Sonja Blignault has been blogging some terrific stuff on Paul Cilliers’ work on complexity. Specifically she has been riffing on Cilliers’ seven characteristics of complex systems and the implications of complexity for organizations.
Yesterday I was teaching an Art of Hosting here in Calgary, where we were looking at Cynefin and then followed with a discussion about how the nature of complex systems compels us to make important design choices when we are facilitating participatory processes to do work in organizations.
This is a cursory list, but I thought it would be helpful to share here. Cilliers’ text is bold.
Complex systems consist of a large number of elements that in themselves can be simple.
If you are planning participatory processes, don’t focus on working on the simple problems that are the elements in complexity. Instead, you need to gather information about those many simple elements and use facilitation methods to look for patterns together. We talk about describing the system before interpreting it. Getting a sense of the bits and pieces ensures that you don’t begin strategic process work with high level aspirations.
The elements interact dynamically by exchanging energy or information. These interactions are rich. Even if specific elements only interact with a few others, the effects of these interactions are propagated throughout the system. The interactions are nonlinear.
Non-lienarity is truly one of those things that traditional planning processes fail to understand. We want to always be heading towards a goal, despite the fact that in complex systems such controlled progress is impossible. What we need to be doing is choosing a direction to move in and make decisions and choices that are coherent with that direction, all the while keeping a careful watch on what is happening and what effect our decisions have. Participatory processes help us to make sense of what we are seeing, and convening regular meetings of people to look through data and seen what is happening is essential, especially if we are making decisions on innovative approaches. Avoid creating processes that assume casualty going forward; don’t make plans that are based on linear chains of events that take us from A to B. Traditional vision, mission goals and objectives planning has little usefulness in a complex system. Instead, focus on the direction you want to move in and a set of principles or values that help you make decisions in that direction.
There are many direct and indirect feedback loops.
The interactions between the parts of a systems happen in a myriad of ways. To keep your strategy adapting, you need to build in feedback loops that work at a variety of time scales. Daily journalling, weekly sense making and project cycle reporting can all be useful. Set up simple and easily observable monitoring criteria that help you to watch what you are doing and decide how to adjust when that criteria are triggered. Build in individual and collective ways to harvest and make sense of what you are seeing.
Complex systems are open systems—they exchange energy or infor- mation with their environment—and operate at conditions far from equilibrium.
You need to understand that there are factors outside your control that are affecting the success or failure of your strategy. Your and your people are constantly interacting with the outside world. Understand these patterns as they can often be more important than your strategy. In participatory process and strategy building I love it when we bring in naive experts to contribute ideas from outside our usual thinking. In natural systems, evolution and change is powered by what happens at the edges ad boundaries, where a forest interacts with a meadow, or a sea with a shoreline. these ecotones are the places of greatest life, variety and influence in a system. Build participatory process that bring in ideas from the edge.
Complex systems have memory, not located at a specific place, but distributed throughout the system. Any complex system thus has a history, and the history is of cardinal importance to the behavior of the system.
Complex systems are organized into patterns and those patterns are the results of many many decisions and actions over time. Decisions and actions often converge around attractors and boundaries in a system and so understanding these “deep yes’s and deep no’s” as I call them is essential to working in complexity. You are never starting from a blank state, so begin by engaging people in understanding the system, look for the patterns that enable and the patterns that keep us stuck, and plan accordingly.
The behavior of the system is determined by the nature of the interactions, not by what is contained within the components. Since the interactions are rich, dynamic, fed back, and, above all, nonlinear, the behavior of the system as a whole cannot be predicted from an inspection of its components. The notion of “emergence” is used to describe this aspect. The presence of emergent properties does not provide an argument against causality, only against deterministic forms of prediction.
So again, work with patterns of behaviour, not individual parts. And of course, as Dave Snowden is fond of saying, to shift patterns, shift the way the actors interact. Don’t try to change the actors. Once, when working on the issue of addictions stigma in health care, the health authority tried running a project to address stigmatizing behaviours with awareness workshops. The problem was, they couldn’t find anyone that admitted to stigmatizing behaviours. Instead, we ran a series of experiments to change the way people work together around addictions and people with addictions (including providing recognition and help for health care workers who themselves suffered from addictions). That is the way to address an emergent phenomenon.
Complex systems are adaptive. They can (re)organize their internal structure without the intervention of an external agent.
And so your strategy must also be adaptive. I’m learning a lot about Principles Based Evaluation these days which is a useful way to craft strategy in complex domains. Using principles allows people to make decisions consistent and coherent with the preferred direction of travel the strategy is taking us in. when the strategy needs to adapt, because conditions have changed, managers can rely on principles to structure new responses to changing conditions. Participatory processes become essential in interpreting principles for current conditions.
This is a bit of a brain dump, and as usual it makes more sense to me that perhaps it does to everyone else. But I’d be very interested in your reflections on what you are hearing here, especially as it relates to how we craft, design and deliver participatory processes in the service of strategy, planning and implementation.
I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety. What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double wall of the container.
What I mean by that is that meetings in Open Space happen within break out groups within the larger container. If a break out group breaks down, participants are still held in the larger space. I have seen very few instances where people in conflict left the bigger container, even if the exercised the law of two feet and left their breakout space. Most often a kind of “neutral ground” emerges in Open Space: near the agenda wall, around the coffee table, sometimes outside on a nice day. These emergent neutral spaces provide participants with a chance to discharge, relax, calm down and get their wits about them. The facilitator never has to do anything, in my experience, but just keep holding the space.
I don’t like the idea of safe space though, I prefer the term “safe enough” space, or even “brave space.” For many marginalized people the idea of safe space is always a myth, and there is no way that we can guarantee it will emerge in Open Space. So instead I encourage people to take a bit of a risk and enter into “safe enough” space, so that they can learn something new and let go of whatever it is they are holding on to.
I remember an event I did once on Hawaii with indigenous Hawaiians and well heeled Americans looking together at the values of reverence and sustainability. At one point, one of the Americans, a person with a net worth in the millions of dollars, asked the group that we commit to safety in the space. This raised the ire of the senior Elder in the room who snapped (and I paraphrase) “You have no right to safe space! Your desire for safety has imperilled the entire world. We do not live safe lives as a result. Our lands are colonized, our food supplies are depleted and our oceans are in danger of no longer providing for us. There is no safe space here. You must learn to live with risk and take responsibility for your role in creating it.”
When we are invited into risk together, everyone giving up safety according to their means, the possibility for real relationship exists in the shared challenge to our well held worldviews.
This is the year I finally turn my version of the chaordic stepping stones tool into a book. I’ve been intending to do this for a number of years now, and the planning guide that lives on this website (available for free in English and Spanish) is essentially the book treatment and summary. The book itself will include a little bit of theory as well, based on my decade long dive into complexity work. It will also contains some stories, case studies and inspiration.
As a part of preparing the book, I’m offering a four week online course starting in a couple of weeks. If you have a project that you are working on and you want to bring this tool and some peer coaching to make it better, please join us. We have discounts for teams and we will even be able to provide you with real time design space where you can work together on the project idea.
I’d love to have lots of voices and eyes on the project as we go ahead, so if you have advice about writing books, ideas for publishers who might be interested, stories of chaordic design, criticisms about this way of doing things or any other ideas to share, I’m all ears.
I’ve been enjoying reading Adam Nicolson’s book “Sea Room” about the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides. The history of the small group of islands that he owns obsesses him. He charts the archaeology and natural history of the islands, and the book is filled with the characters who are the real owners of the place – the crofters and shepherds that work the land as tenants witinn the strange Scottish systems of private land ownership.
Nicolson expresses some astonishment at the amount of activity that has taken place on the Shiants over history because they are considered so remote now. It doesn’t escape him that this might be by design
When I was on Iona last month I was also struck by how somewhere so remote was at one time the focus of a mass pilgrimage. In the 15th century thousands of people travelled every year to visit the relics held at the Abbey there.
When you look at a map of the Hebrides, you can see that these islands are beyond the ends of the world, connected as it is these days by roads. To get to Iona from Glasgow involves two ferries and when you’re finally there, you’re much closer to Ireland than to Glasgow. But Ireland is away across the sea. You can’t get there from here.
Yet, it wasn’t always that way. When the traditional cultures and communities of the Hebrides were strong, families rowed and sailed through the islands for work and trade and spiritual reasons. For a culture based on the sea, places like Iona are at the very centre of the world. The abbey at Iona was as important and accessible to worshippers as St. Paul’s in London, or The Vatican.
During the period of most recent colonization, since the late 1700s, Hebridean culture ended up on the margins of the world. Travellers like Samual Johnson visited and wrote patronizing books about the lives of the people huddled together in large communal blackhouses, shared with their animals, surviving on meagre soils, livestock and fish. The colonizers paint a picture of Hebridean communities that need saving.
This same strategy – of decentering a culture and a world – happened on the west coast of Canada too. Place like Bella Bella, Kitkatla and Wuikinuxv all which are considered remote now. They are inaccessible by car, and can only be reached by water or air. But the Heitlsuk, Tsimshian and Wuikinuxv peoples are canoeing cultures. Traversing the waters of the central coast was never a big deal. Bella Bella sits right in the middle of the BC Coast, a place of strategic importance between many different cultures. Until Europeans showed up and began building roads and cities elsewhere, these communities were the heart of the 9000 year history of human occupation on the coast. Almost overnight they went from places of immense importance to places of massive inconvenience. People were moved, villages relocated, children stolen and housed in residential schools so that the colonial governments could “care for” their wards.
The result of course has been a massive seismic upturning of culture and power. That is being resisted today with increasing vigour, and on the central coast in particular, it is becoming obvious that the indigenous governments are the ones best equipped to manage resources, develop economies and protect marine and territorial ecosystems. This ultimately benefits everyone who lives in these territories, both indigenous and non-indigenous.
The decentering of entire cultures is a core tactic of colonization. People that never needed help are suddenly cast as poor, disconnected and in need of aid for their very survival. What is needed instead is a recentering of the world on their communities and ways of life. Governance, ownership and leadership should lie with the people who best understand the land and seas. When that happens, the results are better for everyone. This is what reconciliation can be.
We were working with a local government client last week in a meeting that had a very contentious subject matter focused on the return of land and uses of that land, to First Nations owners. There was an important conversation as a part of this work that involved removing a structure that had some historical significance to the community but was seen as a mark of an oppressive history by the First Nations owners who could not contemplate it remaining on their land. It is a wickedly complicated issue right at the heart of what reconciliation really means: returning land, transferring ownership and working with history.
Our client did an incredible job of preparing multiple stakeholders to participate in this discussion, by meeting each group personally and hearing their thoughts on the situation. All the stakeholders, twenty in total, agreed to come to a two hour dialogue to discuss the issues at hand. Our client put together a beautiful 8 page booklet with much of the technical information in it about proposals and process and sharing some of the things they had heard in the pre-meetings. The format of the day included a presentation from the First Nations about what they were proposing and why, with most of the meeting involving a World Cafe for dialogue.
It went well. We received a couple of really powerful pieces of positive feedback.
These kinds of conversations are the sharp edge of the reconciliation wedge. It is one thing to conduct a brief territorial acknowledgement at the beginning of a meeting or event, it is entirely another for people to sit down and discuss the issues around the return of land.
In debriefing with our client this week, she made the following observations about what contributed to the usefulness of the container for this conversation:
- 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 enabled people who needed to invest a lot of emotional energy and attention in their speaking and listening, to operate in a more relaxed way.
- 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 question kicked off 45 minutes of intense learning, listening and story telling at the tables.
- 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.
- 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. 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. Also, 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.
- The First Nations leadership pulled no punches in explaining their reasons for their proposal and why it was important that the structure be removed from their lands. This can be a very tricky thing because while it is important for non-indigenous stakeholders to hear First Nations perspectives, there is a tremendous amount of emotional labour involved in talking about traumatizing history. We had one of our own team prepared to talk about the history and emotional legacy of the structure. She had interviewed people from her community and was well positioned to share the rationale but on the day we didn’t need to her to tell the story as the leadership were willing to tell that story themselves. Enabling this to happen well is important.
Reconciliation is nothing without the return of the lands or the influence over the lands which we acknowledge as “unceded territory.” What stops people from going much further than territorial acknowledgement is the fear of being unsettled in the conversation. But we can’t do this work without holding containers that allow for people to be unsettled. Only that way to we share perspectives and find possibilities and to do so in small, deep conversations where stories can be shared, perspectives understood and . Or sometimes not. But the path to reconciliation requires us to try, and these few notes and observations might help in that.