For many years I have been teaching Cynefin as a foundational framework in complexity and participatory leadership workshops and retreats. For me it’s the best and most accessible way to explain the differences between complex problems and other kinds of problems and why we need to make complexity-based interventions in complex systems. And while there are great ways to start learning about ontology in a lecture format, or using te examples of a children’s birthday party, I’m rather inclined to playing games as a way of understanding different types of systems before we do any teaching at all. Especially when …
Part six of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action Part 1: Presence Part 2: Have a good question Part 3: Use a talking piece Part 4: Harvest Part 5: Make a wise decision 6. Act The sixth of our seven little helpers is simple: Act. If you have taken the time to plan, talk, and harvest, you owe it to yourself and your group to honourably act on what you’ve learned. Now it’s easy to get consumed by the cult of action, and to assume that every encounter needs to have a week …
As Bronagh Gallagher and I have been musing about our offering on complexity, facilitation and social justice, we have been discussing the shift in activism from ideology to evolutionary. Ideological movements try to coalesce activities and people along a line towards a fixed end state. Evolutionary movements start with intentions, principles and move outward in multiple directions along vectors. They adjust and learn as they go, and they both respond to and change their context. This nice post from Network Centered Advocacy capgtues what I’m talking about by first looking at how a lacrosse player’s artistry evolves in changing contexts …
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 …
Two Tim Merry references in a row. Yesterday Tim posted a video blog on planning vs. preparation. It is a useful and crude distinction about how to get ready for action in the complicated vs. complex domains of the Cynefin framework. I left a comment there about a sports metaphor that occurred to me when Tony Quinlan was teaching us about the differences between predictive anticipation (used in the complicated domain) and anticipatory awareness (used in the complex domain). In fact this has been the theme of several conversations today. Complicated problems require Tim’s planning idea: technical skills and expertise, recipes and procedures and …