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.
Spending a nice New Year’s Day alone at home. Pot of tea, beautiful sunny day that I will shortly head out into for a walk, and then home maybe to play some music, restring the guitar, learn a jig or a reel or two on the flute…
Listening this morning to CBC Ideas who are doing a great show on the number “50” and, because Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species at age 50, they have just played Baba Brinkman’s rap “Artificial Selection.”
One little line stood out, something about the fact that in evolution, little differences are what provide us with evolutionary potential. This immediately rang bells for me as I’ve been thinking about this in the work of strategy, whether that means creating a ten year plan for an organization or simply exploring options for moving forward on a discrete piece of work. Finding the pathway of best evolutionary potential requires that we introduce diversity and difference into the system. Working together across difference, as my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart would say, is a strategic and evolutionary imperative. Accentuating the differences between each other is crucial for learning new things, seeing the world in new ways and finding new pathways out of complex tangles.
This is one of the reasons I like Open Space Technology so much. It brings a huge variety of exploration to a common topic to create multiple pathways forward for exploration. Buit whatever we can do to accentuate our differences and work together across them actually improves the evolutionary potential of the system we are in.
I’m prepping for a small gig with a non-profit moving to a shared leadership model, and also reading a bit more on Cynefin strategy, and so there are a lot of tabs open in my browser this afternoon. instead of saving them all to an Evernote folder, I thought I’d share the best ones with you.
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.
I was working with a couple of clients recently who were trying to design powerful questions for invitations to their strategic conversations. Both organizations are dealing with complex situations and specifically with complex changes that were overtaking their ability to respond. Here are some of the questions that cam up:
- How can we be more effective in accomplishing our purpose?
- How can we create more engagement to address our outcomes?
- What can we do to innovate regardless of our structure?
- Help us create new ideas for executive alignment around our plan to address the change we are now seeing?
Can you see what is wrong with these questions, especially as they relate to addressing complexity?
The answer is that each of these questions contains a proposed solution to the problem, buried as assumptions in the question itself. In these questions the answers to addressing complexity are assumed to be: sticking to purpose, creating more engagement, innovating except structurally, aligning executives around our plan. In other contexts these may well be powerful questions: they are questions which invite execution once strategic decisions have been taken. But in addressing complex questions, they narrow the focus too much and embed assumptions that some may actually think are the cause of their problems in the first place
The problem is that my clients were stuck arguing over the questions themselves because they couldn’t agree on solutions. As a result they found themselves going around and around in circles.
The right question for all four of these situations is something like “What is going on?” or “How can we address the changes that are happening to us?”
You need to back up to ask that question first, before arriving at any preferred solutions. It is very important in discerning and making sense of your context that you are able to let go of your natural inclination to want to DO something, in favour of first understanding what we have in front of us. Seeing the situation correctly goes a long way to be able to make good strategic choices about what to do next. From there, planning, aligning, purpose and structure might be useful responses, but you don’t know that until you’ve made sense of where you are.