A couple of days I ago I shared a link on twitter from Rob Hopkins about a community meeting held in Totnes in the UK which brought together the community to discuss what to do now that the town had declared a climate emergency. The design of the meeting was highly participatory and I’m grateful that the organizers took time to document and share the results.
The design had all the hallmarks of an effective participatory gathering, including having a well thought through harvest strategy so that the gathering was in service of the work and that it left people engaged, enthusiastic about participating in community work and more importantly trusting one another.
These kinds of gatherings are not uncommon, but it’s unlikely that you’ve ever been to one in your town or city. I’ve been lucky enough over the years to do a few really interesting gatherings in my home community of Bowen Island, including a nearly year long series of monthly Open Space events which ran parallel to our Official Community Plan update and a participatory design session for the future of some of our community lands.
This morning, when asked on twitter what I though contributed to building trust in community meeting I answered with a few thoughts. I’ve written a lot about this before, but it’s always interesting to see what I would say differently at any given time.
So here’s today’s version. As design principles, I think these should be at the centre of design for participatory processes if you want to do things that increase trust:
- Trust the people. Invite them because they care about the issues and they have something to say, and invite them to engage in questions you don’t have answers to. Don’t spend a lot of time lecturing at them. You invited them, treat them like honoured guests.
- Let them host and harvest their own conversations. My core practice here is “never touch the people’s data.” If they are recording insights and clustering themes and writing session reports simply give them the tools or the process for that and let them get on with it. Provide a clear question for them to work on, and let them use their own words to rerecord the answers and insights. Be very careful if you find yourself synthesizing or sense making on behalf of a group. Those are your insights, not theirs.
- Use small groups and mix them up. Put people in proximity to many different ideas and perspectives and let them struggle with difference and diversity. Mix them up. Not every conversation will be great. Let people move on and discover better things in different conversations.
- Work from stories and not opinions. If you want to know about the future of a community ask people to tell stories that somehow capture the change they are seeing, rather than “what do you think is going to happen?” try not to have abstract or aspirational conversations without first grounding the participants in a process that helps them to also see what’s happening in the system.
- Ask people to act within the scope of their agency. Be careful asking for recommendations for other people to do things if you don’t have the resources to undertake those recommendations. Be clear with participants about what you can support at the end of the meeting and what is theirs to do, and don’t ask them for actions that they have no ability to undertake.
If you ask me again in a few months what I would say, it would probably be different, but this is a pretty reliable set of principles to guide design.
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.
My friends over at the Social Labs Revolution website have been fielding questions about the prototyping phase of labwork and today published a nice compilation of prototyping resources. It’s worth a visit. It got me thinking this morning about some of the tools I use for planning these days.
Spent an hour in conversation with a friend in the US last night discussing the role of dialogue in connecting communities together. My friend has extensive experience working with immigrant, refugee communities and in working with inner city agencies. He’s been personally affected by Trump’s travel edict as his family members are directly targetted by the current travel ban. He’s a man I respect very much.
We were talking about ways to connect and understand the “other side.” After our conversation I stumbled over this podcast on the “deep story” of what is motivating Trump supporters, and probably both Brexit supporters and other Europeans struggling with how the world is changing and how they perceive their privileges coming apart. We talked about how there is always a thin slice of people that will never sit down with “the other.” We also spoke about the many main street Republicans who feel abandoned by their party and have done since the Tea Party took it over. It comes down to the fact that arguments on economics and policy cannot overrule the emotional aspects of identity, especially when people feel those identities are under assualt through no fault of their own.
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they’re actually voting to serve their emotional needs
The image of standing in line to get your rewards and watch people stream past you is compelling. It’s one thing to deconstruct this image with data and facts, but first it’s important to understand it and how people deeply FEEL it.
Deep story is fascinating to me. Here in my home community of Bowen Island, we experience tensions from time to time over our deep story. We all have ideas about what we think this place is and who we think we are. To some extent that story is an illusion born in our world views and our desires. In a place like Bowen Island, where most of us moved here from somewhere else, our own deep story includes the deep motivation that brought us here.
And deeper beneath the personal deep story we bring is the emergent and slowly changing story of the island’s identity. Over the last couple of years, as a member of our local Economic Development Committee, I have worked with friends and colleagues to understand our deep story. Once you can see it, it reveals the deep yes’ and deep no’s that make things happen or hold things back. People are often surprised by things that go on in our little community, but understanding the deep story helps to explain where these things come from.
When you understand the deep story, you can find deep places to connect together and important places of engagement and curiosity. Dialogue gets more interesting as we set out to learn about each other, what we care about, what we assume is true, and what is essential to our identity. Strategy that does not take the power of identity into consideration creates implementation plans that will inevitably endure oblique assaults on its efficacy. Understanding the deep story and identity of a place or a person is essential to resilience, collaboration and peacemaking across difference. A healthy community can hold different stories in all their complexity, even when those stories conflict with each other. An unhealthy community pits one story against another, and cynical leaders do the same.
We have a choice as citizens. This podcast helps us become resourceful in making that choice.
When I was up in Whitehorse last week I got to spend time with folks from the Public Service Commission discussing a project that would see us looking at discriminations in the workplace from a complexity angle. Using Cynefin and SenseMaker(tm), we hope to understand the ways in which the landscape of discrimination shifts and changes over time so that the PSC can make wiser decisions about the kinds of initiatives it sculpts. One of the problems with diversity initiatives in the public service (in any large public organization really) is the feeling that they need to be broad based and rolled out to everyone. This usually results in a single initiative that spreads across the whole organization, but except for a little awareness raising, does little to address specific instances of discrimination. Everything from awareness raising “cultural competency training” to zero tolerance accountability measures have limited effect because a) discriminatory behaviour is highly context and situation dependant and b) the public service has a permeable boundary to the outside world, meaning ideas, behaviours and people move between the two contexts all the time. The larger your organization, the more like the real world you have to be.
At any rate, I took a bit of time to do a mini-Cynefin teaching to explain how strategy works in the complex domain. and my friend Pawa Haiyupis and I added two Ps to my concentric circles of intervention in a complex system. So to review:
- Patterns: Study the patterns in a complex setting using narrative capture and sense-making. This can be done with the SenseMaker(tm) software, and it can also be done with dialogic interventions. The key thing is to let the people themselves tag their stories or at the very least have a group of people reviewing data and finding patterns together. For example, you might notice a correlation between stressful times in an organization and an increase in feelings of discriminatory behaviour
- Probe: Once you have identified some patterns, you can make some hypotheses about what might work and it’s time to develop some safe to fail probes. These aren’t meant to be successful: they are meant to tell you whether or not the patterns you are sensing have developmental potential. Failure is entirely welcome. What if we offered stress reduction activities during high stress times to help release pent up feelings? We want to be okay with te possibility that that might not work.
- Prototype: If a probe shows some promise, you might develop a prototype to develop a concept. Prototypes are designed to have tolerance for failure, in that failure helps you to iterate and improve the concept. The goal is to develop something that is working.
- Pilot: A pilot project is usually a limited time proof of concept. Roll it out over a year and see what you learn. In Pilot projects you can begin to use some summative evaluation methods to see what has changed over time. Because of their intensive resource commitment, pilot projects are hardly ever allowed to fail, making them very poor ways of learning and innovating, but very good ways to see how stable we need to make an approach.
- Project/Program/Policy: Whatever the highest level and most stable form of an initiative is, you will get to there if your pilot shows promise, and the results are clear. Work at this level will last over time, but needs regular monitoring so that an organization knows when it’s time to tinker and when it’s time to change it.
Cynefin practitioners will recognize that what I’m writing about here is the flow between the complicated and the complex domains, (captured by Dave Snowden’s Blue dynamic in this post.) My intention is to give this some language and context in service organizations, where design thinking has replaced the (in some ways more useful) intuitive planning and innovation used in non-profits and the public service.
Since October, when I first starting sketching out these ideas, I’ve learned a few things which might be helpful as you move through these circles.
- Dialogue is helpful at every scale. When you are working in a complex system, dialogue ensures that you are getting dissent, contrary views and outlying ideas into the process. Complex problems cannot be addressed well with a top-down roll out of a change initiative or highly controlled implementations of a single person’s brilliant idea. If at any point people are working on any stage of this alone, you are in danger territory and you need another pair of eyes on it at the very least.
- Evaluation is your friend and your enemy. At every stage you need to be making meaning and evaluating what is going on, but it is critically important to use the right evaluation tools. Developmental evaluation tools – with their emphasis on collective sense making, rapid feedback loops and visible organizational and personal learning – are critical in any complexity project, and they are essential in the first three stages of this process. As you move to more and more stable projects, you can use more traditional summative evaluation methods, but you must always be careful not to manage to towards targets. Such an error results in data like “We had a 62% participation rate in our diversity training” which tells you nothing about how you changed things, but can shift the project focus to trying to acheive a 75% participation rate next cycle. This is an especially pervasive metric in engagement processes. And so you must…
- Monitor, monitor, monitor. Intervening in a complex system always means acting without the certainty that what you are doing is helpful. You need data and you need it on a short term and regular basis. This can be accomplished by formal and informal ongoing conversations and story captures about what is happening in the system (are we hearing more stories like the ones we want?) or through a SenseMaker(tm) monitoring project that allows employees to end their data with a little data capture.
- These practices are nested, not linear. An always to remember that this is not a five step process to intervening in a complex system. In a large organization, you can expect all of these things to be going on all the time. Building the capacity for that is a kind of holy grail and would constitute a 21st century version of the Learning Organization in my books.