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Leadership traits for working in diverse contexts

September 6, 2016 By Leadership One Comment

Vu Le pays tribute today to his friend Bob Santos who was a leader in Seattle in the field of non-profit leadership and social change. To do so he listed nine key traits for leaders working in diversity, and the whole post is like an index to a life long curriculum on managing diverse teams in diverse contexts.  Leaders, especially those with traditional privilege in the non-profit sector, would do well to see these as basics rules to guide their leadership:

  1. See the strength in uncertainty
  2. Consider differing viewpoints
  3. Understand that everyone is affected by unjust systems
  4. Remember that we are all tied to one another and there are no “others.”
  5. Paradoxically ground work in their own story while removing themselves from the work.
  6. Believe that diversity is our strength
  7. Play the game while the change the game
  8. Unite and bring out the best in people.
  9. Have a relentless optimism for an ideal world, grounded in reality.

These are pretty good complexity principles too, with a caveat that the last one requires us to have a motivating drive for a better world rather than an ideological goal and pathway in mind. It’s a lovely tribute to Bob Santos and a very handy list to reflect on.

 

Radical innovation is never acceptable

August 29, 2016 By Emergence, Featured, First Nations, Leadership, Organization, Philanthropy, Youth 9 Comments

My friend and colleague Bronagh Gallagher and I are in the early stages of creating a learning offering around complexity, facilitation and activism, whereby we try to bring complexity and participatory tools to the work of social change.  We’ve been assembling some very interesting sources for our work and she recently introduced me to the work of Micah White who has written about protest and activism from a complexity perspective.  I’m working my way through some interviews he gave in support of his book, The End of Protest.  Here is one juicy line:

This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest are illegal until they succeed. All revolutions are illegal until they succeed, and then they become the government and all of the sudden these people are celebrated as heroes and all that kind of stuff. What we’re talking about is very real. This is what distinguishes fake protest from real protest. Fake protest is underpinned by the idea that our actions don’t need to be illegal, that we can get permits from the government, that we can have “free speech zones” or we can do scripted arrests; it doesn’t need to be illegal or dangerous or disobedient. I think that’s completely misguided. We didn’t get a permit for Occupy Wall Street. We asked people to bring tents knowing that it was illegal for people to set up tents. We did these behaviors because the legal regime doesn’t matter when you create a protest. You operate outside of the law.

It doesn’t mean they have to be violent. There are lots of different ways to be illegal. But it does mean that you have to say, “I’m trying to change a situation that is so important that I will disobey the law. My protest stands above the law.” And you also have to accept the consequences of that. For Occupy Wall Street seven thousand people were arrested. That’s an astounding number. People had their bones broken. People lost their jobs.

Absolutely. Real protest is always illegal. For sure.

There is an interesting observation here, that the socially acceptable forms of protest, innovation and radical change are only helpful in terms of creating incremental and socially acceptable change. You may shift things but they will be shifted WITHIN the acceptable boundaries.  When you start pushing on the boundaries, or fundamentally breaking the boundaries, you will be operating outside of the law. In society, this takes the form of illegal activity. In organizational life this means fundamentally violating the organization’s norms and policies, some of which are unwritten and my not even be visible until you start acting in ways that make them visible.

It is this way with colonizing mindsets embedded in the ways that social institutions, governments and businesses operate in Canada, where there is hardly ever a fundamental challenge to some of the core ideas of colonization, such as the assumption that all private land was legally obtained or that all public land is owned by the Crown.  In a society based on colonial power structures, everything goes along fine until some First Nation somewhere stands up to a Canadian law and challenges it’s authority. The act needs to be law-breaking in order for the laws to be rewritten. This is how Aboriginal title has entered Canadian Constitutional law as a valid, binding and important legal concept.

Likewise as organizations and businesses are trying to fundamentally change core practices, they are largely constrained by doing by having such change championed by an approved panel of change makers.  Fundamental change comes to organizational life from the outside. It is disruptive. It calls into questions sacred cows about power, management policies, core purposes and priorities.  Like activists, change agents are marginalized, dismissed reassigned, and often fired. At best if you are championing fundamental change within an organization you may suddenly find yourself without access to decision makers, left out of strategic cnversations and not allowed to work with and mentor junior staff.

Fundamental change is a threat. As I grow older as a middle class white skinned man, I have found myself on the receiving end of more and more  challenges from younger people who don’t look like me.  They challenge my assumptions and my ideas. I am beginning to discover that, despite having lots to offer, the way the world is changing around me must necessarily overturn the assumptions I make about the world, the ones that have allowed me to work relatively close to the core of social stability.  I aspire to be an ally to those making change from the far margins, but it is not my place to declare myself an ally. People are given status as allies of fundamental change makers. It is not a title you can claim for yourself, no matter how well intentioned you are.

Social change, innovation and reorganization requires a kind of leadership at every level that works at the margins to provoke and overturn and works from the centre to, in effect, not defend the status quo too much from the “threats” from outside.  There is no “other side of the fence” in the work of social change.  While I’m not sure that there has ever been an orderly revolution in the world,the question for all of us is which side of the revolutionary Möbius strip are you on and what can you do to help what wants to be born?

 

Internationalism is not globalization

June 25, 2016 By Uncategorized

I’ve been reflecting on the UK referendum results obsessively for the past couple of days. While most of my friends and colleagues voted to remain, I can also understand a little the desire to “leave.”  What I find awful is the manner in which the Leave campaign used racism and xenophobia to generate support for its position. As a result we can’t really be sure what the actual decision was as the debate was caught in irrelevant issues and there seems to be a great deal of regret over it. 
What I love is internationalism. What I think needs to change is globalization. Confusing the two is common but it’s important to unpack them. 

Globalization is the mechanism of standardization that makes is possible for capital to move quickly around the world. Like any fluid, when capital moves quickly it erodes structures and often acts like a tsunami or a flash flood. You see it in “boom towns” in northern Canads where capital rushes it and destroys the local land and community in pursuit of energy profits. It leaves a devastated result in its wake. 

By contrast, internationalism is essentially what we have in the community: a slow exchange of ideas, creative collaboration that both respects borders and cultural realities and transcends them as well. If I would ask how many people I know speak more than one language, we would see a high number. (And as an English speaker with a little French, I feel both grateful and frustrated that our primary language is English…but that is another conversation). In internationalist relationships we take the time to slow down and learn and work together. It is in some ways the antithesis of globalization. 

The EU was born on the twin pillars of internationalism and globalization. It was made for both peace and a common market. Since the financial crises though, it feels like we see which approach is more important. And Greece has paid the dearest price for that.

Despite that, perhaps the internationalist aspect of Europe still holds hope for peace. The free travel of people is important. 

In North America out relationships are entirely held within global trade agreements with very little internationalization takes place. Capital finds easy pathways across borders but people do not. As a result, in Canada and the US global capital interests are able to manipulate election narratives with fear to keep their interests in power while preying on the fears of “the other.”
I think this is what happened in Britain this week.  To counteract the waning influence of capital as the financial system begins to erode itself, a move was made to enlist people’s fear of the other to consolidate the interests of a few. Of course the collateral damage is immense and the result means that Britons have cut themselves off from the world’s people’s. But rest assured that globalization forces will easily find a way to make this result for them. 

The EU may not be the best answer for a community of nations but I believe that until it became an instrument of financial colonization and exploitation it had, in its deep architecture, the promise of global community. What I lament for is that this promise seems to be under attack. We are on a fast track to more global deals with less internationalism what we really need is a radical rebalancing the other way. 

Talking about counting things

June 23, 2016 By Conversation, Evaluation, Leadership 2 Comments

Sometimes people see that I’m a dialogue practitioner and the assume that I am not a fan of quantitative measurement. I think this has to do with the fact that the dialogue practitioner community has been a kind of antithesis to the “measure and manage” world of empirical scientific management.

In any endeavour both qualitative and quantitative measurements are important. The issue isn’t whether or not numbers are to be more trusted than meaning making; the issue is whether we are measuring thing properly.

The issue is whether or not we use measurements as targets or gauges.

Again, this is helpful in understanding the distinction between summative and developmental evaluation and sensemaking. In a linear system, you are aiming for certain end states and targets. In a complex and non-linear system you are aiming to keep to vectors. So using technology to increase production by 5% and decrease expense by 15% can be achieved and you can look back and see how well you achieved that target. You can also do tests and host conversations with workers and customers to discuss the quality of your product, aiming for a general score of “happy” which in turn might be reflected in numbers like sales, returns, recommendations and so on.

In a complex system, lilke an organization’s culture however, you are not managing for a target, but rather you are managing a kind of balance and a direction. You get to choose that direction from your own moral and ethical sense of what is right to do. For example, maintaining an organizational culture of openness, respect, creativity and support requires monitoring your culture in real time, a lot, and noticing how things are shifting and changing. Dialogic methods play an important role here, especially in perceiving patterns and making decisions about what to do, as well as engaging people in the endless negotiation about what those values look like on a daily basis. As a management tool, developing skillful dialogue tools allow you to manage the day to day issues with departures from your preferred set of values, beliefs or practices. Being complex, things like organizational cultures won’t always act they way you want them too, and so good leaders do two things well: they help resolve the inevitable violations of standards and practices in a manner that reflects the preferred way, and they gather together people over time to discuss what everyone is learning about the way the culture is working.

It’s not good enough to convene an annual meeting about the organization’s values and culture. That simply gives you a snapshot in time and tells you nothing about how an organization is evolving and changing, nor does it provide information about promising practices. To monitor over time, you can use a tool like CultureScan or a series of other regular ways of documenting the small observations of daily life that together help provide a picture of what the organization is doing.

Efficiency and the commons

June 20, 2016 By Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Culture, Organization

Is this still a commons?

This morning, I’m reading this article. It’s a review of two books charting the changes in fishing practices in the north eastern Pacific over the last century. I’ve been witness to some of these changes, directly involved as I’ve watch abundant fish stocks in British Columbia become concentrated in the hands of a few corporate owners, with most of the economic activity associated with those fish moving off shore.  Fishing communities in British Columbia are a mere shadow of their former selves, our coastal waterways (and wild salmon migration routes) are dotted with farms that grow invasive Atlantic salmon using a bevy of damaging industrial farming practices. Aboriginal rights are constantly challenged and whittled away even as individual non-indigenous owners grow rich and the fish that are critical to healthy indigenous diets are rendered scarce.

Largely this is due to a practice of creating Individual Transferable Quotas, which is basically an amount of fish that you can transfer to someone else through a lease.  You can read a detailed piece on this here.  Bottom line is that the nature of the system has shifted the wealth generation in fisheries from food production to ownership. You get rich by leasing your quota to someone who barely makes a living catching your fish.

This is much like the way the financial system works too. The fastest way to get rich these days is to trade in financial instruments, whose value is propped up by management practices that make companies so efficient that they return a healthy profit on their capital investment. This means that to create a profitable financial instrument like a share or a bond, you need to suppress or eliminate your company’s costs. Obvious candidates for this include limiting wages, cutting corners on safety and environmental protection and either doing the bare minimum to comply with regulations, or investing in a lobby effort to reduce the burden of regulation that protects the public interest from your efficiency mandate. Managers and leaders in the private sector are told to return value on the investment before everything else.

The mantra of efficiency is so widely accepted now, that it appears increasingly in the public sector as well:

[British Columbia] Premier Christy Clark riled school trustees Wednesday by referring to the $54 million in administrative cuts facing districts as “low-hanging fruit.”

“…there is no reason that in the back office — the part that has nothing to do with delivering educational programs on a local level — there’s no reason we can’t find savings there.”

B.C. School Trustees’ Association president Teresa Rezansoff said Clark’s comments ignore the fact that school districts have been making cuts for years.

“It’s inaccurate to say that we haven’t already been doing this stuff and it doesn’t reflect the reality in school districts,” she said. “It also is not a fair recognition of the really tough decisions and hard choices that have already been made in school districts across the province.”

Rezansoff said districts will continue to look for efficiencies, but she questioned their ability to find $29 million this year and a further $25 million in 2016-17 as stated in the provincial budget.

“I don’t believe, and I don’t think anybody in our sector really believes, that the $29 million is going to be found in shared services,” she said.

NDP Leader John Horgan said Clark’s comments reflect her fuzzy thinking on the issue.

“Low-hanging fruit usually gets picked in year one or two or three of a mandate,” he said.

“We’re in year 14 and I think school boards appropriately are responding by saying, ‘How many times are you going to come to us saying we’re the bottom of the tree?’ ”

Management practices these days manage for efficiency which on the surface is widely accepted as a good thing. But there are things in human experience for which efficiency is devastating. Love, care, community, and attention are all made much worse by being efficient. Where those things intersect with the “efficiency” agenda is where you will find the thin edge of the wedge for social breakdown, erosion of community and poor physical and mental health. An efficient education system does not produce learners. An efficient health care system does not create wellness.  And efficient economic structures don’t produce vibrant local economies.

In this sense the thing that drags upon efficiency is the commons: that which we share in common, which is owned in common and governed in common.  Resources like fish and trees and pastures and water and air and minerals and energy all used to be commons, and some are still commons.  Other intangible commons include human knowledge, culture and community. In order to keep these commons, you must make their exploitation inefficient. Inefficient economies are costly, and the reason is that there are many many hands through which money passes. In economic terms (and in other living systems) this is actually a good thing. The more people you have involved in something, the more the benefits are spread across a community. Efficient use of the commons enables enclosing and privatizing the commons to streamline its exploitation. An efficient pipeline of wealth is established between ownership and benefit with very little wealth going to those that add value. In other words, the those who can own things get richer and everyone else loses their common inheritance.

Efficiency is the spiritual practice of the religion of scientific management. Under its spell, we have not only privatized once abundant shared natural resources, but we have also privatized our intellectual and cultural commons.  Even as we beat the drums for more and more efficiency, we lament the loss of community and local economies, the loss of personal attention and care in education, health, social work and public services. We despair at the high cost of post-secondary education (where we have privatized the costs and made banks profitable from funding the system with student loans from which students can never escape, even if they go bankrupt). We complain that the fish are gone, that our natural assets are depleted. We call for individual rights to usurp public interest, because a fallow public interest is seen as economically wasteful.

Technology has enabled a massive level of efficiency to serve the rapacious appetite of profiteers and neo-liberal policy practitioners. It has also enabled us to begin to re assert the commons, enabling networking, participation and gifting to re emerge as tools by which people can make a living. It is only a failure of imagination and will that requires us to continue down the path where everything is owned. Participatory technologies, including social technologies like dialogue and collaborative learning and leadership, enable us to reintroduce inefficiency into our world to invite participation in the commons. Slow down, participate and benefit. We don’t have to end private ownership, but we do need to get much better at imagining community, economy and stewardship.