Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Tim Merry, Caitlin Frost and I are just returning from a gathering of experienced Art of Hosting practitioners from around the world. One of the threads in our gathering was and exploration of how the practice of hosting and harvest conversations in the world can be applied to working with groups in ever increasing scale and influence.
This is the core inquiry of our new Beyond the Basics offering.. Being skillful facilitators of dialogue is obviously not enough to make shifts in systems, although dialogue is a powerful place for people in a system to start to understand the complexity, diversity and challenges that we are dealing with. It is also the prime vehicle for locating the innovation at the edge of the collective intelligence in the system that helps design innovations in systems of all kinds. . But alone, dialogue is not enough. Shifting systems requires us to apply dialogic practices and participatory leadership in a series of connected events throughout a system. Dealing with the complexity of shifting systems requires that we build depth in the capacity of core teams that are holding the work.
A key part of our work is nto build capacity and depth in core teams to host systems work together. Building the capacities of core teams is a marker of the success and sustainability of the kinds of participatory initiatives that achieve lasting results and outcomes. Where we have worked with systems where the consulting team retains the capacity, the initiative tends to fizzle when the contract ends.
Sustainability and lasting results lie at the intersection of depth, breadth, friendship and power. Core teams need to operate deeply, which means that they need to be engaging beyond the facilitation of hosted events. Good core teams ARE the field they are influencing and therefore they have to be practiced at going deep into their own dynamics to begin to make changes in a system. And they hold a level of depth that allows them to see and sense together strategically as an initiative unfolds.
To scale up initiatives, a team needs to then achieve breadth without sacrificing depth. More people need to be involved in core hosting of the work. But this cannot be a classical “train the trainer” model. It takes time for more practitioners to come into the field. The initial core team must not only train others in systems work but also become teachers and mentors of new practitioners and protect the work as it gets off to it’s shaky start. Going nto scale means lots of learning happening in public, so connecting people together in learning becomes crucial.
The architecture that keeps breadth connected to depth rests on trust, and so friendship becomes a powerful part of the operating system. In complex systems work there are times when formal accountabilities don’t ensure the levels of trust and commitment that is needed, and only a field of deep trust between people will sustain the practice and sustain the resilience as groups go through the difficult parts of systemic evolution.
The challenge here is that we then need a new conception of power, because power in existing systems tends to come from accountabilities for results delivered against known and predictable plans. Participatory work is a huge challenge to power because it requires everyone in the system, to work from a position of trust and uncertainty while still staying accountable for results. When working in any human system, issues of visible and invisible power and privilege are important strategic acupuncture points for change. And if we don’t pay attention to them we can find ourselves mired in simple relationship building projects or in oppositional and combative power struggles. We find trust and commitment eroding and we lose the breadth required for impact.
As a team this is our learning edge. We have many stories to share and tools and practices that help us be in this work, but we are also excited for our BtB offering to be a place where we co-discover with others the deepest challenges at these edges and perhaps even co-create new collective knowledge about how the art of hosting and harvesting can work in these domains.
Our beyond the basics offerings is informed by and structured around learning, discovering and implementing practices that integrate these approaches to working in complex environments with complex challenges. We have discovered that there are personal practices of coaching, mentoring and support that complement a deep skill set in designing, hosting and harvesting participatory process and a fierce commitment to creating architectures of implementation that respect and work with the existing power structures in a way that protects results while also building the capacity for uncertainty.
As we work towards the BtB workshops in 2014- and 2015 we will be continuing to share learnings, resources and case studies here on this blog and we invite your own questions and inquires about this practice as we move towards learning together.
Yesterday was wonderful. We spent the whole day around a fire on MacKenzie Beach listening to three stories and reflecting back what we learned. Pawa’s father Moy and uncle Tim both told stories of growing up in a traditional family and village. For me Tim’s story of getting stranded with his brother in a rowboat was powerful and contained all kinds of teachings about leadership, knowledge and practice. In the afternoon we did the same with Admire’s story from Zimbabwe, the story of what is happening at Kufunda Village. A full day of deeply listening to stories, harvesting lessons and teachings. And then this morning, Tim’s story was reenacted. Myself and Kelly, one of the participants here, re-enacted the story of Tim and his brother in a canoe alternately rowing and baling and having to switch roles while the waves pitch and roll. Physically re-enacting the story, sitting in chairs and actually switching places as if we were in a canoe leant a depth to the story – teachings about balance and safety and working together. Feeling it is a whole different kind of listening.
One of the things that is happening here is that we are beginning to experience a really different sense of time. We are spending our days outside, blessed by constant sunshine that is a complete surprise at this time of year. We are gathering around a fire on the beach or sometimes outside one of the cabins where we are staying. Teachings are flowing in everything we do, from cooking to walking, to spending time alone. Time is so slow here and we are finding ourselves going to bed at 8:00 after the sunsets and waking up early in the morning. This is probably one of the most interesting teachings we are getting from the land itself, watching the tides come and go and the moon grow towards fullness, as we barbeque salmon on the fire and share the work of our little village.
Purpose is beginning to arise amongst us. And as that happens, offerings are beginning to appear as well, offerings of space for future gatherings, offerings of resources and friendship and deep commitment. We are still running the Indiegogo campaign so people from around the world are contributing there too, and you can join them. Tomorrow we continue our living in open space, heading out for a walk in the woods and perhaps playing some lahal later after the sun goes down.
A very useful list from Dave Snowden which can be used to describe good tactics for dealing with complex situations:
- The whole success of social computing is because it conforms to the three heuristics of complex systems: finely grained objects, distributed cognition & disintermediation
- In an uncertain world we need fast, real time feedbacks not linear processes and criticism includes short cycle experimental processes which remain linear.
- The real dangers are retrospective coherence and premature convergence
- Narrative is vital, but story-telling is at best ambiguous
- Need to shift from thinking about drivers to modulators
- You can’t eliminate cognitive bias, you work with it
- Extrinsic rewards destroy intrinsic motivation
- Messy coherence is the essence of managing complexity
It had to be an Irish politician that finally suggested this! Ireland has been leading the European Union the past six months, including chairing and hosting the EU’s meetings. Micheal Ring tried a different approach to having all 27 ministers show up and read a speech.
Sports Minister Michael Ring might actually have made a difference. At the Council of Sports Ministers in Brussels, the Ringer pioneered a new approach to these meetings. The usual drill sees each of the 27 ministers reading a prepared script outlining their country’s viewpoint. It’s tedious stuff.
Minister of State Ring decided to change this. He announced to his fellow sports ministers: “No scripts today! If you cannot speak without a script for thee minutes ye shouldn’t be in the job you’re in.”
The politicians looked a little uncertain. Their civil servants looked horrified.
”Let me tell you this,” he continued, “I came through Westport town council and the county council, I’m in the Dáil and now I’m a Minister and we had more debates in the town council than we’ve ever had here.” The ministers were discussing drug misuse in sport. They had brought their scripts, but after initial misgivings and a bit of cajoling from Michael, they decided to throw caution to the wind and have a proper discussion. Ring banished officials to the margins and let the ministers do the talking.
“It was mighty. Mighty altogether,” he tells us. “I was told this was the most successful meeting in Brussels for 20 years. We had a lively exchange of views and a frank and open debate. The place was packed and the meeting went on for nearly four hours.”
Inspired post by Dave Pollard today on the challenge of scale and the confusion of control. Complicated systems require few connections in order to be manageable:
It is because business and government systems are wedded to the orthodoxy of hierarchy that as they become larger and larger (which such systems tend to do) they become more and more dysfunctional. Simply put, complicated hierarchical systems don’t scale. That is why we have runaway bureaucracy, governments that everyone hates, and the massive, bloated and inept Department of Homeland Security.
But, you say, what about “economies of scale”? Why are we constantly merging municipalities and countries and corporations together into larger and ever-more-efficient megaliths? Why is the mantra of business “bigger is better”?
The simple answer is that there are no economies of scale. In fact, there are inherent diseconomies of scale in complicated systems. When you double the number of nodes (people, departments, companies, locations or whatever) in a complicated system you quadruple the number of connections between them that have to be managed. And each “connection” between people in an organization has a number of ‘costly’ attributes: information exchange (“know-what”), training (“know-how”), relationships (“know-who”), collaboration/coordination, and decision-making. That is why large corporations have to establish command-and-control structures that discourage or prohibit connection between people working at the same level of the hierarchy, and between people working in different departments.
Why do we continue to believe such economies of scale exist? The illustration above shows what appears to happen when an organization becomes a hierarchy. In the top drawing, two 5-person organizations with 10 people between them have a total of 20 connections between them. But if they go hierarchical, the total number of connections to be ‘managed’ drops from 20 to 8. Similarly, a 10-person co-op has a total of 45 connections to ‘manage’, but if it goes hierarchical, this number drops to just 9.
This is clearly ‘efficient’, but it is highly ineffective. The drop in connections means less exchange of useful information peer-to-peer and cross-department, less peer and cross-functional learning, less knowledge of who does what well, less trust, less collaboration, less informed decision-making, less creative improvisation, and, as the number of layers in the hierarchy increases, more chance of communication errors and gaps.
But, what about complex systems?
So back to the purpose of this post, to answer these questions: 1. What is it about the ‘organization’ of the Internet that has allowed it to thrive despite its massive size and lack of hierarchy? And: 2. What if we allowed everything to be run as a ‘wirearchy’?
To answer the first question, the Internet is a “world of ends“, where the important things happen at the edges – and everything is an edge. “The Internet isn’t a thing, it’s an agreement”. And that agreement is constantly being renegotiated peer-to-peer along the edges. If you look at the diagram above of the co-op with the 45 connections, you’ll notice that the nodes are all at the circumference – around the edges. There is no ‘centre’, no ‘top’. And the reason the organization isn’t weighed down by all those connections is that they’re self-managed, not hierarchically managed. The work of identifying which relationships and connections to build and grow and maintain is dispersed to the nodes themselves – and they’re the ones who know which ones to focus on. That’s why the Internet can be so massive, and get infinitely larger, without falling apart. No one is in control; no one needs to hold it together. It’s a model of complexity. And, like nature, like an ecosystem, it is much more resilient than a complicated system, more effective, and boundary-less. And, like nature, that resilience and effectiveness comes at a price – it is less ‘efficient’ than a complicated system, full of redundancy and evolution and failure and learning. But that’s exactly why it works.
via What If Everything Ran Like the Internet? « how to save the world.