“Tell everyone you know: “My happiness depends on me, so you’re off the hook.” And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they’re doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel – and then, you’ll love them all. Because the only reason you don’t love them, is because you’re using them as your excuse to not feel good.”
– Esther Abraham-Hicks
via whiskey river.
Heading to Hahopa today. Hahopa is an idea. It is a place of the heart and the imagination which is rooted in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “teaching and learning with love and kindness.” You might say that it is a place of grace, an ideal place where we can ground our happiness in an experimental way of being.
Hahopa is the dream of my friend Pawa Haiyupis. Pawa’s full name is Pawasquacheetl which means “she gives in the feast with the energy of bees coming out of a hive.” For years she has wanted to give the world a place where Nuu-Chah-Nulth teachings can be offered to anyone who feels that they are useful. Inspired by our friends at Kufunda village in Zimbabwe, Pawa and her family this week are embarking on an incredible dream. The work we do together this week will set in place a lifetime of contribution to the world.
So I am off to Tofino where we will initiate this endeavour being hosted by the land, the beach and the sea. We are open to seeing what will come of it and how it will flow.
If you would like to support this dream, please consider donating to the Indiegogo campaign and follow along here and on the facebook page where I will be helping to harvest what we learn.
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.
Here at the Art of Hosting in Chicago working with 70 people fromthe restorative justice field and the early childhood education world. Inspired by a design from Tenneson Woolf and an invitation from Teresa Posakony, my new friend Anamaria Accove and I hosted a lovely exploration of the Cynefin framework using movement and physical embodiment to help people understand the difference between the domains. The exercise went this way:
We taped the framwork on the floor, which is the standard way I teach it. Before we talked about it at all, we invited the group to divide into four groups and follow our instructions.
The first exercise was a simple challenge: to arrange the group by height. There were different ways this was accomplished but everyone settled on a linear shape with the tallest at one end and the shortest at the other.
The second exercise was for people to arrange themselves by age and year of birth. A complicated problem for sure, and there was a variety of good solutions that emerged. Of course in order to do this you need a little analysis, both of the data and a good model fro representing it. But having arranged themselves, each selection was accurate and useful.
In the third exercise we asked people to arrange themselves by place of origin. This wasn’t a particularly complex task, but it did result in an experience of emergence. Again it required conversation, story telling and some meaning making (like, from my mother’s womb? From my hometown? From the place I left this morning?). What emerged were several interesting ways of representing the data, but we honed in on one of the two maps. By asking one or two people where they originated from we were able to predict where the rest of group was from with startling accuracy. What emerged was a map of the United States that came with its own information and data.
For the fourth exercise we asked people to arrange themselves like five year old children at a birthday party right after the cake had been eaten. Utter chaos.
Finally we posed a question from the realm of disorder. We asked the group to arrange themselves by temperature. “What?” This really helped to show that disorder was not the same as chaos. Disorder invites us to lean in and figure out what is going on before we see if this is a simple or complex task. In that sense it is the opposite of chaos, in that disorder itself is a container. This is such an important domain to understand and to understand especially how we default to assuming how to solve problems without first defining the scope of what we are looking at.
After running this exercise we taught the Cynefin framework but naming the domains, explaining the cause and effect relationships and explaining the decision making schemes for each domain. Many people reported that they understood it at a deeper and more practical level and especially in the domain of disorder which gets a short shrift in the wider world. Folks that were familiar with the framework but who had not groked the concept of disorder got it this time! That is partly down to me learning how to teach it better as well, by characterizing the disorder domain as one that present problems that stop us in our tracks and force us to say “WTF?” WTF has now been translated by the group in this context as “Where’s the Family?” which is actually a pretty good strategy for dealing with disorder!
Last year in Slovenia, a group of Art of Hosting practitioners gatherd for a week at a well loved 17th century manor to be together. I suppose you could call it a “conference” but we all called it a “Learning Village.” And it was a learning village. The agenda we set was for a five day Open Space gathering. there was music and local wine drinking and a learning journey on the land, and the teenagers cleaned out an old stone chapel that hadn’t been dusted for 300 years. We talked about our work, did tai chi and aikido, played football and made art. Our kids fell in love and broke up!
It was a village, and there was tons of learning. And no action plans, no next steps, no commitments, no necessary reports. A few months later there was a harvest document lovingly stewarded by a few people. This is all appropriate and good.
And sometimes, there are gatherings where next steps and action plans are important and necessary and are the reason why we are gathering. But always? No.
I have begun to notice that when I see conference agendas with “next steps and action plans” attached to them (and especially attached to the end of the last day when everyone is tired and most people have left), I become sad. Actually and emotionally a little sad. i think it is because doing this unconsciously reduces the pure experience of being together and intenstly learning into something “productive” in order to justify doing it.
So please, think really carefully about whether or not you gathering needs action steps, especially if you are planning a conference where the purpose is for people to simply be together learning and connecting. That alone is significant action. Do we really need to justify it any further?
Today was a day of hosting on webinars, with a group looking at the emerging edges of the non-profit sector in BC and with a group od UNited Church ministers and lay leaders who are hosting transformation and learning together in a community of practice. At the end of our second call, this Thomas Merton quote was shared with us:
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
This resonates strongly with the tack Meg Wheatley takes in her no book, So Far From Home, which is a call to spiritual warriorship, despite everything.
Several really stunning insights fell at me feet today, from this five hours of online discovery. Forexample, a friend working with victims of sexual abuse in northern BC talked about how people who do this work are not burnt out by the work – humans have been caring resliiently for each other for eons. What burns them out is maintaining the systems that formalize that work of community. As humans we are easy in relationship, but our energy and lives are sapped by turning away from what nurtures us and tending nto a system of professional practice, regulations, administrative accountabilities and resource deployment that leaves us tapped out.
Or another insight today that the real practice of making change is making space for dissent so that there can be an authentic yes from the centre of the work. Or that evolution is a difficult metaphor for change work, because so much of what we are aiming to change has been put in place intentionally and which purpose.
We are one learning journeys with these groups, and these little insights trickle in like sunlight when you are listening openly and sharing in each other’s discovery. Nice way to end the week.