An important post, observation and question from George Por: How well can collective self-reflexivity scale?
For conversations that matter to grow into communities of practice and social systems at increasing scale, they have to be able to absorb the increased complexity involved with those systems. What does it depend on whether a community or a network of communities is capable to do that? One of the factors seems to be the trust and appreciation that flow among the participants in the conversation, besides their capacity for double loop learning in real-time, on the spot”
Part of the challenge of working with shift in systems is finding the time to create the containers in which this trust and appreciation can flow. It takes time, and it’s not always time that is seen as productive time. Most people that are paying me to facilitate a meeting for them have definite outcomes that they want to see. Often they want more than can be acheived in the short period of time they assign (how many conferences are scheduled for three days but everyone leaves at lunch on day three?) Building trust and appreciation is real work and it requires a real committment of time.
The cost of this came clear in work with a recent client. We are working on something which could result in a major public policy shift in a contentious field with many diverse and irreconcilable stakeholders. What they are discovering is the closer they get to implementing the policy changes they are working on, the more people retreat into old and unhelpful patterns. What is absolutely needed in this context is a retreat of all of the major stakeholders to create a container to build trust and appreciation. Without a collaborative process, the initiative they have designed will fail.
And yet, such a retreat is so far from their usual practice that it seems like they can’t see it at all. For me, I see clearly what needs to happen, but there is only so much I can SAY, only so much I can TELL them. In my work with them we tried to create some conversational process but I felt we fell short in creating any kind of relationship that can hold the complexity of what they are trying to do.
So this is the scope of my challenge. I’m now wondering if I should even take on these kinds of facilitation gigs. I’m not sure that the reification of old patterns in cases like this actually helps, and in fact it may well hinder efforts to move to the shift everyone wants.
Hey reader(s). Wondering if you would join me in a little exercise…
A few months ago I was sitting with Christina Baldwin in a World Cafe on the question of “What question, if asked, would change everything?” and we realized that the answer for us was something like “What would it take for you to be curious?”
That question is powerful because a curious person is a non-judgemental person. A curious person is a learner, not a passive participant in the cultural stream. If people practiced not only asking questions, but being curious about the answers I think that would change everything.
Last month, I was in Ontario with a friend of mine and he asked “what are your goals? What would I see if I talked to you in six months?” I told him that I don’t have any goals, but instead I run these little research projects. I get curious about things and start noticing them in my life and work and I usually use a combination of this blog and a moleskine journal to record my results. It keeps me moving forward.
So, I’d like to invite you to try this approach out and see if there is something that gathers your attention and piques your curiosity enough that you’d be willing to engage in a a somewhat public 30 day research project. For myself, I am looking at the question of how to be of service in large scale change work from the perspective of someone who has limited contact and influence. As a facilitator, I come into processes, but often I am not involved in a day to day role. So how do I help encourage shift where I can?
I’m going to be thinking and reflecting over the next 30 days on this question and I invite you to choose a question and engage in a research project as well. See what we can learn. Everything I post here will be tagged “Shift”.
You in?
(PS…two sources to get me started…Debra Meyerson on Tempered Radicals from last year’s Pegasus Conference and a site on patterns for introducing new ideas into organizations)
Photo by jurvetson
Being a Canadian means watching US politics like most people watch major sporting events. You admire the players, ooo and ahh at the spectacular moves they make, but ultimately you know you will never have a chance to play. It’s all entertainment.
Except that it isn’t. The President of the United States is often styled as the “leader of the free world” which is true in some ways, although the leader the rest of us in the “free world” might choose for ourselves is very often not the ones Americans choose for us. So, in case any of my many American friends and colleagues are curious about the opinions of those of us who have to live with whoever you elect, here is my most concise redux on Barak Obama.
Obama matters because he is inviting us to see the world differently. He is bucking the trend of western society by offering hope instead of hate, by challenging us to be better rather than to be afraid, but encouraging responsibility rather than dependancy. And if we needed any further evidence of that, along comes his masterful speech of yesterday in which he addressed the real life racism and divisiveness that plagues American society and rests just beneath the surface.
The world right now is about segmenting everything – market share, demographics, political polarities. In the corporate world, we are subjected to team building exercises that using various typologies to label what kind of thing everybody else is. We are not seeing each other clearly. Prejudice, be it economic, racial, demographic or whatever, fuels everything. Companies and campaigns reach out to different groups in different ways to get them to buy into the same thing, leaving people divided, bitter and suspicious about the “other” even as we all end up drinking Coke.
If Obama is doing anything – inviting anything – he is inviting us to rise above the ways in which we have been segmented, and the ways in which we segment ourselves and find partners, collaborators, creative sources of tension and cohesion by USING the diversity that exists everywhere. Diversity and multiculturalism in the America I know currently holds that country back. It is exploited for gain, whether political, social or economic. Obama is calling for it instead to take the country forward, and as a citizen of America’s closest neighbour, I applaud that call and hope it resonates in November.
I think Obama is raising the stakes with the magnificent speech. If his campaign dies because his message is destroyed by the very things he is calling out, it will represent a Pyrrhic victory for the the winner, be it Clinton or McCain. Whoever defeats that message of hope and cohesion will have inherited a country which glimpsed the light of possibility and lowered the shades against it.
So I invite my American friends to think about the kind of leadership that is being offered in this moment and imagine what it will mean not only for your country but for the rest of the world as well. If I was voting, I’d throw it to Obama. To the extent that any of these three candidates can, he has the best chance to really help things shift. That shift, as I see it, can only be a good thing for America and the rest of the world.
I ran a workshop last week for the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association of British Columbia. The taske was to to spend a day and a half reviewing the high level vision and direction of the organization and to come up with some streams forward to present to the organization’s membership at the AGM. In thinking about the design of the gathering, I chose to consciously use Theory U to help structure a series of exercises. I proposed a five phase process for the day:
- Sensing needs and purposes and reviewing the world outside
- Appreciative Evaluation of the organization’s path over the past five years
- Presencing the vision for the near future
- Crystallizing the intention of the emerging visions
- Harvesting forward to present to the AGM
For the first three phases I created a series of reflective exercises, based in part by some of the exercises Otto Scharmer has been using in his work. The list of questions went as follows:
Sensing
- What are the voices tapping us on the shoulder? What are the forces competing for our attention?
- What are our sources of frustration in the world?
- What are our sources of joy?
- Think of the diversity of IAHLA membership. What are they facing that is coming through you in this moment?
Each person journalled individually on these questions and then we went around the circle of six and harvested what was in the field. At the end of the exercise we had a harvest that represented an environmental scan that was presenced through the minds and hearts of each Board member.
Appreciative evaluation
- Thinking of IAHLA’s journey as a canoe trip on a river, five years ago, when IAHLA began, what caused the founders to put the canoe in the river?
- What landmarks have we passed on our journey over the past five years?
- Who has been there with us, in the boat or on the shore?
- If we imagine the journey extending through where we are now, what does our past and present say about where we are going?
- If you received news this afternoon that IAHLA’s funding were to disappear what would your initial reaction be? What would you fear for first?
In the same fashion I led the group through these questions, with each person journalling individually. The result was a harvest, drawn on the frame of a canoe journey that recorded the founder’s vision as we have inherited it, the work that we have done, a sense of where we are going, a list of people and organizations that have been instrumental in getting us there and, most interestingly from the last question, a list of what is essential. Many of the board members remarked that this exercise was powerful in that it connected the current board to the legacy of the founders and those that came before, who started the entire movement of offering this type of learning centre in Aboriginal communities. This exercise resulted in a powerful sense of stewardship for the movement.
Presencing vision
For this exercise we used a framework document that describes the work of IAHLA and captures the overall intention and purpose of the organization. Participants were invited to spend nearly an hour on a learning journey with this document, using the following questions as a guide:
- Inspired by the framework, what are three shifts in the world you can see IAHLA spearheading?
- For each of these shifts, imagine being in that changed future and note down how we might have arrived there.
- Find and circle parts of the framework that will have contributed to that shift.
The harvest from this was a fantastic conversation in which we identified eight areas of shift and some of the major strategic landmarks that would appear on those paths. In the subsequent conversation as we crystallized the intent of these directions we talked extensively about some of the priority areas, the work that might have the most impact, and that which the organization’s members might be most excited in.
We will capture these results in a large graphic harvest for the AGM, at which time we will be inviting the membership in a cafe to reflect on these eight shifts and contribute another level of collective strategic thinking to the work.
So I’m a map maker. I am a cartographer of my own learning, and I love making maps to help me understand where I am, where I have been, and where I might go.
Since being an active participant in the community of learners working with what we call the Art of Hosting, I have been fascinated with the maps we use that represent our ways of making sense of the world. I have been trying various ways to draw a grand map of all of these things, and here is my latest effort, a sketch I did today based on learning as recent as last week. Click here to get the large version of this, so you can read it.
These are drawn as a circle, to address the idea that the way we have been drawing our maps was too linear. This is a map that charts the territory of working in long term, large scale change efforts within complex living systems.
There is a lot here, so let me go through it is some detail. It’s a draft, a sketch and it changes about as fast as the territory does, so I’d appreciate your thoughts and noticings about it.
Circles within circles (black)
The two black circles are where we begin the one with the cross in it stands for the individual and the larger one stands for the social sphere. The personal sphere is divided into four quadrants and these extend out into the social sphere as well. Wilber’s integral quadrants map on to here if you put individual at the bottom and collective at the top and internal at the left and external at the right. It is this interaction that is what the Art of Hosting is all about.
The four stages of developing leadership in community
The naming of the quadrants in this map comes from Meg Wheatley’s and Debbie Frieze’s work with the Berkana Institute on the Lifecycle of Emergence. The green words are four stages for developing leadership in community and they translate well into individual leadership practices as well . These four stages are naming, connecting, nourishing and illuminating. These are practices that are alive in the relationship between people and the lives of groups.
Navajo concepts (light brown)
The light brown words delineate five spaces that reflect the Navajo cycle of collaboration, moving from Creation Space to Intention Space to Vision Space to Action Space to Renewal Space, again coming around to Creation Space again. In actual fact, this is a map of the unfolding of Creation Space, so if it helps, picture the point at which the two circles intersect as an infinite point.
These concepts are based on Navajo philosophy but are not orthodox interpretations of the same. They are simply the way Navajo facilitators and hosts are making sense of their work from a traditional context. These concepts were developed by the Shuprock Health Promotion team that we have been working with over the past year.
The Diamond of Participation redrawn (dark blue)
While the circles do look nested one within the other there is another shape tat they create together that is important. Travelling clockwise from the bottom of the diagram you will notice that the space between the circles grows and then shrinks away again. This is intentional. I have named these three phases after Sam Kaner’s three zones in the Diamond of Participation: Divergent phase, Groan Zone and Convergent Phase. This is the shape of an overall project, and it is a pattern that scales.
The Five Breaths (red)
In looking at large scale change, we work with a pattern called “The Five Breaths” which is a pattern of the life of a project, be it a meeting or a systemic shift. The five phases of this process are Call, Clarify, Invite/Design, Meet and Act. Each of the breaths is nested in the other and each one is experienced as diamond, with a divergent, emergent and convergent phase to it. Hosting and Harvesting as practice grounds live deeply in these diamonds.
On either side of the five breaths, in the spaces that are called Intention Space and Renewal Space, there is a think thread. On the left, this thread represents the call that is alive in someone from the moment of inspiration (or the threshold of longing, that red line at the bottom left) until the call is made. This thread, even held as an intention grows and attracts attention to work until a call blossoms. On the other side, beyond action, the thread fades away in what could be called the art of stewardship, an art that is about letting go of things once they are done. This line grows ever fainter until the thread of consciousness passes over the threshold of memory and all of our work is gone and forgotten. The ideal result of such a fading away is ripples of action and influence that emanate out as the legacy of a project or a life.
The Chaord (purple)
Chaos and order interact in Creation Space, where the chaos of the world intersects with the order we as individuals bring to making meaning of our world. This dance is generative and is both the source of all great work and the place to which it all returns. The chaord lives in the space between the threshold of memory and the threshold of longing, on the other side of doing. It is unintentional but conscious being-space.
The Chaordic Stepping Stones (light blue)
The chaordic stepping stones are some ways we help make sense of the journey. We use different stepping stones, and there are some that aren’t on this sketch that are listed elsewhere. All of them emerge from the lenses developed by the Chaordic Commons. They lie on the outside of the model more because they are tools. They are points of order in the chaos that surrounds work.
If anyone wants to take a crack at a more beautiful way to draw this, I’d love it. We could probably use it for the module Monica Nissen, Toke Moeller and I are doing at the Shambhala Institute this June, where we will be teaching much of what is on here.
Note: I’ve updated this post to reflect Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s ideas here. I had wrongly attributed them to my Navajo friends.