Category: complexity

Patrick Lambe on Against Bestness

Photograph of yellow warning signsthat says "water over roadway" and "dead end" surrounded by flood waters. Clouds and trees reflected on the water.


In 2008 Patrick Lambe wrote this fabulous blog post challenging our notion of, or perhaps obsession with, bestness. Green Chameleon » Against Bestness

First, I encourage you to read the whole post. It is still spot on resonant. Patrick highlights many of the missteps of trying to focus on all things best: best practices, simplistic taxonomies, etc. 

Why do we fall for bestness? For me, it is our own entrained thinking and simply not paying attention to the signals where a focus on best is, at best (haha) is a wrong turn.

Second, I’d love you to share the signals you notice when you (if you ever do) start focusing on bestness instead of the right thing to do right now. (Or some variation.)

In taking a step back from constant work, I’m reflecting on some of my choices with groups and clients and see moments where I have consciously or unconsciously not heard what others offer because I thought I had what was best.  Signals? Defensiveness. Interrupting others. Prioritizing the voices that agreed with me. 

My antidote? Stick with structures that prevent behavior that I succumbed to now and again. This is probably why I use Liberating Structures, or at the least, consider my process choices based on how much the bring all voices to the work. 

 

Gardner Campbell- network or resonance?

From the forest of forgotten blog post drafts, this one from Gardner Campbel still resonates for me. Gardner Writes » Postscript to symbolism and cognitive resonance

It occurs to me that the metaphor of “network” may be holding me (us?) back. I like to think about social networks, network effects, high-speed networks, and so forth. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But the metaphor conveys a set of telegraphic connections, criss-crossing lines with nodes at the connection points, add-a-beads, point-to-point contacts and correspondences.

When I think about resonance, something else happens in my brain.

I think about resonance effects, about social resonance environments, about sympathetic vibrations and overtones and timbres and chords. I think about symbolism, and suggestion, about most resembling unlikenesses and most unlike resemblances (the way Milton described the relation of husband and wife in a successful–and happy–marriage). I think about complexity calling to complexity, about models that simultaneously simplify and amplify the power of the original as the models make the original more present, more resonant, to our minds.

As a lover of all things network, I too find myself wondering if I’m the hammer, looking for the proverbial nail. Resonance is a lovely option to add to my repertoire. The question is, what tool am I using for resonance? 🙂 I’ve leave that to your speculation.

Quick Edit: while draft cleaning, this one by Jim Benson “Liberate your Inner Hammer” on  form/function weaves into our speculation. 

 

Reflections of islands in Skagit Bay at high tide. Ika Island in the distance on the left, Goat Island on the right. Light clouds reflected in the water.

Tom Haskins on our Inner Teacher

In 2008 this blog post, growing changing learning creating: Relying on inner teachers, from Tom Haskin’s caught my eye enough to cause me to save the URL in a draft post. Revisiting it today, it still has resonance, but far beyond the classroom teaching context of the post itself. Please, after scanning the snippet below, go read the full post. Substitute what ever domain is yours for Tom’s as a classroom teacher.

Dawn on Skagit Bay, with Ika Island in the foreground and reflections on the tidal flatlands.

While blogging for the past year on related topics, I’ve come to the following realizations about the nature of a compounding solution in education:

  1. When we assume each student has an inner teacher within their minds, we will stop interfering with the discovery, cultivation and trust building with that inner teacher. The inner teacher will come to the fore of the students learning experiences and and reconfigure how they picture learning occurring. Problems with a particular learning challenge or patterns of learning efforts will get worked out between the student and the inner teacher who already knows what the underlying problems are.

As I read Tom’s words they resonate for me as a practitioner of Liberating Structures and more generally as a process person who deeply values learning, reflection and action. How do Tom’s words resonate for you?

Thanks, Tom!

(I’m having fun going through the detritus of draft blog posts!)

Uncertainty/Agreement Matrix

I have started going through the 419 draft blog posts sitting in my WordPress dashboard. Some are simply links of things I found interesting, and alas, many of those links (2006, 2015) are now dead and those drafts are deleted. There are a few nuggets.

I came upon this little doodle that emerged from/by people at the 2008 gathering of process practitioners, Nexus for Change. (Nexus continues to grow and thrive focusing on the domain of whole systems change. There are three videos which try and tell the story of its evolution.)

The image is of an agreement/certainty matrix based on the work of Ralph Stacey. I continue to use it as part of my Liberating Structures repertoire and it has infused and informed many other process approaches.

What attracted me to resurrect this image and post it is that there is still such resonance for me today. Much of my work of the past five years has been in this area of low certainty and low agreement – the stuff in the upper right hand side of the image. And of course the invitation into each piece of work has often been in the lower left – clients thinking they were working in higher agreement and certainty, only to discover they were not.

This shift of understanding where we place and understand our work (play, relationships, etc.) is both liberating, daunting and, sometimes, frustrating. It calls upon different skills and expertise. The lessons of the COVID era illustrate this. Just when we think we understand what is happening and how we might respond, things change. We have to find that space between “just do something useful today ” and live with the uncertainty and “unknowing.”

Photo of a hand drawing of an Agreement-Certainty matrix in various colors of pen.

From the Principles Chart on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

At the same time, this does not mean we ignore the lower left. There are things we can do with some amount of certainty. One that seems to have been somewhat abandoned is the choice to care about every person around us, and to act with kindness. Our uncertainty seems to have nudged many of us (USA I’m looking at you) towards self-preservation, or even outright selfishness, as if we deserve something. In uncertainty, all bets are off, including our past sense of entitlement.

What does this image tell me today? Keep ahold of the principles of our best selves and practice them together, with certainty and agreement. And let go of things that prevent us from seeing and experimenting with possibility in the areas of high uncertainty and disagreement. A classic wicked question and filled with potential dissonance. And possibility.

Part of a larger photo set from Nexus for Change in 2008 https://www.flickr.com/photos/choconancy/albums/72157604309184882

What does consent look like to you as a facilitator?

“Consent is key. Relatedly, whatever you do, get consent from the local government and the local community. Involve them in the decision-making and processes. For example, in a humanitarian crisis (outbreak, environmental, or manmade), development organizations and INGOs (e.g., UN, Save the Children, IRC, MSF) aren’t allowed to enter a country to provide support until the country has invited them or accepted their offer. This is one example of tapping into existing structures, which are in place for a reason, as well as the importance of consent.” https://www.fsg.org/blog/covid-19-seven-things-philanthropy-can-do

I’ve been thinking more and more about how I have controlled and oppressed others through my well-meaning facilitation. I jokingly call it “facipulation,” and seek to be very transparent about how I approach facilitation. But that is no excuse to ignore my filtered and often biased approach.

I have been working to understand how better to work with the Tribes in my state as it relates to my work with an integrated floodplains management network. Informal conversations between the consultants and the leadership team have opened up many new and nuanced vistas about what consent means.

As I begin to glimpse the complexities of sovereign nation relationships (thank you Bobby), the relationships within and between tribes, and practices of who can or does speak for whom, it is clearer that I based most of my sense of “inviting people in” on my white, American, female and other identities, without having a clue how they were received by others different than me. More importantly, WHY they are perceived the way they are. My personal value was to ensure that “everyone speaks.” Does that, in fact, equal egalitarian engagement? Not necessarily.

In my belief in networked and multi-nodal approaches, I often dismissed existing power structures as oppressive, without even understanding HOW they worked. I lumped them into the buck of obstruction and sought to work around them.

But what happens when working around them makes matters worse? While you might not agree with me and I with you, dismissing the way we each wish to engage does nothing for moving forward together. So what does the path “between” look like? How do we flock together and hold our uniqueness and diversity intact? How does that inform consent and group process?