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What do I need to understand before I act?

December 11, 2018 By Complexity, Emergence, Featured 2 Comments

Things change in different ways.  

A couple of weeks ago, I took a deep dive into Glenda Eoyang’s Human Systems Dynamics, learning about her theory of complexity and getting my hands on the tools and methods that HSD uses to work in complex adaptive systems. (The tools are very good by the way, and highly recommended as ways to both get a good introductory grasp on complex problems, and work within those contexts to make decisions and lead).

One of the useful ways of looking at things concerns the kinds of change that happen, and if you’ve been reading my blog lately, you’ll know that accurately describing your theory of change is a key discipline for me.

In HSD we talk about three kinds of change: static, dynamic and dynamical. I’m not 100% sold on the terminology, but I invite you to think of these are ways of describing the start and end points of an intervention.

Static change begins and ends with a fairly stable system.  An example is nailing drywall to a frame.  You start with a frame, a sheet of drywall and some nails.  The act of change is a predictable and controllable action that fastens the drywall to the framing and creates a wall. The system is stable to begin with and stable after the intervention. 

Dynamic change is change that is full of motion and movement but that motion follow a predictable trajectory and also begins with a fairly stable beginning and end point.  To extend our metaphor, this is about building a house, or using a crane to raise and lower materials on the building site.  There are dynamics at play but the beginning is knowable and the end state is predictable.  The interventions are dynamic, requiring little adjustments as you go, applied with expertise.  Hire a crane operator if you want to avoid accidents.

Dynamical change comes from the world of physics, where small perturbations in a system result in massive changes and emergent outcomes.  The beginning state is in motion and has a history that matters.  The end state is also in motion and has a trajectory that matters.  The intervention will alter the the future state in unpredictable ways. This is what happens in most complex systems.  Small changes make big and unpredictable differences.  Extending our house building metaphor even further, this is what happens when you build a variety of structures in a neighbourhood and fill them with people.  The neighbourhood changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.  

We can try to reduce the amount of unpredictability in our work but there are limits to that. Externalizing the results of our decisions is not without peril, and in fact I would say that there is a moral imperative to taking responsibility for the kinds of interventions that we make in a system.  While we can’t know everything that is going to happen, we need to bear some responsibility for our actions.  In highly ordered systems where causality is attributable, we can do this with solid accountability mechanisms.  In highly unordered, complex and emergent systems, we can’t attribute causality and accountability, but we can take care to use the right tools and views. This sometimes paralyzes people into not acting – the well known “analysis paralysis” situation. Sometimes not acting, or simply ignoring consequences, comes with some moral peril.  The problem is that, despite the nature of the problem, we still need to act.

I find in general that it helps to know that complexity is fundamentally unknowable in its totality. in this kind of system, no amount of data and research will give us definitive answers before making decisions about what to do. This is why adaptive action is so important. It shortens the feedback loop between planning, acting and evaluating so that you can start small and being to watch for the effects of your decisions right away. Of course with large scale system work, the process of understanding the system is important, but it’s a never-ending process. One studies it but one shouldn’t treat a large complex system as if it is always subject to static change: moving between one state and another. We need to learn to see that and operate within a dynamic and changing environment, finding “just enough” information to initiate changes and then watching for what happens, adjusting as we go.

From the feed

December 9, 2018 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Complexity, Evaluation, Links, Philanthropy

Some interesting links that caught my eye this week.

Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever

Leonard Susskind has linked the growth of black holes to increasing complexity. Is it true that the world is becoming more complex?

“It’s not only black hole interiors that grow with time. The space of cosmology grows with time,” he said. “I think it’s a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity. And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I don’t know the answer.”

With a Green New Deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation

This is the vision I have been asking for from our governments.  This vision is the one that would get me on board with using our existing oil and gas resources to manufacture and fund and infrastructure to accelerate this future for my kids. The cost of increasing fossil fuel use is so high, it needs to be accompanied by a commitment to faster transition to this kind of world. Read the whole thing.

Why we suck at ‘solving wicked problems”

Sonja Blignault is one of the people in the world with whom I share the greatest overlap of theory and practice curiosities regarding complexity. I know this, because whenever she posts something on her blog I almost always find myself wishing I had written that!  Here’s a great post of five things we can do to disrupt thinking about problem solving to enable us to work much better with complexity.

Money and technology are hugely valuable resources:  they are certaintly necessary but they are not sufficient.  Simply throwing more money and/or more advanced technology at a problem will not make it go away.  We need to fundamentally change our thinking paradigm and approach things in context-appropriate ways, otherwise we will never move the needle on these so-called wicked problems.

rock/paper/scissors and beyond

I miss Bernie DeKoven. Since he died earlier this year I’ve missed seeing his poetic and playful blog posts about games and fun.  Here is one from his archives about variations on rock/paper/scissors

The relationship between the two players is both playful and intimate. The contest is both strategic and arbitrary. There are rumors that some strategies actually work. Unless, of course, the players know what those strategies are. Sometimes, choosing a symbol at random, without logic or forethought, is strategically brilliant. Other times, it’s just plain silly.

So they play, nevertheless. Believing whatever it is that they want or need to believe about the efficacy of their strategies, knowing that there is no way to know.

The longer they play together, the more mystical the game becomes.

They play between mind and mindlessness. For the duration of the game, they occupy both worlds. The fun may not feel special, certainly not mystical. But the reality they are sharing is most definitely something that can only be found in play.

How Evaluation Supports Systems Change

An unassuming little article that outlines five key practices that could be the basis of a five-day deep dive into complexity and evaluation. I found this article earlier in the year, and notice that my own practice and attention has come back to these five points over and over.

While evaluation is often conducted as a means to learn about the progress or impact of an initiative, evaluative thinking and continuous learning can be particularly important when working on complex issues in a constantly evolving system. And, when evaluation goes hand in hand with strategy, it helps organizations challenge their assumptions, gather information on the progress, effects, and influence of their work, and see new opportunities for adaptation and change. 

Becoming a supporter of feminism.

December 6, 2018 By Uncategorized

I was always a social justice minded kid. But on December 6, 1989, when I was 21, my lifelong support for the feminist struggle was cemented.

Every year I publish the list of women who died that day and whose deaths changed the lives of so many of us.

Never forgotten are:

• Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), mechanical engineering student

• Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student

• Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student

• Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student

• Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student

• Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student

• Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department

• Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student

• Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student

• Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student

• Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student

• Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student

• Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student

• Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

From the feed

December 2, 2018 By Links 3 Comments

Thinking of resuming a weekly round up of links that have come through my feed in one way or another. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about these links, but I’m sure my readers would be interested in some of them.  I’ll post a few each week, on Sunday evening, if that works for you all.  Let me know if you’d welcome this as a little repeated pattern.

Developing Human Capital: Moving from Extraction to Reciprocity in Our Organizational Relationships

Careful about the terms you use and the metaphors that drive our thinking about “resources.”

“Environmentalists and systems thinkers underscore the fundamental distinction between extractive and interdependent modes of interacting with one another and the natural world. They warn us that the extractive economy we are attempting to sustain now is, by very definition of its continuous mining of natural and human resources, unsustainable. As the writer and farmer Wendell Berry has written:

The expert assumption appears to be that the products of the soil are not included in the economy until after they have been taken at the lowest possible cost from those who did the actual work of production, at which time they enter the economy as raw materials for the food, fiber, timber, and lately the fuel industries. The result is inevitable: the industrial system is disconnected from, is unconcerned about, and takes no responsibility for, its natural and human sources. The further result is that these sources are not maintained but merely used and thus are made as exhaustible as the fossil fuels.

This ecological framework should give us pause as we consider notions of “human resource” and “human capital” in nonprofit organizations.”

A reflection on Zadie Smith’s “On Optimism and Despair.”

A beautifully annotated reflection on Zadie Smith’s 2016 speech:

Only the willfully blind can ignore that the history of human existence is simultaneously the history of pain: of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror. No land is free of it; no people are without their bloodstain; no tribe entirely innocent. But there is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress. It might look small to those with apocalyptic perspectives, but to she who not so long ago could not vote, or drink from the same water fountain as her fellow citizens, or marry the person she chose, or live in a certain neighbourhood, such incremental change feels enormous.”

There is no middle ground for deep disagreements about facts

I think it’s high time to be clear that willful ignorance cannot be equated with subjective truth.  

“Examining how deep disagreements arise will demonstrate the gravity of the issue. Why do we disagree with valid, knowable facts when we all live in the same world, we have roughly the same cognitive abilities and, in the Western world at least, most people have fairly easy access to roughly the same information?

It is because we use our cognition to support factual beliefs or value commitments that are central to our identity, particularly in situations where we feel that our identity is threatened.”

What do we expect from Innovation? Mostly disappointment

Let’s get good at handling the emotional component of innovation and creativity:

“Much of the innovation discovery journey is a disappointing one. A hunch or insight becomes a dead end. A promising idea did not foresee a roadblock that cannot be resolved. Resources constantly “churn” and get depleted, waiting for others to be brought up to speed. Those not involved directly within the innovation project constantly remain skeptical or require more proof. The status quo of the existing places an increasing drag on the forces of change.”

Building an Innovation Strategy from Cultural Insights

“Ethnographic thinking is a powerful approach that organizations and innovation teams can use to strategically guide how they innovate. Ethnography has grown in popularity as a research method, but as I’ve argued, it is more than just a tool. Ethnographic thinking operates at a strategic level,”

A very detailed and interesting account of how ethnographic research helps organizations see the complexity they are immersed in, and make decisions about what to do next.

Towards the idea that complexity IS a theory of change

November 7, 2018 By Complexity, Design, Emergence, Evaluation, Featured, Learning 20 Comments

In the world of non-profits, social change, and philanthropy it seems essential that change agents provide funders with a theory of change.  This is nominally a way for funders to see how an organization intends to make change in their work.  Often on application forms, funders provide guidance, asking that a grantee provide an articulation of their theory of change and a logic model to show how, step by step, their program will help transform something, address an issue or solve a problem.

In my experience, most of the time “theory of change” is really just another word for “strategic plan” in which an end point is specified, and steps are articulated backwards from that end point, with outcomes identified along the way.  Here’s an example. While that is helpful for situations in which you have a high degree of control and influence, and in which the nature of the problem is well ordered and predictable, these are not useful with complex emergent problems.  Most importantly they are not theories of change, but descriptors of activities.

For me a theory of change is critical. Looking at the problem you are facing, ask yourself how do these kinds of problems change? If, for example, we are trying to work on a specific change to an education policy, the theory of change needs to be based on the reality of how policy change actually happens. For example, to change policy you need to be influential enough with the government in power to be able to design and enact your desired changes with politicians and policy makers. How does policy change? Through lobbying, a groundswell of support, pressure during elections, participation in consultation processes and so on. From there you can design a campaign – a strategic plan – to see if you can get the policy changed.  

Complex problems are a different beast altogether. They are non-linear, unpredictable and emergent. Traffic safety is an example. A theory of change for these kind of problems looks much more like the dynamics of flocking behaviour. The problem changes through many many small interactions and butterfly effects. A road safety program might work for a while until new factors come into play, such as distractions or raised speed limits, or increased use of particular sections of road.  Suddenly the problem changes in a complex and adaptive way.  It is not logical or rational and one certainly can’t predict the outcome of actions.

In my perfect world I wish it would be perfectly acceptable for grantees to say that “Our theory of change is complexity.”  Complexity, to quote Michael Quinn Patton, IS a theory of change.  Understanding that reality has radical implications for doing change work. This is why I am so passionate about teaching complexity to organizations and especially to funders. If funders believe that all problems can be solved with predictive planning and a logic model adhered to with accountability structures, then they will constrain grantees in ways that prevent grantees from actually addressing the nature of complex phenomena. Working with foundations to change their grant forms is hugely rewarding, but it needs to be supported with change theory literacy at the more powerful levels of the organization and with those who are making granting decisions.

So what does it look like?

I’m trying these days to be very practical in describing how to address complex problems in the world of social change. For me it comes down to these basic activities:

Describe the current state of the system. This is a process of describing what is happening. It can be through a combination of looking at data, conducting narrative research and indeed, sitting in groups full of diversity and different lived experience and talking about what’s going on. If we are looking at road safety we could say “there are 70 accidents here this year” or “I don’t feel safe crossing the road at this intersection.” Collecting data about the current state of things is essential, because no change initiative starts from scratch.

Ask what patterns are occurring the system. Gathering scads of data will reveal patterns that are repeating and reoccurring in the system,  Being able to name these patterns is essential. It often looks as simple as “hey, do you notice that there are way more accidents at night concentrated on this stretch of road?” Pattern logic, a process used in the Human Systems Dynamics community, is one way that we make sense of what is happening. It is an essential step because in complexity we cannot simply solve problems but instead we seek to shift patterns.

Ask yourself what might be holding these patterns in place. Recently I have been doing this by asking groups to look at the patterns they have identified and answer this question. “If this pattern was the result of set of principles and advice that we have been following, what would those principles be?” This helps you to see the structures that keep problems in place, and that is an essential intelligence for strategic change work. This is one adaptation of part of the process called TRIZ which seeks to uncover principles and patterns. So in our road safety example we might say, “make sure you drive too fast in the evening on this stretch of road” is a principle that, if followed, would increase danger at this intersection. Ask what principles would give you the behaviours that you are seeing? You are trying to find principles that are hypotheses, things you can test and learn more about. Those principles are what you are aiming to change, to therefore shift behaviour.  A key piece of complexity as a theory of change is that constraints influence behaviour. These are sometimes called “simple rules” but I’m going to refer to them as principles, because it will later dovetail better with a particular evaluation method. 

Determine a direction of travel towards “better.”  As opposed to starting with an end point in sight, in complexity you get to determine which direction you want to head towards, and you get to do it with others. “Better” is a set of choices you get to make, and they can be socially constructed and socially contested. “Better” is not inevitable and it cannot be predictive but choosing an indicator like “fewer accidents everywhere and a feeling of safety amongst pedestrians” will help guide your decisions.  In a road safety initiative this will direct you towards a monitoring strategy and towards context specific actions for certain places that are more unsafe than others. Note that “eliminating accidents” isn’t possible, because the work you are trying to do is dynamic and adaptive, and changes over time. The only way to eliminate accidents is to ban cars. That may be one strategy, and in certain places that might be how you do it.  It will of course generate other problems, and you have to be aware and monitor for those as well.  In this work we are looking for what is called an “adjacent possible” state for the system.  What can we possibly change to take us towards a better state? What is the system inclined to do?  Banning cars might not be that adjacent possible.

Choose principles that will help guide you away from the current state towards “better.” It’s a key piece of complexity as a theory of change that constraints in a system cause emergent actions. One of my favourite writers on constraints is Mark O Sullivan, a soccer coach with AIK in Sweden. He pioneers and research constraint based learning for children at the AIK academy. Rather than teach children strategy, he creates the conditions so that they can discover it for themselves. He gives children simple rules to follow in constrained game simulated situations and lets them explore and experiment with solutions to problems in a dynamic context. In this presentation he shows a video of kids practicing simple rules like “move away from the ball” and “pass” and watches as they discover ways to create and use space, which is an essential tactical skill for players, but which cannot be taught abstractly and which must be learned in application.  Principles aimed at changing the constraints will help design interventions to shift patterns.

Design actions aimed at shifting constraints and monitor them closely. Using these simple rules (principles) and a direction of travel, you can begin to design and try actions that give you a sense of what works and what doesn’t.  These are called safe to fail probes. In the road safety example, probes might include placing temporary speed bumps on the road, installing reflective tape or silhouettes on posts at pedestrian crossings, placing a large object on the road to constrain the driving lanes and cause drivers to slow down. All of these probes will give you information about how to shift the patterns in the system, and some might produce results that will inspire you to make them more permanent. But in addition to monitoring for success, you have to also monitor for emergent side effects.  Slowing traffic down might increase delays for drivers, meaning that they drive with more frustration, meaning more fender benders elsewhere in the system. Complex adaptive systems produce emergent outcomes. You have to watch for them. 

Evaluate the effectiveness of your principles in changing the constraints in the system. Evaluation in complex systems is about monitoring and watching what develops as you work. It is not about measuring the results of your work, doing a gap analysis and making recommendations. There are many, many approaches to evaluation, and you have to be smart in using the methods that work for the nature of the problem you are facing. In my opinion we all need become much more literate in evaluation theory, because done poorly, evaluation can have the effect of constraining change work into a few easily observed outcomes. One form of evaluation that is getting my attention is principles-based evaluation, which helps you to look at the effectiveness of the principles you are using to guide action. This is why using principles as a framework helps to plan, act and evaluate.

Monitor and repeat. Working on complex problems has no end. A traffic safety initiative will change over time due to factors well outside the control of an organization to respond to it. And so there never can be an end point to the work. Strategies will have an effect and then you need to look at the current state again and repeat the process.  Embedding this cycle in daily practice is actually good capacity building and teams and organizations that can do this become more responsive and strategic over time. 

Complexity IS indeed a theory of change. I feel like I’m on a mission to help organizations, social change workers and funders get a sense of how and why adopting to that reality is beneficial all round.  

How are you working with complexity as a theory of change?