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Citizens or customers?

June 16, 2016 By Community 2 Comments

Continuing on from my post yesterday, I find that Henry Mintzberg has been up to his good, outraged trickster self, and has published a redux of what is wrong with Public Management as a whole:

There is no one best way to manage everything. These practices have done their share of damage to many government departments, and beyond. Many corporations and NGOs have also suffered from what can reduce to a contemporary form of bureaucracy that discourages innovation, damages cultures, and disengages employees.

In essence, the New Public Management seeks to (a) isolate public services, so that (b)  each can be run by an individual manager, who is (c) held accountable for quantitate measures of performance, while (d) treating the recipient of these services as “customers.” Let’s take a look at all this.

Am I a customer of my government, or a citizen and a subject?  I am no customer of my government, thank you, buying services at arm’s length in the marketplace of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Do I really need to be called a “customer” to be treated decently?

I worked in government for three years, doing third party consultations on the British Columbia Treaty Process.  It was coalface level democracy. I was talking to citizens – some of them with truly odious opinions – about a historic public policy initiative that had the possibility to permanently change their way of life.  They were not customers, but citizens, with every right to expect that we would treat them the way citizens should be treated in a democracy.  It was not about getting them to “buy in” to what we were doing; it was about operating from the fundamental premise that, collectively, they required a place to express their ownership of their country.  That doesn’t mean that everyone gets what he or she wants, because in a democracy you have to balance rights and interests. But anyone who thinks that treating citizens is basically just providing good customer service has been sold a bill of goods.  Yes, even in the provision of services.

Trying to make developmental evaluation easier

June 16, 2016 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Complexity, Conversation, Design, Emergence, Evaluation, Facilitation

Evaluation is such an influential constraint in organizational and community life. When resources and attention are tied to evaluation results, a kind of tautology gets set up. One begins managing projects towards the evaluation outcomes, in order to give the best chance of an initiative surviving and continuing to attract resources. One of the things I appreciate about developmental evaluation is its deliberate engagement with emergence. Making sense of emergence however can be a really time consuming affair, and so I’m thinking about how we can use good use of time to use dialogue and collective meaning making to help make sense of data and direction.

Developmental evaluation is for the complex domain. That means that we are not working with evaluating actions against desired end states, but instead noticing and paying attention to vectors and directions – intentions and hypotheses that help shape emerging strategy. Developmental evaluation is the process of gathering information about our work to give us some intelligence about what we are doing.

Think of the information needs of two different kinds of athletes. A golf player relies on solid objective data (how many yards to the hole, where the wind is coming from, the nature of the lie of the ball and so on) and interprets that data through her own self-knowledge (I hit a five iron 160 yards. Adjusting for wind and lie and the target topography, I should hit a 4 iron with backspin…)  Of course the better a golfer one is, the easier it is to execute a plan and understand exactly where one succeeded or failed.

By contrast soccer players work in a dynamic environment. The information available to them only becomes apparent as they begin to play the match. They may know something about the other team, but they learn rapidly in the first ten minutes or so how the game is going to go. A team will discover where the opposition’s weakness is, or what its attacking strategy is, or where the open spots are on the pitch.  Making good use of this information requires excellent communication in real time to share what is being learned. It requires players to play with potentials and patterns rather than certainties. Every move provides yet more information. The better a team works together, the faster they can adjust their strategy to take advantage of potentials.

When we are evaluating work there is a mix of these two types of approaches at play.  Summative evaluation will look at the gap between expected outcomes and what actually happened and suggest how to adjust for next time. Budget planning and auditing is a good example of this technical kind of results based evaluation.  Count the money and compare against projections.  Look for causes. Some of these causes will be technical and some will be down to culture.

Developmental evaluation requires a different strategic approach, and simply put, it might fall into these four things (I’m trying for simplicity here, to try to be able to describe this in an easy way):

  1. Data points that give us the ability to capture information about a current state of an evolving system.  This can render a series of pictures that will allow us to see patterns and trends. You need multiple snapshots over time to make sense of what is happening. One photo of a soccer game in progress tells you nothing. You need to monitor indicators not manage end points. Soccer is much more than just putting the ball in the net, even though that is the desired end result.
  2. Feedback loops from data to human sensemaking so that data can be used in real time to develop strategy and adjustments to the directionality of work.
  3. A facilitated sensemaking process to bring together multiple perspectives to interpret what is happening. In a complex system the data won’t give you answers. It will provide information to form hypotheses about the patterns that are emerging, and that information can give you guidance for action.
  4. A way of acting that doesn’t over commit resources to emerging potential strategies, but which gives enough momentum to see if we can shift things in a desired way. Snowden calls this “safe-to-fail.” This is tricky and calls for good context dependant leadership, but it is the essence of good decision making.

There are all kinds of ways of implementing these strategies.  You can use surveys to discover what people are accessing on your website and you can use interviews or sensemaking tools to find out HOW they are using that information. You can use a strategic group to interpret these results and see how they are either coherent with our intentions, or at odds with them.  You can then create new initiatives that support what is emerging or figure out ways to abandon what is not working. There are thousands of dialogue methods and processes to use to ask questions about and develop action around the data that is emerging.

Importantly, developmental evaluation needs to be a part of the way you work strategically. It needs a rhythm and a cadence to it, so that you know you are coming back on a regular basis to the emerging picture of what is happening. You need outsiders occasionally to come in and disrupt your point of view and offer alternative views of the patterns, and you need to choose a longer rhythm to continue to develop and refine your evaluation strategy as a whole.

I want this to be simple as a process to use. Strategy without information is just a wild guess. But if we tie our decisions too closely to the data emerging from dynamic systems we can get equally stuck making decisions that try to game the system towards desired results, with sometimes disastrous results for clients, customers and ultimately, organizational integrity. It’s a balance and a practice.  How can we make this easy?

What’s in the central garden?

June 15, 2016 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Evaluation, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning, Organization, Philanthropy 6 Comments

A few years ago, Juanita Brown shared a very powerful image with me. She talked about how those of us that practice dialogue and facilitation in a deep way have access to various gateways that take us into a “central garden.” All of our pathways invite us into this garden where we come to discover and realize something about the role of dialogue, meaning making and collaboration. It is a set of realizations that lies beneath the practice of methods.

On a call today with my friend Mark McKergow, we were discussing this image  There are a bunch of us – although not a large bunch of us – from different practitioner communities who are always interested in transcending our methods and entering into this conversation.   Alongside Juanita, Mark has also been wondering “where is everybody else, and how come we’re not connecting?”

Today we were discussing the failure of dialogue to have enough presence to provide workable and practical alternatives to everything from public policy decisions (such as the EU referendum in Britain, or the polarization of US society) to the everyday challenges of managing and running large organizations, evaluating, strategizing and controlling outcomes, people and money.  

We know that our field of dialogic practice is massive, well researched and well documented.  We know that leadership literature is filled with the importance of relational and sense making work. We know that that mid-career professionals end up coming to our various workshops to take on skills and ideas that are fundamentally transformative to their work and lives and that they go back to places where “it’s difficult to implement” because other mid-career professionals are wedded to globalized management practices that are good enough for what they are trying to do, within the highly constrained performance frameworks within which they are forced to operate. We even know (thanks to people like Jon Husband) that global organizations like Hay Associates have spent the better part of a century ensuring that these management science constraints are widely deployed and understood. They frame everything, not without utility, but to the exclusion of almost every other way of organizing and being together in human endeavour.

So what is the problem? Are we just lousy storytellers? Are we being deliberately marginalized? Is there something fundamentally flawed about the ability of dialogic practice to actually be of value?  And how do we disrupt the standard set of management tools and the narcissism of our own communities of practice in a way that creates some serious openings for change?

What do you think?

Lovers in dangerous times

June 13, 2016 By Uncategorized 2 Comments

 

Bruce Cockburn is probably my favourite songwriter. I like to say that he’s my favourite psalmist too, because his somgs are like little prayers that capture the full range of human experience from drop-down-on-your-knees awe, to deep and desperate despair. Yesterday I found myself, as I do in times of reflection, going to Bruce Cockburn’s catalogue for some quiet mirroring.

When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
You’ve got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

What is so striking about yesterdays massacre is that it was a direct act of hate against people who were asserting a bold statement of love. That to me is the worst kind of violence – nihilistic, pessimistic, narcissistic and cynical to the extreme.

There are very few things I don’t understand about American culture and society. Americans are nearly identical to Canadians in almost every way that matters. The differences between us are often less than the differences between Americans from different regions or political stripes. But one thing most Canadians fail to understand is the American attachment to guns. It is simply a different way of thinking about society, rights and responsibilities.

A society that is armed to the teeth, that has leaders and presidential candidates fanning the flames of fear, xenophobia, racism and contempt and that extols the individual’s power while knowing full well that the deck is stacked against most people transcending the class they are born in, is a recipe for these ongoing outbursts of anger and violence targeted in whatever way. The fact that every mass killer in the United States, has acquired weapons legally is mind boggling. The fact that some mass killers even self-identify with terrorist groups makes the gun ownership system in the US essentially a pipeline for supporting, enabling and abetting acts of terrorism. In every other country in the world, if self-declared terrorists had access to weapons to carry out their agendas, the state would move to restrict that access. Not in the United States. The heavily lobbied response to each of these killings is to work even harder to allow for everyone, including the next terrorist to have access to the tools of their trade. This is a thing that is hard for us to understand. And I know for most of my American friends and colleagues it’s hard to understand as well. But we have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

It has taken me a lifetime to learn to love our neighbour to the south. But I do. And yet, I have friends now who, when they find out I’m going to US, now say “stay safe.” I tell them that it’s really not a dangerous country, and they nod affirmatively but the look of concern doesn’t leave their faces. I’m not going to lie though. Going to open carry states makes me think twice. Mass shootings, racialized violence and blistering rhetoric are often present in my consciousness. I’m trying to love you America, but it’s dangerous times.

Working across the political divide in the USA

May 18, 2016 By Collaboration

One of the things I see as a Canadian working in the USA in these times is that politics takes a second seat to actually working on problems at the local and community level.  

My experience in the past few years has been working with diverse groups of people people on issues such as disability inclusion, the future of churches, anti-violence, social justice, immigrant and refugee services, health promotion, public education alternatives, fisheries policy engagement, and palliative care.  Some of these groups have been made of of folks with shared politics, but many have included people from across the spectrum. I have been working with groups of people that are diving in together on some important shared work for their communities. The divisiveness that everyone associates with American civic dialogue is usually highly muted when there is actual work to do.  I find that on the ground, our work has not been hampered or even really affected by the political divisions that are appearing in the public conversation.  At the least there is some smoke and heat, but then we just get down to work.

This is interesting to me because it suggests that while people might hold a firm ideology about what direction the country SHOULD be going in, there is very little impact of that ideology in the grounded work of day to day problem solving.  We run into the ideology when work we are doing begins to require political support, and the elected officials, who are more and more guardians of a mindset rather than stewards of possibility, apply their lens to support or stop things.  I have witnessed many times people frustrated by their own elected officials, from their own parties who stop good work on the basis of ideology. And yet these same people, outside of their own projects, demand a kind of ideological test of integrity for anyone wanting to run for office.

So this strikes me that the divide is not left/right in the US so much as it is ideological/practical.  Americans are at heart very practical people. If you have a decent project and a compelling need, Americans will roll their sleeves up and get to work on it with very little ideological bickering.  (This is in stark contrast to some work I have done in Europe, where ideology often needs to be negotiated before getting down to brass tacks.)

The cost of the divide is that good work at the community level often gets blocked at the policy and governance level.  

The antidote therefore I think to the “divide” such as it is, is to work obliquely to the problem by inviting people into shared work together where they can see that actual problems and real humans are more complex than the projections everyone throws up against their “enemies.”  

I think addressing the “divide” question head on actually results in the divide become more and more real and more and more debilitating.  I’m not saying that you should ignore it, but I am suggesting that people’s passion and attention are better used solving actual problems, and when they sit down and work together, it is remarkable to me how unified Americans can still actually be.