How do we do good work, when we don’t know what to do?
The seventh cohort of this program launches on October 1. Registration is now open.
Over the past 26 years we have worked with all kinds of organizations and communities facing change, conflict, growth, uncertainty and the need to make important decisions together. Increasingly, we find ourselves working with people who are facing situations where there is no obvious answer, even when there is plenty of expertise in the room.
Sometimes the challenge is organizational culture or leadership. Sometimes it is strategy or systems change. Sometimes it is simply the difficulty of trying to work well together when circumstances keep changing, or finding new ways to approach a problem that seems intractable.
These are complex situations, and one of the most useful things we have learned is that complexity requires different ways of working. There are lots of problems for which expertise, analysis and planning are exactly what is needed. But when people are involved, conditions are changing, and every action we take changes the situation itself, it becomes much harder to know in advance what will work.
For us, a key question has become: How do we do good work when we don’t know what to do?
Complexity practice helps us distinguish between situations where we can rely on what we know and situations where we need to learn our way forward.
Complexity informed approaches help us to develop more ways of seeing what is happening and having more choices about how to respond.
In practice, that means developing our capacity to:
- notice patterns before rushing to explain or solve them;
- bring different perspectives together to see more of what is happening;
- understand some of the conditions and constraints that are holding patterns in place;
- try things at a scale where we can learn without overcommitting ourselves;
- make sense of what happens and adjust our next move accordingly.
Over the years we have also come to understand that this work isn’t only about what is happening in organizations and systems. We are part of the complexity too.
The uncertainty, ambiguity, and lack of control that characterize complex situations can provoke some very familiar responses in human beings. We can become attached to certainty, defend what we think we know, narrow our attention, stop listening well, or reach for control precisely when the situation requires curiosity and openness to other possibilities.
This is why we call the course Complexity Inside & Out.
We pay attention to three interconnected areas of practice: what happens inside ourselves, what happens between us, and what happens in the larger structures and systems in which we are working. Our beliefs, emotions, identities and reactions influence how we listen, speak, make decisions and use power. Those interactions create patterns between us, while the structures and histories of the systems we inhabit shape what is possible and influence us in return.
There is a useful correspondence between the practices we use across all three. Whether we are working with ourselves, a team or a larger system, we learn to notice patterns, get curious about what is holding them in place, seek perspectives we don’t already have, make small moves in a direction we want to go, and pay attention to what happens next.
Complexity Inside & Out is our attempt to bring much of this practice together in one place. During the program we work with:
- ways of understanding different kinds of problems and situations, including Cynefin;
- patterns, constraints and approaches to creating change in complex systems;
- participatory dialogue, process design and decision making;
- stories, collective sensemaking and working with multiple perspectives;
- iterative approaches to action and evaluation;
- inner inquiry and practices for noticing and shifting our own reactive patterns, assumptions and limiting stories.
This is not primarily a course in complexity theory. We use theory where it helps us see and act differently, but the emphasis is on practice.
Participants bring their own work and questions into the program. We spend time applying the ideas, trying practices together, reflecting on what happens and learning from the different contexts and experiences in the group.
The course is especially useful for people who have some responsibility for helping others navigate uncertainty: leaders and managers, facilitators, consultants, coaches, evaluators, community organizers, and people doing organizational and systems change work. You don’t need a background in complexity theory. You might simply recognize the experience of being responsible for something important and realizing that nobody really knows what to do next.
We don’t expect people to leave with a formula for complexity, because there isn’t one. What we hope you leave with is a richer repertoire of ways to notice, make sense and act; a stronger capacity to work with your own responses when things become difficult; and more confidence in finding a way forward with others when there is no map to follow.
Increasingly, that seems to us to be an essential part of leadership and good work in the world we are living in.
Join us for our seventh cohort of Working with Complexity from the Inside Out and please share this invitation with anyone you know who might benefit from this deep dive into practice.
Over the last month I have been working with this diagram that depicts the architecture of held space. You can read much more detail about this at the post I wrote earlier in the month, including some of the comments that helped me to think it through a little more.
One very helpful set of comments from Corina Enache came during a good discussion at LinkedIn. I’d like to quote them at length so they are preserved here. Her main point was clear. If I’m trying to get the facilitator out of the centre, I’m doing what I want to do if I give the facilitator a specific place of their own in the diagram. Corina argued that the facilitator’s power can already be understood by the expression of Interaction and structure, and that the facilitator can be seen a a thick node or connections in that space. We both agree that power and authority are inevitable and potentially useful aspects of group work. We shouldn’t ignore or try to transcend them, but make them visible.
These are great points and I found that what I really needed was some field testing. Since that discussion took place I have worked with two clients in teaching and hosting retreats, and have brought a set of observations to this work. I promised Corina a reply and here it is.
The triangle helps us to understand the source of constraints in hosted spaces. The first observation is that this triangle is not a claim about the reality (ontology) of social fields. I agree with her that social fields can be described sufficiently with the structure – interaction axis. The triangle is however a way of looking at what I call dialogic containers (or “hosted spaces), and the three corners are sources of constraints on those spaces. Structure is a source of inherited constraints. Interactions are a source of emergent constraints. And Design is a source of intentional constraints. So I’m not looking to develop a new theory of social fields. I’m looking at creating a way of accounting for what happens in a field when someone says “Welcome” or “we’re here for…” or “This is what will happen next…” That could be anything from a courtroom to a party to a conversation to a pub, to a public meeting, a strategy session or a workshop.
The role of the facilitator should be visible. As a person who has worked for decades in facilitation, I think it’s important that we bring our attention to the practice of hosting but also the way in which we affect social fields. In my work with the Evans School of Public Policy last week, the director of the Evans Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC), Amanda Bankston, mentioned to me that there is very little in the literature on public policy that describes the role of the facilitator on policy making or democracy. This is an astonishing fact to me, and so true. For decades I have helped design and facilitate hosted spaces that have had impacts on policy issues like health care, fisheries, child and family services, Indigenous rights and title, poverty, forestry. marine stewardship and other issues. And in not one case can I ever remember that the design choices we made, and the facilitation itself being named as a source of what happened. Adam Kahane in particular writes about this function a lot and is always careful to say that the involvement of the facilitation team in his work, while important, must be held up against many other things that are happening in the social fields in which the process is located. He wisely guards against facilitators taking his own observations as universal truths about “how to do it.” Instead his books are about the thorny challenges of how to do it, and how to make some sense of what has been done. I appreciate his work so much, because he is one of the most honest voices in thinking about the role of facilitation in public policy and social change, especially at the scales at which he and his teams work.
Of course, it is impossible to assign any single cause to any single effect in a policy initiative. But the absence of the host and the process design in any kind of analysis about public policy making means that consulting firms, and facilitators become invisible in the work. Furthermore, the host isn’t the only source of intentional constraints, but is most often the vector through which other intentional constraints arrive in the room. The power and privilege behind the shaping of the process can enter a hosted container through design differently from the way they enter through structures that authorize them or interactions that change when leaders are in the room. I think this deserves to be distinguished in our work.
In complex work we are asked to be responsible for the foreseen and unforeseen outcomes of our choices. We need a way of seeing and accounting for this effect. Hence, the third corner of this triangle, one which lifts the hosted container out of the social field and provides a lens through which we can interrogate and understand what intentional constraints that are brought to the work.
Design is not sovereign. It exists in relationship with Structure and Interaction. So the Design corner of this triangle is not “the facilitator” per se, but rather represents the choices that are made in crafting a process. When I work with a client, I always try to learn as much as possible about the existing social field we are working with. What structures are already in place? What are the interactions that are important to understand? In long-term initiatives, especially those related to issues of culture, conflict or leadership development, we use detailed narrative captures before entering into the substantive work, and we continue to use narrative capture so the group can make sense of it’s own reality. At some point, we make a choice. We design a workshop. We make a proposal. The leadership makes a decision. A hosted space becomes a part of the work and what happens there collapses the potential of the social field into a dialogic container, one in which intention is introduced and which works with and influences structure and interaction.
The choice of how much or how little constraint in a container is brought to bear on this situation is an important ethical consideration. If I come into an organization or community with “a great meeting method that will solve all your problems” my intention may colonize the very real capacity in the room that could emerge from the interactions between people. A lecture delivered on how an organization’s culture should change will have a particular effect. Many leaders, consultants and facilitators may see the Design corner as a way to get their own way and introduce power and influence into a room backed by some amount of authority that comes from their role, positionally or privilege. The “dense node” or Corina’s observation has history to it, and I think that needs to be accounted for.
The triangle therefore gives us a diagnostic tool in which we can honestly weigh the sources of constraint in a hosted space.
The triangle as a diagnostic tool. By diagnosis here I don’t mean a tool that helps us somehow patholigize and organization before we set to work solving a problem. I mean the practice. Diagnosis is useful when it helps us see differences that matter. And so the triangle does that.
It makes a set of questions visible to practitioners to help understand what is needed and what is going on in a dialogic container. If a process is stuck or failing, it might not be sufficient to blame the people or the room or the agenda or the relationships. We can also ask what is shaping the conversation. This helps us to shine a light on some of less visible aspect of what is at play.
This is what I got to field test last week in Seattle. I convened a breakout session on working with the power that exists in the fields in which we are hosting. I didn’t draw the triangle. Instead we had a participant offer up a case – a long term and highly distributed culture change initiative she and her team were asked to lead. It was struggling and so we explored the different sources of constraints in the initiative to see what ways the work might be changed. The overwhelming thought was that “it’s just too hard to change people’s behaviour.” I thought this was a good observation! The question is why are we trying to do that?
I asked questions, informed by the triangle. These included questions like this:
- What is fixed or given in this process. What can’t you actually change?
- What does the mandate holder need to hold? Why?
- What does the mandate holder need to let go of to open this space up?
- What is genuinely open in the work?
- Who can say no to what you are doing?
- What can people in the work influence?
- What are you trying to do?
- What do you condor a good outcome?
I think the main learning was that the group was able to examine to role of the mandate holder – in this case a committee doing the work of a senior leader through the responsible implementation team – and see it both with empathy and curiosity. The mandate comes strongly through design and provides a massive amount of influence on a process. With something as significant as culture change, the mandate holder can be holding a very tight set of constraints that are impossible to deliver on and that rob the people of their own agency in creating and sustaining the kind of culture that is desired. In fact, in the absence of a decent narrative collection from the field it can be hard to know if the mandate is even an appropriate response to the situation. Are there NO examples in the field that prove the exception to what people think is going on?
The triangle is an instrument of attention, not a map of reality. So, this little triangle, at the end of the day, is a way to guide attention to what is already shaping a container, what is happening between people inside it and what is being deliberately introduced through the design. It might seem like overkill to spend so many words and thoughts on this, but the challenge that I have been grappling with over the past year is trying to figure out a way to honestly account for the influence of the host.
Facilitators, hosts, designers and leaders are not neutral participants in a dialogic containers. They are in fact the reason why a hosted dialogic container exists. Without their injection of constants on a social field, we don not have a hosted space. A leader does not just show up in a room and “hide in the corner.” Open Space Technology is not a value-free method that refreshingly makes everything possible. A desired outcome for a process narrows what can be observed and requires those holding power to scaffold their attention open so that they do not foreclose the work of the work of group.
This is my attempt to offer something to our field of practice to help us see the way a dialogic container arises from the different weights of constraint on a field. There is no ideal place for a process to live within this triangle. There is only the question of what is needed now. And now. And now.
Thoughts, comments, critiques and questions all welcome.
Corina’s comments in full:
…structure and interaction are group processes, they belong to no one but design, as you’ve drawn it, is a role held by a person. So the triad puts two field-level phenomena and one individual actor at the same altitude, and I don’t think that holds… The facilitator’s power isn’t a third source of constraint entering from its own corner, it’s already expressed in structure (the chairs in a circle) and interaction (naming the method). Giving it a separate spot double-counts it, and might do the thing you say you want to avoid: it puts the facilitator back at the centre.. i look at it as one field of structure and interaction in which power is unevenly distributed, and the facilitator is just a dense node in it, to be named and tracked, not given its own axis…
… I think we both want the same thing: power made visible and accountable. Where we might diverge – and tell me if I’ve got you wrong – is in the underlying stance. I read the post as treating authority as presumptively suspect, something to be caught before it does harm. I look at authority as a natural feature of any field, something to be held well rather than guarded against. – for example I really like your threshold idea and once the crossing can be held by a compelling shared purpose, or what lingers after the host goes invisible in Open Space you’ve stopped describing a role and started describing something already in the field because uneven influence is what fields do. Someone becomes a dense node long before any facilitator arrives; the facilitator is just a dense node who came on purpose…
For me the absence of explicit authority isn’t neutrality. When a facilitator disowns their power, “I’m only holding space” , it doesn’t leave the room. It flows to whoever was already dense in the field, now the least accountable authority present. Disavowed authority is the most dangerous kind, because you can’t track what insists it isn’t there…Which is uncomfortable because if power is in the chairs and the invitation, there’s no outside. Self-effacement is a technique. Even “stewardship” is a form of power, maybe the most effective, because it works while feeling like care. So if I can’t purify my way out 🙂 [then] the question is, given that uneven power is unavoidable and productive, the medium, not the contaminant, what distribution do we want, and by what criteria do we judge it?
…one more reflection on your triangle coming from our exchange. For me structure and interaction are what a container is made of. They’re always fully there, even your pub group, with no design at all, has both. But intention isn’t like that. Its weight varies with the work and sometimes it’s near zero. That’s not a third thing the container is made of, it’s a way the made-of-stuff can be oriented, a direction the field leans, not a substance alongside the two others. And every case you reach for to justify the pole dissolves back into the two, when I let power sit unevenly across them. The threshold is the field reconfiguring, structure and interaction shifting as people cross into “being in something.” The Open Space is persistent structure: patterns that outlast the people. The leader’s intention is a dense node bending interaction. None of them is a third kind of thing, each is the existing field, unevenly weighted and pointed somewhere. So I don’t think intention needs a corner but what it does need is to be named. A corner says it’s a different dimension but i dont think it is. It’s the direction I’m leaning a field I’m already standing inside. And I think the corner actually works against the intention you named in our exchange because it gives the facilitator a place to stand. A clean, legitimate-looking spot off to the side, as if design were something I bring to the room rather than something I’m doing to it from within. That’s the separation you rejected, “design acts upon the field”, but the geometry actually reproduces it if you add it as a third pillar. draw intention as its own pole and I get to mistake my lean for a location…
A technology professor in France provides an option for students to use chat bots in his exam and researches what happens. Here are the rules he set.
# Use of Chatbots
Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.
Option A: I will not use any chatbot, only traditional web searches. Any use of them will be considered cheating.
Option B: I may use a chatbot as it’s part of my toolbox. I will then respect the following rules:
1) I will inform the professor each time information come from a chatbot
2) When explaining my answers, I will share the prompts I’ve used so the professor understands how I use the tool
3) I will identify mistakes in answers from the chatbot and explain why those are mistakes
Not following those rules will be considered cheating. Mistakes made by chatbots will be considered more important than honest human mistakes, resulting in the loss of more points. If you use chatbots, you should be held accountable for the output.
Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.
The whole post is worth a read for what he learns, for his pedagogy and for the costumes.
I love that people are writing on Substack, because it is almost a return to what blogging originally was: openly sharing connected and linked learning and insight with the world.
A couple of things frustrate me about Substack though and these are things that really distinguish it from a proper blog:
1. It's really hard to comment. In order to comment on a Substack post, I have to be a subscriber to a person's substack and I have to log in to do it. That is a bit too much work for me. When I read an interesting post and I want to contribute in the discussion, that extra step of subscribing is sometimes a bridge too far. I have dozens of unpublished comments sitting in various authors' comment boxes. Blogs, like this one, may ask you to identify yourself – which helps with spam – but you don't have to do anything else. I moderate comments here with Akismet, a plug in that rejects spam, and personal moderation. But I love the conversation here, when it happens.
2. Substack is its own ecosystem. While some social media sites are walled gardens inside of which content is protected and locked away (hello LinkedIn and Facebook and whatever is left of Twitter), Substack is at least a fenced garden. We can look through the fence at the content, which means it's more public than other places, but your content still lives inside its own wrapper. At least with Substack you can export your content in a way that it can live inside an actual blog but in practice, the website is still an algorithm-driven collection of personal pages, very much like Facebook. If your reading of online writing happens WITHIN substack mostly, you are getting served stuff based on algorithms.
3. The site encourages monetization rather than sharing. Of course you can make everything on your Substack free, but most writers I have read have at least some of their posts locked behind a paywall. I have no problem with that, and I believe that writers should be paid for their work. Substack is a publishing platform that allows people to be compensated for their work. BUT, I cannot keep adding subscriptions not my life at the rate in which I encounter invitations to do so. Blogging, traditionally speaking, is about sharing. It is about an open offering of ideas and conversation to the world, and it encourages connection and mutuality. Again, writing for money is fine. But I do find myself lamenting what I will never be able to read.
4. We might never find it again. This one applies to everywhere people write. Yes, search is broken, but at least tools like Kagi make it possible to find material that is otherwise hidden by the big "search" engines. If you are publishing on Facebook, LInkedIn or Substack only it's really hard to find your stuff! And, especially with the first two, there is no real archive of material. Furthermore, as my experience with Twitter demonstrated, some racist might come along and buy the site and change it for his own purposes, or delete it altogether and then everything would be lost. If you can AT LEAST republish your writing on an open platform that you control – like WordPress – then it will always be yours.
So this is a little cranky. But I found myself reading some substacks this morning that compelled me to respond to what was written. And I found my responses stymied by the subscription model, but my response too tribal to post here. Maybe I should just start using Mastodon for these kinds of replies. Being out there and unseen is maybe better than not ever existing in the first place!
Simon Goland describes an experience of travel that seems very common these days:
When my parents were finally able to travel and start seeing the world, their travel looked like checking off boxes of countries, places, cities, and museums. Arrive somewhere. Walk through a place without stopping much. Take some photos. Check off a mental box. On to the next place. And when I traveled with them, I too embraced that way of seeing the world.
I got good at it, actually. I could “do” a European capital in two and a half days and tell you, with some confidence, that I had been there. I had the photos to prove it. What I didn’t have – though it took me years to notice the absence – was any memory of my own body while I was standing in front of the thing I had traveled so far to see. I was present for the checklist. I was not present for the cathedral, the museum, or the funky little cafe nearby.
This speaks to something I have learned over my life, as I have been able to travel to all kinds of places for work and curiosity. Nowadays when Caitlin and I visit a place on holiday we go to walk: multi-day walks, day trips, walks to places where we sit for a while and listen to the sounds. Most of this travel happens in rural and wild places, and so even when we are in popular areas like Tuscany or Provence, we find ourselves alone in the quiet of the woods, the shoreline, or the fields that fewer people travel to. We tend to avoid the cities.
When I am in a city, instead of going to the tourist spots I like to try to find a football match to attend. Especially if I am in a place where the football is not one of the top leagues. Going along to a football match gives me the experience of what a community is like. The travel from wherever I am staying to the stadium, the culture of the place, the food, the walk, the chants, the style of play. All are much more interesting indicators of where I am than the curated experience of a place through its formal cultural institutions. It induces and requires the presence that Simon is talking about.
As a result my language of travel has become very explicit. I don't "explore" a place or "discover" something, unless what I am exploring and discovering is something about myself. Instead I am very clear that when I am away from home I am "visiting" a place, which places upon me a burden of respect for what is there. I try to learn enough of the language to be understood. I try to familiarize myself with places that visitors are not welcome, because many communities have fragile refuges from the influx of visitors and, living on an island that is a busy summer tourist destination, I know there are some places that the community needs to have for itself, for sanctuary and calm.