I’ve been going down a bit of a rabbit hole these past few mornings, looking at some commentary and writing about Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who died in 1947 was a psychologist whose theory and research had a tremendous influence on the modern movements or organizational development, action research, Gestalt theory, change management and group dynamics. To read his writings now is to read a person deeply interested in the complexity of human systems long before there was much language at all available to even discuss complexity.
His ideas – or more precisely other people’s ideas about his ideas – have been largely responsible for the way mainstream organizational change is conceived and thought about.
One example is the theory of change attributed to Lewin that is known as “Change As Three Steps” or CATS. This theory is reduced to an incredibly simplistic set of moves called “Unfreeze –> Move –> Refreeze”. Looks simple enough to use right away and authentic enough because it can be attributed to Lewin. Lots of consultancies uncritically use this model, and even a cursory glance at Lewin’s work would make it clear that he would never make change that simple or linear.
The fact is that Lewin never proposed this set of moves, and it’s not even clear if he ever used the terms “freezing and unfreezing.” The rabbit holes I’ve been down started with a paper from 2015 that showed up in my feed by Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman, and Kenneth G Brown called “Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management.” This is SUCH a great critique of how Lewin’s ideas have been misattributed and misused. Lewing is the victim of a classic strawman argument, where something simplistic is attributed to him, and then folks pile on saying that his work is simplistic. Meanwhile. the work he did do is ignored or lies unread.
And that is a tremendous shame, because that paper led me to look at some of Lewin’s writings again and some of the papers about him. I got especially interested in his work on Field Theory, which is a term used in the world I travel in quite a bit. The Presencing world is predicated on working with “social fields” and lots of facilitators talk about “sensing the field” and so on. In my experience the uses of the terms “field” feels like a softer, more approachable, but more mystical way of describing complexity in human systems. Some might call it a “fluffy bunny” approach to complexity, but anything applied without much rigour can be that.
Lewin’s work is really worth a long look. His work is important because it embeds human behaviour in a set of contexts that influence change and stability. This was pretty groundbreaking in Western thought especially thinking that was rooted in Cartesian theories of mind and behavioural psychology. Lewin called that context in which we are all embedded “the life-space” which represents a field of influences that creates what we might now call “affordances” for behaviour. Lewin’s work anticipates ecological psychology, the effects of trauma, anthro-complexity, systems theory and other approaches to organization, culture, and human behaviour.
The implications for this idea are pretty clear, and a 1991 paper by Malcolm Parlett called “Reflections on Field Theory” in the British Gestalt Journal articulates five principles of Field Theory that are quite useful for thinking about change. In that paper, Parlett reflects on five principles of Field Theory that are rooted in Lewin’s work and influenced by subsequent thinkers like Gregory Bateson, Gary Yontef and Carl Hodges. The principles are:
- The Principle of Organization which states that field are organized by what I would now call “constraints” and that changes to these organizing forces will result in changes to what happens within the field.
- The Principle of Contemporaneity says that what matters in the field is the present. While history helps to explain how the field is currently organized, there is no special causal weight given to actual events that have happened in the past. However, it is important to understand how a person in the present has made sense of those events because that is what guides behaviour. To me, this is an acknowledgement of the limitations of retrospective coherence for making sense of the present and also an important insight for trauma-informed practice.
- The Principle of Singularity which states that each situation is unique and therefore requires a unique response. This clearly acknowledges the limitations of best practices on dynamic fields. Generalizations are of limited use and every moment needs to be approached afresh to find the affordances of timing and opportunity that allow for some actions to be easier to accomplish than others.
- The Principle of Changing Process which acknowledges that the field is in constant change. This is why the metaphor of unfreezing – moving – refreezing is of such little utlilty. It is predicated on a knowable stability in a system that simply isnt’ present. If one’s change management strategy is predicated on that, one is walking into a dark alley of surprise with a dangerous and blissful assumption of certainty.
- The Principle of Possible Relevance which points to the fact that in an interconnected field of actors and effects, anything can be a locus for change. And because we just don;t know which points in a field will be the most relevant in any given time, Snowden’s approach of multiple, parallel safe-to-fail probes can teach us a lot about the potential for change that takes us in the desired direction of travel.
In 1991, I finished an honours thesis that tried to use several theories and approaches to traditional knowledge, postmodern ethnography, critical theory, sociology and organizational development theory to create a new way of looking at organizational culture in Indigenous organizations. It was admittedly a little pompous for an honours thesis. Still, it led me in the direction of curiosity toward complexity and epistemologies that were rooted in more holistic ways of knowing. It would have been great to have Parlett’s paper back then and a better understanding of Gestalt approaches, to make the case in the academy that such ideas were not ONLY rooted in the marginalized worlds of “traditional knowledge” at that time but were in fact a long-standing part of the western intellectual traditional of behaviour, culture, and action in organizations.
Ove the years I have been aware of Lewin’s influence in the fields in which I work, especially organizational development. But I have to confess that I didn’t take an active interest in his work because I saw how it was used, especially CATS. It turns out that Lewin never developed CATS as a theory, and his actual work is much more interesting, especially as a source of some of the vestigial ideas and language that is present in the “field” in which I work. His work deserves a broader reading for those of us wanting to ground our practices in the history of thinkers like him and Mary Parker Follett and others who dreamed us into being 100 years ago.
Part 1 is an introduction to this model.
In the first post on this model, I introduced the basic model. In this one, I want to explain the way I think about the lines and the spaces between them
The big moves
The “two loops” referred to in the model’s name refer to these two arcs that essentially represent the rise and fall of influence over time. In the original, as I encountered it, only the bottom arc had labels for four big movements of an emerging system. They were the original Name, Connect, Nourish and Illuminate, based on the movements named by Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley in a pamphlet called Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, which described the Berkana Institute’s approach to social change. The system took on a different form in each of these locations on the map. Naming was what “pioneers” (later changed to “innovators”) did. Innovators are in the wild, tinkering with new forms of being and not necessarily doing it with others. Once they create a shared identity – a name, like “Regenerative Economics” or “New Heretics” or “Decolonizers” – it is easier to find each other, and they can begin to connect. Connecting happens in Networks, where individuals connect and share information, usually pursuing their own ends. But when folks find each other and decide to team up, what can begin to emerge is a shared purpose and Nourishing that centre that, in addition to doing individual work, creates a Community of Practice. Get some big wins, and it might be possible that your community of practice evolves into a System of Influence which can Illuminate possibilities and hold the power and resources to help people transition from the old to the new.
It is always tempting to stigmatize the legacy system as run by a bunch of stuck-in-the-mud-old-timers who resist change. But truthfully, those who manage and lead the legacy system can often feel the same about the self-styled social innovators who want to “tear down everything around them” but haven’t yet understood what they are doing or what it takes to maintain something and even institutionalize it. So much intergenerational rancour comes from this dynamic. Naming the phases of the legacy system was an attempt to give it some recognition and respect. After all, the emerging system, if all goes well, will turn into exactly this kind of system, and in due course, will be replaced again. So it’s useful to know what it takes to keep a system in place to provide stability over time.
As systems begin to thrive and become predominant systems of influence, they attract leaders whose job is to steward and protect these systems and ensure continuity and stability. Banking systems, energy systems, and social systems that require a continuity of care of people all need good stewards who actually do their job by resisting massive changes. But there comes a time when all systems have outlived their usefulness and will begin to crumble. In this time, there is a decision point when it becomes clear that death is inevitable, and in that time, the best thing to do is welcome death by hospicing the system and helping it to die well. That means ensuring that folks can easily transition to the new system and that things that won’t make it over the bridge can compost well and be used as nutrients for the parts of the new system that require resources to get established.
Globally, we are in such a time right now with energy systems and economic systems too. There are also changes to democracy that are happening as authoritarianism and populism begin to erode democratic institutions and former democracies start to collapse into oligarchies, warmongering pariah states, and populist regimes incapable of robust governance.
The small moves
The two loops are constantly interacting on different scales and in different ways. The lines matter on this map, and so do the spaces. This is less a linear description of what happens next and more a map that can describe and illuminate what is needed at different times. So as we look at the small moves on the map, think about them and where the other loop is. Realize that the “higher” a loop gets, the more it tends to ignore the positions below it, whether those are inevitable parts of its future or the moves of the other system. Influence gives you privilege. The legacy system is rarely aware of how it came to power, what it took to grow, and indeed at what cost. Likewise, the emerging loop seems always to be aware of what the legacy loop is up to, but rarely has the full picture, and very often, people in the Name and Connect spaces often actively try to dissociate themselves from the legacy system, even as they continue to depend on it for their food, money, energy, services and institutional power. The whole
And so a healthy system has folks in all these places all existing simultaneously and actively engaging with other parts of the system. When I have people map themselves onto this diagram, I often see situations where it’s all just innovators or stewards. This represents a risk to efforts because it means that the cluster of people I am working with are not in a relationship with the world around them. They are likely to experience some catastrophic failure because they just can’t see what else is happening.
At any rate, we started naming different points on the map over many years of teaching and working with this model. These points represent leadership moves that are often required in this moment. Here’s a brief description of each, starting on the legacy system. Think of these labels as places where you are more likely to have conversations and where certain skill sets will be really welcome.
The Legacy system
The Stewarding phase of the legacy system is where leaders have conversations and undertake actions aimed at structuring, stablizing and resourcing operations. This is where institutionalization occurs, systems, policies and processes get formalized, and scaling is locked in. Innovation can continue to happen, but organizations here are generally invested in fail-safe planning rather than safe-to-fail planning. Risk is managed. These activities require good traditional managers, and a lot of the work here is done by people who traditionally fall into the “expert” class in the complicated domain of Cynefin.
Once the legacy system hits a peak, uncertainty begins to accelerate. This is a sensitive time in the legacy system because the rise of experts can often cause leaders to believe that we are immune from the changes that more volatile organizations suffer from. There is a desire to believe that everything we have done in the past will continue to work. At this point, you will feel the current stirring below you as the emerging loop takes shape. If you are engaged in good strategic scanning, you will have the situational awareness to know that the context is changing so being able to plan and work in multiple futures is very useful here. If you are a fossil fuel company, by the 1990s, if you hadn’t begun the transition to becoming “an energy company,” you were probably placing yourself at a massive disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, scenario planning was developed in industries like oil or the military, where operational uncertainty was causing established ways of doing things – along with massive amounts of wealth and lives – to be put at risk.
As the legacy system’s influence begins to fade, a period of struggle begins. Realists can see the writing on the wall. Denialists refuse to accept the evidence. Power complicates the conversations. If those who control resources refuse to accept the changes occurring, the system will be starved of what it needs just as it collapses. Collapse of the old in service of the new is inevitable. We see this with churches over the past 1900 years of Christianity. Forms of the church have come and gone over centuries while the religion has endured. Christians still gather around roughly the same stories and philosophies, but the form is very different. I have seen churches close and squander their legacy because those controlling the resources refused to accept this change. Promising that anything can be made great again is a form of denialism. If what you are really stewarding is life, purpose, the provision of energy, governance or services, then you can still do this in different forms in ways that help the transition from one for to the new. Still, only those who hold power and resources can see the writing on the wall. Hosting shadow and fear, working with emotionally charged conflicts and exercising a graceful use of power are all key leadership moves in this stage. Without this, a legacy system will experience a painful death at best, or cause a civil war at worst.
When the inevitable is largely accepted, hospicing, harvesting and honouring the system’s death is a kind thing to do. It allows those served by the system to move as easily as possible into the new emerging system. The Hospice and Transition phases go hand in hand, as anyone who has witnessed a good death will know. In the energy world, Just Transition is all about this. It is about letting go of the old ways we have powered the planet and ensuring everyone can cross over into the new ways. The kinds of backlashes we see to alternatives to fossil fuels are a good indicator that we are not yet in a health transition zone. Politicians and large financial interests will continue to hold on to their beliefs even at the cost of the planet’s health or the prosperity of their citizens. Watching the premier of Alberta rail against electrification is a betrayal of her responsibility to use her province’s creative and financial resources to continue providing energy and jobs to the world. Lines like “heat pumps don’t work in an Alberta winter and EVs are useless rural vehicles” are not rationales for abandoning electrification. Instead, they represent a failure of imagination that serves only to protect fossil fuel capital interests. The Alberta workforce, trained as it is in the infrastructure of oil and gas, is well placed to transition to industrial-scale electricty production in the province. Refusing to seek opportunities because you disagree with the premise is a great way to get left behind.
A seamless transition from one system to another requires a tone of stuff to go right. At the simple level it looks like the transition those of us in our 50s and older made from typewriters to personal computers. As long as computers ran on punch cards or other interfaces, they would not be widely used by the public. Creating a user interface that looked like the one on my typewriter meant that the transition from typing to word processing was pretty seamless. I love that my keyboard still has a “return” key. I doubt many folks in their 20s know why it is called that!
Transition in social systems like health and education and child welfare is really tricky, because you need to provide a continuity of care from one form to another. In Canada, the rise of public health care would have been a massive transition and doctors, hospitals, government bodies, and all the institutional support in place in the 1960s would have been needed to support the continued quality of care for patients even as the funding and governance models in the system were being transitioned from private to public. I’ve seen how tricky this is in providing Indigenous education, health, and child and family services. The necessity for a change to decolonize these fields is always urgent, but the pace needs to move at the speed of the clients.
When a legacy system really does die, the best thing that can happen is for the resources of that system to be repurposed and reused by the emerging system. Watching the rail system in North America be ripped up after trucks and highways became the primary ways of moving cargo across the land was heartbreaking. We are now in desperate need of rail corridors both within cities and between them and that means a massive reinvestment in re-creating infrastructure that we already had. Grieving what is gone and creating choices for what comes next is a beautiful way to support transition. In my work with large Foundations, I can see this happening. Money made in previous generations is held in trust for what comes next. If governments refuse to provide the support for innovation and development, foundations may be able to.
The Emerging system
While the legacy system is the dominant way of doing things there is always innovation happening in its midst. Folks must steward the legacy system aware of where the seeds of change are happening around them. Developing sophisticated sensing practices and being in active connection with folks who are not a part of the legacy system helps to ride the journey of living and dying well. The Naming phase oif the new happens when those labouring away outside of the mainstream find each other. These are often folks who have left the legacy system “walked out” or people who have been “left out” because they were never included in the first place. Those folks are always hard at work developing energy solutions, health care, new forms of food production or cultural revitalization. It is a lonely place until you find others to work with. THis is the world of safe-to-fail work and building prototypes of the new system. The trajectory of this curve is down to begin with because there is far more failure and frustration involved in large-scale innovation than when the legacy system is investing in incremental improvements. There are very few resources available; beyond that, the legacy system will often try to crush you. You might even find the heads of fossil fuel companies leading global conversations on climate change. While such power does need to be a part of the solution, everyone knows that the way to suppress a coup is to seize control over the process.
Naming alone doesn’t generate the ideas that are needed. Good relational work helps to keep people together during the struggle. Building trust and tolerating difference with grace is really important here. Any of us involved in social movements will know what lateral violence comes from the narcissism of small differences as social movements splinter and split like a Monty Python skit.
As innovators find each other and loose connections are woven together, networks start to form. Networks are powerful ways for individuals to support their purposes. Held well, a network enables the sharing of information and ideas, but it doesn’t sustain a level of stability without a central purpose. So when networks are created and supported to create new systems, keeping it together is an important move. That involves finding ways to repurpose resources from the legacy system that are finding their way into innovation, and it also means supporting people who have experienced many failed efforts at change.
When networks mature, and a shared purpose appears, Communities of Practice are the first inklings of new stability as an emerging system coalesces into a System of Influence. Communities of practice require participation and management, meaning that nascent structures that sustain the energizing purpose at the centre of the work start to appear. As Mary Parker Follett wrote 100 years ago, “common purpose is the invisible leader,” and indeed, it is that that requires continual Nourishment.
Increasing structure and stability creates more influence for new ideas invites others, and attracts the investment needed to make the new stable enough to be a destination for the Transition. So as these structures begin to appear, trustworthiness, experience, and security help a system to become the System of Influence that Illuminates possibilities and the opath forward. By now, choices have collapsed. Once a new energy source has been determined, others will likely fall away. Electric vehicles for example, are not new at all. Still, the internal combustion engine dominated the car market in the early 20th century by the way systems of power and resourcing became stabilized creating the economy of scale needed for these machines to become the default engines of our time.
Once the transition happens, the new system stabilizes and becomes the legacy system for the next cycle and on it goes.
Next, I’ll chart a bit of the model’s provenance and how I came to it. Like most of the tools and maps I work with, these are co-created by communities of folks making sense of their work in the world.
My laptop died this week after many years of faithful service. It is an example of something that was used and loved to death. This post is about the opposite.
On January 1, Steamboat Willie’s copyright protection finally lapsed. The Internet Archive posted a blog post about it.
Three days ago, they followed up that post with another about the implications of the ever-extending terms for copyright protection. In that article, these paragraphs caught my attention:
The time extension of copyright, from 14 to 28 to “75 years or life of the author plus 50 years” to the current “95 years or life of author plus 70 years” has been a rapid expansion that has swallowed many creative works, and, combined with automatic copyright, has effectively ended a long-rich and held system of creations that could reference near-contemporaries in their works beyond the scope of parody or (often disputed fair use). What was a rich environment is now a rather dry landscape.
The ramifications of this have been many, but one of the most striking has been preservation – with works whose corporate or anonymous creators are undetermined, there is very little incentive to invest in their upkeep and maintenance, meaning that many early works tend to disappear in percentages that are heartbreaking for their size: half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever [cite].
That excellent copies of Steamboat Willie still exist are owed mostly to Disney’s own efforts to keep their materials under control and locked down for nearly a century. Steamboat’s fellow members of the Class of 1928 will not, ultimately, be so lucky. Each successive year of items released into the public domain will have a few “stars” to make the news and receive the artistic references that Mickey is getting this month – but hundreds, maybe thousands of works from the same year may never again see the light of day.
This is an astonishing fact. Those who are hell-bent on hoarding cultural production in the name of protecting it are more likely to be the ones who actually kill it. I am in favour of artists being compensated for their work (and I am in favour of artists having a stake in each successive sale of their work, too). When artists own their own works and the rights to those works, it is in their interest to make them available on their terms. When large corporations own the rights, it is in their interest to exercise control, apparently to the point of neglect. That can result in tragedies like what happened in the Universal fire in 2008. (Here’s a free New York Times link to read: scroll down until you see the list of artists whose original recordings are gone forever).
If we want to protect the material culture of a place, it needs to be used, shared, interacted with and made available. Simply holding the rights and not the responsibilities is a form of cultural cruelty, like buying star footballers and sitting them on the bench. My heart skipped a beat when I read about how much has been lost.
Share what you have. The world needs your beauty, ideas and art.
I was struck by Daniel Miller’s research on Skerries, a small seaside town in Ireland which he discussed on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed podcast this week. The town he is describing is almost EXACTLY a match for Bowen Island, where I live right down to the demographics, the community dynamics and the fact that we don;t have a swimming pool, a theatre or a hotel and we do drink A LOT and have a cocaine problem. He wrote a book about his research but I was struck by the deep parallels between our two villages. In thinking about the commonalities it strikes me that the homogenous nature of our ethnic and age demographics, language, wealth levels, and isolation from but proximity to a major centre and the major constraints that generate such similar profiles on the surface of it. I can think of other places I’ve been too like Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia, Vankleek Hill in Ontario, Sooke, BC and probably Knowlton, Quebec that probably fit the bill too.
There is a reason for this consistency. The fact that two towns so far away on the globe exhibit such similar characteristics is remarkable but it is a testament to the power of global capitalism that created a class of English speaking upper middle class and wealthy people from similar professions and worldviews and fed us all memes (the original definition) that resonate with the lives we lead. Even the fact that I am subscribed to Thinking Allowed is a part of this phenomenon.
Folks in Mitchell County, North Carolina, working with stories of substance use to discover patterns and generate ideas for supporting folks in active addiction and recovery and prevention.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on what participatory leadership really looks like. I use the word a lot in my work – teaching participatory leadership and participatory decision-making – and of course, “participation” is one of the four practices of the Art of Hosting. Hosting meetings and contexts for large-scale work means creating the conditions for participation. And it means learning how to be a good participant.
Words like this are always in danger of being overused, but a couple of moments over the past few weeks has reaffirmed the radical nature of truly participatory design and decision-making.
We have just wrapped up a couple of Art of Hosting Participatory Leadership cohorts with in-person retreats followed by online sessions. For both cohorts – one from a group of 35 senior academic leaders at a large US university and one from a coalition of community health organizations – we did a three-hour online session on participatory decision-making. In both cases, what struck me in discussions with participants is where the heart of participatory decision-making actually lies. It is not enough to be “inclusive” in making decisions. The real work – and the real benefit – comes from an actively participatory process. Inclusion, on the face of it, while worthy in itself, has a kind of passive tone to it. I can say I have included you in a decision, and I can even let you have a vote, but have you participated in the decision? Have you had a chance to co-create what we are deciding upon?
In the right context, participatory decision-making is the most powerful way to create shared ownership over decisions. In this respect, the heart of participation lies not just in having a say in the final stages of a decision but in being a part of developing the proposals being voted upon. I was in North Carolina a few weeks ago working on a Participatory Narrative Inquiry project we’ve been running on substance use and opioids. We collected over 130 stories and, as is a key feature of PNI, ran sessions to bring the community in to make sense of what they were seeing and what needed to happen in their rural counties to address patterns of substance use and support recovery. One circle consisted of folks who were all in recovery or still in active addiction. It was immensely moving to witness them in their power, considering other people’s stories, reflecting on their own stories, and working together to not only generate ideas for local governments and health agencies but actually take the initiative to create spaces for young people to learn about addiction and recovery from those with lived experience. Their feedback was that healing and recovery look like THIS: being active participating members of their societies and communities, and yet that is something that is hardly afforded to anyone, let alone people recovering from addiction.
Perhaps I take it for granted, but on reflection, it seems to me that participation – deep, authentic co-creation – is becoming an increasingly radical act. Where I live, we tend to either consume what is offered to us or are passive participants in the social and cultural dynamics going on around us. What would you say if I ask you where you participate in the world, outside of the decisions you make for your own self or family? How many things do you do where your participation is important to the thing’s success?
Me, I make music, play soccer, help sustain supporter culture at a small semi-professional soccer club, help steward two faith-based communities and participate on teams for teaching and supporting organizations and communities. These are good practices because being a participant in the world is an important capability to keep strong. And if you are someone who hosts or leads participatory spaces and processes, it’s important to know what enables good participation and what it feels like to actively co-create.
But even still, I’m not an active participant in politics, for example, where my participation, such as it is, is minimal and even optional and yet the implications of what happens in the governance arena is deeply influential on my life.
Where are the places we can extend the continuum of participation from engagement to inclusion to participation to co-creation?
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A resource: Sam Kaner et. al. wrote perhaps the finest user guide to this work with the Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision Making. This is a useful and very sparse collection of maps, tools and insights to help facilitators and leaders create the conditions for more and more participation in their work. Sparse is a good thing. The book is full of tools that folks with even a small amount of facilitation experience can put to work. A Fourth Edition of the book is being prepared for the new year.