The difference between what's whole
and what's held, what's withheld
or revealed, what's real and what's
revelation - that's what I seek,
rest of my life spent in search
of little epiphanies, tiny sparks surging out of the brain during the clumsiest speech. - Allison Joseph from Little Epiphanies It feels like that, combing through stories, looking through graphs and charts and frameworks to find the little insights that spark the little actions that spark the little changes that might topple the biggest dragons. (Poem published today at whiskey river)
Yesterday was spent working with my friend and colleague Ciaran Camman yesterday on a design for a workshop on evaluation in complexity. We had the utter joy of being able to be together, having a high bandwidth human experience, which enabled us to really dive into some interesting existential questions after which we were famished and so we retreated to Kulinarya Filipino Eatery for dinner, feasting on Crispy Binagoongan and Batil Patong.
The food was great and as usual our conversation wandered all over the place and at some point – possibly when we were standing outside a small rehearsal space listening through an open window to a jazz combo swinging nicely inside, the thought came to me: “forget about your theory of change…what is your theory of stability?”
It occurred to us that in the non-profit and philanthropic world, we are constantly asked for a theory of change which is intended to explain how our intervention will change things for the better. There is a trap in this of course, that these theories are often linear and predictive, which is the antithesis of complexity as a theory of change, and in fact, in most cases the only answer to the question “Please describe your theory of change?” should rightly be “complexity.” I even wrote a post about that once which should serve as a companion to this one.
Interestingly however, I have never heard anyone ask “What is your theory of stability?” and that strikes me as a fundamental question to address fs one is to be making change, especially in a complex system. For instance, if you are looking at a set of unhealthy patterns in a system, like racial discrimination or persistent and chronic poverty or disparate health outcomes among different populations, it strikes me as really important that you talk about WHY you think those situations are stable over time. What is your theory about what keeps them in place? This is important because what you believe about how to create stability will affect HOW to design and act to create new stability. And that can be fraught with category errors.
To me this is where the work around constraints really hits home. And so to recap, typically I introduce this work with folks as:
- Connections. Links between agents in a context
- Exchanges. What flow across the connections between agents and how it flows.
- Attractors. The forces in a system that inspire or influence patterns of behaviour
- Boundaries. The forces that create a context or a container for behaviour
When we spot stable patterns in a system, we can look at the constraints that are keeping them in place and try changing one or more to see what kinds of results we get. That is the essence of complexity as a theory of change. But what is the mechanism used to create stability?
Cynefin is helpful here as it describes different types of systems and different kinds of ways to both make change AND to stabilize things. So here is a Cynefin framework with the constraints and action language rephrased to help us think through a theory of stability for a project:
As always, knowing which domain you are working in will help you think about how the problem you are working on is constrained. From there, I think it’s worth asking “How do you think the stability in this situation is functioning?” It is very important to note that if you are indeed working in complexity, you need to avoid taking action to disrupt and stabilize the system as if you are working in the complicated domain. Is that situation really be held together by someone who is controlling things and pulling the strings?
The question is not “What is the root cause of the fentanyl crisis?” but rather “What is maintaining the stability of the fentanyl crisis? And how?” One could be tempted to answer something like “someone is controlling the drug supply, or is actively preventing us from making that supply safer.” In complexity, your theory of stability is as much a hypothesis as your theory of change, and it seems crucially important that we begin change initiatives by also questioning whether we have the stability mechanisms right. In a complex and emergent context it is highly unlikely that the emergent phenomena that we are trying to change are produced by a single actor doing a single thing. And yet, I recognognize the seduction of that thinking, which critically influences the action I will take.
So that’s important for starting, but a theory of stability is alos critical for understanding how any positive work done in the initiative will be sustained. Funding cycles, for example, are powerful periodic attractors for change making meaning that they often dictate the time frame in which a problem needs to be solved and they alos dictate the pace and cadence of the work to solve it. They also dictate the stability strategy.
Many foundations are happy to fund a community group that is aiming to double literacy rates in vulnerable communities and will support a set of interventions to do so. But when the goal is hit, the work doesn’t end, and who is willing to invest in a stability strategy that is also complex? High literacy rates are maintained in some places not because there is a well funded literacy program. Literacy is an emergent outcome of privilege and wealth, among other constraints, that help maintain a stable pattern of high degrees of literacy. There are certainly deeper and less visible constraints that enable concentrations of wealth and privilege including historical policy choices that limit access to housing finances, like redlining certain neighbourhood and people to restrict their access to credit.
So when you find practices that support increased literacy rates, what are the constraints that you can work with to enable the continued emergence of these outcomes? And what happens if, after the intervention funding ends, the needle starts turning downward again?
So I’m just thinking out loud here but the takeaway from this post is this:
- Think about your theory of change
- Think about what domain your work lies in.
- Look at the patterns you are trying to change and ask why they are stable to begin with.
- Test ideas to shift these patterns AND test your ideas about stability.
- Consider changing not only the conditions of the system you are working with, but also changing the ways by which beneficial patterns are stabilized and maintained.
Thoughts?
It’s an old post by Henry Mintzberg from 2015 but he tweeted it out today and the message is as current as ever. If Mintzberg is retweeting seven year old essays, it’s probably worth paying attention to them. Here’s the essence:
Someone I know once asked a most senior British civil servant why his department had to do so much measuring. His reply: “What else can we do when we don’t know what’s going on?” Did he ever try getting on the ground to find out what’s going on? And then using judgment to assess that? (Remember judgment? It’s still in the dictionary.)
Measuring as a replacement for managing has done enormous damage—undermining the souls of so many of our institutions (as discussed in last week’s TWOG). Think of how much education has been killed by assuming that we can measure what a child learns in a classroom. (I defy anyone to measure learning. You are reading this TWOG: please measure what you are learning.) Must we always deflect teaching from engaging students to examining them?
The principle of “bounded applicability” is one that I first learned from Dave Snowden (and one which Sonja expands on here). Measurement ticks all the boxes for pretending that the world is objectively knowable, and that anything can be quantified. in fact there are indeed probably HR consultants out that that will give you a quantitative analysis of your organizations culture.
Actually I just went down the rabbit hole looking for examples. I’ll save you the trouble. That is to peer into hell. Please do so only at your peril.
Sometimes when I’m teaching Cynefin i will say something about the boundary between Complicated and Complex problems that goes something like this: “The line between these two kinds of systems is important because there is a strong urge to use methods from the complicated domain to “solve” problems in the complex domain, and if you do that, you can create a world that hates humans. There is actually a really easy way to reduce the homeless population to 0, but not if you have an iota or morality in your character.” The most dehumanizing thing to do is to treat cultures, and people, and living human systems strictly by the number, as empirical units of problem or success, to be increased or eliminated. The peril we are in if AI starts making decisions about our lives is that these ways of working are devoid of ethics, or more frighteningly, they are reliant on the ethics of those who program them. Elon Musk’s acquisition of twitter for it’s massive semantic database should have us all wary of technology that learns from that data set.
imposing the ruthless methods of the complicated work onto the complex world is one way we map colonization onto the Cynefin framework. In complexity, culture is what matters and culture is produced by the countless interactions between people creating shared meaning from their stories and experiences. To the complicated system, all this meaning is noise that contributes to an inefficient waste of time and energy. But the energy produced by inefficiency in the complex domains produces warmth, human connection, community, society, relationship Community is inefficient. Thank god.
Long live the inefficient community. And long live measurement by the numbers, firmly nestled into the complicated domain where it can do the most good. And the least harm.
Laureen Golden is one of those people that is able to just get me talking. From the first time we met back in 2015, she and I have had dozens of great conversations about complexity, facilitation, participatory design and leadership. I’ve supported her in her work with leaders and Montessori educators and also in teaching a course on system work and trauma.
Here are a couple of offerings from her YouTube channel, where she has edited some of our conversations into teaching pieces that we are happy to share with you
- A playlist of four short videos on working with complexity in trauma. These interviews were for a series called “Looking at Systems with a Trauma-Informed Lens” taught at Portland State University.
- Introduction to Participatory Narrative inquiry. A short interview with Montessori educator Jacqui Miller where I talk about using story to make sense of the world. Here I talk about why we work with anecdotes and story fragments and how PNI helps us to gather information for collective sensemaking about our world and how we should act. If you want to learn more about PNI, Cynthia Kurtz shares all her resources here, and I’m told she’s thinking of making a workshop for deeper learning, for which I cannot wait.
Enjoy these offerings.
For much of the past few years my facilitation and evaluation practice has been steadily merging together. When I FINALLY came across Cynthia’ Kurtz’s body of work, Participatory Narrative Inquiry a few years ago, I felt simultaneously validated and challenged. Validated in that the participatory facilitation work I have been doing since I stumbled on Open Space Technology in 1995 met the complexity work I have been in since 2005 and the developmental evaluation work I’ve been doing for the past ten years. Challenged in that it opened up new streams for my practice, and that has been gratifying.
Nowadays I regularly do story gathering as a part of all my projects. I use online tools like NarraFirma, Spryng or Sensemaker and sometimes pen and paper approaches. In a future blog post perhaps I’ll name some of the projects we’ve been doing with these tools and how they have contributed to our work.
Today in a conversation about getting started with stories, someone asked about how to get a bunch of perspectives from throughout to company on a new phase in a company’s evolution. I responded with a simple approach to PNI. You can use this to get started with a group.
- You want to begin by collecting stories, not running a workshop where everyone tells you what they think are the issues. That approach tends to get everyone prepared to advocate for their own position. So try this simple approach. Do a little questionnaire, using Google Forms for example. Ask participants to “share a story of something that happened lately that made you think: ‘we need to address this issue…'” Get everyone in the organization to enter one story, a few sentences. On the form then ask them a) how common do you think this is in our organization and b) what is one thing we could do to address that issue?
- Now you have a collection of grounded stories and a bunch of material you can use to host some more interesting strategic sessions. Convene some meetings and give people the stories to look at, maybe separated into common and rare, and have them look at the material and work together to create ways of addressing the issues.
- There are many things you can do with these stories, but the principle is “Use the harvest to convene the conversation.” From that the conversation can produce a harvest of things to try to address the issues you discover.
The advantage of this is that everyone’s voice gets in the mix, and everyone has a chance to interpret their own stories and then interpret what other people’s stories might mean. This generates massive engagement.
I really appreciate Cynthia’s clear writing on this and offer you this quote from work as a heuristic in your own planning and design:
In my experience, the greater the degree of participation the stronger the positive impact of any project that involves people and aims to improve some situation faced by those people. I have also noticed that some forms of participation are easier to manage than others. So I generally encourage people planning projects to think about taking one more step up the staircase of participation, wherever they find themselves now; but I order the steps so as to make the transition more feasible in practice.
If you are asking people to tell you stories, why not ask them what their stories mean?
If you already do that, why not ask people what the stories other people told mean?
If you already do that, why not ask people to build something with their stories? Why not ask them what that means?
If you already do that, why not ask people if they can see any trends in the stories that have been told?
If you already do that, why not ask people to design interventions based on the stories they have told and heard?
Then, why not ask people to help you plan new projects?And so on. As you step up, keep watching your project to see if increasing participation is making it better. If it stops making the project better (for the people you are doing the project to help), stop increasing the participation. Wherever you find yourself is participatory enough. For now.