Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University.
In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes:
In disciplines as diverse as genetics, psychology, sociology, disaster management, public health, urban development, and environmental science, there is movement away from research on the factors that produce disease and dysfunction to analyses of capacity building, patterns of self-organization, adaption, and in the case of human psychology, underlying protective and promotive processes that contribute to the resilience of complex systems.
The same is true for my own practice and development around complex facilitation. From a resilience standpoint, my inquiry is, what are the facilitation or hosting practices that help create containers that foster resilience and capacity building?
Ungar’s principles are as follows:
- (1) resilience occurs in contexts of adversity;
- (2) resilience is a process;
- (3) there are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience;
- (4) a resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex;
- (5) a resilient system promotes connectivity;
- (6) a resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning; and
- (7) a resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation.
I think it’s a moral imperative to build resilience into strategic dialogue and conversations, whether in a short hosted meeting or in a long term participatory process. Participatory work is always a chance to affirm the dignity of human beings. Furthermore, many people come into participatory processes suffering the effects of trauma, much of it hidden from view. While facilitation is not therapy, we cannot practice a “do no harm” approach if we don’t understand patterns of trauma and the way resilience strategies address the effects. Creating “safe enough” space for people to engage in challenging work is itself a resilience strategy. Do it well, and you contribute to long term capacity building in individuals and collectives.
I find these principles inspiring to my complex facilitation practice, because they help me to check designs, and make choices about the kinds of ways I intervene in the system. For example, just off the top of my head, here are some questions and insights we could use to embed our processes with more resilience, related to each principle.
Resilience occurs in contexts of adversity
- Ensure that a group struggles with its work. Don’t be afraid to overload individuals for short periods of time with cognitive tasks (evidenced by confusion, contorted faces, and fatigue). But don’t let that cognitive overload create toxic stress in the system. Your boundary is somewhere between those two points.
- Avoid premature convergence (a Dave Snowden and Sam Kaner principle). Create the conditions so that people don’t simply accept the easy answers without going through the struggle of integrating ideas and exploring emergence.
Resilience is a process
- A resilient system is constantly growing and changing and achieving new levels of capacity, and able to deal with harder and harder stresses. Build-in some adversity to every aspect of organizational life, and you will build capacity building into the organization.
- There is no “final state” of capacity that is acceptable, and so good leadership and facilitation continue to design processes that work the resilience muscle.
- Don’t undertake a “capacity-building project.” Instead, make capacity-building a collateral benefit of engaging in a participatory process.
There are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience
- Watch for the way resilience begins to shift power dynamics and authority in a system. When a group can manage itself well, it requires different support from leadership and different methods of management.
- If the “operating system” of the organization in which a resilient team doesn’t keep pace with the capacity built in the team, a break can occur. Attend to these connections between the resilient parts of the system (that survive by being changed) and the robust parts of the system (that survive by being unchanged).
A resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex
- To my point in a previous post on complex facilitation, you have to work in a complex system with a complexity approach. That means eschewing tendencies to control, closed boundaries, fixed approaches and known outcomes.
- Work with the properties of containers to encourage emergence and self-organization
A resilient system promotes connectivity
- Many of the dialogic methods we use with the Art of Hosting are premised on the fact that everyone in the system is responsible for participating and that relationship is as important an outcome as productivity.
- Working with stories, shared perspectives, diverse identities, and multiple skills in the same process builds connection between people in a system. Solving problems and overcoming adversity together helps individuals become more resilient and connected to each other.
- Any process hoping to survive over time needs to have explicit attention paid to the connections between the parts in the system.
A resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning
- The very first inquiry of the Art of Hosting community was something like “What if learning together was the new form of leadership we need now?” A good marker of a resilient team or organization is its ability to fail, recover, and learn. Many organizations say they do this. but few actually pull it off.
- Create work in which individuals enjoy solving problems and take pleasure in getting things wrong.
A resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation
- A forest without these features is a tree farm. An organization with these features is a machine.
- Diverse perspectives and lived experiences present opportunities for change and development. They challenge existing ways of doing things and disrupt in helpful ways.
- Redundancy is a feature of living systems. Never be afraid to have the same conversations twice. Or three times.
- Aim for full participation in every meeting. If a person is not participating, the group cannot benefit from their knowledge, experience, or curiosity.
These are just my initial musings on Ungar’s work. They validate many of the practices and methods used in the world of participatory leadership and the Art of Hosting. They also challenge us to make braver choices to create spaces that are harder than we might want them to be so that participants can struggle together to build capacity for change. I truly believe that communities, organizations, and people that develop resilience as a by-product of their work together will be best equipped to face increasing levels of uncertainty and emergence.
In this blog post, I’m going to lift the lid on the core of my facilitation practice. I specialize in complex facilitation for addressing complex issues and this requires a special approach to working with groups. In the Art of Hosting world, we call this approach “hosting” to signify that it has its primary focus on the spaces and processes that we use to host dialogue rather than a more traditional facilitation approach that manages the content, meaning-making, and dynamics.
For me, this approach is defined by a focus on the two key dynamics of emergence and self-organization. After 15 years of trying to figure this all out, I think I finally have this down to a simple set of underlying principles that have been heavily borrowed and deeply influenced by the work of Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang.
I first learned the term “complex facilitation” from Dave Snowden. “Complex facilitation” refers to an approach to working with groups that is grounded in good complexity theory. It is an important approach to take when the work you are doing is complex. There is almost always a temptation, when confronted with the uncertainty of a complex system, to default to control in order to drive the process towards a comfortable outcome. This can often result in a process becoming so constrained that there is no possibility for the magic of emergence or self-organization to happen. The desired outcomes of good complex facilitation process are precisely these two states: emergence of meaning and understanding, and self-organization of a group.
Emergence means that a group of people leaves a room with insights that no one person brought into a room with them. When we are confronted with complex problems stemming from emergent phenomenon (culture, conflict, identity, shifting markets, new realities dictated by contexts we don’t control, interpersonal dynamics, “next level” anything…) we need to to create a process that invites emergence. Emergent problems are addressed with emergent solutions.
Self-organization means that a group of people organizes their time, attention and resources in ways that meet the urgent necessity of the moment. It is possible to create processes that allow for self-organization to occur by providing clear attractors and boundaries in a system. Self-organization represents an emergence of structure, which is what is needed to work with emergent ideas. It’s no good going away on an off-site retreat, creating a set of powerful new ideas, and then going back to the office and trying to fit them into pre-existing structures.
Creating conditions for emergence
When we work with complex facilitation Snowden gives us three clear heuristics that can inform design: work with finely grained objects, disintermediate sensemaking, and distribute cognition.
Working with finely grained objects means that groups both generate and work with lots and lots of data points. In my practice, these are generally generated from collecting a large number of small stories and anecdotes about situations. My clients can attest to the huge numbers of post-it notes we go through in group process work, for this reason. These are use to collect data grounded in reality (“tell a story of a time when you made this move…”) and such data objects can be collected together, individually or using online tools. Lately, I’ve fallen in love with Cynthia Kurtz’s approach of Participatory Narrative Inquiry, which is one branch of the work she started with Dave Snowden as they began to create methods for complex facilitation. Other methods like Liberating Structures and large group facilitation methods also help do this.
Disintermediated sensemaking refers to the principle that the people themselves should make sense of their own work. We try to create processes where people are in touch with the raw data objects, so they can find meaning and patterns themselves, without a facilitator or consultant imposing a framework on them. Interpretation of data should rest with the people who are using it. In complexity, how people make meaning of their context dictates how they will act. If a consultant writes a report with their own conclusions, it will always distort the sensemaking participants do. We help this happen in groups by having people hunt for patterns, clusters things into themes and really using tools like Glenda Eoyang’s Human Systems Dynamics and technology like Sensemaker or NarraFirma to help in this work.
Distributed cognition means decentralizing the thinking in the group so that many brains are put to work on a problem and many different perspectives can be brought to bear. This includes having groups of people working in parallel on different issues so that they can generate approaches free of influence from each other in order to enhance creativity. Creating the conditions for diverse perspectives and contradictory actions helps groups to choose general directions of travel together and to test hypotheses and learn more about what paths forward are helpful and which are not.
Creating conditions for self-organization
Complex facilitation works with “containers” which are bounded spaces and time in which emergence is enabled. Containers are made up from a set of constratints acting together to create patterns. Inside these spaces, groups must be able to self organize emergent forms of working if they are to work on emergent ideas. In complex facilitation, you can create the conditions for self-organization by working with the attractors and boundaries that make up the constraints of the container, the exchanges and differences that enable the flows inside the container, and the identities that people take on in the work.
I’ve learned all this from Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework and Glenda Eoyang’s CDE model and lately, I’ve been blending the lessons and insights from both into a general approach towards working with constraints in facilitated spaces..
In a container Attractors are things that attract and enable coherence and Boundaries are things that constrain and contain, creating separations and allowing us to categorize differences. Think about an attractor as something we all gather around: a fire, a song, a strong purpose, a centre, a meal. Attractors bring us into coherence. Boundaries contain us: a rim, walls, a fence, a roadway, a rule, a fixed amount of time or money. They draw lines between in and out, between what’s included and what’s excluded, and what is the same and different. You cross a boundary when you are no longing sharing a space with others, or when a data object is no longer functionally similar to something else. Taken together, attractors and boundaries form the basic properties of containers, and you can add more or fewer attractors, deepen or lessen attachment to them or tighten or loosen boundaries to create or shift containers.
Exchanges and Differences describe the dynamics inside a container and also act as constraints. Differences give us tensions and potentials for change. You can create more diversity or more homogeneity in a container. The potential for change lies in the differences in a container. Homogeneous systems tend to be very stable and resistant to change, massively diverse systems tend to move and change quickly. Exchanges describe the connections between things in a container and also describe the flows of resources in a system. These might include information, energy, power, and money. Exchanges can be increased or decreased, or given more amplitude or less. They can be channelled through one pipe like a garden hose or distributed through a more intricate structure like a mycelial network.
Identities influence self-organization because they can change the way people think about problems or perform functions in the system. Sometimes you need to CEO to be the most influential person in the system and sometimes you need their staff to be the important ones. Changing and disrupting identities is important for undertaking the three functions that enable emergence. Identity can often be a powerful dark constraint in a system that can hold stuck patterns in place or enable the emergence of new ones. Breaking down existing identities is key before self-organization into new emergent structures takes place. But too much undermining of identities leads to existential chaos, so sensing is critical.
Any questions?
I’ll be hosting an online course with my pals at Beehive Productions next March on this topic, so expect a few more musings over the next several months as I put together that four-week program.
For many years I have been teaching Cynefin as a foundational framework in complexity and participatory leadership workshops and retreats. For me it’s the best and most accessible way to explain the differences between complex problems and other kinds of problems and why we need to make complexity-based interventions in complex systems.
And while there are great ways to start learning about ontology in a lecture format, or using te examples of a children’s birthday party, I’m rather inclined to playing games as a way of understanding different types of systems before we do any teaching at all. Especially when you are teaching Cynefin by referring to constraints, games are super useful because a game is really just a constrained system.
My go to games involve movement and various challenges inspired by theatre exercises, and I’ve documented them before. This morning I needed to create a new suite of games for a context in which free movement was itself constrained (two participants in wheelchairs and a room that was not big enough for good and open movement.) I went to my arsenal of improvisation games and came up with these three games. We did these in groups of about 6-7 people.
- In your group, recite the English alphabet in order one letter at a time. Go around the circle, with each person saying one letter at a time.
- In your group, this time you will construct a 26 word story by each person contributing a word that starts with the next letter in the alphabet. Go in order around the circle, one word from each person. The theme of the story is “Our journey to the retreat centre.”
- In your group you have 3 minutes to tell a one word story about a mythical and legendary community event. Each person contributes one word at a time and you go clockwise around the circle. I will let you know when you have 30 seconds left to wrap up your story.
You can see that these three games map on to the Obvious, Complicated and Complex domains of Cynefin and although they are variations of the same process, the way we use constraints is what dictates the nature of the game.
In the first game, there is a rule: recite the alphabet in order, one person at a time. There is no room for creativity and in fact a best practice – singing The Alphabet Song – help you to do it. If anyone in the group doesn’t know the alphabet, it’s easy enough to google it and show them so they don’t lose their place.
In the second game, there was more latitude for participants to ad something, but they were still constrained by the alphabet scheme and the rule of one word at a time, going in a circle. Again, expertise helps here, as people can remind others that they skipped a letter for example, but increasingly the story is emergent and there is more unpredictability in the exercise. It’s also worth pointing out how people game the system by schoosing words that fit the rules rather than words that contribute to the story. The rules are far more influential constraints than the purpose of the exercise. This leads to all kinds of discussion about why it’s easy in large system to justify your work by just doing your part rather than by what you added to the whole. This is a good example of governing constraints.
In the third game we free the participants from all constraints except one word at a time, in a circle. The theme of the story becomes more important, because word choice is ENABLED by the theme which constraints options. Enabling constraints are at play, and I offered people a couple of heuristics from the improve world in order to hep them if they were stuck:
- Accept the offer and be changed by it
- Make your partner look good by building on the offer
- Don’t be afraid to fail
One word at a time stories can sometimes be very powerful and moving as they emerge from people co-creating something together. You can see how small changes cause the story to go in a radically different direction and participants can often feel their desire to control the narrative dashed on the rocks of different offers. With fewer GOVERNING constraints in place, people feel freer to make mistakes and fail, especially knowing that others may be waiting to work with their material anyway.
So there you go: a new way to experientially learn ontology before diving into Cynefin to explain and make sense of what we just did.
Part three of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action.
3. Use a talking piece
Think about any conversation you have ever had. If it ws a good conversation, there was a purpose or a question or a topic that was compelling and interesting to the people taking part. You may have found yourself “leaning in” and listening with curiosity, offering your own stories and perspectives, finding commonalities and exploring difference. In our natural setting as human beings, conversation sis easy and a wholly natural way of exploring ideas and making sense of the world. If so you have found yourself in a dialogic container, a social structure with a centre and a boundary and all kinds of things happening inside.
So much of organizational life though runs counter to our instincts, and even when there is an important need for a conversation we can find ourselves resistant to it. The timing doesn’t work naturally, or the conditions aren’t conducive to the natural flow and participation of a good conversation. There are many times when we need to stop what we are doing and enter into a space where we can pay attention to each other. Good dialogue practice helps us to do that by creating a container which encourages speaking, listening, sense making and decision. in times of conflict or stress, a thoughtful method that allows everyone to speak and be heard is essential.
A simple method for every facilitator is using a talking piece: some item that can be passed around a room and allow the person holding it to speak while others listen. The talking piece, and its rules and rituals, structures the process and creates the container. Every facilitation tool, agenda, or set of guidelines and principles functions to structure process. Every facilitator decision functions like a talking piece. When Toke added this one to his list of “little helpers” it was with the caveat that such a tool needed to be chosen and used with great care and consciousness about how it would affect the group. As a facilitator you wield a lot of power and it’s quite difficult to strike the right balance between too much freedom, which doesn’t provide creative constraints, and too much control, that throws people into apathy. Learning how to strike the balance is a practice, which means that you get better at it the more you do it and reflect on it. There is no answer for how to strike the right balance, but here are a few principles that might be helpful.
Host the process in a way that allows the group to do the work themselves. As much as possible, stick to creating the conditions for people to do their own work. Don’t tell people what to do or what they will feel. Try not to be the person interpreting the words of participants or the overall insights of a group. Instead create good process that allows people to make contributions, listen and learn and mitigate their personal impact on a collective conversation.
When things go awry, pause and go back to the simple question: “what’s happening?” Conflict is inevitable. Things go off the rails. People get angry and hurt. The facilitator makes mistakes. Remember that when these things happen, you are not alone. You are allowed to reset, to take a breath and move to a higher level conversation about what’s happening. Early in my facilitation career I hosted a meeting which felt like pulling teeth. No one was participating, there was very little creativity and it was stifling. I made the mistake of believing that it was my job alone to fix the situation and the more I tried, the more desperate the situation became. Finally, I realized that I was not alone in the room. There were thirty other people there I could ask for help. I stopped and asked the question “what is going on?”
To my relief one of the participants said “This is not the conversation we want to have right now. You keep asking us to do work that no one is interested in.”
“What should we be working on, then?” I asked. The participants all shouted out the topic they were expecting to be discussing. And so I pivoted the conversation there and said “okay, let’s talk about that then!” and away we went. As a facilitator, you don’t have to have all the answers. If the process you have designed isn’t right, ask folks to help you get it right.
Create a container for conversation using ABIDE. A few years ago I published a paper on using Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework to design and host dialogic containers. I have since grown to really appreciate this framework and have altered it a little to blend in some of the work from Glenda Eoyang’s CDE model from Human Systems Dynamics. I now have an acronym that neither of them created, but which is insanely useful.
ABIDE points to five things you can change in the structure of a container that will change the interactions of the participants. I would say that every good facilitator and leader working in complexity knows this. Learning this helps you to be able to shift patterns without dictating the outcomes and is an essential step for facilitator development to move beyond simply using tools. I’ll write a longer piece about this later, but here is my current version of these five important characteristics that constrain group behaviour.
- ATTRACTORS. These are things around which patterns are organized in a system: a story, a question, a powerful person, even the physical focus of attention in the room.
- BOUNDARIES: These are things that constrain a system, including physical space, time, money, and mandate Basically these are lines within which a meeting operates.
- IDENTITY: Identities are deep patterns that shape behaviour, and we often wear them unconsciously. They can be formal roles (leader, manager, administrator), archetypes (bully, victim, hero, elder, child), or social constructions rooted in norms around race, gender, class, and other distinctions.
- DIFFERENCES: Difference and sameness can flavour a conversation radically. Too much of one or the other can sap the energy from a container. Homogeniety can create massive spots of unawareness, and complete diversity can become a Tower of Babel.
- EXCHANGES: These are things that flow in a system, be it money, power, ideas, information, or knowledge.
When conversations are stuck it’s often because one of these things is creating a pattern that is unhelpful. Shifting one of these things can shift the whole process.
Be mindful of how you use constraints. Decolonize constraints as much as possible. A container in one context is an enclosure in another. This is an important consideration. In the literature on dialogue, much has been written about “containers” and it has become a technical term in the field. All human process happens within constraints, but different peoples have different experiences of what it is like to be constrained, especially by others. It is very easy to use the term “container” and have it become a colonizing concept. In Indigenous communities, containers can be conflated with the reservation system. In Ireland, the word can evoke the pain of enclosure, the legal process whereby the land was privatized and colonized by the British Crown. And yet in both these contexts, containers for life giving conversation are well understood using terms like “nest” and “hearth.” As with all tools, be mindful of where you are and how you are using it, and how your words will land.
On the Art of Hosting list today there has been a very interesting conversation about some of the Japanese words that are used to describe space and container. As I will be working this spring in Japan with these very concepts, I thought it would be interesting to hear from my colleagues Yurie Makihara and Kazuhiko Nakamura about these ideas of “wa,” “ma,” “ba,” and “tokoro.” Yurie shared her thoughts, on some of these words, including noting that the word “ba” is often cited by foreigners as an example of a word describing the quality of dialogic container that exists in Japanese and not English. I learned today that all of these words are similar, and include not just ideas about the quality of space but time as well. Anyone who engages in dialogue will know that there is a time and a place for everything.
Over my career I’ve had the gift of working extensively in indigenous communities in North America and one of the features of many (but not all) indigenous languages is the fact that they are verb-based as opposed to English which is very noun-based. Indigenous languages here contain many words and ideas that are similar to the ones Yurie described, and I have experienced language speaking Elders and others cautioning me that “this time isn’t right” or “the space is wrong” in a way that is hard to put into English. When they say those things, the English ear hears the word “time” or “space” (the nouns in the sentence), but the words the Elders use are pointing to the qualities of the relationships between things in the container of time or space.
In English we lack relational language. We have to use metaphors like “safe space” or “brave space” or “juicy” or “a ripe time” that point a bit at the feel, but use words as metaphors and not direct. Over the years, teaching about containers to people who speak these languages I have begun to learn a few concepts. In Diné there is a word – “k’e” – which describes the quality of connection between an individual and their clan and family that is critical for survival and sustainability. In Nuu-Chah-Nulth, the word “tsawalk” meaning “oneness” really is a word that points to the presence of a texture in a container that helps us see the connection between things (people, animals, land…) and the relationship between the spiritual and physical world. Without tsawalk we are not doing good work, because we are not doing work that attends to the many relational fields that are necessary to create space that is fully alive. More of my reflections here.
Ove the years I’ve learned of similar words and ideas in other languages an cultures: in fact this seems to be a feature of human language in a way that isn’t quite available to unilingual English speakers like myself. Its the reason we find these other languages and concepts attractive. They fill a need we have.
In some ways it’s too bad that we use English in the Art of Hosting community as our global language! The most important thing for us as a community – the quality of a container – is the one thing that is difficult to explain properly in English. The word itself is actually a metaphor and used in indigenous-settler contexts, as my friend Jerry Nagel pointed out in an email this morning, it can be taken to mean the very core act of colonization: to contain a group of people. So be careful!
Perhaps this is why for the most part, people I work with in English are interested in tools and processes, and why we have a hard time explaining the “art” of the Art of Hosting. It’s easier to talk about the nouns we use because we have language for them. It’s hard to talk about what happens when we approach space and container as artists, with an eye to hosting the quality of relationships and interactions that create generative action. In English there is no satisfying way to talk about this, at least not that I’ve found. We have to default to poetry, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Or, we default to using words from other languages, but we use these too as metaphors: “we don’t have a word in English, but the Nuu-Cha-Nulth word is…” as if these give the ideas some weight. My learning over the years is to be very careful when using words and concepts from other languages, because as an English speaker I can only use them as metaphors and not with the realness with which a fluent speaker of a language uses their own words. Helpful, but never the whole story…