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?

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?

As Bronagh Gallagher and I have been musing about our offering on complexity, facilitation and social justice, we have been discussing the shift in activism from ideology to evolutionary. Ideological movements try to coalesce activities and people along a line towards a fixed end state. Evolutionary movements start with intentions, principles and move outward in multiple directions along vectors.  They adjust and learn as they go, and they both respond to and change their context.

This nice post from Network Centered Advocacy capgtues what I’m talking about by first looking at how a lacrosse player’s artistry evolves in changing contexts and then concludes with these important paragraphs:

Being labeled a “movement” is a reflection of evolutionary status. One person or organization does not qualify as a movement, yet there is no set size of a movement. Movements are messy, complex and organic. The movement label is shorthand, an inclusive term of many independent leaders and supporters, their support structures, all that they can tap into, as well as their capacity to disagree as often as they align on work.

Movements are a reflection of self-directed, adaptive, resilient, self-sacrificing, supported and persistent initiatives to work on complex problems. There are no movement structures, but instead a movement is a mass migration of people, organizations, businesses and communities unified in common story, driving to shift culture, policy, behavior and norms. Successful movements build and transform the landscape as they progress providing a base for further progress. A quick scan of the first few pages of google news for” movements” produces a snapshot of the current movements that come to mind, including the movement against fracking, the climate change movement, the tea party movement, Occupy, #blacklivesmatter, the anti-austerity movement, the dump-Trump movement, the maker-movement, the LGBTQ movement–the list goes on.

A key evolution point in a movement’s trajectory is the transition away from any single point of failure, to be loosely structured and resilient enough to absorb setbacks. The agility and adaptive characteristics of movements are fueled not only by personal stakes, individualism, driven leadership, passion and local control, but also by unpredictable solidarity and a distributed organizing approach that resists centralization. The difference between an organization, coalition, centralized campaign and a genuine movement is the way each fuels smart local initiatives and the ways leaders align power.

Building a movement is actually more aptly perceived as unleashing a movement, creating new spaces that help the movement surge in wider, expansive and still supportive directions. As a movement gains organizing momentum, strategies shift to broadly unfold and push a wide set of actions that draw opposition thin rather than clustering and making defense easy.  This distributed layout requires a shift in thinking and strategy.

The key thing to notice here is that culture is changed by evolving movements, not linear programs.  Movements are not led TOWARDS a goal, but rather emanate from a set of connected and coherent stories, actions and intentions, and self-correct, fail and adapt as they go.  This is true whether the venue of action is organizational or societal.  Cultures are complex and require complexity to change them. Diving more into the examples given in the quote will give you more insight into how these movements have become a part of, and transformative agents within, the cultures they are aiming to change.

I have been spending my Saturday inside watching a bit of soccer and engaging with Donald Trump supporters on twitter.  You might consider that a waste of time. I loved the soccer (Tottenham survived a thrilling FA Cup scare) and I learned some stuff about Trump supporters, and I think I have one strategy that might be worth trying.

This is all predicated on a hypothesis about what Donald Trump is doing. I believe that he has every intention to continue the trend in US government (and G20 governments in general) of ensuring that a small group of ultra wealthy people and companies continue to get rich and become richer. Policies that continue to exacerbate the wealth disparity in the US will necessarily restrict the prosperity of the middle and working classes.  People are going to continue to be worse and worse off than they were before while a small group end up controlling the vast amount of the wealth.

It seems impossible that a president would get continued support for policies from the very people that are going to be hurt by them, but it isn’t surprising. Since the 1980s and especially since the Republicans launched the culture wars, crating outrageous social issues was always enough to ensure support for the base even as, on the economic front, everyone fell further behind.  Karl Rove was a master of this, putting anti-gay marriage propositions on ballots in key districts to ensure that the Republican votes would come out to vote against moral depravity and also pull the lever for Bush. With the noose tightening around middle and low income white people, Trump upped the game with his outrageous policies designed to make America look like the fantasy of large numbers of poor white people: a racially cleansed, ostensibly Christian, patriarchal, second amendment country, that gives the illusion of “us being in control again.” Trump is a master salesmen, and he sold the people their dream: a shoddy building with gold and onyx laminates for the finishing.

It is critical now that he takes these dreamers and molds them into an army to protect, because the next few years are going to be very hard on all but a handful of Americans. Without an army of believers in the cause, people will be hard pressed to participate in their own victimization. With an army of trolls, fed on lies and propaganda, and supported by seeing action in the form of illegal and outrageous executive orders, Trump will be free to reshape the economy into a capitalist end game that benefits himself first and others like him. It is always Trump first, not America first. America will finish dead last.

So if this hypothesis is true, or even partly true, what are strategies that can be done to disrupt it?

I offer this one, especially to my friends who are privileged by their skin colour, language, religion and location. If you look like the core demographic of Trump’s supporter army, you might be able to do this.

Essentially I am arguing for good old fashioned community organizing. Facts and evidence do not matter to Trump supporters, and so what is required is for people to go into these bastions of support and create indicators alongside local Republicans to measure how well it is all working out. What if you were to work in your neighbourhood or town to get a group of citizens together and begin to collectively benchmark your position.  What’s the income people have? What are their wages? How much is health care? What is their current standard of living. Trump said America is in carnage right now. So measure it together. What does carnage look like, and how will we know that it’s getting better?

Once you’ve benchmarked the state of play, continue to bring people together to have a look at what is changing. You need to have community members do their own research, see what is happening, collect the stories.  Perhaps some things will improve under Trump, but my guess is that things will get worse for everyone. And the only way to create a crack in the armour is if you are working actively on the ground with people to help them see their own situation and help them to discover together that they are getting screwed, even though a wall got built or Muslims stayed away, or ObamaCare got repealed; all things they were told would make their lives better. It won’t take long for them to see that their lives are getting worse. How they react is anyone’s guess but your goal is to have people face reality and talk about it together.

There are many many strategies and tactics that are required to resist what is happening, and this is just one. But this one is based on successful efforts from the Saul Alinskys and Paolo Frieres of the world. It can have efficacy, but it requires you to have tremendous courage, to go outside of your comfort zone, slow down, connect and disrupt the information that people are being fed about their lives with inquiry. If you are a white person it is a powerful use of your privilege to connect with and empathize with the Trump army in an effort to organize them to look at their own condition and watch it change.

If you’d like to try doing this, contact me and I will help you, for free.

My friends over at the Social Labs Revolution website have been fielding questions about the prototyping phase of labwork and today published a nice compilation of prototyping resources. It’s worth a visit. It got me thinking this morning about some of the tools I use for planning these days.

Tools for prototyping abound – discerning what’s needed, trying things out, iterating and learning.  In my experience, working on complex challenges requires us to master first of all the mindset of complexity work and then deploy tools.  We have to be careful about the tools we employ because some are great for linear, predictive planning and others require us to work on challenges differently.  When working with truly complex challenges, we create processes that generate a number of hypotheses about what to do and create very small probes to test the efficacy and coherence of these kinds of interventions.  This is deeply informed by the PROBE – SENSE – RESPOND rubric that Dave Snowden employs for complexity work. 

Disrupting a mindset to enable people to work well in complexity requires groups to confront its assumptions about planning and execution.  When I’m working on truly complex challenges, my process begins with a bit of theory to understand the different kinds of problems we face, through an exploration of the Cynefin framework, which helps to explain the differences between ordered and unordered situations.  Sometimes we even incorporate play, movement and improvisational exercises to remind us of what we already know about complex challenges.

From there we move to exploring and deploying new approaches and toolsets. Recently I’ve begun to think of correlations between tradition strategic planning processes and complexity managing processes.  Traditional strategic planning works well in ordered domains, where the future is predictable and knowable.  But for complex challenges, it goes like this:

Environmental scans vs. discerning patterns.  In traditional strategic planning, scans are given a lot of weight. THe data and observations about a problem that are brought into a planning process determine the rest of the process – they describe the problem to be addressed and they shape the scope of the plans that follow.  In complexity work we begin by working with patterns to look at the present state of the system and discern need. We can use all kinds of sources for this, but the data are also collected through storytelling processes (anecdote circles, in various forms, is my preferred method). Participants in the process then work with the data to cluster and find overarching patterns that we can work with. It’s important in complexity that we understand that not everything can be known about a system or a problem and so beginning with story helps set us off on work that is important.

Visioning and goal setting vs. scenario planning. In traditional strategic planning an emphasis is put on getting the future state right, through visioning, goal setting, and pre-determining outcomes.  In complexity work, we begin by admitting that the future is unpredictable. I address this future looking part of planning by working with scenarios that are created based on stories that we gather. The goal is to create multiple plausible futures, because teams and organization need to be prepared for various outcomes and possibilities. Hanging a strategic plan on one known outcome makes a team blind to opportunity and deviations that might lead them into much better or much worse places.  Having various scenarios at hand helps the teams to keep exploring possibilities and define a territory of action rather than a single point of attack. It helps teams be more agile and aware of the dynamics affecting their work. Creating scenarios has the added benefit of helping a team get clear about the intentions that drive it, and the frames by which they will know what is “good” and what is not.  This replaces the “goals and objectives” part of cascading hierarchical planning.

Goals and objectives vs. probes and prototypes. In linear problems solving, strategic planning meets operational planning at the level of project management. In order to build a bridge, you need to have all the materials and labour arranged and together and you need to organize how they will all be deployed to get your result.  In complexity (and I include in this the work of non-profits and communities) it’s important to probe the system with ideas, to test out hypotheses about what might work, and to amplyfy successes and move away from failures.  We plan by acting and learning rather than creating abstract goals and objectives and then trying to fit our actions into the plan.

Summative evaluation vs. Developmental evaluation and learning. Traditional strategic planning almost unquestioningly uses summative evaluation to measure what happened. How close did you come to your targets? Who is accountable for that hit or miss?  In complexity work we create feedback loops to learn what is going on as it evolves, always gathering information about where we are and what we are doing and what we are learning.  The basic frame of “What? So What? Now What?” is the heuristic we use for evaluating projects and work.  Building developmental evaluation frameworks and using sensemaking processes to collective see, learn, make meaning, and act together is critical.

These four mindset contrasts form the core basis of the way I help teams develop planning skills for complex challenges. Traditional strategic planning methods and project management tools are useful for complicated, ordered challenges, but the complex work requires us to take a step off that old familiar ground and into new ways of doing things.  This is one easier way to begin.

Yesterday I spent most of the day honouring people who have worked for decades to preserve and grow the Skwxu7mesh language.  I’m on the advisory board of an organization called Kwi Awt Stelmexw, which supports Skwxumesh language learning and fluency.  Kwi Awt Stelmexw translates roughly as “everyone who is here in the present moment” meaning ancestors and descendants.  It is for these people that we are all doing our work.

There are only a handful of fully fluent Skwu7mesh speakers currently.  When I say a handful, I mean 7.  My friend Khelsilem has been ramping up fluency capacity with an immersion program at Simon Fraser University and we are now about to witness the graduation of that first cohort of 14 people who are well on their way in their fluency journey.

Yesterday Khelsilem hosted a ceremony to honour everyone who had done so much to keep the language alive, and who had brought us to this point where we can build a fluent future.

During the ceremony yesterday several speakers shared their thoughts and a few powerful images came to mind.  Chief Ian Campbell talked about the return of the herring to our inlet, Atl’kitsem (Howe Sound) which has signalled a shift in the story that people have about this place.  People are beginning to harvest herring eggs again using the old practice of placing cedar or hemlock bows in the water and allowing the herring to spawn on them

I reflected that alongside the return of the herring comes the return of the language. Just in the last five or six years as we have seen numbers of these fish increasing, we have also seen the use of the Skwxw7mesh language increasing as well.  It is as if every herring is a word and every language learner is one more bough placed in the water upon which the language can spawn.

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.)

“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.

Nadia has a small piece this morning on one element of good design, reflecting on a book review by Ian Pinasoo.  I like the way she puts this:

Great workshops are based on a creative challenge. A creative challenge is real and not fake. It matters. A creative challenge engages, pulls us in and takes us on a discovery tour. Responding to a creative challenge is like the hero’s journey of accepting a call, going through the process of revelation and returning with deep insights.

I would add that if the challenge is anchored to a common need, and the people you have identified and invited are the ones with enough agency to take on the challenge, you really start cooking.

Last week I was a guest keynote facilitator at Econous2017, the annual gathering of Canadian community economic development practitioners. In all, 450 people from across the country gathered together in a traditional conference of panels, workshops and tours to learn and develop their own practices of social entrepreneurship, community development, planning and research.

The conference organizers, led by the courageous Barb Davies of Momentum Consulting were resolved to make at least part of the conference a participatory plenary. The idea was to put the intelligence of the network to use and to ground and apply the learning and experiences of the previous three days on actual projects. We secured 250 small tables that only seated four, which is essential for doing participatory work in a conference setting. Rounds of 6, 8 or 10 people are useless as people cannot hear each other and they are seated too far apart. The inimitable Avril Orloff designed some templates for us and Matt Mayer and Brenna Atnikov were on hand to help hold space and to be good sounding boards for design and harvesting ideas. Team, tools, physical set up all in place.  We had a plan.

Pro Action Cafe is a method that was invented by Rainer von Leoprechting and Ria Baeck in Brussels in the early 2000s.  It is now a core method in Art of Hosting trainings worldwide, as it is a brilliant combination of the self-organizing nature of an Open Space Technology meeting with the constraints of time, space and questions of a World Cafe. You can learn more about the core method by watching a short video or by downloading a user-guide to the process. While there is lots of scope for variation, the basic flow of questions: from need and purpose, through to what’s missing, to next steps, are as simple a planning framework as one can imagine. I’ve used the process in groups as big as 120, so 300 was going to be a new challenge.

For the conference we needed to customize the process in our planning and in real time. The initial idea was to have participants at the conference post project topics all week long on a long clothesline outside the plenary room.  This was intended to save time, as having 80 or more projects hosts identify and name their projects in a plenary room would be massively time consuming and boring.

It quickly became very clear to me that everyone had a very different idea of what that clothesline was, and soon it became filled with information about things people were doing in addition to projects that people were working on. It was a cool news wall, but it wasn’t serving our function of being an emerging agenda wall for the final day’s plenary session.

This meant that we had to adjust our work on the fly.  One important lesson for keynote facilitators when working with a conference is never expect people to remember instructions. When you are working with a group of people who are moving in 400 different directions, they can only respond together to directions for the next thing to do.  Give them one instruction at a time.  Conferences are bubbly and chaotic and participants are there for individual learning. Group activities need to take place within a well managed but not overly controlled container.

When it came time to begin our Pro Action Cafe on Friday morning following a panel presentation and some great rhythmic improv by Troo Knot. I knew we had to change our plan.  Instead of asking people to remember what they had posted on the clothesline we took the 40 or so cards and laid them on the stage.  I then led the group through these steps:

1. Everyone move to a table of four.
2. Anyone who posted a project on the clothesline who wants to work on it, retrieve it from the front and return to your table and sit down.
3. At all the other tables, the first person to sit down gets to host a project for the morning. Host write there project on a table card
4. Once every table had a host, participants had two minutes to cruise the room and find a group to work with.
5. We then proceeded through a normal Pro-Action cafe.

This wasn’t a 100% ideal situation, as there may have been more than one person at a group of four that wanted to champion a project, but when you are working with a group of 300 people in an on the fly design, you simply can’t accommodate a very nuanced approach to individual desires. At any rate, there were no complaints at the end of the morning that people didn’t get to champion a project. One quarter of the room got to bring projects into the space and everyone else fulfilled the role of listeners and advisors. I let people find the projects they wanted to work on, but only a maximum of three advisers could join any round. I also encouraged people to just randomly sit at a table and offer a naive perspective to the work, one which can be very valuable.

Following three rounds of work (which included a short break) we had a popcorn feedback session where people stood to offer reflections and gratitudes on what they had received during the morning to the plenary

We had a number of really interesting projects emerge on the day covering the full spectrum of community economic development from food production to access to capital for entrepreneurs to community renewable energy models to creating labyrinths in a city.  Participants left with filled in templates that captured their need and purpose, new ideas to improve the project and a list of resources and people that might help them move forward.

It takes attention and a small team, but creating participatory and productive sessions in large conferences is possible. It means disrupting traditional conference organizing and conference hosting, but the upside is that participants get to work with the people in the room, get to exert agency over their learning agendas and everyone gets a chance to participate. I can’t overestimate how important it is work with good physical space set ups and to build in more time than you think you need in order for participants to not be rushed. Moving three hundred people around a room is a lot of work, and the herd moves slowly!

Keynote facilitation is  something I have done lost of in the past ten years. I’d be happy to chat with you about making your next conference more interactive and truly participatory beyond accepting questions to a panel from the floor, or having people tweet on a back channel to be engaged. Pro Action Cafe might just be the perfect tool to bring a conference to action in a short period of time and put the inspiration and learning to work.

At the end of a couple of weeks in Europe and being here in Glasgow during this past week has heightened my sensitivity to how democracy, devoid of deliberation and focused only on numeric results, has been hijacked and rendered ineffective for making complex decisions related to governance of complex issues.  The UK is currently paying the price for a ridiculous decision made in June of 2016 to leave the European Union.  Whatever you think of the merits of Brexit, there can be no denying that the method for doing so has been deeply flawed both in its democratic implementation and the subsequent negotiation. Britain is currently mired in apolitical, constitutional and economic mess of its own making.

So how to we make better decisions together?  This video has some very interesting hypotheses that combine complexity science with deliberation practice.  It’s worth reflecting on.

In the Cynefin framework, the domains are really shades with some clear boundaires.  Strategic work using Cynefin is about making various moves between different domains for different reasons.  This is called Cynefin dynamics, and there’s an old but good paper on it here.

In Cynefin dynamics there is a strategic move of “taking a shallow dive into chaos” which is useful for strategic purposes when one needs to break pattern entrainment.  It is a very useful move in teaching contexts when we are trying to get people to let go of some of their fixed ways of seeing and doing things.  Even putting a group in a circle can be a shallow dive into chaos.  The idea here is that in complexity you have a system with a permeable boundary with lots of connections between the elements in the system (people, ideas, resources).  That allows for emergence to happen.  In chaos, the connections break down and you need to hold a tight container – nothing is emerging, everything is breaking.  So if you want to take a shallow dive into chaos, the container needs to be very tight, very constrained, and the relationships between people and ideas that are within that container are very open.  That’s how you break patterns without creating a deep experience of chamos, which would be when everything breaks down, including the container.  Sometimes that is required, but there is a much lower likelihood of recovering from that kind of thing.  I wouldn’t call that “leadership.”  It’s more like “abandonment.”  No one wants to create a deep dive into chaos unless you want to create a civil war or a revolution, and even then you have no right to expect you’ll survive it.

Chaos is a very high energy state, and it costs a lot to be in it. As a result systems (or learners) that are in a state of chaos won’t stay there for long.  Typically they will respond to the first person that comes along and applies tight constraints (think about a paramedic arriving on the scene of an accident).  From the perspective of the person in chaos, anything that helps stabilize the situation is welcome.

This can make chaos in systems VERY VERY vulnerable to unchecked power.  In times of war, fear or conflict, it is very easy for people to choose and trust despotic leaders that bring tight constraints to the situation, because bringing constraints is actually the right move.  I have seen meetings and gatherings happen where chaos was deliberately triggered (sometimes under the guise of “there’s not enough happening in this container”) and then people come in and hijack the agenda and apply their own power.  In my experience, very few people are deeply skilled at initiating deep levels of chaos to break patterns and then creating complexity responses (rather than imposing their will), but on the national scale perhaps Iceland is an example.

In workshops  sometimes participants want to question or check the power of the facilitators.  This has happened twice to my colleague Tuesday Ryan-Hart and I when we have taught groups of activists who seized on her power teaching to question the power dynamics of teacher/student within the workshop.  In both cases we took responsibility as hosts to hold a tight container in which the relationships could dissolve and so that the group itself could discover what to do next. We did this by suspending the agenda and hosting a circle and a Council.  The decisions that came out were both group owned and I think made the workshop a better learning experience for everyone AND proved the efficacy of our tools and processes.  I have seen other examples where the hosts did not take that responsibility and instead the participants were left designing their own gathering.  That kind of thing is poor strategy in chaos, unless you are planning on just abandoning the situation and letting others take over, in which case it’s an excellent strategy to ensure you’ll never be invited back (I have also done this sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally.)

So that is the kind of decision that you have to make from time to time.  Working with constraints is what leaders and teachers do.  Being conscious about that is good practice.

At his two day class last week in Vancouver, Dave Snowden presented this constraints based take on Cynefin and shared the evolution of the framework.  There is now a new version of this known as “liminal Cynefin” that explores the boundary conditions between complicated and complex and complex and chaotic.  I like this because it begins to highlight how dynamic the framework is.  I use Cynefin to explain systems and I use the Chaordic Path to talk about developing the leadership capacity to stay in the dynamism of flows around these types of systems.

We were working with a local government client last week in a meeting that had a very contentious subject matter focused on the return of land and uses of that land, to First Nations owners.  There was an important conversation as a part of this work that involved removing a structure that had some historical significance to the community but was seen as a mark of an oppressive history by the First Nations owners who could not contemplate it remaining on their land. It is a wickedly complicated issue right at the heart of what reconciliation really means: returning land, transferring ownership and working with history.

Our client did an incredible job of preparing multiple stakeholders to participate in this discussion, by meeting each group personally and hearing their thoughts on the situation.  All the stakeholders, twenty in total, agreed to come to a two hour dialogue to discuss the issues at hand.  Our client put together a beautiful 8 page booklet with much of the technical information in it about proposals and process and sharing some of the things they had heard in the pre-meetings.  The format of the day included a presentation from the First Nations about what they were proposing and why, with most of the meeting involving a World Cafe for dialogue.

It went well.  We received a couple of really powerful pieces of positive feedback.

These kinds of conversations are the sharp edge of the reconciliation wedge. It is one thing to conduct a brief territorial acknowledgement at the beginning of a meeting or event, it is entirely another for people to sit down and discuss the issues around the return of land.

In debriefing with our client this week, she made the following observations about what contributed to the usefulness of the container for this conversation:

• Very small groups – no more than four at a table – meant that there was no need for people to “take their best shot” as they would have in a larger plenary format. Groups smaller than five reduce the performative nature of conversation and allow dialogue to fully unfold. This enabled people who needed to invest a lot of emotional energy and attention in their speaking and listening, to operate in a more relaxed way.
• The questions for the dialogue were very broad. Sometimes the most powerful question is “what are you thinking and feeling about what you just heard?” This question kicked off 45 minutes of intense learning, listening and story telling at the tables.
• The invitation process is everything. We helped our client design an invitation process but she took the lead in going to each group separately and talking to them about why they were needed in the conversation.
• There were no observers. Everyone in the room was at a table except for me and our graphic recorder. Everyone at a table had a question they needed answered or a curiosity about the outcome. there was no certainty in the room, no positionality, and yet, each person spoke about their own experience and their own perspective and listened carefully to what others said.  Also, everyone in the room had to stretch their perspectives to participate. This was not comfortable for anyone, because this work isn’t comfortable for anyone.  It is literally unsettling.
• The First Nations leadership pulled no punches in explaining their reasons for their proposal and why it was important that the structure be removed from their lands.  This can be a very tricky thing because while it is important for non-indigenous stakeholders to hear First Nations perspectives, there is a tremendous amount of emotional labour involved in talking about traumatizing history. We had one of our own team prepared to talk about the history and emotional legacy of the structure. She had interviewed people from her community and was well positioned to share the rationale but on the day we didn’t need to her to tell the story as the leadership were willing to tell that story themselves.  Enabling this to happen well is important.

Reconciliation is nothing without the return of the lands or the influence over the lands which we acknowledge as “unceded territory.” What stops people from going much further than territorial acknowledgement is the fear of being unsettled in the conversation. But we can’t do this work without holding containers that allow for people to be unsettled.  Only that way to we share perspectives and find possibilities and to do so in small, deep conversations where stories can be shared, perspectives understood and . Or sometimes not. But the path to reconciliation requires us to try, and these few notes and observations might help in that.

Sonja Blignault has been blogging some terrific stuff on Paul Cilliers’ work on complexity.  Specifically she has been riffing on Cilliers’ seven characteristics of complex systems and the implications of complexity for organizations.

Yesterday I was teaching an Art of Hosting here in Calgary, where we were looking at Cynefin and then followed with a discussion about how the nature of complex systems compels us to make important design choices when we are facilitating participatory processes to do work in organizations.

This is a cursory list, but I thought it would be helpful to share here. Cilliers’ text is bold.

Complex systems consist of a large number of elements that in themselves can be simple. 

If you are planning participatory processes, don’t focus on working on the simple problems that are the elements in complexity. Instead, you need to gather information about those many simple elements and use facilitation methods to look for patterns together.  We talk about describing the system before interpreting it. Getting a sense of the bits and pieces ensures that you don’t begin strategic process work with high level aspirations.

The elements interact dynamically by exchanging energy or information. These interactions are rich. Even if specific elements only interact with a few others, the effects of these interactions are propagated throughout the system. The interactions are nonlinear. 

Non-lienarity is truly one of those things that traditional planning processes fail to understand. We want to always be heading towards a goal, despite the fact that in complex systems such controlled progress is impossible.  What we need to be doing is choosing a direction to move in and make decisions and choices that are coherent with that direction, all the while keeping a careful watch on what is happening and what effect our decisions have.  Participatory processes help us to make sense of what we are seeing, and convening regular meetings of people to look through data and seen what is happening is essential, especially if we are making decisions on innovative approaches.  Avoid creating processes that assume casualty going forward; don’t make plans that are based on linear chains of events that take us from A to B.  Traditional vision, mission goals and objectives planning has little usefulness in a complex system. Instead, focus on the direction you want to move in and a set of principles or values that help you make decisions in that direction.

There are many direct and indirect feedback loops.

The interactions between the parts of a systems happen in a myriad of ways. To keep your strategy adapting, you need to build in feedback loops that work at a variety of time scales. Daily journalling, weekly sense making and project cycle reporting can all be useful.  Set up simple and easily observable monitoring criteria that help you to watch what you are doing and decide how to adjust when that criteria are triggered.  Build in individual and collective ways to harvest and make sense of what you are seeing.

Complex systems are open systems—they exchange energy or infor- mation with their environment—and operate at conditions far from equilibrium.

You need to understand that there are factors outside your control that are affecting the success or failure of your strategy. Your and your people are constantly interacting with the outside world. Understand these patterns as they can often be more important than your strategy. In participatory process and strategy building I love it when we bring in naive experts to contribute ideas from outside our usual thinking.  In natural systems, evolution and change is powered by what happens at the edges ad boundaries, where a forest interacts with a meadow, or a sea with a shoreline. these ecotones are the places of greatest life, variety and influence in a system. Build participatory process that bring in ideas from the edge.

Complex systems have memory, not located at a specific place, but distributed throughout the system. Any complex system thus has a history, and the history is of cardinal importance to the behavior of the system.

Complex systems are organized into patterns and those patterns are the results of many many decisions and actions over time. Decisions and actions often converge around attractors and boundaries in a system and so understanding these “deep yes’s and deep no’s” as I call them is essential to working in complexity.  You are never starting from a blank state, so begin by engaging people in understanding the system, look for the patterns that enable and the patterns that keep us stuck, and plan accordingly.

The behavior of the system is determined by the nature of the interactions, not by what is contained within the components. Since the interactions are rich, dynamic, fed back, and, above all, nonlinear, the behavior of the system as a whole cannot be predicted from an inspection of its components. The notion of “emergence” is used to describe this aspect. The presence of emergent properties does not provide an argument against causality, only against deterministic forms of prediction.

So again, work with patterns of behaviour, not individual parts.  And of course, as Dave Snowden is fond of saying, to shift patterns, shift the way the actors interact. Don’t try to change the actors. Once, when working on the issue of addictions stigma in health care, the health authority tried running a project to address stigmatizing behaviours with awareness workshops. The problem was, they couldn’t find anyone that admitted to stigmatizing behaviours. Instead, we ran a series of experiments to change the way people work together around addictions and people with addictions (including providing recognition and help for health care workers who themselves suffered from addictions). That is the way to address an emergent phenomenon.

Complex systems are adaptive. They can (re)organize their internal structure without the intervention of an external agent.

And so your strategy must also be adaptive. I’m learning a lot about Principles Based Evaluation these days which is a useful way to craft strategy in complex domains.  Using principles allows people to make decisions consistent and coherent with the preferred direction of travel the strategy is taking us in.  when the strategy needs to adapt, because conditions have changed, managers can rely on principles to structure new responses to changing conditions.  Participatory processes become essential in interpreting principles for current conditions.

This is a bit of a brain dump, and as usual it makes more sense to me that perhaps it does to everyone else. But I’d be very interested in your reflections on what you are hearing here, especially as it relates to how we craft, design and deliver participatory processes in the service of strategy, planning and implementation.

I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety.  What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double wall of the container.

What I mean by that is that meetings in Open Space happen within break out groups within the larger container. If a break out group breaks down, participants are still held in the larger space. I have seen very few instances where people in conflict left the bigger container, even if the exercised the law of two feet and left their breakout space.  Most often a kind of “neutral ground” emerges in Open Space: near the agenda wall, around the coffee table, sometimes outside on a nice day. These emergent neutral spaces provide participants with a chance to discharge, relax, calm down and get their wits about them.  The facilitator never has to do anything, in my experience, but just keep holding the space.

I don’t like the idea of safe space though, I prefer the term “safe enough” space, or even “brave space.” For many marginalized people the idea of safe space is always a myth, and there is no way that we can guarantee it will emerge in Open Space.  So instead I encourage people to take a bit of a risk and enter into “safe enough” space, so that they can learn something new and let go of whatever it is they are holding on to.

I remember an event I did once on Hawaii with indigenous Hawaiians and well heeled Americans looking together at the values of reverence and sustainability. At one point, one of the Americans, a person with a net worth in the millions of dollars, asked the group that we commit to safety in the space.  This raised the ire of the senior Elder in the room who snapped (and I paraphrase) “You have no right to safe space! Your desire for safety has imperilled the entire world. We do not live safe lives as a result. Our lands are colonized, our food supplies are depleted and our oceans are in danger of no longer providing for us. There is no safe space here. You must learn to live with risk and take responsibility for your role in creating it.”

When we are invited into risk together, everyone giving up safety according to their means, the possibility for real relationship exists in the shared challenge to our well held worldviews.

Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to develop artistic mastery in facilitation/hosting practice. It’s an important topic to me because I teach this work, and it’s not always easy to design deep learning when people are expecting to become instantly good at facilitation after a single workshop.

The Art of Hosting is a practice founded on tools, rooted in theory. It takes time to understand and integrate this practice and become masterful at it. I often draw parallels between learning the practice and development of mastery in the arts.

Today I was sharing my experience in a kind of cheeky way with some other Art of Hosting stewards, and I wrote the following, which seems helpful:

The 14 steps of the artist’s journey to mastery (based on the last 30 years of my experience)

1. Cultivate the desire to create beauty
2. Discover a medium for doing so
3. Seek the teachers who can teach you how to use the tools of your medium faithfully
4. Use the tools faithfully to make simple things.
5. Ask why things work and why they don’t
6. With that knowledge, modify your tools to do what needs to be done beyond simplicity.
7. Discover the limitations of your tools.
8. Become a tool maker
9. Take on apprentices and teach them to use the tools faithfully to make simple things
10. Take on apprentices and help them reflect on why they are succeeding and failing.
11. I don’t know…I haven’t got there yet
12. Unimaginable to me, but I see it.
13. Wow.
14. The unrealized ideal master that I aspire to become, should I be given more than one lifetime to do so.

Along the way, be aware of the following:

• self-doubt
• errors at different scales
• mistakes and regret
• joy and surprise
• the desire of others to learn from you
• the feeling that you have nothing to offer them
• times of steep learning and times of long periods of integration
• waxing and waning of inspiration
• Rule 6a applies at all times (an inside joke: Rule 6a is “Don’t take yourself too f*cking seriously)

When working in complexity, and when trying to create new approaches to things, it’s important to pay attention to ideas that lie outside of the known ways of doing things.  These are sometimes called “weak signals” and by their very nature they are hard to hear and see.

At the Participatory Narrative Inquiry Institute, they have been thinking about this stuff.  On May 31, Cynthia Kurtz posted a useful blog post on how we choose what to pay attention to:

If you think of all the famous detectives you know of, fictional or real, they are always distinguished by their ability to hone in on signals — that is, to choose signals to pay attention to — based on their deep understanding of what they are listening for and why. That’s also why we use the symbol of a magnifying glass for a detective: it draws our gaze to some things by excluding other things. Knowing where to point the glass, and where not to point it, is the mark of a good detective.

In other words, a signal does not arise out of noise because it is louder than the noise. A signal arises out of noise because it matters. And we can only decide what matters if we understand our purpose.

That is helpful. In complexity, purpose and a sense of direction helps us to choose courses of action from making sense of the data we are seeing to acting on it.

By necessity that creates a narrowing of focus and so paying attention to how weak signals work is alos important. Yesterday the PNI Institute discussed this on a call which resulted in a nice set of observations about the people seeking weka signals an dthe nature of the signals themselves:

We thought of five ways that have to do with the observer of the signal:

1. Ignorance – We don’t know what to look for. (Example: the detective knows more about wear patterns on boots than anyone else.)
2. Blindness [sic]- We don’t look past what we assume to be true. (No example needed!)
3. Disinterest – We don’t care enough about what we’re seeing to look further. (Example: parents understand their toddlers, nobody else does.)
4. Habituation – We stopped looking a long time ago because nothing ever seems to change. (Example: A sign changes on a road, nobody notices it for weeks.)
5. Unwillingness – It’s too much effort to look, so we don’t. (Example: The “looking for your keys under the street light” story is one of these.)

And we listed five ways a signal can be weak that have to do with the system in which the observer is embedded:

1. Rare – It just doesn’t happen often.
2. Novel – It’s so new that nobody has noticed it yet.
3. Overshadowed – It does happen, but something else happens so much more that we notice that instead.
4. Taboo – Nobody talks about it.
5. Powerless – Sometimes a signal is literally weak, as in, those who are trying to transmit it have no power.

You can see that this has important implications for building in equity and diversity into sense-making processes. People with different lived experiences, ways of knowing and ways of seeing will pay attention to signals differently. If you are trying to build a group with the increased capacity to scan and make sense of a complex problem, having cognitive and experiential diversity will help you to find many new ideas that re useful in addressing complex problems.  Furthermore, you need to pay attention to people whose voices are traditionally quieted in a group so as to amplify their perspectives on powerless signals.

Bowen Island is where I live and work.  Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and colleagues.

Last year Scott Macklin came and made a beautiful video capturing the experience we craft here.  Enjoy it and if you would like to experience it for yourself, please join us this November.

All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds.  When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done.  It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community.  

Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process.  They participate and co-create.  In order to do this, participants need to make a conscious step over a threshold into the container.

Thresholds are as old as humanity.  The boundary between in and out is ancient. Being welcomed into a home, a family, a structure or a group comes with ritual behaviours to let you know that you have left one world behind and entered into another.

In meetings, these thresholds are multiple and nested.  My friend Christie Diamond once said “the conversation begins long before the meeting starts, and continues long after the meeting is over.”  That has rung true for the thousands of conversations I have hosted and participated in over my life. And on reflection, I can trace a series of threshold that are crossed as we enter into and leave a conversational space.  At each step, my “yes” becomes more solid and my commitment to the work becomes more important and concrete. See if this scheme makes sense:

1. Invitation is noticed
2. Engage with the call, connect it to my own needs
3. Making time and space to engage (committing my resources)
4. Physically moving to the space
5. Arriving in the field of work
6. Entering the physical space
7. BEGINNING THE WORK
8. PARTICIPATING IN SUB-CONTAINERS WITHIN THE MEETING
9. FINISHING THE WORK
10. Leaving the space
11. Exiting the field of work
12. Returning home
13. Reorganizing resources to support the change
14. Re-engaging with the world
15. Working from a changed stance

Each one of these crossings happens whether you are coming into someting as mundane as a staff meeting or something as important as attending your own wedding.  Often time facilitators pay attention only to numbers 7-9 and many times 7 and 9 are given short shrift.  

I’m curious to hear about your own experiences of crossing thresholds for important meetings.  

Helping a friend with a design challenge today. He is running a small group process at the end of a day of presentations about energy futures in a small community. He initially thought that it would be good to end the day – in which 120 people are gathered to hear about energy futures – with action steps, but these kinds of gatherings are not good places to come up with action planning.  Instead I advised him to use a World Cafe for reflection process to produce the elements of a shared vision.  IN a little over an hour, good work can get done without raising expectations to high or demanding too much commitment from folks who just came to hear some presentations. 

Here is the design I sent him.

You have a short time. Here’s a design:

Get people into groups of four. If you can, get them around tables with some markers and paper in the middle. If not, just have them move into groups of four chairs.

Tell people not to get comfortable. They will be moving twice in the next hour.

Give them a simple question: “what have you heard today that excites you about our future here?”

Tell them they have 20 minutes to share in their groups and discuss that question.

After 20 minutes stop them all, have everyone stand up together and move to different groups.

Repeat

And repeat again.

Towards the end of the third round, say fifteen minutes in, give each group three post it notes and a pen. Ask them to reflect and agree on three things they heard commonly across all conversations.

To harvest, your ask anyone to read out one of their post it notes. Then you invite any group with a similar one to shout BINGO! And bring the notes to a wall in a nice neat cluster. I’m serious. The goal of the process is to get clusters.

Repeat until all the post it notes are on the wall. Have people come up to the wall and give the clusters names. Get the core team to look at the clusters and write a shared purpose statement from it. This is what you can present back the next day.

World Cafe is perfect for this. It works because it is based on a basic structure of small groups of four people, switching conversations to allow a whole group to deeply explore a question, and a harvesting strategy that makes visible what’s being collectively learned. And you can do it in a little over an hour.

Learn more about The World Cafe.