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Understanding vision

June 7, 2017 By Art of Hosting, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured 4 Comments

“Vision” is one of those words that is overused in our work and the reason it is so elusive is that is is so context dependant.

You can have a vision of a full bath tub of steaming hot water. You can have a vision of making your home run on rain water alone. You can have a vision of safe drinking water for all humans.

The first is simple, short term and you have all the tools and abilities to make it happen.

The second is more complicated and you require a few experts to make it happen, but with the right people and resources, you can achieve it.

The third is not up to you. It is a complex and adaptive system. You may be motivated by a desire to see safe drinking water for all humans but you are unlikely to achieve it because it is a complex problem. Intention can make a difference here and instead of working TOWARDS a tangible vision you can work FROM an intention and guide your actions against that.

The problem comes when people want tangible outcomes from linear processes. “We need a vision of our future” can sometimes lead to work that ignores all the opportunities and threats that come up in a living and evolving system. Without good methods of understanding what is happening, what a system is inclined to do, or iterating work based on learning (in other words developmental evaluation), in my experience those with power and a mandate to accomplish something will eventually narrow the work down to mere deliverables. The vision maybe in there somewhere but the context renders it useless.

So these days when a client asks me for a vision I want to know why and whether they have the means and desire to actually achieve it, or whether they are simply calling for a conversation on “what we’re all trying to do” so that work and opportunities can be evaluated against that.

At some level, in complex systems, vision and purpose become moral centres and ethical guidelines and not targets. That seems important to me.

Desire lines for strategy and change

June 2, 2017 By Art of Hosting, Culture, Design, Featured, Learning One Comment

 

I think that doing strategic work with organizations and communities is really about learning. If a group is trying to confront newness and changes in its environment and needs to come up with new strategies to address those changes, then it needs to learn.

I love the term “desire lines.” Most of my initial work with organizations tries to get at the desire lines in the organization; the patterns embedded in the culture that help or hinder change and resilience. Naming and making visible these entrained desire lines (including the ones that that group takes into the darkness of conflict and unresourcefulness) is a helpful exercise in beginning to first reflect and then disrupt and develop capacity. When a group can see their patterns, and see which are helpful and which are not, they can make the choice to develop new ones or strengthen the stuff that works.

When  problems are complex, then the people in the group need to focus on learning strategies in order to discover and try new things, rather than adopt a best practice from elsewhere.  It is, as Steve Wheeler says in this video, the difference between designed environments and personal choice:

“Students will always find their own unique pathways for learning. They will always choose their own personal tools and technologies. Our job is not to try and create pathways for them, but to help them create the pathways for themselves and the scaffold and support them as they go through those pathways.”

Hosting groups is always about learning – in fact one core question of the Art of Hosting community is “what if learning was the form of leadership required now?” To support learning, help groups find the desire lines for learning and good strategic work to address change that is owned by the group will follow.  That is how learning builds capacity and capacity builds sustainability.

Canada’s shadow

May 23, 2017 By Being, First Nations 2 Comments

An incident in Red Deer this week has made visible some of the deep seated xenophobia that exists just under the surface in Canada.

While we are known as a country of tolerance and peace, and we largely are, there is a longstanding thread that runs through our history and right into our present that claims a kind of Eurocentric supremacy, and it has its impact against immigrants, indigenous people and people of colour who were born here.

In the Red Deer story a group of high school kids are punished for fighting, in an incident that involved Syrian refugee kids and others.  The response was a protest against the Syrian kids, because some people believed that the Syrian kids were getting different punishment for their role in the fight.  That wasn’t true.

However that did not stop some of the more seedy xenophobes and dogwhistle racists from getting their voices heard on the matter, and the Euro-centric white supremacy thread again surfaced. Consider this quote from Steven Garvey who organizes against Muslims:

“Who we are as a people, as a country, as a heritage, it’s all getting pushed aside and if we don’t stand up for us as a people, as our country, we’re going to lose it,” Garvey said. “We welcome people coming to our country, but they have to integrate into our society. It’s not about accommodating their values.

“It’s about standing up for Canadians, our freedoms, our civil rights and our liberties. And some of these cultures that are coming are incompatible with our own.”

Garvey’s voice is not at all unusual, and the sentiment is not at all uncommon. Many non-indigenous Canadians, if you ask them, will tell you that immigrants should integrate into their idea of society, and that we should not accommodate their values, and that our own laws and cultural practices should be respected, as if this has been going on from time immemorial on this continent.

And of course this begs two questions. First is, where were you from 1500 until now? Because without having done exactly this to the tens of millions of indigenous people here, there would be no basis for a man of immigrant European heritage to claim that his particular set of values is “Canadian” and therefore supreme in this place.

The second question is “which values?” which is a question that Kellie Leitch has spun into a dog whistle political campaign to attract racists and xenophobes to her leadership bid for the Conservative Party. Those that voted for her are now members of that party, and despite the results of the leadership race, they will remain members of that party unless they quit.

The question of “which values?” is totally confounding in a country as big and diverse as Canada.  We have a Constitution, and that’s as close as it gets to a collective expression of values.  The Constitution dictates the legality of our laws. Break the law, you’ll be punished by the courts. So we already have a mechanism for doing what Garvey says we should be doing.

Except he’s not saying that our current rule of law is good enough. He and others like him want to pick and choose what Constitutional rights apply. For example, he wants to exercise unfettered freedom of speech but he would like a limit of the freedom of religion – his organization is called the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam, after all. I suspect that he values the ability to freely associate or have access to equality before the law, but I’ll bet he quibbles with the protection of Aboriginal rights as defined by the Royal Proclamation of 1763.  All of those rights are equally protected in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Justice demands that Canadians uphold and live by this Charter, something we’re not always very good at.

So what does he really want?  Garvey’s ideas – that are readily shared by many with the merest of prompting across this country – are not fundamentally Canadian. They are not compatible with our Constitution or the laws we have set in place to help everyone who lives here get along.

Worse they are a perfect example of the ongoing imposition of a colonial mindset on the Canadian psyche.  Canada is not a “nation-state.”  this is not a country that is composed of a single nation of people with a shared history, language and set of values and standards. There are many many expressions of what it means to be Canadian and they are allowed within the framework of the laws we have made to try to balance rights and responsibilities. The shadow of the colonial violence that sought to erase indigenous cultures and laws is that the colonizers somehow became the victims. It isn’t true. Colonization still proceeds apace, and Euro-centric racism and xenophobia drives the seedier parts of the civic conversation on immigration policy.

Bigots like Garvey should not be left unchallenged as long as news outlets like the CBC see fit to give his ideas daylight.

It is both our right to do so, and our responsibility.

 

 

The VALUE of invitation

May 22, 2017 By Facilitation, Featured, Invitation

This month I am in the middle of delivering another very cool online offering with Beehive Productions on the art of invitation. It’s a three session program focusing on the practice of invitation as it relates to participatory meetings, longer term participatory strategic initiatives and even organizational design.  Michael Herman will be joining us next week for the “Inviting Organization” module.  He’s really the guy that got me thinking about invitation way back in 2000 when I first came across his work as an Open Space colleague.

While Rowan and Amy and I were thinking about content we discussed some of the essential practices of invitation that facilitators, leaders and process designers should keep at hand. As we did when we discovered the “PLUME” mnemonic for harvesting, we arrived at VALUE as a mnemonic for invitation.

In participatory processes, I have found that the success or failure of the work is rally correlated to the quality, intention and active nature of the invitation.  Just as participatory processes require participatory harvesting, they also require invitations to be participatory, iterative, emergent, and yet clear in intent and boundary. These five principles form a decent heuristic for invitation practice that can be scaled from single meetings, through to sustainable initiatives and enterprises. Here they are

Invitation is a  VERB: If you are inviting people to a gathering using a single static email or a poster, you aren’t doing enough, in my experience. Invitation requires you to be active, in relation and dialogue. The interaction between inviter and invitee creates a connection and a commitment and kicks off the design. My friend Christie Diamond one time remarked “The conversation begins long before the meeting starts…” and that captures perfectly the idea of an active invitation.

Invitations are made from  ATTRACTORS AND BOUNDARIES: It’s obvious that an invitation should have a purpose at its centre, but it should also include a statement of the boundaries of the container you are inviting people into. This could be a clear sense of what we are NOT doing, or it could be a cost associated with coming (time, money, attention, commitment). Peter Block says a good invitation contains a barrier to overcome to assure that the person reading it will respond with an authentic yes or an authentic no to what is on offer. Attractors and boundaries together help to define the container inside which the work will unfold.

Invitation is  LEADERSHIP: When you invite people to something you are taking an active leadership role. You will confront all kinds of emotional states in yourself, ranging from excitement to anxiety. You are taking a stand for something, especially if you are inviting people to something new and there may be times when you are the only one with a strong sense of possibility about the work. Good invitation requires people to practice good leadership.

Invitations respond to an  URGENT need: in chaordic design, we go to need first, to understand why something is necessary and to be able to reach people who also feel the need. The more an invitation can respond to the zeitgeist of the moment, the more energy and focus people will have coming into your container or your process.

Finally, invitations are  EMBODIED: You cannot just send a text, or invite somebody to something while signalling your distinct lack of invitation with your body and behaviour. Recently, there has become a trend among American high school students to do fantastic invitations to prom dances. Like bower birds, young American men are going completely over the top to wow their dates. You can say what you want about it, but there is no doubting the fully embodied commitment to invitation expressed by this guy.  How are your invitations?

(Thanks to Viola Tschendal for the image. She does our real time harvests for Beehive.)

Privilege, beauty and evaluation

April 20, 2017 By Evaluation One Comment

I’ve been for a beautiful walk this morning in the warm mist of a spring day in the highlands near Victoria. It was quiet but for the cacophony of bird song, and everything was wet with mist and dew. This is the greenest time of year on the west coast, and the mossy outcroppings and forest floor were verdant.

There is a beauty in what is, in any given moment.

I’ve been thinking about this as I have been struggling with watching people be evaluated in their work recently.  My daughter is a jazz musician, training her art in a university program where she is judged on her performance and where that number assigned to that moment in time affects much in her life.  My son laid out the papers he has been graded on, showing me a variety of marks that surprised him and made him proud of what he had accomplished. All of it a shallow judgement applied to a limited action in a tiny slice of time. Do these numbers take into consideration my daughter’s love of jazz or my son’s pride in the story he wrote or his ability to solve quadratic equations? Do they take into account how my kids approached this test, what it meant to them, what they were trying to do? How do these numbers track their changes, their growth, the affect that they are having on the world around them?

The evaluator’s job comes with enormous privilege.  The privilege is in determining the frame within which the noticing takes place. Poorly done evaluation happens when an evaluator reduces a complex outcome like “impact” into a few arbitrary indicators developed in isolation with a poorly articulated rationale and coherence with what is happening. When an evaluator walks into a process it is amazing how much gravity also enters the work.

At some point in our culture – and maybe it was always thus – evaluation became something of an investigation used to justify accountability pursued with a particular agenda in mind. Frameworks became both too narrow and too fuzzy. I have been in processes where evaluators wanted a single number on a scale from 1-5 to rate the effectiveness of an experience. And I have been in processes where evaluators are seeking to measure “impact” without every defining it, or only defining it on how a process has advanced their client’s singular needs and not the need of the whole ecosystem. I have never seen an evaluation that says to a client “these people are discovering some stuff that has nothing to do with what you funded them for, and therefore your assumptions about change are wrong.”

Done well however, evaluation contributes a tremendous amount of knowledge, awareness and confidence to a process. It allows us to make sense of our work, it opens our eyes to different questions we should be asking and it can put the tools of meaning making in the hands of people doing work. In complex environments, it can give us a new set of senses that help us see and hear and feel what is happening, and that open up promising new directions to nudge an effort.

When evaluation is part of the work it makes a huge difference. When evaluation is a separate project, laid on top of the work or done at a distance, it can bring the work to a standstill as everyone organizes around what the evaluator is looking for instead of where the project is at in its evolution or what the needs are.

Evaluations conducted with principles such as these ones are amazingly useful and empowering. They are deeply powerful influencers in the life of a project, and they need to be done with intense awareness of this power. We need to demand from our clients and funders and stakeholders, a more sophisticated standard of engagement around evaluation, and we need to hold evaluators to these principles too.

 

There is tremendous beauty in the moments of people working together, learning, creating, trying to improve the lives of others. Some days are rich with green and lush life and others are despairing failures. I would love to read an evaluation report that is as rich as Thoreau’s observations of life at Walden capturing the changes and the beauty, witnessing the growth all around, understanding its meaning and being open to the surprises that come with being immersed in an experience.

I’ll be writing more about this topic in the next little while. What are your longings for or experiences of great evaluation?