It’s good to have Dave Snowden back from his treks in the Himalayas. He’s been a big influence on my thinking and practice over the past few years and his near daily blog posts are always rich, irreverent and practical. He is in the process of creating an important body of theory and practice that is useful even if the language and the concepts are sometimes a lot of work to grasp. The payoff from wrestling with his ideas is rich.
Today he’s discussing “dispositionality” which simply means that making change in a system is much easier when you have a sense of what the system is pre-disposed to do (and what it is NOT pre-disposed to do…)
Back in the summer Caitlin and I led a learning lab for the board and staff members of various community foundations from around British Columbia. The five principles that Dave articulated today were very much embedded in our work and they are becoming very much the basis for any change and planning work I do. Here’s how we made it work, pen and paper style.
1. Map the current state of the system, including its dominant flows, eddy points and whirlpools.
We began with a World Cafe design based on small stories of change. It is always good to ask people about actual decisions or stories that they remember to ground their experience in discovery. If you run a cafe on “What are the big sources of change in our sector?” you get a data set that is divorced from reality, meaning that it is subject to being gamed by the participants. I can just insert the things I want to see in there. But if I am asked to tell a story about a particular decision I had to made, the data set is richer and we have a good chance to see emerging patterns.
And so our Cafe ran like that: “Tell a story of a time when you knew things needed to change?”
Each person told a story and the other three at the table listened and wrote down what they heard was the impetus for change, with one data point on a post-it note. We did several rounds of story telling. At the end of the round, we asked people to give the post-its to the story teller, and we gave the story tellers time to rank each post it note on a scale of 1-3. A one meant that the impetus for change was just known to me (a weak signal), two meant that a few other people know about this impetus, and a three meant that this change trigger was known by everybody.
We then had the group cluster all the post-its to find major categories, and we sorted post it notes within the categories to produce a map that was rendered by our graphic recorder, Corrina Keeling. You can see that above.
2. Identify the energy gradient associated with existing dominant patterns and what adjacent possible states to any undesirable pattern present themselves.
The resulting map shows the major areas for change making, specific “acupuncture points” and the “energy gradients associated with the dominant patterns.” Practically what this means is that items marked in yellow were very weak signals and could be candidates for a change initiative that would appear out of left field for the dominant system. Not a bad thing to do, but it requires a lot of resources and political capital to initiate. The red items were things that EVERYBODY was talking about, which meant that the space for innovation was quite closed down. There are a lot of experts, large consulting firms, influential funding pots and politically committed people tackling change at this level because it is perceived to be an influential place to play. As a result it is generally a zone that is not failure tolerant and so these items are not good candidates for a probe or prototyping approach.
But the orange items were in a kind of Goldilocks zone: there are a few people who know that you can make change here, so you have allies, but the field is not cluttered with competing experts trying to assert their ideological solutions.
The whole map allows you to make choices.
3. Engage in safe-to-fail experiments in parallel either to change the energy gradient or to nudge (or shift) a dominant pattern to a more desirable state ideally through action rather than platitude.
This is of course the best approach to making change within complex systems. We took time to develop prototypes that were intended to tell us something about the system. A bonus would be that we might might create ideas that would turn into interesting new initiatives, but the primary function of running prototypes is to probe the system to tell us something about what is possible. Making tentative conclusions from action inspires people to try more, on a path that is a little more blazed. Just creating platitudes such as “Let’s build networks for knowledge transfer” doesn’t do enough to help change makers poke around and try things that are likely to work.
Each participant in the group created one or two prototypes which they rolled out, seeking to make a bit of change and learn about what helped or hindered change making in a relatively conservative sector of civil society.
4. Monitor the impact in real time and take multiple small actions to reinforce the good and disrupt the bad.
We kept the group together over a few months, having them check in over webinars to share the progress on their prototypes. We deliberately created a space where things were allowed to fail or radically change and we harvested learning all the way along. Where things were working, prototypes evolved in that direction, and we had a little funding to help accelerate them. By simply starting, participants discovered oblique strategies and in some cases entirely new ways to address their basic desire for changing some element of their environment. Without engaging in a deliberate yet loosely held action-based project, it is very difficult to see the opportunities that lie in the blind spots.
This learning was summarized in a report, but the bigger harvest was the capacity that each participant built to take steps to sense, design and implement change initiatives with a better informed complexity approach.
5. At all costs avoid any announcement of a change initiative or idealistic outcome based targets
I think this goes without saying. Change making in the complex space is essentially learning on overdrive. When we are truly stuck and yet we have a sense that “this might just work” we need good support to explore that instinct. Being deliberate about it helps. But announcing that “this is what we are doing and here are the targets we have to meet” will collapse people’s inherent creativity down to narrowing the focus of their work on achieve the pre-determined outcomes. That is a perfect strategy for destroying the capacity to engage with complexity, and it can result in a myopic approach to change that guarantees “black swan events” and other nasty surprises.
It’s a hoarfrost kind of day here on Bowen Island, kind of cold out and the ground is covered in snow, frost and ice. Sitting in The Snug Cafe having lunch when a weekend visitor comes in saying the he blew out his shoes hiking and all he has is flip flops. Nothing’s open. He’s a size 11.
The six of us in the cafe were about to post on Facebook and the forum and make some calls when Will, the cook here, heads to the back and comes out with his pair of spare shoes. Fits perfectly. Stranger will bring them back tomorrow when he leaves.
We call these moments “only on Bowen”.
Early morning crossing for Howe Sound. It’s below freezing, with a strong windchill coming from a Squamish wind. Fresh snow on the mountains, clear sky, dawn coming. Last night we had a little earthquake, 4.8 magnitude. It smacked the house and for a moment I thought it was my teenage son coming up the stairs.
The year is ending, all is well with that. And although it is in reality an arbitrary boundary – the solstice is a better marker of turning – I nevertheless find myself deepening into reflective mood at this time of year.
I will put aside this year of theory. It was a year in which I discovered the praxis if complexity both at home on my home island and in my work. It was a rich year of learning and opening and now it is back to a deepened practice in so many ways.
Happy new year to you all. May the dawn come, shaking you a little and clearing you out with a cold northerly wind.
In the last year of applying Cynefin theory to my practice I’v e made a few conclusions about things. One of these is that what Dave Snowdon calls “pattern entrainment” is probably our achilles heel as a species. Pattern entrainment is the idea that once our brains learn something, it is very difficult to break that knowledge. And while we may be able to change our knowledge of facts fairly easily – such as admitting a mistake of a factual nature “you’re right, there is no 7:30 ferry after all!” – changing the way we make sense of facts is surprisingly hard.
It’s like water flowing into a whirlpool. The water coming into to the whirlpool is entrained into the pattern, and finds it impossible to escape.
For example, with the recent spate of massacres around the world, the social sphere has been full of people seeking answers. And the kind of answers people are seeking are firmly rooted in an entrained set of patterns of how we make sense of and solve many problems in the world: linear causality.
A belief that there is a clear set of steps that solves things like gun violence or war assumes a kind of order that isn’t there. Dave Snowden points out that our ability as humans to see in retrospect how something came to be leads us to believe that if we just get the steps right going forward, then we can prevent future bad things from happening. All we need to do is put the right things in order and follow the plan.
This act of “retrospective coherence” fools us into believing that we know what to do, and because decision makers in the complex space of social problems rely on retrospective coherence to understand how we got to where we are, this particular assumption – that problems have a linear causality – has infected discourse, policy making and politics. In short, research and investigations show the chains of causes and effects. Policy recommendations often advocate solving problems the same way we make sense of them. And we can’t.
This is becoming quite dangerous now. A tendency and romance of simple and well ordered solutions has resulted in Donald Trump getting away with identifying Muslims and Islam as the sole cause of terrorism. This is an easy sell to people who have been made to feel afraid and convinced that all problems are solved with simple solutions. It is true that you can solve all problems with a simple solution – just kill everyone – but this is not an option in a humane and sustainable society. This is, however, the logical end point of a simplified, linear solution being brought to complex problems: it creates psychotic societies.
This is showing up everywhere. I am at the early stages of working with a client who is a service provider. The funders of her programs are starting to want to to see evidence that her work (and their money) is ‘shifting the needle’ on the large scale social problems she is addressing. Both the funder and the service providers are suffering at the moment from the idea that a well designed set of interventions will address the root causes of poverty and vulnerability in communities. This is impossible of course as these are effects that are the emergent properties of, among other things, an economic systems that is designed to create inequality. The service providers cannot change the system, and everyone is frustrated.
To really eliminate poverty, we need to change the economic system, because it is that of attractors and constraints that gives rise to the transactions and social relationships that create the emergence of poor communities and people. What the service providers are doing well is effectively addressing the effects of an economic system founded on inequality, and while vulnerability may be increasing, in many local places, service providers are making a real difference in economic security for individuals and families. It is only when we confuse this local act with systemic change that the problems appear. We do good work, but in the big picture nothing changes.
For strategy, and especially for non-profits and service organizations trying to bring about a better world, this is an achilles heel. If you and your funders both evaluate your work on the basis of macro indicators that are the result of a myriad of interacting causes at a myriad of scales, you will be shown to be ineffective. And yet the myth persists that we can simply choose actions with limited resources, prioritize a set of steps and achieve “a poverty free community.” The failure to reach this goal is dispiriting to all involved, and it doesn’t have to be.
Non-profits and funders need to address the pattern entrainment that creeps into policy making and program design. We need to understand the proper role of a linear causality analysis and begin to take a more sophisticated, multi-pronged and complexity based approach to social problems. Seeking single answers to complex problems reveals much about the pattern entrainment and confirmation biases of people. It does very little to actually change these dynamics, and as a result, we can find ourselves stuck in a whirlpool, trying more and more things and getting further and further away from the world we’re wanting to create.
My kids approaching the Vimy Monument
I’ve been holidaying in Europe with the family this month – England, France and soon to Estonia. I haven’t been blogging, just soaking things up and relaxing.
But today the kids and I went to Vimy Ridge and it kind of keeps with the theme of some of the reconciliation posts I made here last month.
It is said that Vimy Ridge was the event that defined the young Nation of Canada, which was only 50 years old when 100,000 of it’s men, women and children (yes many many soldiers were under age) assembled on the slopes of Vimy Ridge and launched the first battle in the Arras Offensive in April 1917, a battle that would lead to the stalemate being broken and the eventual victory for the Allied forces a year and a half later.
Almost 3600 Canadians were killed and another 7000 or so wounded that morning. That is nothing compared to the losses of 150,000 French and Moroccan forces that tried to take and hold the ridge in the years prior to 1917. But for Canada, that was and still is, the greatest single loss of life in a day of military action.
Much is made of Vimy, especially these days when Canada’s military role has now fully evolved from peacekeeper to combat again. Vimy is often evoked to draw on Canadian sentiment to gather support for our military campaigns overseas. As we approach the 100th anniversary of that battle, I expect the sentiment to be further reinforced, especially by politicians.
But here is the thing. You simply have to visit Vimy to really understand this: if Vimy defined the kind of nation we are then it is a nuanced and complicated thing. For our greatest ever battle was not celebrated by a triumphalist monument declaring our greatness (in fact a staue stomping a German helmet was rejected in the design), but rather a huge sombre memorial to the costs of war, and the responsibilities of peace. There is simply nothing to celebrate at Vimy Ridge. If you were to read into what Canada is by attending that site you will see the kind of country Canada is: brutal and unrelenting in its pursuit of a military (or colonial) objective, but capable of deep reflection almost immediately afterward. Perhaps it was because Vimy was not a final victory, but simply a small part of a much much larger effort that the commemoration there is as sombre and reflective as it is. Or perhaps it was just an acknowledgement that war is a steaming pile of horror often for unclear objectives or far distant motives of power and politics divorced from the sacrifice that actual soldiers suffer. Our current government parrots this same pattern, championing new military actions, while ignoring the needs of veterans who return from these wars physically and emotionally scarred for life.
The monument itself consists of a number of important figures with names like Sympathy of the Canadians for the Helpless, The Spirit of Sacrifice, The Breaking of the Sword, Canada Bereft and The Mourning Parents. Inscribed on the eastern side of the monument are the names of Canadian soldiers whose remains were never found. The monument itself stands at the site of the objective of the battle and for several hundred meters to the west, the ground is still chewed up with craters and trenches, off limits because there is still unexploded ordinance in there, along with the bones of hundreds of human beings, blown to pieces in the battle. It is a place alive with suffering, terror and death. There is nothing beautiful about it, except perhaps for the birdsong, or the flock of sheep that graze the craters or the pines trees that lean upward towards the ridge top, appearing out of the corner of ones eye like some many soldiers charging for the top.
It is a place that is deeply moving and powerful and it does say something about the kind of country we can choose to be. For I wonder if we have ever really enacted the spirit of Vimy Ridge. Of course we are a country that is a small player in the military world, but when we fight we are ruthless. But we are also a country whose defining battle resulted in a reflection on our care for the helpless, on the practice of sacrifice, on the breaking of swords, on the deep mourning of what has happened in the name of Canada, and of the care for those who have lost children. In this way, Vimy says something about our national need to reflect and reconcile our actions with a morality that is lost in violence. I wonder if we have actually done that. I wonder if we can see this as an invitation to practice these principles in an ongoing way. I wonder if in the spirit of Vimy Ridge, if we are living up to the ideals that are emblazoned in that massive marble statue on top of a lonely escarpment in Pas-de-Calais.