Last Friday night, beneath the lights on the Bowen island football pitch, my co-ed soccer league team won our Cup Final 5-0. We played the best team in the league for the Cup and although were prepared for a tight game. we were rather stunned with the result. What happened far exceeded our expectations of what was possible. We played unbelieveably well.
Football (I use the global term for “soccer” here) is a team game that is much like other team games in life. It features constrained action, bounded and with a purpose. It requires different people to perform different roles, sometimes at a distance from each other and it requires tremendous levels of improvisation to deal with the flow and constantly changing conditions. At the best of times it is an easy game to play but a hard game to play well, and it is an incredible game when your team plays out of its skin as we did on Friday. In my work life I work with some pretty good teams, especially with my friends in the Berkana Collaborative with whom I have tight and deep relationships. But playing on a football team for an hour or so gives one a clear and bounded sense of the possible, and I have been harvesting some of the key elements that went into making up my peak experience.
1. Train and learn together. It should go without saying that a team that does not train or learn together is not going to create an incredible experience right out of the box. A foundation of basic skills is essential. You have to know how to do the elementary things that you are being asked to do. None of us on the team are professionals, although some of us have had good coaching in the past. And because this is a recreational league we didn’t do much in the way of training together apart from on game days. But on game days we always arrived quite early and worked on skills, worked on patterns and ran some basic passing, shooting and team drills to get us in the mood for the game and to learn a little. Practicing and training together, in a positive spirit of encouragement and curiosity is a fundamental basis for good collaboration. We were never critical with each other, and always helped each other learn to do things we hadn’t been able to do before. In this way I think we all grew a little during the season.
2. Be friends. You are not going to perform anything near well if you don’t like each other. A case in point is this year French World Cup footbal team. A team of incredible invidiual talent, they ended up imploding, picking nfights with each other and going on strike with the result that they clattered out of the tournament’s early stages. When he was interview on CNN about what was wrong with the French team, German great Jurgen Klinnsman said simply “they don’t like each other.” You may think that being friends is a kind of kindergarten approach to getting things done but trying doing incredible work with people you dislike, distrust or haven’t forgiven. Good luck with that.
3. Have an obvious purpose. My friend Toke Moeller says that “purpose is the invisible leader.” So it is. On Friday our purpose was to win the game and the tournament. That was what we were there to do. We didn’t need a mission statement or a set of objectives. We had a simple set of measureables, the most obvious of which was the difference in goals scored. To acheive our purpose, we needed to score goals in their net and keep goals out of our net. But as clear as our purpose was, it would also be fair to say that we had a clear plan, although it was not a very precise one – it was rather based on principles. Basically we decided to attack on the wings, get past their midfield to where their defense was weakest and collapse our defenders on their forwards, denying them the centre of the field. Given these straightforward tactics, which were concrete and easy to remember, execution was easy. As a defender if I was playing too far outside, I could make a mental check in and move towards the middle. If my partner was passing the ball up the middle I could remind her to get it up the wings. We were able to adjust on the fly and feedback was welcome. We played dynamic football, but committed to our roles and responsibilities. We were able to be creative and supportive and flowing.
4. Communicate well and often. Football, like basketball and hockey and other flow sports, moves and changes quickly. Communication is essemtial. In fact it may have been the difference between our two teams on Friday night. We are chatty and talkative, communicating information to each other to alert players to threats, openings, available support, opportunities and options. Sometimes the communication is subtle – a hand waving to indicate that you are open – and other times it is panic laden and full of passion and roar. First and foremost it is clear and factual; second it is encouraging of stuff that is working; third it is helpful criticism to shift strategies or play a little differently.
5. Be aware of the whole field. This is another subtlety that separates good team from poor ones. In collaborative activities there is very little room for people to collapse their focus down on invididual needs. This awareness is a tricky thing to cultivate in an individualist culture, where we are rewarded for personal accomplishment. On Friday I was spending a lot of time tightly marking Team White’s striker, a tough playing and talented Brazilian named Gelson. For a lot of the match my focus was on him but the moment the ball was away from us, I could literally feel my awareness expand to contain the whole field. It helped me to be able to suggest options to our midfielders as I was seeing things unfold from my back line position. This total team awareness was perhaps the best indication that I was in a flow state all night.
6. Do your job and trust others to do theirs. Football is a great sport because you cannot do everything. The division of labour means that you have to focus on your job, figure out ways to connect to others and trust them to run with what you offer them. In football as in improv, the idea is to make your partners look good. A well weighted ball from the back helps midfielders chase it down the pitch. A good recovery from a rebound keeps your goalkeeper riding a clean sheet. On Friday I chose the job of marking Gelson, which meant that I was not going to be anywhere near the opposing team’s goal. No glory for me on the night except through the fact that we weren’t scored on. If I could keep Gelson and the other strikers from having any chance on goal, it would be easy for me trust our strikers to slot goals, and that was just what they did. It’s a relief not to have to do it all. It conserves energy, allows me to focus and takes advantage of the good relations we have.
7. Be generous. I think more than anything else on Friday night, I learned that football is a game of generosity. For the vast majority of the time, your job on a football pitch is to give and create. In the improv world we call this “making offers.” Generosity on the pitch means delivering useful passes, creating space by pulling your markers away from the action, helping support the play going forward by providing options so that we don’t give the ball away. In football, greedy players are vilified unless they are of the absolute highest talent. And even then, when they miss, especially when they had better options open, they are shunned. A shunned team member is impossible to play with and in fact becomes a liability as they create a hole on the pitch and bad feelings that pervade the relationships on the team. So generosity, gifting, creates the best teams. A gift economy of attention, resources, and opportunities creates the conditions for shared glory and accomplishment.
These little learnings are perhaps elementary, but think about how difficult they are to execute in daily life. In your organization, have you got these all right? Is there something you AREN’T doing? Are there elements of collaboration that you aren’t paying attention to? And what other lessons should we glean from peak flow experiences in collaboration and team work?
I’m at a Casey Family Programs conference in Seattle that is looking at applying science to early learning in kids. The people here are learning about brain science and the results of early adverse childhood experiences and what the science can tell us about how we should react in the policy sphere to create healthy kids, families and societies.
The keynote is by Jack Shonkoff, who is a leading brain researcher in this field and who has been sharing some of the basics of what we know about brain science, relationships and healthy societies. Here are some of his key points:
Experiences build brain architecture. What happens is that neural circuits develop to reinforce behaviours, emotions, motor skills and so on. Babies brains build a basic architecture by forming synapses and then a more complex architecture develops on top of that. For the first three year of life, babies’ brains form 700 synapses a second. Genes provide the template for this work, but experiences turn the genes on and off. So early life experiences are built into our bodies, encoded in our brains – for better or for worse. To promote healthy brian architecture you need language rich environments, supportive relationships and “serve and return” interactions with adults are the three things that promote health brain architecture. Prolonged stress and reduced exposure to supportive relationships – in other words, what are known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) – create the conditions for heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases that are a result of disrupted development of organ systems.
Toxic stress derails healthy development. In babies, stress is alleviated by contact with a caring adult. If a child is exposed to stress in large amounts, the brain loses the ability to turn off the stress responses, and the stress becomes toxic. Nurturing, stable and engaging environments are the antidote to stress. It’s interesting that in North America we don’t treat stress with much compassion – “get over it” is a common response. In the USA especially, a hyper individualistic culture diminishes the importance of stress.
Some positive stress is a good thing however – what we call in the facilitation world “The Groan Zone” which helps learning and helps healthy development. There is always stress associated with learning new things or doing things for the first time. In healthy development, adults help kids with this kind of stress and the kids learn strategies for dealing with stress, which amps up the heart rate and blodd pressure and then reduces it. Supportive relationships help children to learn adaptive and coping skills.
Tolerable stress is serious and temporary – death of a family member, natural disasters, war and violence, an experience of extreme despair and other things that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. This kind of stress is also buffered by supportive relationships. Families, extended families, friends, neighbours, supported programs need to step in and provide the buffering that reduces stress to baseline levels.
Toxic stress however is prolonged activation of the stress response in the absence of protective relationships. This includes living alone in violence, or with adults that neglect children or who are unable to care for children because the are sick or depressed. If you don’t have access to caring adults, the stress becomes toxic and the stress system is built into your brain architecture, placing hardship on your organs, your nervous system and your hormones. This is the kind of stress that leads to long term health and development issues.
Neglect can be as powerful as abuse. It doesn’t matter to the baby’s brain whether your lack of relationships come from neglect or abuse. It has the same effect on the brain, and it keeps the stress levels high. Seven hundred synapses a second don’t care what an adult is doing if there are no compassionate relationships. Reducing stress by reducing the numbers and severity of adverse early childhood experiences results in better outcomes. This doesn’t mean that we have to solve poverty and subsistence abuse overnight before we get better outcomes – it means we need to make policy decisions that ask the question about whether we are supporting healthy and supportive relationships. In other words, the social safety net needs to work both at the systemic level to reduce inequalities, and at the acute level to create spaces where people can learn and experience healthy supportive relationships at every age.
I’ve been listening here thinking about the implications for this in organizations and communities. To sacrifice relationships at the alter of work or learning is to not only inhibit the sustainability of what is going on, but also creates the conditions for unhealthy families, groups, communities and organizations.
Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton. We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.
Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems. We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.
For me, lots of good insights are coming up. A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:
- The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW. How can we deliver services differently? How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate? How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us? These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up. Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
- New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place. But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old. Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies. While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old. Ignoring power is naive.
- A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.
Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur. That alone is not innovation. The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level. The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families. Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues. Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.
Meetings reflect the basic operating system of a group of people. In organizations where power dynamics are heavily at play you will see lots of meetings chaired by those with the power. In flat organizations, circles and open space events are probably more the norm. Communities meet in all kinds of different ways, but essentially a meeting is a good way to make the operating system visible.
A great deal of the work I do involves helping organizations and communities shift to more participatory meeting processes. It isn’t always easy, and today I had one of those days when the stars didn’t quite align in a way that created the magic. I needed to return to a default setting for the group, because they weren’t prepared for such a massive shift in how they were meeting. To have gone on would have been to alienate them and prevent real work from getting done. So we had to shift on the fly, change our hosting styles and reconfigure the room and the process architecture to enable people to be comfortable enough to dig into difficult content. It is a tough call and a fine line to walk but flexibility, curiosity and willingness to learn will help you as a facilitator stay present to the group’s needs, which is after all, of primary importance.
So what if you want to change that operating system? What if you want to tinker with the DNA of a meeting process? What does it take?
In my experience it takes a lot of work up front and not just in the planning phase. You also have to change the WAY you do planning. If you are trying to move from a top-down, command and control meeting style to something more participatory, here are a number of factors to pay attention to:
1. Create a core team that learns together. This is a basic tenet of any systems change initiative. A core team stewards the change and creates the shift. In doing so they also embody the change, which means that they have to be reflective of the whole in their composition and willing to learn together about new ways of working. Successful core teams in my experience spend equal time learning, building relationships and working together. They are made up of a variety of people with a variety of experiences and interests and the very best teams contain people who are willing to stretch, perhaps host part of the meeting in a way they have never done so before. The core team become the designers, champions and leaders of the change, reflected in the way they approach the shift. They don’t simply hire a facilitator and give orders: they host. They have a stake in the outcomes, and they believe in change.
2. The invitation is a process. I’ve written about this before and it is crucial: invitation is not a thing that you send out over email – it is a process. It includes conversations with key potential participants, it is an iterative process of learning, refining, communicating and listening. It involves writing something, creating web presences, making phone calls, taking people out for coffee. If you haven’t gone out for lunch with at least one potential participant as a part of your invitation process, you aren’t doing it right! Short changing invitation will result in poor preparation for participants and perhaps even a rude surprise when they arrive and see that you have changed everything. Too much change all at once to the unprepared can be shocking.
3. Participants have to want it. Successful shifts in meeting culture come in part from participants who show up because there is compelling work to do AND because there is a promise of a new way of working. If people show up just to do the compelling work, they aren’t going to want you to monkey with their meeting process too much. Creating that frame of mind in participants is a time consuming process but it pays huge dividends in shifting a culture of meeting. This is a key plank in the invitation platform and shouldn’t be dismissed.
4. If you don’t get it right the first time, don’t fight it. Learn from mistakes. If you get a world cafe set up and the group rebels, take a stand for the work, not the process. The worst kind of facilitators are those who let their attachment to process stand in the way of good work getting done. Instead of forcing yourself on people who “just don’t get it” get out of the way and help them do the work that they are hungry to do.
Systemic change does just happen because you have a good theory and some smart ideas. It happens because you have sensed the timing and offered the right things at the right time. I’m not saying that we should shortchange people either and simply offer them comfortable options, not by any means. But a system’s tolerance for challenge is a sensitive thing and walking the edge comes with high stakes. Learning how to do this is a lifelong skill.
Harrison Owen periodically restates his invitation to the world to not only join in Open Space but to go as far as you can in Open Space and see where it takes you. I feel like my work of late has been about this in many ways, and Harrison’s recent post to the OSLIST came at just the right time for me. Here is what he says:
A long time ago a good friend, Ralph Copleman, was to be found in the middle of a large circle of peers dressed in a flowing cape and repeating the words, “Everything is moving, Everything is moving.” Odd to say the least and some doubted Ralph’s sanity. Some still do, but that image has stuck in my febrile brain ever since – and as time has passed it occurs to me that Ralph had it precisely right: This is an energetic cosmos. The problem arises when we (and that includes all of us some of the time) desperately want everything to stop and stand still. So desperately in fact that we have created a mental image of our environment exclusively populated by static things which include everything from mountains to super nova along with the oddments of our life like professions, chairs, relationships, organizational structures, corporations, countries and empires. Unfortunately this mental image is a radical illusion, one might say delusion. Ralph is right. Everything is moving and what we perceive as stable structures are but the momentary, slice in time, freeze-frame constructs of our imagination.
Heresy? Psychobabble? Advanced esoteric insight? – None of the above, I think. As a matter of fact, Ralph’s observation is nothing but a short (poetic?) version of the (now) standard scientific understanding of the nature of the cosmos. Starting with the Big Bang it is all flowing energy, albeit now clumped in momentary configurations – but still flowing energy for all of that. Scratch any rock hard enough and its essential nature comes through – a whirring bunch of quarks and neutrons doing the cosmic dance. Doubtless my physicist friends would take issue with my phrasing – but not, I think, with the core message. Everything is moving.
So what does all this have to do with the price of eggs? Or for that matter – Open Space and our role as facilitators and consultants? A lot, I believe.
Starting with Open Space which is many things to different people. For some it is a Large Group Intervention. Others might see it as an aberrant phenomenon peculiar to a cultish few. For myself Open Space is a trial ride in the flow of life which has a lot of similarities to my boat.
My boat is smallish in size (32 feet) but definitely larger than the average punt. She is very seaworthy and shares a common heritage with the local Lobster Boats here in Maine. We have many visitors, most of whom have never been on a boat such as the Ethelyn Rose. When you walk on board, things look sort of familiar. Chairs for sitting, a comfortable nook for dining, and even an oriental rug on the floor – excuse me, sole. If you look further there are the standard amenities such as a shower and commode, all sequestered in their separate quarters. Even a complete landlubber will feel more or less at home.
But the moment we leave the dock the world changes – apparent stability yields to constant motion. Everything is moving even if it seems to be staying in the same place! In the harbor motion is minimal, but the moment we clear the breakwater marking the harbor entrance the experience can be radically different. Sea swells from the open Atlantic Ocean take us up and down in distances measured in yards, and should we have a good cross wind the surface chop adds an interesting side to side motion. The Ethelyn Rose is right at home, but some of our visitors have a different impression. And navigating in these conditions is a definite learning experience. Even a simple walk through the main cabin can be a challenge. Hand holds that you had carefully plotted at the start of your journey suddenly changed position relative to you as you made your way. What was up is now down and who knows what is happening in between. Interesting, and as they say, It ain’t Kansas.
Most people meet the challenge and after a few educational bumps to various parts of their anatomy they learn not to fight reality. No matter what you may have thought you were going to do, the only useful option is to go with the flow. And the next level of learning is that when you do that well (flow) you can actually arrive where you need to be. Wonderful! Sounds a lot like Open Space.
We start in the static stability of a circle. This may seem strange to some, but there is a place for everybody and everybody finds a place. A familiar and enduring structure for sure. Then it happens. The circle crumbles in bits and pieces as people come to center, announcing their passions – only to be briefly restored as they return to their seats. However the restoration is but momentary. Shortly everybody leaves their seats to join a chaotic gaggle at the wall. So much for static structure, and it goes downhill from there.
Ebbing and flowing, groups form and reform all without benefit of the standard constraints essential for orderly organizational life–or so we might have thought. Pre-arranged agenda (sometimes called Mission, Goals, Objectives) is nonexistent. The Schedule might be posted but never followed – things start when they start. Assigned participation is nowhere to be found, and yet the right people show up. And to make things even worse, the air is filled with buzzing and flutters as Bees and Butterflies do their thing. Madness! To be sure there may be a few people who are utterly flummoxed as the hand holds they may have expected (see above under “Ethelyn Rose at Sea”) disappear . . . or reappear in unexpected places. Their condition is not helped, for should they ask what to do the answer is likely to come back as a question – What would they care to do?
A trifling few will lose heart and head for the shore – perceived stability. But the vast majority, as we have seen over the years and around the globe, will be totally captivated by the moment, and a smaller group will experience that moment as total exhilaration. They are doing what their prior life experience taught them could not be done – seriously and intentionally going with the flow. And rather than being rank hedonism, the experience proves to be massively productive and fulfilling. Doing well and good – and feeling great. A hard to beat combination.
And then we come to Monday Morning. Back to reality, as they say. But is it? The truth, I believe is rather different. They have experienced reality and come to the edge of shedding illusion/delusion. In the words of friend Ralph, “Everything is moving” – and this is now a fact of life to be savored and enjoyed. No longer a terrifying unknown, it is to be affirmed and embraced. Not without a few “white knuckle” moments to be sure – but infinitely better than hanging onto the (illusory) rock of stability.
So what about us – those privileged folks who have accepted the honor of opening space in people’s lives? Short answer: Invite our guests over the edge. Please note I did not say, Push them over the edge.
Crafting this invitation is always a matter of personal style and must come from the heart. The invitation I have in mind never appears on a piece of paper (or the electronic equivalent). It arrives in our personhood – who we are and how we present ourselves, which is to say, from the heart. Not to be confused with a gushy valentine or formulaic presentation, the invitation manifests in our simple presence, revealing our own acceptance and joy in the moving flow of life. Without words we express the swimmer’s call: Come on in, the water is fine! Of course you have to be in the water for that call to have any credibility.
It is perhaps easier to say how NOT to create this invitation. First off, it is not a matter of rational argument and presentation of facts. Most people already know the facts at some level, and I think the case could be made that it was “rational argument” that has gotten us into the bind we experience. Given the “fact” of a moving, changing world which can be very uncomfortable, it is quite “rational” to define that world in terms of controllable static chunks that may be contained, or better, bent to our specifications. This has led us to such wonderful things as “Flood Control” which works until such time as Mother Nature and Old Man River decide to take a different course. It turns out that The River is not a static, definable thing but part of a vast ever changing system. Effective Flood Control would require close management of the Planet’s atmosphere to say nothing of the cosmos beyond. Good luck!
Also under the heading of “NOT to be included” are well intentioned efforts to sugar coat the pill, as it were. Which is to say that we might propose certain limitations that will restrict the possibility of change in Open Space. Some of us have called these “givens” but so far as I can tell the only given is change itself. And to suggest otherwise is not so much to violate the “Spirit of Open Space” but rather the essence of the cosmos itself. Ralph had it right: Everything is moving. In this context, Open Space Technology is a minimal consideration.
I am by no means suggesting that our invitation look like the back panel of some medication listing every possible adverce reaction, if in fact unexpected change is such an adverce reaction. And truth to tell I find the appearance of unexpected change in the midst of an Open Space to be one of its (OS’s) most delightful consequences. I also think that it is important to note the OS is not the engine of change. It simply provides the space for change to show up and the cosmos (or whatever) takes care of all the heavy lifting.
For me an invitation to Open Space is an opportunity to include friends and strangers in the deepest experience of (my) life. It has little to do with selling a product, doing a process, excersizing some sort of professional competence – although there are doubtless elements of all of that. Fundamentally it is my invitation to experience life at its fullest in which chanagability is not the enemy to be suppressed but rather the rich tapestry of an evolving future. I don’t make it, I can’t predict it – but I can participate both as a sojourner and a co-creator. Stuart Kauffman speaks of being “At Home in the Universe.” That is my elemental experience, and I am always looking for playmates.