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:
This morning we began our Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking online course. Rowan Simonsen, Amy Lenzo and I were really excited to be able to share our first little insights with people, and especially this new mnemonic that we created to capture five key principles of harvesting practice: PLUME. We are excited to introduce this into the world.
In the complex space, Paul Hobcraft shares some very good guiding principles, but the whole post shimmers with good advice about transformation, and is applicable to movement building, network organizing and enterprise.
Today corporate transformations must be designed and executed quickly and routinely—not as once-a-decade events. Management teams are looking for best practices that increase speed and reduce the risk of pursuing business model innovation and change. That’s where minimum viable transformation comes into play. Before diving in, management teams should consider these five principles:
1. Learn how to learn. The central goal of minimum viable transformation is to learn from a true field experiment.
2. Pick up speed. There’s a reason this approach starts with the word “minimum”: The learning has to happen fast. As soon as a company executes the idea it’s pursuing, it shows its hand to competitors— who will quickly respond with their own strategies.
3. Embrace constraints. Much has been written about the counter-intuitive effect of constraints—they don’t foil creativity, but fuel it. It’s worth noting that the very constraints we’ve been talking about here—few bells and whistles and scarce time—take real creativity to address. At the very least, they compel a focus on the goal—the need to learn and reduce risk around the key objective.
4. Have a hypothesis. To succeed, transformation initiatives must clearly articulate both the need for change and its direction. Such a statement of direction helps identify key assumptions driving the change effort (assumptions that will need to be tested and refined along the way). Leaders will also need to develop metrics that measure short-term progress.
5. Start at the edge. Find an “edge” of the current business—a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.
In short, these five key principles can help bypass traditional barriers to transformation, ultimately supporting more effective response to mounting performance pressures.
via Deeper read or quick summary- finding the time | Paul4innovating’s Innovation Views.
Caitlin and I are hosting a learning process for the Vancouver Foundation which has brought together 11 people from community foundations around BC. We are trying to discover what kinds of new practices community foundations can adopt to roll with the changing nature of philanthropy and community.
It’s a classic complexity problem. The future is unknowable and unpredictable. Data is plentiful but not helpful because context trumps all. There are competing experts with different hypotheses of what should happen. These twelve people are brave. They’re willing to be the innovators in a sector that is by nature fairly conservative when it comes to change.
We are using an architecture combining Theory U and complexity work coming from Cynefin practices. I can maybe write more about our design later, but today I’m struck by a comment one of our participants made when she was reflecting on the past three months of engaging in deep dialogue interviews with people in her community. She talked to a number of people as a way of beginning to understand the context for making change, and noticed that the conversations she was having were taking her away from the rigid roles and responsibilities (and the associated posturing) that comes with trying to do interesting work in a hierarchical, top down and controlling way. Today in our check in she shared this:
“When we are given permission to talk to anyone about anything it’s freeing. We let our roles drop as well our limiting beliefs about what we can and can’t do. We are able to more closely align our actions and our way of being with our intentions.”
A pithy but powerful statement in how changing the way we converse changes the way we are able to act. It’s lovely witnessing the birth of a complexity worker.