Hey Networks! Don't underestimate relationship

In strolling through the archives of unpublished blogs posts, I came upon one which was simply a link to a great blog post from the Interaction Institute in 2017. And boom, it is still resonant today.

Network members making sense of their own data…

The wonderful author, Curtis Ogden, offered 10 principles for thinking like a network. I want to pull out a few things in each one to share with folks in some projects I’m working on. So why not share it here too? This is dynamically incomplete… be forewarned!

The groups I have been and am working with are quite different in some ways. One is an internal organization. Another is a tripartite collaboration that is ready to grow into a network. A third is a group that has done amazing F2F training and capacity building and has had to regroup in a COVID-Virtual world. All three, however, are motivated to act their way into their purposes in new ways. So first is the mindset and practices. In a later blog post I want to explore snap-back, the falling back into our old ways of being and doing.

Curtis’ intro to the article is great context:

Over the past several years of supporting networks for social change, we at IISC have been constantly evolving our understanding of what is new and different when we call something a network, as opposed to a coalition, collaborative or alliance. On the surface, much can look the same, and one might also say that coalitions, collaboratives and alliances are simply different forms of networks. While this is true, it is also the case that not every collaborative form maximizes network effects, including small world reach, rapid dissemination, adaptability, resilience and system change. In this regard, experience shows that a big difference maker is when participants in a network (or an organization, for that matter) embrace new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing. 

https://interactioninstitute.org/thinking-like-a-network-2-0/

I think we all confound different forms of collaboration, try to be all things to all people and then we are frustrated when our ambitions are cut short. Working in new ways requires two things: discernment about what is possible, and a repertoire to make the possible real. I think these principles from Curtis support both these things. I encourage you to read the original article, because below I’m short cutting into some specifics.

Adaptability instead of control

This shows up so strongly in “strategic planning.” We tend to equate a detailed, task descriptive plan as a proxy for strategic action, especially in grand funded projects where plans, and executing on the plans, are key points for accountability. Yet, most work these days is in complex and changing contexts. Can we shift to adaptive planning which defines the purpose, direction and then iterates forward with strong accountability during, not just at the end?

Contribution before credentials

Equity has been in so many conversations. What seems to constantly block equity and its precursor, access, is that we continue to worship at the alter of credentialed expertise, rather than tapping all kinds of expertise. Whoops, look at the word “tapping!” We have extractive approaches to knowledge generation. How do we move to more contribution versus extraction that honors all, regardless of the title certain parts of society wish to attach to some and not others?

Giving first, not taking

See above about extractive mindsets!

Resilience and redundancy instead of rock-stardom

See above regarding stepping away from single views of expertise for the rock stardom stuff, but the resilience and redundancy needs a post of its own. The practice-based approach I’ve been working on for this is that we backfill for each other across departments, organizations, networks. No one these days can afford to hire all the skills they need at any one time. Trading labor across our networks builds redundancy and a sense of mutual support. There is a limit to this — we can’t keep ADDING work without taking something away.

Diversity and divergence rather than the usual suspects and forced agreement

This is why we work in networks!

 Intricacy and flow not bottlenecks and hoarding

I struggled with this one until I went back and read Curtis’ words on this one. The word that emerges for me is abundance. (In all senses of the word, including mindset.)

I’m running out of steam, so I’ll leave the last four for YOU to flesh out, annotate, expound upon. If I leave this as a draft for another year… well, you know what happens!

Self-organization and emergence rather than permission and the pursuit of perfection

Shift focus from core to the periphery

From working in isolation to working with others and/or out loud

 From “Who’s the Leader?” to “We’re the Leaders!”

A Community Considers the LS “What I Need From You”

I’ve promised myself to start blogging regularly this year. One way to get a jump on it is to finish drafts that I never got around to publishing. This is one of them! Is there something you’d like me to write about? Leave a note in the comments!

Skagit Bay – and colors change all the time…

What I Need From You (WINFY) is one of the Liberating Structures that I avoided for a long time. My own fears? Lack of clarity about how the structure would work, particularly in view of the presence or absences of trust in a power-dynamically lit situation? That said, once I actually started using it, it flowered open with many useful layers. I found some particularly great insights AND, when my fellow practitioners share their experiences, I see even more. This is the value of a community of practice, my friends!

For context for those of you new to Liberating Structures, I love the short and sweet description from The Liberators: “Liberating Structures are a collection of interaction patterns that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group — from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers.” The help us find the sweet spot between over controlled and under controlled group processes to access the intelligence and action of everyone in a group.

Our LS community of practice functions partially on a Slack instance, where we ask and answer questions for each other. At some point last year there was a great question and answer thread around WINFY that was SO VALUABLE I wanted to capture it before it aged off of our free Slack instance. (As so much does!) The players gave me permission to share so I’m going to share the actual thread, then close with a brief summary of my own. Italicized comments are mine to explain stuff that might not mean anything if you aren’t in the community!

OK, here is the transcript!

lolo
A question re (WINFY –> we use the icon as shorthand in Slack!): :winfy:
I’m not fully understanding the reasoning behind the “No discussion! No elaboration” piece of the sharing. Why wouldn’t elaboration or discussion be helpful? Or do people often follow up this activity with something else to address if a ‘no’ came up? I appreciate that if there’s a ‘whatever’ that it means that there’s a need to clarify the request and so a second round could be done, but “I will try” or “No” with no discussion or no elaboration feels like the opposite of building trust.

fisher
I tend to describe this rigidity as purposeful: there’s no need to justify why it’s a no. WINFY isn’t meant to be a negotiation. If you need me to get you a report by Friday at 12, and I say no. What more is there to discuss? Usually, people want part of the need met – “well we can get you half the report by Friday at 4”. That’s not the need. Do you mistrust the person’s initial request – do you think you know better than they do what they need? I find WINFY goes right at two types of trust. Do I trust that you how your own needs better than I think I can know your needs? Can I say no and deny you an essential need and believe we’ll still be ok relationally?

keithmccandless19
Saying no or whatever or huh in WINFY is an invitation to offer an honest and direct signal. So many of the explanations muddle the relationship and trust among people… particularly when you are working across functions that are very different. Also, getting very short answers out helps everyone see the interrelatedness of what is needed to move forward together. Each individual request is not sacred but rather part of a critically self-organizing set of entanglements. The next straw may break the camel’s back. Often one function or action must be sub-optimized to address the mix of needs expressed across the whole group. Last, it is a good idea to make space for more explanation and follow-on commitments after :winfy:. Helpful? Confusing? Nonsense?

lolo haha18
@fisher & @keithmccandless Thanks so much for your explanations!I appreciate what you bring in here, @fisher, around not only emphasizing the non-negotiation but also intensive negotiation happening where there’s a real need to pose whether you can really know the other’s need better than them, and whether you can accept the relational impact of saying no to their need. How have you experienced people with perhaps more positional power handle the added heat of that need?@keithmccandless I love what you’re saying here, too! I appreciate the need for a brief and non-confusing signal. What have you followed up with to offer space for more explanation or commitment follow-up after :winfy: ? I also welcome other feedback from those who haven’t commented yet!

fisher
@annajackson has some hard stories about using :winfy: with funders and grantees that were tricky given the power relationships. In my experiences, functional groups will often say “Yes” to a leadership team. If you are holding the structure, you often have to intervene a bit and gently nudge them to consider whether it is a request that is clear enough for a Yes or No – or whether it ought to be a huh. You can make it quite playful and eventually someone will say Huh or Whatever to the bosses and there’s usually a cathartic cheer. All of us tend to be underspecific in what our actual needs are and so you have be sometimes a little stiff in terms of supporting groups – especially those without positional power or authority to use No, Huh, and Whatever more frequently.As with most LS, frequent and consistent use of WINFY as a regular interactional or operational structure dampens the anxiety and increases the fluidity.

lolo haha
Thank you @fisher !!

Ziryan
@lolo haha, beautiful question. I have seen WINFY address two major assumptions within a company. People feeling comfortable enough to say Huh or No, and people feeling comfortable enough receiving Huh or No.I facilitated a workshop ones in which we wanted the sales team and development team to work together to sell more Agile contacts instead of fixed scope and deadline contracts. Almost at the end of the workshop, I asked the sales reps, including the sales director to state what they need from the development teams to be successful. The teams only had a few Yes while having lots of Huh and a few No. The sales director was not amused, and I had to intervene and address the trust issue. After the intervention, the sales director cooled down and was grateful for the honesty of the development teams that they did not understand what he exactly wanted from them. They decided to work together to formulate what the director needed and followed up by another WINFY to clarify if it is a Yes, huh or a No. Had I not intervened and allowed discussion, the development team would have been overwhelmed by the reasoning and negotiation power of the sales reps and director. They would end up frustrated and eventually giving in by saying Yes and still doing No. Or, making assumptions in what the director and sales reps needed. And most importantly, the issue of trust and lack of collaboration would not have been discussed and remain in the air like the elephant in the room.

lolo haha
Awesome anecdote, @Ziryan !! Thanks for sharing, sounds like it’s one of those that may need a good deal of added facilitation depending on the trust and communication skills within the team!:heart:1

fisher
I find :winfy: to be the most exhausting and actively held structure. In my experience, there’s quite a bit more hanging on during that structure than in some of the others.:+1:1

keithmccandless
Tempted to share more stories when the people with less power gave honest & risky answers and the people with more power responded with surprise/confusion/curiosity. (Working in healthcare is instructive because there are complex power dynamics). If there is a pattern, I would say the people with more power are unwitting and making unexamined assumptions about the relative importance of their role. Most often, the BIG WINFY insight revolves around interdependence. Eyes are suddenly open to what we need from one another to accomplish something important to everyone.

My Summary

As I read through the thread, the emergence of patterns of interaction – particularly those habituated through roles and power positions – help us see MANY things in a new light. If we can find simple ways, like WINFY and other LSs, to make patterns visible, then we can explore and act upon them. The SIMPLE part is essential, because it is so easy to get lost in a verbal analysis and miss the point.

This is why I love Liberating Structures!

Artifacts from the KM4Dev Session on Peer Assistance

Note: My threat/promise to blog weekly has suffered a bit. I’ll try harder! What do you want me to blog about? Tell me in the comments.

A few weeks ago I wrote a provocation on Peer Assistance and Mutual Support in preparation for a KM4Dev Knowledge Cafe. I really enjoyed thinking more deeply about the power dynamics of peer assistance. Thanks to the great KM4Dev team here are the artifacts from the event. ‘

Sunday Share: Brain Images

A little rabbit-holing today. First stop was at Peter Kaminski’s Collective Sense Commons site and community, which led me to Jon Manning’s Creative Commons Galaxy Brain images, both in male and female representations. (I acknowledge that binary is insufficient, but we’ll leave that for later.)

Everyone talks about brain science these days. It is fun to see how folks visualize this. These images are cool to me, and YOU can use them too! Jon role models that what YOU made, YOU TOO can share!

Let’s share! From https://secretlab.institute/2021/02/15/cc-0-licensed-galaxy-brain-images/ CC-0 license

Jon’s Sources/Source Information:

These images are licensed under CC-0. They contain material from the following sources; if you’re using them in your own works, you’ll need to acknowledge the CC-BY elements:

Virtual Peer Assistance & Mutual Support (MOIP#11)

What we don’t see beneath the patchwork on the surface…

This is 11th in a series of posts about the tidal wave of moving online in Pandemic-Covid-19. #1, #2, #3,  #4 , #5 , #6, #7, #8, #9 and #10. This post explores peer assistance and mutual support practices, building on a blog post last Spring about virtual peer assists. This is also in preparation for a KM4Dev Knowledge Café on February 18th on this topic. (Please, join us! 7:00AM PST, 16:00 CET)

We Are Connected

My colleague and friend, Helen Gilman, pointed me to a tremendous book by Robert McFarlane, “Underland: A Deep Time Journey.” Among other fascinating topics, McFarlane writes about how trees “talk to” and support each other through underground fungal networks. (See Suzanne Simard’s Ted Talk.) This reminded me that we often operate as apparent autonomous workers in our jobs — single trees — yet in fact our networks sustain and support us. We are part of a bigger whole without which we could not exist. Like looking just above the forest floor and not below, we miss the practices that generatively connect us. Unseen, but present. With this blog post I want to “observe” some of those practices we call “peer assistance.”

Here is the baseline I offer. Our greatest knowledge resource is each other. The knowledge we each carry, the perspectives and experiences around our knowledge, and our diverse contexts, gives us an immense, and decentralized resource.

Assistance: With useful peer to peer (P2P) practices, knowledge can be more accessible, freed from centralized organizational boundaries and gatekeepers. P2P practices can subvert the power of large institutions that can dominate with or perpetuate one view of the world, one knowledge perspective. P2P approaches can step around those who wish to protect, prioritize, or hoard knowledge. They can help us be aware and address racism and colonialism that has been baked into so many of our “expert-centric” practices.

Support: At a human level, P2P practices can engage each of us. They can respect the fact that we all have useful knowledge. We might feel a bit more empowered and a bit less vulnerable working at the peer-to-peer level rather than trying to show up in front of a large organization. Feel a little more human. We, and our knowledge, might be unleashed in more generative ways.

I’m interested in these P2P knowledge liberation practices, and particularly these days, doing them online. This post explores a common form of P2P, peer assists, and how we might expand the repertoire beyond them, and to include support as well as assistance.

Peer Assistance (and support!)

A fungus growing in a rotten tree near my house…

Peer assistance is NOT new. In the knowledge management (KM) world, it has been popularized by the Peer Assist format. (Doing them online is also not new, but it matters now, more than ever, with the pandemic.) I like the definition from ODI building on Purcell and Collison’s work that describes a peer assist as a “learning before doing” activity.” Learning before doing, or the process of learning before undertaking a task, activity or project.” (Learning AFTERWARDS with peers could be exemplified by an After Action Review.)

A common format for peer assists is to have the assistee – the person who needs assistance — convene a gathering with people they invite who may have useful knowledge or expertise to address the assistee’s challenge or task. “You know more than I do, please help me!”

There is an explicit recognition in peer assists that knowledge is power. Knowing “the right thing” to do is a central component. And yet, our challenges are not always about not knowing what to do, but moving beyond feeling alone and vulnerable when risking doing what we perceive we should. Knowing WHAT to do is different than doing it. Knowing HOW do do something is different than doing it. Understanding the context for doing it. Having the mindset to do it. Confidence? Enough “safety” to take the risk? This is where mutual support comes in. Recognizing that we are humans working with this knowledge.

P2P may also help us with another huge challenge we face. Bias, or more accurately, biases! An “expert-driven” view of assistance may be implicitly propagating the bias of dominant actors or cultures. It could deprioritize or even bury local and indigenous knowledge. Could P2P approaches help us a) be aware and b) step out of these traps?

KM4Dev, one of my core communities of practice, has been engaged in ongoing conversations both about decolonisation of KM, and, as always, about specific KM practices. (See these posts from Bruce Boyes and Charles Dhewa.) For example (and forgive the broad generalization) when we look at the implicit prioritization of recognized expertise, we may be practicing racism and colonialism. When we look at centralized knowledge practices — same.

In the time of COVID-19, we have focused on ONLINE practices. Online theoretically gives us more access to a wider diversity of peers and allow easy self-organization, rather than relying on a centralized source. Peer to peer methods online provide scaffolding to connect with other peers to assist in a member’s or members’ challenges and opportunities, often in a “just in time” or very contextually embedded context. I sense that they also offer a specific assumption that we all have knowledge that may be useful to others, not just the validated and/or high status “experts!” 

Below are a few starting peer assistance and mutual support options, building on a blog post last Spring about virtual peer assists. We will build off of this at our KM4Dev Knowledge Café on February 18th on this topic. (Please, join us! 7:00AM PST, 16:00 CET)

P2P Assistance and Support Online Practice Options

One approach to peer to peer assistance recognizes we each bring something of value, even if we aren’t identified (self- or by others) as an expert in a particular area. An example of a process that recognizes this distributed resource is Troika Consulting as defined in the Liberating Structures repertoire. Three people “sit” together, taking turns sharing their challenge, problem or idea, and get feedback from two peers. It is amazing that each time people report they received insights, even with perfect strangers.

As I think about Troika compared to traditional peer assists, Troika actively promotes the idea that everyone has something of value, not just the experts. It is easy to do with just three people (or 3x X). During the process, ALL THREE people can gain insights from their peers, not just one peer assistee. There is the distribution of engagement and value creation, regardless of role.

Another Liberating Structure is Discovery and Action Dialog. DAD, as we know it, builds on the idea of positive deviance – how can one person or group succeed at what the rest of us struggle with? Exploring where there are seeds of innovation and possibility through simple guided conversations through a series of prompts, and new possibilities emerge.

There are other Liberating Structures that do this sort of unleash/engage that we might not always define as peer assistance and support, as noted in my previous blog post. You can go there for specific examples. Longstanding group process traditions such as Open Space, World Cafe and the Art of Hosting also rest on this foundation of the value of our peers.

Connect the Micorriza!

Many years back when I was deeply involved in communities of practice (CoP) work, there was this persistent observation that people drew more confidence and a sense of support from their peers in their CoP than from their supervisors and direct team members. Freed from the constraints of organizational hierarchy and politics, peer support felt more genuine. To unleash ourselves, do we need our peers? I experience this as essential.

To decolonize or remove racism from our work, do we need our peers? I don’t know about you, but I can’t even imagine doing the work without my peers, both in figuring out HOW to do it (peer assistance) and the confidence to DO the work (mutual support.)

Resources