I think that doing strategic work with organizations and communities is really about learning. If a group is trying to confront newness and changes in its environment and needs to come up with new strategies to address those changes, then it needs to learn.
I love the term “desire lines.” Most of my initial work with organizations tries to get at the desire lines in the organization; the patterns embedded in the culture that help or hinder change and resilience. Naming and making visible these entrained desire lines (including the ones that that group takes into the darkness of conflict and unresourcefulness) is a helpful exercise in beginning to first reflect and then disrupt and develop capacity. When a group can see their patterns, and see which are helpful and which are not, they can make the choice to develop new ones or strengthen the stuff that works.
When problems are complex, then the people in the group need to focus on learning strategies in order to discover and try new things, rather than adopt a best practice from elsewhere. It is, as Steve Wheeler says in this video, the difference between designed environments and personal choice:
“Students will always find their own unique pathways for learning. They will always choose their own personal tools and technologies. Our job is not to try and create pathways for them, but to help them create the pathways for themselves and the scaffold and support them as they go through those pathways.”
Hosting groups is always about learning – in fact one core question of the Art of Hosting community is “what if learning was the form of leadership required now?” To support learning, help groups find the desire lines for learning and good strategic work to address change that is owned by the group will follow. That is how learning builds capacity and capacity builds sustainability.
Reflecting these days on some two day courses I have coming up, including one on complexity and social change, one on invitation practice and one on Open Space.
Each of these courses is workshop to introduce people to a practice or a set of practices, as opposed to techniques and skills. In each of these workshops people will come away with an ability to go into the practice, literally as artists. These are not technical trainings designed to download procedures and methods. They are courses that will leave you ready to practice, ready to make mistakes and learn as you go, and ready to improve.
It’s always hard to explain to people when they come on these courses that they will not leave as competent practitioners of the stuff they are learning. All artists make mistakes when they are first using a tool. What’s most important is that you have a way of developing your mastery with a tool, which is to say that you have a framework that helps you understand what you are doing and how well your are doing it. In traditional settings, mentorship is an important piece of this, to help one develop mastery from every attempt as you learn. The point is that these kinds of tools are useful in complexity, meaning that they are context and practitioner dependant. How you use these tools and where you use them matters.
Teaching, therefore, requires a disruption to the pedagogy of filling another person’s brain and body with competence. In my courses, my favourite answer to questions about application is “it depends.” But what doesn’t change over time is the body of theory that needs to inform one’s practice.
Theory is the constant, and therefore a heuristic (a basic set of measurable principles) are they way to develop practice that is appropriate in context. By theory I mean a serious understanding from natural sciences that underpin the ways systems work.
Courses that are pure theory are generally not helpful without grounding them in practice, and courses that are just collections of tools and practices are somewhat useful but can lead practitioners astray if they don;t understand why things work (or they aren’t able to see why things aren’t likely to work). So my basic approach to teaching these kinds of things is to use the following heuristic:
- Theory
- Framework
- Practice examples
- Application
Teaching theory – in my case usually complexity theory – is critical for setting the groundwork for the practices that follow. If you don’t understand the nature of the context you are working in, you are likely to make serious errors in applying practices: linear problem solving doesn’t work in non-linear settings. That seem intuitive but you need to know why and be able to explain it.
Frameworks are helpful because they provide touchstones to connect theory to practice. When we were teaching the harvesting course last year, we came up with the mnemonic PLUME to describe five heuristics that help practitioners design methods that are coherent with good theory. (We have a new one for the invitation course by the way: VALUE. You can learn more about it on the course or in the blog posts that come as a result of the teaching). Sometimes that framework is Cynefin, sometimes it’s the chaordic path.
The important thing about a framework is that it helps you to create something and then it can fall away and what you have created can stand on its own. If your practice relies on maintaining the integrity of the framework then your framework isn’t effective. This is an issue I see sometimes with things like sociocracy where in poor application it’s important that people retain accountability to the framework (but not even necessarily the theory). Frameworks should be important enough containers to inspire grounded and coherent action, but not so critical that the action depends on the framework.
Dave Snowden uses the metaphor of the scaffold, which is useful. Build a scaffold to build your house. But if the scaffolding is a part of your house and your house depends on the scaffolding for it’s structural integrity, you haven’t succeeded
Once we are grounded in theory and have a way of carrying it with us, we can share practices that help practitioners to ground this in real life. I always combine this with an opportunity to apply the learning on real projects. This gives people an opportunity to work together to make sense of what they are learning. It means that folks working on projects get a variety of perspectives from people who have just learned something, including naive and oblique perspectives, which is good when you are trying to do new things. For those that are giving their help with projects, they learn a lot by stepping into the coach or critic role, as they are forced to think about what they have been learning in an application context.
So that’s my basic pedagogy these days. I’ve been on a few facilitation workshops over the years and been shocked at two things: the lack of theory (so how do I know how your methods work) and the over reliance on tips and tricks, which is basically a kind of addictive mechanism for people learning facilitation. many people are super-interested in adding a few things to their tool box, and while I love helping people add tools, I would never give an apprentice carver a knife without helping them understand why this thing works and what happens if you use it incorrectly. And I would never say “here’s a knife, now go make your masterpiece.” Their first effort is going to be terrible, and that’s what practice is. We need more folks teaching the art of facilitation as artists teaching artists and less shady selling of recipes and tools for guaranteed success.
Last weekend I took a ramble across Bowen Island, where I live, with a friend and colleague, Annemarie Travers. Annemarie and I have been teaching the Leadership 2020 program for a number of years now and we both love walking: she on the long pilgrimages of the Camino and Shikoku and me in the mountains of southern British Columbia. We are also both interested in managing in complexity.
My friends over at the Social Labs Revolution website have been fielding questions about the prototyping phase of labwork and today published a nice compilation of prototyping resources. It’s worth a visit. It got me thinking this morning about some of the tools I use for planning these days.
As Bronagh Gallagher and I have been musing about our offering on complexity, facilitation and social justice, we have been discussing the shift in activism from ideology to evolutionary. Ideological movements try to coalesce activities and people along a line towards a fixed end state. Evolutionary movements start with intentions, principles and move outward in multiple directions along vectors. They adjust and learn as they go, and they both respond to and change their context.
This nice post from Network Centered Advocacy capgtues what I’m talking about by first looking at how a lacrosse player’s artistry evolves in changing contexts and then concludes with these important paragraphs:
Being labeled a “movement” is a reflection of evolutionary status. One person or organization does not qualify as a movement, yet there is no set size of a movement. Movements are messy, complex and organic. The movement label is shorthand, an inclusive term of many independent leaders and supporters, their support structures, all that they can tap into, as well as their capacity to disagree as often as they align on work.
Movements are a reflection of self-directed, adaptive, resilient, self-sacrificing, supported and persistent initiatives to work on complex problems. There are no movement structures, but instead a movement is a mass migration of people, organizations, businesses and communities unified in common story, driving to shift culture, policy, behavior and norms. Successful movements build and transform the landscape as they progress providing a base for further progress. A quick scan of the first few pages of google news for” movements” produces a snapshot of the current movements that come to mind, including the movement against fracking, the climate change movement, the tea party movement, Occupy, #blacklivesmatter, the anti-austerity movement, the dump-Trump movement, the maker-movement, the LGBTQ movement–the list goes on.
A key evolution point in a movement’s trajectory is the transition away from any single point of failure, to be loosely structured and resilient enough to absorb setbacks. The agility and adaptive characteristics of movements are fueled not only by personal stakes, individualism, driven leadership, passion and local control, but also by unpredictable solidarity and a distributed organizing approach that resists centralization. The difference between an organization, coalition, centralized campaign and a genuine movement is the way each fuels smart local initiatives and the ways leaders align power.
Building a movement is actually more aptly perceived as unleashing a movement, creating new spaces that help the movement surge in wider, expansive and still supportive directions. As a movement gains organizing momentum, strategies shift to broadly unfold and push a wide set of actions that draw opposition thin rather than clustering and making defense easy. This distributed layout requires a shift in thinking and strategy.
The key thing to notice here is that culture is changed by evolving movements, not linear programs. Movements are not led TOWARDS a goal, but rather emanate from a set of connected and coherent stories, actions and intentions, and self-correct, fail and adapt as they go. This is true whether the venue of action is organizational or societal. Cultures are complex and require complexity to change them. Diving more into the examples given in the quote will give you more insight into how these movements have become a part of, and transformative agents within, the cultures they are aiming to change.