A little piece I’ve just written about Harrison Owen’s work on High Performance Systems for an Art of Participatory Leadership workbook on the connections between Open Space Technology facilitation and leadership for self-organization.
From the moment Open Space was formalized as a meeting method in 1985, its creator, Harrison Owen, saw massive potential for the process to inform organizational design and leadership. Watching groups of 100 or more people self-organize a conference over multiple days was simply a microcosm of what could go on in organizational life. It offered a radical view that perhaps there was a different way to organize and a different way to lead when we are confronted with complexity and chaos.
In many ways, Open Space Technology was the doorway to the participatory leadership approaches championed by the Art of Hosting community. In his book Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, Owen shares his observation that what he saw happening in Open Space meetings was a practical expression of what organizational scholars were observing in high-performance teams. He formulated this working hypothesis:
High Performance is the productive interplay of diverse, complex forces, including chaos, confusion, and conflict, characterized by holiness, health, and harmony. it is harmonious, including all elements of harmony, both consonance and dissonance, in that multiple forces work together to create a unitary flow. It is whole in the sense that there is a clear focus, direction, and purpose. It is healthy in that the toxins of its process (metabolic byproducts in organisms) are eliminated effectively and without prejudice to itself or its environment. High Performance can never be sustained at the cost of a fouled nest. A High Performance System is one that does all of the above with excellence over time, and certainly better than the competition.
Harrison Owen. Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance, p. 35
To create the conditions for high performance, Owen turned to what he had learned from facilitating Open Space Technology meetings. Creativity springs from urgency, passion (including conflict) and responsibility. It is facilitated by providing leaders with the time and space to organize their work and choose the places where they make a maximum contribution of learning or doing, and essentially getting out of the way of work. When these conditions are in place, and the leader simply holds the space for self-organization, a high-performing System will emerge.
In Wave Rider, Owen provides three simple principles for leaders to create these spaces:
- “Never work harder than you have to.” Let the managers manage, and as a leader, focus only on what is yours to do. Take action that feeds the system with resources of time, money, and connection and holds space for outcomes to emerge.
- “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” This requires a leader to be patient and wait for the system’s wisdom to emerge. Too often, leaders respond to their own anxiety and discomfort with uncertainty by rushing to a solution or constraining their people to deliver something—ANYTHING—on time and under budget. For complex problems, staying open longer and allowing people to self-organize and explore many options for moving forward will increase the chances of novelty and innovation.
- “Never, ever, think you are in charge.” The myth of control lies at the heart of much management and organizational leadership literature. The assumption is that if you simply maintain control of the situation, including focusing on accountability for deliverables and directing efforts in a single direction, you will hit your KPIs and achieve a return on investment. The reality is that things are much more messy than that, Understanding that the leader is never solely in charge of the whole system liberates the leader to address situations with curiosity and invitation and builds the conditions for co-creation.
Owen explored these principles and approaches alongside the emergence of the World Wide Web and the idea that organizations could become more flexible and agile if they self-organized in networks around core purposes. New organizational forms and emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, enabled by the web’s ability for people to find each other and resources quickly. Manufacturing was revolutionized by agile approaches to product development, and organizational development became informed by complexity and dialogic practices often based on experiences formed using large-scale self-organizing meeting methods like Open Space Technology. The dynamics of self-organization were harnessed to create currency systems and governance models, which required leaders to be more like facilitators or hosts than dictators or controllers.
Participatory leadership is a set of practices rooted in the need to create spaces of creative self-organization and collective responsibility for new responses to complex and emergent problems. Facilitating Open Space Technology meetings is a tangible way to explore and practice these transferable skills from a single gathering to years-long project management to creating entire organizational structures.
When we are teaching dialogue practice and participatory meeting design, I often draw on the example of organizational and team staff meetings. Every organization I’ve worked with has these meetings and they ae almost nearly the same: an endless re-iteration of what people are doing, and rarely nothing more compelling that an email wouldn’t take care of. There is rarely even time for discussion becasue you have to get through everyone’s update in the 30 minutes assigned for the meeting.
So I often advise folks who want to bring more participatory culture to their organizations to focus on staff meetings. Rotate leadership, get serious about pruning out stuff that can be done by email and replace it with dialogue. After all, 30 minutes with an open agenda is a great place to brainstorm and discuss the thorny questions that are are dogging your team.
Today I cam across a great post from Tom Kerwin addressed to team leaders to help change their staff updates. I like this becasue it builds a container for team members to think about their work and share it in a way that makes it clear and helpful to others. (I’ve often said that if you’re having trouble explaining what you do, try to tell you great-aunt or your teenager about it.)
At any rate, here’s how Tom has re-designed his team’s update meetings:
I asked everyone to give a mini-pitch. In one minute, tell us:
- What’s the main challenge your team is tackling right now?
- What approach are you using to help your team tackle it?
- What are you looking for to tell you if your approach is working?
- And what are you looking for to tell you if your approach isn’t working?
I designed this to follow a key complexity principle: don’t try to change people, instead change their interactions. I designed this particular interaction to be a kind of ‘intuition-pump’ that could indirectly generate beneficial effects. And it did.
Here are five cool things it ended up doing:
- Everyone on my team got to practise pitching their work so that it would make sense to others and not only to themselves. This is a valuable skill in business. It took some repetitions to get this working, but we started live in low pressure small groups to lower the barrier and enable people to learn from each other. We could choose to switch to asynchronous written pitches when the ritual was stable.
- In order to figure out a pitch, each person had to understand why they were doing what they were doing for themselves. People started to develop a sense for different shapes and contexts of work, rather than sticking to one tool or process.
- I could instantly tell when someone was confused about what they were doing because their pitch either didn’t add up internally or didn’t cohere with the team’s strategy. We could grab time right then and there to figure it out together – before they’d spent days on pointless stuff. And this happened less over time.
- We started to enjoy the progress updates. I’ll use a food analogy. Before the change to the meeting format, it felt like we had to sit through people droning on about their food shopping lists. Afterwards, we got to hear chefs inspiring us with the delicious meals they were preparing.
- And folks on different teams started to actually understand what their colleagues were working on. This meant fewer complaints about not having enough visibility, and much more spontaneous collaboration.
Via Scott Thomas (@ScottGL1 on twitter) comes a very interesting note on a US weather service forecast from yesterday:
I live on a small island located in a steep-walled inlet that opens onto an inland sea on the Pacific Coast of North America. Our island is medium-sized, about 12 km long and 8 km wide. Part of it sticks out into the Strait of Georgia, which is part of the larger Salish Sea that exists between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Part of our island sticks into Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, an inlet that leads from the Strait 45kms inland to the mouth of a river valley that drains the Coast Mountains. In winter, katabatic winds can blow more 100km/h onto the north shore of the island, coating it in ice and snow with a -25C windchill while 12kms away on the southern shore of the island, it can be a nice warm, calm, and sunny spring day, where the temperature feels 30 degrees warmer.
If you count on the local weather forecast, which comes from a mere 15 km away at the Vancouver airport, you will have no idea about the weather on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. The Vancouver airport is located on an island in an estuary at the mouth of a long and broad river valley and experiences completely different weather.
It still boggles my mind that people who live where I live fail to grasp the hyperlocal nature of our microclimates. If you rely only on weather apps and have no idea how the forecasts on these apps are made (or indeed what a 60% chance of rain means), then you might think that meteorology is a big lie. In fact, the limited accuracy of long-term weather forecasts is often one of the things that climate change deniers use to bolster their idea that you can’t forecast the weather and you can’t trust the “weather scientists.”
Trying to predict the intensity of an atmospheric river or the landing point of a compact sub-tropical cyclone is an important function for weather forecasters. But it is impossible to tailor forecasts to the hyper local conditions. I know, by virtue of the fact that my house faces southeast, that the gale warnings that come from an atmospheric river forecast are important for me to heed. The rain will fall everywhere, but it will be more intense on the windward-facing slopes and with a 90 or 100 km/h wind gust, it will be driven into the cracks and seams on my house. I have to seal things up if I don;t want leaks. I have to make sure stuff is bolted down or put away and that the fireplace remains dry, as the rain can be driven into my chimney under the cap.
Literally a few hundred meters away, over the ridge behind my house, there will be no wind. Rain, yes. But if you panicked upon hearing the gale warnings, you might be surprised to find that the wind didn’t matter to you at all. People express anger or frustration all the time on our neighbourhood Facebook pages. Sometimes folks will ignore a warning that actually applies to them, because the last one didn’t affect them at all. That lack of situational awareness is perilous and it is not the fault of weather forecasters.
We just do not have a very good sense of how complex systems work or how we are supposed to relate to them. There is a broad societal expectation that experts will give us answers. Weather forecasts do not provide answers, they provide guidance. To use a weather forecast, you have to also participate in sensemaking and decision-making. You have to have situational awareness about where you are and what information you have about your current state, and you have to have an idea about where the forecast information is coming from and what it means. You need to understand the cadence and granularity of the forecast and to know that forecasts about volatile weather systems can change by the minute. With weather emergencies, you need to be able to prepare and take action, even if the outcome isn’t as severe as the forecast made it out to be. And you also have to realize that things could turn out to be worse than the forecast for your area at any given moment.
This weather forecaster, upon retirement, offers us good wisdom for living in a society where we have tools and expertise that help us live with complexity. This little missive reveals what it is we need to do as complexity practitioners and experts in different fields and it also illuminates how to be a better consumer of data about complex situations, whether that is the economy, the weather, our own health or the myriad of other places where the future is just a set of probabilities.
I’m back in Tlaoquiaht territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This is a place I once described as The Land of Tsawalk as it is the cradle of a philosophy and cosmology of interconnection and interdependence that has been refined by centuries of Nuu-chah-nulth philosophers, leaders and families. We’re here to do an Art of Hosting with the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust and 40 or so local leaders and organizers. This will be the fourth Art of Hosting I’ve done here and they are always different, responsive to the land and the ocean and the people and the way time works here. We will plan tomorrow and then we will allow things to happen, and it will be, as it always is, a rich and abundant experience.
On the way here, Caitlin and I listened to some podcasts. Two of these had moments that spoke to the place and the quality of time and landscape, and this is the real purpose of this post.
The first is. A Radiolab episode called “Small Potatoes” is about how observation and reflection can transform the most mundane of things in our daily experience. One segment of this episode featured a clip from Ian Chillag’s podcast Everything is Alive in which the philosopher Chioke l’Anson plays “a grain of sand” in conversation with Chillag. l’Anson brings an incredible perspective to this interview, including these gems:
CHIOKE:
Yeah, I mean, I think that if there’s one difference between them and I… Sorry, I’m just having
trouble with the pronouns, you know, we’re doing this interview and I’m a grain of sand.
IAN:
Yeah.
CHIOKE:
But that’s not really the way I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, “We are sand.”
IAN:
OK.
CHIOKE:
So, you see that there’s the mass noun thing happening and it’s weird to talk to you because you
don’t have a mass noun thing. Or you don’t seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So, you say
yourself that you’re a person, right?
IAN:
Yeah, I would say I’m a person.
CHIOKE:
So, like why aren’t you a grain of person?
IAN:
Like why do I not consider myself as like a fraction of all of humanity?
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like that makes more sense. It just seems to me like if you recognise the degree to which you
owed your existence to other people you might also be nicer to other people.
Or then there is this meditation on time and change:
IAN:
Right. Do you know how old you are?
CHIOKE:
Not exactly, no. I think, it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of
years. Like, I mean, I wasn’t always sand, right? Like there was a time when I was a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, yeah.
CHIOKE:
Yeah. So, you know, like do you know about the myth of Sisyphus?
IAN:
Yeah
CHIOKE:
Yeah, that’s a funny one to me because Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity,
but really the boulder would eventually erode. I mean, a hundred thousand years or so. It would be
like a little pebble. Like, just stick it out, Sisyphus. You’ll be done in no time, you know?
IAN:
Eventually it’s just going to be sand.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, exactly. And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus after some time
would have a flat plain instead of a hill and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, so, yeah. So, he’s cursed for eternity, but really, he just needs to get through I don’t know
50,000 years or something.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like he should really stick to it. And then that’ll show the Gods.
Amazing.
In another podcast we listened to, a To The Best Of Our Knowledge episode on deep time, Ann Strainchamps interviews geologist Marcia Bjorneru about changes to our earth and climate:
AS: Do you think the perspective of deep time can help with any of the existential fear and dread that comes with an awareness of climate change and global warming? Does being aware of the many long ages of the planet put climate change in perspective? Or make it more frightening?
MB: From a scientific point of view, I can say that Earth will be fine. The Earth will deal with the changes in climate that we’re causing and eventually, new ecosystems will emerge.
But the human part of me mourns what we’ve done and the rapidity with which old, well-established ecosystems and landscapes have been changed. And I worry for humanity, for what the next decades or century will bring as we cope with a new set of rules. That’s the scary thing to me. We’ve been able to understand the way the planet has worked through the Holocene, but now we’re changing the boundary conditions and parameters, and so many of the models we’ve developed aren’t going to be very relevant as we go further into the Anthropocene.
The past won’t necessarily be a key to the future. And there’s real sadness there. Our cultures have grown up with a certain version of Earth, and it’ll be radically different.
These insights seem to hit so much deeper out here in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth territories, where a deep sense of time and a deep connection with the ancient marine and forest ecosystems are responsible for thousands of years of occupation and well-being. Indeed, Bjorneru’s observation about the new boundary conditions of life on earth brings added importance to preserving intact large amounts of wild and ancient ecosystems. In 300,000 years as a species, humans have never lived in an environment that is as heavily degraded as it is now. We were nurtured in the complex life-giving cradles of the very ecosystems out of which we arose. We have changed those conditions of life, and who knows what effect it will have on our survival, the survival of millions of other species and the evolution of new forms of life on Earth.
Out here, on the edge of the world, the principles of tsawalk compel us to engage these questions. The perspective of deep time and deep interconnection lies all around us.
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