Category: complexity

Responding to Clark Quinn: Technology or preparation? 

Clark Quinn has a great provocation on his blog today. I ‘ll share a quote, then reply.

So, many of the things we’re doing are driven by bad implementation. And that’s what I started wondering: are we using smart technology to enhance an optimized workforce, or to make up for a lack of adequate preparation?  We could be putting in technology to make up for what we’ve been unsuccessful at doing through training and elearning (because we’re not doing that well).

To put it another way, would we get better returns applying what’s known about how we think, work, and learn than bringing in technology? Would adequate preparation be a more effective approach than throwing technology at the problem, at least in some of the cases? There are strong reasons to use technology to do things we struggle at doing well, and in particular to augment us. But perhaps a better investment, at least in some cases, would be to appropriately distribute tasks between the things our brains do well and what technology does better.

Let me be clear; there are technologies that will do things more reliably than humans, and do things humans would prefer not to. I’m all for the latter, at least ;). And we should optimize both technology and people. I’m a fan of technology to augment us in ways we want to be augmented. So my point is more to consider are we doing enough to prepare people and support them working together. Your thoughts?

Source: LearnletsTechnology or preparation? – Learnlets

While Clark’s question is in the context of workplace learning, it is resonant in far wider contexts. I see it when I’m asked to design group process and gatherings. We are constantly putting “band aids” on instead of addressing underlying issues. We don’t really “prepare people and support them working together.” Why is that? Is it the continued desire for a quick fix, or the deep denial that how we work together matters and making it work more effectively might challenge too many things: power, status quo, cost?

The observation of this problem is neither new nor unique… it is how things often work. So the question  is how do we better shine a light on the underlying issues and take immediate steps — however small – for remediation? Rather than throw up our hands and say it is too messy, hard or difficult?

This is where complexity-informed practices come in. From the deep dives into understanding what is happening with sense-making tools like Cognitive Edge’s Sensemaker, to simple, reproducible group practices like Liberating Structures, we can stop shrugging our shoulders and saying “that’s out of my scope of work” or “I can’t do anything about that.” The point is we have to do SOMETHING. Not just plow on from tech innovation to tech innovation. Here are four possible sets of practices that could help us go deeper and do better. Here are four possible sets of actions.

 Creative Destruction to Make Space

What one thing, no matter how tiny, can we stop doing to make space for the things we want to try? Before we add a new technology, do we stop using another one? Before we seek a solution to an efficiency problem, can we find out what to stop doing that caused the problem? Cue up Ecocycle or TRIZ, and make some of these now-useless activities visible. So often we strive to manage and scale when we have either grown past the things we are scaling, or they are no longer fit for purpose. We operate in mostly dynamic environments, yet we try and shoehorn everything into an ordered domain. (The complicated and simple in the Cynefin framework. In an ordered domain “cause and effect are known or can be discovered.” Complex and chaotic domains are understood as unordered, where ” cause and effect can be deduced only with hindsight or not at all.”).

Space for Uncertainty and Experimentation

Maybe certainty and obsession with technical fixes is overrated. Earlier this week I participated in an online gathering hosted by Johnnie Moore on Unhurried Conversations. He offered five principles to support unhurried conversations and one was The wisdom of uncertainty. We can use uncertainty to experiment our way into useful solutions, rather than coming up with a “brilliant idea” that may inadvertently build on past weakness. We may miss the underlying preparation. We can use Improv Prototyping to “act our way into knowing.” We can use Helping Heuristics to strengthen our listening before we pounce with our own (half baked?) ideas, giving space to considerations that are lost for those of us who “think by talking.”

Leadership for Spotting and Picking Up Promising Experiments

When we start getting seduced by technological innovation, it reminds me that there are people who see the world differently and can look within and beyond the tech itself and spot the ideas for promising experimentation. Not everyone has these skills to imagine things. We want solutions and we tend to foreclose on them too quickly, or fail to do, as Dave Snowden loves to say, “safe fail” experimentation to test our assumptions and asses the complexity (or not) of a situation. Sometimes that means we are smart enough to notice others with these strengths, and not try and be the “solution maker” ourselves. Approaches such as Wicked Questions , Discovery and Action Dialog, and Critical Uncertainties can help us spot the things we might otherwise rush by.

Right Management of the Right Things

I do not want to dismiss the Ecocycle domain of “maturity.” When there is a useful technical application, we want to bring it productively into the work. Same for process issues. Not everything is uncertain and shifting. The critical issue is HOW we manage these things into maturity, and how do we ensure we don’t repeat the cycle of “getting stuck” when that thing ceases to add value. And how leaders and managers can both work in this quadrant of maturity while at the same time supporting the other three areas of creative destruction, networking and birth. Great leaders and managers do their magic in the maturity quadrant AND support others to deploy their strengths in the unordered domains. Keep a critical eye on what must be destroyed, reimagined/imagined and birthed, even if it is not their own area of expertise and comfort.

What are your ideas?

See also:

Wanderings of a Liberating Structures Practitioner – Part 2 the practice

This second post will describe the Liberating Structures string used at the Fire Adapted Communities Network three day retreat in Ashland, Oregon earlier this month to demonstrate the application of LS for strategic planning in contexts that are portfolio based, complex and full of (good!) people, all mentioned in part 1 where it all started.

FAC missionThe Fire Adapted Communities Network springs out of  work sponsored by The Watershed Research and Training Center and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). The network is dedicated to working with peope helping communities live safely with wildland fire. They have a very clear mission: “We work with communities across the nation to create a more wildfire-resilient future. A “fire adapted community” consists of informed and prepared citizens collaboratively planning and taking action to safely co-exist with wildland fire.”

A key strategy for the network at it’s birth was to work through communities of practice (CoPs). After a year and a half, it was time to look at the progress so far and develop a learning agenda within and across the CoPs going forward, since the core function of the network is to identify, spread and apply good fire adapted community practices. Learning is always at the core.

I was initially invited in to do an afternoon’s training on CoPs but after a short conversation, I suggested that a CoP approach, woven across their three days, might be more meaningful than training. You know, that stuff which can often go in one ear and out the other. Additionally for me,  a CoP perspective is more useful than simply focusing on the form of CoPs themselves.  This idea of a CoP perspective is from Etienne Wenger-Trayner and basically asks us to consider the domain – what we are interested in learning and applying learning, the community – who we learn with, and the practice – how we learn and apply our learning. To look at whatever we are doing from that social learning perspective.

As the meeting concept evolved, the team eventually invited me to help them design and facilitate the three days, giving them a chance to step back and participate themselves, and see Liberating Structures in action. I in turn promised to weave in little CoP “meta moments” as issues and opportunities arose.

We proceeded to plan a lovely agenda for an amazing group of enthusiastic, smart and dedicated volunteers and staff. I had my string of Liberating Structures and back ups all designed. I had my adapted visual Strategy Gameplan sketched out. The gameplan is something I learned from Keith McCandless and which I’ve been tinkering with over the past six months. It builds off the foundation of a visual process templates developed by David Sibbet at the Grove, then adding the LS twists and questions. What used to be the “first steps” in the middle of the arrow (traditional first quarter, second quarter planning)  has now been replaced by the LS Ecocycle to hold the portfolio and to recognize what is in or ready for scaling, what needs destroying/stopped, what needs to be imagined and birthed.  This final twist is what has broken new ground for me. More on that in a minute…

Anchor Questions

I continue to tinker and modify the questions. In an actual application, they are customized to the issues/domains of the people using them, but the generic ones can offer us some insight. What you see above are actually draft questions for a LS Immersion Workshop in February with BC Campus on the use of LS in higher education. (IF this is relevant to you, JOIN US!) If people are interested, we can share our string once we finish it and I hopefully will debrief the event with a blog post afterwards. For the FAC communities, obviously the questions were about FAC!

  1. What is happening around us that demands change? (Often the words growth, adaptation can come into play.) This question has a long lineage through facilitation and planning practices and I find it particularly energizing to help identify purpose. Keith has said he has stopped wasting time with vision and mission and uses this sort of question to sharpen PURPOSE. I’m heading in the same direction. Then values and principles – really important aspects – are worked on in the context of the purpose, not as stand-alones. See Purpose to Practice for examples of the purpose/principles link.
  2. What paradoxical challenges must we face to make progress? This to me is the reality check and often the ground shifting conversation in working in a complex environment. It is not “if we do X, Y will happen.” It can be competing priorities, uncertain futures (classic example here in the US with a wild card president-elect!), antagonizing circumstances etc. Dealing with this up front in the context of the sub-question makes it more stark: What happens if we don’t change? In other words, how do we keep moving forward in this land of “wicked questions?”  Paradoxes are not things to defeat us, but to change how we view a problem. To shift our mindset. What is not very obvious from my image is that those circles are yin/yang containers for these paradoxes.
  3. Where are we starting, honestly? This question can have many layers and options, from identification of strengths (things in our “Maturity area” of the Ecocycle) , positive deviance, as well as the challenges, the things we have resisted or feared discussing, the light and the dark. Speaking our truths, sometimes just between ourselves, sometimes “to power.” This question surfaces the things we have to work with. AND the things we need to creatively destroy in the Creative Destruction are of the ecocycle.
  4. Given our purpose, what big ideas seem possible now? (Remember, question 1 surfaced our purpose. I keep wondering if I should add that label…) What big opportunities do we see? What is ready to be imagined and then stewarded into birth. This frames our shared impetus forward.
  5. How are we moving away from the current state to our desired future state? This is the practical piece. What are the next steps? Things we can decide and do. Start now. Do something. Don’t wait to plan for perfection. ACT!

Anchor Structures

For each question in the gameplan there are a variety of Liberating Structures we can use. Because this image is small, I’ll also add a list below as a starter point, but one of the heaven/hells of LS is that you have many options to use a structure in different phases and in different ways. That comes after building your overall LS practice! 🙂

  1. Impromptu Networking to quickly get people talking about real issues. 9 Whys to make sense of initial insights. 1-2-4-all to see diverse viewpoints and synthesize patterns. User Experience Fishbowl to surface perspectives. 8 Word Purpose Statement (which is an LS in development and not well documented on the website yet) to hone down to the most important part of the purpose, to clarify and compel. What, So What, Now what (W3)to move the process to question 2. Often in my first use of W3 I’ll weave in Argyris’s Ladder of Inference as documented on the W3 LS page. This all drives the Ecocycle.
  2. Critical Uncertainties to move us away from some fixed perception of the context and future and build robust, resilient and anti-fragile possibilities in our work. Wicked Questions to tackle the paradoxical challenges. W3 again to reflect. Sometimes these identify where we are stuck in the rigidity or poverty traps of the Ecocycle.
  3. Min Specs to identify and sharpen principles, TRIZ to surface the real issues if we are still avoiding or not being able to see them, Shift and Share to spread strengths, Discovery and Action Dialog to identify positive deviants, Appreciative Interviews to surface strengths. Generative Star Relationships or What I Need From You to surface team issues… plus so many other LS! Map on the Ecocycle.
  4. 25/10 Crowdsourcing to identify big ideas. 9 Whys to sharpen big ideas. Improv Prototyping and Troika Consulting to both develop,  test and improve ideas. Put them all on the Ecocycle.
  5. 15% Solutions to get stuff we can do NOW. Purpose to Practice to develop discrete projects within the portfolio. Plus a ton more LS! The team building LS mentioned in #3 may come into play here as action moves forward. (Edit: see also Social Labs’ piece on prototyping.)

Now of course you aren’t going to do ALL of these. I have been using about 2, sometimes 3 structures per question and I always have alternatives in my “back pocket.” This is my own emerging edge.

Noticing Turning Points

I’ve uses this approach three times now in the past three months and each time there has been a moment in the gathering where all of a sudden we notice a turning point. For the TNC folks it became clear when we could not nail down a clear purpose. The energy up to that point had been on building the people side of the network and its constituent CoPs and the turning point shifted the focus to what strategic learning agenda or agendas would move the network forward. From that some of the CoPs found clarity for their forward movement, some because obsolete and were targeted for sunsetting, and some new needs and forms were identified. The current portfolio was better understood, and then the group could then go through the process of identifying their new and emergent elements of the portfolio. What is scaled to its next level of maturity? The well defined CoPs. What is destroyed? The fuzzy CoPs? What new ideas are imagined? New forms and focus for learning.

Be warned that this is a powerful string for creative destruction. DON’T go there if you are not prepared to have your past assumptions blown away, and your plans may change. DO go there if you are in a complex and uncertain environment, or when you have audacious ambitions that require powerful thinking and doing.

Documentation

The Graphic Game Plan + Ecocycle gives you a place to harvest the most important parts of the process and provide a base documentation for going forward. It has been nearly impossible for me to include the fully developed Ecocycle in the game plan (unless you have a ginormous wall) so I have the full Ecocycle on a separate page and just harvest out the key ideas and turning points.  I also use a Kanban chart to track the LS as we go through them, and our tasks as we go through.  There are three columns: Backlog (what is to be done), WIP (work in progress and make sure you keep this LIMITED. Thank you Jim Benson) and Done! (track and CELEBRATE!). My Kanbans are very dynamic, and role model how we adapt as things emerge. Here is a picture of a Kanban from the FAC gathering:

What, So What, Now What?

Walking my own talk, what I have observed in the use of this approach is:

  • people get confused. Uncomfortable. And playful. And engaged.
  • issues are made visible
  • it can get messy
  • I did not always lead/invite/explain well

So What, or why I think this is important is because the approach:

  • is flexible and adaptable
  • people quickly see and own it (visually, emotionally and cognitively)
  • making confusion visible is a useful thing
  • it provides a container for surfacing and using discomfort and diversity
  • IT REALLY HELPS US find some solace in the complexity that might otherwise overwhelm us
  • it takes practice and I still have my sticking points

Now What?

  • I’d like to improve the harvest and graphic container for the harvest.
  • Keep practicing
  • Get YOUR feedback. That’s what the comments are for, ok?

Edit: For a great read on planning in a complex world, see Chris Corrigan’s post.

Wanderings of a Liberating Structures Practitioner – Part 1 3 Reasons

Purpose 2 PracticeAs readers of my blog may have noticed, I’ve mentioned Liberating Structures more and more over the past two years. I’ve used them extensively with clients, but I don’t often get the chance to write publicly about that work. The great folks at the Fire Adapted Communities Network gave me permission to share my process “download” with you. It prompted me to a bit of year end reflection that requires more than one post. So here we go! This is a bit of a mishmosh of work and conversations that came prior as well. Consider this first post the rationale, or reasons for my shift towards Liberating Structures. The second post will show up here. (When I get it finished!)

What my clients have been asking for a lot is something that falls into the general category of a “retreat” to examine progress, consider current conditions and plan for the future. In almost every case there has been internal or external factors that make these moments in time feel like inflection or turning points. Policy changes due to political shifts. Growth in networks. Shifting priorities. Emerging possibilities. All of these could be addressed with “traditional strategic planning.” But I have realized I don’t do this anymore. Forget your SWOT analysis. I’m fully into the “liberating planning” space.

This first pots gives an overview of genesis of what I’ve been doing comes out of some work Keith McCandless and I did at the University of Michigan immersion last Spring, conversations with Keith, Fisher and other LS pals, and all the gatherings that have come before me with my clients. (THANK YOU CLIENTS! I LOVE YOU!) Some of the key themes that keep croping up include:

A Portfolio Perspective

Very few organizations or even projects have just one element. The group/organization/person needs to take a portfolio perspective on planning which is quite different than, for example, “planning a project.”  This thinking was first introduced to me by Rachel Cardone when she was managing a portfolio of investments in the water, sanitation and hygiene area.

When you work at the portfolio level, you are looking not for a single success (or failure), but for signals that can show how to move the whole field forward. You want to do rapid “safe fail” probes and experimentation in areas of uncertainty, and then scale up more mature results. This is very consistent with the Cynefin Framework of Snowden and friends. And,among many useful things, Ecocycle Planning in Liberating Structures is an amazing porfolio oriented approach.

That said, few non profits or NGOs talk about managing their portfolios. I most often see a project and project management perspective, something that exists over a totally artificial three year grant funding cycle, that dominates the narrative. And within that narrative are the holy pair of impact and scaling up and out. Figure it out and then replicate the you-know-what out of it. So why aren’t all our problems solved? How are we relating that to strategy? That brings up the second area.

Complexity

Most of the challenges people are facing are not simple cause/effect problems. They are muliti factoral, often unpredictable which makes them complex. Now don’t get all wobbly kneed with the C word. It does NOT mean that things are SO complex, we simply can’t address the complexity. There are plenty of scholars and practitioners who have proved otherwise. And I don’t just mean to pretend a problem is simple and try to solve it that way.

The implication for my work is that people need a handle on complexity, something that allows them to recognize it, work with it, and not get overwhelmed. Think about the 2030 Sustainable Development goals.  At one level there are 17 rational appearing goals:

  1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
  2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture
  3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
  4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote life-long learning opportunities for all
  5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
  6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
  7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all
  8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
  9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
  10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
  11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
  12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
  13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (in line with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)
  14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
  15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
  16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
  17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

Then start thinking about how these 17 are all emmeshed with each other. Dive into the links and look at the many layers of indicators and outcomes. Does your head hurt yet? (The sheer number of PDFs makes my head hurt!) Should that stop us from taking action? NOOOOOO…. If we are to tackle system level problems, we need a repertoire suited from complex contexts. Look at the work of Cognitive Edge (alas, now most of the methods are behind a paywall), Harold Jarche (and..), and many others.

The patterns I notice across these and other useful processes for working in a complex context are these:

  • they ask us to shift our perspective about how past experiences inform our present analysis,
  • they support the emergent (often unpredictable), and,
  • they are iterative.

All these ask us to practice a different mindset for planning. These approaches are also attracting REALLY INTERESTING people. That, of course, attracts me.

It’s the People

Yes, those people. If I were to admit it, it is the people, not the complexity that draws me in! Interesting people who really want to get things done are tackling these tough problems. They are passionate, open, hard working and they deserve practices that acknowledge the wisdom and intelligence of all actors (well, we all say/do some stupid things too. I do. Don’t you?) They deserve not to be tortured by boring meetings, poor process and feeble results. Work, learning, doing –> all is ready for liberation. And that includes how we plan for our work, learning, doing and yes, even serious play.

So there you have it in a messy nutshell: what drives me in my work. On to part 2 to talk about this strategic practice that has been emerging for me.

 

“Finely calibrated moments of risk”

sunburstI’ve had this snippet in my queue for a while and decided to just BLOG it. I love the idea of “finely calibrated moments of risk.” Sounds like my life! This is the space of learning, of innovation. Can I get an “amen!?”

The quote is from Molly Melching in a piece by Courtney Martin,  The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems — The Development Set — Medium   The context was “development tourism,” which is an interesting issue on its own. Here is the context for the quote.

“Don’t go because you loved studying abroad. Go because, like Molly Melching, you plan on putting down roots. Melching, a native of Illinois, is widely credited with ending female genital cutting (FGC) in Senegal. But it didn’t happen overnight. She has been living in and around Dakar since 1974, developing her organization, Tostan, and its strategy of helping communities collectively address human rights abuses. Her leadership style is all about finely calibrated moments of risk — when she will challenge a local leader, for example — and restraint — when she will hold off on challenging a local leader because she intuits that she hasn’t yet developed enough trust with him. That kind of leadership doesn’t develop during a six-month home stay.”

For my international development friends, you might want to peek at The Development Set. Many of us continuously wonder if we are adding value in our work. 😉 Here is the “about.”

Finally, a word about journalistic ethics. The Development Set is made possible by funding from the The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Please know that the Foundation’s involvement with this publication stops there. They are interested in cultivating a dynamic space to explore the question, “How do we do the most good?” They do not have any sway whatsoever in our editorial decisions.

Empherality, KM, Inner Reform and Social Impact

IMGP3464Blogs are ephemeral. Today someone referenced a broken link on my blog back from 2005. I cruised across the page and alas, found many dead links. There was one quote on knowledge management that is still resonant to me… and the blog is gone. (Some of the posts are still visible via the amazing Wayback machine. For example here and here.)

Olaf’s Notebook: What is the relation between KM and inner reform?This post from Olaf’s Notebook speaks for itself: What is the relation between KM and inner reform?Knowledge management as social system change requires an inner reform of people involved. Where KM projects are usually ‘sold’ on the basis of business cases, they should be sold on the basis of ‘humanity and consciousness cases’ to be effective drivers for social system change.What can we do if we cannot cope with some aspects of our lives, if we fail in our relationships with other people, if we destroy our opportunities for the future, if we become ill because of work stress? Good chance that we will be advised to start psychotherapy.What happens if our organizations destroy societal trust relationships, opportunities for future generations, if they make workers ill because of work stress, or exploit workers and children in low-wages countries? Good chance organizational leadership receives shareholders’ praise, bonuses, and fame as a captain of industry. No psychotherapy there, and one could only wonder about this double standard.Corporations and governments debate endlessly on corporate social responsibility, draw up sustainability reporting schemes, codes of conduct etc. I do not deny these agreements can represent steps forward toward sustainable corporate policies. However, what is right or wrong for companies and company leaders to do is not so hard to imagine”

Source: Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: 11/01/2005 – 12/01/2005

In a bit of kismet, the Straits Knowledge newsletter arrived today with a link to a paper from my friend Patrick Lambe on Knowledge Organization and Social Impact. There is resonance from Olaf’s writing in 2005.

KM as an inner practice. Knowledge (in all its forms and practices) as a core for social impact. Lots of good stuff. Only need time and presence to weave the ideas and make sense. Or to lose things and to find them anew with fresh eyes. To destroy to create.

Ah, I dream.