Working with Complexity Inside and Out
We are getting excited about our Complexity Inside and Out program which starts on April 13 and runs to June 15, every Thursday in the afternoon for the Pacific timezone, early evening in the Eastern time zone and late evening in western Europe. The course will cover:
- Characteristics of complexity and foundation practices for working with them
- Identifying and working with patterns
- Working with constraints to shift sticky situations and unsolvable problems
- Complexity-based tools for shifting inner systems (limiting beliefs, fears other mental gymnastics that keep us locked in unhelpful patterns)
- Evaluation and participatory narrative inquiry
- Using the Cynefin framework for decision making
…and more. This program will serve you well if you are a facilitator working with groups in complex situations, a leader, a community worker, a strategist, a researcher, or a teacher. Or just a human who is curious about how the world works and is developing a practice for working with it.
We have some great folks coming into the cohort from around North America including people working on racial equity in public health and people responsible for quality and change in a province-wide child and family services system. The conversation and practice opportunities will be rich. Come and learn together! Come with a team and we’ll give you a discount!
You can register here. Drop me an email if you want more information.
The Art of Hosting
Our annual west coast Art of Hosting is taking shape for the fall and we are hoping to return it to Bowen Island. The team of Caitlin Frost, Kris Archie, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and I are looking forward to welcoming you back here. Get on the waitlist now, as space is limited and tends to fill quickly. We’ll announce the dates soon. Sign up here.
Other training from friends
I have many great colleagues out in the world doing cool stuff. here’s a listing of some other upcoming learning opportunities
March 18
The global Art of Hosting practitioner community has a full 24-hour day of events that will be happening online. I’ll be participating and you should come too. It’s free. Check it out here.
March 30
My colleague Amanda Fenton, who is one of the best I know of in using online tools for harvesting is offering a two-hour introduction to the current state of online harvesting tools. This is not to be missed if you want to level up your harvesting game.
June 2
Amande will be joining Michelle Laurie for Engaging Beyond Words (in BC, Canada or online option, it’s a hybrid offering). The focus is on using visuals to help increase understanding and learning; retain information.
July 13-14
Michelle will be leading her annual Graphic Facilitation intensive in Rossland, BC, Canada. If you want to increase engagement at your meetings, help plan with people in a collaborative way, be more creative and generally help people make sense of complex ideas, and see the bigger picture, this hands-on workshop does this!
This is a picture of me, puzzling something out.
I’m about a third of the way through a 20-week Participatory Narrative Inquiry practicum with Cynthia Kurtz. We’ve been spending a lot of time talking about story, and story collection, because that is a really important aspect of generating the magic. As Cynthia said today “magic is amazing but all the folktales will tell you that it is always supposed to be hard.”
Today she shared an old blog post on the work being “too hard” and it’s worth quoting in depth:
Story work is hard. It is not clean or clear or simple. It is high input, high risk and high output. I find there is a tendency, probably common to all human beings, to jump past the first two parts of that sentence and pay attention only to the last part: high output. But all three parts are equally important. If input is not high enough — yours and every participant’s — or if things go wrong, the potentially high output of story work could be low or nonexistent, or even negative. Nobody should work with stories in organizations or communities without a full awareness of this fact. The reason story work digs deeper than other methods of inquiry is the same reason it is more likely to fail than other methods of inquiry. It is hard because it is good, and it is good because it is hard.
All of this makes working with stories hard to popularize. It’s not an approach that spreads like wildfire. I’d rather it be slow than wrong, and I’m not in any hurry to change the world, so I don’t mind if the majority of people stand off and view story listening from a distance…
…soak yourself in stories. Why? First, because before you have a good long soak in stories you can’t see the values they bring to inquiry, so you can’t sustain the high input required. Second, because until you understand the life of stories you won’t know where to place your high input, and you won’t know where the risks lie. Like a gardener who tries to grow food without learning to love the soil, you will bring failure upon your own efforts. Most of the people I’ve seen come to story work from other fields have not been willing to be with thousands of stories and learn how they live. They just want results, and that’s part of why they get frustrated. They aren’t in the world of stories to settle down, just to visit. But the world of stories doesn’t open itself to casual visitors. Only the locals know the soil, and only the locals grow the best tomatoes.
This has been my experience too. The amazing insights that come from working with stories together are like magic, but it is a lot of work to get it going and make it sing.
In our Complexity from the Inside Out program, we do a session on evaluation, looking at some of the implications that complexity has for traditional models of monitoring and evaluation. This is especially an issue in the non-profit world where organizations find themselves managing complexity while being subject to requirements from funders that treat their operations as if they were ordered and predictable.
It is common for participants in these sessions to ask the question “Complexity is all good, but how do we actually deal with the funding bodies that want us to measure everything and create targets?”
Well, this report from a series of conversation convened by the UN Development Program offers a helpful starting point for having these conversations with funders. Here are some of their framing questions:
- How can we measure in ways that enable and incentivize learning and adaptation?
- For whom and why do we measure (recognizing that measurement is often an extractive activity done to satisfy a donor rather than something with the primary objective of learning and empowering local change agents)?
- What should we measure when we are just starting out (e.g. at the intervention design stage) given we may not know what solutions or success will look like? What is the role of baselines and how do we change measures as we learn and adapt?
In my experience, having these conversations early on is critical so that a grantee working on a complex project and their funders can create an evaluation approach that is coherent with the work they are doing. In this article you will find many good conversations starters and framing ideas to help start this co-creation without alienating anyone in the conversation. It pays to meet people where they are at, and that includes funders and folks that are wedded to ordered approaches to evaluating change work despite the reality that those approaches might not work, or even be harmful, to a complex project.
I just came across this tiny short story “On Exactitude in Science” written by Juan Luis Borges. Enjoy.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
“On Exactitude in Science”by Luis Borges
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
Brilliant. Thanks to Qamar Zaman at EPIC for pointing me to this story.
My friend Marcus Jenal published his latest weekly newsletter in which he muses over a few questions related to complexity, strategy and taking a stance. He doesn’t have a comments section enabled on his blog (hint! hint!) so I’m going to respond a bit to what he wrote here and we can have a conversation in this space.
Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature of being human we will never reach a place of ‘pure’ unbiased understanding. So we need to strike a balance between self-critical reflection and believing that we found some ground that is solid enough to step on and move forward.
It’s like the metaphor of crossing a river on foot. We make a careful step to check if the next stone is stable enough to step on or not. If it is, we make the step and then check which direction we can go from there. If we get stuck, we move a few steps back. But if we never trust the stability of the next stone, we will not move at all. And yes, sometimes we might fall into the water but that’s ok. We can pick ourselves up and start again.
This is one of the biggest blocks I see with folks who are new to complexity work. There is a tension – a polarity even – between needing to move and needing to know. I think that tension is generated by standard problems solving practices that begin with the Cynefin framework’s Ordered Systems formula of “SENSE – ANALYSE – RESPOND.” You start by gathering information you can about the system, have an expert analyse the data and tell you what to do, chart out a path forward and then execute. That is what most problem solving in business and organizational life looks like and it permeates design thinking and action practice.
When I’m teaching people to work in complexity, it’s good to use tools and metaphors that draw on their own experiences in the rest of their life. I am firmly of the belief that human beings are innate complexity workers but our organizational life squishes those capacities out of us, or relegates them to the sidelines of our non-work lives, to hobbies, games, parenting, gardening, cooking, art, and other activities of daily life. In places where we are safe to fail, we can try all kinds of things at our own pace and comfort. We are not paralysed by the fear that someone will yell at us for getting it wrong, or worse, we will be fired, demoted, or thought less of. So many organizations and leaders I work with are paralysed by fear. Ofet they figure out how to download that fear on to their teams and always have someone else to blame if things go wrong. That’s a lot of the work we do when trying to open up leadership practice.
“Why are we stuck?” ask many leaders. “How do you reward failure?” I ask in return. And thus begins the conversation.
These days I just point people to this EXCELLENT Liz and Mollie cartoon to illustrate this:
So yes. We need to act without information. We take up some, have a sense of where we want to go, and then move and the cycle begins.
That leads to the second part of Marcus’s post:
I am re-watching the two conversations between Nora Bateson and Dave Snowden on ‘When meaning looses its meaning’ (Session 1, Session 2) together with a group of friends who are both interested in Nora’s and Dave’s work. We are having fabulous discussions after watching bits of the conversations. While Nora and Dave try hard to agree with each other, of course they have their differences. And these differences are somehow reflected in my own thinking about how to be and act in the world, which I’m expressing in my weekly emails – particularly the dilemma of if/when/how to act. In very strongly simplified terms, Nora advocates for broad, open, purposeless spaces to make connections and relationships that will then sprout into change in whatever way, while Dave sees the possibility of catalysing certain attractors and shifting certain constraints in a more intentional / purposeful way so that new, more desirable things emerge (he calls this ‘nudging’ the system). While it is more obvious with Dave, both have an idea of how a more desirable world would look like: more people would accept that ecological and complexity thinking are better ways to engage with the world than industrial linear thinking. Both, Nora and Dave, take a stance, which allows them to become thought leaders.
It has been lovely watching Nora and Dave dance together and as Marcus rightly identifies, the differences, held in a generative tension, are the interesting bits. I think the tension about direction of travel that Marcus has seized on here is an important polarity to navigate in complexity work.
Direction of travel matters. Call it a moral compass, call it a shared purpose, a shared vision, or a sense of what is right and good, but INTENTION, as Alicia Juarerro will tell you, matters. It serves as an attractor for action and so if you are planning to move, you better be aware of your intention, especially if you think you are just hanging out in a purposeless space. In complexity, there is no space that is free from context. If I am just hanging around with a soft gaze waiting to explore something, that is not an empty space of thinking. My eyes and ears and heart are conditioned and constrained by my history. And that is why Nora’s ideas of “warm data,” as I understand them, are helpful. It helps to populate the purposeless space with enough diversity and possibility that it can be intentionally purposeless.
I learned that a long time ago when I was thinking about Bohmian dialogue in the context of alos developing my practices of invitation. Bohmian dialogue is intentionally open, and, as Harrison Owen once said, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.” That is true and it is alos true that there is always intention in the invitation, and whoever comes has arrived there by virtue of the history of connections that led them to discovering and responding the the invitation. Spaces can be open, but they are never unbounded. Awareness of the boundary conditions is helpful for understanding what is possible and why what happened was “the only thing that could have.” Complex systems have history and that history matters.
So I think this difference that Marcus has found presents us with a nice space to manage within when we are working in complex systems. A range of openness of direction of travel from broad to narrow. At a certain point if you treat the direction of travel like a target you have drifted into the complicated domain in Cynefin, which is fine, if that is truly what you are doing. But targets are not the same as vectors and they inspire very different patterns of behaviour.
Oh and on Marcus’ last question…
PS: I’m not 100% sure what the difference is between ‘taking a stance’ and ‘taking a stand’. Even English native speakers could not really explain it to me consistently.
…I answered him by email saying essentially that a “taking a stance” is a position that you take to prepare for action, and you optimize your ability to engage well to whatever is coming. It’s preparing to move. “Taking a stand” is getting ready not to be moved, to dig in and resist whatever is coming. One could even say it’s another way of thinking about the resilient vs. robust form of dealing with change.