Spending a nice New Year’s Day alone at home. Pot of tea, beautiful sunny day that I will shortly head out into for a walk, and then home maybe to play some music, restring the guitar, learn a jig or a reel or two on the flute…
Listening this morning to CBC Ideas who are doing a great show on the number “50” and, because Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species at age 50, they have just played Baba Brinkman’s rap “Artificial Selection.”
One little line stood out, something about the fact that in evolution, little differences are what provide us with evolutionary potential. This immediately rang bells for me as I’ve been thinking about this in the work of strategy, whether that means creating a ten year plan for an organization or simply exploring options for moving forward on a discrete piece of work. Finding the pathway of best evolutionary potential requires that we introduce diversity and difference into the system. Working together across difference, as my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart would say, is a strategic and evolutionary imperative. Accentuating the differences between each other is crucial for learning new things, seeing the world in new ways and finding new pathways out of complex tangles.
This is one of the reasons I like Open Space Technology so much. It brings a huge variety of exploration to a common topic to create multiple pathways forward for exploration. Buit whatever we can do to accentuate our differences and work together across them actually improves the evolutionary potential of the system we are in.
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Thinking that the facilitator has the answers is one of the biggest problems with the way people are entrained to relate to facilitators. Because you are guiding a process, many people will feel that you are also an authority on what to do. They will often stop and ask questions about how things are going to work.
Imagine: you have just done an elegant and energetic Open Space opening and you are ready to hand the process over to the group. You have slowly and clearly explained the instructions. You have showed everyone how the process works. You have restated the theme of the gathering to refocus everyone on the task at hand. Just as you start to walk out of the circle and let the group take over, a hand goes up “Excuse me, but what if no one comes to my session?” And then another “Yes and what happens if there are two things going on at the same time and I want to do both ” And so on…
Here you have a choice. Answering the questions stops everything. And truthfully your answer SHOULD be “I don’t know” but you are also trapped in the pattern of “facilitator as expert” and so you try to answer…”well, you could wait a while and see who comes…and you, you can move around between sessions or maybe see if you can get a session moved to another time slot….”
“Yes but what if…”
And on it goes. And you are not getting to work. And those that are ready are also not getting to work, which is REALLY frustrating because what you are actually doing is indulging people’s anxieties. Anytime you answer a question about a hypothetical situation, you are not helping. You are entraining the group into your perceived expertise instead of letting them discover possibilities on their own.
So there is a better choice and it’s one that I’ve been using for a couple of years now. In the second before you let people get to work you ask the group a question: “Put your hand up if you have enough clarity from the instruction I just gave to get down to work.” Many, many hands should go up. Invite people to keep their hands up, and then utter these magic words.
“If any of you have questions about the process, ask these people.” And then remove yourself from the situation.
This does two things. First it immediately makes visible how many people are ready to get going and that shows everyone that any further delay is just getting in the way of work. And second, it helps people who are confused to see that there are people all around them that can help them out. And that is the simplest way to make a group’s capacity visible and active.
You will have to brave a little fire from time to time. Even after doing this recently I had a person say “Can I just ask a question for clarification, though?” to which I replied “no.” She was shocked. I let people get to work and then went over to talk to her myself.
“What can I help you with?”
She got a little angry. “I had a question about notes.”
“Sure what is it?”
“Well I’m not going to ask it now. I think it was a question that the whole group should have heard.”
You need to help people see that their anxiety and their ego are a potent mix. It may well have been a great question about taking notes. It may well have been valuable on some level for everyone to hear. But almost certainly it would not have been more valuable than the group becoming aware of its own capacity and getting down to work. And if I couldn’t answer the question one on one, then I was left wondering if it wasn’t just going to be some clever grandstanding.
Getting myself out of the middle of the work is hard not only because my ego gets tickled a little by my own role, but because other people’s egos conspire to keep me in the middle. Ever since I have used this technique, turning the group’s attention to its own resourcefulness has never failed.
And as a shameless plug, we’ll cover more techniques like this in my Open Space Technology facilitator training June 2-3, 2016 in Vancouver. I hate adding commercials at the end of a blog post, but click on through if this is something you’d like to learn more about!
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A small elevator speech I shared on the OSLIST yesterday:
Self organization works by a combination of attractors and boundaries. Attractors are things that draw components of a system towards themselves (gravity wells, a pile of money left on the ground, an invitation). Boundaries (or constraints) are barriers that constrain the elements in a system (an atmosphere, the edges of an island, the number of syllables in a haiku)
Working together, attractors and boundaries define order where otherwise there is chaos. We can be intentional about some of these, but not all of them. Within complex systems, attractors and constraints create the conditions to enable emergence. What emerges isn’t always desirable and is never predictable, but it has the property of being new and different from any of the individual elements within the system.
Self-organization is where we get new, previously unknown things from.
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I get asked this question a lot. It makes me laugh because truthfully there is very little “technology” to an Open Space Technology meeting. You just need some paper and markers and some tape and away you go. In fact you don’t even need that.
So why is it called “Technology?” Well, I have known the story for a long time, but today I goaded my old friend Harrison Owen to tell it again, and he did, beautifully, on the OSLIST:
It was 1989 in Bombay (now Mumbai). My friend and colleague, one V.S. Mahesh, a senior member of the Tata Administrative Service Corps, had invited me to do a series of lectures, in addition to an Open Space conference in Goa. How could I resist?
At the conclusion of the several programs, Mahesh convened a press conference for the business reporters of India. This was rather a formal event, and in the way of such things in India, Mahesh’s introduction of myself seemed to go on forever. He covered my CV in detail, including articles and activities I had forgotten, one of which was a review of a colleague’s book entitled, “Global Management Principles.” This 725 page monster described the work of 4 management theorists under such headings as, “Primal Management,” “Developmental Management,” – and last, “Metaphysical Management,” …and that was me.
As Mahesh drew to a heart stopping close, he said… It is my pleasure to introduce Harrison Owen … and Harrison will you please explain to the gentlemen of the press what you mean by Metaphysical Management and Open Space…Technology. And he sat down.
I think I could have shot him. “Metaphysical Management” was the invention of a colleague. I think I know what he was getting at, but it surely would not have been my choice of wording. As for Open Space Technology, that was, I do believe, Mahesh’s invention. “Open Space,” I admit to… as for “Technology” – I can only think that Mahesh got on a roll. “Metaphysical Management” was pretty cool. But “Open Space” was a little weak. Needed a tweak. “Technology” might just make it into the titles of the next day’s articles.
Mahesh was right. The Press took the bait. And we have been stuck with it ever since.
So that’s the story… as best as I can tell it. But I think there is a moral. If we ever take what we are doing too seriously, we are definitely in trouble. What we “do” is really a joke. Truthfully, it all happens by itself. We just take naps… if we are smart.
So that’s the answer. And like all good Harrison Owen stories, it comes with a bit of self-deprecating humour and some very good advice.
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A post I made to the OSLIST today…
I seek simplicity in trying to describe where and how Open Space does it’s magic.
One of the ways I have had excellent success over the years in describing this work is derived from David Snowden’s work on the Cynefin framework.
The short story is this:
We are faced all the time with problems that are basically knowable, and problems that aren’t. Knowable problems mean that with the right knowledge and expertise, they can be fixed. A technical team can come together and analyse the causes, work with what’s available and craft a solution. Then they can get an implementation plan in place and go ahead and do it. These kinds of problems have a start line and a finish line. When you are done, you are done. Building a bridge is one of those kinds of problems. You build it and there is no tolerance for failure. It needs to be failsafe.
Open Space doesn’t work well for those kinds of problems because the solution is basically already known, or at least knowable.
Then there are problems for which no know solution exists, and even if you did get a solution, you can’t really “solve” the problem because the problem is due to a myriad of causes and is itself emergent. For example, racism. Look around and you will find very few people that identify themselves as racists, but look at the stats for Canadian society for example and you see that non-white people are trailing in every indicator of societal success. Essentially you are seeing the results of a racist society but no racists anywhere. This is an emergent problem. Racism itself is a self-organizing phenomenon, notwithstanding the few people that actively engineer racist environments. Such a problem didn’t really start anywhere and it can’t really end either. What is needed is a way of addressing it, moving the system away from the negative indicators and towards something else.
In other words, this is a complex problem.
The way to solve complex problems is to create many “strange attractors” around which the system can organize itself differently. Open Space nis the best method I know of for creating such strange attractors, as they are born from the passion and responsibility of those that want to create change, and they are amplified by people coming together to work on these things.
It’s “post and host” rather than “command and control.”
And because you can’t be sure if things are going to work out, you have to adopt a particular mindset to your initiative: one that is “safe to fail.” In other words, if it doesn’t work, you stop doing it. If it does work, you do more of it. And all the way along you build in learning, so that the system can see how change is made and be drawn towards those initiatives that are currently making a difference. Certainly this kind of problem solving is not useful for building a bridge, as you cannot afford a failure there. But for problems with no known solutions, it is brilliant.
Harrison has spent decades outlining this simplicity in even less words than I have now and his writing and thinking is, and continues to be far ahead of it’s time and maybe a little under appreciated because it is delivered in simple terms like “don’t work so hard.” But ultimately this is the best and most important advice for working in complex systems.
Open Space. Do it. Learn. Do it again. Don’t work so hard.
More than that really starts to build in the delusion that people can possibly know what to do. From that place solutions will be deluded. That they may work is pure luck. Open Space offers us a disciplined approach to addressing complexity in an ongoing way. Don’t be fooled by its simplicity.