Just off a call with a potential client today and we were scoping out some of the work that we might do together, with a small organization facing unprecedented change. They are in a place of finally realizing that they are not in control of what is happening to them. They are completely typical in this respect.
I am constantly struck by the fact that we have so few skills, frameworks and so little language for dealing with complexity. Clients all the time approach me looking for certainty, answers and clear outcomes. It’s as if they are searching for the one person who will promise them the relief they are looking for. And no one can. Because mostly what they are FEELING is their emotional reponse to the reality of a complex world. And no amount of rational and linear planning will address that feeling. in fact quite the opposite. Sitting down and deciding on a vision, goals, objectives and plan just defers the pain, because it fools you into thinking you are in control but it sets up a false ideal against which your progress will always be measured to be short.
Confronting complexity is hard. It is not merely that we need better tools to think about it. We need better tools to emotionally deal with it. it is overwhelming, infuriating, confusing, and frightening. And almost every organization I work with that fails to address it well fails because they don’t attend to the fear. They build fears into their processes, or they build processes to avoid confronting what they are afraid of: usually that we don’t know what’s going and we don’t know what to do.
My potential client asked me if I could say what outcomes would come from working with me. In brief they are this:
- We will build the capacity to understand and work with the problems you are facing in context by confronting and changing the view we take around complexity
- We will work strategically with the content of the project, and build participatory processes together that will change the way we do the work of addressing complex problems
- We will build resilient containers for the work that will allow us to confront our fears and limiting beliefs about the work and the change we are in, and that will provide a solid strategic framework for our project.
- We will arrive at a set of strategic decisions about the present moment and be prepared to make strategic decisions about the future.
That’s it. Sometimes those outcomes are incredibly concrete, sometimes it is more about building capacity, but it is always about acting strategically, and that sometimes means learning a new language and a new set of skills. I find that it’s the learning part with which people are most impatient. They seems to want to be able to accelerate the outcomes they want without having to change their approach. But, if you found yourself teleported to rural Bangladesh and you now had to make a living as a rice farmer, do you think your current language and skill set would be applicable, if only you applied yourself harder?
There are projects that fit the ordered domain of work, in which project management and strategic planning leads to predictable outcomes. And there is work for which “learning” is both the outcome and the new organizational structure and leadership practice. It is very important not to confuse the two contexts. And it is surprising just how much we are willing to turn a blind eye to complexity (as both a friend and a foe) in favour of a stable and knowable future, no matter how impossible that idea is.
Henry Mintzberg revisits some of his research and conclusions about the methods used to teach MBAs at Harvard, and his conclusions point to the near complete saturation of analysis and control that now drowns the business, government and non-profit world:
When I studied management across the river in the 1960s, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Harvard Business School was just as renowned as it is today. But it was weak in research—in fact some of its prominent faculty derided research. The turnaround since then has been quite remarkable. In the areas I know, Harvard’s faculty is fantastic, especially in the ability of many to relate concrete issues to conceptual understanding. Too bad that they have to devote so much of their teaching efforts to a method—and its view of management, like that of other business schools so concentrated on analysis–that is doing such great harm to our organizations and the societies in which they function (see mintzberg.org/enterprise).
We are mired in a heroic view of management (now called leadership)–centralized, numeric, individualistic and often narcissistic–that is too often detached from what is supposed to be managed. People who believe they can manage everything often prove themselves capable of managing nothing. We don’t need generic managers; we need engaged ones. The problem has been bad enough in the private sector; its infiltration into other sectors of society is far worse. Do NGOs need “CEOs”, business models, strategic plans, measures galore, and all the rest? Harvard and most other business schools have to be doing better than that.
What happens at places like Harvard matters, because it sets the standard for what passes as responsible management in organizations. And there are many fatal flaws with the way Harvard teaches business, and those are magnified and distorted in the hands of the amateur quant jockeys that reduce everything to numeric analysis. This is the finest and most concise articulation of this problem I have read in a while and it matters that it is Henry Mintzberg who is saying it.
Caitlin Frost, Tim Merry, Tuesday Ryan-Hart and I have been loving offering our Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics workshop over the past nine months.
We’re really pleased to announce that we are coming to Minnesota May 6-8, Staffordshire UK July 8-10 and Ontario this fall. And we’re really happy with the video invitation.
If you have been working with participatory methods and are curious about extending these tools and forms of leadership to systemic challenges, please consider joining us!
Asheville, North Carolina
We are about to begin three days of learning together, Ashley Cooper, Dana Pearlman and me. And 27 other folks who are coming to something we called “the Art of Learning Together.”
One of the core inquiries of the Art of Hosting, since it’s beginning has been “what if learning together was the form of leadership we needed now?” It’s not that other forms of leadership AREN’T important, but that ihis particular form is not well supported. We think of learning as something you are doing before you become a leader. Something to do before you ramp up to the next level of leadership.
But of course there are situations in the world – complexity, confusion, innovation, disruption – that require us to learn, sometimes almost too fast, usually only until we can make the next move “well enough.” We need tools, heuristics (my new favourite word, meaning experience based guidelines or basic principles based on previous experience) and ways of quickly understanding our experience so we can be open to possibilities that are invisible when we take a narrow view of change.
Over this three days we will teach and learn about frameworks for personal and collective leadership, including Cynefin, The Lotus, and principles of improvisiation. We will use dialogue methods of World Cafe, Pro-Action Cafe, Open Space, Circle practice and other things. We will use movement, improvisation, music and art. And we will employ walks in the neighbourhood, silence, reflection and raid prototyping. We are alos going to be diving into the art of working with core teams and understanding the dynamics of power, identity and relationships as they unfold in a context that is disruptive, changing and complex.
And we are doing it in a sweet space called The Hub in Asheville, which, if you don’t know it, is the most amazing, creative, and moldable space in an amazing, creative and moldable city. You can follow along online if you like at our weebly.
I’ve been using the Cynefin framework for many years now. For me, I think I’ve internalized it through practice and it becomes second nature to not only talk about and teach from it but to use the way it was intended to be used: to help make decisions.
Today Dave Snowden posts a very useful set of guidelines for working with complexity that are captured in the framework. This list is useful for us to tuck away as it provides very clear guideposts for moving around the complexity domain:
The essence:
- In any situation, what can we change?
- Out of the things we can change, where can we monitor the impact of that change?
- Out of the things we can change, where we can monitor the impact, where could we amplify success and/or dampen or recover from failure.
What we should avoid:
- Retrospective coherence, we should learn from the past but not assume that what happened will repeat, or that it had linear causality
- Premature convergence, coming to quickly to a single solution (although coming quickly to parallel safe to fail experiments is a good thing) rather than keeping our options open
- Pattern entrainment, assume that the patterns of past success will entrain the inevitability of future failure unless you actively manage to prevent it.
Then the three basic heuristics of complexity management:
- Work with finely grained objects
- Distribute cognition/sense-making within networks
- Disintermediation, putting decision makers in contact with raw data without interpretative layers
Admittedly this is technical language, but I appreciate the clarity.