Part seven of a seven part series on the seven little helpers for dialogue and action
- Part 1: Presence
- Part 2: Have a good question
- Part 3: Use a talking piece
- Part 4: Harvest
- Part 5: Make a wise decision
- Part 6; Act
7. Stay together.
Our final little helper in this series is maybe the most important and it perhaps brings us back to the beginning again. Quite simply, if you have taken the time to do good work, the best way to ensure that it is sustainable over time is to stay together. Important work requires a strong relationship between people that can hold the work as it moves, grows, changes, and sometimes fails. As my colleague Tuesday Ryan-Hart says, “relationship is the result.” Good work done in the absence of good relationship rarely fulfills its potential.
I remember watching an American sports broadcast of the FIFA World Cup in 2010, with German legend Jürgen Klinsmann reporting as a correspondant for ESPN from the French team’s training camp. The French team imploded that summer, a team that had squeaked into the Finals on a poor refereeing decision to begin with. The team scored only one goal in the group stages and lost all three of its games. The players revolted and brawled with coaches and administrators. It was horrible.
When asked why the team was performing so badly on the pitch by the American sports anchors, Klinsmann stared incredulously into the camera and said “because they don’t like each other; they are not friends.” The Americans blinked dumbfoundedly at an answer that seemed to come from a kindergarten teacher. But to anyone that has played a game like football, (or hockey or basketball and other “flow” sports) you will know EXACTLY what Klinsmann was saying: without good relationships, it is impossible for talent to perform at its potential. Staying together is everything.
So here are a few principles to keep that going.
Give equal attention to action and relationship. Relationship is sustainability. Developing and practicing good working relationships is essential. The fruits of good relations are borne when times get tough and if you haven’t been actively practicing as you go, it will be too late to draw on those resources when you’re in a hole. Find ways, in all of your strategic work, to also do the work of maintaining trust, respect, generosity, and honesty. Have string enough relationships that there is no fear to call each other to account, because you all know that it is for the greater good. Every planning session, every update meeting, every community consultation is a chance to generate good results and good relationship. Make sure you build in co-responsibility to care for the quality of relationship as well as the quality of results.
Check in with one another to maintain healthy relationship last based on openness, trust and support. There is a personal aspect to this, and team members should be doing their work to create productive and healthy relationships. Take time to celebrate and to socialize. Build in depth to your relationships. The best teams I have ever been on are with people who become trusted friends, and even if our work goes sideways or our working relationships crumble, we can walk away still holding each other in high esteem. It isn’t easy and that is what makes it worthy.
Whenever possible create and work with conditions for reciprocity, gifting and mutual support. The biggest lessons I have learned from healthy indigenous communities and organizations focus on this. Reciprocity, gifting, and mutual support are practically essential features of every indigenous group I have ever worked with. You simply cannot show up in these spaces self-centred, single-mindedly focused on transactional work, or unwilling to offer mutuality and support. Organizations and communities who hold a high ethic around these issues tend to be resilient and generative over time. So accept the invitation to decolonize your approach to relationships, especially when you walk into a place holding power and privilege.
I hope this series has been useful and inspiring. It’s been fun reading the comments and the additional insights. If you have more to add later but find the comments closed, please contact me and let me know.
Part six of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
- Part 1: Presence
- Part 2: Have a good question
- Part 3: Use a talking piece
- Part 4: Harvest
- Part 5: Make a wise decision
6. Act
The sixth of our seven little helpers is simple: Act. If you have taken the time to plan, talk, and harvest, you owe it to yourself and your group to honourably act on what you’ve learned.
Now it’s easy to get consumed by the cult of action, and to assume that every encounter needs to have a week defined action plan at the end of it. While that is simply not true – not every water cooler conversation results in action, but many are critically important in organizational life – when action is called for, be sure to act well. For whatever reason I find that many people have trouble with action. Perhaps it relates to the aversion and anxiety associated with decision making, but to act with clarity and commitment is kind. Here are some principles to guide your action. But be warned, these principles can take you down the road of planning to act, so be sure to keep it as simple as possible and get on with it.
Don’t confuse action planning with action. You would be surprised how many people confuse action planning with action. Often when I am contracting with a client and I ask for outputs, they will specify a document or an artifact, all the while emphasizing that they want to see action. Artifacts are pretty straightforward, and that is certainly something your consulting team can produce for you. But if you’re my client, I need you to understand that action is on you. That means thinking through how you are going to support action coming out of the work we do together. Recently I had a client place huge expectations on an off-site retreat. It needed to produce change in the organization’s culture designed over a three day gathering. I asked how the leadership was supporting people to make change (and to fail at it) and the client said “we have a really fear based culture here.” I warned her that without support from those in power to accept and even incentivize failure while people tried to change behaviours, meaningful action would be highly unlikely. She promised to go back to her Vice President for clarity and I never heard back from them. “We’re going in a different direction” is often the response I get from organizations not ready to put their money where their mouths are. That’s fine by me; I never want to be in a place of creating the conditions for merely performative action, when the people or the situations are calling for real change.
Action requires resources of time, money and attention. Don’t over promise commitments to resource action. In chaordic design, I call this work supporting the Architecture of Implementation. It seems to me that anything arising out of a participatory strategic initiative will require specific commitments of time, money, and attention to sustain it. If there is new work coming then new resources need to be in place to support it. I always caution leaders not to promise to “support all good ideas” that come out of a meeting if they can’t back that commitment with commensurate resources. How much time will your staff get to work on issues? What money do they have available to them? Who has the capacity for oversight and connection? If you fail to prepare a good architecture for implementation, you will burn out your people with added demands on their time and energy and no support. That’s cruel, and its a waste of time and resources. If you are committed to change you need to support change.
Distribute action plan and responsibility as much as possible. Use power to support self-organization and agency. It should be obvious, but participatory change should include participatory leadership. Sustained efforts to address sticky problems in organizations will often benefit from having many agents working on the project together. Use good organizational practices like the ones my friend Samantha Slate has shared in her book Going Horizontal to support leadership and action throughout the organization: share accountability, support personal leadership, give people space to work, ensure people have good conditions for collaboration, and practice good principles of equity and care
Be be mindful of PRICE. Because we love our five letter acronyms, use PRICE to design and check in with your architecture of implementation. Ask:
- How is POWER operating in this situation? Do we need more? Does is need to be more centralized or more distributed? Where is informal power and influence at work and how can we use it or mitigate it?
- What are the RESOURCES we need in order to act well? Who is in charge of these resources, and how to we get them onside to support our work early? What do they need to continue sending resources our way?
- How will we ITERATE our action? AS we try new things, what is the process for failing and trying again and improving as we go? How can we maximize support from those with power to allow for experimentation? Without thinking this through beforehand, people with power in a system are very likely to pull the plug on new initiatives the moment something goes wrong. Iteration is a crucial aspect to make things resilient.
- What CAPACITY do we need to develop? Where do people in the system need to undertake learning to work with the changes they are facing? What new skills and perspectives do we need to change the way we are working? Building organizational and community capacity is critical to sustaining creative and engaged work.
- How will we EVALUATE our work? Is our evaluation strategy in line with the kind of work we are doing? If we are working in complexity do we have good developmental evaluation and learning frameworks? If we are working with more predictable systems, do we have the right experts evaluating our work? How will we tell the story of what we are up to and communicate it well to those who need to hear about it? Evaluation is not something done in isolation at the end of a project but something done throughout. It’s how you document and share the story of what’s happening.
Taken together, these five things can support ongoing and sustained action beyond the report from the meeting or the project planning grant charts or the budget. True action needs support.
And then, when you are ready. Act.
Part five of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
5. Make a wise decision
I’ve always thought that the essence of good leadership is the ability to make a decision. It requires a certain kind of courage, especially when it seems that there is a zero sum game at stake. It also requires a high degree of emotional intelligence and compassion and empathy, especially when the decision you have to make could result in harm for others. Discernment, care, ethics, courage, and detachment all wrestle for attention in the mind of a decision maker.
As much as possible, in the world of complexity, I try to help groups make decisions together. Participatory decision making gets a bad rap for being time consuming and mired in interminable and endless conversation as groups turn over every little pebble, looking for an answer. Many complex problems produce enough data to support multiple competing ways forward, but complex problems never present predictability. You can take an informed guess, but where groups and decision makers get bogged down is in the waiting for absolute clarity. Decision makers in complexity need to be able to act with incomplete information and carefully watch the results of their decisions as they unfold, being prepared to adjust as they go.
For facilitators, hosting decision making can sometimes be a trap, especially for people who are conflict averse. Important decisions often involve making choices that pit conflicting views against each other. Where you can explore these options with small experiments, that’s a wise thing to do, like probing a couple of different paths in a dark forest to see which one looks more promising. But sometimes it comes down to one group’s preference getting chosen over the objections of others. To stay in that process and work well, you need good practice.
A strong personal practice is important, so that you don’t get triggered into making rash decisions as you are hosting a process. It is also important that the group you are working with has a clear process for making decisions. It’s even better if they are familiar with the emotional territory that leads to good decisions.
For me, Sam Kaner, Lenny Lind et. al. set the standard for this clarity with their book The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. That book gives us the well known “diamond of participation” – pictured above -which to me is the single most useful diagram to explain decision making from a group and personal process perspective. It features three zones: the zone of divergence where ideas are presented and explored; the zone of convergence where options are whittled down and decisions are made, and the zone in the middle, which I call the zone of emergence and which the authors call “the groan zone.”
The Groan Zone is the place where the group’s engagement with the content of their work gets stressful. Individuals experience cognitive overload, and they are stressed by the need to let go of ideas to which they are attached and to incorporate ideas which they find irreconcilable. Groups who get stuck in the groan zone experience conflict, impatience, and a waning sense of purpose. Facilitators who know the groan zone understand it to be the place that is necessary if a group is to discover something new and make a decision that is bigger than the decision any one person can make.
Over the years, conflict averse as I am, I have garnered many lessons and principles for practice from applying Kaner’s work and aligning it with complexity theory. Here are some key principles for hosting a group to a wise decision.
Don’t converge too early. When we are working in complexity, there is a tendency for groups to throw out lots of ideas, pick one and move on. That is a good approach when we can be certain about the right answer, but cases where real complexity is at play, prematurely converging can create more problems than it resolves. While it prevents a group from going through the groan zone it can reinforce established patterns of power and control as the loudest voice get its way. Decisions made before really considering options are almost certainly rooted in patterns of entrainment, bias, and habit. This is a good way to prolong the underlying patterns that have created the complex problem in the first place. If the decision is easy, don’t trust it.
There will be pain; build shared perspectives and relationships there. One of the best contributions of Kaner et. al. was to name the groan zone and provide a number of practices for facilitators to help the group navigate this territory. Working in the groan zone requires us to work with relationships. That can seem counter intuitive because groups get there largely because they are struggling to engage with the complexity of the content. Building shared perspectives makes sure that the infrastructure for emgernece – connection, attention, discernment, and a willingness to explore – is in place. Without this, toxic power and control patterns can have their way with the discussion and things can get “shut down.” A group that struggles together will usually make a better decision together and will usually be closer together as a team at the end.
As much as possible, try to build consensus using clear proposals, testing agreement and refining. I love working with consensus processes – and my friend Tree Bressen is a master at these – for building shared ownership over decisions. Consensus building is not a matter of opening everything up and letting the conversation drift in a thousand different directions. On the contrary, it’s about providing a high level of constraints to the process which lets the group focus on its work while holding a strong container for dissent. I’ve written elsewhere about large group processes for creating broad consensus, but it comes down to a few simple elements:
- Create a clear proposal
- Have a method for testing levels agreement and expressing specific concerns
- Deal with specific concerns with an eye to developing a more robust proposal
- Test again, refine again as necessary, and decide
If you have to vote be careful to understand what a yes and a no means. The worst decisions we can make are yes/no decisions on complex topics. This is why referenda are generally counter productive for setting large scale public policy direction. Brexit is the primary example. In Canada we have had referenda on electoral reform, transit funding and Constitutional amendments that produce results that are clear, but produce ongoing civic consternation about what they mean, because it was not possible to reduce the topic into a binary resolution. The advantage of using a gradients of agreement process in advance of a yes/no vote is that you at least know what people’s concerns are. If you can’t explore agreement before hand, conduct a yes/no vote but then have everyone write down why they voted the way they did. You’ll get lots of information pertaining to implementing your decision.
Pay attention to dissent and to patterns of dissent and have a process for understanding these. That leads me to the last point which is to acknowledge and understand dissent in a decision making process. Good leaders and well functioning groups will make a space for dissent because it can provide important weak signals for the state of the system, Dissent can hep a group escape inattention unawareness by raising “I told you so” issues early in the process. It also helps to sustain relationships when people who are on the losing side of a decision nevertheless feel included In it. Fear of dissent creates nasty power plays and exclusion that immediately renders any tricky decision unwise.
Part four of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
4. Harvest
Back in 2008, SIlias Lucius, Monica Nissen and I gathered at Phil Cass’s house in Columbus, Ohio and talked about the Art of Harvesting. Monica developed this practice because she found herself often as the “secretary” in participatory processes, typing up notes, clustering ideas, graphically recording landscapes, and generally making sense of the conversation. This was great for her, but she realized that the group was deprived of all the learning that she was doing. She set out determined to create a body of work that was complimentary to the Art of Hosting, called the Art of Harvesting.
She and I had already been thinking about this stuff for a couple of years when we finally got a chance to sit down with Silas. At the time, Silas was a permaculture gardener at Kufunda Village, a learning village in Zimbabwe that had been using the Art of Hosting as an operating system for eight years. AS a farmer, Silas had a lot to say about harvesting, and as our conversation explored the connections between harvesting from a meeting and harvesting from a garden, I managed to record our insights and we created a little book on The Art of Harvesting that outlined the phases and stages of harvesting from conversations that matter.
One of my core mantras in participatory process is “I’m not designing a meeting, I’m designing a harvest.” That is to say that my focus as a process designer is on what we will harvest together form our work, and creating the process and structure that will do that. As facilitators we are often involve with our meeting process tools and we end up walking away from meetings with dozens of flip charts rolled up under our arms and hundreds of post it notes, and very little idea what to do next. Paying attention to harvesting, is critical if we are to make good use of our time together in meetings. So here are some principles that keep me focused on this little helper:
Make sure you have a way of picking up what is growing inside your container. It should maybe go without saying, but if you don’t have a way to harvest the conversation you are running a risk of wasting your time. And while I’m not suggesting you keep minutes of a date with your significant other, in strategic work, harvesting insights, ideas, conclusions, decisions, and effects is essential. For important and large scale processes I often work with partners who job on the team is being responsible for hosting the harvest. That means they are responsible for the container for the harvest, whether it is templates for small group work, organizing materials to use later, graphic recording, making videos, or writing. Every strategic conversations needs to be harvested well.
Use PLUME to design your harvest. Yes, it’s another five letter acronym. This one is my touchstone for designing harvests that work well for participatory strategic processes. This one cam out of a conversation I was having with my partners Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen as we were designing a nine-week online course on harvesting a few years ago. The letters stand for this:
- PARTICIPATORY: Ensure that a harvest involves the people’s voices and words and images and is co-created as much as possible.
- LEARNING: Not merely a record of the conversation, a good harvest helps accelerate learning in the organization or community.
- USEFUL: Don’t create an interpretative dance if you’re hoping to raise money for your tech start up. Make a harvest useful in medium and message to those who will use it after the meeting.
- MULTI-MEDIA: totally make interpretative dance one way that you raise money for your tech start up if it helps get the message across to people otherwise bored of powerpoint presentations. Mix it up.
- EMERGENT: Make sure that you capture things that are happening and emerging and not just the things that you thought would happen.
There is a lot more on PLUME at the original post from 2016.
Have some idea of how you will put the harvest to use. No farmer plants a field of wheat without knowing what to do with it in October. Who will it be sold to? What will be done with it? These questions determine how the wheat is harvested, stored, transported and processed. That applies to harvest from meetings too. Have SOME idea about what you are going to do with it otherwise you’ll just stick it up on a shelf along with all of the other ideas that your generated but never did anything with. That’s no way to make change, and it’s no way to make meeting matter.
Decolonize this too! Just as creating “containers” runs the risk of colonizing space and people’s time and labour, harvesting can be even worse. I once ran a meeting with a number of indigenous youth who were reporting on some research they had done on their community. We gathered with non-indigensou adult “allies” and I introduced the process by saying “be sure to tell stories and harvest nuggets of widows that can be carried forward.” A small group of youth got up and left the room. When I found them in the hallway I asked them why they left. One young person stared me right in the eye and said “You’re a f*ing colonizer! You want me to tell my stories to adults who will harvest nuggets and cary them away.”
He was right. I had set up the process to be extractive, and completely without the kind of reciprocity and generative character that would have made for a powerful encounter between these two groups. Instead I unconsciously evoked the worst possible way of harvesting: transporting nuggets away to be turned into value elsewhere. I apologized but the damage was done. The trust was eroded and I wasn’t able to work with that organization again.
In her book “Braiding Sweetgrass” Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about “The Honourable Harvest.” And honourable harvest is one that is reciprocal, regenerative, and based in mutual respect and gratitude. An honourable harvest sustains life and makes everyone and everything healthier. Be sure to incorporate those values into your harvesting process and be extremely careful about extracting knowledge, labour, time and energy from people who are giving it without reciprocity.
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.