I think that doing strategic work with organizations and communities is really about learning. If a group is trying to confront newness and changes in its environment and needs to come up with new strategies to address those changes, then it needs to learn.
I love the term “desire lines.” Most of my initial work with organizations tries to get at the desire lines in the organization; the patterns embedded in the culture that help or hinder change and resilience. Naming and making visible these entrained desire lines (including the ones that that group takes into the darkness of conflict and unresourcefulness) is a helpful exercise in beginning to first reflect and then disrupt and develop capacity. When a group can see their patterns, and see which are helpful and which are not, they can make the choice to develop new ones or strengthen the stuff that works.
When problems are complex, then the people in the group need to focus on learning strategies in order to discover and try new things, rather than adopt a best practice from elsewhere. It is, as Steve Wheeler says in this video, the difference between designed environments and personal choice:
“Students will always find their own unique pathways for learning. They will always choose their own personal tools and technologies. Our job is not to try and create pathways for them, but to help them create the pathways for themselves and the scaffold and support them as they go through those pathways.”
Hosting groups is always about learning – in fact one core question of the Art of Hosting community is “what if learning was the form of leadership required now?” To support learning, help groups find the desire lines for learning and good strategic work to address change that is owned by the group will follow. That is how learning builds capacity and capacity builds sustainability.
This month I am in the middle of delivering another very cool online offering with Beehive Productions on the art of invitation. It’s a three session program focusing on the practice of invitation as it relates to participatory meetings, longer term participatory strategic initiatives and even organizational design. Michael Herman will be joining us next week for the “Inviting Organization” module. He’s really the guy that got me thinking about invitation way back in 2000 when I first came across his work as an Open Space colleague.
While Rowan and Amy and I were thinking about content we discussed some of the essential practices of invitation that facilitators, leaders and process designers should keep at hand. As we did when we discovered the “PLUME” mnemonic for harvesting, we arrived at VALUE as a mnemonic for invitation.
In participatory processes, I have found that the success or failure of the work is rally correlated to the quality, intention and active nature of the invitation. Just as participatory processes require participatory harvesting, they also require invitations to be participatory, iterative, emergent, and yet clear in intent and boundary. These five principles form a decent heuristic for invitation practice that can be scaled from single meetings, through to sustainable initiatives and enterprises. Here they are
Invitation is a VERB: If you are inviting people to a gathering using a single static email or a poster, you aren’t doing enough, in my experience. Invitation requires you to be active, in relation and dialogue. The interaction between inviter and invitee creates a connection and a commitment and kicks off the design. My friend Christie Diamond one time remarked “The conversation begins long before the meeting starts…” and that captures perfectly the idea of an active invitation.
Invitations are made from ATTRACTORS AND BOUNDARIES: It’s obvious that an invitation should have a purpose at its centre, but it should also include a statement of the boundaries of the container you are inviting people into. This could be a clear sense of what we are NOT doing, or it could be a cost associated with coming (time, money, attention, commitment). Peter Block says a good invitation contains a barrier to overcome to assure that the person reading it will respond with an authentic yes or an authentic no to what is on offer. Attractors and boundaries together help to define the container inside which the work will unfold.
Invitation is LEADERSHIP: When you invite people to something you are taking an active leadership role. You will confront all kinds of emotional states in yourself, ranging from excitement to anxiety. You are taking a stand for something, especially if you are inviting people to something new and there may be times when you are the only one with a strong sense of possibility about the work. Good invitation requires people to practice good leadership.
Invitations respond to an URGENT need: in chaordic design, we go to need first, to understand why something is necessary and to be able to reach people who also feel the need. The more an invitation can respond to the zeitgeist of the moment, the more energy and focus people will have coming into your container or your process.
Finally, invitations are EMBODIED: You cannot just send a text, or invite somebody to something while signalling your distinct lack of invitation with your body and behaviour. Recently, there has become a trend among American high school students to do fantastic invitations to prom dances. Like bower birds, young American men are going completely over the top to wow their dates. You can say what you want about it, but there is no doubting the fully embodied commitment to invitation expressed by this guy. How are your invitations?
(Thanks to Viola Tschendal for the image. She does our real time harvests for Beehive.)
A couple of years ago I wrote a post that was critical of the way in which the Representative for Children in Youth in British Columbia drove practice changes among social workers. In short the reason had to do with apply too much order (rules and checklists) in a complex space (social work practice). At a certain point, when you are trying to prevent deaths that have occurred in the past, you end up outlawing all but the deaths that will surprise you in the future. We look at reviews of child deaths as if they were expected and predictable and create highly ordered accountability mechanisms to prevent them from happening again. The problem with this, as anyone knows who works with complexity, is that you create a break between good social work practice which is sensitive to nuance and context, and rigorous accountability standards. While no one is arguing that social workers should not be accountable, what is required is the ability for social workers to develop and rely on their practice, because no amount of rules will prevent children from dying in novel ways, but good social work practice does have an effect. In fact, checklists over practice almost ensure children will die in increasingly novel ways because as social work becomes constrained simply to what is on the checklist, social workers narrow their gaze too much and are unable to detect the weak signals in a situation that would otherwise anticipate a problem before it happens. This is the dilemma between anticipatory and predictive awareness and getting it wrong is costly.
It’s a brutal example, but I do believe it points to the the consequences of accountability models that assume that all outcomes are predictable and negative effects can be prevented with best practices even when its proven that they can’t be. (the confusion in that link is perfectly illustrative, by the way. “Child deaths are preventable” on the one hand and “we lack the most basic information about why children die” on the other.) That can be true in ordered systems but not in complex ones. This particular problem has a major implication for philanthropic organizations that are seeking to have “impact.” In many cases, the impact is a pre-defined outcome of a process taken largely in a narrowly defined strategic context. Real life is messy but logic models are sweetly and seductively clean.
Messiness is important and working in messy ways is a critical skill of philanthropic workers, donors and directors. In this recent article Martin Morse Wooster argues for a loosening of constraints on philanthropic work and although he doesn’t provide a solid theoretical basis for his assertions, but good theory on the limits of managing and measuring impact backs him up.
Many front line philanthropic workers – grants administrators, programs staff and consultants – know this approach but they are often constrained by donors, Boards and executives who demand simple outcomes, simple metrics and clear impact. I’m increasingly interested in putting together specific trainings and learnings for boards and donors that will increase their literacy of messiness in support of making smart changes and supporting good in a way that is much more aligned with how community actually works.
One such offering is currently open for enrolment. We are gathering in June in Glasgow and will be repeating the workshop in October in Vancouver. If you’d like it in your neck of the woods, let me know.
For a long time I have known that the idea that culture change can be managed is a myth. A culture is emergent and is the result of millions of interactions, behaviours, artifacts and stories that people build up over time. It is unpredictable and results in surprise. The idea that a “culture change initiative” can be rolled out from the top of an organization is not only a myth, it’s a hidden form of colonization. And worse, the idea that people need to be changed in the way the boss determines if we are to become the kind of place that we all aspire too is cruel and violent.
So what to do when an organization says that its culture needs change? Until I had stumbled over David Snowden’s work, I had few practical tools, principles and practices for doing this work. Since working with the theory that Dave has assembled and translating it into praxis, I have come up with a number o
Here are a few key notes for working with people who ask me to help them with that.
Principles
- Culture is an emergent set of patterns that are formed from the interactions between people. These patterns cannot be reverse engineered. Once they exist you need to change the interactions between people if you want to change the patterns.
- Culture includes stories but it is not a story. This is important because simply changing the story of the organization will not change the culture. Instead you need to create ways for people to interact differently and see what comes of it.
- Cultural evolution is not predictable and cannot be led to a pre-determined character. You can aspire all you want to a particular future culture but it is impossible to script or predict that evolution.
Practices
- Start by getting clear about the actual work. In my experience people use the term “culture change” as a proxy for the real work that needs to be done: improving employee relations, becoming more risk tolerant, shifting leadership styles…whatever it is, it’s best to start with getting clear what is ACTUALLY going on before assuming that the problem is the “culture.”
- Look at what actually is. Studying the way things are is important, because that helps you to identify what you are actually doing. It seems simple, but it’s important to do it in a way that doesn’t bring a pre-existing framework to the work. You have to look at the patterns from the work that you already do, not from how it illuminates a pre-existing model.
- Work with emergence to understand patterns together. Using tools such as anecdote circles, organizations can discover the patterns that are present in the current environment. Anecdote circles generate small data fragements that describe actual actions and activities. Taken together and worked through, patterns become clear, like the process of generating a Sierpinsky triangle. Out of large data sets, hidden patterns appear.
- Identify those patterns and discuss ways to address them with safe to fail experiments. Run a session to create several ideas that are coherent with the patterns, design multiple small experiments to try to shift the patterns. Institute rigorous monitoring and learning and allow for experiments to fail.
- Support new ideas with appropriate resources. If you really want to change the interactions between people you need to resource these changes with time, money and attention. The enemy of focused innovation is time. Even allowing employees to work on something a half day a week could be enough to create and implement new things. Butif they have to do it on top of the full workload they have, nothing will get done.
- Learn as you go. Developmental evaluation is they way to go with new forms of emergent practice. To be strategic about how change is happening, it’s important to design and build in evaluation at the outset.
These are just notes and practices, but are becoming standard operating procedures in my world when working with groups and organizations who are trying to address that elusive idea of “culture change.”
Last weekend I took a ramble across Bowen Island, where I live, with a friend and colleague, Annemarie Travers. Annemarie and I have been teaching the Leadership 2020 program for a number of years now and we both love walking: she on the long pilgrimages of the Camino and Shikoku and me in the mountains of southern British Columbia. We are also both interested in managing in complexity.