Just coming off an Art of Hosting with friends Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and Teresa Posakony. Something Tenneson said on our last day as we were hunkering down to do some action planning, has stayed with me. He said something like “it is easy to create actions that go off in a million different directions, but much more sensible to create actions that come from a common centre. There is something about holding that common centre together invites trust so that we can release responsibility to action conveners and known they are initiating works that comes from our common shared purpose.”
People often make the distinction between talk and action, largely in my experience as an objection to the amount of time it takes to be in conversation around complex topics. It seems that with complexity the conversation is endless and can go on forever. And almost by defintion, that is true. That can be a very frustrating experience if you consider the action – reflection process to be a linear one in which we spend time figuring out what we are going to do and then go and do it.
That approach works well in the complicated domain where everything can be known, or enough can be known that we can discern the wisest path forward. But the complex domain contains a number of features which makes that kind of linear thinking folly. First of all there is the prospect of emergence: things will happen as a result of interactions in the system which could never have been predicted and which may radically alter strategy and action. Secondly, actions undertaken in the complex domain cannot have their success or effectiveness guaranteed and therefore complex systems actually benefit from having many actions undertaken, with an ongoing developmental evaluation process as to the efficacy of these actions and the connection to the centre of action is constantly changing.
A lot of the work I do in hosting conversations is about both discerning what is our shared purpose as well as generating action that can come from that shared purpose. And, with the smart clients I have, we repeat that cycle over and over as they continue to operate in a changing and complex world. It creates strategy that represents a fine line between reacting and hedging your bets on some pretty good ideas. Conversation and time and a wicked question helps us to check into and explore a deeper core purpose that can lie at the centre of ideas for action. I have been lately calling this a generative core: an idea at the centre that is so powerful and compelling that it alone can inspire interesting and creative ideas. There is an energy to a generative core that is inviting, and that seems to make people WANT to be in conversation and relationship with it. There is a quality to the questions that lie in the generative core that open ourselves in exciting ways to new possibilities. Good conversation can help to illuminate this core purpose
Action planning from this place means coming up with good ideas and designing what David Snowden and others have called “safe-fail probes” which allows us to begin small. In the Berkana Institute we call this approach “start anywhere and follow it somewhere” indicating that this kind of action creates its own momentum over time and therefore needs to be shaped and carefully watched. Action that arises from agenerative core can be borne in conversation, and should be developmentally evaluated in conversation. Conversation becomes a key tool in designing, evaluating and making meaning of what is going on. And while actions and probes are being designed, tested and implemented, at the same time we have to pay attention to what we are learning about our core purpose, because that is always changing too.
This is not easy to understand, especially in a world where proceeding in an orderly direction from point A to point B is a desirable and seemingly sensible thing to do. But understanding the nature of complexity is important for action planning, because it can actually unleash the kinds of ideas that otherwise seem to never come to the surface. And it can make a community or organization powerfully resilient to shifts and changes that require retooling without stopping. It seems like a long investment of time to be in conversations that slow things down, but I invite slowing down to go fast, because the speed at which activities and ideas can be implemented on the other side of a well centred and well bounded discernment process can be breathtaking.
This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.
Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done. “We’ve done that before,” she said. Nobody likes that. I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing. We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions. We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints. I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”
Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern. People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it. Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources. Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:
The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:


So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group. We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either. Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts, The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications. This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.
A brilliant post from Field work, football and Tiki Taka @ Dance of Unity:
Their style of play is known as Tiki Taka, commonly spelled tiqui–taca in Spanish. In Wikipedia is it shortly described as “A style of play characterised by short passing and movement, working the ball through various channels, and maintaining possession.” With Tiki Taka the ball is continuously passed between team members in a way that the whole team operates as one intelligent field, rather than sum total of talented individuals.
Action comes from a accepting offers. When an offer comes to you you can accept it or block it. Blocking it kills the action. Accepting it moves it forward. When we are working in complexity, waiting for the failsafe plan leads to inaction because there are more blocks than acceptances. In contast diving into a safe fail mindset means committing to action and refining it as you go.
This is the essence of improvisation: accept, commit, develop, offer. A simple four stage cycle for action planning
I see it all the time, where cultivated and well-raised people stumble in the wild land of chaos and open space. Whether it is the tourist in the forest who complains against the mud or the leader in an organization, community or country (like Egypt) who clings to the illusion of confidence and control and who cannot make friends with the wild and the chaotic.
Thoreau:
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
Are you friends with the wild within you? Do you cultivate that characteristic as a mould against the uncertain future? How do you prepare to welcome surprises of all kinds?