Drawing by ritwkdey
I have been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the living systems vs. the mechanical systems worldviews. It’s interesting that there is a clear distinction between these two kinds of systems – a system is alive or it isn’t, at least in this point in time – and yet the way we humans think our way through being in these systems seems to fall on a continuum.
My conversation with Myriam Laberge here has pointed this out. I initially wrote a post that put facilitating up against hosting as two words to describe different ways of working with groups within human systems. I advocated for a new way of thinking about the role of facilitation (especially as it is perceived by mainstream and unspecialized views, which describes a large number of the clients of facilitators). Myriam rightly called me out on the stark polarity of my conceptualization, seeing instead that facilitation and hosting (not the words, but the actual work that we both articulate) are on some kind of continuum of approaches to groups.
Now I’m thinking that a continuum is even too limiting a way to talk about the variety of possibilities in working with groups. Humans in relationship with each other are, after all, living systems, and as such even a group of two people can be an incredibly complex system, bouncing between high degrees of chaos and order. So there is nothing whatsoever mechanical about human beings, and therefore any approach to working with humans – and life in general, is by definition a living systems approach. Instead of a continuum, we facilitators (or hosts or whatever) simply work from a cloud of approaches, as distinct and unique as each of us are. This makes the work of facilitation difficult to describe. Some, like the International Association of Facilitators, have tried to define the field and provide certification around a specific approach, but this is by no means an exclusive definition. The variety of ways of working with people is as various as people themselves.
And so I am led instead to think about the attributes of living systems so that I might better understand effective ways of working with people. I am not breaking any radically new ground here, except in my own practice. I began my professional life of working with groups specializing in chairing meetings, which I did from a young age. As a teenager, I was involved in all kinds of groups thet met, and I chaired many of them, enjoying being a position of power and control (I mean, let’s be honest, shall we?) but growing into an enjoyment of the kinds of good things that skilful conversation can produce. I was aware from the age of 16 that the way a meeting was run could have a significant impact on its outcome.
As I grew in my practice and curiosity about this field, I discovered chaos and complexity theory and became very interested in methodologies like Open Space Technology that place this world view at its core. To me watching groups in Open Space was unlike anything I had ever seen. Large groups of people, sometimes in the hundreds, could manage an entire conference themselves with only a few simple directions, some elementary pieces of form and a question or issue for which there was real passion. Over the years, I have witnessed this experiment running literally hundreds of times, and it continues to amaze and delight.
So if Open Space really works, then what is it that makes it work? Harrison Owen has been consumed with studying self-organization for many years now, because his experience of Open Space led hm to the same conclusions – humans are living systems and they behave much more like nature than machine. There is no mechanical approach that will work with humans – witness the recent trend for instance away from Business Process Re-engineering due to the deemphasis on the human factor. What works BETTER in a living system is an appreciative approach. What if an appreciative world view was a more relevant and therefore a more generative world view for determining processes for working with humans than a world view that seeks to engineer human engagement?
As I was flying in Denver Yesterday on my way home from Phoenix, looking down on the land on final approach, a question went through my mind: How do living systems make use of resources? I was reflecting on a recent appreciative summit I facilitated last week, where I was explaining the appreciative world view as being essentially a way to understand the resources we have among us and figuring out ways of deploying or channelling them where they are needed. The brown prairie below our approach path, and the dry streams leading out of the front range of the Rocky Mountains made me aware that in living systems like the one below me, all resources go to creating life. There is no waste in a living system at all. Everything that lives, eventually dies and in death it becomes, in the words of William McDonough, nutrition for the system. The resources that exist within the system flow towards life and life itself aggregates and grows around resources, creating an ever upward spiral of living matter that is limited only by the constraints of the system itself. When a critical limit is reached, the system seeks balance. If a catastrophy strikes the systems becomes something else, an emergent self-organizing order will take place. But it never dies, for the earth itself is a living system. Even rocks, locked in statsis for millions of years eventually supply the minerals that are needed for life itself.
Resources flow where they are needed and they attract life to themselves. This is fundamental. The system acts with a kind of intelligence, but it is not control. What can we learn about this for working appreciatively with small living systems of human beings?
A stump in a forest hosts life in a living system
Photo by alastairb
* NOTE: I changed the title of this post to better reflect the both/and nature of this conversation, rather than the unhelpful either/or way I originally wrote it.
At the Art of Hosting last weekend, it finally came to me – the simple description of the different between facilitation and hosting as I understand it. So here are a few simple metaphors and a more detailed meditation.
At the simplest level, you can think of a party. A facilitator is like a party planner, or a wedding organizer, running around taking care of details, scripting the event and staying outside of the experience. A party host, by contrast, is inside the experience, invested in the outcome, bringing energy to conversations, not only form, and both affecting and being affected by the experience.
For the sports minded is the difference between a coach and a captain, the difference between being on a football team and an ultimate team. For musicians it is the difference between what happens when a conductor conducts an orchestra and how a string quartet hosts itself.
Scaled up to another level, facilitation and hosting can be seen as complimentary forms of leadership for two different systems. Facilitation comes from a mechanistic view of organizations, that they are machines that can be fixed. Facilitators typically take a neutral stand, bring their tools and tool kits to help things run easier. The facilitator is the mechanic and the group is the machine.
Hosting, on the other hand, is a practice of leading from within a living system. It’s like entering the machine, becoming a part of it and changing it by being there. In a living system you cannot enter the field without affecting the field. So the host enters the field with all of the resources and assets he or she has and offers what they can to the centre of the work. When I am working explicilty as a host (which is my practice most of the time now) I am actively involved in what is going on. Sometimes it loks like facilitation if I may be called to offer an outsider’s view, but I do that from INSIDE the field in which we are working. I bring my whole self to the work and host conversations that invite us to co-create the tools and forms and processes we need to move. Hosting is leading from the field, and it is a very different path from “facilitation” and it operates out of a very different worldview about the kinds of systems in which we live. Anyone can do it, and in fact it works better when there is more “hosting consciousness” in a group. That way the power of a traditional facilitator is not needed, and the group’s capacity to take itself to the next level is increased.
From a complexity stand point, facilitation is seen as a reductionist activity, reducing complexity to simple problems with simple outcomes and a simple path for getting there. Facilitators help groups to seek answers and end states. Hosting from within the field however is more aligned with the nature of complex systems, where there are no answers, but instead only choices to make around the next question, and the paths where those questions lead us. There are no end states. The idea of a healthy community is a vector, not a point. It is a direction to move, not something that can be acheived and then crossed off the list.
For me the critical need for hosting is in the fact that traditional approaches to systems problems are not working. The systemic problems themselves are now understood to be so interconnected and embedded in each other that they are impossible to disentangle. The mechanical world view is fading and the living systems world view is arising. We are in a period of transition in the world between these two ways of seeing things and I think the core capacity of groups, organizations, communities and nations to find sustainable futures lies in their ability to host themselves to their next level of responsibility and action. Consulting in the mode of the mechanic that fixes things is over. Hosting in living systems is here.
Photo by Darwin Bell
Hyperlinks –
follow these leads
a thread.
- Haiku resources
- My friend Thomas Arthur, who weaves with gravity, posts Wooshclang!
- Richard Sweeney weaves with paper.
- A beautiful and complete list of what the world is made of.
- Does your disaster plan include conversation to mobilize quickly? Or is it still expert driven?
- Nice summary of Senge’s core concepts on Learning Organizations
- You, and many other living creature, have a billion and a half heartbeats to change the world.
- Change management myths. (Not including the myth that change can be managed, but still…)
- Doug’s blog: Footprints in the Wind, which I read all the time, and so should you.
- From Nancy…the power of a line.
Taholah, Washington
If this article is any indication, the future of management will require more hosts and less bosses. Hierarchies are disappearing, top-down and centralized is giving way to distributed, and organizations are becoming more open and engaging of stakeholders.
That is true everywhere in my experience, including here at the Quinault Indian Nation where we are reframing the tribal government’s strategic plan in several unique ways. First we have established a core team of stakeholders from the government and community who are willing to take responsibility for stewarding the plan. Second, the core team has proposed a new strategic plan model that organizes work not by the departments and programs of the Quinault government structure, but rather by “domains” which are yet to be determined but may end up being things like “prosperity” and “learning.” Organizing the aspirations and preferred futures of the nation this way means that the government departments need to talk to each other and the community to move the Nation forward. And finally the new plan requires engagement with many many people, to bring in the wisdom and ownership of the community so that the plan is theirs. Tomorrow for example we will be hosting an ongoing cafe in the lobby outside the Nation’s general council meeting, where we will be hosting conversations with community members and capturing wisdom with a graphic facilitator.
As a result, our planning sessions are a combination of work and facilitation training because the core team knows that to do this means that they have to talk to people. So we are exploring how to convene conversations that matter and that have an impact.
How is the shift in management changing the way you plan strategy?
Seattle, Washington.
This morning’s keynote was a four person panel presentation from the team that created the Boeing Operations Centre, which is the primary face of Boeing’s interaction with their customers, helping them with maintenance and servicing issues. The presentation was given by Peter Weertman, Bruce Rund, Bob Wiebe and Darren Macer. This post is a collaborative harvest of that keynote by myself, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony.
One thing to notice about people that work at Boeing is that they almost always talk about their relationship to planes dating back to being kids, they take great pride in their work and they all see the work of designing and building planes to be very, very cool. Bob Wiebe, talking now, began his presentation like this, and almost everyone I know at Boeing also checks in to their work this way. There is a lot of heart and deep commitment in their work. It is more often than not a chance to express some aspiration or intention that was held from childhood and that is renewed every time they step on a plane or see one flying over head, Imagine having a relationship to your work like that.
This panel is presenting on a the process they went through to produce a new state of the art Operations Centre to support the needs of customers whose planes were on the ground. It required creating a “new normal” which wasn’t everybody’s normal, and it certainly wasn’t the old normal. Wiebe describes it as a process of moving forward and sliding back – a form of rapid prototyping. I’m hearing this as the practice of sparring in taekwondo, where you slip in and out and back and forth, trying things to see how your opponent reacts, adjusting your strategy to meet the challenge that is in front of you, and understanding that the opponent is also adjusting and changing, based on what you do. It’s a continuous feedback loop and engagement with a dynamic changing system, and this is the ground in which strategy and tactics translates into action.
The shortest distance between two people is a story…these guys started with stories. Are we designed properly to deliver on customer satisfaction? The group went on a learning journey and discovered how other companies do it and is covered that good operations support can actually support and drive customer satisfaction. Boeing looked at previous integration efforts and realized that the thing that made them fall short was the fact that they weren’t based on the most engagement possible. Engagement is critical to moving everyone in the system towards the new normal.
Airplanes now run at 1% not in operation, down from 3% previously. There is not a lot of space on airplanes. Utilization and passenger loads continue to increase. What this means to Boeing is that what used to be a couple of days to figure something out has now been reduced to a couple of hours. How to live with this? The solution again was to work, to engage, to be in conversation with each other, all in support of Boeing’s business objectives. From this came clarity of the voice of the customer and turned elephants to bold recommendations to action plans.
Bruce … helped lead the change in the ops centre. He used to run rough shod over people as his form of leadership. He learned as part of the new normal:
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make yourself part of the solution
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get up and talk to people
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peers get curious when you engage them at the level of caring for the work
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cross boundaries to collaborate – this is powerful
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stories of success and failure helped us to see causal loops
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bring level of response from expert to the customer
A power in this sessions is Boeing’s commitment to learning in complex systems. Their customer service was known as “black hole” because things come in and never leave. They mapped plans, causal loops, etc. under much pressure. Their path and action began with engagement. It makes me think of what to do in the in the complex systems we are all in – this is what we share – begin talking with each other. Go from never talked, never knowing the options to the simple, yet focused interaction of human beings learning together to improve. Begin with curiosity. Come back to the energy of childhood dreams of planes and invite that into the form of learning, listening, and wise action with the broader system including customers. “Open to the wisdom of the local effort and connect to others.”
Open up to the customer, to the stakeholder, to those who are in the system to collaborate around options and build trust. When Boeing was getting the engagement strategy started, they encountered some tough systemic barriers to communications arising from hero and expert behaviour. Two of the most tonic behaviours were experts saying to teams “That’s not the way I would have done it” which is behaviour that trumps engagement and reconsolidates power in the expert, undermining collaboration. The second behaviour was that the experts or the authorities reserved the right to make final decisions on their own time. This introduced delays in responses to customers that were unacceptable. The initiative introduced rules of engagement – or what we call principles of cooperation in the chaordic stepping stones process – that would serve emergence of the new normal.
World War II pilot: “You know you are getting close, because the flak gets heavier.”
“Help me understand, here’s what I think, tell me more, here’s the story…” This frame of structured curiosity is a fast way into what David Isaacs is calling “conversational leadership.”
This is really brining home for me the power of the chaordic stepping stones:
- Need: identifying the real red spot, in this case “Schedule pressure”
- Purpose: The initiative has to address the need. So let’s get clear on the purpose of the initiative.
- People: Who is involved? Who else needs to be involved? And who else? And how?
- Principles of cooperation: If we are moving towards the new normal, what are the new principles we need to work with to get us there?
- Concept: Start plugging away at prototypes. One of the overwhelming sentiments at this conference is that small wins, rapid prototypes and little shifts are the origin of the bigger changes. Conceptualizing and learning from that prototyping process gets us there.
- Structure: Build what works into the system. Tie it to relationships and infrastructure to create sustainability and shared ownership.
- Practice: Do it and learn from it and keep doing it and keep learning from it.
Darren is now describing how to operationalize the vision and they did it by physically
designing space that helped. This meant putting everyone who receives customer requests at the centre and fanning people out around them to physically embody the system. They got a big AV wall – inspired by the NASA command centre – and agreed to put stuff up there that was useful to everyone in the system. This is rapid harvesting, allowing the system to interact with the information it needs AND to see the impact of its work. They were playing with gaming concepts like each job is a dot and they have to get the job off the screen before it passes the magic time line. Everything was created live with engagement, rapid prototyping, and lots of shifting to see reality. They even have a TV running to see what comes through traditional news like the plan running off the runway in Chicago in 2005.
We used everything we could.
The first day – December 9, 2005. They were bring people together into the same room across many different groups, disciplines and silos. They did a lot of simulation and scenarios to pick up everything they could before going live and that the processes were as simple as possible. Lots of effort to get everyone to follow the processes – to the letter – then to notice what they learn so after a bit they could look back to these agreements to see what needs to shift. Anything they wanted changed they were to put on a sticky note and put on the way. They couldn’t take anything down until the change had been made or the reasons for not changing was communicated to everyone. They even changed the coffee pot… if you’re working 24/7 you need a good coffee pot.
This is how you learn about processes by tapping everyone’s wisdom and experience.
The truth of all of this is that Boeing didn’t have a lot of time. They had a lot of dedicated people who really wanted to make it work, and there were a lot of difficult times and situations. Darren is sharing that change can be personalized and that there are a lot of people at Boeing that don’t like him. People will find ways of sabotaging, undermining or opposing these kinds of efforts and the commitment to dedicate to change can be very hard. You need to develop a thick skin and mostly talk to people A LOT. If people have better ways of doing things, you have to understand and use them. If they don’t have better ways of doing things, they have to know that the channels are open and passion and responsibility is the operating system of learning. NOT talking to people will be the quickest way to make the tough experiences grind everything to a halt. So this kind of rapid action and change in a furiously turbulent and unpredictable environment with lots of moving pieces REQUIRES leaders to be almost a constant conversation with others listening skilfully, collaborating, finding new ways of working, rapid prototyping and making small changes.
[tags]stia2007[/tags]