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What it means to be free to engage

September 23, 2015 By Complexity, Conversation, Learning, Organization One Comment

Caitlin and I are hosting a learning process for the Vancouver Foundation which has brought together 11 people from community foundations around BC.  We are trying to discover what kinds of new practices community foundations can adopt to roll with the changing nature of philanthropy and community.

It’s a classic complexity problem.  The future is unknowable and unpredictable.  Data is plentiful but not helpful because context trumps all.  There are competing experts with different hypotheses of what should happen.  These twelve people are brave.  They’re willing to be the innovators in a sector that is by nature fairly conservative when it comes to change.

We are using an architecture combining Theory U and complexity work coming from Cynefin practices.  I can maybe write more about our design later, but today I’m struck by a comment one of our participants made when she was reflecting on the past three months of engaging in deep dialogue interviews with people in her community.  She talked to a number of people as a way of beginning to understand the context for making change, and noticed that the conversations she was having were taking her away from the rigid roles and responsibilities (and the associated posturing) that comes with trying to do interesting work in a hierarchical, top down and controlling way.  Today in our check in she shared this:

“When we are given permission to talk to anyone about anything it’s freeing.  We let our roles drop as well our limiting beliefs about what we can and can’t do.  We are able to more closely align our actions and our way of being with our intentions.”

A pithy but powerful statement in how changing the way we converse changes the way we are able to act.  It’s lovely witnessing the birth of a complexity worker.

The core imperative: training in practice

September 22, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Practice

When you make your living in the world as a facilitator, you can’t help but notice the quality of conversation that surrounds you.  People come up to me all the time asking advice about how to have this or that chat with colleagues or loved ones.  Folks download on me their grief that our civic conversations have been polluted by rudeness and the inability to listen.  We feel an overall malaise that somehow our organizations or communities could be doing better.

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Retrospective coherence and the road not taken

September 14, 2015 By Complexity, Emergence, Featured, Leadership

One of my favourite concepts from the complexity world is the fallacy of thinking that comes from the truth of retrospective coherence.  The mistake is that, because we can look back in time to understand causes of our current condition, we can therefore see forward in time and affect the causes of a future condition.  Complex systems are emergent, so we can never be sure what the future holds, regardless of how well we can trace how we got here.

Despite the fact that it is illegal to sell an investment instrument without the warning that “past performance does not guarantee future results” falling for the trap that retrospective coherence gives you a reliable path forward is basically a feature of doing any strategic work at all.  It leads to planning that puts out a future preferred state and then backcasts a set of steps that, if we follow them, will take us there or nearly there.

So there are all kinds of issues with this, and the Cynefin framework’s greatest gift is that it helps us create strategy to avoid to pitfall of retrospective coherence.

Today though, a surprise in my morning reading.  A lovely article on Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”  We all think we know what that poem is about: about the adventure that will ensue if we just take the less beaten path.  But you might be surprised to learn that the poem is actually about retrospective coherence and not adventures strategic planning (emphasis mine):

 

Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Brilliant.

How self-organization works: short form

September 1, 2015 By Complexity, Invitation, Open Space, Organization One Comment

A small elevator speech I shared on the OSLIST yesterday:

Self organization works by a combination of attractors and boundaries.  Attractors are things that draw components of a system towards themselves (gravity wells, a pile of money left on the ground, an invitation).  Boundaries (or constraints) are barriers that constrain the elements in a system (an atmosphere, the edges of an island, the number of syllables in a haiku)

Working together, attractors and boundaries define order where otherwise there is chaos. We can be intentional about some of these, but not all of them. Within complex systems, attractors and constraints create the conditions to enable emergence.  What emerges isn’t always desirable and is never predictable, but it has the property of being new and different from any of the individual elements within the system.

Self-organization is where we get new, previously unknown things from.

 

Returning to the Basics

August 31, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership, Learning

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

— TS Eliot

Our Beyond the Basics team is about to host our last gathering of the current cycle of offers, back in North America.  Over the past five Beyond the Basics offerings I have learned more than I feel like I’ve shared. I can feel that my practice has changed as a result of doing this work, and I’ve become interested in the way our team’s ideas and lessons from working at scale have begun to outline a form and practice of leadership that is needed in much of our work now.

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