Richard Straub writes in the Harvard Business Review, on a great piece about what stops managers from adopting complexity views:
Complexity wasnt a convenient reality given managers desire for control. The promise of applying complexity science to business has undoubtedly been held up by managers reluctance to see the world as it is. Where complexity exists, managers have always created models and mechanisms that wish it away. It is much easier to make decisions with fewer variables and a straightforward understanding of cause-and-effect. Here, the shareholder value philosophy, which determines so much of how our corporations operate these days, is the perfect example. Placing a rigid priority on maximizing shareholder returns makes things clear for decision-makers and relieves them of considering difficult tradeoffs. Of course we know that constantly dialing down expenses and investments to boost short-term margins inevitably damages the long-term health of the company. It takes a complexity approach to keep competing values and priorities and the effects of decisions on all of them in view – and not just for management, but equally for investors, analysts, and regulators.
In the short term, a reductionist mindset is most useful for winnowing away externalities so that you can show that what YOU did had real results in the real world, thus justifying your value to the accountability chain and the shareholders.
via Why Managers Havent Embraced Complexity – Richard Straub – Harvard Business Review.
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I hate bombs.
In my 45 years I have had six friends and colleagues killed by bombs both on the Air India bombing in 1985 and in the London bombings in 2005. As a 10 year old kid living in England during the IRA letter bombing campaigns of Christmas 1978 I remember being completely terrified whenever letter came through our mail slot.
I hate bombs.
And this afternnon I am sitting at a Starbucks in West Vancouver, BC and the man sitting nthree tables over from me is proclaiming in one of those know it all not quite stage whispers about what should be done about the Boston marathon bomber. He declares that this is what the death penalty is for. The man should be killed and his ilk should be eliminated, he just said.
And my experience of hearing that just now was literally chilling. To hear the hate in his voice, a man sitting here absolutely materially unaffected by the bombings in Boston, declaring in public a vaguely murderous intent as a way of expressing outrage was chilling.
When I heard about the bombings in Boston I treated them as news. Sad of course, but nothing I could do about it. They seemed just as distant as all of the other bombing stories we hear on a daily basis expect that of course I’ve been to Boston and American cities don’t get bombed like that a lot, so it’s unusual and disconcerting. But I never felt an iota of fear, until just now, sitting in a peaceful distant Starbucks in West Vancouver. I am warily watching this man, although by now he seems to have calmed down.
How we talk matters. How we choose to model a response to events in the world can contribute to make us more resilient or more fearful. Bombs go off every day, literally and figuratively. They don’t scare me anymore. People responding to that news with a powerful need to make a public declaration about killing someone worry me more. This is exactly what bombers are trying to do, to create violent and chaotic responses to their actions and to spread fear far beyond their immediate sphere of influence.
Interesting how we help them do that.
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How many of you live in communities where community meetings are boring affairs punctuated by outrage? How many of you feel like influencing your local government means showing up en masse with a pettion or an organized campaign to get them to make a small change? How many of you are just plain disillusioned with your local government and have given up trying to help them involve citizens in decision making?
And how many of you are leaders that are frustrated by citizens who just yell at you all the time? How many of you don’t actually know what you are doing, but could never admit that in public? How many of you have tried to involve the community once, failed and vowed never to do it again? How many of you have strategic communications strategies (public or secret) for dealing with your own citizens?
This is what it has come to in many places. In my local community, not unlike many others across Canada, our local Council was elected on a tide of resentment that was stoked against the previous Council. For most of the previous Council’s term, a group of citizens mounted a campaign of smear and slander, including starting a newspaper funded by developers devoted to criticizing almost every Council initiative and culminating in an election campaign where four of the sitting members of Council were branded “The Gang of Four.” And even subsequent to the election 18 months ago, there has been an ongoing litany of blame against the old Council and people considered to be nsupportive of the old Council (and I count myself as one of them). The result is, on our local island, there is a real sense of cynicism. The new Council has not created any new initiatives with respect to involving citizens, and has, if my records are straight, only one “town hall” meeting. We have been short on dialogue and deliberation and if there are any decisions being made at all, they are being made without the invitation of the community. It feels sad, not because somehow the old Council was better than this one, but because our community can be so much more interesting and engaged.
Over the years citizens on Bowen have self-organized not just is lobby groups to advocate for particular policy decisions, but to actually build things that local governments should otherwise be doing. A group of citizens from across the political spectrum participated in a unique group called Bowen island Ourselves, which sought to undertake these kinds of initiatives to compliment local government services and functions. As a result, we did things like develop a crowdsourced road status tool, hosted a parallel process of Open Space dialogues alongside the formal consultation process for our official community planning process, sponsored deliberation meetings on issues such as local agriculture and the proposal to create a national park on Bowen Island, organize and implement BowenLIFT as an alternative transportation system. Lots of stuff.
But when the well becomes poisoned and citizens and elected officials begin just screaming at each other, fear takes over and stuff like that shuts down. We are in a period like that right now on Bowen, and the result is that a number of decisions are being made that have a significant impact on the future of our island, especially with respect to our village centre, without having any creative public dialogue. There is simply no place for the public to be a part of co-creating the future. We will get open houses on the plans that Council designs with a few advisors.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are thousands of tools out there that can help people do interesting and creative community engagement. This list of decision making tools from the Orton Family Foundation came through my inbox today. What is required to choose these tools?
Well first, a local government must be brave enough to stand in front of it’s citizens and ask for help. Assuming that you have the answers to complex questions is unwise. Better to be learners in office than heros. Second, a local government has to trust it’s citizens and create a climate where ideas can be discussed respectfully. Sure there are always going to be people wanting to take shots at you (especially if you played that way before you were in office) but as local leaders, there is an art to opening space where citizens can be in dialogue rather than debate. Third, local governments have to be serious about using what they learn and being clear an transparent about why they are choosing some ideas over others. Lastly it helps if local government leaders actually relish their jobs and see their community members, even the ones they disagree with as interesting and worthwhile neighbours. I have heard many local elected officials over the years express outright contempt for their citizens (although rarely does it happen while the official is sitting in office)
If you get some of this right, things can open up. If that’s what you want. But it takes leadership, and not just the kind that massages agendas and works behind the scenes. It requires leaders to stand up in front of their citizens and declare their willingness to make a new start and to leverage the best of their community’s assets. It requires leaders to trust their citizens and to relish working with them to create community initiatives and services that are loved and enjoyed by all.
I’d love to hear stories of local governments that changed their tune midstream to become open and excited about inclusive and participatory decision making processes. It would inspire me to hope that maybe something like that is possible where I live.
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It’s an old saw with me, but Dave Snowdon puts it very nicely and succinctly:
Numbers are good, but they are never the whole picture. Its easy to focus on them, they give the comfort of apparent objectivity and used to support human judgement they have high utility. The problem is when they replace judgement rather than supporting it. Of course in the ordered aspects of any enterprise statistics and numbers can do a lot of the work for you, but in a complex situation they can be dangerous. Applied to ordered aspects (boundary conditions, probes and the like) they have utility, but for the system as a whole they are more problematic.
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All the best stuff I have learned about mentoring has been in the context of traditional culture, whether with indigenous Elders from Canada or in the traditional Irish music community. Traditional Irish music is played and kept alive in a structure called a “sessiun.” There is a repertoire of thousands of tunes, but most musicians who have played for a while will have a hundred or more in common, and that can easily make for a long evening of playing together. Sessiuns are hosted by the most experienced musicians (traditionally a Fir a Ti, or Ban a Ti; the man or woman of the house). These guys are responsible for inviting people in, inviting tunes, keeping a tempo that everyone can play with, resolving any conflicts”in short they are the hosts.
But the best ones are also the teachers and the mentors and they dispense wisdom, lessons, encouragement and direction during and between tune sets. If you are smart and you are learning you try to sit near them in the circle to pick up teachings.
With Irish music, the best mentors I ever had always did a few things well:
- They were better musicians themselves than I could ever imagine myself to be
- They created space for me to play with them and gave me increasingly more responsibility from starting tune sets to perhaps playing a solo air to eventually sitting in for them if they couldn’t make it out to host a sessiun. But they didn’t invite me to lead the session when I was just beginning.
- When they knew I had a set of tunes down they invited me to lead that set. If I had a slow air they knew I could play, they would invite me to play a solo.
- They pointed out things that I could DO, rather than things not to do, and if they played flute (my instrument) they showed me on their instrument what they meant. There was never any abstract conversations about the music or technique. If I was doing something wrong, they would suggest an alternative (indigenous Elders, and especially Anichinaabe elders are very good at this. There is something peculiar to traditional Anishinaabe culture that makes it very hard for an Elder to tell you NOT to do something. They always point to doing something else.)
- They protected me from “hot shots” who like to show off by playing tunes too fast for you to play with them.
- And when I was ready I got invited into more and more responsibility with the sessions and was eventually invited to perform with them. The day of becoming a colleague is a big deal, and I still feel that I can’t hold a candle to my teachers, even though they insist that we have moved into a co-mentoring relationship.
What was beautiful about all that was that, even when i became colleagues with my mentors I never lost the sense of gratitude of being able to play with them. Even today 20 years later, it is a treat for me to play with those who taught me.
Mentoring in the art of hosting, of leadership of working with groups is the same. It is a traditional practice.