Menu

Limiting beliefs

November 4, 2015 By Complexity, Facilitation, Leadership, Practice One Comment

in most of our leadership training work and our strategic work with Harvest Moon, we devote at least a half day to working with limiting beleifs using a process developed by Byron Katie called simply The Work.

At its simplest, the work is a process of inquiring into limiting beliefs that are unhelpful in our work and lives.  Such beliefs often include judgements, ideologies and other beliefs that prevent us from really seeing the reality we are dealing with.   Some of these beliefs are so strong that we take them for granted – such as “Richard shouldn’t have punched Eric” which is an excellent example of an espoused belief that crumbles in the face of the reality that Eric was just punched by Richard.  As anyone with teenagers knows, just saying something “should” or “shouldn’t” happen is no guarantee that it will or won’t, and is an utter denial of what just did happen (or didn’t!).  Any statement that contains “should” is an argument with reality.

Every time we enter into complexity work with clients we confront limiting beliefs: this won’t work, we’ve already tried it, it’s impossible, the boss will kill it, we don’t know what to do, the answer has to be clear, and so on.  Limiting beliefs do a couple of things.  First they limit thinking by exerting a powerful constraint over the mind that, left unquestioned, makes us narrow our ability to scan of possibilities.  And second, they cognitively entrain our thinking with unhelful attractors, so that when the boss enters the room, so do all our thoughts about the boss’s resourcefulness and support.  Doing creative work with unquestioned beliefes in the way is near impossible.

The way to deal with this kind of thinking is, not surprisingly, informed by complexity practice.  So this means that it won’t work to ask a direct question about that belief.  Addressing situations head on is a good strategy for complicated problems but a poor strategy for complex ones.  And entrained brains will always game the system.  In practice this misapplication looks like adopting an affirmation or something like “I will be kinder towards my boss” that doesn’t shift thinking at all, and in fact can bury the resent and anger directed at the boss that will come out in some passive aggressive .form when you least expect it or least desire it.

instead we inquire into the the thought by looking at how a belief lines up with reality, and then looking at what happens when we are believing thoughts – how our body, emotions and behaviours are influenced when a belief is active in our mind.  From there we engage in a powerful set of exercises called “turnarounds” in which we investigate beliefs from different angles.  After that, we simply sit and let the mind settle.  there is no action plan.  We are not fixing problems, we are rewiring our cognition.  It’s a simple practice, but it works because we take an oblique approach to addressing the constraints, attractors and solidified identities that limit our ability to do good work in complex and uncertain environments.

It has been very cool developing this practice with my partner Caitlin Frost who is a master facilitator and teacher of this work.  As I have been exploring the world of complexity-based design, I have been seeing more and more how this process is a strong complexity-based approach to addressed constraints and cognitive entrainment in our thinking.  It’s a key piece of strategic capacity building.

You’re not at good at failure as you think you are.

October 27, 2015 By Being, Complexity, Featured, Improv, Leadership, Practice 3 Comments

Somehow that statement is worth keeping nearby in my work.  For me and everyone I work with.

I spend a lot of time working with people who need or want to do something new.  And no level of new work – innovation, boundary breaking, next levelling or shifting – is possible without failure.  A lot of it. Much more often than not.

Today, working with 37 leaders from human social services and government in our Leadership 2020 program, Caitlin asked a question: “How many of you have bosses that say it’s okay to fail?  How many of you have said to your staff, it’s okay to fail?  How many of you have given permission to yourself to fail?”  No surprise.  No hands up.

There are many reasons for this, the least of which is that people equate failure in this system with the actual death of a human being.  When that is the thought you associate with failing, of course you will never put yourself in a position where failure is an option, let alone likely.  And yet, it’s impossible to create new things that work right out of the box.  You need to build testing and failing into strategy if you are to build new programs and services that are effective.

This is where understanding the scale at which you are working helps: hence probe, prototype, pilot, program, process…five incrementally more robust and more “fail-safe” (in terms of tolerance) approaches to innovating and creating something new.  But just having a process or a tool for innovating – whether it is Cynefin, design labs, social innovation, agile, whatever – is still not going to give you a resilient mindset in which failure is tolerable or possible.  And this is as true for leaders as it is for people working on the project teams that are supposed to be delivering new and better ways of caring for children and families.

In our programs and in our teaching, we double down on working with improvisational theatre and music techniques and especially The Work, which Caitlin teaches and leads.  That process is the primary tool we use with ourselves and others to work on the limiting beliefs, patterns, thoughts and cognitive entrainment that impedes our ability to embrace failure based approaches.  Without addressing patterns of thinking, it is just never safe to fail, and when a change leader is hidden behind that block, there is no way to truly enter into strategic, innovative practice.

How do you sharpen your failure practice?

The line that threads through our hearts

October 7, 2015 By Being, Invitation 2 Comments

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

This.  And a small vignette.

In our circle yesterday, Caitlin arrived a little late, and took a seat on the outside of the rim.

The one who noticed was a Chinese-Vietnamese woman who had come to Canada as a child refugee in the 1970s, stuffed into a dangerous boat with hundreds of others fleeing war and fear.  She turned and saw Caitlin and moved her chair to make room for her in the circle.

She knew intuitively how to fit one more person in, how to welcome, how to alleviate the feeling of being outside. How to bring wholeness.  It was a moment in which our threaded hearts were stitched together.

In these days, when a cultivated fear of the other is what passes for politics, this quote and this story landed.

Probes, Prototypes and Pilot projects

October 5, 2015 By Complexity, Evaluation, Featured One Comment

I’ve been working in the world of program development with a lot of complexity and innovation and co-creation lately and have seen these three terms used sometimes interchangeably to describe a strategic move. As a result, I’ve been adopting a more disciplined approach to these three kinds of activities.

First some definitions.

Taken explicitly from Cynefin, a probe is an activity that teaches you about the context that you are working with. The actual outcome of the probe doesn’t matter much because the point is to create an intervention of some kind and see how your context responds. You learn about the context and that helps you make better bets as you move forward – “more stories like this, less stories like this” to quote Dave Snowden. Probes are small, safe to fail and easily observed. They help to test different and conflicting hypotheses about the context. If 8 out of 10 of your probes are not failing, you aren’t learning much about the limits of your context. Probes are actually methods of developmental evaluation.

A prototype is an activity that is designed to give you an idea of how a concept might work in reality. Prototypes are designs that are implemented for a short time, adjusted through a few iterations and improved upon. The purpose of a prototype is to put something into play and look at its performance. You need to have some success with a prototype in order to know what parts of it are worth building upon. Prototypes straddle the world of “safe to fail” and fail safe. They are both developmental evaluations tools and they also require some level of summative evaluation in order to be fully understood. Prototypes are also probes, and you can learn a lot about the system from how they work.

A pilot is a project designed to prove the worthiness of an approach or a solution. You need it to have an actual positive effect in its outcomes, and it’s less safe to fail. Pilots are often designed to achieve success, which is a good approach if you have studied the context with a set of probes and maybe prototyped an approach or two. Without good intelligence about the context you are working with, pilots are often shown to work by manipulating the results. A pilot project will run for a discrete amount of time and will then be summatively evaluated in order to determine its efficacy. If it shows promise, it may be repeated, although there is always a danger of creating a “best practice” that does not translate across different contexts. If a pilot project is done well and works, it should be integrated with the basic operating procedure of an organization, and tinkered with over time, until it starts showing signs of weakened effectiveness. From then on, it can become a program. And pilots are alos probes, and as you work with them they too will tell you a lot about what is possible in the system.

The distinctions between these three things are quite important. Often change is championed in the non-profit word with the funding of pilot projects, the design of which is based on hunches and guesses about what works, or worse, a set of social science research data that is merely one of many possible hypotheses, privileged only by the intensity of effort that went into the study. We see this all the time with needs assessments, gap analyses and SWOT-type environmental scans.

Rather than thinking of these as gradients on a line though, I have been thinking of them as a nested set of circles:

PPPsEach one contains elements of the one within it. Developing one will be better if have based your development on the levels below it. When you are confronted with complexity and several different ideas of how to move forward, run a set of probes to explore those ideas. When you have an informed hunch, start prototyping to see what you can learn about interventions. What you learn from those can be put to use as pilots to eventually become standard programs.

By far, the most important mindshift in this whole area is adopting the right thinking about probes. Because pilot projects and even prototyping is common in the social development world, we tend to rely on these methods as ways of innovating. And we tend to design them from an outcomes basis, looking to game the results towards positive outcomes. I have seen very few pilot projects “fail” even if they have not been renewed or funded. Working with probes turns this approach inside out. We seek to explore failure so we can learn about the tolerances and the landscape of the system we are working in. We “probe” around these fail points to see what we can learn about the context of our work. When we learn something positive we design things to take advantage of this moment. We deliberately do things to test hypotheses and, if you’re really good and you are in a safe-to-fail position, you can even try to create failures to see how they work. That way you can identify weak signals of failure and notice them when you see them so that when you come to design prototypes and pilots, you “know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.”

Stoking Canada’s racism

September 30, 2015 By Community, First Nations One Comment

This morning I’m listening to a lecture from Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, who recently gave the Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture on “Doing the Right Thing.”  Nenshi shares his thoughts and stories on citizenship and on how that is changing in Canada.  And he doesn’t pull punches.

The lecture is divided into two parts.  The second part talks about citizen action, but the first part talks about our history of racism.

There is a deep thread of racism that runs through Canadian society.  As a white skinned man, I grew up hearing  racist chatter.  “Privilege” in Canada – being an “Old Stock Canadian” to use Stephen Harper’s egregious phrase, accords you a special window on people’s real views about things.  It’s as if you can be confided in to keep the dirty little secret that racism is rampant in this country.  And I’m not merely talking about the obvious and official outbreaks of racism like the Komagata Maru or Japanese internment or the Chinese Exclusion Act or None is Too Many or Africville or residential schools or carding or any other of the historical and official policies of racism.  No, I am talking about the mindset that simmers beneath it all, the permission given to an attitude of micro-aggression and othering that is constantly stoked by “wink wink nudge nudge” conversations between light skinned people when they think no one else is around.  I am talking about a widespread practice of refusing to be reflective on one’s own racism and privilege, leading to misplaced outbursts of outrage that have the odd effect of white people claiming victimhood while at the same time disparaging others for their adoption of an “entitled victim mentality.”

The way Canadian society works is that this simmer mindset among the privileged stays out of sight and below the radar.  Anyone who dares to state it out loud and publicly is usually disowned right away as a crazy crackpot.  If much of what is said on newspaper comments sections comes out of the mouth of an ordinary citizen in a public setting, you’re supposed to call them out even as you nod along and your inner voice says “damn rights!”  The mindset is always there, but you’re supposed to refer to it in code: “those people,” “offshore owners,” “I’m not racist, but…” “one law for all,” “honest, hardworking Canadians,” “Old Stock…”

But what is happening now – and this is something that Naheed Nenshi points out in the first part of his lecture – is that kind of talk is becoming normalized.  Over the past ten years, what is supposed to be a secret set of conversations between privileged people is becoming shamelessly public.  We are seeing candidates running in this election that have no qualms stating outright racist stuff.  We are seeing public debates in which refugees as a class are slandered as potential Islamist terrorists, the 21st century version of the yellow peril scare.  Call them racist and they declare you out of order for making an ad hominem attack.  In the most openly racist era of my life, one is left wondering when and where we get to have this conversation about how racism informs public policy.  Anyone?  During the election?  Calling another candidate racist is now a gift to the racist candidate.  They can rally their base supporters behind the slanderous accusation that they are racist.

And while I’m all in favour of having racism out in the open where we can deal with it, it’s also clear to me that this normalization has the effect of legitimizing racism as an acceptable rationale for policy making.  People seriously use terms like “cultural suicide” to discuss the effect of admitting Muslim refugees to Canada and no one seems to blink an eye.  We have seen our federal government openly use racism to drive a wedge between citizens in Canada and raise the suspicions between Canadians.  We have witnessed the government create two classes of citizens with two different standards of justice for Canadians who were born here or whose grandparents were born here – “the Old Stock” – and others (like my wife, or my children), who can be deported to another country and stripped of their citizenship for committing certain crimes.  We have seen the passage of a Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act which outlaws things that are already outlawed, but has the effect of also making “barbaric” an official standard by which we can cast suspicion on people.  Have any of you reading this pictured in your mind a white man beating his children and justifying it by saying “a man’s home is his castle and no one can tell me how to parent?”  Because that is a pretty barbaric cultural practice, but I will bet not a single white man will be brought to court under this act for that offense.

Racism has become normalized.  We are making actual laws again in this country on that basis.  Our history tells us that what comes next will be inhumane and unjust and that we will eventually look back on it with regret and dismay.  Future generations will ask us how this could be allowed to happen.  And no one will say “I let it happen.”  We will all declare powerlessness in the face of politicians or elites or whomever we can separate ourselves from.  Especially those of us granted the privilege of being “Old Stock” Canadians.  If history is any teacher, something powerful and tragic will happen, a denouement will occur, and the conversation will go back underground to simmer along as it always has.  Disrupting this cycle is important.  It is the critical work of citizenship.