Caitlin Frost, Tim Merry, Tuesday Ryan-Hart and I have been loving offering our Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics workshop over the past nine months.
We’re really pleased to announce that we are coming to Minnesota May 6-8, Staffordshire UK July 8-10 and Ontario this fall. And we’re really happy with the video invitation.
If you have been working with participatory methods and are curious about extending these tools and forms of leadership to systemic challenges, please consider joining us!
Have a listen to this piece from a recent segment on CBC’s current affairs show “The Current.” It is a discussion about Canada’s commitment (or lack of it) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In it you will hear Keith Stewart from Greenpeace (Disclaimer: an old friend, by the way) arguing for a policy and fiscal framework that helps Canada make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. You will hear him discussing the issue with Ron Liepert, who comes from the petroleum sector in Alberta and was the former Alberta Energy Minister. And who is running for the Conservatives in the next federal election, after defeating the Conservative Party’s most loony MP in recent years, Rob Anders.
The conversation is, in the parlance of my teenage kids, a shitshow. The first sentence out of Liepert’s mouth is full of accusations, unsubstantiated claims and he uses the word “extremist” to characterize Keith’s points and his character. Keith is one of the smartest energy policy minds I know and I daresay he has been at this work longer than Liepert has and for more honest reasons. What was going to be an interesting conversation quickly becomes sidelined by Annamaria Tremonti’s inquiry about Liepert’s terms. Liepert is campaigning for election. Keith is trying to get a conversation going.
That sideline was not helpful to my understanding of how we are going to need to use fossil fuels to create the new renewable energy system for the planet. There is a very important conversation here about policy, economic incentives and transformation and there are people in the fossil fuel industry who are capable of having that conversation. Liepert was a ridiculous and buffoonish choice to represent the status quo. He clearly doesn’t take the challenge seriously. I’m much more interested to see petroleum producers who do, and I know they exist because over the years I have encountered them. They work in the long term strategic planning units in the oil companies, and they are realistic about how to position their companies as energy companies who need to develop and active interest in creating and owning significant stakes in renewable energy if they are to survive and service the debt they will have incurred for a century or more of development of a resource that runs out, or becomes too pricey to use.
This is a conversation we need to have. Keith is inviting a 100 year view of how we are going to do this. There is no oil company out there that is not thinking about this issue too, and although they are also happy to have shills like Liepert doing their dirty work, they KNOW that we need to come off fossil fuels in this century. Scarcity, pricing and climate change will ensure this. Whether we can make this transition well will be the determinant of the quality of life humans will have on this planet when my kids are old people. Avoiding the conversation by these silly short term election tactics costs us all.
Yesterday in a webinar for the Art of Hosting Applied Practice cohort I threw out a set of ideas around harvesting that were prompted a bit by experience and a bit by the questions that participants were asking. This is a list kind of banged out on the fly. What do you think?
Meetings are fundamentally productive. They produce results. But without planning for these results, we can get meetings that are unclear in their purpose or unclear in their function and the results are alos unclear. Ask yourself with every meeting “What are we producing?” The act of paying attention to that is called “harvesting.”
Harvesting planning needs a coherent scheme to structure the work and it is important to focus on all kinds of different outputs and outcomes from a process. To spur thinking, try working with these polarities:
Intangible/tangible. What are the intangible results we want from the work we are doing? Examples might include community, possibility, connection, belonging, clarity or inspiration. And what are the tangible things we want to have in hand? A report, a video, a mural, a decision? these are things we can point to and say “we accomplished this.”
Harvesting that serves the process and harvesting that extends after the process. In process harvesting includes ways in which the group uses it’s information to deepen or clarify the work it is doing. In almost every meeting, having a flip chart where we record ideas, or a table top sheet in a world cafe, or a book of proceedings in Open Space, means that the group has generated information that it can use to work with inside of the process. We also need to harvest things for afterwards, including reports for bosses or communities, decisions to implement, designs to create, prototypes to run. Think about what is useful in the meeting and what is useful afterwards. Anything you produce for later needs to have some context around it so people understand where it came from, how it was made and why it is useful.
Participant done/facilitator done. This is a balance. In dialogic participatory processes, we want harvesting to be done as much as possible by the participants themselves. But we have to be good with their time and effort and not distract them from engaging and participating in conversation either. So yes it might be important nfor participants to generate a number of insights around a question but it might be prudent if a smaller group does the pattern finding. The caveat here is that you have to be very very conscious of who is making meaning. It is so easy to bias a meaning making scheme. Try this experiment: next time you are clustering ideas for a group process, have a group of participants come up with a categorization scheme and then have the hosting teams come up with their own scheme. Whenever I have done this, I have been surprised by how different the schemes are. Meaning making is context dependant, so if you have a consultant walking away with an armful of flipcharts at the end of the day and writing a report, make sure that some small group of the participants checks the work for accuracy and bias.
Artifact/channel. What are the actual physical artifacts we will have in hand as a result of this process? Reports, videos, manuals…physical things. And what are the channels we need to create in order for those artifacts to be used? Without a channel for action, a report will sit on the shelf, or worse, it will be 300 pages long where it only needed to be 10 pages because only a certain amount of information matters to get things done. be precise with the artifacts you produce and ensure you have a way to use them right away or they will find their way to a shelf.
Intentional/emergent. When a hunter/gatherer goes out into the woods she goes looking for specific things: mushrooms, berries, roots, animals. But while she is out there she notices things, important patterns that help her decide on how she will go out into the forest in the future. This is what it is like when you go into a process with an intentional desired result AND what happens when you pay attention to what happens because you have undertaken the work. For example, one of the principles I try to operate by when facilitating meetings is “leave more community than you found.” We might initiate a process to do some strategic planning, but the emergent harvest could also be community and perhaps participants gaining new insights into each other’s leadership or perspective.
Personal/collective. Conferences are fabulous places for personal harvesting. In every learning situation a personal harvest is possible as well as a collective harvest. Make space for both. Build in reflection so that people can integrate their own learning with the group’s
I’ve had a couple of requests to share the exercise that helps people understand Cynefin physically. I’m happy to do so here.
I enjoy designing these kinds of exercises, as it gives people a number of ways of understanding the framework and I find that it actually helps the penny drop for folks who otherwise have a hard time groking the nature of the different domains. I am continuing to develop this exercise but here’s how I do it now:
1. Begin by having the group stand and clear a large space so that everyone can move around comfortably. To do this well, you need a large open space with lots of room for people to move. As you give directions, just give folks a simple instruction and don’t allow questions. They have to figure the rest out themselves. At the end of each mini exercise take a little conversation to reflect on questions such as “how did you do this?, what is happening here?, how did you gather data? How did you evaluate your efforts?” Use questions that are relevant to the applications of Cynefin you are dealing with.
2. Exploring the obvious. Have people divide into four groups (they don’t have to be even numbers). Instruction: “Organize yourselves by height.” Things to note: this can happen quickly, top-down leadership works well, it can be evaluated objectively. You can constrain the exercise further by instructing people to complete the task in 15 seconds. It is unlikely you will be surprised by the results of this exercise.
3. Exploring the complicated. Have people divide into four new groups. Instruction: “Organize yourselves by birth month and year.” Notes: there are many ways to do this, each can be objective;y verified. It requires getting hidden data that is easily discovered and top-down leadership still works well. You will find some surprising solutions for this problem.
4. Exploring the complex. Have everyone stand in a circle and introduce “The Systems Game” (I learned this version from Joanna Macy’s work). In this well known game, individuals must identify two other people and move to a place equidistant from each of them. You cannot let your “targets” know you are connected to them. It helps to demand that people try to achieve a high degree of accuracy in this triangulation. Done well, and with lots of space in the room, the group should be set into a pattern of constant motion. Notes: small rules initiate constant complex motion. You will see times when a group is clumped up and other times when it is spread out. Notice how some folks are naturally influential in the group – tall men wearing bright clothes seem often to have a higher number of connections to themselves. Notice how it feels to be constantly moving and adjusting. If people stop moving ask why (usually they are tired of the game, a fact of life that translates into dealing with real world complexity). Leadership is participatory and top-down leadership cannot help. When the group gets tired of the exercise, invite some probes to see what happens when certain people move. You will start to see the patterns of connection better that way. This is a good introduction to developmental evaluation. Once the system is at rest, it’s difficult to evaluate the connections. Probes (inviting certain people to move to a very different place, for example) gives us lots of information. Have the group devise their own probes to illuminate more of the situation.
5. Exploring chaos. Have people start “milling.” Milling is a practice from theatre training where participants are instructed to walk into space, rather than walk in a circle. Keep the speed medium pace, and ask them to listen to your instructions. Instructions proceed as follows:
Notes: “leadership” is increasingly difficult. Any strategy you develop for keeping the commands straight will be disrupted by randomized instructions. It takes a lot of attention to keep going, and eventually a breakdown is going to happen. Some will simply follow instructions as best the can, rendering the exercise simple. Others will try to devise coping strategies; others will give up and do their own thing. You could notice the tip from a simple exercise to a chaotic one and how difficult it is to cope as a group when you enter into chaos this way.
6. Exploring disorder. Have people divide the group into four groups. Invite people to organize themselves by a word that is both a verb and a noun. Pick one from this list. Words like this are sufficiently ambiguous that the groups have to figure out what is meant by the word before they can do the exercise. Any word will do. Notes: the group will become keenly aware of the difference between chaos and disorder. Have people reflect on their initial reaction to hearing the word. It is likely that each person instantly developed a strategy to address the challenge. you could slow the exercise down and have everyone take a minute to write down their strategy and then share them with the group. People will be surprised at the variety. This is a good lesson in what happens when a groups makes a decision without getting clear on what the problem is.
After the exercises I then give my own standard teaching of the framework, which can take from 30 minutes to an hour depending on how much discussion we have.
Hope this helps. Leave me a comment if you try the exercise so we can all learn from your experience.
Mount Ranier in the gloaming
It has been a long day of travel. I left Asheville at 7:15am eastern, headed to Atlanta, spent three hours there and then was all set to leave when a woman on our flight got sick on medication and had to be taken off the plane. That set us back an hour and half and I missed my connection from Salt Lake City to Vancouver.
Impressed though with Delta Airlines. While we were in the air their “Irregular Operations Team” was hard at work getting everyone rebooked on different flights (and in some cases different carriers.) the captain came back twice to reassure us that no one had Ebola and that all our connections would be taken care of. In flight wifi meant that we could check our new itineraries en route. When I arrived in Salt Lake, it was a simple matter to print out new boarding passes and I even caught a first class upgrade to Seattle. Now I’m at SEA-TAC, sated with some salmon and a bitter northwest IPA at the tail end of my second three hour layover awaiting the final leg home to Vancouver. Once I get there it will be a train downtown and a car2go out to Horseshoe Bay to meet the 1230 water taxi. I should be home by 1am, which will mark 21 hours of travel today, about two hours longer than the last time I went to Australia.
I have managed to get through a third of Bruce Cockburn’s new memoir, several saved up Instapaper articles, some Radiolab and Tapestry podcasts and some ideas for future inquiries about things. So not a bad day. Just a long one. Four hours to go.
