[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]
June 9, 2010
April 22, 2010
The Lifecycle of Emergence
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?
March 9, 2010
Coping With Complexity
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
| Sense: | Observe, listen, pay attention, open up your senses, perceive everything that has a bearing on the issue at hand. Connect. |
| Self-control: | Don’t prejudge or jump to conclusions. Don’t lose your cool. Focus. Breathe. |
| Understand: | Make sure you have the facts and appreciate the context. Things are the way they are for a reason. Know what that reason is. Sympathize. |
| Question: | Ask, don’t tell. Challenge. Think critically. |
| Imagine: | Picture, hear, feel what could be. Be visionary. Every problem is an opportunity. Anything is possible. |
| Offer: | Consider. Give something away. Create options, new avenues to explore. Suggest possibilities. Lend a hand. Help. |
| Collaborate: | Create something together. Evolve collective approaches that are better than any set of individual approaches. Learn to yield, to build on, to bridge, to adapt your thinking. |
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
January 14, 2010
Not So SMART: Replicating (Instead of Growing) Natural Small Organizations
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.
October 19, 2009
Invitation to KMWorld 2009
I’m not sure whether, since I’m retiring soon, I’ll be invited to present at Knowledge Management conferences from now on. So if you’re able to make it to KMWorld 2009 in San Jose November 16-19 this year, I’d love to see you. I’m running a half-day workshop, Introducing Web 2.0 to Your Organization: A Practical Guide, on Monday, November 16. Then on Tuesday November 17 I’m doing a presentation on Risk Management: A KM Approach, as well as serving on a panel later in the day. The links above are to my Slideshare presentation decks for the workshop and presentation, which you can download if you want to assess whether they’re worth attending. Always the best part of these conferences is the networking between the sessions, though. More on the conference here. Full brochure here. |
October 15, 2009
Sustainable Work, Sustainable Life
 Earlier this month I wrote about the possibility of developing a Finding Your Sweet Spot Workbook to accompany my book Finding the Sweet Spot. I proposed a schema of nine types of what might be called Natural Work, that might help people hone in on their Gifts (what they’re uniquely good at doing) and their Passions (what they love doing):
I also proposed to take the various published lists of ‘green’ jobs and jobs that meet real needs of the 21st century, and classify them into these nine categories, to help people identify their Purpose (what’s needed in the world that they care about). Quite a few readers of the book have told me that, while they love the concept of the three circles and the Sweet Spot where they intersect, they have two practical problems using the model. First, they say that the exercises in the book to help them find their Gifts, Passions and Purpose don’t ‘work’ for them — they’re too conceptual and require more self-knowledge and more knowledge of what the world needs than they, or the average person, can be expected to have. Second, they assert that most of what they think fits in their Sweet Spot (work that they love doing and are good at, and which meets a real need) is not ‘valued’ highly enough for them to make a decent living at it — either it’s something (art, literature, software, music, design etc.) that so many people do (or which is so easy to copy) that the market price for such work is nearly zero, or it’s something (e.g. legitimate, practical health, mental health, and geriatric health products and services, and healthy, unpolluted foods) that their desperate customers are too poor to afford. As I thought of this, I began to realize two things that I should have noticed earlier:
Learning-by-doing is in fact how most Natural Entrepreneurs I know discovered their Sweet Spot. So, my workbook will be light on intellectual exercises (like thinking about what tasks in your life you’ve been most praised for, or most relished taking on) and heavy on real-life adventures (like going and observing and talking with the owner of a small, local business you admire, with a list of questions to talk with them about, or taking up a new hobby or volunteer role you’ve always wanted to do, or at least thought you did). My hope is that, just as my friends Paul and Grace had their aha! moment about their Sweet Spot (helping the world eat better) after they made an excursion to Tibet, encouraging people to just get out and try stuff they’ve never thought of doing, might help a lot of readers really discover their Gifts and Passions, those they might never have considered if they’d stayed inside the confines of their house and workplace. Another thing my Workbook will offer is a way to take some of the research activities discussed later in my book, and apply them earlier in the process of discovering your Purpose. Many people, I’ve discovered, don’t see unmet needs that are staring them in the face and which offer wonderful entrepreneurial opportunities, because they don’t know how to look for them, recognize them, research them and ask the right questions to surface them. As I explain in the book, you can’t just ask people what they need, because usually they don’t know. (I described a product much like an iPod to people in 1971 as part of my university thesis work, and respondents looked at me as if I were from Mars.) Surfacing needs that you can turn into entrepreneurial opportunities is an iterative, emergent process that comes from exploring and prompting and imagining possibilities with the people who will become your customers. The same thing applies to discovering your Purpose. You’ll never discover it inside your own head, no matter how knowledgeable and imaginative you may be. So the workbook will take a much more externally-focused, conversational, research-based approach to finding your Purpose, and hence ultimately your Sweet Spot. The issue of how our economy is shifting, quietly but tectonically, from an Industrial Growth economy that rewards wealth, size, ruthlessness and political connections, to what I am calling a Natural Economy characterized by much lower prices (except for scarce resources), generosity, reciprocality, trust, modesty, responsiveness, responsibility, sustainability and the importance of relationships, is staggeringly important, and I’m kicking myself for not recognizing the signs of its emergence earlier. Chris Anderson’s book Free demystifies the phenomenon that has delinked price from value and obsolesced hoarding of intellectual capital. The proportion of a car’s ‘dealer cost’ attributable to labour is expected to plummet from 70% to 30% within a decade. Generation Y is justifiably complaining that their wages are subsistence with little hope of improvement, and the returns for fledgling entrepreneurs, no matter how lucky or bright, don’t look much better to them. This is a world that no longer pays fair. Unions will wail. Overpaid executives and fat financial industry Ponzi-scheme artists, recently or soon to be laid off, will sell their sports cars and buy taxi licenses. And the poor, working long hours in multiple jobs for pathetic wages, will become even poorer. Not fair, but it’s here to stay. Five billion people vying for jobs means labour supply is so much higher than demand that your work is worth next to nothing. What’s good about this is that much of what we want and need now will also soon cost next to nothing. Your income will keep dropping, but so will a significant proportion of your costs of living. It’s called deflation, and while it’s currently being hidden from consumers by price-gouging corporatist oligopolies who are stealing the labour savings as obscene profits and more obscene bonuses, it’s only a matter of time before wage-earners run out of money and stop buying products with outrageous markups, opening the way for new providers who will disintermediate the corporatists and offer their products and services for next to nothing. For a short while these may well be Chinese providers, but as oil and commodity and resultant transportation costs soar, the providers will ultimately be mostly your neighbours. We are headed for a relocalized, community-based Gift Economy, with low prices for most things, and low wages. Such an economy will not respond to advertising or hype. It will be based on trust, generosity and reciprocity, and those who try to exploit it will be quickly identified and ostracized. It’s already begun, as Chris’ book explains. Just as Generation Y has blurred the distinction between work and non-work activities, they are learning that sustainable work is inseparable from a sustainable life. With that worldview, the Sweet Spot no longer identifies just the work you’re meant to do, it identifies the way you’re meant to live. So, instead of complaining that the work in their Sweet Spot (what they love to do, and are good at doing, that meets a real need in the world) doesn’t pay enough, Generation Y is beginning to look at how much they need to earn to do what is in their Sweet Spot, essentially turning my whole model on its head. Some retirees with inadequate pensions are doing the same thing. They are looking not only to find work that is sustainable, responsible and joyful, but to find a way of life that is sustainable, responsible and joyful, of which work is an indistiguishable part. This is part of what Thomas Princen calls The Logic of Sufficiency, and some of us now get it, and a lot more will soon have no choice but to follow. My workbook then, will not just help readers discover the work that is in their Sweet Spot, but help them to determine how much they need to earn, and what they need to do in their non-work lives, to “afford” that work. It will explore, for example, the paradox that often an extra dollar of income can actually ‘cost’ (in taxes, higher clothing, transportation, child-care, late night fast-food meals, etc.) more than a dollar, and that conversely accepting a lower income can actually increase both your quality of life and your net wealth. The workbook will be, in short, not only a more practical guide to discovering how we can discover the work we’re meant to do; it will be a guide to discovering the life we’re meant to live. Category: Finding and Creating Meaningful Work
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October 9, 2009
Intention to Practice
A couple of years ago I posted some mid-year and year-end “intentions”, to distinguish them from “resolutions”. Intentions are not aspirations; they are things we are in the process of doing, achieving, or becoming. They are what we’re meant to do, and who we’re meant to be. We have already begun to realize them. They are, as the word’s etymology implies, what we are “stretching towards”. I later shifted from intentions that are results-oriented (goals) to intentions that are process-oriented (practices), because I realized that all of the things that are worth doing for a lifetime are complex, and can never really be completed. There is no mastery, there is only the practice. More recently, I described the importance of aligning our long-term intentions (what we are meant to do and be for what’s left of our lives) and our short-term intentions (what we are meant to do and be right now, today, this week). Until they are aligned, we will continue to live in this unreal space, in the knowing/doing disconnect — we know we should be doing X (we are good at it, we love doing it, and it is needed in the world), but we keep on doing Y. We do Y because it is urgent, because it is easy, because it is fun, or because we don’t think we have any choice. Things are the way they are for a reason, and until we understand what that reason is, we will not be able to change it, or adapt ourselves to it. We will keep on doing Y, and X will never get done. If our long-term intentions are X-stuff, then when we identify short-term intentions that are also X-stuff, that are “stretching toward” the same place, we will see starkly the disconnect between it and the Y-stuff we’re actually doing. Something then has to shift. Either we stop doing (some of) the Y-stuff to make time and space for the X-stuff, or we acknowledge that we don’t actually intend to do X at all. We’re merely dreaming about it, or hoping it will happen magically. Recipe for unhappiness, self-dissatisfaction and a life wasted. If we were able to hear our future obituary, and it was all Y-stuff, would we see it as a life well-spent? And if not, what’s holding us back from doing the X-stuff? And if it’s lack of time or money holding us back, are we really intending to do X? Example: One of my long-term intentions is to create working models of a better way to live and make a living. I’ve written a book about how to create sustainable, responsible enterprises. I’m working on a novel/screenplay that depicts what life in a sustainable world 200 years from now might look like, to help us imagine possibilities. Right now I have James Kunstler’s book World Made by Hand sitting beside me — airplane reading as I make my way to visit my father for the Thanksgiving weekend. In this, my long-term and short-term intentions are aligned. Second example: Another of my long-term intentions is to work with others to stop the Alberta Tar Sands. I have a book, Andrew Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands sitting beside Kunstler’s, but beyond the vague idea of some kind of Open Space event, to brainstorm with others creative ways to disrupt and close down this ecological nightmare, I have no short-term intention stretching towards that longer-term one. Worse, I’m anxious about the longer-term intention: I have no passion for this kind of work (though I have great passion for helping others do it), and I know people whose lives have been devastated as a result of having been arrested, for nothing. No question this is holding me back, and that my intentions in this area, if that’s what they are, are out of alignment. This brings me back to practices. It occurs to me that, when I retire (soon), I will be best able to align and stretch toward both my short-term and long-term intentions by allocating specific time blocks to three kinds of practices every day (though I recognize I’ll have to be flexible on the times): (a) Reconnecting practices, (b) Capacity-building, activism and model-building practices, and (c) Reflecting practices. Or, put more simply, sensing (mornings), doing (afternoons) and thinking and playing (evenings). Starting with these three blocks of time, I developed the chart below that shows my long-term intentions, the long-term practices that “stretch toward” those intentions, and the short-term, daily intentions (exercises) in alignment with the longer-term ones. The long-term practices tie into the nine steps in my What You Can Do graphic above, and the colour (red, yellow, green) is from my ’scorecard’ and shows how much work I have to do on each.
What I discovered in putting this chart together was that (a) many of the things I do today, things which take up most of my day, really don’t contribute at all to my intentions, and (b) when I reallocated time in my day to these three blocks of time (right column), it required a lot of thought, imagination and work to come up with a list of short-term intentions (exercises and projects) with which to usefully fill that time — exercises and projects that would stretch toward the long-term intentions. And even with retirement, I suspect “freeing up” six additional hours a day for intentional work will be a challenge — it will mean less time on e-mail and casual reading, for example (i.e. getting away more often from this computer). The third column of this chart is new and tentative and incomplete, but it’s also for me a personal breakthrough. I am not sure whether this is the solution, for me, to the knowing/doing disconnect and the tyranny of the urgent over the important — the real formula for Getting Things Done. But I intend it to be. With practice. Category: Getting Things Done
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October 4, 2009
A ‘Finding the Sweet Spot’ Workbook?
 Since my book Finding the Sweet Spot was published, I’ve been thinking about how to make it more useful. I did set up a companion website, but I was far too ambitious in its design, and was naive in the expectation that people could/would actually compare ideas, Gifts, Passions and Purposes with others online, and that there would be anough traffic on the site to create a self-organized ‘market’ of ideas and potential partners. Lately I’ve wondered whether it might be possible to create an online workbook to accompany the book, one that would include exercises to discover your Gifts, Passions and Purpose, and find the Sweet Spot at their intersection. Rather than starting with the industrial classifications, the way most career counselling guides do, I thought it might be more appropriate to start with the types of activities that go on in a Natural Economy and Natural Society. My first attempt to delineate these (which was part of the research for my novel) is illustrated above. Nine “meta-careers” are identified:
I developed this framework in the context of essential work of a post-civilization society. These are all things that are needed in a community, and which we offer to others (because no individual is self-sufficient), to make the community self-sufficient. They cut across all of the modern, specialized ‘disciplines’ that have become our modern economy’s strait-jacket: we think of disciplines like ’sales representative’ or ‘engineer’ or ‘musician’ or ‘athlete’ as the only way collective effort can be divvied up and parsed, because it is the only way we have ever seen work categorized. So, for example, the work of a scientist can entail all nine of the work categories listed above, as can the work of an artist or a programmer. My belief is that our natural affinity is more for one or a few of these nine work categories, than it is to a modern ’specialty’: People who are good at designing could be as useful designing shirts as designing recipes. People who are good at mending people (e.g. doctors) could be as useful and passionate about mending trains (e.g. mechanics). So I think it might be useful to think about what we are meant to do using these nine meta-ways of being of use, that draw on similar natural Gifts and similar Passions. In thinking about my own Sweet Spot, I generally identify “reflecting” and “imagining possibilities” (category 3 activities) and “writing” (a category 4 activity) as being what I’m meant to do. I am passionate but not especially gifted at facilitation, conversing and demonstrating (category 2 and 9 activities). I am competent but not especially passionate about research (category1 activity). And I am neither competent nor passionate about category 5-8 work, though I recognize their great value and would not start an enterprise that didn’t have partners who were both gifted and passionate about such work. When I look at wild creatures, I see evidence of learning and practice of all nine of these categories of essential work. The need for us to be social, to associate and collaborate and, together, to do all nine types of work effectively, transcends history, geography and species. Another thing I like about this categorization of essential work is that it demonstrates the uselessness of a lot of the work that is being done today by millions of highly-paid people, and hence might give pause to young people drawn to these ‘professions’ simply because they’re easy and lucrative. Lawyers, stock-brokers and insurance agents come to mind, for example. None of these professions produce anything of essential value. They are parasites of the current, unsustainable and dysfunctional industrial economy. The post-civilization world will not need anyone to do these things. So if I were to develop a Finding the Sweet Spot workbook, to help people discover the work they’re meant to do, I would be strongly tempted to use this nine-category classification of essential work as the basis for doing so, and to re-cast the exercises about discovering your Gifts, your Passions, your Purpose and your Partners (those with complementary Gifts who share your Purpose) accordingly. So, for example, in listing the dozens of possible and needed ‘green’ careers in Roberts and Brandum’s book Get a Life! I would reorganize them into the nine categories above. I’d welcome your thoughts on this plan. Is this way of discovering what you’re meant to do too conceptual for most people? Does it require a degree of self-knowledge and the workings of an economy (Natural or Industrial) that is beyond most people’s capabilities? Is it counter-intuitive? Although the book has not been a popular success, I still think it could be very valuable to young people about to embark on their careers, boomers about to ‘retire’ from their first careers, and frustrated and underemployed workers of all ages. I’m just trying to figure out how to make it accessible and useful enough that it gets the attention it deserves. Category: Finding and Creating Meaningful Work
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August 23, 2009
Resilience is Futile (Adapt and Improvise Instead)
I‘ve been using the word resilience to describe the capacity — of individuals, communities and organizations — to improvise, to respond well in the moment. But I think resilience is the wrong word — it is from the Latin meaning “springing back”. Humans try to be resilient, acting as if everything is temporary, or cyclical, and as if it will always eventually possible to go back to the way things were before a challenge arose. That’s why so many of us live in misery, in false hope. While we aspire to move back to the way things once were — after the desertification, after the forests and fish have gone – the rest of all-life-on-Earth is moving on, forward. What we try to do instead of adapting to the changes in our environment, is to try to change the environment to suit us. We’ve become very good at this, but it’s unsustainable. What we’ve created in human-made environments is fragile, shabby, and ineffective. Much of human employment today is fixing all the human-made things that constantly break, and break down. Much future employment will be cleaning up the mess we’ve created with the human-made, non-biodegradable broken stuff we’ve thrown away. We try to be resilient, and to force changes in our environment, because, after learning that our cultural “software” can adapt very quickly (in as little as a generation), we discovered too late that our biological “hardware” adapts over millions of years, not decades. Today we’re racked with epidemic rates of diseases of maladaptation — notably immune system diseases, cancers, and mental illnesses. Our bodies just can’t adapt to stress, the malnutrition of the modern processed monoculture food system, and the toxins in our air, water, soils and foods. They’re still designed for life in the uncrowded, abundant and unpolluted rainforest. Alas, there’s nothing we can do about our bodies, nor is there anything sustainable we can do to our environment. Resilience is, in fact, futile — we cannot expect things to change back to what they were so that we can bounce back to what we were. And in Darwin’s sense we cannot evolve either — at best we can unschool our descendants to acquire the capacities that we lost, or never had — like the ones depicted in the charts above. We’re probably too late, those of us over 30, to learn them all effectively ourselves now. What we can do, however, is adapt and improvise. Evolution and adaptation are not about springing back, but rather springing forward. Evolution is from the Latin meaning “rolling out”, but it is worth noting that Darwin avoided the term he is now so associated with, and instead in his books used the term “descent with modification” (descent in the sense of ‘descendants’ — change only occurred with the passing of genes ‘down’ from one generation to the next). Adaptation comes from the Latin meaning “fitting in” (hence to Darwin “survival of the fittest” was not about strength or intelligence but about adaptability). Improvisation comes from the Latin meaning “[responding to the] unexpected”. These are the only effective responses to change in complex systems. Wild creatures have this ability to adapt and improvise: to fight, to flee, to change what they eat, where they live, what they do. They migrate, they hibernate, they adapt to different foods, neighbours and environments, as well as changes to members of their own community. Evolution helps them do this, by selectively favouring that capacity — those that can’t adapt and improvise, perish. So how do we, poor maladaptive and conservative creatures that we are, learn to adapt (”fit in”) and improvise (”respond to the unexpected”), and can we help our communities and organizations do so as well? Last week I visited with one of the most adaptive and improvisational organizations I know, one that I profile in my book, called Mountain Equipment Co-op. It’s a true one-person-one-vote cooperative, that began with 6 members and which now has millions. Only a tiny proportion actually participate in MEC’s decisions, but it’s enough to know that if they started doing things the members didn’t like, that could change very quickly. They generate only enough ‘profit’ to cushion them through economic downturns — any other surplus is returned as a cash refund to members based on their annual purchases. The people I’ve met like working there, and they really do care about being of service, offering excellent products (made in Canada whenever possible), and doing excellent work. As I spoke with and visited them it occurred to me that, compared to other, profit-for-shareholders companies that sell sporting goods, MEC is culturally more adaptive and resilient in 18 ways:
Here are 10 other things that organizations can do to be adaptive and improvisational, that I’ve seen some Natural Enterprises (especially cooperatives) do (I don’t know whether MEC does any of these, but it would be interesting to find out):
So much for organizations wanting to be adaptable and improvisational. What about communities and individuals? Communities (small towns, villages, intentional communities and neighbourhoods within cities) are a form of co-operative organization, the only difference being that they have a wider and more essential set of products and services, and have members instead of customers. But many the same principles of adaptation and improvision apply: autonomy, steady-state, diversity, built-in redundancy, non-indebtedness, collaboration, non-hierarchical connection, risk awareness, self-management “on principle”, emotional intelligence, biomimicry, contingency planning (including scenarios and simulations), candour and responsiveness. The town I live in tries hard, but they’re zero for fourteen on these measures. Individuals are of course part of communities and organizations, but there are also some things we can each do as individuals to be more adaptive and improvisational in our lives: be autonomous (not dependent on those outside your community), live within your means (a life of sufficiency and comfort, not one dependent on tomorrow’s income being more than today’s), get debt-free, self-manage, build emotional intelligence and other personal capacity, collaborate, plan for contingencies, always be honest, stay healthy, be good to yourself, and be open, attentive and responsive. Whew. That’s enough lists for a lifetime. Category: Complexity and Discovery
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July 7, 2009
Can Groups Be Taught to Resolve Their Own Inadequacies?
 Our hosts during my vacation this past weekend in McKenzie Bridge, OR were Charlene and Galen Phipps. Charlene, it turns out, is a facilitator with an interest in complex adaptive systems, and specifically the issue of how an understanding of social complexity can be applied to improving group functionality. Those familiar with this blog know the fundamental factors that differentiate complex from merely complicated systems. Mechanistic, complicated systems (like an automobile) have many moving parts, but they can be fully identified and understood with study and effort. By contrast, complex systems (like the world’s climatic system, or a community) are never completely knowable. They have too many variables to ever fully map, and the n-to-n connection between those variables is too manifold and nuanced to fully appreciate. Further, in complex systems, causality is never determinable; one can never separate cause and effect. So while a dysfunctional automobile can be ‘fixed’ by assessing the cause or causes of the dysfunction, we can never hope to do this with the world’s climate, or with community interactions or other social systems. Nature’s way of ‘dealing’ with complexity is to make these complex systems self-managing. A balance is found, and as the infinite number of variables constantly and inevitably change, the entire system itself collectively seeks and finds a new balance, a new equilibrium. The physical and social systems of our world are complex because, in Darwinian terms, they work. They are less brittle than simple and complicated systems — cars break down much more easily and frequently than ecosystems and societies. If an ecosystem has a quintillion components, it makes far more sense to have all these components working collectively to resolve their problems (the resolution is then said to ‘emerge’), than expecting a single superior intelligence, or even a single species, to try to manage the system and impose ’solutions’ on it. In her work, Charlene summarizes the work of many social complexity pioneers and then presents what she calls the Discovery Model, which recognizes that groups learn and perform optimally when the people, the environment and the capacity for self-organization are in sync, and when information, interaction, and adaptability are present and working to enable the group to continuously transform itself into one sustainably suited to dealing with the issues of the moment. The facilitator’s role in this dynamic is to open up, unblock, encourage and enable the group to be fully functional. S/he does this through coaching, inviting, drawing out, connecting, challenging, articulating, and building personal and group capacities. This is a huge task, and while I do agree that the role of a skilled and present facilitator is essential to effective group function, it’s my belief that this is largely because we have been indoctrinated to believe that mechanistic, complicated problem-solving is the answer to every situation (hence organizational hierarchies, and the simplistic and dysfunctional decision-making methodologies that have prevailed throughout our civilization), so we have never properly learned (as I believe indigenous and non-human societies do from birth) to self-manage, to allow resolutions to emerge naturally. Reading Charlene’s work and talking with her got me thinking about the model of social fluency that Chris Lott and I co-developed, which is illustrated above. Here’s a brief re-cap of what it says: Our ability to impart social value to others is a function of (a) our knowledge, (b) our thinking competency (critical, creative and imaginative), (c) our communication skills (conversation, presentation and demonstration), and (d) our ability to integrate these three things.
This ability to integrate these three things gives rise to (i) insight, ideas and new perspectives (thinking competency applied to knowledge), (ii) reportage and stories (communication skills applied to knowledge), (iii) rhetoric and provocation (articulation of one’s thinking), and (iv) art (in its broadest sense, the re-presentation of reality). We are all artists, performers, when we have the stage in a social circle. This aspect of the social fluency model is from the perspective of the actor (presenter, demonstrator, creator, artist), and is shown in black in the model above. The corresponding elements of social fluency from the perspective of the re-actor (audience, listener, student, learner) shown in red brackets in the model above, are as follows: Our ability to derive social value from others (i.e. to learn) is a function of (a’) our openness to others’ knowledge and ideas, (b’) our learning competency (ability to learn), (c’) our attention skills, and (d’) our ability to integrate these three things. This ability to integrate these three things gives rise to (i’) understanding (openness and competency to learn new ideas and knowledge), (ii’) appreciation (openness and attention to new ideas and knowledge), (iii’) self-change (attention/awareness of change opportunities and the learning competency to apply them), and (iv’) improvisation (the real-ization of learning). Again, this ability to integrate is social fluency. We exhibit social fluency inter-act-ively, as actors (though art/presentation) and as re-actors (through improvisation/attention). Just as individuals’ social fluency is a function of these capacities, so is that of groups. The best facilitators have the awareness and skills to recognize the capacities and incapacities of the people in a group s/he is facilitating, and those of the collective group. It’s been my experience that groups are more or less dysfunctional depending on the presence or absence of certain preconditions. The work of Dave Snowden and John Kotter supports this. These necessary preconditions for functional groups include:
So my sense is that the role of the facilitator in dealing with complex issues should include the following: Being aware of the presence or absence in the group of the necessary preconditions for a functional group.
Being aware of the presence or absence of social fluency among the members of the group, and of the group collectively, as described in the model above. Articulating to the group the presence or absence of these preconditions and the elements of social fluency, so that they are aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Suggesting compensatory ideas and methods (e.g. bringing in people, knowledge or teachers) to strengthen the group. Most importantly, enabling the group to self-assess these strengths and weaknesses and to self-generate ideas and methods to draw on strengths and alleviate or compensate for weaknesses, to make the group and its members stronger and more competent to address the issues at hand. I’m not suggesting that competent facilitators don’t do this already, just that there is a tendency for some facilitators to take the inherent problems of missing preconditions and incapacities as a given and hence not explicitly reflect them to the group, and also a tendency to make that the facilitator’s problem rather than the group’s. It seems to me that, while the facilitator may be able to get the group started in this self-assessment and self-management process (i.e. to facilitate it) the process itself should be directed and managed by the group. This is the very essence of managing social complexity. For example, in my experience dealing with senior executives, they have a propensity (often reinforced by others) to exaggerate their own competencies and knowledge and to be blind to their incapacities and areas of ignorance. In facilitated sessions, they tend to dominate groups of subordinates and rush to conclusions. In such cases I have tried to research their possible and perceived incapacities and areas of ignorance in advance, and pull them aside before the session to urge them to recognize the value of them holding back judgement, listening, and helping draw out the knowledge, perspectives and ideas of others (almost making them quasi-co-facilitators, to disable their dominance, infallability and judgement behaviours). On rare occasions, an executive will even lead off by confessing his/her incapacities and ignorance as a means of leveling the power playing field and eliciting active participation of others. On occasions where the group explicitly acknowledges their strengths and weaknesses, the session can be very productive. A team aware of its individual and collective strengths and weaknesses will generally outperform a team that isn’t. Likewise, I have found that business groups in particular often suffer from imaginative poverty, and that there is great value in doing some quiet advance brainstorming with creative and imaginative people, and then pre-seeding some provocative and credible ideas to selected group members, so that these ideas emerge as their ideas during the session and not mine as facilitator. Even better, if the group acknowledges this (or any other factor) as a collective incapacity, it can enable them to collectively invest more attention and effort on that area of weakness, or bring in others who have that capacity, or even follow a course of study or practice to acquire that capacity. Having spent many years in research, I’ve also found that groups tend to think they are more knowledgeable about issues than they really are. In particular, there is a tendency for bad news and information about problems not to be communicated vertically in organizational hierarchies. For that reason it can be helpful to have the organization’s research staff (or group members with that competency) do an ‘environmental scan’ around the issue, and pull together and present an objective and uncensored precis of applicable facts and perceptions. Of the three sets of elements of social fluency, in my experience the one that is most often lacking in groups I have facilitated is communication/attention skills. Many people come to these sessions with their minds made up, but an inability to articulate the reasons for their belief coherently and compellingly to others (often they don’t particularly care if others understand and share their viewpoint). As a result they may convey their ideas, information and perspectives poorly, or not at all, and disengage and be distracted when others are speaking. There is no simple answer to this significant challenge, but being aware of it, and recognizing it as a challenge explicitly, is a first step. It is then largely up to the group to deal with this, and I have seen groups do so very effectively. There is a technique, for example, of requiring each speaker to summarize the point made by the previous speaker before making their own point. The group can use a ‘talking stick’ to focus attention on the speaker and the importance of courtesy and attentiveness. And if a point is poorly made, asking clarifying questions can help, and can also teach the speaker how to be more coherent and responsive in future. Some facilitators use mindmaps displayed on a screen at the front of the session to ensure the points made are captured coherently and collectively understood. I know that many readers of this blog are facilitators, and would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how you have enabled groups suffering from lack of necessary preconditions for effectiveness, or lack of social fluency, or even total dysfunctionality, to become aware of, name, self-manage and resolve these issues themselves. The word facilitator literally means ‘one who makes things easier’. How have you made it easier for groups struggling with incapacities to make it easier for themselves? Thanks to Charlene for inspiring this post, and to Charlene and Galen for their wonderful hospitality.
Category: Complexity and Discovery
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