Principles of resilience for designing and facilitating containers for complex work
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Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University.
In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes:
In disciplines as diverse as genetics, psychology, sociology, disaster management, public health, urban development, and environmental science, there is movement away from research on the factors that produce disease and dysfunction to analyses of capacity building, patterns of self-organization, adaption, and in the case of human psychology, underlying protective and promotive processes that contribute to the resilience of complex systems.
The same is true for my own practice and development around complex facilitation. From a resilience standpoint, my inquiry is, what are the facilitation or hosting practices that help create containers that foster resilience and capacity building?
Ungar’s principles are as follows:
- (1) resilience occurs in contexts of adversity;
- (2) resilience is a process;
- (3) there are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience;
- (4) a resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex;
- (5) a resilient system promotes connectivity;
- (6) a resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning; and
- (7) a resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation.
I think it’s a moral imperative to build resilience into strategic dialogue and conversations, whether in a short hosted meeting or in a long term participatory process. Participatory work is always a chance to affirm the dignity of human beings. Furthermore, many people come into participatory processes suffering the effects of trauma, much of it hidden from view. While facilitation is not therapy, we cannot practice a “do no harm” approach if we don’t understand patterns of trauma and the way resilience strategies address the effects. Creating “safe enough” space for people to engage in challenging work is itself a resilience strategy. Do it well, and you contribute to long term capacity building in individuals and collectives.
I find these principles inspiring to my complex facilitation practice, because they help me to check designs, and make choices about the kinds of ways I intervene in the system. For example, just off the top of my head, here are some questions and insights we could use to embed our processes with more resilience, related to each principle.
Resilience occurs in contexts of adversity
- Ensure that a group struggles with its work. Don’t be afraid to overload individuals for short periods of time with cognitive tasks (evidenced by confusion, contorted faces, and fatigue). But don’t let that cognitive overload create toxic stress in the system. Your boundary is somewhere between those two points.
- Avoid premature convergence (a Dave Snowden and Sam Kaner principle). Create the conditions so that people don’t simply accept the easy answers without going through the struggle of integrating ideas and exploring emergence.
Resilience is a process
- A resilient system is constantly growing and changing and achieving new levels of capacity, and able to deal with harder and harder stresses. Build-in some adversity to every aspect of organizational life, and you will build capacity building into the organization.
- There is no “final state” of capacity that is acceptable, and so good leadership and facilitation continue to design processes that work the resilience muscle.
- Don’t undertake a “capacity-building project.” Instead, make capacity-building a collateral benefit of engaging in a participatory process.
There are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience
- Watch for the way resilience begins to shift power dynamics and authority in a system. When a group can manage itself well, it requires different support from leadership and different methods of management.
- If the “operating system” of the organization in which a resilient team doesn’t keep pace with the capacity built in the team, a break can occur. Attend to these connections between the resilient parts of the system (that survive by being changed) and the robust parts of the system (that survive by being unchanged).
A resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex
- To my point in a previous post on complex facilitation, you have to work in a complex system with a complexity approach. That means eschewing tendencies to control, closed boundaries, fixed approaches and known outcomes.
- Work with the properties of containers to encourage emergence and self-organization
A resilient system promotes connectivity
- Many of the dialogic methods we use with the Art of Hosting are premised on the fact that everyone in the system is responsible for participating and that relationship is as important an outcome as productivity.
- Working with stories, shared perspectives, diverse identities, and multiple skills in the same process builds connection between people in a system. Solving problems and overcoming adversity together helps individuals become more resilient and connected to each other.
- Any process hoping to survive over time needs to have explicit attention paid to the connections between the parts in the system.
A resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning
- The very first inquiry of the Art of Hosting community was something like “What if learning together was the new form of leadership we need now?” A good marker of a resilient team or organization is its ability to fail, recover, and learn. Many organizations say they do this. but few actually pull it off.
- Create work in which individuals enjoy solving problems and take pleasure in getting things wrong.
A resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation
- A forest without these features is a tree farm. An organization with these features is a machine.
- Diverse perspectives and lived experiences present opportunities for change and development. They challenge existing ways of doing things and disrupt in helpful ways.
- Redundancy is a feature of living systems. Never be afraid to have the same conversations twice. Or three times.
- Aim for full participation in every meeting. If a person is not participating, the group cannot benefit from their knowledge, experience, or curiosity.
These are just my initial musings on Ungar’s work. They validate many of the practices and methods used in the world of participatory leadership and the Art of Hosting. They also challenge us to make braver choices to create spaces that are harder than we might want them to be so that participants can struggle together to build capacity for change. I truly believe that communities, organizations, and people that develop resilience as a by-product of their work together will be best equipped to face increasing levels of uncertainty and emergence.
Chris, thanks again big time for taking the time to write up and share this!
The topic of resilience is very much alive in the communities I work with.
I didn’t know Ungar’s work; yet everything that you shared resonates with me deeply.
In a recent workshop that I co-hosted, we tackled collective (team, organizational …) resilience as an intentional process of co-learning from challenges; in a way that the collective expands (= grows collective awareness/portfolio of inner strengths; and outer opportunities).
A big part was the importance of taking regular time to dialogue about: (a) what challenges we faced, navigated and learned from recently? (including illuminating new possibilities, mindsets, strengths/gifts/skills we didn’t know we had; connections and alliances we forged …); (b) what changes/shifts are on the horizon (including that which we don’t want to see, name and face …) – and how do we want to embrace and navigate them, true to our guiding principles (or purpose, vision … whatever sources the collective)?
As you say: it does sound so simple and natural; yet few organizations /communities /teams take the time (and the courage, the discomfort, the intimacy) to tackle it. It yields a huge return-on-time-investment though.
The Art of Hosting fourfold practice can be a good supporting model: hosting oneself as growing personal resilience (including nurturing a healthy inner talk); building dialogue skill and capacity; initiating and hosting dialogues; and – co-learning by reflecting on past and upcoming challenges.
At least in the cultures I come from (Eastern Europe), an appreciative approach is super important; it catalyses lots of courage, curiosity and compassion – all key in building resilience. Yet because it is counter-cultural (people have traditionally bonded through sharing pain), it takes extra care and skill to hold and host it well.
PS. Was great to experience Bowen this September (within The Circle Way board retreat). It’s easier to follow your local community sharings now – I have a context in which to ‘place’ them :-).
Regards from Crete, Greece – an island culture (nonhuman and human) that embodies resilience.
Thanks for your reply here Marjeta! I was sorry not to be able to spend time with you on Bowen Island but glad you got to experience the forest and the mountains and the seas of my home place.
Hi Chris,
Fantastic post !
My AHA moment was “Redundancy is a feature of living systems. Never be afraid to have the same conversations twice. Or three times.”
Anyway you don’t have the same conversation twice (paraphrasing Heraclitus).
>A forest without these features is a tree farm. An organization with these features is a machine.
Isn’t it “An organization *without* …. ” ?
Thanks for your inspiring writings.
Géry
Great work here Chris! Love how you are bringing focus to crucial topics in a time where they are desperately needed. I’d love to offer a few thoughts with some of the authors who inspired them.
Resilience occurs in contexts of adversity
• Weick gives us a perspective to understand this through the lens of sensemaking.
• Learning implies a form of cognitive distress called ‘autonomic disruption’. This consumes significant resources and must be resolved by either adapting your mental models, or more likely, the load is reduced (cognitive bias).
• Facilitators have to harness this adversity to intercept the flight or fight tendency of the brain with something more coherent. Not easy! 🙂
Resilience is a process
• That odd place where you maintain a precarious balance between chaos and order, between seeking stability and transformation at the same time, is what we call ‘edge of chaos’.
• It sounds like Resilience is similar to Ashby’s diagonal within the Law of Requisite Variety, where a system is seeking to match the Variety of Response with the Variety of Stimuli to maintain adaptive coherence.
• Ralph Stacey talks about this extensively as a necessary paradox where coherence is allowed to emerge.
There are trade-offs between systems when a system experiences resilience
• Weick is perfect here. Systems have different levels of sensemaking:
? Intrasubjective: individual
? Intersubjective: between 2 individuals
? Generic subjective: organizational scripts (SOPs and policies), allowing people to be replaced easily (Taylorism)
? Extrasubjective: elevation to pure meaning like mathematics, capitalism, etc
• Stacey also visualizes power and authority through the fractal nature of communication.
? Formal vs Informal, Conscious vs unconscious, and legitimate vs shadow creates a fascinating array of heterogenous interactions in a room of actors trying to make sense, or being facilitated to make sense.
• Hierarchy theory has promise, but I haven’t read much on that front except for Peterson’s 1st chapter on lobsters. 🙂 (12 rules to live by)
A resilient system is open, dynamic, and complex
• This one is tough. Cilliers has a sophisticated way to describe both complex systems and self-organizing systems. To Snowden’s point, the issue is when our solutions are incoherent with the domain we are intervening within. So, to apply simple solutions within a Complex scenario is to invite disorder. I think you addressed that by describing them as ‘tendencies’.
• Systems are complex for reasons completely out of our control. All we can do is choose the appropriate response. Working with the properties of containers to encourage self-organization and emergence is really tough in a hierarchical organization that spends a lot of time suppressing decentralized teams and autonomous behaviour. Techniques that target interventions within a robust hierarchy to trigger adaptation is lacking in the literature.
A resilient system promotes connectivity
• Cilliers and complex systems is great here once again, but I love a little bit of Ackoff to help us understand the failure of reductive scientific inquiry to solve increasingly complex problems. The metaphor of aliens arriving at Earth to understand the purpose of a car by tearing it apart to understand each piece, is hilarious. The method of inquiry called synthesis forces us to zoom out to the larger system and ask therein, ‘what is the purpose of a car’? There you see the ‘connectivity’ between a car, the transportation grid, houses, workplaces, parking lots, etc.
• The best quote here comes from Cilliers himself. “A complex system is not constituted merely by the sum of its components, but also by the intricate relationships between these components. In ‘cutting up’ a system, the analytical method destroys what it seeks to understand.”
A resilient system demonstrates experimentation and learning
• I struggle with this one personally. The hardest part isn’t teaching an organization to conduct interventions (I’m doing this now at a canadian bank), and to prepare to amplify what works, and dampen what doesn’t. The hardest part, by far, is breaking their mental models around cause and effect. Getting them to unshackle their cognitive bias, to absorb their intellectual tension, and to use it to allow them to think differently? Wow, not enough literature is written to cover that. Kahneman helps us understand the necessary dysfunction of the brain, but his great insight is that we can do little to prevent it. We can only train System 2 to address it after the face.
• Systems thinking has also helped us analyze the differing, and sometimes, contradictory goals between levels in a hierarchy. Very often, the success practitioners hope to achieve with teams, directly contradicts the goals of executives who feel a stronger accountability towards a capitalist group of shareholders demanding financial return for their investment. Capitalism is broken. I wish more economists would write about this.
A resilient system includes diversity, redundancy, and participation
• I love this principle. Diversity isn’t just important because it promotes inclusivity. It’s critical for any system to engage in innovation and adaptation.
• As a facilitator, it is important to understand your ontological foundation. If you are a post-modernist, or a subjectivist, you believe that the ‘truth’ is socially constructed, not something to be found by employing scent hounds. The social constructivity of truth forces you to invite extreme diversity and participation within a group. We are better off with a fictional version of the truth that everyone aligned on, then the ‘truer’ version of the truth that only a few in the room share. You can act, intervene, or nudge in a positive manner with the former. Weick and his sensemaking theory helps us see the science of epistemology as an act of retrospective coherence, where everyone is stitching together a fictional version of the truth in their own minds.