Dave Snowden Tackles Innovation

Here is what I wrote to Dave when I read about this:

As regular readers know, I’m a champion of entrepreneurship, and especially sustainable, Natural Enterprise. The fact that large incumbent corporations addicted to growth can never hope to be innovative doesn’t bother me in the least — their vulnerability to disruptively innovative natural enterprises is a good thing, and these big clumsy dinosaurs (think: General Motors) won’t be missed.

Dave Snowden is, like me, a fan of Open Space, and he plans on using a modified version of it in his program. He has six qualms about Open Space, however, that he plans to address with his modifications:

1. It requires outstanding facilitators, but can be over-influenced by their charisma.
2. It is overly focused on the event itself, rather than seeing Open Space as a part of a journey.
3. There is insufficient use of dissent and debate and an over-focus on consensus and dialogue.
4. The pendulum is swung too far from expert based interventions, to assuming that the group assembled will have the necessary expertise.
5. People not at the event can be excluded from involvement in the follow through.
6. Issues of judgement and validation are assumed to belong to the group regardless of context and responsibility; it is worth remembering that Socrates was condemned to death by an open space event because he made the other participants uncomfortable.

The modifications he proposes are:

• Use of a catalytic event or process to disrupt entrained patterns of thinking and prepare participants to be open to novel or new ideas.
• The assembly of a diverse range of perspectives on the issue, objectively to prevent premature convergence on any analysis or determination of action.
• Inclusion of people who, while not naive in their area of practice, interest or expertise should be naive in respect of its potential application to this issue to allow for innovation. 
• Initially focusing on maximizing friction between the diverse perspectives and naive participants to create the conditions for innovation, and then focusing on specific interventions and tools which are refined before the end of the event into concrete and tangible actions.

My sense is that Dave’s experience with Open Space has led him to believe his six qualms are inherent in the Open Space process rather than the result of a flawed application of it. Here’s my response to each of these qualms, in order.

1. With each experience in applying Open Space, I believe participants learn to self-manage the process and cease to be ‘led’ by or dependent on facilitators. Every methodology has a learning curve.
2. The critical part of Open Space is the collective actions that participants sign up for once they have achieved a deep understanding of the issue, and the personal actions that each participant decides to undertake as a result of that understanding, in the context of his/her own job or capacities. Any particular issue will involve series of conversations and possibly several Open Space events as components of the personal and collective ‘journey’ of resolving the issue or problem at hand.
3. Maybe it’s the Welshman in Dave that makes him fond of dissent and debate as ‘creative friction’. One of the things I learned from Hugh Brody’s study of indigenous people’s complex problem-solving processes is that wide open, candid, detailed knowledge sharing (largely through stories), letting people learn by doing, precision in communication, deep listening skills, strong analogic and inductive thinking capacity, excellent memory and recall, Let-Self-Change rather than solutions imposed on others or on the environment, profound respect for individual decisions and autonomy, waiting to be asked for advice rather than proffering it, great self-confidence, egalitarianism, trusting individuals with personal responsibility to act as they see fit, and deliberate recognition of uncertainty, are critical to the process and to the success of methodologies like Open Space. These are skills and capacities that many of us in modern societies lack, and they must be re-engendered before any methodology will be effective. Creative friction is no substitute for these skills and capacities and, I would argue, are unnecessary once these skills and capacities are present among the participants.
4. As a champion of the Wisdom of Crowds I have developed enormous respect for consensus and dialogue, and confidence that if the ‘crowd’ is large enough, diverse enough, and sufficiently informed, they will do a much, much better job than any so-called ‘expert’. In my opinion, the pendulum Dave refers to hasn’t swung nearly far enough.
5. A proper Open Space process trusts the participants to involve others as appropriate in the follow-through and personal action plans after a particular event. The event is only a small part of the ‘journey’; many others with passion about the issue will inevitably be involved in that journey.
6. I think my points 4 and 5 immediately above address Dave’s concern about reckless and irresponsible actions coming out of properly-convened and properly-conducted Open Space events. If the results of an event are reckless or irresponsible, I would argue that it’s a problem with the execution of the Open Space methodology, not the methodology itself.

So in conclusion, I still like the 9-step process I reviewed in yesterday’s post — the Collective Complex-Environment Problem Resolution Process, as the mechanism for organizing collective action around a particular complex problem (including the problem of lack of innovation). And I still like my new 15-step process laid out and diagrammed in that post (I’ve included the graphic again above) for Dealing With Complexity Day-to-Day, as a mechanism for responsibly governing ourselves throughout the ‘journey’ that, collectively and individually, will allow ‘sensible’ resolutions to complex problems, over time, to emerge.