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The advice you have for others…

November 5, 2013 By Leadership

…is the best wisdom for yourself:

The advice you’ve been giving your family and friends turns out to be advice for you to live, not us. You become the wise teacher as you become a student of yourself. It stops mattering if anyone else hears you, because you’re listening. You are the wisdom you offer us, breathing and walking and effortlessly moving on, as you make your business deal, buy your groceries, or do the dishes.

— Byron Katie

Loving being with my partner Caitlin Frost as she teaches this powerful stuff to a group of leaders whose freedom and resourcefulness makes a huge difference in the lives of vulnerable humans in this world.

Soliciting questions from inside and out

November 4, 2013 By Facilitation, Leadership

Working with a group of leaders this week all of whom are engaged in bringing their full selves to complex problems largely in the community, family and social services sector.  Tonight we are co-initiating our work together and I led them through this exercise which was inspired by my friend and colleague Roq Garreau of Centrespoke Consulting:.

  1. Take a piece of paper and fold it in half so that you have a little book with four pages.
  2. On the front of the little book write your leadership challenge, something that you are called into doing, something that occupies much of your attention and that seems unresolvable, something you feel you have to DO.
  3. Write 12 questions down relating to this challenge.  Make them open ended questions and spread out the Who, What, Why, When, Where and How.  These are questions you cannot easily answer.
  4. Turn to a fresh page in your litle book and rewrite your challenge
  5. Now mill in the room and pair up with another person.  Simply read your leadership challenge and listen as they offer you three questions.  Don’t explain, don’t justify, just listen.  Those offering questions can just offer the first three things that come to mind.
  6. Once you have collected nine questions, rest and rewrite your challenge one more time.

We then went around the circle and had people read these challenges out. It is a very vulnerable exercise as people shared what they don’t know how to do.  And they become equipped with questions that are deeply embedded in the centre of their work and curveball questions that come from the margins.  These marginal questions have a powerful effect on people and it is a useful reminder that change and challenge often comes from outside of what we think we know.

In the debrief a participant suggested a further step: she offered that embedded in every challenge is a vision of how we want things to be and that in rushing to DOING, we forget PURPOSE.  This is a useful antidote to the more common complaint that “we are spending too much time thinking about PURPOSE and not enough attention on ACTION.”  Purpose and Action are therefore held in a creative tension.

These challenges and questions will travel with people this week, and we have invited our participants to see these as friends.

Art of Hosting beyond the basics: a new offering

October 29, 2013 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Facilitation, Leadership 2 Comments

 

Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Tim Merry, Caitlin Frost and I are just returning from a gathering of experienced Art of Hosting practitioners from around the world.  One of the threads in our gathering was and exploration of how the practice of hosting and harvest conversations in the world can be applied to working with groups in ever increasing scale and influence.
This is the core inquiry of our new Beyond the Basics offering.. Being skillful facilitators of dialogue is obviously not enough to make shifts in systems, although dialogue is a powerful place for people in a system to start to understand the complexity, diversity and challenges that we are dealing with.  It is also the prime vehicle for locating the innovation at the edge of the collective intelligence in the system that helps design innovations in systems of all kinds. .  But  alone, dialogue is not enough.  Shifting systems requires us to apply dialogic practices and participatory leadership in a series of connected events throughout a system.  Dealing with the complexity of shifting systems requires that we build depth in the capacity of core teams that are holding the work.

A key part of our work is nto build capacity and depth in core teams to host systems work together.  Building the capacities of core teams is a marker of the success and sustainability of the kinds of participatory initiatives that achieve lasting results and outcomes.  Where we have worked with systems where the consulting team retains the capacity, the initiative tends to fizzle when the contract ends.

Sustainability and lasting results lie at the intersection of depth, breadth, friendship and power.  Core teams need to operate deeply, which means that they need to be engaging beyond the facilitation of hosted events.  Good core teams ARE the field they are influencing and therefore they have to be practiced at going deep into their own dynamics to begin to make changes in a system.  And they hold a level of depth that allows them to see and sense together strategically as an initiative unfolds.

To scale up initiatives, a team needs to then achieve breadth without sacrificing depth.  More people need to be involved in core hosting of the work.  But this cannot be a classical “train the trainer” model.  It takes time for more practitioners to come into the field. The initial core team must not only train others in systems work but also become teachers and mentors of new practitioners and protect the work as it gets off to it’s shaky start.  Going nto scale means lots of learning happening in public, so connecting people together in learning becomes crucial.

The architecture that keeps breadth connected to depth rests on trust, and so friendship becomes a powerful part of the operating system.  In complex systems work there are times when formal accountabilities don’t ensure the levels of trust and commitment that is needed, and only a field of deep trust between people will sustain the practice and sustain the resilience as groups go through the difficult parts of systemic evolution.

The challenge here is that we then need a new conception of power, because power in existing systems tends to come from accountabilities for results delivered against known and predictable plans.  Participatory work is a huge challenge to power because it requires everyone in the system, to work from a position of trust and uncertainty while still staying accountable for results.  When working in any human system, issues of visible and invisible power and privilege are important strategic acupuncture points for change.  And if we don’t pay attention to them we can find ourselves mired in simple relationship building projects or in oppositional and combative power struggles.  We find trust and commitment eroding and we lose the breadth required for impact.

As a team this is our learning edge.  We have many stories to share and tools and practices that help us be in this work, but we are also excited for our BtB offering to be a place where we co-discover with others the deepest challenges at these edges and perhaps even co-create new collective knowledge about how the art of hosting and harvesting can work in these domains.

Our beyond the basics offerings is informed by and structured around learning, discovering and implementing practices that integrate these approaches to working in complex environments with complex challenges.  We have discovered that there are personal practices of coaching, mentoring and support that complement a deep skill set in designing, hosting and harvesting participatory process and a fierce commitment to creating architectures of implementation that respect and work with the existing power structures in a way that protects results while also building the capacity for uncertainty.

As we work towards the BtB workshops in 2014- and 2015 we will be continuing to share learnings, resources and case studies here on this blog and we invite your own questions and inquires about this practice as we move towards learning together.

Safety and rank

October 23, 2013 By Collaboration, Facilitation, Learning

Good spot from Johnnie Moore on the power dynamics of safety in groups.  Hint: it comes from attending to rank, not cohesiveness:

Nancy Dixon writes about the conditions that favour good quality conversations in organisations. She uses the term psychological safety to describe the conditions that allow people to take risks in conversations. She distinguishes that safety from cohesiveness (for which it could be mistaken). The latter may feel safe but really sets everyone up for groupthink. The safety Nancy talks about allows challenging things to be said.

The essential precondition for that kind of safety is largely to do with power differences…

And from the paper he links to:

For a team to be effective and competitive it must be engaged in learning behaviors that are too often perceived as risky by members of the team. To take that risk, team members need to feel psychologically safe, that is, “have a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish members for speaking up.” The actions that help to bring about collective sensemaking are:

– reducing the power differential between leaders and members

– teams taking the time to reflect together on a regular basis about their actions, results, concerns, and innovative new ideas

– members actively providing support for each other in meetings

– holding small group discussions about appreciative topics to build relationships and enhance the knowledge of others’ competence

– engaging in shared experiences that serve as a reference point for meaning.

 

via Safety and rank | Johnnie Moore.

Just doing it

October 21, 2013 By Being, Collaboration, Design, Facilitation

Playing music rather than talking about it

 

 

I’m coming back from Hahopa with simplicity ringing in my ears.  I think the mantra is “put something in your hands.”

At Hahopa we cooked together, wove cedar together, trained with swords together, played lahal and sang songs.  We DID a lot.  And in our doing we could reflect on our being.  And from our being we can create a view of what else we might do.

I spend a lot of time helping people plan things.  But I am noticing that people want plans that promise a great future, but are afriad to start doing things.  Heading into a set of meetings this week with some Chruches here in BC, I think I’m curious mto ask “What do you want to be doing that you aren’t doing now?”  And by this question I don’t mean “What do you want other people to do?”  I mean, what are you willing to start now that would help us become something that we wanted to become.  Let’s do more of that and THEN we can see what we have learned.

Visioning and creating a common purpose is cool but it often assumes that we know what the future will hold or that we can guess what will be useful.  We need to be more adaptable.  We need to look at what is stopping us from DOING the things we want to do, and focusing on removing the barriers to that, whether those are resources or fears or time.