Was in a quick coffee conversation this afternoon with one of our local artisan metal workers on Bowen Island. He has been fascinated by bicycles for a long time and is thinking about how to build one that fits his 6’6″ frame. He has been scouring the net for information about building oversized wheels, and has decided that, as much as people are already doing it, there is something to be learned from “reinventing the wheel.”
Occasionally innovation has to go back to first principles. Often in the group work I do there are two approaches to innovation: stand on the shoulders of giants or reinvent the wheel. Both these approaches have some validity.
Almost anything you can think of doing has been done before by others. That doesn’t mean that “best practices” can be easily applied from one context to another, but knowing that someone somewhere has taken on the hard work of pioneering innovation – be it a product, a tool, an approach or a design – helps us to jump off from a starting point.
But sometimes going back to the beginning can be fruitful too. Often groups who have the time and resources can benefit from starting from scratch, thinking about how they could redesign what they were looking for if they had to do it from first principles. Groups that do that become resilient and build capacity, but it takes more time, and people will often accuse you of being inefficient.
I wouldn’t throw out either approach in doing innovative work. Be conscious about which approach will best serve and assemble the resources you need to build out from there.
SItting here with Geoff Brown and Steven Wright at the World Indigenous Housing Conference here in Vancouver. We are on the back end of what has been a terrific gig.
We were hired by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association of BC to facilitate dialogue at this 800 person international gathering. The sponsor made dialogue a clear priority and after talking about intentions, we arrived on the design of three World Cafes: one in the plenary with everyone present and two in more focused breakout sessions. The first cafe would look at stories of success, the second would think about how to build capacity to support success and the third was focused on institutional development. each one built on the last.
The theme of the conference was “Sharing our Stories, Sharing our Successes.” With that theme to play with, we knew the cafes needed to be about connecting people and ensuring that stories were central to the work. Our first challenge was to think about how to harvest stories and connections quickly from 800 people. We looked at several tech solutions and realized that we needed something simple, unobtrusive and accessible. The ubiquitous tool at hand was the text equipped smart phone. Almost everyone has one, and almost everyone can text. Our basic problem was first how to gather text messages and second how to make meaning from them quickly. Geoff, Steven and I were familiar with Wordle.net which makes a word cloud out of blocks of text, and which I have used in the past to get a visual and intuitive sense of what concepts and words are weighted highly.
So our question became, how can we combine smart phones, text messages and wordle?
Through our networks we found Luke Closs, a local developer/hackerwho put together a simple solution that he called “Text to Cloud.” At the back end he connected Twillio to world using an interface that we could control with commands sent by text message. groups of texts that come in can be tagged and sorted and then sent straight to Wordle for processing. We also enabled the software to produce a CSV output that we can use for other purposes. Luke was great, developing the tool right up to the moment that his daughter was born on Tuesday. Of course, the tool is open source and you can find it on Github, download and install it and use it for yourself.
Armed with Text to Cloud, we began our first cafe by inviting people to text in the name of their tribe of origin. We created an instant wordle that showed who was in the room. That immediately connected people together (and showed we were blessed with Crees!)./ Following that we had people enter into the cafe to start telling stories of successes with listeners paying attention to the factors that made those successes possible. People gathered information on tablecloths and texted in wisdom and insights and by the end of the cafe we had 438 text messages to make meaning from. We had a half hour to do something with all this.
So we sent it all to Wordle and discovered a theme: Building Homes, Building Communities and Building Nations. There were six key areas we needed to think about for capacity building: governance, building, partnerships, community, education and ownership. Steven whipped up a digital mind map which we projected on our screens. We invited people at each table to choose one of the topics and dive into stories of capacity building. In our third cafe, we thought about how institutions can support sustained capacity building.
By the end of the day we were soaking in flip chart paper, but we had some great high level meaning through the Text to Cloud output, the wordles and the developmental nature of the conversation. We retreated to Steven’s room and started trying to figure out how to share what we had learned. We realized early on that there was absolute gold on the flip charts, so we decided to create a presentation that combined what Geoff calls “vox pops” – short pithy and insightful comments – along with longer stories. While Steven created a map to chart the highlights, Geoff and I prepared a slideshow that touches on the headlines. Our plan this afternoon is to call the storytellers up to the stage to share their stories with the audience. They are the true key notes.
This gig has been fun. Our client has been fantastic, we’ve created new tools, connected people doing important work, pushed our own edges and done stuff we’ve never done before, and that we could never have done alone. It was a superb co-creative experience and a great way to spend time with good friends.
I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision. It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours shouting and fighting with each other.
The team I was working with are trying to reinvent the way this community is engaged. We used a lovely redux of Peter Block’s work to help frame our conversation about design and implementation. A few things stood out for this group with respect to Peter’s work.
Changing the room changes the conversation. We talked a lot about the fact that changing engagement starts in this room and in this moment because this room IS the community. When we dove in about what was missing from the way the community engages it was clear that the ownership piece was the biggest one. As in many community meetings the way people traditionally engage is with passion that is directed outward. There is an expectation that someone else needs to change. We joked about the sentiment that says “I’ll heal only after every else has healed!” It was a joke but the laughter was nervous, because that statement cuts close to the bone. So we DID change the room and decided to hold a World Cafe. gathered around smaller tables, paper in the middle, markers available for everyone to write with…
So how do you begin a meeting with people who are invited to take up the ownership of the outcome? I am not a fan of giving people groundrules, because as a facilitator it puts me in the position of enforcer, and gives people an out for how the behave towards one another. So instead we considered the question of what it looks like when people are engaged. What stood out is how people “lean in” to the centre of the conversation. So the question became, how do we get people to lean in right away and take ownership of the centre?
The solution was simple but was later revealed to have tons of power. At the outset of the cafe as I was introducing the process I gave the following instructions:
“That paper in the middle is for all of you to use, as are the markers. We want you each to record thoughts and insights that other need to hear about. So before we begin I invite you to pick up a marker and write your name in front of you. <people write their names>. Now I want to invite you to answer this question: what is one thing you can do to make sure that this meeting is different? Write your answer beneath your name.”
People took a moment to write their names and their commitments. And they shared them with each other at the table. That is how we began.
The first round of conversation proceeded as usual, but I noticed something very powerful in the second round. When everyone got up and moved around they took a seat in someone else’s place, and often the first thing they did was to read the name and the commitment that was in front of them. Can you imagine coming across the name of someone who you have a disagreement with only to see that they have written “I won’t fight anymore” beneath their name? The core team is now going through all of the tablecloths and making a list of the commitments that people made. Taken on their own, they form a powerful declaration of willingness.
People reported that this was the best meeting the community had in a long time. And it had a lot to do with this tiny intervention of public ownership for the outcomes.
Here is a little diagram of the chaordic stepping stones mapped onto Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation. This is a pretty geeky Art of Hosting map, but essentially it describes the way planning unfolds in practice.
The chaordic stepping stones is a tool I use to do a lot of planning. These nine steps help us stay focused on need and purpose and design our structure and outcomes based on that. the first four steps of Need, Purpose, Principles and People are essential elements for the design of an invitation process. Getting clear on these steps helps us to generate purpose, questions and an opening for good participatory process to flow.
The next three steps of Concept, Limiting Beliefs and Structure help us to think about how we will organize ourselves to hold space for emergence. This becomes especially important in the Groan Zone, the place where a group is struggling with integration of ideas, diversity and creativity and where they feel lost and tired. Good process helps us to hold a group together through that struggle.
The last two steps, Practice and Harvest, help us to shape our outcomes, create a process for impact and create useful artifacts and documents of our learning process that can help others to continue the conversation.
The chaordic stepping stones are a design tool, meaning that we think through all of them at the outset of an initiative, and refine them as circumstances change. This diagram shows how they become active through the life of a process.
First of all there is no such thing.
Second, a friend asked me the question “What is the idea group size for collaborative process?” and in trying to answert the question I emailed him the following (please note that this is all off the top of my head, and in practice I usually go with intuition, relying more on patterns than rules):
Innovation generally starts with individuals, so I like to build time into to processes for people to just be quiet and think for a bit. Small groups can help refine and test good ideas, and large groups can help propagate ideas and connect them to larger patterns. In small group work, in general, working with an odd number is helpful because it creates an instability that keeps the group moving. If you want solidity, you work with even numbers. So it goes like something this:
1 = innovation, idea generation, inspiration and commitment
2 = Pairs are good for long and exploratory conversations, interviews, and partnering
3 = Good number for a small team to rapidly prototype a new idea
4 = A good number for a deep exploration. You benefit from having two pairs together, and from having a little more diversity in the group than in two.
5 = good number for a design team; there is always an instability in a group of five and good diversity, but the group is not so large that people get left out.
6 = Good for noticing patterns, and summing up. A group of six can be entered from three pairs coming together as well, allowing for insights gathered in pairs to be rolled up.
7 = At this scale we are losing the intimacy we need for conversation, and so generally I will work a group of seven into 3 and 4 if we need to break up.
8 = is too big. And it is no coincidence that big conferences are boring, because most hotels have tables that can accomodate 8, 9, or 10 people which is too many for real conversation. At these scales, people start to be able to dominate and introverts dry right up.
It is a good practice to use a huge group (like in the dozens or hundreds) to source the diversity that is needed for good dynamic small groups, and then to find ways to propagate ideas from the very small to the very large.