In the last year of applying Cynefin theory to my practice I’v e made a few conclusions about things. One of these is that what Dave Snowdon calls “pattern entrainment” is probably our achilles heel as a species. Pattern entrainment is the idea that once our brains learn something, it is very difficult to break that knowledge. And while we may be able to change our knowledge of facts fairly easily – such as admitting a mistake of a factual nature “you’re right, there is no 7:30 ferry after all!” – changing the way we make sense of facts is surprisingly hard.
It’s like water flowing into a whirlpool. The water coming into to the whirlpool is entrained into the pattern, and finds it impossible to escape.
For example, with the recent spate of massacres around the world, the social sphere has been full of people seeking answers. And the kind of answers people are seeking are firmly rooted in an entrained set of patterns of how we make sense of and solve many problems in the world: linear causality.
A belief that there is a clear set of steps that solves things like gun violence or war assumes a kind of order that isn’t there. Dave Snowden points out that our ability as humans to see in retrospect how something came to be leads us to believe that if we just get the steps right going forward, then we can prevent future bad things from happening. All we need to do is put the right things in order and follow the plan.
This act of “retrospective coherence” fools us into believing that we know what to do, and because decision makers in the complex space of social problems rely on retrospective coherence to understand how we got to where we are, this particular assumption – that problems have a linear causality – has infected discourse, policy making and politics. In short, research and investigations show the chains of causes and effects. Policy recommendations often advocate solving problems the same way we make sense of them. And we can’t.
This is becoming quite dangerous now. A tendency and romance of simple and well ordered solutions has resulted in Donald Trump getting away with identifying Muslims and Islam as the sole cause of terrorism. This is an easy sell to people who have been made to feel afraid and convinced that all problems are solved with simple solutions. It is true that you can solve all problems with a simple solution – just kill everyone – but this is not an option in a humane and sustainable society. This is, however, the logical end point of a simplified, linear solution being brought to complex problems: it creates psychotic societies.
This is showing up everywhere. I am at the early stages of working with a client who is a service provider. The funders of her programs are starting to want to to see evidence that her work (and their money) is ‘shifting the needle’ on the large scale social problems she is addressing. Both the funder and the service providers are suffering at the moment from the idea that a well designed set of interventions will address the root causes of poverty and vulnerability in communities. This is impossible of course as these are effects that are the emergent properties of, among other things, an economic systems that is designed to create inequality. The service providers cannot change the system, and everyone is frustrated.
To really eliminate poverty, we need to change the economic system, because it is that of attractors and constraints that gives rise to the transactions and social relationships that create the emergence of poor communities and people. What the service providers are doing well is effectively addressing the effects of an economic system founded on inequality, and while vulnerability may be increasing, in many local places, service providers are making a real difference in economic security for individuals and families. It is only when we confuse this local act with systemic change that the problems appear. We do good work, but in the big picture nothing changes.
For strategy, and especially for non-profits and service organizations trying to bring about a better world, this is an achilles heel. If you and your funders both evaluate your work on the basis of macro indicators that are the result of a myriad of interacting causes at a myriad of scales, you will be shown to be ineffective. And yet the myth persists that we can simply choose actions with limited resources, prioritize a set of steps and achieve “a poverty free community.” The failure to reach this goal is dispiriting to all involved, and it doesn’t have to be.
Non-profits and funders need to address the pattern entrainment that creeps into policy making and program design. We need to understand the proper role of a linear causality analysis and begin to take a more sophisticated, multi-pronged and complexity based approach to social problems. Seeking single answers to complex problems reveals much about the pattern entrainment and confirmation biases of people. It does very little to actually change these dynamics, and as a result, we can find ourselves stuck in a whirlpool, trying more and more things and getting further and further away from the world we’re wanting to create.
Somehow that statement is worth keeping nearby in my work. For me and everyone I work with.
I spend a lot of time working with people who need or want to do something new. And no level of new work – innovation, boundary breaking, next levelling or shifting – is possible without failure. A lot of it. Much more often than not.
Today, working with 37 leaders from human social services and government in our Leadership 2020 program, Caitlin asked a question: “How many of you have bosses that say it’s okay to fail? How many of you have said to your staff, it’s okay to fail? How many of you have given permission to yourself to fail?” No surprise. No hands up.
There are many reasons for this, the least of which is that people equate failure in this system with the actual death of a human being. When that is the thought you associate with failing, of course you will never put yourself in a position where failure is an option, let alone likely. And yet, it’s impossible to create new things that work right out of the box. You need to build testing and failing into strategy if you are to build new programs and services that are effective.
This is where understanding the scale at which you are working helps: hence probe, prototype, pilot, program, process…five incrementally more robust and more “fail-safe” (in terms of tolerance) approaches to innovating and creating something new. But just having a process or a tool for innovating – whether it is Cynefin, design labs, social innovation, agile, whatever – is still not going to give you a resilient mindset in which failure is tolerable or possible. And this is as true for leaders as it is for people working on the project teams that are supposed to be delivering new and better ways of caring for children and families.
In our programs and in our teaching, we double down on working with improvisational theatre and music techniques and especially The Work, which Caitlin teaches and leads. That process is the primary tool we use with ourselves and others to work on the limiting beliefs, patterns, thoughts and cognitive entrainment that impedes our ability to embrace failure based approaches. Without addressing patterns of thinking, it is just never safe to fail, and when a change leader is hidden behind that block, there is no way to truly enter into strategic, innovative practice.
How do you sharpen your failure practice?
I’ve been working in the world of program development with a lot of complexity and innovation and co-creation lately and have seen these three terms used sometimes interchangeably to describe a strategic move. As a result, I’ve been adopting a more disciplined approach to these three kinds of activities.
First some definitions.
Taken explicitly from Cynefin, a probe is an activity that teaches you about the context that you are working with. The actual outcome of the probe doesn’t matter much because the point is to create an intervention of some kind and see how your context responds. You learn about the context and that helps you make better bets as you move forward – “more stories like this, less stories like this” to quote Dave Snowden. Probes are small, safe to fail and easily observed. They help to test different and conflicting hypotheses about the context. If 8 out of 10 of your probes are not failing, you aren’t learning much about the limits of your context. Probes are actually methods of developmental evaluation.
A prototype is an activity that is designed to give you an idea of how a concept might work in reality. Prototypes are designs that are implemented for a short time, adjusted through a few iterations and improved upon. The purpose of a prototype is to put something into play and look at its performance. You need to have some success with a prototype in order to know what parts of it are worth building upon. Prototypes straddle the world of “safe to fail” and fail safe. They are both developmental evaluations tools and they also require some level of summative evaluation in order to be fully understood. Prototypes are also probes, and you can learn a lot about the system from how they work.
A pilot is a project designed to prove the worthiness of an approach or a solution. You need it to have an actual positive effect in its outcomes, and it’s less safe to fail. Pilots are often designed to achieve success, which is a good approach if you have studied the context with a set of probes and maybe prototyped an approach or two. Without good intelligence about the context you are working with, pilots are often shown to work by manipulating the results. A pilot project will run for a discrete amount of time and will then be summatively evaluated in order to determine its efficacy. If it shows promise, it may be repeated, although there is always a danger of creating a “best practice” that does not translate across different contexts. If a pilot project is done well and works, it should be integrated with the basic operating procedure of an organization, and tinkered with over time, until it starts showing signs of weakened effectiveness. From then on, it can become a program. And pilots are alos probes, and as you work with them they too will tell you a lot about what is possible in the system.
The distinctions between these three things are quite important. Often change is championed in the non-profit word with the funding of pilot projects, the design of which is based on hunches and guesses about what works, or worse, a set of social science research data that is merely one of many possible hypotheses, privileged only by the intensity of effort that went into the study. We see this all the time with needs assessments, gap analyses and SWOT-type environmental scans.
Rather than thinking of these as gradients on a line though, I have been thinking of them as a nested set of circles:
Each one contains elements of the one within it. Developing one will be better if have based your development on the levels below it. When you are confronted with complexity and several different ideas of how to move forward, run a set of probes to explore those ideas. When you have an informed hunch, start prototyping to see what you can learn about interventions. What you learn from those can be put to use as pilots to eventually become standard programs.
By far, the most important mindshift in this whole area is adopting the right thinking about probes. Because pilot projects and even prototyping is common in the social development world, we tend to rely on these methods as ways of innovating. And we tend to design them from an outcomes basis, looking to game the results towards positive outcomes. I have seen very few pilot projects “fail” even if they have not been renewed or funded. Working with probes turns this approach inside out. We seek to explore failure so we can learn about the tolerances and the landscape of the system we are working in. We “probe” around these fail points to see what we can learn about the context of our work. When we learn something positive we design things to take advantage of this moment. We deliberately do things to test hypotheses and, if you’re really good and you are in a safe-to-fail position, you can even try to create failures to see how they work. That way you can identify weak signals of failure and notice them when you see them so that when you come to design prototypes and pilots, you “know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.”
One of my favourite concepts from the complexity world is the fallacy of thinking that comes from the truth of retrospective coherence. The mistake is that, because we can look back in time to understand causes of our current condition, we can therefore see forward in time and affect the causes of a future condition. Complex systems are emergent, so we can never be sure what the future holds, regardless of how well we can trace how we got here.
Despite the fact that it is illegal to sell an investment instrument without the warning that “past performance does not guarantee future results” falling for the trap that retrospective coherence gives you a reliable path forward is basically a feature of doing any strategic work at all. It leads to planning that puts out a future preferred state and then backcasts a set of steps that, if we follow them, will take us there or nearly there.
So there are all kinds of issues with this, and the Cynefin framework’s greatest gift is that it helps us create strategy to avoid to pitfall of retrospective coherence.
Today though, a surprise in my morning reading. A lovely article on Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” We all think we know what that poem is about: about the adventure that will ensue if we just take the less beaten path. But you might be surprised to learn that the poem is actually about retrospective coherence and not adventures strategic planning (emphasis mine):
Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Brilliant.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
— TS Eliot
Our Beyond the Basics team is about to host our last gathering of the current cycle of offers, back in North America. Over the past five Beyond the Basics offerings I have learned more than I feel like I’ve shared. I can feel that my practice has changed as a result of doing this work, and I’ve become interested in the way our team’s ideas and lessons from working at scale have begun to outline a form and practice of leadership that is needed in much of our work now.