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Back to a simple teaching of chaos and order

March 4, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Complexity, Conversation, Leadership, Learning, Organization, Travel One Comment

Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and I are snuggled into the attic rooms at the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B in downtown Denver, listening to some jazz, eating some pasta and salad and finishing up a productive design day together.  We are preparing to teach the Art of Hosting to 60 leaders from the community at St. John’s in the Wilderness Cathedral in Denver.  St. John’s is a high Anglican Gothic Episcopalian cathedral in the heart of Denver.  We have been working with the cathedral community over the past couple of years to build the capacity among the 1700 members to be able to host and engage in conversations that matter.

As we’ve done this work, I’m struck at once by how simple it really is and how little space we make for it in our lives.  People are busy, rushed and worried about deadlines and results and as a collective society we tend to defer the slow and clear attention to the quality of how we are together.  Quality gets sacrificed at the alter of timely outcomes.

And of course this is no more ironic than in the myriad church communities we have been working with over the years, which, at their best, host a place to slow down and consider the nature of the relationship between peoples and to attend to the sacred quality of the spaces in between.

For me there is something in the richness of returning to the simplest way we know of to slow down and host good conversations.  This evening as I write by the fire, Caitlin and Tenneson are preparing a simple teaching of Circle practice.  Earlier we were thinking about the simplest way we know of to discuss the relationship of our traditional notions of chaos and order.

While I have been diving deep into the nuanced explorations of the Cynefin framework, it is becoming necessary to find ways to invite people easily into the mind shift that complexity requires.  In the Art of Hosting community we have, for a long time, been inspired by Dee Hock’s work on chaordic organization.  At the simplest level noticing the polarity of chaos and order, and noticing how our reactions to chaos and uncertainty often take us to high levels of control becomes an entry way into a different way to think about strategies for achieving goals in the complex domain.

So tomorrow, I’m looking forward to Tenneson’s leading on the chaordic path, a simple teaching worth returning to.

Simple distinctions between complicated and complex

February 28, 2015 By Complexity, Featured 4 Comments

2015-02-19 08.03.32

Coming back from Campbell River tonight. I was working with a group of Churches who are currently trying to understand their future. The United Church of Canada is in a period of massive restructuring due to all kinds of causes. We are very clear, retrospectively, what these causes are…everything from demographics shifts to the overall decline of Christendom. Most folks I have been working with over the past few years actually welcome these dynamics and realities, even though it means that the Church has plunged into a period of deep uncertainty. For people that are both spiritual AND religious in the liberal tradition of the United Church, this is actually a good thing and an opportunity for practice. In short, an uncertain world is where a spiritual practice comes into it’s own.

And of course from a complexity perspective, this is where the tools of complexity thinking comes into play as well, although that is largely a harder sell. In the United Church, leadership has emerged over several generations firmly in the managerial model. In fact some Churches I have been in don’t even start their board meetings with a prayer, claiming that “this is business.” Which is shocking, actually.

Ironically complexity thinking tools are perhaps in short supply but the scriptural texts contain a fantastic set of heuristics (experienced based principles) with which to understand and live with complexity and change. The New Testament, for example contains letters from various apostles to the new Churches scattered throughout the Levant, Turkey, Greece and Rome. These letters contain guideline after guideline for living together in community true to the message of Jesus, which was essentially that love is the number one heuristic. Practice that and your community thrives. Forget that and things founder. More stories lie that, less like this.

At any rate, despite it being right there, in plain view, I find myself over and over having to reintroduce and reinforce the need to think differently when confronted with the complexity of what is happening to the Church. And make no mistake, this is a dress rehearsal for the inevitable collapse of many social institutions that we take for granted, so doing this work has been illuminating. I have been trying to simplify the Cynefin framework’s distinctions between ordered and unordered systems and, inspired a bit by Dave Snowden’s recent post, have started teaching from a list that invites new strategies for planning. In it I contrast complexity strategy with strategy used to solve technical problems and knowable situations. In Cynefin terms, this is complex vs. complicated.

Here are a few of the contrasts that I talked about today, complexity first and its correlation second:

The basic difference between complex problems and complicated problems comes down to whether a problem is solvable or not. Is there a stable outcome? Is there an end state? Can research and expertise provide us with answers? Is the situation predictable? Answer yes to these questions and you have a complicated problem. Answer no and you have a complex one. It comes down to the difference between building a community and building a building.

  • Complex problems aren’t solvable; complicated ones are.
  • Address complexity by sense patterns and weak signals and amplifying them; solve complicated problems by analysing data and problem solving.
  • In complexity, pay attention to what works and ask why?; for complicated problems, keep your eyes on the prize and study gaps (ask why not?)
  • Be informed in your strategy by stories, myths and parables that translate across many contexts; for complicated problems, adopt “best” practices and rule based solutions.
  • Employ collaborative leadership to address complexity; employ experts to solve complicated problems.
  • In complexity, truth is found in stories; for complicated situations, truth is found in facts.
  • Complex planning requires anticipatory awareness, meaning that you have to constantly scan for meaning through the system; a vision won;t help you. In complicated situations a vision is useful and the end state can be achieved with logical, well planned steps.
  • In complexity, the future is already here, but it is quiet and hidden in the noise of the culture. in complicated systems the future is not here and it is well understood what it will take to get there from here.
  • In complex systems, the solutions will come at you obliquely, out of the blue and in surprising ways, so you need to cultivate processes that allow that to happen.  In complicated systems, problems are tackled head on from a position of knowing as much as you can about how to proceed and then choosing the best course of action.

The point of this list is to make a crude distinction in order to have people understand that they need new strategy tools to address the situation they are in. In the Church, leaders have had to confront a situation of such fraught complexity in many generations, and so the leadership that has brought them to this point no longer answers all the questions. This can be a profoundly traumatic experience for people who are used to being able to understand what is going on and influence the situation. So there is lots in this work, and a gentle, clear and fierce introduction to complexity thinking is really needed now. That’s what I’m after here.

 

Complexity principles and policy making

February 27, 2015 By Complexity, Organization

Interesting paper released that demands that policy makers adopt a complexity approach to policy making around environmental decision making.  These principles are useful, and can you see how they would apply to social systems too?

 

  • Create policies that have legs: When developing a policy to manage fisheries or allocate water distribution in agriculture, for example, make it flexible so it can continue to effectively manage the resource, no matter how it changes in the future.
  • Support policies that encourage ecosystem diversity: Opt for plans that encourage organism and habitat diversity, because casting a larger net will let the policy be most responsive no matter what happens in the future.
  • Invest more in monitoring: Don’t just collect data, but actively analyze the data, drawing connections to the past and assessing what that relationship might mean for the future. Do more field-based monitoring and less predictive modeling.
  • Expect a future that’s different from the past: Move away from a “better safe than sorry” approach to management and assume the ecosystem will shift in unexpected ways. Design policies that can adapt based on how the ecosystem changes.

Good, basic complexity principles applied to the management of resources, an area often dominated by predictive, target-based planning approaches.

 

via Embrace unknowns, opt for flexibility in environmental policies | UW Today.

Reconciliation as every day practice

February 18, 2015 By First Nations

Thinking of friends and especially the Elders and survivors in Alert Bay today as the residential school is torn down. I was in a meeting today where we were discussing ethics and the social contract that Canadians have with one another and here’s the thing: if you are a Canadian, whether born here or recently arrived, you are bound to an ongoing relationship with indigenous peoples. It is impossible for you to own land or to benefit from the taxes paid by those who have exploited resources without being directly connected to the original relationships that founded this country. This country was founded and made possible because of an ongoing relationship with indigenous peoples, which most times only indigenous people remember. And this is not about the past, this is current and real today. Each person living here is a contemporary beneficiary of the treaty relationships or the outright theft of land. Right now, if you are a Canadian, you are benefitting.  

But if you forget that, you forget who you are and you have forgotten on what basis the accident of your birth has accorded you privilege.

May this be a day to honour those who have died and to remember and renew the relationship that makes living in this country possible for most of us, while lots of us still struggle to benefit from the original promises of respect, trust, reconciliation and mutual benefit.

 

Exploring Dialogic Organizational Development

February 17, 2015 By Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership One Comment

Later this spring, Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak will be publishing a new text on Dialogic Organizational Development.  It is a book that is a mix of theory and mpractice, written by both academics and practitioners.  I contributed a chapter on holding containers.

There are several events happening in the next few months in connection with the launch of what we hope will become the standard text in a new field.  This includes a full day pre-session before the Academy of Management conference in Vancouver in August

Here is what Gervase sent along this morning:

Bob Marshak and I are hosting a conference on Dialogic OD in August in Vancouver.  Bringing together an international cast of experts who have all contributed to the soon be released Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change(Berrett-Koehler, May 2015), this should be an outstanding day of colleagueship and learning for anyone interested in transformational change in organizations. Conference brochure attached and at:  http://www.dialogicod.net/DOD_Conference.pdf

Please pass it on to anyone in your network you think would like to know about it.  Note that Ed Schein’s opening address will be by video.

If this is the first you are hearing about Dialogic OD, you can learn more about it and the book at www.dialogicod.net

For consultants, a good short overview is http://www.gervasebushe.ca/practicing.pdf
For managers, a good short overview is http://www.dialogicod.net/ATC.pdf
For academics, a good scholarly over is http://www.gervasebushe.ca/mindset.pdf

We certainly hope you will be able to join us at the Academy of Management in Vancouver this summer.  Failing that, keep an eye out for the book this spring.