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Moleskine harvest 2 – the pattern of work that scales

October 5, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning, Moleskine Harvest, Organization

Back in March we ran an Art of Hosting for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team and all of our comunity partners.   At the conclusion of that Art of Hosting we held an Open Space.   One of the topics that I posted was about the pattern of our work with community based on the experiences that people had had over the three days of training.   I was interested in seeing if anything we did over three days with forty people in an Art of Hosting could scale up to larger levels in the system.   I had a couple of powerful insights during that session.

  • The idea of “consultation” with community stakeholders is dead.   This process is about inviting community members to take ownership over the structures and institutions that affect their lives.   Instead of a one-way flow of advice from the community to VIATT, the new model is a gift exchange between cousins, relationships between familiy members who are putting children in the centre and looking after each other.   As such there is expertise, care and ownership everywhere in the system and so we all must actively become “TeacherLearners.”
  • The circle is the fundamental pattern for reflection: leadership at the rim and inquiry in the centre.   The relationships in the Art of Hosting developed quickly because we established trust and openness in the beginning with an opening circle.   We were able to establish a real sense that everyone was sitting on the rim of the circle together, facing inward at the question of how to do this work.   The circle is a structure that opens up the possibility for leadership to come from anywhere, with inquiry at the centre.   In this case the questions at the centre of the circle revolve around the principle that when the system puts children in the centre everything changes.   This is a powerful   organizing principle guiding our transformation of the child and family services system from a system that places resources and institutional interests at the centre while trying to keep families there.   The proof of this is embodied in the idea that when the current system breaks down, and a child dies, the parts of the system fly apart and many different process are required to bring it back together.   By contrast, when a child dies in a community, everyone comes together.   There can be no one else in the centre, only the needs of the family.   That is the ideal for our work: a system that places children in the centre.

It is interesting to see the way some of these insights have deepened into operating principles.   The idea of Children at the Centre has become a simple but powerful organizing principle for all of our community linkage work with VIATT.   The idea of TeacherLearners in the community has informed the way that we are developing community circles – policy and decision making bodies that will hold significantly more responsibility for the system that mere advisory committees.   At the moment we are looking at using   study circles as a methodology for running the community circles.

[tags]VIATT, community consultation, circles, children, child and family services, study circles[/tags]

A tricky spot

October 4, 2007 By Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation

Today I ran into an interesting situation.   I was in a conversation about a community process I have been designing and a potential participant took me aside and said that she would love to participate but that one of the people who had already agreed to also participate had committed some serous abuse against her partner.   She wondered how I would do to resolve the situation.

That was a good one, a little bit out of the blue and somewhat unexpected.   I thought for a moment and then, putting my best collaborative principles into practice said “I don’t know.   What would you do if you were in my situation?”   She wasn’t expecting this answer, but to her credit she stopped and thought about it.   We stood next to each other in silence for a few moments.

“I don’t know,” she said.   “Well then,” I said.   “That makes two of us.   Let’s think about this together.”

We shared a little laugh and then I started thinking out loud.   I mused about the fact that we needed many perspectives in this process, and perhaps even the perspectives of “abusers” whatever that means.   Having all voices in a process does not come cost-free.   I also acknowledged her needs for both safety and a way to contribute to the process.   The truth of things, as Christina Baldwin has said, is that as a facilitator I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety, but I can help a group create the conditions that would look after its own safety.   In that spirit I invited her to join our process and be in dialogue with me about co-creating the conditions of safety and participation that would meet her needs and keep the group functioning well.   This was an agreeable proposal to her and so we will be in conversation as our process unfolds to make sure that the group is doing its best possible work.   She has taken some responsibility for helping us to understand her experience of the situation and we’ll deal with whatever comes up with inquiry, curiosity, imagination and patience.

It is a great gift when individuals in a group step up to take responsibility for co-creating conditions of safety and efficacy in their dialogic container.   It pays to be honest with people and as for help when you don’t know what to do, and see if proposals forward can be co-created.   I was reminded today how important that is to adopt as a world view and not just a facilitation trick.

The gift of bureaucracy

October 3, 2007 By Organization 2 Comments

irrigated fields.jpg

Photo by Feng Jiang

A propos of the interview I did with Dave Pollard last week, there was an interesting comment at Johnnie Moore’s weblog:

I can’t help but wonder if, “if we need to discover that we don’t need leaders”, is just wishful thinking on Corrigan’s part.

Admittedly, many of those who call themselves leaders are just over-promoted managers at best, or administartors at worst, but we all know great leadership when we see it. And we need it to motivate, cajole and direct those who don’t see the bigger picture and their role in delivering it.

Whether we like it or not, hierarchy and its sibling command & control, are here to stay. That doesn’t mean that networked organisations and self-organisation are not valuable additions, but they are just that. Additions, not the norm.

I replied to this comment thusly:

It’s interesting…I can see that that comment at the end of the podcast might be a little confusing. It’s a bit out of context, and so I’ll explain myself a little more.

First off, Dave and I were talking about the role of language in defining who we are and that the language of “leadership” seems to create all kinds of expectations that are untenable.

Second, I’m really interested in freeing up the idea of leadership so that it can be practiced everywhere and not in some designated box on an org chart somewhere. The kind of leadership that you talk about Graham is not just needed in the top boxes on org charts…it is needed, and indeed is available all over the place. Assuming that we can’t practice that is what is stifling alot of leadership potential in the world. I think this is something of the point that Desmond Tutu was making.

I’ll quibble with you a little on the idea that command and control are here to stay. I think the evidence is showing that hierarchy may be here to stay as a way of irrigating and organization with resources, but command and control have long given way to networked action based on relationships and intimacy. It’s how anything actually gets done, especially in large organizations. Don’t believe me? It’s the principle behind “work to rule” slow downs. Command and control aren’t synonymous with hierarchy – one can organize a resource allocation hierarchically but use distributed leadership to get the work done.

I have been playing with the idea that healthy bureaucracy is like an irrigation system in a field: at its best it slows down the flow of resources so that they can be useful and productive. When bureaucracies move too slow the stuff in the fields rots. With not enough control in the system, the fields wash away. A perfectly useful buraeucracy should look something like this amazing photo above, allowing farmers at each level to do their work of growing, nurturing, harvesting and selling their crops. What if we took a lesson from this pattern?

Divergent and convergent thinking

October 3, 2007 By Conversation, Facilitation, Learning 9 Comments

diamon.gif

Diamond graphic by Darrell Freeman at Colour

Within the constellation of design tools I find especially helpful in creating spaces for conversation, Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation has been very influential. About three years ago my friend Myriam Laberge pointed out to me the possibility that all learning conversations take place along this flow of thinking and since then the model has been an important part of my life and work.

The diamond is a map that points to three phases that groups pass through as they move from questions to insights. Groups begin with divergent thinking, sit for a while in the chaos and uncertainty of “The Groan Zone” and later move into convergent thinking.

Today I found a nice description of these modes of thinking, buried in an article on neuroscience and fundamentalism

Convergent reasoning involves an assembly of known information and results in a solution within the realm of what is already known. Most problem solving occurs this way. It is instilled, for example, in medical school students. If a physician sees a person in the emergency room that has a fever and is comatose, they are taught that there are two possible disorders that might give these signs: an infection or a heat stroke. If this patient is found to have a stiff neck, the physician considers the possibility that the patient’s fever and unconsciousness are related to an infection of the central nervous system, such as meningitis. To obtain further converging evidence the resident doctor may perform a spinal tap; if the analyzed spinal fluid reveals certain indicators there is now sufficient converging evidence to make a diagnosis of meningitis and to start antibiotic therapy.Divergent reasoning, on the other hand, enables a person to arrive at a previously unknown solution (at least unknown to the person who is doing the reasoning). When a person is confronted with a problem and decides that the existing information is insufficient to develop a satisfactory solution, he or she may diverge from the information and imagine,or reason about, new possibilities. William James, who first put forth the concept of divergent reasoning, stated:

Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another … unheard of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy … we seem suddenly introduced into a seething cauldron of ideas … where partnerships can be joined or loosened … treadmill routine is unknown and the unexpected is the only law.

The human capability for divergent reasoning results in a nearly limitless range of creative outcomes, from entirely personal to world changing. Surely humanity’s earliest innovations were life altering, as were the many that followed. Recall our eventual acceptance (against initially unyielding church doctrine) of Copernicus’s unfathomable idea that the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of our solar system, or Einstein’s affront to the known laws of physics with his concept that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. But even more mundane activities, like resolving an unacceptable marital situation by seeking conduct on the part of one of the partners that was previously not considered, discovering a treatment solution for a heretofore incurable disease,creating a work of distinctive art, finding an alternative to war in a tense geopolitical situation, a chef’s creation of a new recipe, carefully arranging flowers in vase, or making up a bedtime story, are examples of creative acts resulting from the ability to diverge from current circumstances and consider or enact new possibilities. Certainly, both convergent and divergent reasoning serve to enhance our well being. But it is an individual’s ability to diverge from what is familiar and move beyond the known into a new understanding which is the essence of creativity, and that which gives rise to advancement. In the words of Frank Zappa, “Without deviation from the norm, ‘progress’ is not possible.” Whether a person chooses to question and think on his or her own or remains unconditionally adherent to religious dogma, might relate to how specific areas of the brain are utilized–or not.

Interesting, eh?

[tags]Sam Kaner, Myriam Laberge[/tags]

School: Socialized or Civilized?

October 3, 2007 By Unschooling, Youth One Comment

It’s kind of an old debate, but the question of “socialization” seems to come up a fair amount when I talk about homeschooling with people who aren’t familiar with that way of life.

Usually I give the half-facetious remark that we don’t send our kids to school precisely because school seeks to socialize them.   That starts a nice conversation about the role of institutions in shaping the behaviours of young people.   In general people expect schools to do these things but then there is very little deep conversation about the role of school when folks talk about youth alienation, the hyper-extension of adolescence or gang culture and violence.   Most often the media comes in for blame, and no one looks at how well the school based “socialization” program works.

At any rate, today I found a nice piece at one of regular homeschooling blogs that gives the question some more thought, and I invite you to have a look if the question interests you.