I live on a small island in the sea with a very complicated water supply. We have some community water systems, and a complex geology that means that many people are on wells, and nearly every well seems different. As our population increases, and as the moisture decreases, we are finding ourselves subject to more and more restrictions on what we can do with water. This is as it should be. We cannot live on our island beyond our limits, with a bigger water footprint than the water we have available to us. In the past, you were free to run taps as long as you want. Now we are metered and in some neighbourhoods there are daily sue restrictions. Signs at the entrance to these areas say “Converse Water Or Have None.” It’s not an alarmist message. It is true.
One of the arguments I often hear people using against things like climate change mitigation is that it will somehow restrict their freedom. Libertarians, for whom all taxation is theft, protest against carbon pricing as a tax grab, even though it was always the preferred mechanism of free market economists. Oil companies and manufacturers complain about excessive regulation of fuel standards and emissions, and consumers object to high prices which limit what they are able to do.
Climate change requires a radical shift in the way economies and societies work, and it’s interesting to look at this from a complexity perspective. Ideally in a society you want to manage complex dynamics with complexity based policy solutions. In other words, instead of dictating behaviours, it’s better to influence behaviours by incentivizing things that lead in a positive direction and dis-incentivizing things that lead in a negative direction. This can be done with laws, regulations, pricing incentives, policies, and taxation. These attractors and boundaries create the conditions for behaviour change.
The free market is indeed a self-organizing mechanism, but it is also amoral. There is a reason why, even in the United States where gun ownership is a right, there are plenty of weapons and firearms that are highly restricted and outright banned. There is a good reason why it illegal to dispose of PCBs and dioxin in the atmosphere, despite the fact that for years companies used the fact that air wasn’t taxed to dump their waste products. So markets are regulated and behaviours change. That is a complexity based approach to trouble.
In chaos, the only response is a massive imposition of constraints and restriction of people’s freedom. Think of situation in which you might have required a first responder like a paramedic. If you are injured, you will accept a high degree of control over your life in order to stabilize the situation. First responders impose sometimes extreme levels of command and control to manage a situation. When things are more stable and heading out of chaos, the constraints relax and the complex task of healing or rebuilding or moving on can begin.
The argument I find myself making with folks who object to climate solutions is this: if you think that a simple carbon tax is an infringement on your freedom now, are you willing to live with that freedom now in exchange for much more brutal constraints on your freedom later? As climate emergencies continue to increase, it is very likely that people will be told where they can live and where they cannot, how they are allowed to travel, how much water they can use, what they can do with their land. The increase of control over people increases with the level of crisis and chaos. At a certain point you simply cannot live free beyond the limits of your bio-physical system to maintain you. The system imposes the constraints, and you will have no choice but to be told what to do.
For libertarians and others who value personal choice, now is actually the time to get on board with the complexity tools that can help us make choices that limit our impact on the climate. If we fail to influence populations into positive choices now – and it may already be too late – we will find ourselves increasingly being subjected to highly controlled environments later. One way or the other, our freedom to do whatever we want needs to be curtailed. We have lived for decades in unmitigated commercial and economic freedom on the backs of future generations, and the planet is telling us that it’s over. Choose differently now, or be told what to do later.
Came across a Medium piece by Sahana Chattopadhyay today in which she discusses facilitation competencies for working in emergence and complexity. She points out in the article that this kind of facilitation practice is different from what passes for facilitation in many more familiar and simpler contexts:
Facilitation is often mistaken for some methods and processes that experienced trainers use during workshops to run successful sessions. I am not talking about that kind of facilitation, which is an important skill by itself.
I am talking about Facilitation as a way of being that offers safe space, creates a container for exploration, makes way for emergence, enables collaboration and co-creation, builds a culture of inclusion, and helps to align discrete actions with and towards a larger purpose.
I might have a quibble with the “align discrete actions towards a larger purpose” as this can sometimes be taken as license for a facilitator to direct a group’s choices towards a particular future state, as if that is a knowable thing. In complexity, you really want to help group explore emergent pathways, some of them often quite divergent in nature, but that drive in a chosen direction of travel.
Nevertheless, she has a short list that is actually quite good, and can form the basis of some focus for learning. These are practice competencies, and so you will always find yourself learning and growing along these. Hers are:
- Hold space for complexity and emergence
- Stay centered on the participatory process
- Tap into the potential present in the room
- Be aware of the different capacities of individuals
- Help the system see itself.
To these I might add something like:
- Practice seeing your limiting beliefs and unconscious biases that influence your choice of methods.
- Understand the theory beneath the problems you are working with.
What else would you add as a way of developing a list of complex facilitation competencies? A friendly warning, I’ll challenge and engage you in the comments! Let’s see what we can make.
My last blog post here was back in March, at the beginning of a colossal few months of travel and work during which I was away from home and working in the Netherlands, Germany, northern Ontario, New York City, Vancouver Island, and several locations in Japan. In the course of my travels I was away from home for 64 days, had two major airline cancellations (one airline went bankrupt, one couldn’t get me home without massively creative re-routing). I probably doubled the number of foods I’ve tasted in my life, just from the 28 day trip to Japan alone, and I’ve come back to find myself taking stock of where I am these days.
Summer is good for that.
In reflecting on my work offerings these days, I find myself doing these kinds of things:
- Helping organizations and communities by facilitating large scale meetings and participatory processes to understand and act in complexity. I do this through meeting design and facilitation. That’s the bread and butter.
- Using technology to support strategic work in complexity. This year I’m working with both Sensemaker and NarraFirma in different projects to help groups collect, analyse, and act from stories. I love this work and it has taken me into the realm of deep developmental evaluation. The software is helping us to be able to generate deeply informed strategic insights with our clients and to create innovative ways to address stuck problems. It’s amazing and powerful participatory research and support for strategy.
- To that end, I have been also been working closely with evaluators in some interesting emerging community projects as well as developing teaching modules to run workshops on participatory methods and evaluation.
That’s the basic strategic work. There is lots of capacity building work I’m doing as well. For me that focuses on teaching, first and foremost:
- Teaching Art of Hosting workshops, including upcoming ones in the next year on Bowen Island, and in the Whitehorse, Montreal, and Calgary.
- Teaching complexity courses. One with Bronagh Gallagher focused on complexity for social activists, and one with Caitlin Frost on complexity basics, using Human Systems Dynamics, Cynefin, The Work and dialogue methods. I’ve taught several one and two day complexity course this past year, and feel like we’ve really got a good introductory course.
- A one day workshop on dialogic containers that I gave to good reviews at Nanzan University in Japan. It is based on two papers I wrote over the past few years on Hosting and Holding Dialogic Containers, and one Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework (now mooshed with Glenda Eoyang’s CDE framework) as a way of using containers to work with complexity. At Nanzen, Caitlin added a neat little piece on Self as Container as well.
- A course on evaluation, which I first offered online with Beehive Productions this past winter, and then has developed into a two day course offered in New York with Rita Fierro and Dominica McBride. That might morph again and meet the Art of Hosting, so if you’re and evaluator, look out for an offering that joins up those two worlds.
- Leadership 2020, a nine month participatory leadership program for leaders in the Social Services Sector and child and family services ministries in British Columbia. We are coming up on ten years of this work, with a redesigned program so that we can get more leaders through it in a slightly compressed time frame.
- I continue to offer a one-day course at Simon Fraser University on World Cafe and Open Space Technology as part of the certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. You can come to that if you like.
- And I have a few coaching clients as well, folks I spend an hour or so with here and there, thinking through issues in their own practice, working on workshop designs and supporting their confidence to take risk.
As for writing, I have long promised a book on Chaordic Design, and that may still come to pass, but I can see it now being a joint effort with my partner Caitlin Frost. We have been using the Chaordic Stepping Stones tool in every context imaginable and have a ton of stories of application to share. The basic model on my website is due for a revision as well, so perhaps I’l have a chance to do that in the coming few months. When Caitlin and I can find some time to go away and write, we might actually get some stuff on the page.
And here is the blog, my old friend, the place I have recorded thoughts and insights and ideas and events over the past 17 years or so. It needs a bit of attention and it needs to be used, so look for more blog posts more frequently. And they won’t all be well crafted essays – could be just more musings, things that are longer than tweets, and that properly belong free in the world and not locked into the blue prison of facebook. Maybe you’ll even see something of the other passions that are in my life, including my love of soccer, music, and some of the local community projects I’m up to.
Does any of that grab your interest? Is there anything you’d like to hear more about? Can I support your organization or community, or individual practice in any way? Wanna play?
Perhaps I need to curate a series of posts called “The Whatabout Chronicles.” When I’m teaching participatory leadership or sharing complexity tools, folks who are wedded to traditional linear mind and tool sets often raise objections.
“Complexity would be nice, but we haven’t got the time. We have to get this problem solved now, and we need a plan to do it.”
It’s a hard one because often it’s obvious that the problem is complex and the desire for a linear solution, while urgent-feeling, is just not possible. But if you can’t see it that way, objections get raised.
In my courses and workshops, often people who are discovering these tools for the first time have their first moment of dread when they imagine themselves trying to “sell” a participatory or complexity-informed approach to their organization, team or, worse still, their boss.
“How do you handle the naysayers?” Yup.
Recently I was asked this question and I used the Cynefin framework to answer it. Disagreement with an approach depends on the context of the problem. Broadly speaking if we look at the five domains of Cynefin, you handle naysayers this way:
Obvious problems (knowable problems, predictable, simple solutions). If a problem is obvious then you should have no trouble convincing a naysayer that you are right. Does the door open in or out? Push it and see. Anyone who disagrees with you will have the problem of never getting into the room unless they adopt to the reality of the situation.
Complicated problems (knowable problems and predictable solutions, but only with expert help and analysis). Complicated problems have multiple competing approaches that may all be right, but will all be different. Plumbing a house is not an Obvious problem, but there are only a few ways to do it. There maybe different ways to do and experts may not agree, but they can give you a plan and show you in advance how their solution is a good one. To hire an expert, give them constraints to work with (money, time, and materials) and ask for a proposal. Disagreement between experts can help you solve the problem better, but don’t pretend you know enough to challenge an expert. Ask for a few quotes and choose the person that will do the job to your specs. Make a contract that makes them accountable for the outcome, and have someone else you trust evaluate their work.
Complex problems (unknowable and ever changing problems and unpredictable but multiple emergent ways of addressing them). Here we can’t know the whole system, but we can bring in multiple perspectives and look for patterns that will helps us figure out what to do. Naysayers in complex situations are a gift. You WANT naysayers in complexity. In complex problems like addressing social, cultural and economic systemic problems, no one has the right answer. In order to act you need people who will come into the space and offering competing approaches. You have to try them out – even contradictory ones – to see what works in your context of time and place. You might even discover new ways of doing things. For sure, the worst thing you can do in addressing complexity is create an agreeable environment that stifles conflicting views and difference. Diversity is required for a resilient and collectively intelligent approach. You have to make sure that the container you are working in can hold difference without becoming a fight or a power game of domination. The system should always move towards diversity of opinion, not consensus.
Chaotic problems (unknowable and unpredictable problems and there is not enough time to think about a solution). Everything is massively dependant in this scenario, and high chaos is a high energy environment where you might only get one chance to act. You might have seen situations where someone is injured and a paramedic arrives and the patient says “I’m okay, get away from me.” The paramedic may be able to see that the patient is not in fact okay. In these situations, imposing tight constraints is how you handle naysayers: “Sir, you are wrong! Sit down now before you risk further injury!” This can be very helpful, but you have to loosen the constraint once the situation has stabilized.
Disordered problems (where you don’t know what kind of problem you have). Sometimes you just have to start by saying “What’s happening here? is this a linear system or a complex one?” Using Cynefin can help you agree upon the characteristics of the system you are working with that allows you to then make a decision about the intervention. Naysayers here can be very influential, but you really don’t get to argue with reality. No matter what you say, racism is a complex issue. Get a group of people to help you address it. However, getting sued for a racist hiring practice is complicated. Get a lawyer. You’ll need one.
I’m on the road, currently in Columbus Ohio, working my way through a two week road trip that has taken me to Ontario to visit family and to New Brunswick where I was part of a remarkable hosting team for the Art of Hosting Working Across Divides. It was a timely gathering for 70 people from government, civil society, and social enterprise to come and learn how to work with differences.
In Canada’s only bilingual province, language is a massive difference between people, and New Brunswick has a multitude of language cultures. There are 34 local French accents alone in New Brunswick and probably just as many English ones too, having to do with class and ethnicity and proximity to the sea or the woods.
In the last provincial election there, the virus of populism had its day and took these existing differences and turned them into divides. Right wing populists have a well-trod strategy for doing this. Instead of pointing to differences between people, they tap the fear that people have of people who are different than them, without naming the other. This is called “dogwhistle politics.” Once they find a fear of the other that elicits an emotional response, they double down on the fear often, but not always, with lies and misrepresentation. When their political opponents offer up diversity and difference as an asset to a healthy society, the populists accuse them of “divisiveness.” They claim that only their approach will bring “unity” typically by eliminating any conversation that recognizes the value of differences. Often their “unity” platform is basically assimilitation: “if only you were like us, we’d have unity; if you want to be different, you’re creating division.” Sometimes they outright declare such an emphasis on difference to be “racist.” If you want to see this in action, visit Rebel Media, an organization I will simply refuse to link to. They are great at this.
The pithy insight on difference and divisiveness that struck me in this Art of Hosting is this: differences are real and useful, and division is one thing you can do with them. People are different, and offer different perspectives, lived experiences, and world views on things. These differences are essential to living and working in complexity, because a homogeneous view of a situation leaves you open to crises hitting you unawares. Cultivating difference is a good strategy for surviving and thriving in a complex situation. Seeking out differences of opinion is essential, finding people who are different than you and working with them makes you all smarter.
Divisions happen when people become so afraid of the other that they stop making the effort to bridge the gap. When this happens a kind of vacuum opens up between people and that gap is the thing that populists exploit. Political power can be won and held with a very thin margin these days in Canada. You only need about 20% of the voters to vote for your party. If you get your vote out, and the opposition is split or apathetic, you can form power. In New Brunswick the current government was formed on this exact number: about 31% of voters voted Conservative, and only 67% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. The populist People’s Alliance hold the balance of power. (In Ontario, Doug Ford came to power with 23.49% of eligible voters supporting his party.)
The way to defeat populism is to not allow people to play on your fears of other people who are different from you. It means convening incredibly diverse spaces and creating the conditions for people to show up with their unique perspectives, working WITH differences. That sometimes means doing things that make differences more stark, to explore different experiences, different ideas and different stories, so we can learn from each other. And it sometimes means making differences less pronounced so that we can find common purpose or shared perspective.
Divisiveness does not come from people working with differences. Divisiveness comes from people inserting fear into the gaps between people who are different.