When I was up in Whitehorse last week I got to spend time with folks from the Public Service Commission discussing a project that would see us looking at discriminations in the workplace from a complexity angle. Using Cynefin and SenseMaker(tm), we hope to understand the ways in which the landscape of discrimination shifts and changes over time so that the PSC can make wiser decisions about the kinds of initiatives it sculpts. One of the problems with diversity initiatives in the public service (in any large public organization really) is the feeling that they need to be broad based and rolled out to everyone. This usually results in a single initiative that spreads across the whole organization, but except for a little awareness raising, does little to address specific instances of discrimination. Everything from awareness raising “cultural competency training” to zero tolerance accountability measures have limited effect because a) discriminatory behaviour is highly context and situation dependant and b) the public service has a permeable boundary to the outside world, meaning ideas, behaviours and people move between the two contexts all the time. The larger your organization, the more like the real world you have to be.
At any rate, I took a bit of time to do a mini-Cynefin teaching to explain how strategy works in the complex domain. and my friend Pawa Haiyupis and I added two Ps to my concentric circles of intervention in a complex system. So to review:
- Patterns: Study the patterns in a complex setting using narrative capture and sense-making. This can be done with the SenseMaker(tm) software, and it can also be done with dialogic interventions. The key thing is to let the people themselves tag their stories or at the very least have a group of people reviewing data and finding patterns together. For example, you might notice a correlation between stressful times in an organization and an increase in feelings of discriminatory behaviour
- Probe: Once you have identified some patterns, you can make some hypotheses about what might work and it’s time to develop some safe to fail probes. These aren’t meant to be successful: they are meant to tell you whether or not the patterns you are sensing have developmental potential. Failure is entirely welcome. What if we offered stress reduction activities during high stress times to help release pent up feelings? We want to be okay with te possibility that that might not work.
- Prototype: If a probe shows some promise, you might develop a prototype to develop a concept. Prototypes are designed to have tolerance for failure, in that failure helps you to iterate and improve the concept. The goal is to develop something that is working.
- Pilot: A pilot project is usually a limited time proof of concept. Roll it out over a year and see what you learn. In Pilot projects you can begin to use some summative evaluation methods to see what has changed over time. Because of their intensive resource commitment, pilot projects are hardly ever allowed to fail, making them very poor ways of learning and innovating, but very good ways to see how stable we need to make an approach.
- Project/Program/Policy: Whatever the highest level and most stable form of an initiative is, you will get to there if your pilot shows promise, and the results are clear. Work at this level will last over time, but needs regular monitoring so that an organization knows when it’s time to tinker and when it’s time to change it.
Cynefin practitioners will recognize that what I’m writing about here is the flow between the complicated and the complex domains, (captured by Dave Snowden’s Blue dynamic in this post.) My intention is to give this some language and context in service organizations, where design thinking has replaced the (in some ways more useful) intuitive planning and innovation used in non-profits and the public service.
Since October, when I first starting sketching out these ideas, I’ve learned a few things which might be helpful as you move through these circles.
- Dialogue is helpful at every scale. When you are working in a complex system, dialogue ensures that you are getting dissent, contrary views and outlying ideas into the process. Complex problems cannot be addressed well with a top-down roll out of a change initiative or highly controlled implementations of a single person’s brilliant idea. If at any point people are working on any stage of this alone, you are in danger territory and you need another pair of eyes on it at the very least.
- Evaluation is your friend and your enemy. At every stage you need to be making meaning and evaluating what is going on, but it is critically important to use the right evaluation tools. Developmental evaluation tools – with their emphasis on collective sense making, rapid feedback loops and visible organizational and personal learning – are critical in any complexity project, and they are essential in the first three stages of this process. As you move to more and more stable projects, you can use more traditional summative evaluation methods, but you must always be careful not to manage to towards targets. Such an error results in data like “We had a 62% participation rate in our diversity training” which tells you nothing about how you changed things, but can shift the project focus to trying to acheive a 75% participation rate next cycle. This is an especially pervasive metric in engagement processes. And so you must…
- Monitor, monitor, monitor. Intervening in a complex system always means acting without the certainty that what you are doing is helpful. You need data and you need it on a short term and regular basis. This can be accomplished by formal and informal ongoing conversations and story captures about what is happening in the system (are we hearing more stories like the ones we want?) or through a SenseMaker(tm) monitoring project that allows employees to end their data with a little data capture.
- These practices are nested, not linear. An always to remember that this is not a five step process to intervening in a complex system. In a large organization, you can expect all of these things to be going on all the time. Building the capacity for that is a kind of holy grail and would constitute a 21st century version of the Learning Organization in my books.
In the complex space, Paul Hobcraft shares some very good guiding principles, but the whole post shimmers with good advice about transformation, and is applicable to movement building, network organizing and enterprise.
Today corporate transformations must be designed and executed quickly and routinely—not as once-a-decade events. Management teams are looking for best practices that increase speed and reduce the risk of pursuing business model innovation and change. That’s where minimum viable transformation comes into play. Before diving in, management teams should consider these five principles:
1. Learn how to learn. The central goal of minimum viable transformation is to learn from a true field experiment.
2. Pick up speed. There’s a reason this approach starts with the word “minimum”: The learning has to happen fast. As soon as a company executes the idea it’s pursuing, it shows its hand to competitors— who will quickly respond with their own strategies.
3. Embrace constraints. Much has been written about the counter-intuitive effect of constraints—they don’t foil creativity, but fuel it. It’s worth noting that the very constraints we’ve been talking about here—few bells and whistles and scarce time—take real creativity to address. At the very least, they compel a focus on the goal—the need to learn and reduce risk around the key objective.
4. Have a hypothesis. To succeed, transformation initiatives must clearly articulate both the need for change and its direction. Such a statement of direction helps identify key assumptions driving the change effort (assumptions that will need to be tested and refined along the way). Leaders will also need to develop metrics that measure short-term progress.
5. Start at the edge. Find an “edge” of the current business—a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.
In short, these five key principles can help bypass traditional barriers to transformation, ultimately supporting more effective response to mounting performance pressures.
via Deeper read or quick summary- finding the time | Paul4innovating’s Innovation Views.
I remember when I worked in the federal government, one of my roles was acting as part of an internal facilitation team. This team was put together by a director in who had an interest in organizational development. This was back in the late 1990s and we didn’t really have in house OD units which was a blessing. Instead we had this team of people that were interested in systems thinking, development and facilitation and we were made available by our bosses to do work within the organization. I cut a lot of my hosting teeth in that context.
I remember that we once led a little informal experiment. We were finding that much of what we heard when we ran sessions in the organization was platitudes of a kind of aspired set of values and stories. But when you went on the road with people, especially senior people, you’d get the real stories. This is where anyone wanting to go into management was going to get their real mentorship training. My job involved a lot of travel so I heard a lot of these stories.
We called these “tie off” stories, because when senior managers travelled in the public service at that time, they used to take their ties off and just wear an open collar shirt and a blazer. (This seems to have become a mark of high status these days, but back then it was a kind of relaxing of protocol) When the tie came off the stories flowed. And travelling around remote British Columbia communities pre-World Wide Web and smartphone, means you get a lot of time kicking back in hotel bars and airports and avalanche detours. With no Netflix to watch, no mobiles to check and no email to get through, there was nothing left but storytelling. (By the way, I rarely learned anything deeply personal about people in these settings. Personal stories were strictly available only when your senior manager was completely casual. I learned early on that the uniforms of business are like the gels used in the theatre lighting to change the colour of the stage light: suits and jeans and ties filtered the person. People were always “authentic” but their uniforms constrained and shaped what was coming through.)
A small group of us resolved to spend a year listening to these stories and comparing them to stuff we heard in formal planning processes and at the end of a year we basically concluded that there were two different organizations: one that was a performance for the bean counters and the accountability police, all tidied up into reports, memos and budgets and the other which was a mess of story, rumour, gossip, cobbled together work-arounds, covered up failures and surprising results. When citizens wonder why government seems to be such a mess of bureaucratic boondoggle, saying one thing and doing another, they are noticing an actual phenomenon. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the second set of characteristics and stories is how things actually get done, but the first set is the story the public (and the Minister) wants to hear.
You cannot have innovative change without a mess. And very few organizations, especially it seems in the public sector, allow for mess making to happen. Whatever we learn, it has to be packaged up into something neat and simple, and preferably replicable. It bothers me to this day that citizens demand one without the other. I think citizens need to be a bit more grateful about the way public servants get things done in spite of the overwhelming demand to simplify processes and guarantee results in what is a massively complex job.
Thinking that the facilitator has the answers is one of the biggest problems with the way people are entrained to relate to facilitators. Because you are guiding a process, many people will feel that you are also an authority on what to do. They will often stop and ask questions about how things are going to work.
Imagine: you have just done an elegant and energetic Open Space opening and you are ready to hand the process over to the group. You have slowly and clearly explained the instructions. You have showed everyone how the process works. You have restated the theme of the gathering to refocus everyone on the task at hand. Just as you start to walk out of the circle and let the group take over, a hand goes up “Excuse me, but what if no one comes to my session?” And then another “Yes and what happens if there are two things going on at the same time and I want to do both ” And so on…
Here you have a choice. Answering the questions stops everything. And truthfully your answer SHOULD be “I don’t know” but you are also trapped in the pattern of “facilitator as expert” and so you try to answer…”well, you could wait a while and see who comes…and you, you can move around between sessions or maybe see if you can get a session moved to another time slot….”
“Yes but what if…”
And on it goes. And you are not getting to work. And those that are ready are also not getting to work, which is REALLY frustrating because what you are actually doing is indulging people’s anxieties. Anytime you answer a question about a hypothetical situation, you are not helping. You are entraining the group into your perceived expertise instead of letting them discover possibilities on their own.
So there is a better choice and it’s one that I’ve been using for a couple of years now. In the second before you let people get to work you ask the group a question: “Put your hand up if you have enough clarity from the instruction I just gave to get down to work.” Many, many hands should go up. Invite people to keep their hands up, and then utter these magic words.
“If any of you have questions about the process, ask these people.” And then remove yourself from the situation.
This does two things. First it immediately makes visible how many people are ready to get going and that shows everyone that any further delay is just getting in the way of work. And second, it helps people who are confused to see that there are people all around them that can help them out. And that is the simplest way to make a group’s capacity visible and active.
You will have to brave a little fire from time to time. Even after doing this recently I had a person say “Can I just ask a question for clarification, though?” to which I replied “no.” She was shocked. I let people get to work and then went over to talk to her myself.
“What can I help you with?”
She got a little angry. “I had a question about notes.”
“Sure what is it?”
“Well I’m not going to ask it now. I think it was a question that the whole group should have heard.”
You need to help people see that their anxiety and their ego are a potent mix. It may well have been a great question about taking notes. It may well have been valuable on some level for everyone to hear. But almost certainly it would not have been more valuable than the group becoming aware of its own capacity and getting down to work. And if I couldn’t answer the question one on one, then I was left wondering if it wasn’t just going to be some clever grandstanding.
Getting myself out of the middle of the work is hard not only because my ego gets tickled a little by my own role, but because other people’s egos conspire to keep me in the middle. Ever since I have used this technique, turning the group’s attention to its own resourcefulness has never failed.
And as a shameless plug, we’ll cover more techniques like this in my Open Space Technology facilitator training June 2-3, 2016 in Vancouver. I hate adding commercials at the end of a blog post, but click on through if this is something you’d like to learn more about!
in most of our leadership training work and our strategic work with Harvest Moon, we devote at least a half day to working with limiting beleifs using a process developed by Byron Katie called simply The Work.
At its simplest, the work is a process of inquiring into limiting beliefs that are unhelpful in our work and lives. Such beliefs often include judgements, ideologies and other beliefs that prevent us from really seeing the reality we are dealing with. Some of these beliefs are so strong that we take them for granted – such as “Richard shouldn’t have punched Eric” which is an excellent example of an espoused belief that crumbles in the face of the reality that Eric was just punched by Richard. As anyone with teenagers knows, just saying something “should” or “shouldn’t” happen is no guarantee that it will or won’t, and is an utter denial of what just did happen (or didn’t!). Any statement that contains “should” is an argument with reality.
Every time we enter into complexity work with clients we confront limiting beliefs: this won’t work, we’ve already tried it, it’s impossible, the boss will kill it, we don’t know what to do, the answer has to be clear, and so on. Limiting beliefs do a couple of things. First they limit thinking by exerting a powerful constraint over the mind that, left unquestioned, makes us narrow our ability to scan of possibilities. And second, they cognitively entrain our thinking with unhelful attractors, so that when the boss enters the room, so do all our thoughts about the boss’s resourcefulness and support. Doing creative work with unquestioned beliefes in the way is near impossible.
The way to deal with this kind of thinking is, not surprisingly, informed by complexity practice. So this means that it won’t work to ask a direct question about that belief. Addressing situations head on is a good strategy for complicated problems but a poor strategy for complex ones. And entrained brains will always game the system. In practice this misapplication looks like adopting an affirmation or something like “I will be kinder towards my boss” that doesn’t shift thinking at all, and in fact can bury the resent and anger directed at the boss that will come out in some passive aggressive .form when you least expect it or least desire it.
instead we inquire into the the thought by looking at how a belief lines up with reality, and then looking at what happens when we are believing thoughts – how our body, emotions and behaviours are influenced when a belief is active in our mind. From there we engage in a powerful set of exercises called “turnarounds” in which we investigate beliefs from different angles. After that, we simply sit and let the mind settle. there is no action plan. We are not fixing problems, we are rewiring our cognition. It’s a simple practice, but it works because we take an oblique approach to addressing the constraints, attractors and solidified identities that limit our ability to do good work in complex and uncertain environments.
It has been very cool developing this practice with my partner Caitlin Frost who is a master facilitator and teacher of this work. As I have been exploring the world of complexity-based design, I have been seeing more and more how this process is a strong complexity-based approach to addressed constraints and cognitive entrainment in our thinking. It’s a key piece of strategic capacity building.