This week I have been a part of a series of meetings, gatherings and workshops around the release of a new book on Dialogic Organizational Development. I contributed a chapter to the book on hosting containers.
Yesterday, the lead authors hosted a day long conference on the themes contained in the book and we delivered some workshops and hosted some dialogue on the emergence of this term and the implications for the field. Today we are at the Academy of Management conference being held in Vancouver where the lead authors, and some of the rest of us, are delivering a professional development workshop.
Over the past few days I’ve been reflecting on relationships between practitioners and academics, especially as it pertains to the development of learning and innovation in this field. Traditionally, academics are suspicious of practitioners who fly by the seat of their pants, who don’t ground their experience in theory and who tell stories that validate their biases. Practitioners are traditionally suspicious of academics being stuffy, jargony and inaccessible, too much in the mind and engaged in indulgent personal research projects. Secretly I think, each has been jealous of the other a bit: academics coveting the freedom of practice and practitioners wanting the legitimacy of academics.
One of the things I like about this new book is that Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak brought together people from both fields to write the book. Gervase is really clear that the role of researchers in this work is to help practitioners understand why things work. This is a really welcome invitation as I have been working for a year or more led by Dave Snowden’s exhortation to us in the practitioner field to “understand why things work before you repeat them.” For practitioners it is important to engage with theory. If you don’t, you miss out on a tremendous amount of generative material that will make you a better designer and a better practitioner.
I am now interested in bleeding these distinctions between academics and practitioners and I think we both need to do this. I think we are discovering that these days, practice is the fastest way to advance the field. In fact we find researchers now trailing along behind practitioners sifting through the mess we leave when we do projects willy nilly, whether well planned or delivered based on a gut instinct. Our practice evolves quickly because we only need work to be “good enough” in order to use it as a platform for further development. We publish stories and learning instantaneously on our blogs and face book pages and listervs and twitter feeds. Once academics get their hands on the data and take the time to analyze it and publish it, the practice field has moved quickly and may have evolved in ways that the academic conversation has been unable to anticipate.
For practitioners though it’s worth pausing from time to to time and working with the people that are trying to tell you what you are doing. There is a tremendoous body of theory in philosophy, neurology, cognitive science, anthropology, and the natural sciences that is directly applicable to our field. I find that many practitioners have one or two blind spots or reactions to theory: they dismiss it as too dense to get, they borrow it badly (usually as a metaphor, such as quantum physics being misused to talk about intention and influence) or they dive it. I have been guilty of these in the past, and these days I’m trying to embrace theory much more deeply and work with researchers who are studying our field including folks like Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles, Elizabeth Hunt and Trevor Maber, just to name a few recent ones. I invite you to do the same.
A couple of good blog posts in my feed this morning that provoked some thinking. These quotes reminded me how much evaluation and planning is directed towards goals, targets and patterns that cause us to look for data that supports what we want to see rather than learning what the data is telling us about what’s really going on. These helped me to reflect on a conversation I had with a client yesterday, where we designed a process for dealing with this.
Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and I are snuggled into the attic rooms at the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B in downtown Denver, listening to some jazz, eating some pasta and salad and finishing up a productive design day together. We are preparing to teach the Art of Hosting to 60 leaders from the community at St. John’s in the Wilderness Cathedral in Denver. St. John’s is a high Anglican Gothic Episcopalian cathedral in the heart of Denver. We have been working with the cathedral community over the past couple of years to build the capacity among the 1700 members to be able to host and engage in conversations that matter.
As we’ve done this work, I’m struck at once by how simple it really is and how little space we make for it in our lives. People are busy, rushed and worried about deadlines and results and as a collective society we tend to defer the slow and clear attention to the quality of how we are together. Quality gets sacrificed at the alter of timely outcomes.
And of course this is no more ironic than in the myriad church communities we have been working with over the years, which, at their best, host a place to slow down and consider the nature of the relationship between peoples and to attend to the sacred quality of the spaces in between.
For me there is something in the richness of returning to the simplest way we know of to slow down and host good conversations. This evening as I write by the fire, Caitlin and Tenneson are preparing a simple teaching of Circle practice. Earlier we were thinking about the simplest way we know of to discuss the relationship of our traditional notions of chaos and order.
While I have been diving deep into the nuanced explorations of the Cynefin framework, it is becoming necessary to find ways to invite people easily into the mind shift that complexity requires. In the Art of Hosting community we have, for a long time, been inspired by Dee Hock’s work on chaordic organization. At the simplest level noticing the polarity of chaos and order, and noticing how our reactions to chaos and uncertainty often take us to high levels of control becomes an entry way into a different way to think about strategies for achieving goals in the complex domain.
So tomorrow, I’m looking forward to Tenneson’s leading on the chaordic path, a simple teaching worth returning to.
Interesting paper released that demands that policy makers adopt a complexity approach to policy making around environmental decision making. These principles are useful, and can you see how they would apply to social systems too?
- Create policies that have legs: When developing a policy to manage fisheries or allocate water distribution in agriculture, for example, make it flexible so it can continue to effectively manage the resource, no matter how it changes in the future.
- Support policies that encourage ecosystem diversity: Opt for plans that encourage organism and habitat diversity, because casting a larger net will let the policy be most responsive no matter what happens in the future.
- Invest more in monitoring: Don’t just collect data, but actively analyze the data, drawing connections to the past and assessing what that relationship might mean for the future. Do more field-based monitoring and less predictive modeling.
- Expect a future that’s different from the past: Move away from a “better safe than sorry” approach to management and assume the ecosystem will shift in unexpected ways. Design policies that can adapt based on how the ecosystem changes.
Good, basic complexity principles applied to the management of resources, an area often dominated by predictive, target-based planning approaches.
via Embrace unknowns, opt for flexibility in environmental policies | UW Today.
Two Tim Merry references in a row. Yesterday Tim posted a video blog on planning vs. preparation. It is a useful and crude distinction about how to get ready for action in the complicated vs. complex domains of the Cynefin framework. I left a comment there about a sports metaphor that occurred to me when Tony Quinlan was teaching us about the differences between predictive anticipation (used in the complicated domain) and anticipatory awareness (used in the complex domain).
In fact this has been the theme of several conversations today. Complicated problems require Tim’s planning idea: technical skills and expertise, recipes and procedures and models of forecasting and backcasting using reliable data and information. Complex problems require what Dave Snowden has named an artisian approach which is characterized by anticipatory awareness, theory and practice (praxis) and methods of what they call “side casting” which is simply treating the problem obliquely and not head on.
When I was listening to Tony teach this last month, I thought that this distinction can be crudely illustrated with the difference between playing golf and playing football (proper football, mind. The kind where you actually use your feet.) In golf there is a defined objective and reasonably knowable context, where you can measure the distance to the hole, know your own ability with golf clubs, take weather conditions into account and plan a strategic line of attack that will get you there in the fewest strokes possible.
In football it’s completly different. The goal is the goal, or more precisely to score more goals than your opponent, but getting there requires you to have all kinds of awareness. More often than not, your best strategy might be to play the ball backwards. It may be wise to move the ball to the goal in AS MANY passes as possible, in a terribly inefficient way because doing so denies your opponent time on the ball. And the context for action is constantly changing and impossible to fully understand. And the context also adjusts as you begin to get entrained in patterns. If you stick to a long ball game, the defending team can adjust, predict your next move and foil the strategy. You have to evolve or be owned.
This is, I believe, what drives many Americans crazy about world football. There is rarely a direct path to goal and teams can go for whole games simply holding on to the ball and then make one or two key finishing moves. Some call that boring, and it is, if you are in a culture that is about achieving the goal as quickly as possible and moving on. And God knows we are in a culture that loves exactly that.
You plan golf holes by pre-selecting the clubs you will use in each shot and making small adjustments as you go. In football you prepare by doing drills that improve your anticipatory awareness, help you operate in space and become more and more physically fit, so that you have more physical options. You become resilient. Yes you can scout an opponent and plan a strategy and a tactic, but football is won on the pitch and not in the strategy room. Golf is very often won in the strategy room, as long as your execution is masterful.
It’s a crude distinction and one has to be mindful all the time of downright folly of “this vs, that”, but sometimes these kinds of distinctions are useful to illustrate a point.