Visioning as the estuary of action

December 7, 2011 By Chris Corrigan

This is an estuary.  It is the place where a river goes to die.  Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean.  These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.

Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done.  ”We’ve done that before,” she said.  Nobody likes that.  I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing.  We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions.  We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints.  I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”

Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern.  People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it.  Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources.  Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:

 

 

The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:





So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group.  We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either.  Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts,  The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications.  This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.

 

Filed Under: BC, Design, emergence, Flow, Improv, Leadership, Learning, Open Space, World Cafe Tagged With:

Love and power, holons and process

November 29, 2011 By Chris Corrigan

Graphic from puramaryam.de

Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results).  There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate.

Love and power as a complimentary system. Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in a complimentary system.  Seeing these two forces this way creates all kinds of important strategic imperatives in systems – moving from degenerative power to generative love, from degenerative love to generative power.  This is polarity management in it’s core…the ability to keep a system of complimentary poles in a rhythm that oscillates between the upsides of both, but never rests in one or the other.  This dynamic approach to love and power invites us to become skillful at both.  The approach is fundamentally Taoist!

Turtles all the way down. We had a brief exchange about what is going on with the #Occupy movement in terms of this framework.  A question was asked about whether #Occupy represented a love move or a power move.  I said that I saw #Occupy representing a drive to wholeness, a unifying effort to unite the 99% – a love move.  Much of the process evident at the three Occupy camps I have been to has been about inclusion and joining.  Adam saw it differently.  By distinguishing ourselves from the 100%, #Occupy is a power move because it is a drive towards the self-realization of the 99%.  This is fascinating to me because it pointed out that love and power drives operate in different ways, in different scales even within the same process,  This is what makes it so tricky to be in thiss dynamic.  You have to understand at which level your love or power move is working.  In everything we are involved in there are multiple levels of scale and focus (“turtles all the way down“) and skillful leadership is as much about knowing which scale you are at as it is about making the right move.  Also Taoist: moving in line with the times and the context. This idea of acting in scale has come into our work today where we are looking at the living and dying systems model developed by Meg Wheatley, Deborah Frieze and a number of us in Berkana.  Living systems scale, and exhibit similar patterns at each level.

Holons. That leads to the next insight, which is Adam’s use of the concept of holons to describe how systems are influenced by love and power.  I like this a lot, because holons represent a stable structure at every level.  I first was introduced to the idea of holons through Ken Wilber’s work, who developed the concept frost proposed by Arthur Koestler.  Adam’s use of holons to illustrate love and power is very useful.  Love in this case is the holon’s drive for connection and integration and power is the holon’s drive towards self-realization and differentiation.  There can be many drives moving simultaneously, hence my use of the above graphic, which gets the picture across.

Power/love moves in process design. Adam spoke about “moves” that are called for when the power/love dynamic tips too far to ones side or the other.  This comes from Barry Johnson’s work in polarity management, and for process designers, it has important implications.  Using the love/power dynamic, we can make choices about the kinds of processes that we use to bring people together or to create the drive for self-realization.  Adam mused that in process design and facilitation, World Cafe was a good example of a love move (as it tends the group to wholeness based on the fact that there is one questions that the whole group explores) and Open Space Technology as a good example of a power move (as it is dependant on agency and diverse streams of self-realization happening simultaneously).  I though this was a pretty useful observation, and it behooves us as process designers and facilitators to think about this construction in the design choices we make.

Adam’s work on this stuff has legs because it is a very simple concept which becomes immensely complex in practice.  But importantly, it is practice.  Efforts to understand it in theory can be limited.  The dynamic of practice, the complicated roughshod effort to get it right is where the reward is.

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Community, Design, Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, Practice, World Cafe Tagged With:

Working at the margins

July 29, 2011 By Chris Corrigan

I’m currently engaged in a number of projects that have me working at the margins, exploring margins, eliminating margins and generally working with difference, otherness, power and exclusion.  These projects include:

  • Running an Open Space Technology event in September to create collaborative actions around reducing addictions-related stigma in the health system in Vancouver.
  • Working with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in the United States on supporting and expanding a culture of welcome and acceptance in their work with migrants and refugees, work that is stunningly radical in the context of the current “conversation” on immigration in the USA.
  • Part of a team co-hosting an Art of Social Justice gathering in New York City, looking at how power, privilege, race, class and other forms of marginalization and control crop up in society and what challenges those pose for the application of self-organization and participatory leadership in addressing these challenges.
  • Working with youth organizations that support the reduction of stigma for youth with mental illnesses in Ontario and the inclusion of youth voice in policy and practice.

What is common to these projects is the idea that voices matter, that diversity matters and that the reality of community life now is that solutions to complex social problems are not going to emerge without participation from the margins.  It is in fact the margins that will probably produce the solutions to the radical problems facing societies these days.  If you look at the debate in the United States between Republican and Democrats about the fiscal future of the State, the conversation is being conducted on very narrow lines.  There is a huge hole in the debate where the voices of those disempowered by the current financial situation are not being heard.  A radical restructuring of the way people think about national economies is needed if the US is to make a transition from what is clearly an unsustainable path to something that ensures that the needs of citizens are met over the long term.  Where are the solutions?  They are not in the Congress, the are not in the financial pages of the newspaper, they are not at Davos, or the G20 or the IMF or on Wall Street.

It is the same with all of the intractable problems that we face.  My friend Willie Tolliver, one of our Elders for the work we are doing in New York, says that change in social systems comes from clients, not from those within the system.  Radical changes are driven by the clients and consumers of services re-designing the structures that provide for them.  It happens when people claim the ownership of a problem and are able to get their hands on enough power to turn the ship.  What keeps those voices out of the conversation is both the vested power and the unconscious practice of privilege which excludes and stigmatizes voices from the margins, and especially the voices and talents and capacities of those who have been victimized, oppressed, excluded or plain beaten down by the prevailing system.

It’s time for movement and movements, for action and activism, for engaging with power and questioning power, for creating ties and breaking them.  That’s what’s in the air at the moment.

 

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, Community, Design, Facilitation, Invitation, Leadership, Open Space, World Cafe Tagged With:

Why culture matters

May 17, 2011 By Chris Corrigan
20110517-100657.jpg

Analyse this...!

Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.

I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.

Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.

Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.

The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.

In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Design, emergence, Facilitation, First Nations, Leadership, Stories Tagged With:

From rules and tools to principles and practices

February 17, 2011 By Chris Corrigan

Still playing with the Cynefin framework and thinking about how it helps us to understand the processes for decision making and action in the domains of simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disordered domains.

Today talking with clients and friends we were discussing the “spaces inbetween,” especially with respect to cultures.  In British Columbia, services are increasingly being separated between indigenous and non-indigenous service providers which isn’t a bad thing on the face of it, but the enterprise is being undertaken from a scarcity mindset.  in other words, resources are being moved from one part of the sector to the other in a zero sum approach leaving people resentful and frightened of the spaces in between, which is the space that clients live in.

One of the results of this fear of space is a collapsing of leadership into a certainty based mindset.  We look for the failsafe solutions and then implement, externalizing all that is unknown and unknowable.  Increasingly however, there is a growing appetite among some leaders for the potential of the space of “not-knowing.”  One can approach that space from the perspective of reductionist analysis, or one can embrace the possibility there.  Working with emergence is not always a secure thing however, as you never know what you are going to get in this space.  What is required there is principles and practices that help one to navigate and make good decisions in the complex, chaotic and disordered domains.  In the simple and complicated domains, where analysis is an excellent approach, rules and tools are very useful.  Previous experience, case studies and best practices are useful for simple problem solving.

Things become dangerous when we seek security in the rules and tools and try to apply them in the complex and chaotic and disordered domains.  Often people will come to learning events with me and ask for a definitive list of situations in which a particular methodology will work.  If I find myself saying “it depends” then I know I am dealing with that unknowable “space inbetween.”  In that case I point to principles and practices.  It sometimes leaves people frustrated, especially if they have come seeking rules and tools.

The goal here is to provide support for leaders who are prepared to enter the spaces of not-knowing and dwell there, sitting in the uncertainty and attentive to all the emotional difficulty that crops up.  It also means taking a disciplined approach to working with safe fail experiments that allow for emergence that then gives you some indications of what is useful and what is not.

In a world besotted with analysis, this is a tough sell, and yet increasingly I meet decision makers who suspect that something is up with the way they have been taught to reason out every situations.  Rules and tools are increasingly failing us as we become more aware of how difficult it is to manage in complex and chaotic domains.  Principles and practices are much more useful.

As to what those practices and principles are, well, it depends.  And that is an invitation to a jumping off point for diving in and learning together.

Filed Under: BC, Design, emergence, Leadership, Practice Tagged With:

What harvesting tool works best?

February 11, 2011 By Chris Corrigan

A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”

My answer was that it depends on so much.  Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle.  The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest”  The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.

A story.  Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed.  It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work.  We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us.  From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns.  The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.

So it depends.  If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools.  So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Collaboration, Design, emergence, Facilitation, World Cafe Tagged With:

There is no precedent; we need new ways.

January 10, 2011 By Chris Corrigan

Theses on Sustainability:

[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.

A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent.  The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale.  Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered.  But it will depend on “ways.”

Ways are roads.  We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time.  While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system.  Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile.  Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern.  His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.

In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future.  If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens.  Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.

Filed Under: BC, Community, Design, emergence, Flow, Leadership Tagged With:

Recent thinking on participatory engagement

September 21, 2010 By Chris Corrigan

I recently wrote a white paper for a First Nations organization on participatory community engagement.  The paper outlines several models, principles and processes that I am mcurrently working with as I help groups design and implement longer term community engagement processes.

Here is the most recent version of the paper for your reading, in .pdf format. The paper talks about mental models and comes from a perspective of decolonization.  I’d love to have your thoughts in the comments so I can refine it further.

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Meg Wheatley’s 12 principles for supporting healthy community

May 25, 2010 By Chris Corrigan

I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem.  And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice.  We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute.  Here’s what I heard:

1. People support what they create. Where are you NOT co-creating?  Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design.  Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness.  Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?

2. People act most responsibly when they care. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done.  We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love.  What is it you can’t NOT do?  Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances.  Are we working on the issues that people really care about?

3. Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together.  In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool.  Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together.  These are not “soft” processes.  This is how wars get started and how wars end.  It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.

4. To change the conversation, change who is in the conversation. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots.  Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract.  If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation.  If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted.  Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well.  What if your became the mentors to adults?  What if clients directed our services?

5. Expect leadership to come from anywhere. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting.  That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere.  Who is surprising you with their leadership?

6. Focus on what’s working, ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy.  Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented.  Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed.  Who is already changing the way services are provided?  Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed?  What gives us energy in our work?

7. Wisdom resides within us. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us.  Rather, the angel is all of us together.”  Experts can’t do it, folks.  They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us.  It has to be.

8. Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.”  How do we act when that happens?  Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?

9. Learning is the only way we become smarter about what we do. Duh.  But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure?  Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.

10.  Meaningful work is a powerful human motivator. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?

11. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next.  Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates.  The time for apologizing for relationship building is over.  We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.

12. Generosity, forgiveness and love.  These are the most important elements in a community. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work.  If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness.  This is NOT soft and cuddly work.  Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact.  Love and power are connected.  One is not possible without the other.  Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening.  Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable.  But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?

We could probably do a full three workshop on these principles (and in the circle just now we agreed to!).  But as key organizing principles, these are brilliant points of reflection for communities to engage in conversations about what is really going on.

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Being, Collaboration, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Invitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, Philanthropy, World Cafe, Youth Tagged With:

Losing sight of being human

March 8, 2010 By Chris Corrigan

A nice indictment – chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov on the submission of creativity to the dull incrementalisim of logic models:

With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.

This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

via The Chess Master and the Computer – The New York Review of Books.

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