Analyse this...!
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.
I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.
Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.
Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.
The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.
In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.
Hard on the heels of Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley’s new book Walk Out Walk On comes a commissioned single from my mates Tim Merry and Marc Durkee by the same name. Tim and Marc have beenmaking poems and music for the past five years or so about the work we all do in the world. THis is a great sounding track, and covers what it is we do in a beautiful and inspiring way.
Just off a call where we were discussing what it takes to shift paradigms in indigenous social development. We noted that we hear a lot from people that they are busy and challenged and they need clear paths forward otherwise they are wasting their time.
I have a response to that.
We don’t know what we are doing. Everything we have been doing so far has resulted in what we have now. The work of social change – paradigm shifting social innovation – is not easy, clear or efficient. If you are up for it you will confront some of the the following, all of the time:
- Confusion about what we are doing.
- A temptation to blame others for where we are at.
- Conflict with people that tell you you are wasting their time.
- A feeling of being lost, overwhelmed or hopeless.
- Fear that if you try something and it fails, you will be fired, excluded or removed.
- Demands for accountability and reprimands if things don’t work out.
- Worry that you are wasting your time and that things are not going according to plan.
- A reluctance to pour yourself into something in case it fails.
- A reticence to look at behaviours that are holding you back.
Social change is not easy. Asking for it to be made easy is not fair. Leadership in this field needs to be able to host all of these emotional states, and to help people hold each other through very trying times. It is about resilience, the kind that is needed both when things fall apart AND when things take too long to come back together.
Everyone needs to be a leader here, everyone needs to recognize these states in themselves and hold others in compassion when they see them arising in others. Working with the emergent unknown requires pacing, a big heart, and a stout challenge. To create the experiments that help us forward we need to be gentle with judgment, but fiercely committed to harvesting and learning. We need to cultivate nuance, discernment, advocacy and inquiry rather than jumping to conclusions and demanding rational analytical responses to every situation.
You up for that?
My friend Michelle Holliday has been devoting her life the past few years to understanding living systems and bringing her learning to organizational settings. She’s been with us at two Art of Hostings and has brought a wonderful group to both events. Here is her slideshare on her recent thinking and above is a TEDxTalk she gave in Montreal. I love the way she sees hosting practices as pathways for action as organizations move to living systems approaches.
From an email sent to a friend of mine (a Mohawk, for context!) about the art of harvesting. It includes an uncited hat tip to the Cynefin framework, and focuses on his particular field of education:
Harvesting, as you know being from a tribe of long standing agrarian practice, (!) is constituted of all kinds of things. Mostly though, you need an artifact and a feedback loop. What is the tangible piece I can hold in my hand and point to, and how does it fold back into the system to create learning. many systems do well at harvesting the artifacts (evaluations, studies, reports) but do very little in creating an architecture for implementing the results. Think Royal commission. It’s the equivalent of harvesting the corn and then storing it on a shelf and inviting people over to come and look at it. Anyone in their right mind would call you crazy, but that is what passes for harvesting in the organizations and institutions of our day.
Within schools there is a special kind of problem with harvesting. When I work in organizations and communities I take great care to make sure that we harvest both the intentional results (evaluations against objectives and so on) AND the emergent results. If we are trying to do new things we need to work with the complex dynamics of emergence. Schools get stuck when they just look at how well the year went with respect to the goals they set out in the first place. It is a set of blinders that turns them away from emergent practice and limits innovation. You will not get much information about the new practices, instead you get a sense of best practices, which is fine but which, by definition, gets us stuck in the past.
The problem is that this analytical, reductionist view is driven in education by accountabilities which are more and more tight every year. Under the guise of spending tax dollars well, there is a real shackle being put on innovation and learning about new ways to do education. Much of the innovations is happening therefore in the private sphere, but the results aren’t being brought to public education. This is BAD harvesting. If someone has figured out a better way to grow corn (what if we planted beans and squash along side the corn?) but didn’t share it or have any way for that information to get to those that need it, well, that’s not working. People go hungry when they don’t have to, and that is happening in education. I’ll bet when you go to conferences mostly you hear about how well people are meeting their targets and you get presentations on best practices. But you are probably not hearing about the trials and tribulations of experiments that fail.
Evaluating emergence and creating the conditions for SAFEFAIL experiments (as opposed to the fail safe plans that every school authority wants) requires a very different mindset. Instead of “merit and worth evaluation” people are starting to use methodologies like developmental evaluation which works with emergence and complexity. I think you need both, and not to privilege one over the other.
At any rate, this is a long conversation obviously, but it comes down to a couple of things:
1. Start with understand what aspects of your work are simple, complicated or complex.
2. Choose in advance a harvesting methodology for each of these three domains.
3. Choose in advance a strategy for using the harvest from these domains.
4. Build a harvesting strategy into the work up front, as a key piece of design.
And as a special treat, here is an hour of me teaching harvesting at a recent Art of Hosting in Calgary.