I snipped the quotes below from Chris Corrigan back in December (Some things that work in real reconciliation dialogue – Chris Corrigan ), meaning to write more about it. I think it is too important to wait for my “round to it” to happen, so here it is. Chris is writing about reconciliation. In our current political environment (especially here in the US) this is becoming a core competency, and can’t be left to luxury. The BOLDING is mine, with comments between points.
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 is where I constantly get push back from convenors and people in authority. They want whole group for fear of missing out on something, or having something happen that they can’t see/control. Working with positional leaders to move past these fears is important prep work, and resisting their urge to derail small group practices mid-stream.
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 was interesting to me as part of me seems to push for sharper, focused questions. I think I have been confusing sharpness and focus. Broad questions can have the stimulating characteristics of broad questions. Or maybe it is the invitation process (see next point.) I clearly have more thinking/learning to do here.
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.
The practice of “everything from the front of the room to all groups” had not been working for me so I’ve started to encourage very broad instructions at the front, then travel to each table/group. People use their questions to me to sharpen their own thinking and understanding. It is far less passive than just waiting for instructions!
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.
I just say, “Amen!”
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.
It was interesting to see Chris put certainty and positionality in the same sentence. Chris, was there a reason?
… 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. …there is a tremendous amount of emotional labour involved in talking about traumatizing history.
Here is the other area I need to learn a LOT more about. It goes to the whole other side of preparation, including self awareness and my own power and how I do or do not use it.
What are your practices for context setting and facilitating for reconciliation?
Are you at or near the University of Illinois at Champagne/Urbana? Interested in Liberating Structures? Then join us for one or two days of hands/heads/hearts on workshops. The first one is a new offering I’ve put together that builds on some of my recent blog posts (and more to come) about facilitating in complex contexts!
April 5 Learning the Strategy Game Plan: Liberating Structures for Development
The first workshop is on April 5th, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm. It is designed to explore how we can use Liberating Structures, a repertoire of 33 group practices, to improve project planning and execution for participatory projects that are often on complex and emergent contexts. While a funder or boss may want a linear log-frame and a budget, we need to find approaches that embrace ambiguity with practical approaches, ensure learning and improvement are part of the design, not an afterthought, and which consistently liberate and unleash the knowledge and experiences across the system at play.
In the workshop you will practice 6-8 structures and utilize an overarching framework to tie the pieces together in a cogent, visual whole. The fee is $100.00, registration is here, and a brief flyer is attached to this blog post. Leave me a comment with any questions. Spread the word!
April 6th, Unleashing Learning Engagement in the Classroom
The second is a series of three, 90 minute workshops that dive increasingly deeper into the use of Liberating Structures for increasing classroom engagement in higher education. We’ve designed this with the busy professor/lecturer/Graduate Student/TA in mind.
Is it a challenge to engage all student voices in your classes? Do you look for ways to spark deeper student engagement the subject matter and with each other? Do you wish they would take more ownership and risks in their learning? Engagement deepens learning and application. It strengthens the muscles that help students work with ambiguity. But it can be challenging, in both small and large groups.
Come explore Liberating Structures, an easy to learn and deploy repertoire of of 33+ open source interaction structures that can build patterns of easy, regular student engagement in the classroom. They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.
You can start with a short 90 minute introductory workshop, or stay for all three learning sessions. First is an introduction of the easiest and most often used Liberating Structures, second, a focused application to solve a real challenge, and third, a deeper dive into the theory and practice behind Liberating Structures.
8:30 – 10:00 Workshop 1: Liberating Engaged Learning: discover and use 4 structures that can immediately increase engagement in your classroom.
Friday, April 6, 2018
Illini Union Ballroom
8:30 am to 10:00 am Workshop 1: Liberating Engaged Learning: discover and use 4 structures that can immediately increase engagement in your classroom. In this 90 minute session you will get a hands on introduction to some of the easiest and most commonly used Liberating Structures to build student engagement in your class. It will conclude with a debrief and identification of immediate applications in your classroom. You can then build your practice by turning to the instructions for individual structures on the website (www.liberatingstructures.com), mobile phone app (available free on iTunes and Google Play) or continue with the two following workshops.
10:30 am to 12:00 pm Workshop 2: Stringing Structures to Tackle a Challenge in Your Classroom: learn how a sequence of multiple structures can address specific challenges (student, passivity, unequal participation, lack of critical thinking, etc.) and larger outcomes. This builds on Workshop 1.
Liberating structures can be used individually, but their power becomes more visible when they are joined together or “strung.” In this 90 minute session we will use a string of 2-3 Liberating Structures to collaboratively work on addressing a concrete shared classroom challenge such as how to create an open environment and tackle a lack of student participation, end student passivity, weak discussions, or the lack of productive risk-taking. You will walk away with at least one actionable solution you can apply the next time you are in the classroom. You will learn how to use the Liberating Structures Matchmaker tool to select and string the structures. Prerequisite: Workshop 1
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm Lunch Break (grab lunch in the food court or on Green Street) with someone you just met this morning
1:00 pm to 2:30 pm Workshop 3: Understanding the Theory Behind Liberating Structures: an advanced workshop that looks at the underlying elements of Liberating Structures and how they can become part of the everyday pattern of highly engaged classrooms. Liberating Structures can appear to simply be “yet another facilitation tool.” What sets them apart is the attention to five microstructures that sit beneath each Liberating Structures, and the ten principles that guide them. These give us insight as to how and why Liberating Structures work well for stronger classroom engagement, enable more critical thinking, innovation and action. In this workshop we will explore some of the theory behind Liberating Structures and experience a few of the more complex and rich structures. You will also be introduced to various vectors for continuing to learn and practice Liberating Structures. Prerequisite: Workshop 1 and/or 2.
It’s worth your time to come to all three, but if you can only attend one, then come to the first. If you can do two, then combine workshops 1 and 2 or workshops 1 and 3.
My clients have been asking for more support in planning for the future. In almost every case there have been internal or external factors that suggest significant inflection or turning points. Policy changes due to political shifts. Growth in networks. Shifting priorities. Emerging possibilities. New combinations of partners.
They usually ask for traditional strategic planning. I have realized I don’t do this anymore. Won’t. Forget your SWOT analysis. I’m fully into the “liberating planning” space. A liberated facilitation space. This work has been deeply enhanced by my collaboration with folks like Keith McCandless and Fisher Qua, fellow “struturalistas!” Many of the words below came from or were inspired by them and others from the Liberating Structures community.
Context
Why do we need complexity informed planning? Three big reasons.
Portfolios, not just projects: Very few organizations have just one element, yet planning is often linear and isolated at the project level. Strategically we need to take a portfolio perspective on planning which is quite different than “planning a project.” 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. A portfolio approach can help buffer against the typical three-year grant funding cycles and keep focused on strategy. Tactics should include “safe fail” probes (http://cognitive-edge.com/methods/safe-to-fail-probes/) and experimentation in areas of uncertainty, and then, once some clarity has emerged, scale up or adapt to more mature results. Among many useful things, the Liberating Structure Ecocycle Planning (http://www.liberatingstructures.com/31-ecocycle-planning/ ) supports a complexity informed portfolio approach. Interestingly it also allows simultaneous work on strategy and tactics.
Planning itself becomes an Ecocycle. My recent work with the Ecocycle Planning tool has opened a new repertoire of facilitating in complex contexts by helping us recognize that our work does, and should, span the four spaces of maturity, creative destruction, networking and birth. The Ecocycle recognizes that we operate across a range of contexts and projects that are, from a Cynefin framework perspective, simple (rules based), complicated (expertise driven), complex (not predictable) and chaotic (we will never fully know!) A manager may feel most accountable for the maturity space, where tested approaches can be scaled up. But without an eye to the pipeline in, simply managing the mature space is self-delusion. It may require making space through creative destruction. Opening up to wider networks to identify new possibilities and steward them through the innovation process. Yet maturity is the manager’s area of comfort. To embrace the other areas, they must see the action of the continuum of the Ecocycle. (EDIT: For some great background on Ecocycle see https://www.taesch.com/references-cards/ecocycle by Luc Taesch!)
The patterns I notice across the Ecocycle and other useful facilitation processes for working in a complex context are that:
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.
Another thing I notice is that this practice embraces a different mindset for planning which also attracts REALLY INTERESTING people. That, of course, attracts me.
The Adaptive Strategy Landscape for Project Design & Development
We have been struggling about what to call this and how to describe it. My newest experiment is “Adaptive Strategy Landscape.” I’m currently designing a workshop for practitioners in international development to use Liberating Structures in project design – thus my need to blog about this and think out loud with you. I am drawn to the term “landscape” because it is visually strong, and implies an ecosystem of inter-relating elements. I am very open to other name suggestions. 😉
So what does this Landscape, this “emergent, complexity-friendly strategic planning” actually look like? Right now we are framing it around six questions I learned from Keith. Typically I tinker and modify them to the domain in question. This is their generic form.
PURPOSE: Why is this work important to us and the wider community? How do we justify our work to others? What makes this important?
CONTEXT: What is happening around us that demands change? This question is particularly energizing to help identify and sharpen purpose. It shocks me how often this is ignored or left muddy and far from strategic. A good idea out of context is often a blind alley.
BASELINE: Where are we starting, honestly? This question has many layers and process options, from identification of strengths (things in our “Maturity area” of the ecocycle), positive deviance (http://www.liberatingstructures.com/10-discovery-action-dialogue/ ) , identification of challenges, or the things we have resisted or feared discussing, the light and the dark. It surfaces the things we must work with. AND the things we need to creatively destroy to make space for innovation. The creative destruction is ESSENTIAL to this process!
CHALLENGE: What paradoxical challenges must we face to make progress? This invites the ground shifting conversation to enable working in a complex environment. It is not “if we do X, Y will happen.” It is not X or Y. It examines competing priorities, uncertain futures, and antagonizing circumstances. It explores multiple perspectives and truths. Paradoxes are not things to defeat us, but tools to change how we view a problem. To shift our mindsets. A useful sub-question if things get stuck is What happens if we don’t change?How do we keep moving forward in this land of “wicked questions?” ( http://www.liberatingstructures.com/4-wicked-questions/ )
AMBITION: Given our purpose, what big ideas seem possible now for our purpose? What big opportunities do we see? What is ready to be imagined and then stewarded into birth? This frames our shared impetus forward. It is the genesis of our monitoring and evaluation framework as well, informed by the other five questions. This is super-important and includes a developmental evaluation perspective right from the start. This is useful to engage project funders in dialog, both in the proposal, planning and discussion of outputs and outcomes from a complexity perspective.
ACTION: 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, no matter how small the step. Do something. Don’t wait to plan for perfection. ACT! Build iterative learning into the design. Monitor and evaluate as a way of working, not an afterthought or a tick on the checklist.
While these each have a number attached to them that informs sequence, this is not by any means always a linear process. A discovery around “where are we starting, honestly,” may lead us to rethink our purpose. Learning loops abound.
Process
A portfolio approach, complexity and the Ecocycle, informed by the six questions, has lead to the construction of a set or “string” of processes (many from Liberating Structures) that inform design of the process.Here are some example structures for each question.
PURPOSE: Why, why, why is this work important to us and the wider community?
I pay close attention to turning points, where something shifts in the group, and adjust my string to respond to these emergent factors. I use large visuals to anchor and capture salient information, ideally identified by the participants and NOT me. (This helps avoid one of my pitfalls, over-harvesting!) Post its, paper, pens are all in everyone’s hands. Fisher has started adding a timeline to the bottom to build off of question 3 with more detail.
We iteratively stop and take turns telling the story of the emerging visual to get clear on what we understand and what we need to process further. Often, this is the moment when we go back and sharpen the purpose, and find the right level of granularity around each question. Sometimes we capture these on videos. There are moments when you see new clarity emerge right on the spot.
From this a smaller team usually transforms this into a written plan, conforming (ahem!) to the needs of the organization and or funders. There is still a gap between the very learning intensive process of complexity-based planning and the formats we use to write, manage and evaluate projects. More work to do!
Here are a few examples of the visual after a planning session.
From the Fire Adaptive Communities retreatFrom Keith McCandless
So what do you think?
Please add, comment, critique, rename in the comments! Thank you in advance for thinking WITH me!
Innovation Barrier #2: Your Network Is Embedded In An Older Model
At this point, most people are aware of the power of network effects. Everybody uses Microsoft Office because everyone else uses it. If you want to sell something, you put it on eBay because that’s where the buyers are (and they’re there because that’s where the sellers are). Apple’s iOS is popular, in part, because everyone wants to develop for it.
Back in 2006 I was a participant in a remarkable gathering called the Evolutionary Salon. It was an intense soup of ideas, feelings and energy. In these contexts a lot of that can overwhelm me. Luckily, I was not alone. Chris Corrigan and Kenoli Oleari and I were doing a little music jamming and a response to all that energy was born. We called it Euphoric Bullshit, a gentle jab at our own sense of self importance. Originally it was just for us, but our four fearless hosts decided it might help shift the energy on the third and final day.
Ashley Cooper (who, by the way has restarted her coaching practice if you are thinking about getting a coach), reminded me of all this with a link back to the debrief the PoP facilitators did. All of a sudden I vividly remember the moment (and almost the tune!)
I have always found that gentle humor, music, visual arts and dance can open up different channels of connection, communication and meaning making. So literally we can sing our way into better work together. (Speaking of singing, if you haven’t seen this, take a peek.) I need to make sure I keep weaving them in.
Digging around in an old thread in the Open Space email list, I found the lyrics. Um, impolite language warning… but know this was joyously and lovingly sung.
Euphoric Bullshit by Nancy White, Kenoli Oleari and Chris Corrigan and 90 amused muses
We come into the circle with our passions and resolve
We each have a lot of issues that we really want to solve
But we all start a talkin’, and things get out of hand
So take a little breath (breath) and settle down and we’ll ease into the plan
CHORUS:
Euphoric bullshit is the name of the game
We take the sacred and we make it profane
You can’t come in, unless you bear your pain
Euphoric bullshit is the name of the game
We’re calling a lot of sessions, with various intents
Some get a little bit impatient as we sit upon the fence
But emergence growing edges will carry us all along
We are but one great voice in the universal song
Chorus
Instrumental break
Now the time has come for us to go out into the world
And throw our great intentions into the cosmic swirl
Hey you don’t need to worry that these things will come to pass
Because evolution’s arrow will kick you in the ass
This is an older quote from Matthew May from 2015. Ironically, he has stopped blogging and participates through social media networks,
a topic for another of my “still in draft” blog posts. But I wanted to get this quote up here as it is related to a longer piece I am writing about Facilitating in Complex Contexts. So here it is, food for thought today.
I used to be agnostic on SWOT. No longer. I’m violently against it as the starting point for strategy.
I now think it’s far better to think through various strategic choices, ask what would have to be true for those choices to be good ones, and explore those hypotheses through valid experiments, before ever locking and loading on a strategy. It’s creative and divergent thinking, which is the polar opposite of the convergent thinking that fuels planning and analysis.
The difference between divergent and convergent thinking is the difference between chess and checkers. Both games are played on the same board, both games have the same number of players. With checkers, though, you really don’t have much to think about, the players are all the same, and the moves are single, linear steps. Chess has far more kinds of players, far more possibilities and options to consider, including the competitive response to a single move. That’s why when you watch the chess masters play (not sure why you’d want to do that), the “action” is mostly invisible…they’re thinking about their choices and and the possible reactions to those choices.
If you want and need a new strategy, swat your SWOT. Forever.
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I snipped the quotes below from Chris Corrigan back in December (Some things that work in real reconciliation dialogue – Chris Corrigan ), meaning to write more about it. I think it is too important to wait for my “round to it” to happen, so here it is. Chris is writing about reconciliation. In our current political environment (especially here in the US) this is becoming a core competency, and can’t be left to luxury. The BOLDING is mine, with comments between points.
