For the past couple of years a group of professional facilitators and others experienced in and interested in improving “group process” has been working to create a “pattern language” (an integrated collection of practices, processes, qualities and other phenomena that “work” in many different group contexts and at different scales) to improve the effectiveness of meetings, conferences and other deliberative gatherings. I have had the privilege to have been part of the core team developing this “language”. When we started, we expected to produce a book, but instead we decided to produce a card deck, to make the tool more interactive, dynamic and fun.

I’m very pleased to announce that we have now published the deck. Here is our announcement:

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The Group Works card deck, the first product of the Group Pattern Language Project, is now out! You can order copies of the deck, download a free PDF copy and learn about our upcoming mobile/phone app version of the deck on our website, groupworksdeck.org .

Image by Susan Stewart

The deck is designed to support your process as a group convenor, planner, facilitator, or participant. The developers spent several years pooling our knowledge of the best group events we have ever witnessed.

We looked at meetings, conferences, retreats, town halls, and other sessions that give organizations life, solve a longstanding dilemma, get stuck relationships flowing, result in clear decisions with wide support, and make a lasting difference. We also looked at routine, well-run meetings that simply bring people together and get lots of stuff done.

The deck consists of 91 full-colour cards (plus a few blanks to add your own patterns), a five-panel explanatory category/legend card, and an accompanying booklet explaining the purpose and history of the project and suggesting uses for the cards in group process work.

Each 3.5″ x 5.5″ card is laid out as follows:

These cards are yours, of course, to use in whatever ways make sense and work for you:  in the workplace, in design and preparation of facilitated events, as a learning and teaching tool, for reflecting on how an event went, or just for fun.  The website and booklet explain some of the ways they have been used by facilitators and students so far, to give you some ideas to get started with, and we invite users to share their experiences and stories with us.

Image by Ethan Honeywell

For more information on the deck, please visit our website: http://groupworksdeck.org

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We have also drafted a .pptx brochure oriented to business audiences (most of our direct contacts are in the non-profit, public, education and government sectors), which you can download here.

Please let me know what you think of the material above, and how we might “tweak” it to make it better. Also, please let me know if you buy or download a deck yourself, or if you have contacts you’d be interested in presenting this to. And of course, if you use the deck to improve your meetings and other group processes, I’d love to hear your stories!

(a guest post by Tree Bressen)

consensus process flowchart

[Last month I posted an article entitled When Consensus Doesn't Work. This guest post by Tree Bressen describes situations where consensus can and should work, but gets derailed, and how such situations can be avoided. Consensus Decision-Making is a group decision-making process that seeks not only the agreement of most participants, but also the resolution or mitigation of minority objections and concerns. Readers not familiar with the process and terminology of consensus might want to read this overview, or Tree's more extensive explanation of consensus, before reading this article.]

1. Inappropriate Blocks

Blocking because you disagree, object, don’t like the proposal, it doesn’t match your personal needs or values, it goes against tradition, you’d have to leave the group if it passed, etc.  Also includes premature blocks, where someone threatens to block if a group explores a particular direction.

► Consensus only works when the power to block is restricted to concerns that are demonstrably based in the core principles of the group.  Consensus means giving a fair and heartfelt hearing to substantive points—it does not mean you always get your way.

► Remember the Stand Aside option exists for people with passionately held concerns and objections.

► Blocking does not have to mean end of discussion.  Some of the most effective consensus groups require the blocker to help work out a solution.

2. Enabling Bad Behavior

If disrespectful statements or behavior from one another member toward another or the group are tolerated (yelling, sarcasm, put-downs, jokes at someone’s expense, etc.), this degrades the meeting environment for everyone, impacting the whole group’s safety and well-being.

► Set a constructive tone and insist on following it, kindly but clearly putting a stop to any meanness, attacks, undercutting, oppressive ‘isms,’ etc.  We are fully capable of disagreeing fervently with respect.

3. Poorly Planned Agendas

People’s time and life energy are precious; when this is not respected, they stop showing up.  Prioritize clearly and be realistic.  Reserve the bulk of time for the things that appropriately call for widespread active involvement.

► Put advance time into creating the best possible agenda—and then be willing to shift it if the group as a whole needs something different.

► Put the most important items early so they don’t get squeezed by less important items.

► Avoid lengthy reports (just get the highlights, or put it over email) or announcements (use a big sheet by the door instead, so people see it when they come in and when they leave).

► Provide breaks at least every 90 minutes (and don’t pretend you can have a 5-minute break).

4. Having the Same Person Facilitate and Present Topics

When the facilitator is also the person offering information and context on an issue, it lessens safety for those who may disagree with the general thrust, putting them immediately on the defensive.

► Presenters supply information and context and should be free to advocate.

► Facilitators need to be neutral so that everyone in the group feels supported by them.

► Mixing roles can work ok in small, committee-like groups (8 people or less?); the larger the group, the more need for facilitator neutrality and formal roles.

5. Starting from a Proposal, Instead of an Issue

In situations where people want to feel fully empowered and included, any overly developed proposal on anything important will inevitably evoke resistance.  At that point, the recipients of the proposal feel scared that they’ll be steamrolled, while the developers of the proposal feel unappreciated, and no one is happy.

► For smaller proposals that don’t require many people’s energy for successful implementation, starting from a proposal can be fine.

► For more complex or controversial situations that touch many people, start by describing the situation, and exploring ideas together in the larger group.  A committee can be useful in helping frame the topic, as long as they don’t go too far down the road.  Later once a basic direction is established, a committee might work out details.  Or if the larger group doesn’t easily come to resolution, they may request a task group of people with diverse viewpoints to work together on it.

6. Too Many Details

There’s nothing like a tedious, overly detailed conversation among a few involved people to put the rest of the meeting to sleep while everyone checks out.

► See #3 above.

► Delegate!  Send the rest to committee.

7. Rushing the Process

Leads to inappropriate blocks, situations where legitimate concerns were not dealt with in an integrated way and so the only option left to the person raising it is to block the whole process, which feels rough on everyone involved.

► Allow plenty of time for discussion.  Take the space to really listen to people’s diverse viewpoints and concerns.  Trust the wisdom of the whole.

► If you have time and if it’s important, discuss the matter, then let it sit and settle, then return to it.

► Wait to make the official call for consensus until a sense of unity emerges.

8. Spending All Your Meeting Time in Open Discussion

In general discussion, only the boldest get their voices heard—many others never even raise their hands.

► Change formats (planned in advance or on the spot):  break into pairs or small groups (3-5 people), line up to show the spectrum of opinion, use dot voting, fishbowls, roleplays, write stuff on sheets around the room, etc.  See this handout for a bunch more ideas.

9. Attaching Proposals to People

Once something is out on the floor, it belongs to the group, not an individual member.  Thus it’s better to refer to an idea as “the proposal to do X” than as “Jenny’s proposal.”  For this same reason, avoid the taint of “friendly amendments,” a holdover from Robert’s Rules and voting process where you ask the proposer’s permission to modify.  You wouldn’t ask one person “Can i add this bed to the garden?” unless it was their garden; since it’s the group’s common plot, it’s up to everyone whether and how the proposal gets modified.

► Expect every proposal to get modified a lot before adoption.

10. Fuzzy Minutes

Failing to accurately record the sense of the meeting can mean hours of lost group work.  Don’t record verbatim who said what, because it’s too long for others to read later and it ties issues too closely to personalities.

► Make sure the decision and reasons for it are written clearly for the records.  Record any stand asides (names and reasons), and tasks for implementation (who will do what, by when).

Donella (Dana) Meadows was famous for her twelve ways to intervene in a system, one of the most often cited works in the field of bringing about change. What is often forgotten is that she listed the twelve ways in reverse order, from least effective to most effective, and suggested that there were really only three highly effective ways to intervene:

1. Change the paradigm (way of thinking) that underlies the system, or open people up to operating without any set paradigm at all.
2. Change the fundamental goal, purpose or function of the system.
3. Encourage and enhance self-organization: Remove the barriers to self-organization and let the collective wisdom of groups of people continuously tweak the system to serve them collectively.

I have recently been talking with fellow Bowen Islander John Dumbrille about the various change initiatives being supported on Bowen, such as Bowen in Transition and its Visioning exercise, the launch of Belterra, the first co-housing and intentional community initiative on Bowen, and the recent proposal to convert half of the island into a special kind of National Park.

I spent most of my adult life working on various programs that were intended to bring about some kind of desired change: more effective work, more successful organizations, self-improvement of one form or another, increased knowledge, understanding, skill or capacity, a more sustainable world. In retrospect, I don’t believe any of them accomplished much. As I noted in a recent post, the six dominant trends of the past forty years have all been negative and all occurred despite massive amounts of energy, effort and enthusiasm to achieve the opposite objectives.

I have been focusing much of my energy and writing of late on the Transition, Unschooling and Communities movements, because I believe what they stand for. Rather than being change initiatives, all three of these are alternative movements; they represent a walking away from the traditional way of doing things (and an attempt to create a new way of doing them) rather than an attempt to reform current processes and institutions. All three of them embrace all three of the Dana Meadows’ top three ways to intervene in a system. For example, unschooling suggests that the way to optimize learning is by enabling people to learn what they want when they need it in the real world, rather than “teaching” them a standard curriculum in a separated institution. Transition’s objective isn’t to make the current culture sustainable, but rather to transition to a very different culture. And intentional communities are local, self-organized and self-managed, and operate on consensus, the antithesis of the top-down, competitive, “representative”, “we’ll do it for you” political systems most of us live with and try in vain to make better.

So it seemed to me such movements should have the right “stuff” to succeed, if Meadows was right. Yet my instincts tell me that the struggle these movements are having to gain traction beyond a small, informed and eager group of people, is an indication that something is wrong with them. At first I thought this was just that it would take people time to appreciate these alternative models of a better way to live. And that perhaps they would not get the momentum to scale up to widespread popularity and implementation until crises got bad enough that people had no choice but to look for better alternatives — that there is as yet no “burning platform”, as businesspeople put it.

But even before speaking with John I had this nagging sense that these movements were flawed in some other way I couldn’t quite fathom. What accounts for the success of a few large-scale change movements (ending slavery, improving the status of women, reducing tobacco addiction and drunk driving) and the failure of almost all others?

John had a suggestion for how to approach the movements I cared about, that also provided an explanation for the success and failure of other movements. His suggestion was to appeal to potential converts at an existential (visceral and emotional) level, rather than a pragmatic and rational one. So to appeal to potential Transition movement members, for example, instead of asking people the practical question “How can we make the transition to a post-cheap-oil, post-stable-climate, post-industrial-economy society?” we should perhaps be asking the existential question “What does it mean to live a good life?”

Asking such questions in a way that is non-presumptive and non-judgemental is, in my experience, almost unheard-of, except perhaps in Buddhist circles. Many movements attempt to prey on human emotions (the US Tea Party being a stellar example, but  many anti-poverty and animal welfare movements use similar tactics). But what movement has ever stepped back from judgement and ideology and attempted to recruit people by appealing to their ability to ask themselves questions about what it means to be human and to be of use, and to be an integral part of all-life-on-Earth?

I’ve tried to illustrate this in the diagram above. The traditional idealistic approaches that political movements have used for centuries (lower left) have fallen victim to the same failings as all ideologies — they are too inflexible in their thinking (“the market will solve all our problems”) and too blind to complex realities to accommodate how the world really works. There have been two reactions to this failure: employing propaganda (“if they won’t buy the logic of our argument, prey on their emotions instead”) (lower right), and its opposite, pragmatic realism (like what the Transition movement has done to transcend ideology by focusing on disaster-preparation and resilience-building, without playing the blame game)(upper left quadrant).

What almost no one seems to have tried is the existential approach (upper right quadrant) — neither ideological nor dispassionate, but politically transcendent, appealing neither to the emotionally-neutral intellect nor to thought-driven emotions like fear, anger and hatred, but instead to the higher emotions — our feelings of connection and belonging to something greater than all of us.

The reason this hasn’t been tried, I suspect, is that it’s too hard — it’s much easier to appeal to ideology, idealism, pragmatism, or raw emotion.

So how might it work? Let’s stick with the Transition movement as an example. At the moment, a lot of people have never heard of this movement, or say they don’t “get” it. It has successfully transcended politics in its pragmatism, and has attempted to deal with the grief of many people about the damage we have done to our environment (it has an integral “heart and soul” component) but it now appears to be stalled. There are lots of working groups in communities around the world that have done visioning exercises and developed local plans for renewable energy, transportation that is not oil-dependent, conservation, disaster preparation, local currencies and other worthy projects. But now what? Until some of the dominoes fall and there is a great sense of urgency, or no alternative, the conditions do not seem right (and human nature is not currently disposed) to implement these ideas.

If Transition were to take an existential approach, it would begin with an existential question such as “What does it mean to live a good life?” and help each individual to become informed about what is really happening in the world (issues like peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis), not for the purposes of planning how to cope with these issues, but for the purpose of deciding how one should holistically respond to this knowledge, from the perspective of increasing the well-being and health of all-life-on-Earth now and indefinitely into the future.

This is less an intellectual exercise than an emotional, physical, sensual and intuitive one. It is not about responding to facts with rational plans, but instead responding to emergent understanding with appreciation and a connected holistic “knowing” (intellectual, emotional, physical, chemical, sensory, and intuitive knowledge, integrated) of what is, what is needed, and what must be done. When Derrick Jensen writes (to many, cryptically) “Stand still and listen to the land, and in time you will know just what to do”, he is, I think, speaking of this kind of holistic “knowing”.

What is needed to allow such an existential approach to work, however, is a rebuilding of our personal capacity for such “knowing”. That entails relearning how to listen to and trust our instincts, how to become present and to silence our egos (which are busy telling us fictional stories and whipping up our baser emotions until we become mentally incapacitated), and how, as groups, to collect and share information, ideas, and perspectives non-judgementally and process this into holistic and collective knowledge. This rebuilt capacity may then let us “know just what to do”, and move us to pursue consequent collaborative effort that is joyous, sustained, heart-felt, and inexhaustible.

In short, we need to become more functional, healthy, connected individuals first, before we can hope to be part of any viable and sustainable change process.

So how do we do that?

I think self-directed learning programs that combine capacity-building with useful information would be a useful strategy. I’m not a fan of training programs because they’re one-size-fits-all when one size fits none. But we don’t have a framework for self-directed learning the way we have for formal education. From the work that’s been done by unschoolers, we might guess what such a framework might look like:

• purpose-driven
• intentional towards that end (with a roadmap and milestones that will likely change along the learning path)
• suited to the style in which the individual best learns and works
• a mix of individual and collective work
• with access to pertinent knowledge (online, and, more important, access to people who have essential and contextual knowledge in their heads)
• with access to facilitators (enablers) and mentors (listeners)
• natural (learning the way wild creatures learn, through play)
• time, and effective methods, for practice

In my case, what I think I need to learn to be able to contribute effectively and usefully to making this world a better place is (a) generosity (including empathy and active listening), (b) living naturally, (c) self-acceptance, (d) presence, and (e) letting go. These are capacities more than skills, but acquiring these capacities requires practice as much as acquiring skills does. This is all I think I would need to be able to bring an existential appreciation to the issues and projects I care about, to know, in consort with others with comparable capacities, “just what to do”.

There is of course lots of knowledge I will probably need to actually do what I discover I must do, but I think I have the knowledge of how the world really works to be able to obtain the appreciation of “what to do”. Many people, I believe, need to acquire more knowledge of how the economic system works (and what happens when it doesn’t), and what the possible effects of peak oil and climate change will be. Acquiring that additional knowledge should be part of their personal self-directed learning program, their preparedness for knowing “just what to do”.

The way to launch such an approach, I think, is to start by inviting people to come together (perhaps in Open Space) to:

• help them assess what capacities and knowledge they might need before they’ll be ready to be of use (i.e. to know what to do),
• connect with people seeking the same capacities and knowledge (so they have the opportunity of learning together), and
• provide them with an unschooling (self-directed learning) framework for identifying what capacities and knowledge they need, and for acquiring those capacities and that knowledge.

This will not be an easy invitation to craft. It asks a lot of people.

When these people are brought together it should be with the intention of reconvening them when they self-assess that they have acquired what they need. So it should include an open invitation: Tell us (all of us — this is a self-organized program) when you’re ready.

And then, when they’re (we’re) ready, we can reconvene and start to ask the existential questions together about what makes a good life, what does if mean to be human, to be of use, and to be an integral part of all-life-on-Earth, and, together, what do we now “know” we must do. We won’t need to assign tasks or set up working groups. It will be, individually and collectively, obvious what the answers to these existential questions are and what that means we must do, as individuals and collectively.

I have no idea whether these “things we must do” will be showing people working models of different ways to live, or blowing things up, or healing suffering, or just waiting in a way that does minimal harm and conveys a deep and genrous love. But we will know just what to do. Right now, most of us do not.

And that is why, I think, all the well-intentioned things we are doing now are not working. It’s not that the world is not ready, that things aren’t “bad enough”. We are not ready. We have much to learn before we will be.

Given that this existential approach is so much more difficult than other approaches, can there possibly be enough of us to make a difference using this approach? That’s another great existential question. When we’re ready, we’ll know.

(thanks to John, and to Paul Heft, for helping me think this post through)

Complexity theory has been around for a generation now, but most people don’t understand it. I often read or listen to consultants, ‘experts’ and media people who proffer ludicrously simplistic ‘solutions’ to complex predicaments. Since it seems most people would prefer things to be simple, these ‘experts’ always seem to have an uncritical audience. Because most of what’s written about complexity theory is dense, academic and/or expensive, I thought I’d try to summarize the key points of complexity theory (focusing on the social/ecological aspects of it, not the mathematical/scientific ones) using lots of examples for clarity, and in a way that might be used practically by those grappling with complex issues and challenges.

Complexity theory argues that simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems have fundamentally different properties, and therefore different approaches and processes are needed when dealing with issues and challenges in each of these types of systems.

As the diagram above illustrates, natural systems (both social and ecological) are inherently complex. It is the nature of evolution that natural systems, at every level from unicellular life up to our global ecosystem, tend to become more complex and diverse over time, until a crisis (e.g. natural disaster, epidemic, meteor strike) occurs and brings about chaos, system collapse and/or extinction, after which the cycle begins again to evolve towards greater complexity. Even an apparently ‘simple’ natural system (like an amoeba) is astonishingly complex, and there is a kind of fractal (or Bohmian hologram) quality to it: all its content is contained in any part of itself, at a lower resolution.

Human invention, for the most part, uses biomimicry, i.e. we attempt to manufacture, to replicate mechanically, things that appear to work in nature. A simple invention like the arrowhead, for example, mimics the speed and penetrating sharpness of predatory birds and animals. Agriculture mimics the natural diversity-diminishing processes of flooding and wildfire. In similar ways, most industrial systems mimic natural systems. But these simple and complicated systems do not evolve of their own accord, they are not self-sustaining, and they lack resilience. They are also fragile, and subject to rapid decay and obsolescence. It takes a huge amount of effort to repair, replace and maintain the components of such systems.

Natural systems are highly effective but inefficient due to their massive redundancy (picture a tree dropping thousands of seeds). By contrast, manufactured systems must be efficient (to be competitive) and usually have almost no redundancy, so they are extremely vulnerable to breakage. For example, many of our modern industrial systems will collapse without a constant and unlimited supply of inexpensive oil.

As natural systems evolve to become more complex, their resilience increases. For example, more biodiversity means less vulnerability to pandemics. However, as manufactured systems become more complicated (e.g. through centralization and globalization) their resilience is reduced. A breakdown in a single component can cause the entire complicated system to seize up or collapse.

The more complex natural systems become, the harder they become for humans to ‘manage’ (control or influence).  That is why much of the complex and varied natural world has been replaced by monolithic, homogeneous manufactured systems (e.g. cities, factory farms, dammed waterways), that are much less resilient than the natural, sustainable systems they replaced. Similarly, the more complicated manufactured systems become, the harder they become for humans to ‘manage’. Large organizations (businesses, public organizations and governments) therefore become inherently more and more dysfunctional (and less resilient) the larger they grow.

Our modern civilization is built on amalgams (combinations) of natural and manufactured systems, and it has components that are simple, complicated, complex, or a combination of all three. Almost all businesses, for example, have both social systems (which are complex) and automated systems (which are complicated), and most offer both products (which are mostly complicated) and services (which are mostly complex).

Most of the so-called intractable problems we are now facing (e.g. war, violence, poverty, epidemic disease, and the growing economic, energy and ecological crises) are not ‘problems’ at all, but complex predicaments. The challenges of complex systems are predicaments, not problems, because, since they are not mechanical, they cannot be ‘fixed’ or ‘solved’. Alternative, non-mechanistic approaches must be used to deal with them, which is what this article is mainly about.

Simple problems or situations (like hammering in a nail), with few variables (i.e. few things to consider) and which have obvious solutions (strike the nail with the ball of the hammer until it goes in), are best approached intuitively.

Complicated problems or situations (like fixing a car), with many variables, all of them knowable (at least with some study), and where the solutions aren’t obvious but cause-and-effect relationships can be determined, are best approached analytically. Systems diagrams and analytical processes — the type that competent managers and advisors employ — are useful for dealing with complicated situations and problems. Unfortunately, we are all too easily tempted to try to reduce complex predicaments (e.g. how to deal with the nightmarish global debt crisis), to simple or merely complicated problems (e.g. how to get banks to give consumers more credit in the short term so they can spend us out of recession, for now), because we’re good at solving merely complicated problems.

In some complex situations, it is possible to simulate the complexity of the system with a simple or merely complicated model, and achieve useful results, at least in the short term. For example, if you can isolate your organization’s customer service problem to a single cause (say, that service staff don’t have the authority to do the things customers need), you can ‘solve’ this problem by giving them more authority. But complex predicaments usually defy such simplification; things are generally the way they are for a good reason, one that’s not obvious or simple (or someone would have ‘fixed’ it already). And people are excellent at finding workarounds for clumsy simple or complicated ‘solutions’ that managers or consultants have imposed to try (inevitably unsuccessfully) to ‘fix’ complex challenges. Complicated approaches generally don’t work for complex predicaments, any more than a simple hammer will fix all the complicated problems you might encounter with your car.

Complex predicaments (like running a social event or a business, or coping with economic, energy or ecological collapse) have these four characteristics:

• The number of variables that can have an effect on the system/situation/event is infinite
• Most of these variables are unknown or unknowable; only the most obvious ones can be listed or diagrammed
• The relationships between cause and effect in the system are unfathomable; at best you can notice correlations that may or may not be meaningful
• It is impossible to predict the outcome of an intervention in the system/situation/event (or when Black Swan events and other unforeseeable interventions will occur)

As we come to understand complex predicaments better, we’re learning that the best approaches to them are very different from what works best for simple or complicated problems. Because all the variables cannot be known, and because cause-and-effect relationships cannot be established in complex situations, analytical approaches (like systems flowcharts) used in complicated problem-solving simply won’t work.

The best approaches in complex situations are, well, complex. They entail the use of many different techniques, some of which we are not very good at, and some of which are quite sophisticated, novel, or nuanced. What I have learned so far is that an effective approach to a complex predicament should have these attributes (and I’ll be using the challenge of peak oil and how the Transition movement is working to address it, to illustrate these attributes):

1. Methodical: Coping with complex predicaments requires a focus on continuously improving processes, not achieving outcomes. A key feature of complex predicaments is that an appreciation of the true nature of the predicament and an understanding of possible workable approaches to deal with it co-evolve. You can’t know the desired outcome up front, because you just don’t know enough about the situation. Your approach needs to facilitate this co-evolution of understanding, and enable you to go beyond selecting from currently known alternatives and simplistic dichotomies. It also requires an appreciation of the four best ways to intervene effectively in a complex system. In my experience, a methodical approach to any complex predicament requires the skills of an excellent, practiced facilitator, someone with an appreciation of complexity and group process, and the competence to enable the group to do its best work. A good facilitator will:
   • Clarify and keep the focus on the group’s purpose and intention (see point 2 below)
   • Optimize the use of available space & time
   • Help the group manage and enhance its knowledge, learning, and appreciation
   • Encourage free flow of creativity & ideas
   • Manage the flow of energy in the space
   • Help the group deepen and navigate interpersonal relationships
   • Help the group appreciate, broaden and shift its perspectives and worldviews
   • Model the behaviours the group needs to demonstrate to be effective
2. Purposeful: If a group is addressing a complicated problem, the purpose is obvious (to find and implement a solution). When it’s faced with a complex predicament, the purpose is not obvious. The purpose is often itself complex: to deepen an understanding of the predicament, to learn what has worked and not worked in similar situations, to explore options for addressing and coping with it, to imagine how things might be done differently, to identify what the group needs to know and be able to do that it currently does not or cannot, to appreciate the knowledge, ideas, shared values and perspectives of others, to deepen relationships for future collaboration, etc. The group needs to understand and agree on its purpose in all its complexity, and stay focused on that purpose. It also needs to be intentional, i.e. to be willing to and begin to stretch energetically towards achievement of its purpose even as the understanding of that purpose may still be emerging and evolving. For example, a community Transition group’s overarching purpose might be to enable their community to make the transition to a post-carbon economy, and its intention might be to form working groups to focus on various aspects of working towards that purpose. Note that the purpose describes a process not an outcome.
3. Visionary: If a group is grappling with a complex predicament, it needs to have a shared vision of what should be different at each step along the process of working towards the purpose, and also a vision of what might happen if they didn’t do that work (often called a “worse- or worst-case scenario”. What would coping with and adapting to the predicament, versus doing nothing, “look like” in the near and more distant future? Several of the Transition communities have developed “timelines” that contain their imaginings of each stage of the transition, possible Black Swan events, and the consequences of inaction. This is how you navigate through complex predicaments, where the outcome is unknown so there’s no clear path from current state to desired future state.
4. Preventive: One step in coping with complex predicaments is to try to imagine and anticipate possible negative occurrences as you work towards your purpose, and take steps to head off such occurrences before they happen. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say. George Monbiot’s Heat, for example, presents a comprehensive climate change prevention strategy, and while many would now argue that we’re too late to prevent catastrophic climate change (and that in any case our society is incapable of moving as fast or as far as Monbiot’s strategy required), the book contains many suggestions for actions that community Transition teams could employ to make the local transition to a post-carbon economy.
5. Defensive: When the system is complex, it doesn’t respond to proactive steps (at least, not predictably). It requires some humility and realism to acknowledge that you can’t always control a situation; in complex situations, usually the best you can do is mitigate risks and consequences of what is happening, as you become aware of them, and in the moment, and hence reduce the impact of undesirable situations on you and your community. Ilargi and Stoneleigh’s Automatic Earth for example outlines many steps you can take (such as extinguishing your debts and selling your equities) to mitigate the risks and consequences you will face when the next economic depression hits. A Transition community might likewise mitigate the risks and effects of the end of cheap oil by improving public transport, establishing local renewable energy co-ops, etc.
6. Attentive: Complex systems are in constant flux, so it is essential to continually monitor and ‘probe’ to collect information and make sense of what is happening, so that you can respond to unfolding occurrences knowledgeably and effectively. Sometimes the best way to probe what’s going on in a complex system is just to try something, a systematic intervention, and see what happens. Another method is to gather stories and anecdotes and look for meaningful patterns. Sometimes by scanning broadly for data and synthesizing it, you can get a clearer and more actionable picture of the situation. Transition communities across the globe are trying various methods (e.g. car-share and ride-share programs) to see how they effect local dependency on fossil fuels, and collecting and sharing stories, knowledge, ideas and findings with other Transition communities to get a better picture of what works and what doesn’t.
7. Experiential: The analytical techniques that are used to address complicated problems are inherently theoretical and hopefully repeatable, and our (left) brains love this “best practices” stuff. Unfortunately, theoretical approaches and “best practices” don’t usually work in complex situations. What works better is experimenting with an array of diverse approaches in parallel and in series, and examining the results and get a collective understanding of what is effective and what isn’t in the real world, and where might be the best place to go from there. The Transition movement doesn’t have a set of “best practices” for coping with the end of cheap oil; what they have instead are “patterns“, synthesized from experiential work, of what approaches seem to be effective across an array of different situations. Two examples of such patterns: Iteration (going through a process iteratively to refine and learn from it is more effective than trying to get it perfect the first time) and Self-Organization (actions seem to work better when the group embracing them organizes itself to plan and implement the actions, rather than having the work assigned to its members by a central control group). More about “pattern languages” in an upcoming post.
8. Improvisational: As we have learned from our response to Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina and other modern crises, preplanning doesn’t work in complex situations. Improvisation entails responding to situations on the fly; for example, emergency workers find improvisational capacity far more useful when dealing with complex crises than procedure manuals, provided these workers are armed with the right tools and knowledge, empowered and connected with others for consultation. Adaptation entails changing yourself or your situation to respond to an outside event, rather than (as we too often try to do, futilely) trying to anticipate, change or control a complex system (the weather, for example). Improvisation and adaptation skills cannot really be learned in a classroom; it takes extensive ‘field’ and/or simulation practice to become competent at them. For example, some Transition community trainers have learned that it’s impossible to know how much their students know, or are ready to know, about peak oil, until the training session is underway, so they often have to improvise their curriculum on the fly. Likewise, some Transition initiatives have run into unexpected obstacles (e.g. bird-lovers objecting to wind turbines), and have had to adapt their programs to suit local sensibilities.
9. Collaborative: It’s foolish to believe anyone has all the answers, or can possibly cope alone in this massively interconnected society. Local knowledge, ideas, perspectives and skills are collective assets, and in our atomized, nuclear, specialized civilization, collective understanding and collaboration are the only ways to compensate for the lost core and generalist knowledge and skills that we need to relearn to cope with complex situations. Each member of a group brings a piece of the truth, and unique knowledge and skills, that, especially in dealing with complex situations, are essential to equip the group with collective capacity, competence, understanding, consensus and wisdom. Most of the real work in community Transition initiatives is done through self-organized and self-managed collaborative working groups, that use consensual decision-making processes.
10. Holistic: We are usually part of the complex systems whose predicaments we have to cope with. From inside, we get perspective and knowledge of four types: intellectual, emotional, sensory and intuitive. The best approaches are rarely purely rational; it requires synthesizing and balancing all four types of knowledge. Some indigenous peoples say that before making important decisions it is essential to “sleep on it” so that the subconscious knowledge from our hearts, bodies, spirits and DNA can be integrated with our conscious, intellectual knowledge. An essential aspect of the Transition initiative is the “heart and soul” component — appreciating the feelings of grief and anxiety that come along with facing energy, ecological and economic crises. Only when we make space for all four ways of knowing, understanding and responding to predicaments can we bring our full capacity, skill and energy to addressing them.
11. Appreciative: There is a tendency for some consultants, managers and experts to presume they know “from experience” how to deal with an organizational challenge, and fail to appreciate the unique context of each situation, or to appreciate that things are the way they are for a reason. It’s essential to understand that reason in all its complexity — how things got the way they are and why they’ve stayed that way — before we can begin to address them effectively. No one is to “blame” for complex predicaments, which often have long and complex histories, and may be self-reinforcing. For example, the Transition movement discovered that trying to reduce the impact of peak oil by improving average gasoline mileage for cars may be ineffective, because as mileage improves drivers may decide to drive farther (for the same price), or drive bigger cars (with the same mpg as the older smaller ones), and hence negate the impact of the regulatory or technological change that enabled the mileage improvement.
12. Open: Groups addressing complex predicaments need to be completely honest and transparent, and must be open to different approaches, points of view, directions of inquiry and exploration, and conflicting information. The sponsors and facilitators of such groups must ensure that their invitation is sufficiently open to attract the right, diverse mix of people to address the predicament competently, and that the process they use is open and flexible to the ideas and insights that emerge. Group members can’t afford to “burn bridges” or be closed-minded to even bizarre-sounding scenarios, proposals and knowledge (Einstein said “If at first an idea doesn’t seem crazy, there is no hope for it”.) George Monbiot’s Heat makes some proposals for reducing fossil fuel usage, for example, that some dismissed out of hand, such as converting AC electrical power to DC to reduce power loss, and shutting down all non-essential airplane flights because there is just no way to make such travel energy-efficient. The people who might have moved such ideas forward were just not open to them, and a chastened Monbiot is sounding increasingly pessimistic that his reforms will ever see the light of day.
13. Bottom-up: Historically, most solutions have been devised and implemented top-down, by leaders atop political, corporate or social hierarchies. But complex predicaments like poverty, violence, climate change, the debt crisis and resource scarcities have defied all attempts at top-down “fixes”. The best approaches to such issues have come from bottom-up initiatives to deal with them at the local level, at a scale where actions can be taken quickly, and where the people involved know each other and what needs to be and what can be done in their community. This is why the Transition movement is organized as a network, where all the work is done at the community level, and there is no hierarchy.
14. Trusting: (This one’s a toughie.) When organizations confront complicated problems, the usual result is a solution (usually imposed top-down) and an allocation of tasks (who will do what by when). By contrast, in confronting complex predicaments, it is essential that team members trust each other to decide what they will individually do, and what they will decide in small groups to collaborate on, and then to do those things. The responsibility rests with each individual — no one can or will stand over them and tell them what to do or how to do it or stay on their case if they haven’t done it. Such implicit trust is foreign to many people experienced with group work, and some believe trust “has to be earned”. What many find difficult in confronting complex predicaments is that they need to just trust people to accept and follow through on their responsibilities, and also that they have to trust a group process that is emergent and pliable, even when that process struggles with lack of consensus, lack of knowledge, lack of ideas, lack of direction, or internal disagreements and conflicts. The Transition movement focuses a lot of attention on trust-building activities, and on ensuring facilitators have the necessary skills to help the group navigate through trust issues.
15. Humble: Implicit in the idea that innovation and human ingenuity can ‘solve’ any problem is a level of arrogance and hubris that has no place in the struggle with complex predicaments. As I have explained, there is no ‘solution’ to complex problems, so what is required is the humility to accept what is, and what cannot be changed, and to adapt. Even now, some technophiles are proposing to ‘solve’ climate change by geoengineering — firing trillions of small reflective metal fragments into the atmosphere to deflect much of the sun’s rays. They have absolutely no way of knowing whether this will have the desired effect; this complex predicament has an infinite number of variables, most of them unknowable. Their action, if taken (and it is quite feasible) might backfire, or might plunge us into another ice age — no one knows. Their energies would be better spent learn studying and learning from nature, a humbler pursuit far more likely to come up with sustainable ideas that, at least at the community level, might help reduce energy usage or deforestation or factory farming — three key sources of atmospheric warming. What is impressive about the Transition movement is that their handbooks are not “what to do” guides for dealing with a post-oil economy, but suggested approaches and resource lists for local Transition groups to study and adapt as appropriate to the situation of their community. They’re staying humble, and setting an example for others working to address complex predicaments.
16. Redundant: I mentioned earlier that industrial systems strive (out of competitive necessity) for efficiency, and minimize redundancy, which makes them fragile. As we develop approaches to deal with complex predicaments, we need to take the opposite approach: because we can’t know the outcomes of these predicaments, we need to build in redundancy so that we are resilient no matter what happens. Some of the community Transition movements are working to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels entirely, even though there will probably be some hydrocarbons available in the future (e.g. in local coal mines). This gives them a cushion to fall back on in a worst-case scenario, though it probably means they will have a redundant (excess) supply of energy.

Complex indeed! You can appreciate why many people would prefer to recharacterize complex predicaments as simple or complicated problems, and use tried-and-true analytical methods to ‘solve’ them — even though the solutions won’t work (though that often isn’t discovered until the consultant, ‘expert’, manager or ‘leader’ has collected their pay and moved on). Fortunately approaches and processes that employ some or all of these attributes are being employed by groups all over the world who have given up on experts and simplistic ‘solutions’ and are striving to develop real, working, sustainable strategies to cope with complex predicaments. And an increasing number of facilitators are studying complexity theory and amending their roles and their approaches to this vital work (which is mostly in the public, NGO, and NPO sectors, and mostly unrecognized and under-appreciated), supporting and encouraging the use of complex (emergent) techniques instead of complicated (analytical) ones.

When complex predicaments are left unaddressed for long periods of time, they can sometimes worsen into chaotic predicaments (like the horrific challenge of homelessness in Haiti). Chaotic predicaments have the same characteristics as complex predicaments, with the additional attribute of massive turbulence, to the point that change and crisis are occurring so rapidly or continuously that any type of coordinated, rational response becomes impossible. Any complex system can become a chaotic one during a period of protracted war, hyperinflation, depression, extreme endemic scarcity or other situation where panic or other irrational behaviour prevails. There is no consensus on how best to cope with chaos, or even if an effective approach in such situations is possible; spontaneous approaches, moment to moment, seem to be the main option.

The hopelessness and desperation that often prevails in chaotic situations often produce a power vacuum that can allow charismatic and despotic leaders to take control; the struggling nations of the world are replete with stories of this happening, and there is a danger that, as we in affluent nations face multiple crises in the decades ahead, we too could see the emergence of chaos and fall victim to the false and simplistic promises of fools and tyrants. The best insurance against this, I believe, is to tackle these predicaments while they are complex, using approaches and processes with attributes like the ones I have suggested above, before they become chaotic.

.     .     .     .     .

So that’s my introduction to complexity theory. There’s much more to it, of course, but I’ve tried to focus on what I see as the key issues of (i) differentiating complex from complicated systems and situations, and (ii) laying out the attributes of effective approaches and processes for addressing complex predicaments. Let me know if you think I succeeded.

[Sorry, folks: I jumped the gun on this post; I will repost it here once Tree has had time to properly edit and approve it, so stay tuned]

Although I’m thoroughly disillusioned with most of the analytical models (like the classic 2×2 matrix) that consultants use to try to describe how things work, I remain fond of “flow” models that depict the dynamics or life-cycle of things. Unfortunately, most such models attempt to oversimplify complexity, and while they may be useful in conveying a basic understanding of a system, they are usually dangerous to employ in practice. The two most notorious “flow” models are the S-curve, which purports to describe the growth of businesses and other cyclical systems, which looks like this:

s-curve, source: Strategic Innovation: Abraham & Knight

and the hype cycle, which is most often applied to new technologies and fads, which looks like this:

The “sustainable growth” ideologues don’t have just one S-curve, of course; they have a whole series of them, each leaping further up just as the one before it peaks. Both the S-curve and hype cycle are cyclical, but both euphorically ultimately trend generally upwards. So in essence they aren’t “cycles” at all, but spirals. Anyone who studies nature knows that nothing grows forever (even though our Ponzi scheme stock markets are utterly based on the assumption that things can and will), so all spirals are, in effect, death spirals.

Nature is however replete with cycles which, over time, wax and wane, advancing over time, if “advancing” is the right word, sideways. Overlapping cycles, cycles embedded in other cycles, smaller and larger and longer and shorter cycles. All of them ending up, finally, back where they started, at zero.

And anyone who has followed the hype cycles over time has quickly discovered that almost nothing ever reaches the “plateau of productivity” except in the minds of those selling it.

So I was intrigued, when I spoke with Chris Corrigan and Tree Bressen over lunch the other day, to learn about Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s (Berkana Institute) model of Lifecycles of Emergence. These cycles are, at once, cycles of birth and death, and over time they travel sustainably sideways. The lifecycle looks like this (as Chris drew it in his conversation with Tree — I couldn’t find it depicted anywhere online):

Emergence is an inherently complex-system construct. Rather than trying to “create” communities, what this model does is acknowledge pioneering efforts, then name them, in ways that others self-identify with, allowing these pioneers to coalesce and connect into networks. Networks are by definition loose affiliations, with members joining and leaving easily.

The next step is to nourish these networks so that they become cohesive, more integral and helpful to their members. At this point they evolve into true communities of practice. The term ‘community of practice’ has been severely misused in business to represent groups of professionals assigned to focus on certain specialties — in this sense they are neither ‘communities’ nor ‘practitioners’. True communities of practice are self-organized, powerfully supportive of each other, highly committed to their shared values and learning, and ‘practice’ in the real sense of constantly learning by doing and by collaborating with each other.

Once you have a true community of practice, the final step is to propagate its value by illuminating, spreading the word through stories, events, word-of-mouth and publications about what they do and why it’s important and useful. Through this the collective value of the practitioners is realized as they become a system of influence — with the power and resources to bring about important and positive change.

Practitioners in a system of influence can even throw ‘lifelines’ or build bridges to invite (or pull) forward those stuck in earlier paradigm thinking, methods and tools — rescuing them from e-mail, for example, by showing them IM, virtual presence and other effective real-time collaboration tools, or showing them new and effective group processes and practices that get them past dissent, disengagement, dysfunctional power dynamics and feelings of helplessness and disempowerment.

These actions of naming, connecting, nourishing and illuminating are part of the arts of hosting and facilitation. These arts are perhaps the only kind of change work that actually works in today’s complex environments, which is why I have so often spoken so highly of the importance of them. The four actions are part of the practice of ‘holding the field’, encouraging and enabling and keeping open the vital ‘field’ of people and relationships that traverse this lifecycle. This field is a field of energy (the vertical axis of the above chart is, in effect, the degree of collective energy at each stage of the lifecycle).

What do you think of this model? I found it intuitively powerful and compelling, particularly as Chris sketched it out and explained it. I like the idea of energy fields and the important work of moving and channeling that energy in productive ways. It ties into the ‘sweet spot’ concept in my book — the high-energy intersection of passion, exceptional competency and deep human need.

A couple of years ago I tweaked Chris’ model of collective decision-making (based on Otto Scharmer’s Theory U) to produce this model, also a life-cycle:

I like this model because it recognizes that decisions and actions start with individual initiative and end with individual responsibility — it is through the intermediate collective stages of conversation, understanding and consensus that the wisdom is obtained to know what to do, but ultimately, what gets done is the sum of motivated individual actions.

What I’m trying to figure out now is how the dynamic of the collective decision-making model works within the larger emergence lifecycle model. They’re both about individual and collective energy, one at a micro level and the other at the macro level, and how those energies move in time and space. It’s a bit new-agey, sure, but the old models were too static and simplistic and hierarchical. At least these recognize and draw on human passion, curiosity, energy, responsibility, self-organization, self-management, and propensity for relationship and collaboration.

Is this useful? What’s it missing? Given that we’re all in so many networks, how could we apply this model to make better use of our time, our relationships and our collective energies? How can we ‘hold the field’ even more effectively?

saraswati, hindu goddess of knowledge, creativity and openness (image online, uncredited)

Some recent comments from readers of my First Principles post led me to revisit one of the first posts I wrote on this blog, nearly seven years ago. It was about a seven-step process for coping with a new situation that Cyndy Roy and I co-developed. Here’s an excerpt:

Sense, Self-control, Understand, Question, Imagine, Offer, Collaborate

We developed this before I started reading and writing about complexity theory, but it occurs to me that this is really a practice (can’t really call it a methodology) for coping with complexity — with situations that have no simple (put the lights on a timer) or merely complicated (include a torque converter in your electric bicycle conversion kit, and make sure you true the wheels before riding). In complex situations, there is no ‘right answer’ — there are too many variables, no clear cause-effect relationships (if you do X, you may or may not get result Y), and no way of predicting what will happen. Most of the ‘problems’ we face are not (complicated) problems (with ‘solutions’) but rather (complex) predicaments that we have to adapt ourselves to.

It seems to me that wild creatures (and perhaps Buddhists) appreciate this, and they appear to use these seven steps to cope with situations over which they (and we) have no real control. I think we would be wise to do likewise. Here’s how these seven steps differ from the normal ‘problem-solution’ process we use in merely complicated situations. As you review them, think about a specific complex situation: Example: Resolving a non-trivial conflict between two people you respect and who both have valid points that cannot be reconciled:

1. Sense: Pay attention to everything that is happening. Don’t try to identify the ‘problem’, or the ’cause’ or the obvious ‘solution’ because in complex situations there are none of these. If we think we see a cause or solution, we’re probably over-simplifying and we will be prone to making erroneous decisions.
2. Self-control: Become aware of your own subjectivity, biases, feelings, and predispositions. Know yourself, and appreciate that you are not separate from this situation or from others trying to cope with it. You are a part of the system and hence of the predicament. You cannot control it (though you probably wish you could and my want to try to); you can only control yourself, and your reaction to it. Appreciate that the situation is a predicament, that you and others need to accommodate and adapt to, not a ‘problem’ that needs to be ‘fixed’. Lower your own and others’ expectations that there are magical or simple ‘answers’ to this situation.
3. Understand: Appreciate that things are the way they are for a reason, and that there’s a reason that this predicament has no simple (or complicated) ‘solution’. Appreciate the situation, and the different knowledge, ideas and perspectives that people have in regard to it. Appreciate not just the ‘intellectual’ content of the situation but also the emotions at play. Sympathize with what and how people feel and understand why they feel that way. Let your senses and intuition inform your understanding.
4. Question: Use questions, of yourself and of others, to explore and deepen your appreciation, and that of others, of the situation. Don’t proffer answers or quick fixes, because if there were a quick fix it would already have occurred to someone and have been done. Ask questions that are not judgemental but which are probing, challenging, and which push past unacknowledged biases or assumptions.
5. Imagine: Surface approaches and possibilities that others have not thought of, and encourage and facilitate others to do so, collaboratively. Hold these approaches and possibilities open. Find different ways to look at the situation. Think about how nature copes with analogous situations and challenges. Hold the creative tension between what is imaginable and what is practicable, by encouraging both creative and critical thinking.
6. Offer: Be generous. Be the first to offer something of value — your time, resources, willingness to talk with others or do research. Give and incite others to give likewise, following your example, your intention. Take responsibility.
7. Collaborate: While there are certain actions that each person will, as a result of the understanding and appreciation they have achieved through this process, do personally, take personal responsibility for, some of the most powerful actions that can come from this practice are collective, collaborative. In collaboration, you do what you do best, and show others what you do, and by watching others you learn from them too. And the collective product is a give and take, a weaving, an adaptation to each other as well as the predicament you are working to address, to adapt yourselves to. Collaboration can produce, unexpectedly and unpredictably, results that outshine what any individual, no matter how brilliant or competent, could ever do alone.

This seven-step practice was itself a collaboration with Cyndy, and despite all I have learned since we developed it, I can’t see how to improve on it, which shows, I think, the value of collaboration.

To remember the seven steps, I created a simple set of hand movements: open and receiving (sense), fingers together contemplatively (self-control), forefingers pointed up in aha! style (understand), left hand open in a receiving gesture (question), fingers  of right hand to temple (imagine), right hand open in giving gesture (offer), hands clasped supportively together (collaborate). Much better than an acronym.

It is a practice, and as such it takes practice, but it seems to work.

drawing by hugh mcleod at gaping void

Consulting ‘guru’ Peter Drucker introduced the concept of Management by Objectives in business and government affairs a half-century ago. The idea was that if you set objectives and measure ‘progress’ against them, more will get accomplished. These objectives, he said, had to be ‘SMART’: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Based. Drucker was one of the last of the old industrial model thinkers, but these ideas have caused a huge amount of damage since he introduced them. Essentially, they mistake complex environments (which most social environments — communities, enterprises and institutions — are) for merely complicated environments. They assume you can control the elements that lead to achievement of objectives. They assume you can get a handle on all the variables that affect an organization’s success. They assume you can predict outcomes. They assume that, because they have been fortunate enough to have been in the right place at the right time and therefore been present during a period of organizational ‘success’, they know what is needed to achieve more ‘success’. They assume their subordinates understand and do what they are told to do.

All of these assumptions are wrong. The reality is that, in business enterprises as in other complex environments, what gets done is the sum of the collective effort of those doing the work. The ‘leaders’ produce, in real terms, insignificantly more than the most junior workers, and have the power to wreck the work of many others, but not commensurate power to improve subordinates’ work. The hierarchy is all about authority, but in fact most of us (especially in non-manufacturing roles) do what we think is right, not what we’re told to do — even if we have to twist ourselves in knots to conceal our non-compliance. We do this because in this age of specialization, we really do know our jobs better than our bosses (who probably have never done those jobs).

So Management by SMART Objective leads to this ludicrous and dysfunctional dance:

• Leaders hire ‘expert’ consultants, or huddle among themselves, or decide by fiat, what the SMART objectives should be for their organization: “increase revenues by 10% and profits by 20% next year by introducing ‘improved’ versions of 15 selected products that can be sold for an average price 25% higher than the old version, and which, through internal efficiencies, cost 15% less per unit to produce”.
• These leaders then ‘cascade down’ these objectives and command subordinates to come up with SMART business unit plans that will, if successful, collectively achieve these top-level objectives.
• The subordinates understand that their success depends on ratcheting up profits, and that the objectives set by the leaders are ridiculous, magical thinking. So they come up with alternative plans to increase profits by 20% through a series of difficult, but realistic, moves. These entail offshoring everything to China, layoffs, pressuring staff to work longer hours for no more money, and, if all else fails, firing people or leaving vacancies unfilled.
• The good people in the organization all leave, because they know this short-range thinking is dysfunctional, damaging to the organizations in the longer term, unsustainable, and a recipe for a miserable workplace. Their departure creates more vacancies that aren’t filled, which in the short term reduces costs.
• The clueless and the losers, who are left, attempt to pick up the slack. They work harder, find workarounds for the dumbest management decrees, and do their best to achieve these objectives. Those fortunate enough to be in the right market areas in the right economies get promoted into some of the vacant spots left by the good people, but without the commensurate salary increase.
• The leaders, as a result, achieve their short-run objectives, award themselves huge bonuses, profit from increases in the value of their stock options, and repeat the whole cycle the next year.
• At some point the utter sustainability of this “management process” becomes apparent. There is a really bad year. The economy is blamed, perhaps. Or the top leaders are fired, and rehired in other organizations suffering from really bad years. Or the company is bought out, or ‘reorganized’ so that all the old objectives and measures no longer apply, and a completely new set is established.

The byproduct is a blizzard of plans, budgets and strategies, which are substantially meaningless. Everyone does ad hoc things to protect their ass and try to make the best of impossible targets and incompetent, arrogant leaders self-deluded about their own brilliance and about their ability to control what is really happening in the organization and the marketplace.

There are, however, some things of real value happening in these organizations. None of them are ‘SMART’ so none is recognized or rewarded, and most of these things are actively discouraged. Nevertheless, because most people take pride in what they do, these valuable things happen. They include:

• Learning: People learn by making mistakes (that they don’t admit to), and this makes them better at doing their jobs.
• Conversations: People share, peer-to-peer, what works and doesn’t work, through mostly informal conversations, and this too makes them better at doing their jobs. These conversations are often surreptitious, since they are not considered ‘productive’ work.
• Practice: The more people work at doing a particular task, the better they get at it. Most such practices are substantially workarounds, self-developed ways to do their particular specialized work optimally, despite instructions to the contrary from leaders and published manuals, and despite the burden of reporting SMART data up the hierarchy, which has to be creatively invented and explained so that the practices aren’t disrupted by new orders from the leaders.
• Judgement: Through the above improved learning, conversations and practice, people develop good judgement. They make better decisions. The leaders get all the credit for these decision, but it doesn’t matter.
• Trust Relationships: Through peer-to-peer conversations, trust relationships develop. When people trust each other, whole layers of bureaucracy are stripped away. People are left to do what they do well. Unfortunately leaders in large organizations almost never trust their subordinates, so these trust relationships are almost always horizontal, not vertical. Despite this, these relationships profoundly improve productivity.
• Professionalism: The net result of all of the above is increased professionalism. People just become more competent.

This is why, in all my years as a manager, I always saw my role as listening and clearing away obstacles my staff were facing, identifying and getting rid of the small percentage who could not be trusted (too ambitious, too self-serving, uncollaborative, secretive or careless), and trusting the rest to do what they do best, and staying out of their way. In recent years I started to lose the heart to do this, but I still tried.

The ideal organization is therefore not SMART, but self-organized, trusting (no need to measure results, just practice your craft and the results will inevitably be good), highly conversational, and ultimately collaborative (impossible in large organizations because performance is measured individually not collectively). It’s one where the non-performers are collectively identified by their peers and self-select out by sheer peer pressure. It’s one without hierarchy. It’s agile, resilient and improvisational, because it runs on principles, not rules, and because when issues arise they’re dealt with by the self-organized group immediately, not shelved until someone brings them to the attention of the ‘leaders’. It’s designed for complexity. It’s organic, natural.

In my experience, such an organizational model can be replicated, but it doesn’t scale. This is true for social and political organizations (transition communities), economic organizations (Natural Enterprises, permaculture and renewable energy co-ops), educational and health organizations (unschooling groups and preventive/self-managed health clinics). This is why our models of a better way to live and make a living need to be small, demonstrative, and replicable — it needs to be clear how to adapt these small sustainable successes to other locations and situations.

There are some good models out there, but they are complex, and it is not at all apparent how we can replicate them. So instead, we try to grow them, until they reach dysfunctional size. If we really want to make the world a better place, we need to stop trying to grow small successes and start finding ways to replicate them, not as cookie-cutter ‘franchises’ under a command-and-control central hierarchy, but as autonomous adaptations. Drucker couldn’t fathom complexity, nor can most of the so-called business ‘thinkers’ of our day. We need some new thinking, aimed at prosperity without growth, at evolutionary cellular replication and adaptation as the means of getting more of a good thing. Small model organizations that are somehow viral, so you can just take the seed, the set of principles, of one, and transplant it and adapt it to work elsewhere. Model enterprises, communities and cooperatives.

I have no idea how to do this, but we need to find a way. Not so SMART. But really important.