How to Cope With Bad Environmental (or Other) News

Posted on October 12, 2006 by Dave Pollard
violence
Yesterday I wrote about talking to children about death, and helping them cope with the news of the death of a loved one. A couple of readers said I should write about how adults can cope with bad news in general, and specifically, since this blog is often about environmental matters, how to cope with the relentless barrage of bad news about the environment.

I’m learning to manage stress, including chronic stress, but horrific and unceasing waves of bad news are more than just stressful, they can, after a while, fill you with grief. And I wasn’t sure I could proffer any advice about this, since I’ve long struggled with my own sense of unbearable grief about Gaia. Grief, it seems to me, combines a feeling of great sadness or regret over loss with a feeling of helplessness to prevent its recurrence and/or hopelessness that we can ever be truly happy again because of it — not knowing how to cope with the sense that there was nothing we could have done to prevent this loss (or worse, that there was, and we didn’t do it).

When you get the toxic cocktail of negative feelings — loss, helplessness, hopelessness and selg-loathing, it is hard to avoid reacting in inappropriate, unhealthy ways that reflect the stages of grief:

  • denial
  • anger
  • depression
  • learned helplessness
  • severe anxiety
  • fatalism

So what can we do to avoid reacting to relentless bad news in one of these six ways?

Perhaps the best place to start is with an awareness of how our bodies are reacting, and an awareness of the emotions we are feeling. Our bodies react in visceral, instinctive, somatic ways that, over time, can actually cause severe and chronic physical illness. These physical, and our emotional, reactions to bad news are entirely natural, and we should not set ourselves the unreasonable objective of being able to ‘overcome’ them. For three million years the kind of ‘bad news’ we faced was the sudden presence of a predator who threatened to kill us or our loved ones. Our intuitive, largely subconscious reactions to such threats were very effective in generating the ‘fight or flight’ response that, in an evolutionary sense, was entirely appropriate and effective in mitigating that threat. These extreme reactions lasted only a short time, until the threat had passed. They were not chronic.

But if the threat turned out to be lethal — a loved one was killed and eaten — then that effective ‘fight or flight’ response would become a debilitating traumatic response. Why would nature have endowed us to respond in this very negative, debilitating way to the loss of a loved one? Surely it could not convey any evolutionary advantage?

Well, perhaps it could: Nothing leads us to appreciate life more than the realization of its fragile and temporary nature. “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”. We love the others who remain behind even more after such a loss, and protect them more. It is only when the loss leaves us utterly alone, with no one else we love remaining, that we tend to give up. In nature those in that situation are generally unhappy, vulnerable, and, of course, unable to procreate — so it may make sense for those left so alone to sacrifice themselves, to allow themselves to become food for those not so alone. That would be an effective evolutionary survival formula for the ecosystem as a whole.

Of course, in modern human civilization, there is no such evolutionary advantage in such responses. But our civilization is simply too new to have allowed our bodies and emotions to adapt and manifest more appropriate responses to grief. And the firehose of modern communications allows us to feel that loss daily, so the trauma and grief become chronic.

So one method of coping, I think, is to be aware of our emotions and how our bodies are reacting and to appreciate that this is an entirely natural, explicable response. Self-knowledge gives us back a bit of understanding and control, and that’s a good thing.

Another important way of coping is learning to be more resilient so that when we do have these reactions we are able to recover from them more quickly and completely. The stress management techniques I’ve talked about in other articles — meditation, avoiding vexatious people, jobs and situations, self-hypnosis, a healthy, stimulant-free diet, exercise, healthy work habits, massage and physiotherapy, healthy sex, lots of social contact and social activities, generosity activities, play and fun, music, spending time in nature etc. can all help us prepare for bad news and be more resilient when it occurs.

Perhaps another way of coping is to deliberately minimize our exposure to bad news that is not actionable. When there is something we can do about a bad news story — the modern equivalent of an immediate ‘fight or flight’ response — and when we do it, then the action usually has a cathartic benefit and our grief will likely be minimal. I’ve stopped reading most environmental news except for local stories, and even then I will only read about local environmental problems if I know I’m prepared to act to do something about them.

The only other ways of coping I have found are social: Talking it out with sympathetic others so your grief isn’t bottled up inside. Keeping your sense of humour and exercising it with others at every opportunity. Learning something new, ideally with or from someone else. Accepting help from others and offering help to others. And, when you’re acting to do something about a local environmental or other problem, doing so with others.

Being aware of and understanding our physical and emotional response to grief, building up our resilience, minimizing exposure to unactionable bad news, and engaging in lots of social coping activities — all of these can help mitigate the sorrow and damage that bad news can produce in our modern society.

They can reduce its intensity and duration, but they won’t deaden us to it. And I think that’s a good thing. We can’t numb ourselves to pain without also numbing ourselves to joy.

This is an incomplete solution, I know. What other techniques have you found that help you cope with regular, relentlesslybad news?

And if you’re a believer in prayer then, as James Taylor says in his song Gaia, “For God’s sake say one for me — poor wretched unbeliever.”
Posted in Collapse Watch | 7 Comments

Talking To Children About Death

Posted on October 11, 2006 by Dave Pollard

Five Stages of Grief Kubler-RossAt a time of great distress and grief, the thought of having to speak to children about the loss of a loved one can bring on an unbearable additional anxiety. We no longer live in a world where children frequently witness death as a part of life, and so it is hard for them to grapple with, and hard on us to try to figure out how best to break such tragic news to them and help them through their own, unique stress and grief. They go through the same five stages that we do, in their own way. Furthermore, they may sense and ‘feed off’ our own unhappiness and anxiety. Here are ten things that we can do to make this difficult task a little easier:

Talk about it when you see it in everyday life

Although seeing human death first-hand is rare for children, the deaths of animals, and the stories about deaths in the media, can provide an opportunity to open a dialogue with children and get them accustomed to thinking about death as a natural process, and to engage them in discussions about what it means and how they feel about it. The loss of a pet, or a friend’s pet, or the sight of a dead bird or animal in the wild provides an opportunity to do this. So do stories in the media about the deaths of famous people, accidents, and stories about war or epidemic disease. Literature, even children’s fairy tales, and television and the movies, often portray death in strange or dramatic ways that allow adults the chance to probe children’s knowledge and feelings on the subject, and help them deal with it more effectively when a more personal situation arises later.

Listen, be honest, patient, reassuring and calming

In the stress to explain a tragic event to a child, there may be a temptation to do all the talking. It is important to listen carefully to what the child is saying, and not to anticipate or judge what he or she says. If his or her response seems casual or harsh, pay attention not only to the words but to the child’s body language and facial expression as well. We can’t expect children to be articulate about this subject, so it is important to give them time to express themselves, and to give ourselves time to understand what they are feeling behind the words they say. We must also be reassuring, and not lead the child to believe it is someone’s fault (especially not the child’s) — children often take stern or tearful discussions with adults to mean they, the child, must have done something wrong, so we must explicitly avoid or correct any such misimpression. And as hard as it may be in the face of our own anger and fear, it is important that we remain calm, even if the child’s initial reaction is, as it is commonly, one of anger or fear.

Admit you don’t know all the answers

There is a natural tendency for children, faced with confusing and unexpected news, to be full of questions, some of which have no answers. There is likewise a tendency for adults, trying to make the child at ease in the situation, to try to come up with all the answers, in case the adult’s uncertainty causes the child even more unease — adults, after all, usually claim to have all the answers, or at least know where to ‘look them up’. Honesty requires that we admit, in these situations, that we “just don’t know the answer to that”. An answer that the child senses is made up, or not really believed, can create more unease and even distrust than an honest, simple “We don’t know”.

Talk about different beliefs about what happens after we die

We may be inclined to tell children what we personally believe happens after someone dies, to use this opportunity to give them this important message and reassure them (and perhaps ourselves at the same time). But even in such difficult circumstances it can be helpful to explain that different people have different beliefs about what happens after we die. This increases the credibility of your admissions that you don’t have all the answers, and provides an opportunity to turn some of the grief to learning and exploration, which is a powerful healer. Talking about these alternatives can discharge some of the raw emotion and at the same time help the child come to grips on his or her own terms with the consequences of death, and hence help him or her be better prepared for the next time they face the loss of a loved one.

Keep the message short and simple but be available

It is usually better to state the facts calmly, simply and briefly, rather than going into detail and trying to anticipate and respond to the child’s questions and taxing his or her attention span. Then listen. The child will tell you if he or she needs more answers now. It is not uncommon for information like this, which the child usually has no frame of reference to digest, to take a while to sink in. This is not insensitivity. When he or she is ready with more thoughts or questions, that’s the time to continue the discussion, so it’s important to remain available and open to such conversations, even if they continue for an extended period of time.

Talk in concrete terms about what will and won’t happen now — how the death will affect the child’s own life

This, too, can be difficult to handle, since the questions and concerns of the child may seem very self-centred, even selfish. Appreciate that children know they are dependent on adults, and need to know whether that dependence will be changed or compromised by the loss of someone close. Try to see the situation from the child’s vulnerable point of view and reassure him or her, as much as possible, that little if anything will change in his or her life, and if there will be changes, what specifically will they be, when will they occur, and what are the important implications for the child. When they are powerless, children seek and need consistency, and in these situations we should try to give them that as much as we can.

Avoid confusing metaphors about death

As a coping mechanism, adults often resort to metaphors — being “called to Heaven”, “eternal sleep”, “going away”, “passed on to the other side” etc. They have a calming and sympathetic effect on us because we know they are metaphors. By contrast, a child will usually take such expressions literally and can become very confused or distraught by them. If the loved one was “taken by the angels” could the angels come for him or her too? If death is an “eternal sleep” should we be afraid to go to sleep in case we don’t awaken? If a senior relative died “of a protracted illness” should we be terrified of dying every time we get a cold? Children often don’t have enough grounding in the beliefs of a religion early in their lives to be able to handle a lot of perplexing explanations about the afterlife all of as sudden when a loved one dies. That doesn’t mean denying one’s religious convictions, but rather, unless the child has been taught these beliefs before and is comfortable with them, keeping the explanations short, simple and factual, avoiding the use of confusing and unfamiliar metaphors, and explaining other adults’ use of confusing metaphors as just “adults’ way of talking about things” — not to be taken literally.

Be cautious of idealizing a deceased child in front of other children

Again, idealizing a lost loved one, especially one who died young, is a natural behaviour and sign of respect and appreciation for the deceased and his or her family. But this, too, can be troubling to surviving children who may feel they now have a burden to ‘live up’ to a near-impossible standard and to fill the enormous empty space that the deceased’s loss has left behind. That’s unfair to surviving children and they may well ‘act out’ their sense of resentment at being put in an impossible position. If the child cannot be expected to appreciate that the idolization is an act of kindness to surviving adults, it may be better to keep him or her out of earshot of such expressions.

Be careful of suddenly becoming over-protective of children

When a loved one is lost, there is a naturally tendency to become more protective of children in one’s care, but if carried to an extreme this can suffocate the child and cause fear, anxiety or resentment. This is something adults need to talk to each other about, to make sure they are not overreacting and causing undue additional stress to the child.

Prepare children for visits to hospitals and funerals

A funeral, or a visit to a hospital to see a dying person, can be very traumatic to children who aren’t prepared and don’t know what to expect. It’s important to tell them calmly and factually exactly what they are going to see and hear, including preparing them for the emotional outpouring of adults who are usually calm. It is more important that the child know what to expect than why, so there is, again, no need to answer questions that haven’t been asked. It’s also important that children have a choice about whether or not to attend these events. They should not feel coerced one way or the other. This decision of each child is a critical step in learning to take responsibility for one’s own decisions.

This list was prepared with the guidance and inspiration of several articles written by experts in the subject, most notably an extensive presentation on this subject by Dr JW Worden reproduced at hospicenet.org.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Caledon, Canada: A Case Study in the Seeming Futility of Controlling Growth

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Dave Pollard
ORM Oak Ridges Moraine
I live in Caledon, the largest municipality (physically) in the Greater Toronto Area, and the one with (for now) the smallest population (70,000, of which 25,000 is in the Town of Bolton, the pink area in the SE corner of the municipality on the map above). The NE third of Caledon is part of the Oak Ridges Moraine, the source of most of the GTA’s fresh water and oxygen (much of the Moraine area is tree-covered, unlike the rest of the GTA). The Oak Ridges Moraine is partially protected from further development, for now. Roughly the Western third of Caledon is protected as part of the Niagara Escarpment, a rare and fragile ecosystem designated a United Nations world biosphere reserve. The two municipalities South of Caledon (Brampton and Mississauga) are pro-growth communities (among the fastest-growing in Canada), and by 2021 every acre of these communities will have been developed (i.e. on the map above, colour them solid pink).

The GTA is one of the world’s fastest-growing urban agglomerations. It accepts over half of all new Canadian immigrants, and hence accounts for 80% of Ontario’s and 40% of all of Canada’s net population growth. The GTA has a current population of 6 million (half of Ontario’s 12 million total). By 2031, Ontario’s population is projected to grow to 18 million (almost entirely due to new immigration). By 2100, if immigration continues unabated, Ontario’s population will be nearly 50 million. The provincial government, apparently for political reasons, is assuming that the GTA’s share of this growth will suddenly and inexplicably drop from 80% to 60%, even though new immigrants have shown no interest in living elsewhere in Ontario (like all immigrants, they tend to choose to live with their fellow expatriates, at least until they get established). So population forecasts for the GTA are deliberately under-estimated and are far below projections. If 80% of new immigrants continue to come to the GTA, its population will balloon to nearly 11 million (almost double its current size) by 2031, and, by 2100, to 36 million (six times its current size). And since suburban population densities are much lower than urban densities, the GTA’s physical built-up area will at least triple by 2031 and increase by a factor of ten by 2100. No city planning envisions, or is prepared to cope with, this astronomical growth. Just imagine triple the pink (built up) area in the map above by 2031 and ten times the pink area by 2100 (the entire area covered by the map, and half as much again).

That’s the future world, and the current state of denial, in the GTA. We in Caledon are already facing enormous pressure to accept far more people than the official plan permits, even though two thirds of the municipality is governed by Moraine and Escarpment regulations and is not supposed to be developed at all. In fact, of the one third that is available for development, one third is designated Greenbelt and the other two thirds is designated Whitebelt (prime agricultural land, where development is officially discouraged). So ‘officially’, no more of Caledon is supposed to be developed. In spite of this, the Official Plan for Caledon envisions its population growing from 70,000 to 110,000 by 2031. In other words, of the nearly five million new GTA residents expected by 2031, Caledon, the largest GTA community, is expected to accommodate only 40,000, or 1% of them. And even that 1% will have to be put on prime agricultural land or greenbelt that is officially not supposed to be developed. Are you getting a picture of a pressure cooker here?

The hapless municipal government of Caledon, rank amateurs every one, are trying to walk a fine line to please all the voters and the different government authorities with their utterly conflicting demands. It’s a recipe for disaster. I can’t help feeling that the same recipe is brewing all over the world.

I’ve always been active in politics, and I believe fervently that, especially on environmental matters, local politics is the future. Despite that, I’ve washed my hands of our local political situation — I’ve given up, as there is no sensible answer to the problems that are boiling up and now reaching a tipping point. Here’s why, despite the Moraine, Escarpment, Greenbelt and Whitebelt regulations and restrictions, and the wish of many of our residents for a zero-growth strategy, Caledon is inevitably going to be paved over entirely, and long before the end of the century:

  • Developers rule, and own the politicians: Most of the undeveloped land in Caledon, including that on the Moraine and Escarpment, is in the hands of rich and powerful developers. They make their money (obscene amounts of it) by bribing, funding and lobbying municipal and provincial politicians to approve rezonings for development. Opponents of development, by comparison, are weak and poor.
  • Lawyers intimidate those who would restrict growth: Idealistic politicians and activist citizens who advocate zero growth strategies are attacked by well-paid lawyers who threaten legal action for unreasonable restraint of trade against any opponents of unrestricted development and growth, on behalf of their clients, including developers, real estate speculators and rapacious business organizations.
  • Real estate agents want growth: Real estate is one of the largest employers in Caledon and other metropolitan ‘fringe’ areas. Agents get paid a percentage of market value for each house listed or sold, and hence rely on growth and price appreciation for their living. They lobby politicians actively, and dominate many local business organizations. They were able to get a large part of NE Caledon exempted from Moraine restrictions as an ‘estate property development’ area: as if large estates of land clearcut and planted with lawns soaked in herbicides and pesticides are somehow better for the Moraine’s protection than more intensive subdivisions. No one has investigated who paid whom for this outrageous exemption that undermines everything the Moraine regulations stand for.
  • Farmers are greedy: As I reported in a previous article, most Caledon farms are subsistence — their owners grow grains and other extensive crops rather than vegetables, fruits and other intensive crops. Many of them have turned down very profitable offers from developers and real estate speculators, in the hope that as population pressures increase, even more lucrative offers will be forthcoming, as they have in every fringe area of Toronto in past. When the provincial government introduced the Greenbelt and Whitebelt strategy, these farmers were foaming at the mouth, and marched on the provincial legislature in protest. Most Caledon farmers, seduced by the promise of windfall profits on their land, have become merely real estate speculators themselves.
  • Business owners want growth: The near-doubling of Caledon’s population by 2031 is insufficient for the Caledon Chamber of Commerce, which issued an expensive mailing to every Caledon resident urging citizens and politicians to raise its target population to at least 130,000 people by that year, arguing that established and prospective Caledon businesses need such growth to be viable.
  • The construction industry wants materials: The Niagara Escarpment is a favoured haunt for sand and gravel operators supplying the voracious needs of the construction industry, and these operators are also major employers in Caledon. They have argued furiously against restrictions that prevent them from continually expanding operations, and threatened legal action against municipalities that try to introduce such restrictions.
  • The property tax base requires more taxpayers: Communities fund road maintenance and other essential municipal services through property taxes. Communities like Caledon with few taxpayers per square mile and per mile of roads and utilities have to charge higher rates or neglect infrastructure. Worse, as low-income new housing spills over into Caledon from adjacent municipalities, new subdivisions have sprouted up that pay little tax (property taxes are based on market value, and these new subdivisions have some of the cheapest houses in the GTA) yet demand the same services as every other residential development. And these new subdivisions are mainly residential — there is little employment created in these communities, so there are few businesses to balance the property tax load, and residents have to commute to other areas for work, placing further burdens on the road system.
  • The city and region want more people accommodated: Understandably, Toronto and other GTA communities cannot possibly accommodate the exploding demand for new housing in the GTA, and want Caledon to accept more than the 1% that it is currently committed to absorb.
  • The provincial zoning authority is dominated by pro-development forces: While municipalities make their own plans, these plans can be overruled by appeal to the provincial zoning authority called the Ontario Municipal Board. This Board is heavily pro-development and almost always overrules any rezoning denials and restrictions imposed by municipalities unless the development proposal is really outrageous. This allows municipalities to pander to anti-development forces and acquiesce to pro-development forces at the same time: They introduce restrictions and refuse rezoning knowing full well that these rulings will be reversed by the OMB. They can tell citizens that “they tried” and developers “don’t worry, the OMB will approve your rezoning quickly”.
  • Many new residents want to make a quick profit and move out: As one of the cheapest areas in the GTA to buy entry-level homes, Caledon is becoming home to a transient group of residents and voters who have no commitment to the community and who are indifferent to its future. What they want is for their first homes to appreciate quickly so they can sell and move up to larger homes on larger lots in areas closer to the workplaces they commute to. So they, too, are pro-development.

Caledon is home to a substantial number of believers in sustainable communities and opposed to untrammeled development. The Green Party does better here than almost anywhere in Ontario (though it still gets a very small proportion of total votes). Caledon has a substantial proportion of executives living here (because of its physical beauty, proximity to the city, and availability of large estate lots and properties), and they too want to keep Caledon from being bulldozed to become the same as the other depressing suburbs of the GTA. But the enlightened or self-interested opponents of development are totally outnumbered and outgunned by the developers, politicians, lawyers, real estate agents and speculators, farmers, local business owners, construction interests, tax-increase opponents, pro-growth advocates, new transient residents and others who have a vested interest in seeing Caledon paved over.

The environmental movement cannot hope to win when it is always fighting a rear-guard, defensive and altruistic battle against the rich, the powerful, and those who have a financial interest in ever-more development. Caledon’s story, its astonishing beauty and its dubious future is a case in point.

The only way to stop development and create communities that are truly sustainable is to do simultaneously two things:

  1. Build grassroots local communities that are committed to sustainability and educated about the means to attain them. These communities will embrace intentionality, natural enterprises, zero population growth, zero net new development, buying local, permaculture, respect for natural ecosystems, and other principles critical to sustainability and anathema to the development industries. 
  2. Get governments to support sustainability by introducing, enforcing, and sticking with regulations and restrictions on growth and development. Ontario’s government, to its credit, did introduce such regulations and restrictions, but the heavy lobbying of the many pro-development forces has weakened their resolve. As a result, they are now pressing GTA fringe communities like Caledon to accept more residents and development, and allowing their OMB to undermine municipal laws designed to reinforce their regulations and restrictions. Worse, they seem to be prepared to abandon their commitment to protection of environmentally sensitive areas entirely as a political liability with an election against the fiercely pro-development Conservatives just a year away.

These two steps need to be undertaken simultaneously — neither works without the other. There are few communities, to my knowledge, that have the enlightened population to undertake the former and the enlightened political leadership to undertake the latter. For awhile, Caledon looked like it might be the exception, and a potential model for the province and the rest of the world. But this now looks more and more doubtful. Other countries like Sweden are miles ahead, and their model sustainable communities are worthy models for the rest of us to study and emulate. But for many of us, Sweden is too far away, and we urgently need local models of successful sustainability to follow in our own countries.

So we will have to start with step 1 above, building grassroots local communities, and continue to fight the good fight against the forces of unsustainability and against all odds (losing most of our battles) until, at last, we get the enlightened and courageous political leadership we need to reinforced these community-based initiatives. The people I have met in STORM (Save the Oak Ridges Moraine coalition), the local Green party, Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, Citizens’ Environment Watch, the provincial Conservation Authorities, the Oak Ridges Moraine Foundation and other champions of local sustainability all exemplify that spirit of perseverance and patience, and I admire them enormously. I wish I had their courage. Quixotic, perhaps, but it seems to be the onlyoption open to us. We do what we must.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 5 Comments

Dave Snowden Tackles Innovation

Posted on October 9, 2006 by Dave Pollard

Coping with Complexity
Dave Snowden’s new organization Cognitive Edge is launching a new initiative to use complex system approaches to foster innovation. His thesis is that there are three necessary preconditions to innovation: starvation (what I call scarcity — a shortage of resources where usually there is abundance), pressure (what I call urgency — an immediate and relentless demand for resolution of the scarcity), and perspective shift (new ways of thinking about the problem). He’s planning on testing this thesis with a program in the Australian outback co-hosted by aboriginal guides.

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

I’ve developed a theory recently to explain human behaviours like procrastination: We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun. The first two of your necessary conditions for innovation (starvation/scarcity and pressure/urgency), are consistent, I think with We do (first) what we must.

Your third precondition for innovation (perspective shift) is, I believe, an attribute that some people enjoy entertaining and some people (not entirely the same group) are particularly good at. My experience is that perspective shift is a skill that can be honed, or learned. I think it ties into Then (to the extent we’re capable) we do what’s fun. Many people are neither skilled nor enamoured of perspective shifting — they are change resistant. You might be able to make them better at it in the outback of Oz, but my guess is that your attendees will already be innovation champions and change resilient.

My theory as to why most (especially large) organizations are so poor at innovating is that they don’t have to innovate to succeed (it is cheaper and less risky to buy out, buy off, scare off or crush innovators that threaten them), and that they do not attract or retain people who are competent and interested in perspective shift — new ways of looking at problems and challenges. And the economic system is increasingly rigged in their favour. Only what Christensen calls Disruptive Innovations, introduced by stealth, can dislodge them, and when they do, the dinosaur organization doesn’t move to adapt in this case either, so by the time it “must” change, it is already too late. Christensen’s argument that the dinosaurs can learn Sustaining Innovations to mitigate the risk of being disrupted out of existence is, I think, just wishful thinking (after all, he has to give them some hope or they won’t pay his consulting fees or buy his books).

On a larger scale, this same “can’t adapt until it’s too late” problem presents itself in our inability to deal with global warming and other ‘wicked’ complex social problems, which is why philosophers like John Gray have pretty well given up on our civilization and our culture. [Some readers wonder why, if I agree with Gray, I care about how businesses, innovative or not, will fare until civilization’s collapse: There’s a reasonable explanation, but that’s the subject for a future article.]

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.
Posted in Working Smarter | 2 Comments

How to Deal With Complexity Day-to-Day

Posted on October 8, 2006 by Dave Pollard

Coping with Complexity
In two previous articles I described this process for addressing complex ‘wicked’ problems collectively:

Collective Complex-Environment Problem Resolution Process

  1. Crafting and sending a compelling invitation: to anyone with passion about and something to potentially contribute to the problem’s resolution
  2. Drafting the issue topology/framework: research what we know, the breadth of the problem and possible aspects to address
  3. Training: of participants in Open Space and other methods, practices and capacities for complex problems
  4. Opening session: issue statement, opportunity for participants to suggest aspects of the problems or issue for ‘conversations’, assigning time and place for each conversation, mapping scheduled conversations to the pre-developed topology/framework for the issue
  5. Marketplace: time for participants to review which conversations are where & when and discuss and decide which to attend
  6. Working sessions: conversations, each with an assigned scribe keeping notes and governed by the ‘vote with your feet’ rule (you can move from one conversation to another that seems to be more valuable or to which you feel you can contribute more, without repercussions or causing offense)
  7. Results and reflections sessions: ‘journal’ of conversations is provided to and read by each participant; participants set personal action agendas
  8. Collective and collaborative actions: are proposed by all; participants volunteer for proposed collective & collaborative actions/projects
  9. Personal actions: participants, informed by the conversations and knowledge of planned collective and collaborative actions, are trusted to decide upon, organize and implement appropriate additional personal actions

and this process for solving complex problems individually when they’re in your job description:

Individual Complex-Environment Problem Resolution Process

  1. Identify the Customer: Determine who the internal and external ‘customers’ are — how they can reasonably be segmented. 
  2. Research & Observe: Study the status quo to understand what is really happening, what the real processes and workarounds are.
  3. Converse: Have lots of iterative discussions with different customer segments to clarify your understanding of what is happening and why. 
  4. Define and Articulate the Needs & ‘Problems’: When identified needs and problems are individual, just observe and provide the individual with your ideas and the benefit of your experience. For needs and problems that are shared and require (and justify) a more substantial ‘solution’ process, rank them by customers’ assessment of their severity and urgency. Feed these back to the customers to make sure you understood. 
  5. Imagine Ways of Addressing These Needs and Problems: With the creative minds in the organization (or outside it, if necessary) brainstorm possible ways of addressing these needs and problems. 
  6. Create a Future State Vision If Your Imagined Solutions Were Implemented: Tell a compelling story of how things could/would happen if the solutions you imagined in step 5 were implemented. Then deconstruct how to get there and use it to budget the money, time and resources needed to implement them. 
  7. Experiment and Prototype: Start small — your imagined solutions will never be perfect, and small-scale experiments and prototypes will allow you to refine the solution before spending all the resources on an imperfect solution. 
  8. Scale Up: Expand the pilot to all users who share the need or share and appreciate the problem. Make adoption voluntary. Let the users own and collectively self-manage the solution.


These two approaches are arguably better than the approaches usually used in these situations: small, uninformed groups at the top of the hierarchy prejudge the problem, bring in outside experts and impose so-called ‘best practice’ solutions on everyone else. When they fail, the people subjected to these failed approaches then find workarounds to cope as best as possible with the chronic, unresolved situation.

Both of the above complex problem resolution processes apply the general approaches suggested by Dave Snowden, Otto Scharmer, Francisco Varela, the Open Space methodology leaders, James Surowiecki, the Freakonomics team, Thomas Princen, Hugh Brody and others, for dealing with complex situations and for imagining possibilities for addressing them.

Is there a way of generalizing these two approaches to create a simple methodology for coping with all the complex situations we face in our day-to-day lives? After all, since all natural and social systems are inherently complex, such situations are far more prevalent than the simple or merely complicated situations we are taught (in school and work ‘courses’ and through the ‘conventional wisdom’ imparted by parents and colleagues) to handle.

A couple of years ago, Cyndy at MouseMusings suggested a catchphrase Sense, Self-Control, Understand, Question, Imagine, Offer, Collaborate, that seems to come very close to comprising such a methodology. What is missing? Conversation, especially early in the process, in understanding and imagining. Learning — acquiring the capacities you need to be able to deal with the particular situation at hand. Articulating the real, underlying issue, which is often different from the symptom or immediate situation. Opening/letting go/Letting-Self-Change. Reflecting before acting. Imagining alternatives and success. Intending. Identifying and getting what you need to succeed. Planning the action steps one at a time.

If we were to merge these missing ingredients into the above catchphrase, we’d get something like this:

Dealing With Complexity Day-to-Day

  1. Sense: Observe, listen, pay attention, open up your senses, perceive everything that has a bearing on the issue at hand. Connect.
  2. Suspend: Don’t prejudge. Don’t lose your cool. Focus.
  3. Learn: Do your homework. Learn the facts and the capacities you need to deal with the situation.
  4. Converse: Find and talk with the people who can help you understand the situation, imagine possible resolutions, decide what to do, garner needed resources, and act.
  5. Understand: Identify the real, underlying problem, not just the symptoms. Make sense of the situation. Things are the way they are for a reason. Know what that reason is. Sympathize.
  6. Question: Ask, don’t tell. Challenge. Think critically.
  7. Imagine: Brainstorm alternative possibilities. Give them time to emerge. Evaluate them objectively. Don’t be wedded to them — be flexible as new knowledge arises and as the situation continually changes.
  8. Reflect: Give yourself time to consider options and consequences.
  9. Decide: Tentatively, what to do, and when/how to do it.
  10. Intend: Imagine realization of success. Picture, hear, feel what could be. Be visionary. Every problem is an opportunity. Anything is possible.
  11. Resource: Get what you need to realize your intention.
  12. Let-Self-Change: Adapt. Increase your resilience to further changes.
  13. Offer: Consider. Give something away. Create options, new avenues to explore. Suggest possibilities. Lend a hand. Help.
  14. Collaborate: Realize together. 
  15. Follow Through: One step at a time, act on your intention.

What do you think?

Posted in Working Smarter | 2 Comments

Links for the Week – October 7, 2006

Posted on October 7, 2006 by Dave Pollard
DJII v TSX

A grim composite, this week, I’m afraid, of nine articles with a single theme: rich, powerful corporations and idealogues pursuing actions in their personal interest that are disastrous for the rest of us.

The Dark Side of Corporatism and Globalization:

NYT sludge poisoning photoEnvironmental Disasters You Won’t Hear About in the MSM: Two new environmental disasters revealed this week, neither reported much in the mainstream media — imagine if either of these had happened in the US! Both were caused by criminally negligent human activity by energy industry corporations and both involved sludge. The first has caused 8 deaths and tens of thousands of skin, nerve damage and other illnesses (like the blisters to the baby at left) in the Ivory Coast, when 250 tons of toxic waste from an ocean tanker hold, the result of undisclosed energy and mining activity, was dumped in suburban Abidjan after being turned away at a Dutch port.

NYT mudThe second occurred in Indonesia, where reckless seismic testing for natural gas has destabilized underground faults and produced dozens of mud-spewing geysers that have completely submerged eight villages (one pictured at right), emitting 170,000 cubic metres of possibly toxic mud per day and forcing 13,000 people so far from their homes. The billionaire owner sold the drilling company that caused the problem for $2 to an offshore company and then forced it into bankruptcy, ensuring that he will face neither criminal prosecution nor financial consequences for his negligence.

The mainstream media are also mostly still not talking about the environmental disaster offshore in Lebanon, the result of negligence during the Israel-Hezbollah war, when Israel deliberately blew up a power plant, spilling 110,000 barrels of oil into the Mediterranean, ruining beaches and the fishing industry, threatening water supplies and the public health, and devastating the local ecology.

Wal-Mart Capping Workers Wages & Shifting to 40% Part-Time Workers: It’s doing this to placate shareholders unhappy with the company’s financial performance. The strategy is to force out higher-paid longer-serving employees so younger, cheaper part-timers can be hired.

Experienced Investors Take Huge Short Position on the Dow: Blogger Cryptogon has been tracking the holdings of professional versus amateur (day-trader) investors in investments in the funds that buy proportionately the entire Dow Jones Industrial Index 30. The pros are betting heavily on a plunge over the next two weeks (short positions) while the amateurs are still buying long positions hoping for more record highs. The index is at 11,850 now (red line on chart above). My bet’s on the pros. I’ll report back on Oct. 20 on whether I was right or wrong. There are a number of forces at work here: Big US Oil is doing all the arm-twisting it can on behalf of Bush to get oil prices down until the elections are over, without sacrificing too much in profits, and that suppression of oil prices has naive investors thinking that it will last long enough to push up corporate earnings. With the markets having nowhere to go but down or sideways, brokers and traders who want to make money on stocks need to orchestrate huge whipsaws in prices and then outguess the hapless day-traders and amateur investors by buying from them at the bottom and selling to them at the top. And with the housing market in the first stages of collapse, savvy investors are bailing out of real estate and looking to find somewhere else to park their money, and energy stocks that have tumbled with the orchestrated oil price drop look like a good short-term bet. Caveat: I’m not an expert or professional on the markets, and I’m not making any investment recommendations. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

The US Runs Out of Options in the Mideast: A great analysis of the no-win political situation throughout the Mideast by Jim Kunstler. The conclusion would send shudders to any neocon: “The bottom line is that the only meaningful project for the US now is to turn its attention and remaining resources to the job of preparing for civilized life without oil. This is the topic that is absent from our political discourse on all sides and at all levels. The anti-war community is itself either lost in raptures of Bush-hatred or preoccupied with fantasies for running the interstate highways on used french-fry oil. We have to talk about things beyond just running our cars by other means. We are a profoundly unserious nation, for all our pretensions.” Thanks to Avi Solomon for the link.

Ancient Rome’s “War on Terror” Sounds Very Familiar: Peter Ireland at Karavans reviews the NYT op-ed drawing a terrifying parallel between ancient Rome’s futile “war on terror” and the Bush imperialist presidency’s. Rome’s final great war portended an abrupt and brutal end to a once prosperous and powerful imperial society.

The Only Way to Avert a Second Great Depression: Nobel-winning economist Joe Stiglitz makes it simple, and stark: “There is one way out of this seeming impasse: expenditure cuts combined with an increase in taxes on upper-income Americans and a reduction in taxes on lower-income Americans.” Stiglitz knows that it will never happen as long as corporatists control both US political parties, and predicts that, failing this, US deficits will plunge the country and the world into economic crisis.

US Recruiting Standards Lowered to Admit Criminals and Mentally Ill: An amazing analysis by Nick Turse explains how, to keep Bush’s Iraq (and future Iran) war machine stoked, recruiters are being urged and rewarded for taking anyone they can get. Thanks to Hugo Urrestarazu for the link.

Thought for the week: Something lighter after the news above: George Carlin’s 10 rules for Staying Young:

  1. Throw out nonessential numbers. This includes age, weight and height. Let the doctors worry about them. That is why you pay “them”.
  2. Keep only cheerful friends. The grouches pull you down.
  3. Keep learning. Learn more about the computer, crafts, gardening, whatever. Never let the brain idle. “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop”. And the devil’s name is Alzheimer.
  4. Enjoy the simple things.
  5. Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath.
  6. The tears happen. Endure, grieve, and move on. The only person who is with us our entire life is ourself. Be alive while you are alive.
  7. Surround yourself with what you love, whether it’s family, pets, keepsakes, music, plants, hobbies, whatever. Your home is your refuge.
  8. Cherish your health: If it is good, preserve it. If it is unstable, improve it. If it is beyond what you can improve, get help.
  9. Don’t take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, even to the next county; to a foreign country but not to where the guilt is.
  10. Tell show the people you love that you love them, at every opportunity.

And always remember, life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. Thanks to GaryHeynesbergen for the link.
Posted in How the World Really Works | 4 Comments

Dave’s Unconventional Theories

Posted on October 6, 2006 by Dave Pollard
food supply chain
Back in May I described the five steps in the self-experimentation process:

  1. Decide on your objective/desired result; 
  2. Collect base-line data; 
  3. Imagine hypotheses/theories about what might lead to your objective/desired result; 
  4. Test hypotheses by changing one variable at a time and collecting immediate feedback; 
  5. If a hypothesis pans out, institutionalize the behaviour and make it part of your regular practice.

I then challenged your imagination to develop hypotheses — unconventional theories — that might explain these puzzling facts:

  1. Our Most Creative Times: When people are quizzed about their creativity, they claim it is highest (a) when they’re in or near water, (b) when they’re in motion, and (c) just before falling asleep or just before/after awakening. Why would this be?
  2. Why We’re Happy Being Tired: Seth Roberts’ work refers to extensive research (and some personal experimentation) that suggest that sleep deprivation elevates mood and may alleviate depression. Why would this be?
  3. The Cause of Natural Addictions: We appear to become easily addicted to substances that are healthy or even essential in moderation but unhealthy in excess, and when we get addicted we tend to need more and more to get the same ‘high’. A recent experiment indicated that birds in captivity can get quickly addicted to sugar-water, craving more and more to the detriment of their health. Why would this be?
  4. Not Too Smart to Put Things Off: There is some evidence that very intelligent people are the ones most prone to procrastinate, and to fail to keep New Years’ resolutions. Why would this be?
  5. Fewer Babies Having Babies: Here’s an article that reports on a dramatic drop in teenage pregnancy and teenage abortions in the US. Conservatives claim this is due to effective ‘family-values’ abstinence programs. Liberals claim it’s due to better information about and use of contraception. But there’s lots of evidence that neither of these is the case. The author of the article ascribes it to lower sperm counts, but, as we all know, it only takes one. Is there a better Unconventional Theory? 
  6. The Cause of Tar Sands Syndrome: Here’s an article that reports an epidemic of rare cancers and even rarer auto-immune diseases in the small community of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. Residents blame water, air and soil pollution due to pulp and paper effluents, uranium and other mining, and now the disastrous Tar Sands development nearby. Business interests say the water has been exhaustively tested and is fine, and blame the poor diet in the remote community, exacerbated by the prohibitive cost of trucking in fresh fruits and vegetables. What’s your Unconventional Theory?
  7. Non-Viral Cause for Auto-Immune Diseases?: You probably know that Harper’s magazine and others have been providing increased publicity to the groups who insist HIV is not the cause of most auto-immune deficiency diseases, and that there must be another cause, probably not viral or microbial, to account for so many people dying of auto-immune related diseases who do not have HIV in their bodies. Many of the diseases on a sharp upswing (e.g. severe allergies, asthma, autism, and ADD/ADHD) also do not appear to have ‘natural’ causes. While some blame human behaviours, or chemical residues (mercury etc.) there are some reasonably compelling studies that refute viral, microbial, behavioural and toxic chemical causes for the dramatic increase in these illnesses, while others assert (less convincingly) that it’s all due to ‘increased awareness and reporting’ of them. Is there another possible cause for one or more of these illnesses (no one Unconventional Theory is likely to explain all of them) that we’re overlooking?

I promised to provide my Unconventional Theories for these facts and events. Here they are:

  1. Heat Opens the Mind: When I’m exercising, I’m not thinking about anything but getting through it. After exercising I often take a cool shower, and it doesn’t work either — exhilarating but not idea-provoking. But I find the hot tub, or a hot shower or bath very creative. In fact, I can come up with ideas just thinking about going into the hot tub. My theory is that it is all about heat and its effect relaxing the muscles. Relax the muscles, relax the mind. Of course, if you’re already sweltering that doesn’t work. Perhaps that’s why Northern countries seem to be more creative.
  2. Fatigue Signals Stress Exhaustion, and Hence Precipitates Endorphin Production: Old people tend to sleep less, claiming their bodies don’t ‘need’ as much sleep. When animals are being hunted, their bodies produce high levels of adrenaline (to run or fight) but also high levels of endorphins (so if they lose it is less stressful and painful, and to fend off shock). My theory is that nature ‘reads’ sleep deprivation as a symptom of high stress or old age and hence increased likelihood of trauma, and therefore produces endorphins to ‘prepare’ the victim.
  3. Bad Habits are Learned from Parents, Then Encouraged and Satisfied by the Food Industry: Baby animals smell their parents’ breath to determine what is safe to eat. Nature would selectively endow them with a ‘craving’ for such foods. In very young animals, the caloric needs are such that there is also apparently a ‘natural’ (unlearned) addiction to sugars. Unfortunately when we ‘smell our parents’ breath’ we are likely to smell sodium, alcohols, nicotine, oils and sugars, and emulate that diet. In nature, these substances don’t occur in dangerous concentrations sufficient to entrench those addictions, but in our homes and supermarkets they do.
  4. We Do What’s Urgent, Then What’s Easy, Then What’s Fun: These three priority-setting ‘rules’ by which we decide subconsciously what to do next suited us very well in gatherer-hunter society, but not so well in civilized society. We now have so much to do that is urgent, we have only a bit of time left for what’s easy and none for what’s fun, and we stall off the urgent stuff until the last minute to leave room for stuff that comes up that is even more urgent.
  5. More Oral Sex, Fear of AIDS, and the Boredom of Fidelity: Several of you, like me, immediately though an increase in oral sex was the culprit, and I think that’s a big part of it. I think another part is fear of AIDS, which I think is a big motivator for abstention, oral sex, and protected sex. It interests me that in teenagers’ talk shows about sex, one of the first questions from the phone-in audience always seems to be about the risk of AIDS from oral sex. The third part, which has nothing to do with sex at all, is reduced number of sexual partners, which I think stems from a growing shyness and general distrust of strangers (this trend crosses all income levels and races), exacerbated by news sensationalism and by Hollywood and music video violence. I suspect a lot of unprotected sex is spontaneous, and having only one sexual partner reduces spontaneity.
  6. Modern Malnutrition Prevents Our Bodies from Learning Immune Responses, and Depression, Stress and Addiction Lower Resistance: It’s interesting that I posed this question (and formulated my theory, which I’ve talked about a lot in the intervening period) just a month before I came down with ulcerative colitis. I understand that babies exposed to pet dander and peanuts at an early age are twenty times less likely to develop allergies to these things when they get older. Foods, water and homes are drenched in antibiotics today, meaning our bodies are exposed to fewer biological substances, and hence have no opportunity to build up ‘natural’ immunity to them. There’s also evidence that the variety of basic foods we eat (despite their use in much more varied recipes) is much narrower with each successive generation — e.g. there are fifty times fewer types of apples available now than there were 50 years ago. So I think the cause for defective immune systems is that we don’t allow immune systems to develop properly in the first place — they don’t get enough exercise so they atrophy, and then when they have to face a real threat, they can’t handle it. The native peoples in  Fort Chepewyan once were self-sufficient, eating the wide variety of foods, with all their ‘natural’ contaminants, their bodies had been accustomed to for centuries. Now they eat a very narrow range of plastic wrapped, antibiotic-laced  foods trucked in from far away. And they have lost their livelihood, their way of living, so like many displaced peoples they are prone to depression and addiction, which also lowers disease resistance.
  7. Modern Malnutrition, plus Environmental Toxins, plus Musculo-Skeletal Distress: Since colitis is an auto-immune disease, as soon as I contracted it I formulated this three-factor theory. So far my self-experimentation has supported it.

There are some things I am at a total loss to understand. The popularity of reality TV, for example, even the more skillful amateur shows with the obnoxious judges and blathering MCs cut out. Why would you want to watch amateurswhen you can put on a DVD and watch much better professionals? Or the popularity of Jackass Two? Anyone have a theory for that?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Embracing Complexity in Your Job

Posted on October 5, 2006 by Dave Pollard
presence
This week I started a major KM project. I can’t talk much about it yet, but it involves both natural (ecological) and social systems, so it is imbued with complexity. There’s a tendency to jump right into information architecture, taxonomy, and community of practice building, and the project’s requirements document assumes that how to do all these things would be self-evident to an experienced KM practitioner. If only it were that simple.

But even if I were to ask the internal and external ‘customers’ of my client what their information and networking and related technology needs were, they wouldn’t know. It’s the nature of complex environments that understanding of the ‘problem’ and potential solutions co-emerge from the exploration, discovery and learning process.

Most of my writings on complexity to date have been about big-issue, save-the-world problems and the use of Open Space and other collaborative processes to invite and bring together the right people to address them collectively. But what happens if it’s your individual job to deal with a complex situation, and you don’t have the resources to convene large groups of people passionate about understanding the issues and surfacing ways of coping with them? Is there a scaled-down methodology that can be applied in such situations?

I think there is. Here’s the methodology I’m trying out on the new project:

  1. Identify the Customer: Determine who the internal and external ‘customers’ are — how they can reasonably be segmented. There are usually multiple customer groups, often with conflicting interests. Don’t expect the interests or needs of management and of front-line staff to be congruent. Expect that this will create problems of irreconcilable needs, expectations and priorities for you.
  2. Research & Observe: Study the status quo to understand what is really happening, what the real processes and workarounds are, not the idealized conception described in the procedure manuals or suggested by the corporate website. Don’t judge them — understand them. In the above diagram, this is called sensing and suspending.
  3. Converse: Have lots of iterative discussions with different customer segments to clarify your understanding of what is happening and why. Question and challenge suppositions and implausible explanations. Between steps 2 & 3, an understanding of unmet needs and ‘problems’ (things that one or more customer segments are having difficulty with or are worried about) will start to emerge.
  4. Define and Articulate the Needs & ‘Problems’: Some of the emergent needs and problems will be personal, and you may be able to solve many of these just by observing, conversing, and providing the individual with your ideas and the benefit of your experience. Other needs and problems will be shared and require (and justify) a more substantial ‘solution’ process, and these can be ranked by the customers’ assessment of their severity and urgency. Feed these back to the customers to make sure you understood. Steps 3 and 4 are pattern-recognition and inferential activities, synthesis rather than analysis.
  5. Imagine Ways of Addressing These Needs and Problems: Now you have reached the real starting point: Not preconceptions and solutions looking for problems, but qualified, articulated needs and problems with no obvious solutions (if the solutions were obvious, someone would have done them already). Find the creative minds in the organization (or outside it, if necessary) and brainstorm, imagine possible ways of addressing these needs and problems. A lot of the problems and needs you identified in step 4 are likely to be competency and capacity-building needs — avoid the temptation to jump to the conclusion that ‘awareness’ and ‘training’ are the right solutions to such problems and needs (things happen for a reason, and if people aren’t aware and aren’t motivated to learn themselves, it’s unlikely that your awareness and training solutions will get traction). In the above diagram, this step is the letting come phase.
  6. Create a Future State Vision If Your Imagined Solutions Were Implemented: Tell a compelling story of how things could/would happen if the solutions you imagined in step 5 were implemented. Then deconstruct how to get there and use it to budget the money, time and resources needed to implement them. The story becomes your business case: present it with the request for needed resources.In the above diagram, this is the envisioning phase.
  7. Experiment and Prototype: Start small — your imagined solutions will never be perfect, and small-scale experiments and prototypes will allow you to refine the solution before spending all the resources on an imperfect solution. These experiments and prototypes will also allow pilot users to embrace and champion and virally market them to the rest of the organization, since in the piloting process they become a ‘part of the solution’, and make it theirs.
  8. Scale Up: Expand the pilot to all users who share the need or share and appreciate the problem. Make adoption voluntary. Let the users own and collectively self-manage the solution. Once it’s realized, set it free.

So suppose you follow this methodology and discover (a) there are a lot of fledgling, disorganized, self-identified communities of practice and communities of interest in (and extending beyond) the organization that need some enabling knowledge-sharing, context-building, sense-making and connectivity technology and processes to self-organize and function, and (b) there are a set of significant risks, ‘costs of not knowing’, that could be addressed through a prevention and early-warning detection program.

Project (a) may be hard to sell to management because there’s nothing in it for them, and they may be concerned about corporate-sponsored networks operating under their radar. But this need not be an expensive application, and you may have so many zealots clamouring for it by virtue of following the first six steps above that management won’t have the heart to say no.

Project (b) may be hard to sell to any of the customer groups because, while the consequences of not knowing are huge, the likelihood of these risks actually arising may be low (it always happens to ‘the other guy’). But since Enron, Katrina and other low-probability, high-consequence risks have come true, management has a much greater appetite for risk prevention and detection applications. The big challenge is more likely getting the people in the field to comply with the monitoring and reporting requirements of the new system.

What you may also discover with this methodology is that a lot of existing ‘legacy’ applications, processes, programs, websites and tools actually don’t address any important needs or problems. Some of these would have been ‘pet’ projects of someone with resources or decision-making authority. Some would be simple-to-implement solutions (like automation of previously manual processes, or broadcasting of information to everyone in the organization) that were instituted as ‘quick wins’ even though they weren’t really needed or valued. These ‘solutions in search of a problem’ are major components of many large organizations’ processes and infrastructure. The secret (as long as you don’t run afoul of the person whose ‘pet’ project they were) is to get authority to get rid of these unnecessary, low value processes, programs, apps, websites and tools and see if anyone even notices their disappearance. Such ‘cleanup’ activities are thankless, but they can eliminate a lot of clutter and wasted maintenance time, and allow more valuable solutions to get more visibility and achieve more traction.

The largest challenge that this methodology presents is that it takes longer than ‘presupposed problem and imposed solution’ approaches. It’s not precise, often defies quantitative ‘success measures’, and rarely has a discrete ‘project end’. To those brought up with traditional management methodologies, this could be very troubling. Part of your job is therefore likely to be bringing management up to speed on complex, adaptive systems and the failure of prescriptive, fast-track, top-down, centrally-managed, discrete-start-and-end projects and programs to deal with them effectively.

I believe that in ten years understanding complexity will be essential learning for all business students and managers, and this task will be much easier. In the meantime, we pioneers will have both the excitement and the frustration of being ahead of the curve.

I’ll keep you informed on how it’s working on my new project.
Posted in Working Smarter | Comments Off on Embracing Complexity in Your Job

An Approach to KM and Learning that Embraces Complexity

Posted on October 4, 2006 by Dave Pollard

knowing knowledge change
Several of my Knowledge Management colleagues have pointed me to George Siemens’ site Knowing Knowledge, and his upcoming self-published book of the same book (to be made available as free pdf’s as well). Much of what George says really resonates with my KM experience. His approach appreciates that many of the systems that KM is applied to are complex ones, and do not lend themselves to hierarchical, top-down, ‘designed’ and centralized solutions.

The four ‘stages’ to his approach are:

  1. Analysis and validation of existing organizational structures and activities
  2. Ecology and network design and creation
  3. Adaptive learning and knowledge cycles to meet developing needs of organizations
  4. System review (a “meta-analysis”) and strengthening to ensure an ongoing spiral of increased competence.

This approach is an evolutionary, iterative one rather than an imposed one. It responds to needs as they emerge rather than pre-supposing what they are. It demands a deep knowledge of the current state (which requires going out and talking to and observing people on the front lines to see what is really happening in their use of information and technology, and appreciating what they need and how they learn). It is a continuous process rather than a disjoint series of projects and ‘releases’. It is focused on developing competence and capacity, rather than just increasing the volume of information flows. For all of these reasons it is superior to the methodologies that have been Standard Operating Procedure in KM for more than a decade.

The illustration above from Siemens’ site exemplifies this approach’s adaptability. It is cyclical, two-way, and accommodates the needs of both managers and front-line staff. Here’s how Siemens’ explains it:

Change pressures arise from different sectors of a system. At times pressure is mandated from the top of a hierarchy; other times it forms from participants at a grass-roots level. Some changes are absorbed by the organization without significant impact on, or alterations of, existing methods. In other cases, change takes root. It then causes the formation of new methods within the organization.

Initially these methods will be informal, as those aspects of the organization nearest to the change begin to adapt. Overtime, the methods significantly impact the organization, resulting in the creation of new structures and new spaces (an alignment to the nature of change). These structures and spaces then create new affordancesóenabling the organization to change and adapt. The new affordances then create a new cycle of change pressures.

This, and not the way described in the corporate policy manual, is the way organizational change actually occurs. Change is a consensual process: If changes (e.g. the use of a new process or website) are mandated by management but don’t ‘make sense’ to those who actually have to effect the change, those people will find ways to not change, and will find workarounds that are effective in spite of the nonsensical mandates of management. Only when there is a consensus that change is valuable will it “take root”. The four change enablers in the graphic above actually operate almost like a pendulum: The demand for change (usually from customers, sometimes from management, sometimes from front-line workers’ learning and adaptation) precipitates ‘affordances’ (possibilities, ideas, alternatives and potentials) which, in turn, if they can achieve consensual traction, precipitate structural, systems, and infrastructure change within the organization, which, in turn, finally produce new methods and processes — different ways of doing things in the organization.

Those new methods and processes reciprocally create evolutionary structural, systems and infrastructure changes to accommodate them, and these ‘institutionalized’ changes reciprocally create new ‘affordances’ (possibilities), and the realization of the opportunity (i.e. the exciting possibility in the eyes of customers, workers and management) raised by these ‘affordances’ reciprocally create new pressure to change. Through several iterations (swings of the pendulum) all four elements converge on a new stasis, until new change pressures restart the change process.

In this article, Siemens elaborates further on how the traditional ‘presupposed problem and imposed solution’ approach to KM ‘simply’ does not work in complex environments, where problems and appropriate solutions constantly emerge and co-evolve. Here are some extracts:

Changes are still being interpreted through existing beliefs of how we should structure our organizations, and what it means to know and learn. When people first encounter distributed tools, the first attempt at implementation involves ìforcingî decentralized processes into centralized models. We then end up with LMS for learning, learning object repositories to manage our content, corporate lock-downs on instant messages, and district-wide bans on social networking tools…The desire for centralization is strong. These organizations want learners to access their sites for content/interaction/knowledge. Learners, on the other hand, already have their personal spaces (myspace, facebook, aggregators). They donít want to go to someone elseís program/site to experience content. They want your content in their space…

The desire to control and manage communities (the notion that control equates to better prospect of achieving intended outcomes was, as usual, evident) struck me as being a bit at odds with how things need to happen for online spaces to prosper…When we try and create Communities of Practice (CoPs) online, we take the same approach ñ come to our community. I think thatís the wrong approach. The community should come to the user. 

Most individuals have started to create a scattered identity and presence. I have pieces of my thoughts scattered across numerous articles, website, podcasts, and presentations. I donít really want to join a CoP. I want the connection values of communities to be available to me in my own online space and presence…

We have a mindset of ìknowing before applicationî. We feel that new problems must be tamed by our previous experience. When we encounter a challenge, we visit our database of known solutions with the objective of applying a template solution on the problem. I find many organizations are not comfortable suspending judgment. The moment a problem takes an initial known shape, the solutions begin to flow… Applying solutions to problems is an order-creating attempt. This is, I think, a very natural process. We all engage in it..Perhaps, in a learning sense, part of the concern here is our views that order doesnít exist unless we enforce it…. Itís difficult to accept that order and meaning can emerge on its own (think chaos theory)…

Instead of trying to force these tools into organizational structures, let them exist for a while. See what happens. Donít decide the entire solution in advance. See the process as more of a dance than a structured enactment of a solution. React as the environment adjusts. Allow feedback to shape the final product. Let the process bring its own lessons before applying structured approaches. Perhaps a learning experience exists in the knowledge/information that emerges…Relaxing on control is vital for sustained knowledge growth, sharing, and dissemination. 

The views that we must know before we can do, and that problems require solutions, can be limiting in certain instances (especially instances of high complexity or uncertainty ñ see Snowdenís knowledge ontology). Knowing often arises in the process of doing. Solutions are often contained within the problems themselves (not external, templated responses). And problems always morph as we begin to work on them.

You can appreciate that such an approach is enough to give both management and ‘project leaders’ apoplexy. Both groups want change initiatives to be controlled, and to have a clear beginning and end, a prescribed measure of ‘successful’ implementation, and closure when that measure is (or is not) achieved. Siemens’ approach is open-ended, continuous, and evolutionary. That’s why the evolution of the solution (and the simultaneous co-evolution of understanding of the ‘problem’) must be self-managed by the stakeholder group — they know enough and care enough to steward it through the lengthy and continuous evolutionary, emergent process (a process that is inefficient but very effective), long after the ‘design team’ and the ‘IT implementation team’ have lost patience with the changes.

For KM ‘solutions’ to be self-manageable, they must be very simple and intuitive (or, as Einstein put it, “as simple as possible but no simpler”.

So suppose you’re a Knowledge Director and you want to help the people in your organization use knowledge more effectively. What do you do? Here’s a few ideas of my own:

  • Conduct personal productivity improvement ‘cultural anthropology’ observation sessions with users. You’ll find out how they learn, and what they really need, not what they think they need (or management thinks they need). A lot of what they need will be highly individual, and you’ll probably find it doesn’t need a ‘solution’, just a bit of demonstration of what already exists that they don’t know about, plus some personal content management coaching. And as you observe more and more people you’ll start to see patterns of unmet collective information and technology needs.
  • Then, rather than designing solutions for these unmet collective needs, create the simplest possible framework for solutions to these unmet needs to evolve, empower the group that has indicated they need and care about the issue to experiment and iteratively change the tool or solution as their understanding of the need and its possible solutions evolves. It is possible that rather than stabilizing, the lightweight ‘framework solution’ will continue to evolve indefinitely, or the need may disappear as circumstances change. Only if the solution stabilizes and there is sufficient critical mass of users, content and technology to justify it, should the stabilized solution then be formally re-designed to make it more elegant, user-friendly, standards-compliant, efficient and powerful.
  • Focus on KM initiatives that enable sense-making (making content more valuable by providing better context), and peer-to-peer sharing, rather than the archiving and ‘broadcast’ dissemination of ‘available’ content. These are the applications that, in complex environments, users find most valuable. Most users are pretty clever at getting the content they need, and, as Siemens says, the last thing they want is to have to go to your site, no matter how elegantly designed, to get it — they want it accessible to or delivered to their site, space, or hard drive, their way, when they want it. If it’s hard to find or access, make it easy for them, and then let them do it. Otherwise, don’t fuss about the format or site architecture of ‘raw’ information content — you’ll get much further helping them make sense of it, and helping them send it peer-to-peer, than by creating elegant, beautifully designed websites to house it.
  • Likewise, rather than ‘creating’ communities of practice and elegant sites and tools to empower them, focus on peer-to-peer expertise finding and connectivity applications, and, once people with common interests and imperatives have found each other, provide them with the simplest and most flexible possible tool to self-manage that community. And again, only if the tool’s evolution stabilizes and there is sufficient critical mass of users, content and technology to justify it, should the stabilized solution then be formally re-designed to make it more elegant, user-friendly, standards-compliant, efficient and powerful.

I’ll be looking forward to the publishing of Knowing Knowledge (tomorrow) and will be writing further about it once the pdf’s are available.

In the meantime, what do you think of Siemens’ idea that KM is all about a “spiral of increased competence”? And what, beyond the ideas described above, could organizations do to precipitate such a spiral?
Posted in Working Smarter | 1 Comment

The Media: Numbing Ourselves to Pain And Others’ Suffering

Posted on October 3, 2006 by Dave Pollard

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The purpose of the information media, says Bill Maher, is to make what’s important interesting, So what’s the purpose of the entertainment media? Watch the gruesome stunts on reality TV, the gross-outs and humiliation that passes today for ‘comedy’, and the gut-wrenching fare of cinematic dramas, war, action and horror films, and you could easily conclude that its purpose is to make us numb, to desensitize us, so that it takes more and more outrageous depictions to rouse any response from us at all.

Yet there seems to be an appetite for this. Why would people want to pay money to be shocked, appalled, and grossed out? I used to believe that most people were just insensitive, and required more and more stimulation to get their adrenaline going (which, for some reason, a lot of people seem to like). But when I talk to the fans of this ‘entertainment’, it seems more as if they are too sensitive, and that they are trying to inure themselves to the shocks that they are finding too much to bear. Subjecting themselves to horrific violence is like a self-imposed hazing, or a rite of passage, or basic training, except that it is to equip them to be able to handle the brutality of life rather than the brutality of university or military duty. In some ways it seems to be the mental equivalent of self-administered body piercings and tattoos.

What’s going on here? Why, when we could be going to movies or plunking down in front of the TV to laugh with people, to be charmed and delighted by funny characters delivering clever lines, are we instead going to laugh at people who behave offensively, who act ridiculously, and who insult and demean others? Why, when we could be uplifted by stories of courage and indomitable human spirit, do we instead choose to see stories of unimaginable brutality, anguish, relentless horror and suffering, often without resolution or redemption? Why, rather than piquing our imaginations with what they don’t show, do today’s popular films use grisly hyper-realistic graphics and special effects that leave nothing to the imagination? We’re still coy about the depiction of sex in films, so why are we so blatant and vulgar in the depiction of extreme violence?

When I go to the movies I go to laugh, or to learn, or to be transported by a good story. Perhaps that is a form of escapism, but it is, I think, a healthy one, akin to the pre-cinematic experience of going to see Shakespeare in the park, or a bedroom farce or mystery at the local theatre. Modern ‘entertainment’ media productions, on the other hand, seem to be driven by schadenfreude, the desire to see someone else suffering more than we are, and more akin to watching an execution, or a car accident, or a sensational murder case in court, live. They say that, to the families of the victim, watching the murderer’s execution brings a kind of closure, of relief. But what closure is there in watching the depictions of strangers’ suffering?

So I’m left to conclude that it’s numbness we seek, to be so inured to pain and the suffering of others that we feel nothing. When I imagine the suffering of animals in factory farms and laboratories, of the victims of spousal and child abuse, of child and slave labourers, of wrongly-accused and political prisoners, of rape and abduction and murder victims and their families, of those who struggle every day with abject poverty or disease or looking after someone who can’t look after themselves, with no respite or hope that tomorrow will be better, I can appreciate the desire to be numb, to be unable to feel. But that feeling of anger and helplessness and frustration is not so pervasive and all-consuming that I really want to give up feeling. For all the misery and suffering in the world, life is still wonderful.

But perhaps that’s because I’m 55 years old, and I have some hard-won perspective. My future is pretty-well set. I’m not going to be around to see the collapse of civilization, and may not even see the second Great Depression. I have a pension waiting for me, and a nice home in a great neighbourhood. I’m debt-free. Our kids are independent, happy and well-adjusted. And I know how the world works, and how to cope with it.

If I were in my 20s or 30s, with the uncertainty of a 21st century future still stretched out before me, and lots of debt and no security and no experience, scratching at the bottom of the ladder to make a living, perhaps I would want, at the end of a day of drudgery, at the start of a life of dread, just to be numb, to feel less overwhelmed, to feel less.

Perhaps, at the age of 55, the reason that I do not seek to be numb, and to feel less, is that, in the process of getting to age 55, I already have become numb, desensitized, unfeeling.

No more anaesthetic for me, thanks, Hollywood. I already gave.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments