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 defined action plan at the end of it. While that is simply not true – not every water cooler conversation results in action, but many are critically important in organizational life – when action is called for, be sure to act well. For whatever reason I find that many people have trouble with action. Perhaps it relates to the aversion and anxiety associated with decision making, but to act with clarity and commitment is kind. Here are some principles to guide your action. But be warned, these principles can take you down the road of planning to act, so be sure to keep it as simple as possible and get on with it.
Don’t confuse action planning with action. You would be surprised how many people confuse action planning with action. Often when I am contracting with a client and I ask for outputs, they will specify a document or an artifact, all the while emphasizing that they want to see action. Artifacts are pretty straightforward, and that is certainly something your consulting team can produce for you. But if you’re my client, I need you to understand that action is on you. That means thinking through how you are going to support action coming out of the work we do together. Recently I had a client place huge expectations on an off-site retreat. It needed to produce change in the organization’s culture designed over a three day gathering. I asked how the leadership was supporting people to make change (and to fail at it) and the client said “we have a really fear based culture here.” I warned her that without support from those in power to accept and even incentivize failure while people tried to change behaviours, meaningful action would be highly unlikely. She promised to go back to her Vice President for clarity and I never heard back from them. “We’re going in a different direction” is often the response I get from organizations not ready to put their money where their mouths are. That’s fine by me; I never want to be in a place of creating the conditions for merely performative action, when the people or the situations are calling for real change.
Action requires resources of time, money and attention. Don’t over promise commitments to resource action. In chaordic design, I call this work supporting the Architecture of Implementation. It seems to me that anything arising out of a participatory strategic initiative will require specific commitments of time, money, and attention to sustain it. If there is new work coming then new resources need to be in place to support it. I always caution leaders not to promise to “support all good ideas” that come out of a meeting if they can’t back that commitment with commensurate resources. How much time will your staff get to work on issues? What money do they have available to them? Who has the capacity for oversight and connection? If you fail to prepare a good architecture for implementation, you will burn out your people with added demands on their time and energy and no support. That’s cruel, and its a waste of time and resources. If you are committed to change you need to support change.
Distribute action plan and responsibility as much as possible. Use power to support self-organization and agency. It should be obvious, but participatory change should include participatory leadership. Sustained efforts to address sticky problems in organizations will often benefit from having many agents working on the project together. Use good organizational practices like the ones my friend Samantha Slate has shared in her book Going Horizontal to support leadership and action throughout the organization: share accountability, support personal leadership, give people space to work, ensure people have good conditions for collaboration, and practice good principles of equity and care
Be be mindful of PRICE. Because we love our five letter acronyms, use PRICE to design and check in with your architecture of implementation. Ask:
- How is POWER operating in this situation? Do we need more? Does is need to be more centralized or more distributed? Where is informal power and influence at work and how can we use it or mitigate it?
- What are the RESOURCES we need in order to act well? Who is in charge of these resources, and how to we get them onside to support our work early? What do they need to continue sending resources our way?
- How will we ITERATE our action? AS we try new things, what is the process for failing and trying again and improving as we go? How can we maximize support from those with power to allow for experimentation? Without thinking this through beforehand, people with power in a system are very likely to pull the plug on new initiatives the moment something goes wrong. Iteration is a crucial aspect to make things resilient.
- What CAPACITY do we need to develop? Where do people in the system need to undertake learning to work with the changes they are facing? What new skills and perspectives do we need to change the way we are working? Building organizational and community capacity is critical to sustaining creative and engaged work.
- How will we EVALUATE our work? Is our evaluation strategy in line with the kind of work we are doing? If we are working in complexity do we have good developmental evaluation and learning frameworks? If we are working with more predictable systems, do we have the right experts evaluating our work? How will we tell the story of what we are up to and communicate it well to those who need to hear about it? Evaluation is not something done in isolation at the end of a project but something done throughout. It’s how you document and share the story of what’s happening.
Taken together, these five things can support ongoing and sustained action beyond the report from the meeting or the project planning grant charts or the budget. True action needs support.
And then, when you are ready. Act.
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 and then concludes with these important paragraphs:
Being labeled a “movement” is a reflection of evolutionary status. One person or organization does not qualify as a movement, yet there is no set size of a movement. Movements are messy, complex and organic. The movement label is shorthand, an inclusive term of many independent leaders and supporters, their support structures, all that they can tap into, as well as their capacity to disagree as often as they align on work.
Movements are a reflection of self-directed, adaptive, resilient, self-sacrificing, supported and persistent initiatives to work on complex problems. There are no movement structures, but instead a movement is a mass migration of people, organizations, businesses and communities unified in common story, driving to shift culture, policy, behavior and norms. Successful movements build and transform the landscape as they progress providing a base for further progress. A quick scan of the first few pages of google news for” movements” produces a snapshot of the current movements that come to mind, including the movement against fracking, the climate change movement, the tea party movement, Occupy, #blacklivesmatter, the anti-austerity movement, the dump-Trump movement, the maker-movement, the LGBTQ movement–the list goes on.
A key evolution point in a movement’s trajectory is the transition away from any single point of failure, to be loosely structured and resilient enough to absorb setbacks. The agility and adaptive characteristics of movements are fueled not only by personal stakes, individualism, driven leadership, passion and local control, but also by unpredictable solidarity and a distributed organizing approach that resists centralization. The difference between an organization, coalition, centralized campaign and a genuine movement is the way each fuels smart local initiatives and the ways leaders align power.
Building a movement is actually more aptly perceived as unleashing a movement, creating new spaces that help the movement surge in wider, expansive and still supportive directions. As a movement gains organizing momentum, strategies shift to broadly unfold and push a wide set of actions that draw opposition thin rather than clustering and making defense easy. This distributed layout requires a shift in thinking and strategy.
The key thing to notice here is that culture is changed by evolving movements, not linear programs. Movements are not led TOWARDS a goal, but rather emanate from a set of connected and coherent stories, actions and intentions, and self-correct, fail and adapt as they go. This is true whether the venue of action is organizational or societal. Cultures are complex and require complexity to change them. Diving more into the examples given in the quote will give you more insight into how these movements have become a part of, and transformative agents within, the cultures they are aiming to change.
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?
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 models of forecasting and backcasting using reliable data and information. Complex problems require what Dave Snowden has named an artisian approach which is characterized by anticipatory awareness, theory and practice (praxis) and methods of what they call “side casting” which is simply treating the problem obliquely and not head on.
When I was listening to Tony teach this last month, I thought that this distinction can be crudely illustrated with the difference between playing golf and playing football (proper football, mind. The kind where you actually use your feet.) In golf there is a defined objective and reasonably knowable context, where you can measure the distance to the hole, know your own ability with golf clubs, take weather conditions into account and plan a strategic line of attack that will get you there in the fewest strokes possible.
In football it’s completly different. The goal is the goal, or more precisely to score more goals than your opponent, but getting there requires you to have all kinds of awareness. More often than not, your best strategy might be to play the ball backwards. It may be wise to move the ball to the goal in AS MANY passes as possible, in a terribly inefficient way because doing so denies your opponent time on the ball. And the context for action is constantly changing and impossible to fully understand. And the context also adjusts as you begin to get entrained in patterns. If you stick to a long ball game, the defending team can adjust, predict your next move and foil the strategy. You have to evolve or be owned.
This is, I believe, what drives many Americans crazy about world football. There is rarely a direct path to goal and teams can go for whole games simply holding on to the ball and then make one or two key finishing moves. Some call that boring, and it is, if you are in a culture that is about achieving the goal as quickly as possible and moving on. And God knows we are in a culture that loves exactly that.
You plan golf holes by pre-selecting the clubs you will use in each shot and making small adjustments as you go. In football you prepare by doing drills that improve your anticipatory awareness, help you operate in space and become more and more physically fit, so that you have more physical options. You become resilient. Yes you can scout an opponent and plan a strategy and a tactic, but football is won on the pitch and not in the strategy room. Golf is very often won in the strategy room, as long as your execution is masterful.
It’s a crude distinction and one has to be mindful all the time of downright folly of “this vs, that”, but sometimes these kinds of distinctions are useful to illustrate a point.
Innovation does not come without discarding ideas, trying and failing. In complex systems with complex challenges, failure is inevitable and desired. If we need to prototype to sense our way forward we have to have a mindset that can handle failure.
On Saturday at the Art of Participatory Leadership in Petaluma my new friend Shawn Berry convened a session on failure and through listening to stories ranging from small prototoyping failures to business breakdowns and even deaths, I noted a few patterns that are helpful for groups and people to address failure positively nd resourcefully
Frame it up. In North America and Europe we have a cultural aversion to failure. Failure is equated with inadequacy. Our self-esteem is tied to our success. Our compensation and status is affected by failure. Fear of failure is prevalent in the culture. In order to combat this tendency, it is helpful to work with a group to get them acquainted to failing. For more playful groups improv exercises can be an excellent way to drop inhibitions to try something and fail. More rational groups might benefit from a little appreciative inquiry where participants recall positive failing experiences. Reflecting and sharing on times of failure and survival reminds us that it is part of the process.
Support the experience. While groups are experimenting and learning, succeeding and failing it helps to have support and coaching present in the process. Depending on the kind of work being done you can offer support to keep a group resilient and unattached. I have used several different kinds of processes here including the following:
- Simply pausing for reflection periodically in the process to notice what is going on. Slowing the process down helps to gain valuable perspective on what is happening and helps a group move on quickly from failure.
- allowing failure to occur and then taking the subsequent stressful thoughts to an inquiry process using The Work of Byron Katie. We do this often when working with groups in the non-profit sector for example, where the pressure to succeed is accompanied by feelings of fear of the results of failing.
- In indigenous and other colonized cultural settings I have often had Elders and healers present who can care for the more invisible dynamics in the field, especially when our work is going to carry us into some of the sources of trauma. When you are working in a place where people are operating out of deep historical trauma, the fear of failure can be laden with many many deep seated implications. Having people in the process who understand these dynamics is essential.
- Peer-coaching is a common way to build resilience in groups where trying and failing is important. When a team is trying to learn something new it helps to also build the capacity for them to be able to rely on each other. This is why so many teams value “cross-training.” When athletes train, they often work out in ways that are not related to their sport _ a skier training by rowing for example. Doing this helps them to learn to use their body differently and builds strength that supports their core work. Similarly, work teams can learn a lot about themselves by creating situations of safe failure such as through improvisational exercises, outdoor experiences, games and other non-work focuses. The skills learned there can help support the team when they knuckle down to focus on key tasks and can support constructive failure within the work domain. Ultimately these skills will build capacity if they increase the ability of the group to support itself through stressful times.
- Developing a practice of greeting failure with joy. My friend Khelsilem Rivers taught me this one. He is – among other things – an indigenous language teacher and using the tool kit “Where Are Your Keys” Khelsilem helps people become fluent in their indigenous languages. One of the barriers to rapid fluency is a fear of “not doing it right.” Khelsilem completely transforms the experience of failure by introducing the technique called “How Fascinating!” When a person (including the facilitator) makes a mistake, the whole group celebrates by throwing their hands in the air, leaning back and declaring “How Fascinating!” While it might seem contrived at first, the technique opens up the body, and greets the failure with a collective celebration. Blame and judgement is avoided, collective support is activated and learning is grounded.
Practices like these are essential to build into the architecture of processes where failure is inevitable if innovation is to occur.
Process the grief. When catastrophic failure occurs it can leave people grieving, frightened and cynical. If there is no way to process the grief then individuals often build their next prototype out of fear. If you feel you have been burned before, you might develop your next idea by building in protection against failing again. While that can seem prudent and safe, in reality, building structures out of fear is a much riskier proposition than building structures out of possibility. Without processing grief, a group or a person can be susceptible to being “defended.” I learned much about this state from Dr. Gordon Neufeld who is a child psychologist who has described this phenomenon in children. Taking a group or a person through the grief cycle using empathy, story telling and compassion can help free the emotions that are triggered in future learning experiences.
Building a mindset to embrace failure and support the transformation of the energy of failure is critical to groups developing the capacity to lead in complexity.
I’ve also written about failure here: