My friend and colleague Bronagh Gallagher and I are in the early stages of creating a learning offering around complexity, facilitation and activism, whereby we try to bring complexity and participatory tools to the work of social change. We’ve been assembling some very interesting sources for our work and she recently introduced me to the work of Micah White who has written about protest and activism from a complexity perspective. I’m working my way through some interviews he gave in support of his book, The End of Protest. Here is one juicy line:
This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest are illegal until they succeed. All revolutions are illegal until they succeed, and then they become the government and all of the sudden these people are celebrated as heroes and all that kind of stuff. What we’re talking about is very real. This is what distinguishes fake protest from real protest. Fake protest is underpinned by the idea that our actions don’t need to be illegal, that we can get permits from the government, that we can have “free speech zones” or we can do scripted arrests; it doesn’t need to be illegal or dangerous or disobedient. I think that’s completely misguided. We didn’t get a permit for Occupy Wall Street. We asked people to bring tents knowing that it was illegal for people to set up tents. We did these behaviors because the legal regime doesn’t matter when you create a protest. You operate outside of the law.
It doesn’t mean they have to be violent. There are lots of different ways to be illegal. But it does mean that you have to say, “I’m trying to change a situation that is so important that I will disobey the law. My protest stands above the law.” And you also have to accept the consequences of that. For Occupy Wall Street seven thousand people were arrested. That’s an astounding number. People had their bones broken. People lost their jobs.
Absolutely. Real protest is always illegal. For sure.
There is an interesting observation here, that the socially acceptable forms of protest, innovation and radical change are only helpful in terms of creating incremental and socially acceptable change. You may shift things but they will be shifted WITHIN the acceptable boundaries. When you start pushing on the boundaries, or fundamentally breaking the boundaries, you will be operating outside of the law. In society, this takes the form of illegal activity. In organizational life this means fundamentally violating the organization’s norms and policies, some of which are unwritten and my not even be visible until you start acting in ways that make them visible.
It is this way with colonizing mindsets embedded in the ways that social institutions, governments and businesses operate in Canada, where there is hardly ever a fundamental challenge to some of the core ideas of colonization, such as the assumption that all private land was legally obtained or that all public land is owned by the Crown. In a society based on colonial power structures, everything goes along fine until some First Nation somewhere stands up to a Canadian law and challenges it’s authority. The act needs to be law-breaking in order for the laws to be rewritten. This is how Aboriginal title has entered Canadian Constitutional law as a valid, binding and important legal concept.
Likewise as organizations and businesses are trying to fundamentally change core practices, they are largely constrained by doing by having such change championed by an approved panel of change makers. Fundamental change comes to organizational life from the outside. It is disruptive. It calls into questions sacred cows about power, management policies, core purposes and priorities. Like activists, change agents are marginalized, dismissed reassigned, and often fired. At best if you are championing fundamental change within an organization you may suddenly find yourself without access to decision makers, left out of strategic cnversations and not allowed to work with and mentor junior staff.
Fundamental change is a threat. As I grow older as a middle class white skinned man, I have found myself on the receiving end of more and more challenges from younger people who don’t look like me. They challenge my assumptions and my ideas. I am beginning to discover that, despite having lots to offer, the way the world is changing around me must necessarily overturn the assumptions I make about the world, the ones that have allowed me to work relatively close to the core of social stability. I aspire to be an ally to those making change from the far margins, but it is not my place to declare myself an ally. People are given status as allies of fundamental change makers. It is not a title you can claim for yourself, no matter how well intentioned you are.
Social change, innovation and reorganization requires a kind of leadership at every level that works at the margins to provoke and overturn and works from the centre to, in effect, not defend the status quo too much from the “threats” from outside. There is no “other side of the fence” in the work of social change. While I’m not sure that there has ever been an orderly revolution in the world,the question for all of us is which side of the revolutionary Möbius strip are you on and what can you do to help what wants to be born?
A few years ago, Juanita Brown shared a very powerful image with me. She talked about how those of us that practice dialogue and facilitation in a deep way have access to various gateways that take us into a “central garden.” All of our pathways invite us into this garden where we come to discover and realize something about the role of dialogue, meaning making and collaboration. It is a set of realizations that lies beneath the practice of methods.
On a call today with my friend Mark McKergow, we were discussing this image There are a bunch of us – although not a large bunch of us – from different practitioner communities who are always interested in transcending our methods and entering into this conversation. Alongside Juanita, Mark has also been wondering “where is everybody else, and how come we’re not connecting?”
Today we were discussing the failure of dialogue to have enough presence to provide workable and practical alternatives to everything from public policy decisions (such as the EU referendum in Britain, or the polarization of US society) to the everyday challenges of managing and running large organizations, evaluating, strategizing and controlling outcomes, people and money.
We know that our field of dialogic practice is massive, well researched and well documented. We know that leadership literature is filled with the importance of relational and sense making work. We know that that mid-career professionals end up coming to our various workshops to take on skills and ideas that are fundamentally transformative to their work and lives and that they go back to places where “it’s difficult to implement” because other mid-career professionals are wedded to globalized management practices that are good enough for what they are trying to do, within the highly constrained performance frameworks within which they are forced to operate. We even know (thanks to people like Jon Husband) that global organizations like Hay Associates have spent the better part of a century ensuring that these management science constraints are widely deployed and understood. They frame everything, not without utility, but to the exclusion of almost every other way of organizing and being together in human endeavour.
So what is the problem? Are we just lousy storytellers? Are we being deliberately marginalized? Is there something fundamentally flawed about the ability of dialogic practice to actually be of value? And how do we disrupt the standard set of management tools and the narcissism of our own communities of practice in a way that creates some serious openings for change?
What do you think?
I’m in a period of recovering from travel and work, over what has been a very busy spring. This weekend I just took right off and did some reading, cleaning and planning for a major kitchen renovation we will be doing this spring.
Reading-wise, it has been a luxury to sit on my front porch and spend hours in a book. My choice this week has been Kim Stanley’ Robinson’s “Aurora” which is a story about a human voyage to colonize a planet 11 light years away. It is an amazing book about problems solving and ontology and should be on every reading list for those who are trying to understand the kinds of philosophy, thinking skills and patterns that make it possible to live with complexity. It’s also a lovely meditation on the difference between technical and adaptive problem solving and leadership. Yes, this is a relaxing piece of fiction for me! I’m lucky to enjoy my work!
On other notes, several interesting links and articles have come my way through different sources this week. Here are a few of note:
So, you don’t think you directly benefit from nonprofits? / Nonprofit With Balls . On why you actually do.
Some Corals Survive Environmental Assault: Scientists Want to Know Why – Plexus Institute. An interesting summary of some of the ways that corals are beginning to demonstrate resilience in the face of massive environmental changes to their habitat. If you’v read Aurora, you’ll appreciate why this article in particular interests me.
Creative Leadership Workshop | Johnnie Moore . A pitch for a cool looking course from my friends Johnny Moore and Viv McWaters in Cambridge this summer.
A Modern-Day Viking Voyage | Hakai Magazine . A few years ago I was staying in Montreal with a Manx friend and learned about this form of governance. My maternal great grandmother’s family is Manx so I’ve always had a passing interest in the little country in the Irish Sea. But the viking connection and the form of council used to govern the country is fascinating.
Complexity Labs . A very interesting new site on complexity, featuring a lot of learning resources.
Saving the planet from governments and markets | Henry Mintzberg. This is the quote that you never expect to see from a business school professor, unless it’s Henry Minstzberg: ”
“It is not plans from some elite “top” that will begin the world over again, but actions on the ground. We are the feet that will have to walk all the talk, connected to heads that will have to think for ourselves. We shall have to confront the perpetrators of climate change—and that includes ourselves—not with violent resistance or passive resistance, but with clever resistance. Some years ago, the angry customers of a Texas telephone company paid 1 extra cent on their telephone bills. This tied the company in knots. It got the message.
Beyond resistance will have to come the replacement of destructive practices by more constructive ones, as has been happening with wind and solar energy. There will be more of this when we “human resources” pursue our resourcefulness as human beings. Imagine, for example, an economy based on growth in qualities instead of quantities, of better instead of more—in education, health care, and nutrition.”
The Secret History of Bioluminescence | Hakai Magazine : Hakai Magazine is one of my favourites, because it’s funded locally but covers global ocean issues. And because I live on an island in the global ocean, that matters. This article is a beautiful meditation on the natural and social history of bioluminecense, one of the many incredibly beautiful things that happens in the ocean here.
It’s good to have Dave Snowden back from his treks in the Himalayas. He’s been a big influence on my thinking and practice over the past few years and his near daily blog posts are always rich, irreverent and practical. He is in the process of creating an important body of theory and practice that is useful even if the language and the concepts are sometimes a lot of work to grasp. The payoff from wrestling with his ideas is rich.
Today he’s discussing “dispositionality” which simply means that making change in a system is much easier when you have a sense of what the system is pre-disposed to do (and what it is NOT pre-disposed to do…)
Back in the summer Caitlin and I led a learning lab for the board and staff members of various community foundations from around British Columbia. The five principles that Dave articulated today were very much embedded in our work and they are becoming very much the basis for any change and planning work I do. Here’s how we made it work, pen and paper style.
1. Map the current state of the system, including its dominant flows, eddy points and whirlpools.
We began with a World Cafe design based on small stories of change. It is always good to ask people about actual decisions or stories that they remember to ground their experience in discovery. If you run a cafe on “What are the big sources of change in our sector?” you get a data set that is divorced from reality, meaning that it is subject to being gamed by the participants. I can just insert the things I want to see in there. But if I am asked to tell a story about a particular decision I had to made, the data set is richer and we have a good chance to see emerging patterns.
And so our Cafe ran like that: “Tell a story of a time when you knew things needed to change?”
Each person told a story and the other three at the table listened and wrote down what they heard was the impetus for change, with one data point on a post-it note. We did several rounds of story telling. At the end of the round, we asked people to give the post-its to the story teller, and we gave the story tellers time to rank each post it note on a scale of 1-3. A one meant that the impetus for change was just known to me (a weak signal), two meant that a few other people know about this impetus, and a three meant that this change trigger was known by everybody.
We then had the group cluster all the post-its to find major categories, and we sorted post it notes within the categories to produce a map that was rendered by our graphic recorder, Corrina Keeling. You can see that above.
2. Identify the energy gradient associated with existing dominant patterns and what adjacent possible states to any undesirable pattern present themselves.
The resulting map shows the major areas for change making, specific “acupuncture points” and the “energy gradients associated with the dominant patterns.” Practically what this means is that items marked in yellow were very weak signals and could be candidates for a change initiative that would appear out of left field for the dominant system. Not a bad thing to do, but it requires a lot of resources and political capital to initiate. The red items were things that EVERYBODY was talking about, which meant that the space for innovation was quite closed down. There are a lot of experts, large consulting firms, influential funding pots and politically committed people tackling change at this level because it is perceived to be an influential place to play. As a result it is generally a zone that is not failure tolerant and so these items are not good candidates for a probe or prototyping approach.
But the orange items were in a kind of Goldilocks zone: there are a few people who know that you can make change here, so you have allies, but the field is not cluttered with competing experts trying to assert their ideological solutions.
The whole map allows you to make choices.
3. Engage in safe-to-fail experiments in parallel either to change the energy gradient or to nudge (or shift) a dominant pattern to a more desirable state ideally through action rather than platitude.
This is of course the best approach to making change within complex systems. We took time to develop prototypes that were intended to tell us something about the system. A bonus would be that we might might create ideas that would turn into interesting new initiatives, but the primary function of running prototypes is to probe the system to tell us something about what is possible. Making tentative conclusions from action inspires people to try more, on a path that is a little more blazed. Just creating platitudes such as “Let’s build networks for knowledge transfer” doesn’t do enough to help change makers poke around and try things that are likely to work.
Each participant in the group created one or two prototypes which they rolled out, seeking to make a bit of change and learn about what helped or hindered change making in a relatively conservative sector of civil society.
4. Monitor the impact in real time and take multiple small actions to reinforce the good and disrupt the bad.
We kept the group together over a few months, having them check in over webinars to share the progress on their prototypes. We deliberately created a space where things were allowed to fail or radically change and we harvested learning all the way along. Where things were working, prototypes evolved in that direction, and we had a little funding to help accelerate them. By simply starting, participants discovered oblique strategies and in some cases entirely new ways to address their basic desire for changing some element of their environment. Without engaging in a deliberate yet loosely held action-based project, it is very difficult to see the opportunities that lie in the blind spots.
This learning was summarized in a report, but the bigger harvest was the capacity that each participant built to take steps to sense, design and implement change initiatives with a better informed complexity approach.
5. At all costs avoid any announcement of a change initiative or idealistic outcome based targets
I think this goes without saying. Change making in the complex space is essentially learning on overdrive. When we are truly stuck and yet we have a sense that “this might just work” we need good support to explore that instinct. Being deliberate about it helps. But announcing that “this is what we are doing and here are the targets we have to meet” will collapse people’s inherent creativity down to narrowing the focus of their work on achieve the pre-determined outcomes. That is a perfect strategy for destroying the capacity to engage with complexity, and it can result in a myopic approach to change that guarantees “black swan events” and other nasty surprises.
I’m prepping for a small gig with a non-profit moving to a shared leadership model, and also reading a bit more on Cynefin strategy, and so there are a lot of tabs open in my browser this afternoon. instead of saving them all to an Evernote folder, I thought I’d share the best ones with you.