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Embedding assumptions in the question

February 9, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Complexity, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Invitation, Leadership

I was working with a couple of clients recently who were trying to design powerful questions for invitations to their strategic conversations.  Both organizations are dealing with complex situations and specifically with complex changes that were overtaking their ability to respond.  Here are some of the questions that cam up:

  • How can we be more effective in accomplishing our purpose?
  • How can we create more engagement to address our outcomes?
  • What can we do to innovate regardless of our structure?
  • Help us create new ideas for executive alignment around our plan to address the change we are now seeing?

Can you see what is wrong with these questions, especially as they relate to addressing complexity?

The answer is that each of these questions contains a proposed solution to the problem, buried as assumptions in the question itself.  In these questions the answers to addressing complexity are assumed to be: sticking to purpose, creating more engagement, innovating except structurally, aligning executives around our plan.  In other contexts these may well be powerful questions: they are questions which invite execution once strategic decisions have been taken.  But in addressing complex questions, they narrow the focus too much and embed assumptions that some may actually think are the cause of their problems in the first place

The problem is that my clients were stuck arguing over the questions themselves because they couldn’t agree on solutions.  As a result they found themselves going around and around in circles.

The right question for all four of these situations is something like “What is going on?” or “How can we address the changes that are happening to us?”

You need to back up to ask that question first, before arriving at any preferred solutions.  It is very important in discerning and making sense of your context that you are able to let go of your natural inclination to want to DO something, in favour of first understanding what we have in front of us.  Seeing the situation correctly goes a long way to be able to make good strategic choices about what to do next. From there, planning, aligning, purpose and structure might be useful responses, but you don’t know that until you’ve made sense of where you are.

Pen and paper sense-making 2.0

February 5, 2015 By Art of Hosting, Complexity, Emergence, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, Learning, World Cafe

Two weeks ago in our Leadership 2020 program I experimented with using a signification framework to harvest a World Cafe.  We are beginning another cohort this week and so I had a chance to further refine the process and gather much more information.

We began the evening the same way, with a World Cafe aimed at exploring the shared context for the work that these folks are in.  Our cohort is made up of about 2/3rds staff from community social services agencies and 1/3 staff from the Ministry of Children and Family Development.  This time I used prepared post it notes for the sense making exercise, which you can see here:

2015-02-02 16.29.20

Our process went like this:

  1. At Cafe tables of five for 20 minutes, discuss the question “What is a story of the future you are anticipating for this sector?”
  2. Second round, new tables, same question, 20 minutes
  3. About ten minutes of hearing some random insights from the group, and checking to see how those resonate.
  4. 2 minutes of silent reflection on the question of ‘What do you need to learn here that will help us all move forward?”
  5. Each participants took a pink and blue post it note.  On the blue post it they wrote what they needed to learn that would be immediately applicable and on the red ones, learning that is needed to prepare for the future.
  6. Participants filled out the post-its and then were instructed on how to signify the data on a triangle framework that helped them signify whether what they needed to learn would help them “in their personal life,” “do their jobs” and/or “make change.”
  7. Participants also indicated on the post-its whether the worked for the Ministry or worked for a community organization.

At the conclusion of the exercise we had a tremendous amount of information to draw from.  Our immediate use was to take a small group and use affinity grouping to identify the themes that the whole has around their learning and curiosity.  We have used these themes to structure a collective story harvest exercise this morning.

But there is some much more richness that can come from this model.  Here are some of the ways people are playing with the date:

  • Removing all the pink post-its to see what the immediate learning needs are and vice versa.
  • Looking at and comparing the learning needs between the two sectors to see where the overlaps and differences are
  • examining the clusters at the extremes to see what ot tells us about personal needs, and professional needs.
  • Uncovering a theory of change by looking at the post its clustered around the “Making change” point and also seeing if these theories of change are different between the community and the government.

And of course because the data has been signified on each post it, we can recreate the framework easily.  The next level for me will be using this data to create a Cynefin framework using the four-points contextualization exercise.  Probably won’t happen in this cohort.

Big learning is the rich amount of data that proceeds from collecting finely-grained objects, allowing for disintermediated sense-making, and seeing all these multiple ways in which signified data can be used to address complex challenges obliquely, which allows you to get out of the pattern entrainment that blinds you to the weak signals and emergent patterns that are needed to develop emergent practice.  This pen and paper version is powerful on its own.  You can imagine how working with SenseMaker across multiple signification frameworks can produce patterns and results that are many magnitudes richer.

Anticipatory awareness and predictive anticipation

January 30, 2015 By Collaboration, Complexity, Evaluation, Improv, Leadership, Learning, Organization

Two Tim Merry references in a row.  Yesterday Tim posted a video blog on planning vs. preparation.  It is a useful and crude distinction about how to get ready for action in the complicated vs. complex domains of the Cynefin framework.  I left a comment there about a sports metaphor that occurred to me when Tony Quinlan was teaching us about the differences between predictive anticipation (used in the complicated domain) and anticipatory awareness (used in the complex domain).

In fact this has been the theme of several conversations today.  Complicated problems require Tim’s planning idea: technical skills and expertise, recipes and procedures and models of forecasting and backcasting using reliable data and information.  Complex problems require what Dave Snowden has named an artisian approach which is characterized by anticipatory awareness, theory and practice (praxis) and methods of what they call “side casting” which is simply treating the problem obliquely and not head on.

When I was listening to Tony teach this last month, I thought that this distinction can be crudely illustrated with the difference between playing golf and playing football (proper football, mind.  The kind where you actually use your feet.) In golf there is a defined objective and reasonably knowable context, where you can measure the distance to the hole, know your own ability with golf clubs, take weather conditions into account and plan a strategic line of attack that will get you there in the fewest strokes possible.

In football it’s completly different. The goal is the goal, or more precisely to score more goals than your opponent, but getting there requires you to have all kinds of awareness. More often than not, your best strategy might be to play the ball backwards. It may be wise to move the ball to the goal in AS MANY passes as possible, in a terribly inefficient way because doing so denies your opponent time on the ball. And the context for action is constantly changing and impossible to fully understand. And the context also adjusts as you begin to get entrained in patterns. If you stick to a long ball game, the defending team can adjust, predict your next move and foil the strategy.  You have to evolve or be owned.

This is, I believe, what drives many Americans crazy about world football. There is rarely a direct path to goal and teams can go for whole games simply holding on to the ball and then make one or two key finishing moves. Some call that boring, and it is, if you are in a culture that is about achieving the goal as quickly as possible and moving on.  And God knows we are in a culture that loves exactly that.

You plan golf holes by pre-selecting the clubs you will use in each shot and making small adjustments as you go. In football you prepare by doing drills that improve your anticipatory awareness, help you operate in space and become more and more physically fit, so that you have more physical options. You become resilient.  Yes you can scout an opponent and plan a strategy and a tactic, but football is won on the pitch and not in the strategy room. Golf is very often won in the strategy room, as long as your execution is masterful.

It’s a crude distinction and one has to be mindful all the time of downright folly of “this vs, that”, but sometimes these kinds of distinctions are useful to illustrate a point.

The village as a venue

January 29, 2015 By Featured, Uncategorized

How’s this for a conference centre?

How’s this for a conference centre?

Last week, we hosted a group of 35 emerging and legacy leaders in the human services sector on Bowen Island to kick off our sixth Leadership 2020 cohort.  Hosting the group on Bowen Island is a powerful way to begin and end this ten month program, and there is tremendous value offered by hosting it on Bowen Island.

We are a small island with a working village and we have evolved an inventive way of hosting gatherings.  We call it “Village as a Venue” a name coined by my friend Tim Merry to describe the way he hosts gatherings in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia.  This is a way to reimagine the local economy of small villages who can compete in unorthodox ways with larger venues in nearby cities for conference and meeting business.

On Bowen Island, our village as a venue model starts with one of the retreat centres on island We use the Bowen Island Lodge mostly for our work (and sometimes we host at Rivendell and Xenia as well).  The Lodge is ideal because it is set up to host groups (as opposed to acting like a hotel), it is right on the water, and is only a five minute walk from the ferry dock and the village, meaning that people can actually arrive using public transit from anywhere in Vancouver.  It is located in a neighbourhood so we keep a careful eye on our noise levels at night, but if people want to socialize in a rowdy way, there are pubs nearby.  The Lodge is also perfect in that it is not a high end retreat facility, and it provides an incredibly affordable and accessible venue to accommodate and host people.  It has shared rooms and shared washrooms, but the beds are comfortable and when we are there we have the whole space to work in.  Overflow registrants are housed at the Lodge at the Old Dorm and other local B&Bs.

The Bowen Island Lodge is a dry rental, meaning that they don’t have their own catering staff.  This means that we get to hire local friends to provide us with food.  Usually we have our events catered by The Snug which is a little cafe that has always punched above it’s weight in terms of quality.  Over the years, both The Snug and the Sam Trethewy, the manager at the lodge have come to appreciate to people we bring to Bowen, who are often social workers and others on the front lines of human services.  They treat them well, with good food and sensitive hosting which makes for a superior experience for people.

Spreading the joy further, we always schedule a night out at Rustique, where our friend Thierry Morbach cooks us up a rural French feast.  We book the whole restaurant for this, and it becomes a raucous and memorable dinner.  On other nights we will head up to the pub for drinks (this past week a group of 15 or so invaded on a Tuesday night, which is no small boost to Glen’s business on a January night).  On the Thursday night we usually have a celebration at the Lodge which necessitates folks walking up to the Beer and Wine Store for supplies.

During the day, we give people a couple of hours at lunch to be hosted on the island.  Many folks end up going to the village to walk around, buy chocolate and meet folks.  They get to see our village for what it is, a friendly working commercial centre.  It is not set up to attract tourist dollars, and my friend Edward Wachtman and his partner Sheree Johnson has just completed a study that shows that tourists are looking for something other than that tourist experiences that are sold in many other small towns on the coast.  What they find on Bowen is authentic community.  They notice the way we look after each other, the way people talk and discuss issues.  They often head out for early morning walks or runs on the nearby trails and stop in at The Snug and get to see a community as it is.  I hear story after story of these encounters and we often talk about the friendliness of the village and what it says about leadership and community.  What happens on Bowen becomes a living teaching for how it is possible to live and work together, and visitors SEE that.

And finally, we use the island itself to host.  Bowen is a beautiful place and to get there you need to cross three miles of water.  this is an almost archetypal journey, and it marks a thresh hold to a different experience.  When you arrive you are received in Snug Cove, and when you leave again, it is as if you are birthed back out into the world.  While on the island, we often take people out on the land, to experience the serene calm of the place and to spend time in reflection about their lives.  There are so few places in the modern world, especially in the social services sector, where people can just slow down and reflect and pause, surrounded by forest and water and ravens and deer.  It becomes transformative, which is the point.  Edward’s survey revealed that this is a primary reason why people come to Bowen Island.

We are in a loose conversation with friends in Mahone Bay and in Ballyvaughn, Co. Clare in Ireland about this concept.  In Ballyvaughn a group called The Burren Call has set up to host gatherings at the Burren College of Art and on the land around it as well.  This pattern is repeating and it takes these places of beauty and transformative potential and leverages what we already have to provide experiences for vistors that also benefit us locals, both financially (and especially in the off-season) as well as psychologically.  There is nothing nquite like having your place seen through the eyes of visitors and reflected back.

For Bowen that reflection is that we have a special place, a beautiful natural setting, a friendly and welcoming community and an authentic working village.  Locals are always curious about what our visitors are up to and Piers at The Snug or Paul Ricketts at the Beer and Wine Store are always curious and, its fair to say, appreciative of the folks who are “in that workshop with Chris and Caitlin.”

Village as a Venue holds a lot of promise for villages like ours.  Having run more than 30 events on Bowen like this, I think we have hit a stride in bringing people over for 3, 4 and 5 days.  It is the unique and quirky local character of our community and the beauty of the land and seas that makes this possible.  These are strong assets and contribute to the visitor experience of renewal, restoration and serenity.

Does it feel lighter?

January 28, 2015 By Uncategorized

Not so much hair anymore

Not so much hair anymore

Yesterday I had my first haircut in 24 years.

Since 1990 I have kept my hair in a braid that was probably 18 inches long, for all kinds of reasons. Yesterday, for all kinds of reasons, it was time for that braid to come off.

It’s been a bit of a conversation on my facebook page and folks here on Bowen Island are starting to get a look at my new head. News travels fast in small communities.

And commonly I am asked, does it feel lighter? And surprisingly, the answer is no.

Because when you chop off your hair that you have grown for 24 years, you do a lot of work before hand, and I would say close to three years of work went into this decision. It involved me asking myself some fundamental questions about who I am and where I am and what matters to me and how I choose to present my identity in the world. It was not an easy decision, and it took me all that time to think about it and work with it from many different angles.

But I didn’t engage in that work so that I could chop off my hair. I engaged in it because that is what we do as middle aged men in this culture. In your mid forties (I am 46) you have enough distance from both your past and projected future to think about what’s up. Questions of identity and meaning, both personal and professional present themselves. If you have a good practice and good and supportive friends, crossing this thresh hold is made easier. It has largely been easy so far, with no major crises other than some occasional dark and sad times.

So the truth is that much has already been chopped away in my life over the last three years, but nearly none of it has resulted in a change to my outward appearance. Cutting my hair yesterday was not the act that shed a lot of stuff, it was an act born of a new lightness. A little tender, but stable enough that it felt right to cut my hair.

Someone asked me why I chose yesterday to do this. My reply was that, because January 27, 2015 was the day I was ready to do it.

Shortly you will see another shift born of this lightness. My website is being totally redesigned as well. Same great resources, same old blog. Fancy new wrapper. Coming soon.