Analyse this...!
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.
I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.
Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.
Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.
The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.
In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.
I am preparing some questions tonight for an exercise I am running, and I rediscovered this elegant and simple process for constructing questions that elicit stories, courtesy of the Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles.
Build the question.
People remember events when they can picture an image reminding them of a specific situation. Combine this idea with the suggestion of adding emotion and you have the two building blocks to create good questions.
First start with an image-building phrase:
- “Think about…”
- “Imagine…”
- “If…”
- “Consider…”
For example, ”Think about a time when you were given advice by your manager.”
Add an additional sentence or two to enhance the image:
“This might have been done formally in the office or perhaps outside the formal environment.”
Then add the open question with the emotive words:
“When have you been annoyed, ecstatic or perhaps just surprised by what you were told?”
Notice there is a spectrum of emotions, which increases the chances of a memory being triggered by the question.
Simply asking people to tell stories rarely results in stories being told. In fact people are often confused when you ask for stories, thinking they might have to concoct an event or perhaps demonstrate Hemingway-level storytelling. Consequently, we suggest you avoid the term ‘story’ and use terms like: examples, illustrations, experiences.
So simple and results in great questions.
Stories that run deep within a culture arise out of the basic and unquestioned metaphors and archetypes that provide the foundation for a culture. This is true in all kinds of communities, including nation-states and villages, organizations and families. You can discover some of those foundational metaphors in your own communities by asking yourself “We are a community and that means…”
As someone who has been working with the cultural narratives of the United States over the past few years, Rob Paterson has cast his eye on the way out of the rhetorical tennis match that passes for conversation on immigration in the US. In this great post, he finds a better metaphor for the conversation about immigration in the United States:
For our debates about immigration and all important aspects of life today are rooted in beliefs and not in knowledge. Two great tribes struggle for power. Their ideology affects everything.
“Secure the Border” is a cultural and tribal battle cry as is “Racists”.
Neither side can hear the truth in the other. Both sides make the other angry. The result is that America is splitting apart. Civic discourse is dying and it is nearly impossible to get anything done anymore.
So how do we escape this trap?
I think that we need to change the rules of the game entirely. What might help is to shift the underlying metaphor.
The metaphor we use today is “Fortress America”.
In the Fortress you are in or out. There is a wall. All that matters is the wall. You make it perfect or you leave holes in it. Motive or the circumstances for people outside the wall or inside the wall mean nothing. This is a mechanical and a simple model that is not suited to a complex and organic problem.
Being simple, such a metaphor insists on a right or a wrong answer and so can never produce what is demanded in a complex problem.
It is like 14th century Catholicism when confronted by Galileo. Facts mean nothing. Only dogma and tribal loyalty count.
You can’t argue with dogma. Facts mean nothing.
Competing dogmas can only fight.
Don’t we have to find another way of seeing the issue that does not trigger a tribal response?
I think that a better metaphor might allow this. I think that a better metaphor might enable us to keep our tribal beliefs but to agree with others about things that do not need beliefs to understand and agree on.
A better metaphor is our body and our immune system. It represents the dynamic reality of America and Immigration much better than a wall. It can show us ways of seeing our response that are not in the realm of ethics but in the realm of system dynamics.
For our body, like all real systems has not a sealed but a porous border. It has open portals such as our nose and mouth and a porous skin.
The most important line of defence that we have is inside the body is our immune system. It is our immune system that regulates our body and that reacts to “newcomers”. It is our immune system that allows the familiar and rejects the unknown.
The healthier it is, the more it can defend you against real threats and the less it will overreact to small threats or even to good things. A Balanced immune system will protect you from flu and will not over react and kill you from toxic shock if you eat a peanut.
The Immune System is also affected by the scale and the power of the newcomer. Large scale and sudden intrusions will cause a reaction. Small and slow will tend not to.
Newcomers who want to enter our body have their own dynamics too. They have pathways, life cycles, reasons to get inside and reasons to leave where they were.
Our bodies are a dynamic system that interacts inside and with the outside. So is America.
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Chimamanda Adichie explains in a beautiful talk about how we construct single stories about people and cultures. This happens all the time with indigenous communities. People often hear one native person say something and attribute that quote or idea to a whole culture or even worse, to “Native Americans.”
Adichie goes deeply into how the flattening of stories results in power shifts that lead to marginalization. Spend the time watching…
And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling. Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue. The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood.
The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me to Penelope, a great little breakfast place at E 30th and Lexington Ave, where I have just downed a great tasting egg and pesto sandwich on a croissant, surrounded by people talking about real estate deals, high blodd pressure medication and book promotion tours.
It’s a huge difference in some ways and just another city in other ways. I am reminded how much I love being in New York City, and how much I love eastern North American cities in general in the winter – New York, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa. All places I have some lingering presence in, some impression left on me from the dark and blustery days of winter, the days when, as a young man, I crept away to late night coffee shops to read and write poetry, or out to hear jazz and blues muted behind closed doors and windows dripping with condensation.
Just as languishing over the weekend in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg brought me to my childhood growing up in Toronto – and to my partner’s childhood in South Africa – being here in new York this morning evokes a kind of nostalgia and a kind of energy for exploration. I feel like a young man again, half my age, a free day in New York, bracing air and bright eyed people. Somehow cleansed from my trip. Clear eyed.
It’s Groundhog Day in the United States, a strange holiday. The day in which one solitary animal in Pennsylvania awakes from his winter hibernation, takes a look out of his burrow and gauges what he sees. If he sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter.
Somehow this captures what it is like to have arrived here in the United States from Africa. Today is a good day to wake up and see our shadows. Can we see the connection between the the crime and poverty and disparity of wealth and the apartheid-by-another-name of South Africa and daily life on the streets of midtown Manhattan? A cab driver dreams of returning to Africa to work for a democratic solution to the turmoil in Guinea, a country that hasn’t known the ethnic conflicts and civil wars of its neighbours. he worries that unless people get to work, that might change and Guinea could descend into bloodshed because the bigger powers in the world, some of them in the office buildings above us, may decide to act ruthlessly for the oil and resources that the country is endowed with.
North America and Europe has a nearly trillion dollar arms industry, much of which, in the form of small arms, ends up in Africa. the hands of despotic leaders, paramilitary death squads, gang leaders and petty criminals are filled with this deadly engineering that generates huge amounts of wealth for the North. The oil and precious metals that power our economies are extracted from the coastal platforms of Senegal, the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the diamond mines of Kimberly. Whatever we want in North America we can have. Cross some palms with dollars and ammunition and turn away from the shadow. A bright day dawns.
Our shadows are all around us, and to see them this clearly means two things. First, it means more winter – that the hard times are not yet done that weeks complicated and mindful living still lie between now and the promise and ease of spring. Second, it means that the sun is shining, something is warming my back, throwing my silhouette on the ground. And that the winter continues.
What a complicated world! What an untidy conclusion! What a way to try and capture the truth of this strange trip I’ve been on!
On the way into Manhattan today my cab driver, Bubu, asked me what my impression of Africa was. I admitted that it was limited – I had only spent a week there, most of it in a middle class suburb or on a safari ranch and all of it in the company of middle class people. But I said that the overwhelming impression was that Africa differed from North America in a key way: in Africa, the truth is valued above everything else. Here in North America we are quick to sacrifice truth at the alter of a happy ending but African stories would never do that. To do so is the ultimate betrayal of promise. To tell the story of South Africa as a successful miracle of transition to democracy would be to betray the promise of what the struggle was all about. It was about truth. Clear, shiny, complicated, messy, dark truth.
Bubu, my driver, smiled widely. “Exactly,” he said.