Courtesy WRme2 on flickr
Entraining your mind to outcomes is the hardest practice to beat as a facilitator working in complexity. Whether it is learning, strategy or design, if you are in the complexity domain your attachment to an outcome is highly dangerous. It will shape your process, and cause you to harvest only what you are looking for, missing out on the juiciest, most powerful places of potential in a system.
Over the past week I managed to watch the entire 10 part series on the trials of Steven Avery on Netflix called Making a Murderer. Regardless of whether you think Avery is guilty or innocent of the murder, the series is a brilliant case study in what happens when we enter processes with our minds made up about the outcomes.
At one point in the final episode, Avery’s lawyer Dean Strang talks about the fact that people hardly ever set out to frame innocent people. Instead what they do is try to find the evidence to prove the guilt of those that they believe are guilty. When you believe someone is guilty you will look for evidence that proves that. And when you are an investigator that is a completely focused on a single outcome, you are going into the work with the problem already solved, and no amount of contrary evidence will change your mind.
Strang is gracious is labelling this a feature of the human condition: we are built this way. And it is that human failing is what makes justice sometimes an unattainable ideal.
Making A Murderer is an incredible portrait of how the entrained mind works. It illuminates a problem we all have to confront when problem solving, harvesting data and dealing with complexity: how do we let go of a pre-conceived outcome so that we can truly learn what’s going on and make decisions based on good information? And how do we do that while still holding on to a higher ideal. In other words, everyone in the case was motivated by justice (and justice what SHOULD have led everyone in the case), but the evidence that was collected and presented seemed to have motivated by a pre-conceived outcome to the trial.
In the world of practical complexity work there are a number of principles I have been using in harvesting and working with data, many of them informed by Dave Snowden’s work. These include:
Gather information with open questions that do not embed assumptions in them (the interrogation of Brendan Dassey is a perfect example of the very opposite of this – fishing for answers). In truly complex situations don’t ask direct questions, rather ask indirect questions about a person’s activities so they can’t game the system (or confirm your bias).
- Work at a very fine level of granularity – the more data you have the more ambiguous the conclusions will become, which is a good thing if you’re trying to learn the truth rather than trying to pre-determine an outcome.
- Use a diverse group of people to make sense of the data as they see it by looking for patterns in the data and asking questions that can be answered by further sensemaking. (The bones were in the firepit? How did they get there? Where were the people that could have moved them? What was happening during the time the body was burning?)
- When you discover a pattern check and see if it makes sense by looking for data that supports the pattern AND look for data that refutes the pattern. The human brain loves being validated so you have to make a special effort to invite a theory to be disproven.
- When you make a decision based on a pattern, lead by doing what you can to move towards the higher ideal, even if the path you choose is not the outcome or the pre-conceived notion you started out with. Leading and acting in this way, providing you have worked well with the data, results in BETTER ways to help build just socieities, make good things, improve organizational life or look after children and families.
These are good practices in and of themselves, and in my experience they also stand out as red flags if I see people engaging in teh OPPOSITE of these activities. If we are faced with closed questions, very small numbers of meaning makers, a refusal to hear dissent or a desire simply to see the big picture rather than the minutae, it causes me to explore in more detail the motivations and assumptions that people have. And like Dean Strang says, most people are not consciously out to commit an injustice, they are just unconsciously out to prove what they think they already know. That can have devastating consequences.
Over the past four years, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Caitlin Frost, Tim Merry and I have been sitting down and thinking about our learning about the way participatory leadership intersects with power, systems change, large scale and sustainable engagement and deep personal practice. We have combed through years of our stories and experiences, and developed a learning offering that shares some of our theory, deep practices and stories of systems change.
Over the past two years Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics has travelled across Canada, the United States and once to Europe and we have been lucky to welcome nearly 300 people to our three day program. They have come from all over the world and every conceivable sector in which leadership, engagement and people and the tools that create new worlds.
From October 21-23 we offer our final instalment of the current round of Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics, in Kingston Ontario, Canada, Over three days we will gather on the Lake Ontario shoreline to engage in conversations about applied complexity, participatory leadership, and the challenges of scaling up the results from large group methods like World Cafe and Open Space Technology. We will talk about power and friendship in change work, and broadening and deepening our impact when it comes to community engagement, employee engagement, strategy and systemic change.
We already have a fascinating group of people coming, including academics, health care systems workers, community activists, people who work in First Nations and managers from companies. That diversity leads to terrific learning, and we’d be excited for you to join us.
If you have been working with facilitation, complexity and engagement for a while, this is for you. It’s not a beginners course, but neither is it inaccessible for people just starting in this field who want to accelerate their learning. It’s applied and grounded theory, learning based in stories and a full day of design and coaching for new and existing projects.
We still have seats left. Join us! You can learn more and register here: http://www.aohbtb.com/ontario.html
Just about to leave Montreal this morning for Toronto and north to Thornbury, Ontario to visit family. I was here for the conference of the Canadian Evaluation Society, where I participated on a panel on innovative dialogue methods (and yes I noted the irony in my remarks) and later led a World Cafe where I presented some of the sense-making processes I’ve been working on. I was here on the recommendation of Junita Brown who has been in some good conversations with evaluators around the use of the World Cafe for evaluation purposes. Originally Amy Lenzo and I were scheduled to host a cafe here that was much more ambitious: a plenary cafe with the participants to explore the learning field of the conference. Through various machinations that was cut back to a panel presentation and a very small world cafe at the end of the day with 16 people. The conference was one of those highly scripted and tightly controlled affairs that I hardly ever go to.
The session before us was a case competition where student teams were responding to a mock RFP from Canada World Youth to evaluate an Aboriginal Youth leadership Program. Not a single team had an Aboriginal person on it, and every single presentation was basically the same: full of fundamental flaws about what constitutes success (“Did the youth return to their communities”) or what constitutes a cultural lens (“We are using a medicine wheel to understand various parts of the program). One group of fresh faced non-Aboriginal students even had the temerity to suggest that they were applying a decolonizing strategy. Their major exposure to indigenous communities was through a single book on decolonizing methodology and some internet searches about medicine wheels. It was shocking actually, because these were the students that made the finals of this competition. They looked like fresh versions of the kinds of evaluation firms that show up in First Nations certain they know what’s going on.
To make matters worse, the case competition organizer had a time mix up with the conference planner meaning that our panel started 30 minutes late which gave me very little time to present. As I as doing a a cafe directly afterwards I ceded most of my time to my panel colleagues Christine Loignon, Karoline Truchon who did a very interesting presentation on their use of PhotoVoice. It was clear to me at the conference that the practitioners among us had a better grasp of complexity theory, power and non-linear sense-making than any of the professional evaluators I met.
I presented most of the work that I have been documenting here over the last few months, and later led a small group through a cafe where we engaged in the creation of a sensemaking framework and used a pen and paper signification framework.
By far the better experience for me was hanging out with friends and colleagues. On the first night I arrived I had dinner and drinks with my friends from Percolab: Paul Messer, Samatha Slade and Elizabeth Hunt. We ate fish and chips, drank beer and whisky and caught up. On Sunday I met Jon Husband for lunch on the grass at McGill with his delightful godson and then joined the Percolab folks for a visit to the new co-operative ECTO co-working space on Mount Royal in the Plateau, followed by a barbeque with family and friends.
And Last night, after my presentations a great evening with Juan Carlos Londono and Lisa Gravel. We had dinner at Lola Rosa and spent hours going over the new French translation of the GroupWorks Pattern Language Deck. This was a brilliant time. I learned a bunch of new French words and most fun of all we discussed deeper etymology, nuance and the limitations and benefits of our respective languages in trying to convey some of the more esoteric practices of hosting groups. The new deck has some beautiful reframing and some names for patterns that need some work. But it’s exciting to see this translation and I always love diving into the language.
I really do like Montreal a lot and in the past number of years come to love it more as I have lost my inhibition about speaking French. the more French I speak, the more French I learn and the more the heart of the city opens up. Many English Canadians have the idea that Montreal is a cold hearted city to English speakers, but I find that isn’t true at all. Just offer what you can in French and people open up. And if you’re lucky enough to sit down with lovers of words like the friends I have, your learning explodes.
Off for a couple of days to visit family and then home to Bowen Island for a series of small local facilitation gigs, all of which will tell me something deeper about my home place.
I was back at St. Aidan’s United Church in Victoria yesterday, hosting another conversation in their continued evolution into their next shape. Last December we worked together to explore four possible scenarios that were being proposed for the congregation. In the past few months they have been working on implementing one of these scenarios – the one which featured a plan to develop a Spiritual Learning Centre. Yesterday was a short strategic conversation called to explore the shape of what that Centre could be and how it will change life at the church.
A couple of good blog posts in my feed this morning that provoked some thinking. These quotes reminded me how much evaluation and planning is directed towards goals, targets and patterns that cause us to look for data that supports what we want to see rather than learning what the data is telling us about what’s really going on. These helped me to reflect on a conversation I had with a client yesterday, where we designed a process for dealing with this.