In the last couple of weeks I have been in deep and important conversations about the work of facilitating change in the world. I am just back from another Art of Hosting gathering, this time in Boulder, Colorado and, among the many many things that were on my mind there, the subject of talk and action came up.
This was especially a good time to have this conversation as this particular Art of Hosting brought together many deep practitioners of both the Art of Hosting approach to facilitating change and the U-process approach to action and systemic change. One of the conversations I had related to solving really tough problems and I had a deep insight in that discussion.
I think first of all that there is a false dichotomy between talk and action. To be more precise I should say that there is a symbiotic relationship between talk and action. We can act any way we choose, and that is just fine, but when we want to take action that is wise, we need to be in conversation with others. We may also be in conversation with context as well, which looks like a literature review, a market study, an environmental scan and so on. Regardless, wisdom follows from being with the insights of others. Wise action is what we do after we have talked well together.
The question now is, what role does wise action have in solving tough problems? It seems to me that every system that responds to something has an action system within it. The action system is what the system or community uses to move on any particular need. And so, in Canada we have a legal system that creates action to resolve disputes between parties. We have a food system that delivers food to our stores. We have a health care system to care for us when we are sick. Within these three systems, there is a discrete action system and there is a lot of conversation. In the legal system conversation and action are raised to high and almost ritualistic arts. The formal conversation of a courtroom is so far beyond regular conversation that one actually has to hire a specialist to engage in it. And judgements, court orders and sentences are the mechanisms by which change takes place. Various bodies enforce these judgements so that there is accountability in the system.
Similarly, the food system and the health care system have conversational forums, meetings and so on in which wisdom and strategy is discerned, and there are trucks and doctors to do the work.
The problem is that neither of these three systems contains an action system that can reduce crime, prevent malnutrition or lower patient wait times. In other words thare are problems that are too big for the curent action system of any given community, society, or world. These problems become known as “wicked problems” or intractable problems, and they are often met with much despair.
When we are faced with these problems, we need to ask ourselves what to do. Do we use the existing systems, even in novel recombination, to try to tackle the biggest problems? Or perhaps is the biggest problem the capacity of the action system itself?
This is an intriguing idea to me. This is what I jotted down this morning in an email to some of my mates about this:
If we take the biggest, toughest and most intractable problem of any community we see immediately that the reason it is so is clearly that the community does not have the ability to deal with it. Water quality is an issue only in places where the community action system has been unable to deal with it. That might be because the community action system is not big enough to address it from a systemic basis, or that the leadership capacity is not strong enough or the collective container is not robust enough, or any combination. Ultimately the biggest problem for any community is: what do we need to do to get our collective power and action working on our toughest problems so that they are no longer our toughest problems?
I wrote a short note on the plane coming home from Denver, and it relates to how absolutely critical harvest is, in terms of focusing our eyes on the ways in which any conversation or meeting might affect a community’s action system. This is an attempt to caputre a simple form of the pitfalls of a false action/talk dichotomy and the necessity for learning, reflection and inquiry in a system.
“If we are wanting stuff to get done by any system, the first question is an appreciative inquiry into how things usually get done in the system so that we know what we are harvesting intoand we understand what forms of harvest will best serve the actions we want to take as a result of any conversation.
But what do we do when the system itself is not up to the task of taking action on a large problem? In that case, the inquiry has to find a way to get the system to act on itself to create the conditions and change necessary for it to become powerful enough to move into action on the intractable problem. This is difficult because it requires “bootstrapping” the system to see itself and then teach itself to be bigger and more powerful.”
I don’t know how to do this. But I feel deeply that THIS is the challenge. We can solve global warming IF we figure out how the world community action system can develop the capacity to address the problem. If we don’t develop that capacity, we won’t solve the problem. We can break it into more manageable bits and pieces that fit what we can already do, but global warming is an emergent phenomenon and it needs an emergent response. So what is the biggest problem? Not global warming…it is us…the biggest problem is the inability of our existing systems to address it. And to me, daunting as it is, that seems like work we can actually do togather.
So that is where I am currently, as a facilitator of deep conversation, interested in how we can connect inquiry, talk, harvest and action to find and use the power we need to make to big changes our world needs.
Your thoughts? What seems especially interesting about this take on wicked problems?
[tags]wicked problems[/tags]
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For the past two years, I have been active in the Art of Hosting fellowship. This is a global community of practitioners dedicated to uncovering the new and emerging forms of meaningful conversation and organizational shape. Together we have been conducting trainings, working together on projects and deeply learning our patterns.
Several of our mates in this fellowship have been working hard to bring about an online presence for our work, and today it went live. So I introduce to you the brand new Art of Hosting site, a place that describes what we are doing, how we are doing it and invites you to join us. Please take some time to poke around there and draw some inspiration from the amazing resources and content that has been assembled.
And if you are interested in exploring this pattern more deeply, there are several opportunities to do so in upcoming trainings, including one here on Bowen Island BC in a couple of weeks.
[tags]art of hosting[/tags]
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Last week I was working with a team of business school professors meeting in their annual retreat to plan their teaching for an integrated introduction to their MBA program. The professors themselves come from all facets of the business world: logistics, accounting, organizational behaviour, ethics, marketing. The often use the terms “hard” and “soft” skills, but only in reference to the stereotypes they are trying to confront in their students.
It’s always interesting to me to see where “hard” and “soft” skills blur, because in practice they truly do blur. In general “hard” skills refer to those practices in business that are about the external world: financials, accounting, finance, market surveys, logistics. “Soft” skills are associated with human resources, relationships, learning, personal development and ethics.
There is a false dichotomy in the business world between these two skill sets, and one of the professors obseved that one can be a good manager knowing hard or soft skills, but one can only be a good leader with both.
I have been thinking about this when today Rob Paterson posts an interview he did with the staff of silverorange, a tech firm in PEI. In the interview there was a great short summary of what it looks like in the real world when hard and soft skills blend:
Do you have a financial plan at all?
“Yes and no – most business plans are also based on a fantasy that you can predict the future in detail. Most also set tight goals when the environment is shifting that is also very risky. You can get trapped doing the wrong thing very hard when the environment has changed.
Instead, we set broad goals. (here is a link to Dan’s view of how best to plan for the future) In the context of never being able to know the future in detail we…(quote from Dan’s post) have no master plan at silverorange. The cat is out of the bag! We do however have broad goals and ideals that factor into our daily, monthly, and yearly decisions. We always have these goals and ideals in mind. We also make decisions the good old fashioned way. The necessary people sit as equals and hammer it out. Often the conversation becomes heated, in the good way. When we are done the best decision has been made for us.
When I look back over the past seven years of silverorange I see a route that has veered its way around tremendous obstacles, some we saw coming, and others we had no idea that we were dodging. Our process of quick, frequent, and small decision making has led us down a safe and secure path.
If I was an investor I would know that you pulled your cash flow projections out of your ass. I wouldn’t care. I would look for the following:
- What are the overall goals & ideals that you are striving for?
- Has you surrounded yourself with a team that can hammer out good small decisions?
- Are you willing to have your idea bend, warp, & mutate based on frequent, small, decisions?
I propose that we all change to process and people based business plans. One, maybe two pages at most.”
The religion of scientific materialism has privileged data over intuition, but the silverorange team is calling for a change, for a balance. It’s great to see this happening in business, and in business schools.
[tags]Rob Paterson, silverorange, business skills[/tags]
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From whiskey river
Only to a magician is the world forever fluid,
infinitely mutable and eternally new.
Only he knows the secret of change.
Only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness
to become something else
and it is from this universal tension
that he draws his power.
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Been quiet here the last couple of weeks but not in my life. Two weeks ago I visited The Shire near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to teach with Toke Moeller, Sera Thompson and Tim Merry in the Art of Hosting. It was a beautiful time, working on the land, working with people from Yarmouth, Montreal and the eastern US who are doing deeply important work with youth, food and community. And it was great working with my mates.
A couple of pieces have showed up around the web about this training. Here is a post from Brian Hurlburt, a truly generous soul in Yarmouth who hosts web sites for community groups:
The Art of Hosting training is open to leaders, managers, teachers and pioneers from all walks of life who want to see and act from a new perspective on leadership that sets free one another’s creativity and intelligence. Helping those who want to learn to lead without being possessive, to help without taking credit, to let go in order to achieve more for the common good.
This practice may well require a shift in our thinking and ways of doing things, however since having left the Shire I’ve had more meaningful conversations with my family, friends, and associates! The exclamation point is purposely used because I’ve been to these types of things before; you know those leadership getaways where you get all fired up and then when you leave and return to reality your left with an empty useless feeling! This was totally different!
What I learned there, and what I experienced there was real, meaningful, and lasting! Easily applied in the real world and very affective and effective! In fact I find myself having more meaningful conversations without even trying!
No that’s powerful, when a way of doing things becomes a practice that becomes a natural way of doing things and can be applied in meaningful ways in daily life the course / conference becomes one that will benefit anyone who is open to it and makes themselves available to attend.
It was also great to see Rob Paterson there, who has been recently investigating the nature of “trusted space” on his blog and who found something in what we were talking about to animate those spaces. In the Art of Hosting, we use the term “fellowship” to describe our way of working together and we often refer to each other as “mates.” In talking with others, like Peggy Holman, the word “communitas” is another way of describing it, in perhaps a less gendered way. Regardless, this is a deep form of organizational structure and Toke, Tim, Sera, Rob and I along with others explored this deeply at The Shire.
Essentially, as Rob put it:
I am still amazed that I can know someone I have never met so well. I am not alone in going to work, as I did with Johnnie Moore, on a very dangerous piece of work with a person that I had never met before. There is some weird property of the web that enables Mates to notice the connection. Cyn has helped me overcome my fear of using my body and has put me on a path to keep healthy and fit. She lived only a mile away but we met for years online. Chris arrived at the Shire never having met Tim before. I came to the Shire because of Chris’ request knowing that it would be great. I have only met Chris once before. Many of you have similar stories about finding ‘Mates” in the ‘sphere. I find no separation in these relationships. Reputation is critical in this world…Fellowship is when Mates decide to do the world’s great work together. There is great work to be done that requires exceptional courage and often more than a lifetime to accomplish.
I think that is a lovely description, and it certainly validates my experience of working deeply with others, connected over long distances, engaged in the work of making good in the world. You probably have your own example of this type of organizing and working together. You work on a simple but mammoth task together, not tied to timelines or outcomes but simply knowing that one another are behind you. It is the shape of a circle moving outward from it’s centre, the essential shape of the expansion of the universe. We remain connected in our origins and our committment, and even over vast distances, we seem able to sense what the others are doing, and know when help is needed.
So, I’m curious, what is your mammoth task? And who are your mates? How is your fellowship working?
If you would like to explore more of this way of working, and the role that meaningful conversation plays in it, there are two Art of Hosting trainings coming up this fall. Here on Bowen Island, British Columbia, Tenneson Wolf, Brenda Chaddock, Teresa Posakony and me are hosting a gathering September 24-27, and there is still space. Sera Thompson will be hosting a gathering with Toke and Tim in Boulder Colorado.
[tags]Art of Hosting, Toke Moeller, Tim Merry, Sera Thompson, Rob Paterson[/tags}