What harvesting tool works best?

February 11, 2011 By

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:

Kevin Kelly’s provocative idea

January 30, 2011 By

From Kelly’s excellent new book “What Technology Wants”:

“The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same number of neurons in you brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain. It has three billion artificial eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in, it processes keyword searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz (a barely audible high-pitched whine), and it is so large a contraption that it now consumes 5 percent of the world’s electricity. When computer scientists dissect the massive rivers of traffic flowing through it, they cannot account for the source of all the bits. Every now and then a bit is transmitted incorrectly, and while most of those mutations can be attributed to identifiable causes such as hacking, machine error, or line damage, the researchers are left with a few percent that somehow changed themselves. In other words, a small fraction of what the technium communicates originates not from any of its known human-made nodes but from the system at large. The technium is whispering to itself.”

Filed Under: BC, emergence, Organization Tagged With:

There is no precedent; we need new ways.

January 10, 2011 By

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:

Nanzan University Human Relations Centre

December 12, 2010 By

Ten years ago Tsumura-sensei created the Human Relations Center at Nanzan University in Nagoya.  Twenty years before, he had been trained by NTL – National Training Laboratories for Experiential Learning – in “T” Group processes.  He became passionate about experiential learning.

What I hadn’t understood was that “T” group work is really a key ancestor to much of the work I and others are doing these days.  It starts from the idea that people come together to talk, and then start to learn from their separate and collective experience.

At the end of November, sixty people who were connected to the Human Relations Center came together for a full day to talk about their own learning and work and to help envision what the next ten years of the Centre might be.  Then for the next two evenings, we did evening workshops with smaller groups exploring this field of ideas about stepping into your self and your passion as an engine for change.

Sometime, early on, Tsumura-sensei and I were talking and I mentioned “elegant next miniumum step” – a phrase I use often in Japan to help people think about working with emergence.  Tsumura-sensei’s face looked confused and he said, “well, I’m usually dorokusa,i” which literally means messy and smelly, of the earth.  We kept coming back to this tension between elegant and dorokusai over the next couple of days.  Where I think we finally landed is that it is important to aspire to elegance and beauty AND, often what we end of doing is a bit dorokusai.  We bring in beauty when and where we can, and sometimes we proceed without it – but even when we do so, we do so consciously and with an eye to creating beauty and elegance wherever we can.

I’m very curious about how the Human Relations Centre will find its elegant next step.  In some ways it feels to me like it needs to grow beyond its roots and to work with a wider range of possibilities which exist now.  I’m fascinated by what might happen if it formed a partnership with KDI to bring Future Center work to corporations in the Nagoya region.  In so many cases the way we step beyond current form is to create new partnerships and sense into new possibilities.

Delightful folks. I’d love to keep working with them.

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Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, emergence, Japan, T Group Tagged With:

Insights on shifting systems

September 27, 2010 By

Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton.  We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.

Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems.  We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.

For me, lots of good insights are coming up.  A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:

  1. The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW.  How can we deliver services differently?  How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate?  How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us?  These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up.  Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
  2. New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place.  But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old.  Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies.  While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old.  Ignoring power is naive.
  3. A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.

Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur.  That alone is not innovation.  The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level.  The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families.  Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues.  Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.

Filed Under: BC, CoHo, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, emergence, Facilitation, Leadership, Organization Tagged With:

Unleashing Leadership and Inspiring Innovation and Creativity in Japan

April 28, 2010 By

Once again I am awake in the middle of the Japanese night.  Head and heart buzzing from yesterday’s work.  I was invited to join KDI — Knowledge Management Initiative in Tokyo for a afternoon workshop with participants in their new Future Center.  KDI was started 10 years ago to work with knowledge creation and realationships to knowledge, building in part on the inspiring work of Dr. Ikugjiiro Nonaka .  There approach is one which places emphasis on “individual vitality” and the  “dynamic field,” or ba.

Crazy bunch, with titles like “Wild Knowledge Architect, “Ba Conductor,” and “Sexy Works Stylist,” they work together in an almost completely flexible workspace in the middle of Roppongi, the international district of Tokyo.  What caught my attention most is where they’re headed.  They’ve been looking at the Future Center idea currently being developed in more than 30 locations in Europe.  See The Reality of European Future Centres.  Last week I wrote about a deep resonance between the work being done by GreenHouse Project and Kufunda Learning Village in Southern Africa and the work of St. Luke’s Health Initiatives.  Guess what?  The resonance continues.

Future Centers, at least as envisoned by Dr. Takahiko Nomura, KDI founder, are incredibly similar to leadership learning centers in the Berkana Exchange.  The core work of Future Centers is to surface the knowledge, wisdom and leadership already present in organizations and to create conditions which all it to be used by all for maximum creativity and innovation.  AND, the same four core competencies we surfaced last month at St. Luke’s Health Initiatives show up as core in Future Centers:

  • connect and convene
  • peer learning
  • source of research and information
  • strengths based approach

So we spent the afternoon with about 35 people from a dozen or so Japanese companies who are thinking about embracing the Future Center concept, each creating a Future Center inside their company as well as a trans-local network which links these Future Centers as a community of Practice.

I think it is going to happen.  These folks are going to step forward and start using all forms of conversational leadership to invite innovation forward.  AND, like elsewhere in the world they’re not doing it because it is the next groovy thing to do, they’re doing it because they know their survival depends on it.

I continue to be impressed with the level of receptivity in Japan for new ways of thinking about leadership, creativity and innovation.  It is not just thinking about it — it is a yearning to step into new practice fields with new partners.

One last note.  We talked about the community of practice work KDI has done over the last 10 years.  The conversation is incomplete, but part of what we talked about is how in their communities of practice perhaps the most important thing that’s happened is that people have learned they are not alone. Others have some of the same intentions and ideas they do.  We’ve always looked at Communities of Practice as places where knowledge is created.  That’s part of their function.  What may be more important is that they are places which people discover more about their own identity and step into their own leadership.

Beginning of a fascinating several weeks in my adopted homeland.

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Filed Under: BC, communities of practice, emergence, Enspirited Leadership, Future Center, Japan, KDI, Resilience, Social Innovation, Strenght Based Tagged With:

Bootcamp is Over

January 1, 2010 By

Bootcamp is over. Those are the words that came to me last month when I was working  in Phoenix with people from the St. Luke’s Health Initiatives.  My trip to Phoenix came right after I returned from almost a month in southern Africa.  What I heard and saw in Phoenix fit into the same pattern as my experiences in Africa.

My sense is that I, and many others, have been in deep training for this past decade.  We’ve been learning how to see our world, our selves, our relationships and our work in new ways.  The learning didn’t start ten years ago, and it won’t stop now, but I’m feeling like this is the time when we need to move on.

On a phone call yesterday my friend Chris Corrigan used three phrases which really caught my attention.  He said we are not yet a community that practices and we are not yet a system that influences.  He went on to speak about the work that needs doing now is practical decolonization.

  • A community that practices… My friend Robert Theobald used to always talk about how we needed to listen to the music, not the words.  We’ve heard and used many words in the last decade.  And they are powerful:  presencing, hosting, healing, zero-waste, appreciation, feeding ourselves sustainably.  The list goes on and on.  Many of us have learned how to dance with words like power and love, warrior and midwife.  The dance is good.  But it is time now to practice, practice and practice.  It is time to hear the music with our bodies.  It is time to embody these practices.  It is time to practice together as if our lives depend on it.  They probably do.  No, I don’t know exactly what this means.  But I sense it means now is not the time to feel satisfied and complete in what we’ve done and learned so far.  Now is the time to push our edges more than ever before.
  • A system that influences… Together we have a chance to create a new era, a step beyond the era which is disintegrating all around us.  Many of us have been pioneers, engaging in promising experiments with new forms, processes and ventures which carry the DNA of the era we might create.  Much of this work has been powerful, rewarding and exciting.  And, it is not enough.  We must find ways which allow this work to easily and naturally spread.  I’m not talking about going to scale, I am talking about creating systems of influence.  Systems of influence require the creation of eco-systems which are larger than our individual work and which connect that work so it can GROW.  Communities of practice can create systems of infulence, indicators can create systems of influence, scenarios can create systems of influence.  In South Africa I saw a reality TV show create a system of influence.  What else?  How do we help this work grow.
  • Practical decolonization… I love the phrase, simply because it hasn’t yet been overused!  Decolonizing is the process of shrugging off the shackles of domination that have controlled our lives.  We’ve all been colonized.  Certainly the colonization and extermination of indigenous peoples all over the world has been the most obvious and most brutal.  Many of us have been victims and perpetrators of practices of power over which has separated us individually and collectively from our selves, each other and all other life on this planet of ours.  Now is the time for us to step out of our roles as colonized and colonizers — practically, clearly, irrevocably.

We know how to do this!  That’s the good news from our work of the last decade.  No, we don’t have a road map.  Hell, we don’t even really know the destination.  But we do know enough to continue, to deepen, to go to a next level.  But we have to move.  Part of this is, I am sure, learning how to be comfortable working with the Alchemy of Opposites.  All of it, I know is done collectively in community, not individually in isolation.

A lot of my own thinking about this over the last couple of months has been influenced both by Adam Kahane’s new book Power and Love and an essay from Barry Oshrey that grew out of a conversation he and Adam had, also called  Power and Love.  I’m personally a little leery of both these terms — power and love — but they have been an important doorway into my current learning.  Oshrey speaks of the need to develop robust systems which combine power and love and I think he’s got it right.  I think that I’ve spent much of the last ten years working on relationships and harmony and listening.  I think the focus of the next ten needs to be more on getting real work done.

Many blessings as we end the era of the “oughts” (aught 1, aught 2, …) and come into the era of the “tens” (inTENtion)  <grin>

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Filed Under: BC, communities of practice, emergence, Resilience, Robert Theobald, Social Innovation, systems of influence, Zimbabwe Tagged With:

Alchemy of Opposites

December 19, 2009 By

I thought when I headed off to southern Africa in early November, I would have a spacious time for reflection, learning, and writing here.  That wasn’t the case.  I was engaged in pretty much non-stop work in various systems.  AND, because I went with the intention of reflecting and learning, I carried that spirit into my work.  I hope this will be the first of a number of posts here.

I started experimenting with a new Mac software — View Your Mind — and it was really help in chasing some ideas down.  What I want to write a bit about today is holding the tension of an alchemy of opposites.

I think that many of us are being called to find our balance in this ecosystem of forces which are seemingly in opposition to each other, but which are each needed to find right direction and right action in these times. We must learn to be equally skillful in the role of midwife and warrior. We must be clear about our intentions and also able to surrender them. We must step into our own power from a place of love. It’s critical that we learn to listen more deeply than ever before, and to speak out without blame or judgment. We need to rigorously apply everything that we’ve been learning and do so from a place of spaciousness. We need to learn to travel the spiral of work that is both planned and emergent.

Calling this tricky is, of course,  a huge understatement. It’s so easy to become trapped in either the upper or lower section of this ecosystem. None of us can let that happen any longer. I’m curious about where you find your self standing and working in this alchemy of opposites and look forward to some holiday discussion here.

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Filed Under: BC, emergence, Resilience, Zimbabwe Tagged With:

A New Zimbabwe Emerging

November 15, 2009 By

I arrived in Zimbabwe several days ago, my first visit this year.  Since before Kufunda Learning Village was a glimmer in the heartmind of its founder, I have been journeying here.  When people ask what I do at and with Kufunda it is often with a typical assumption of people in the global north that I am coming here to teach them something.  I come here to learn.  Of course, this dichotomy between learning and teaching is a false one.  But mostly, I come to listen.  To witness.  To ask questions. To be present to the changes taking place at Kufunda and in Zimbabwe.  I also come to connect Kufunda with others around the world — calling forth connections and relationships which help us all learn.

I first visited Zimbabwe in 2001 and have been witness to many years of things falling apart.  Everything I’ve thought I knew or understood about collapse have been challenged.  Each collapse is unique.  Perhaps the only common thread is that times of collapse are a call for resilience.  In some ways the country “hit bottom” last year.  Some progress has been made since then, but for people who feel like they are at the end of their rope, it is slow and agonizing.

I came here aware of the pain and agony some were feeling.  It wasn’t until I arrived that I also felt how strong the winds of shift are as well.  So it is all present at the same time — agonizing stuckness, emerging creativity, willingness to change.  When you’re stuck, what do you do?  I was thinking this morning about cross country skiing on groomed trails (perhaps an odd thought since the daily temperatures here are in the 90s).  When I’m skiing and see a crash coming, it is almost impossible for me to remember to simply lift my ski out of the track, and to take it from there.  That first step, lifting out of the current track, can be so darn hard.

At Kufunda the need to do so is clear.  The structure and processes which brought Kufunda to where it is today cannot continue.  Among other things, the global economic crisis has shown up here in the form of fewer donor dollars.  But even beyond that, it is clear that changes are needed.  Kufundees have been able to spend a lot of time over the last five years learning how to host processes which help them develop deep relationships with each other.  They have learned how to do permaculture.  They have learned how to build with local materials and how to move towards zero-waste.  They have learned how to use herbs for healing.  They have learned how to share knowledge with surrounding communities and are beginning to learn how to help those communities reach out to others.  Everything from bee-keeping to “arbor-loos” are part of the culture.  There are many pieces in place and part of the work over the last several days has been looking at how to shift those pieces into a more productive overall pattern.

One of the questions I’ve had for years is about how Kufunda reaches out beyond the six communities it has ben working with since 2003.  Even that is more clear.  It does it through partnerships.  For example, one of the friends of Kufunda founded something called “Tree of Life.”  It is a process which works with victims of torture to help them heal.  It is a powerful process led by the former victims themselves.  Once people in villages are more healed, what next?  Perhaps a partnership with Kufunda provides part of that answer — Kufunda can come in and help them remember ways of being a healthy village again.

Enough for now.  Lot’s happening and I’ll be writing more!

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Filed Under: asset-based, BC, emergence, Powers of Place, Resilience, Zimbabwe Tagged With:

Evaluations and Outcomes: Working with Emergent Processes

October 16, 2009 By

One of the great challenges of the kind of work I and others are doing is figuring out how to measure our progress. We often have fundors involved who want to know what our metrics are, but more importantly our communities themselves need to know if their efforts are effective. All to often our work is sidelined when someone says where’s your strategic plan? Many of us don’t believe in strategic planning. We say show me a plan that was actually followed and that was helpful. But, still, we don’t have much that we work with instead. Sure, we follow our intuition and we’re good at using conversation and other tools. But it feels insufficient.

And I am so tired of hearing if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there . What does it mean to work with making the path by walking on it? How do we get collective reassurance that we’re headed in the right direction and not just spinning our wheels? One insight I had a few years ago was that in our new ways of working, we measure from the inside out. Rather than having a fixed set of reference points (goals and objectives) constructed in advance, we’re actually called on to learn how to watch what is actually happening in order to understand the direction that is emerging from within our system and then we have to talk about what that direction means.

One methodology I’ve come across that works in this way is something called Most Significant Change. The link will lead you to a version of the user’s guide from a couple of years ago. I have some problems with the methodology in that it uses a somewhat elitist process to refine data — but I think it has a promising, simple, fresh start. You ask people to notice what is significant about changes and then look for patterns and trends in their responses.

Someone recently forwarded an interesting article from a 2006 NonProfit Quarterly Evaluation for the way we Work. Michael Quinn Patter, the author, begins by saying The very possibility articulated in the idea of making a major difference in the world ought to incorporate a commitment to not only bring about significant social change, but also think deeply about, evaluate, and learn from social innovation as the idea and process develops. However, because evaluation typically carries connotations of narrowly measuring predetermined outcomes achieved through a linear cause-effect intervention, we want to operationalize evaluative thinking in support of social innovation through an approach we call developmental evaluation.

I’ve also been collecting interesting pieces of this and that for the last several years while this question has been bubbling in me including:

    And many more. I’ve been collecting these for some time and finally have an opportunity to read and think about them. I’m very curious. What are others here finding helpful in terms of Evaluation and Measurement? What are you doing? What kinds of resources and documentation are helpful? What can you share here?

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    Filed Under: BC, emergence, evaluation, Measurement, most significant change, Resilience Tagged With:
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