a place that is better than either of us can do separately.
- Its about relationship. The reason why Canada has to confront the horrible legacy of colonization is that Canadians entered into and then promptly forgot the nature of the relationships that were set in place by the laws and policies of 1763. In that year King George proclaimed that nations west of the Atlantic watershed needed to be dealt with as nations, and according to the rule of law. That proclamation, recognizing the importance of relationship over domination, became the basis for all Aboriginal law in Canada and is still to this day the standard upon which adherence to the rule of law is applied. All Canadians are born or move into a relationship with indigenous people and the relationship is direct, personal and beneficial. Reconciliation needs to restore this sense of mutual dependancy and correct the balance.
I will be hosting conversations on reconciliation at Canada Day commemorations on (Nexwlelexwem) Bowen Island this year with my friend Pauline Le Bel, who is running a series of interesting events this year called “Knowing Our Place” about the relationship of Bowen Islanders to the Skwxwu7mesh Nation and to our At’lkitsem (Howe Sound). If you’re on Bowen, join us. If not, host your own and think about why reconciliation matters to you.
“Vision” is one of those words that is overused in our work and the reason it is so elusive is that is is so context dependant.
You can have a vision of a full bath tub of steaming hot water. You can have a vision of making your home run on rain water alone. You can have a vision of safe drinking water for all humans.
The first is simple, short term and you have all the tools and abilities to make it happen.
The second is more complicated and you require a few experts to make it happen, but with the right people and resources, you can achieve it.
The third is not up to you. It is a complex and adaptive system. You may be motivated by a desire to see safe drinking water for all humans but you are unlikely to achieve it because it is a complex problem. Intention can make a difference here and instead of working TOWARDS a tangible vision you can work FROM an intention and guide your actions against that.
The problem comes when people want tangible outcomes from linear processes. “We need a vision of our future” can sometimes lead to work that ignores all the opportunities and threats that come up in a living and evolving system. Without good methods of understanding what is happening, what a system is inclined to do, or iterating work based on learning (in other words developmental evaluation), in my experience those with power and a mandate to accomplish something will eventually narrow the work down to mere deliverables. The vision maybe in there somewhere but the context renders it useless.
So these days when a client asks me for a vision I want to know why and whether they have the means and desire to actually achieve it, or whether they are simply calling for a conversation on “what we’re all trying to do” so that work and opportunities can be evaluated against that.
At some level, in complex systems, vision and purpose become moral centres and ethical guidelines and not targets. That seems important to me.