I’m in New Mexico this week where we will be back together with our colleagues from the Navajo Nation, working together to keep finding collaborative ways to address health and wellness and community resilience in the Navajo Nation. Doing this is an ongoing skill and practice. There are no answers, only different situations that require us to keep working together.
A key skill in being able to address issues you don’t know anything about is to stop and ask for help. My friend Tenneson Woolf, with whom I spent the last weekend in Salt Lake City, sometimes tells a useful story about this. He once asked his then four year old son Isaac what advice he give if someone found themselves not knowing what to do next. Isaac said: “Sit down. Think. Ask for help.” Which, if you have ever worked on a building site, you will know is perfect advice.
I value people that can do that. I think the ability to ask for help is significantly devalued in our society, where status and competence hinge on having the right answer. We all probably have stories about times we pursued the “right answer” well past the point of its usefulness, because the vulnerability of not knowing was a bigger risk that screwing something up.
And yet, we are faced with problems as leaders and decision makers to which we have no answers. And we are often faced with a public or employees or colleagues who hold us to account, unfairly I think, for not having the right answers.
Two years ago during a local election on Bowen Island I worked with a candidate in the local election to create a forum on facebook where the only questions asked would be unanswerable ones, and where the candidates had to work together to understand and address these questions. It provided a safe space for candidates to say “I don’t know” and to go out and share links and find resources. Many of the candidates that were most active in that forum ended up getting elected and I like to think that their ability to work well with others was one of the reasons why they received the trust of voters.
This sounds good, but last week there was an incident that showed how allowing this kind of public conversation is still and uphill battle. In the USA Presidential primary campaigns, Donald Trump was asked a question about what he would called the west bank of the Jordan River. Is it Israel? Palestine? Occupied Territories? Colonized Land? The question is fraught and of course if a guy like Trump can weasel out of answering it, he will probably find a way. Perhaps he did when he turned to one of his advisors and said “Jason, how would you respond to that?”
Now you might argue that he was dodging the question, but what was most illuminating was the vitriol and backlash that came to Donald Trump criticizing his inability to have an answer. There was a lot “gotcha” kinds of comments on social media, implying that Trump must be a fool if he doesn’t know the answer to the question. A New York Times blog captured a muted version of some of the general tenor of criticism this way:
The moment evoked a similar reach-for-an-aide episode, when, in an interview with reporters in September 2003, the retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate, struggled to answer questions about whether he would have supported the congressional authorization for the Iraq invasion that year.
“Mary, help!” Mr. Clark called out to his press secretary as they rode in his campaign plane. “Come back and listen to this.”
Mr. Trump did not make such an overt plea. But he struggled to answer a basic question about a tumultuous issue.
Of course it is not at all a basic question and not just a “tumultuous issue.” It is a loaded question about one of the defining international issues of our time, an issue that in fact suffers terribly from simple and reductionist perspectives. Taking time to stop, think and ask for help is a pretty good strategy.
I’m no fan of Donald Trump and this is not about the way he handled the question. It is about how quickly his critics rose to attack him for not having an answer. It is a call to citizens to hold our public officials and decision makers not to a high level of expertise, but to a higher level of collaborative instinct. I don’t want Donald Trump to be President, primarily because he is a dishonest, racist know-it-all who generally takes pride in taking his own advice. But at the same token I urge us all to be responsible for creating the conditions in which candidates can show that when they don’t know answers, asking for help is a good strategy. This is the most important decision making skill for facing the complexity of our present and immediate future.
Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle. The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with. Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.” I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing. But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:
Back in the fall I got to finally do some work with my friends Peggy Holman and Stephen Sliha (and Carol Daniel Kasbari too!) with the fabulous organization Journalism That Matters. I was able to do a little process hosting and participating in the developmental evaluation that was going on during the two day conference in Portland.
Last month Peggy published an overview of what we learned in that conference. Embedded in that report is this video made by some of the students on the evaluation team. It contains interviews with many of the participants who had epiphanies about what else journalism could be.
It seems obvious to think that journalists, being storytellers, can help communities tell their stories and represent themselves. But I’m interested in the “weak signal” of journalists actually doing the convening of conversations. Journalists don’t only have the power to tell stories, they also have the power to call together people in conversation. They do it whenever they call up a source for a comment on a story. They do it on radio or TV when they call a panel of people to discuss or debate something. They do it in print or online when they host opinions and curate comment sections (and they DON’T do it when they just leave comments sections open). Why don’t journalists call community meetings? Why don’t they host larger scale gatherings where people discuss their communities issues, even come up with solutions, find each other and work together? Sometimes journalists “moderate town halls” but that’s really not the same thing.
I think the new frontiers in journalism are not only in using their media tools in novel ways. I think journalists can now think about how to extend their hosting practice in new ways too, to help communities find the resources they need inside themselves to address the challenges they face. And that would be another way that journalism could matter.
Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech is best known for his statements of possibility and the energy with which he concluded his remarks. It is a compelling call to purpose, to a world in which the future is only currently imagined. It provided a generative image of what is possible, if not what is attainable, and it did what a good purpose does: it helped take the place of a charismatic leader. Internalized, that purpose drives the movement.
When I was up in Whitehorse last week I got to spend time with folks from the Public Service Commission discussing a project that would see us looking at discriminations in the workplace from a complexity angle. Using Cynefin and SenseMaker(tm), we hope to understand the ways in which the landscape of discrimination shifts and changes over time so that the PSC can make wiser decisions about the kinds of initiatives it sculpts. One of the problems with diversity initiatives in the public service (in any large public organization really) is the feeling that they need to be broad based and rolled out to everyone. This usually results in a single initiative that spreads across the whole organization, but except for a little awareness raising, does little to address specific instances of discrimination. Everything from awareness raising “cultural competency training” to zero tolerance accountability measures have limited effect because a) discriminatory behaviour is highly context and situation dependant and b) the public service has a permeable boundary to the outside world, meaning ideas, behaviours and people move between the two contexts all the time. The larger your organization, the more like the real world you have to be.
At any rate, I took a bit of time to do a mini-Cynefin teaching to explain how strategy works in the complex domain. and my friend Pawa Haiyupis and I added two Ps to my concentric circles of intervention in a complex system. So to review:
- Patterns: Study the patterns in a complex setting using narrative capture and sense-making. This can be done with the SenseMaker(tm) software, and it can also be done with dialogic interventions. The key thing is to let the people themselves tag their stories or at the very least have a group of people reviewing data and finding patterns together. For example, you might notice a correlation between stressful times in an organization and an increase in feelings of discriminatory behaviour
- Probe: Once you have identified some patterns, you can make some hypotheses about what might work and it’s time to develop some safe to fail probes. These aren’t meant to be successful: they are meant to tell you whether or not the patterns you are sensing have developmental potential. Failure is entirely welcome. What if we offered stress reduction activities during high stress times to help release pent up feelings? We want to be okay with te possibility that that might not work.
- Prototype: If a probe shows some promise, you might develop a prototype to develop a concept. Prototypes are designed to have tolerance for failure, in that failure helps you to iterate and improve the concept. The goal is to develop something that is working.
- Pilot: A pilot project is usually a limited time proof of concept. Roll it out over a year and see what you learn. In Pilot projects you can begin to use some summative evaluation methods to see what has changed over time. Because of their intensive resource commitment, pilot projects are hardly ever allowed to fail, making them very poor ways of learning and innovating, but very good ways to see how stable we need to make an approach.
- Project/Program/Policy: Whatever the highest level and most stable form of an initiative is, you will get to there if your pilot shows promise, and the results are clear. Work at this level will last over time, but needs regular monitoring so that an organization knows when it’s time to tinker and when it’s time to change it.
Cynefin practitioners will recognize that what I’m writing about here is the flow between the complicated and the complex domains, (captured by Dave Snowden’s Blue dynamic in this post.) My intention is to give this some language and context in service organizations, where design thinking has replaced the (in some ways more useful) intuitive planning and innovation used in non-profits and the public service.
Since October, when I first starting sketching out these ideas, I’ve learned a few things which might be helpful as you move through these circles.
- Dialogue is helpful at every scale. When you are working in a complex system, dialogue ensures that you are getting dissent, contrary views and outlying ideas into the process. Complex problems cannot be addressed well with a top-down roll out of a change initiative or highly controlled implementations of a single person’s brilliant idea. If at any point people are working on any stage of this alone, you are in danger territory and you need another pair of eyes on it at the very least.
- Evaluation is your friend and your enemy. At every stage you need to be making meaning and evaluating what is going on, but it is critically important to use the right evaluation tools. Developmental evaluation tools – with their emphasis on collective sense making, rapid feedback loops and visible organizational and personal learning – are critical in any complexity project, and they are essential in the first three stages of this process. As you move to more and more stable projects, you can use more traditional summative evaluation methods, but you must always be careful not to manage to towards targets. Such an error results in data like “We had a 62% participation rate in our diversity training” which tells you nothing about how you changed things, but can shift the project focus to trying to acheive a 75% participation rate next cycle. This is an especially pervasive metric in engagement processes. And so you must…
- Monitor, monitor, monitor. Intervening in a complex system always means acting without the certainty that what you are doing is helpful. You need data and you need it on a short term and regular basis. This can be accomplished by formal and informal ongoing conversations and story captures about what is happening in the system (are we hearing more stories like the ones we want?) or through a SenseMaker(tm) monitoring project that allows employees to end their data with a little data capture.
- These practices are nested, not linear. An always to remember that this is not a five step process to intervening in a complex system. In a large organization, you can expect all of these things to be going on all the time. Building the capacity for that is a kind of holy grail and would constitute a 21st century version of the Learning Organization in my books.