Category: complexity

complexityevaluationsocial innovation

Developmental Evaluation’s Traps

on April 19, 2018

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Developmental evaluation holds promise for product and service designers looking to understand the process, outcomes, and strategies of innovation and link them to effects. It’s the great promise of DE that is also the reason to be most wary of it and beware the traps that are set for those unaware.  

Developmental evaluation (DE), when used to support innovation, is about weaving design with data and strategy. It’s about taking a systematic, structured approach to paying attention to what you’re doing, what is being produced (and how), and anchoring it to why you’re doing it by using monitoring and evaluation data. DE helps to identify potentially promising practices or products and guide the strategic decision-making process that comes with innovation. When embedded within a design process, DE provides evidence to support the innovation process from ideation through to business model execution and product delivery.

This evidence might include the kind of information that helps an organization know when to scale up effort, change direction (“pivot”), or abandon a strategy altogether.

Powerful stuff.

Except, it can also be a trap.

It’s a Trap!

Star Wars fans will recognize the phrase “It’s a Trap!” as one of special — and much parodied — significance. Much like the Rebel fleet’s jeopardized quest to destroy the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, embarking on a DE is no easy or simple task.

DE was developed by Michael Quinn Patton and others working in the social innovation sector in response to the needs of programs operating in areas of high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in helping them function better within this environment through evaluation. This meant providing the kind of useful data that recognized the context, allowed for strategic decision making with rigorous evaluation and not using tools that are ill-suited for complexity to simply do the ‘wrong thing righter‘.

The following are some of ‘traps’ that I’ve seen organizations fall into when approaching DE. A parallel set of posts exploring the practicalities of these traps are going up on the Cense site along with tips and tools to use to avoid and navigate them.

A trap is something that is usually camouflaged and employs some type of lure to draw people into it. It is, by its nature, deceptive and intended to ensnare those that come into it. By knowing what the traps are and what to look for, you might just avoid falling into them.

A different approach, same resourcing

A major trap is going into a DE is thinking that it is just another type of evaluation and thus requires the same resources as one might put toward a standard evaluation. Wrong.

DE most often requires more resources to design and manage than a standard program evaluation for many reasons. One the most important is that DE is about evaluation + strategy + design (the emphasis is on the ‘+’s). In a DE budget, one needs to account for the fact that three activities that were normally treated separately are now coming together. It may not mean that the costs are necessarily more (they often are), but that the work required will span multiple budget lines.

This also means that operationally one cannot simply have an evaluator, a strategist, and a program designer work separately. There must be some collaboration and time spent interacting for DE to be useful. That requires coordination costs.

Another big issue is that DE data can be ‘fuzzy’ or ambiguous — even if collected with a strong design and method — because the innovation activity usually has to be contextualized. Further complicating things is that the DE datastream is bidirectional. DE data comes from the program products and process as well as the strategic decision-making and design choices. This mutually influencing process generates more data, but also requires sensemaking to sort through and understand what the data means in the context of its use.

The biggest resource that gets missed? Time. This means not giving enough time to have the conversations about the data to make sense of its meaning. Setting aside regular time at intervals appropriate to the problem context is a must and too often organizations don’t budget this in.

The second? Focus. While a DE approach can capture an enormous wealth of data about the process, outcomes, strategic choices, and design innovations there is a need to temper the amount collected. More is not always better. More can be a sign of a lack of focus and lead organizations to collect data for data’s sake, not for a strategic purpose. If you don’t have a strategic intent, more data isn’t going to help.

The pivot problem

The term pivot comes from the Lean Startup approach and is found in Agile and other product development systems that rely on short-burst, iterative cycles with accompanying feedback. A pivot is a change of direction based on feedback. Collect the data, see the results, and if the results don’t yield what you want, make a change and adapt. Sounds good, right?

It is, except when the results aren’t well-grounded in data. DE has given cover to organizations for making arbitrary decisions based on the idea of pivoting when they really haven’t executed well or given things enough time to determine if a change of direction is warranted. I once heard the explanation given by an educator about how his team was so good at pivoting their strategy for how they were training their clients and students. They were taking a developmental approach to the course (because it was on complexity and social innovation). Yet, I knew that the team — a group of highly skilled educators — hadn’t spent nearly enough time coordinating and planning the course.

There are times when a presenter is putting things last minute into a presentation to capitalize on something that emerged from the situation to add to the quality of the presentation and then there is someone who has not put the time and thought into what they are doing and rushing at the last minute. One is about a pivot to contribute to excellence, the other is not executing properly. The trap is confusing the two.

Fearing success

“If you can’t get over your fear of the stuff that’s working, then I think you need to give up and do something else” – Seth Godin

A truly successful innovation changes things — mindsets, workflows, systems, and outcomes. Innovation affects the things it touches in ways that might not be foreseen. It also means recognizing that things will have to change in order to accommodate the success of whatever innovation you develop. But change can be hard to adjust to even when it is what you wanted.

It’s a strange truth that many non-profits are designed to put themselves out of business. If there were no more political injustices or human rights violations around the world there would be no Amnesty International. The World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace wouldn’t exist if the natural world were deemed safe and protected. Conversely, there are no prominent NGO’s developed to eradicate polio anymore because pretty much have….or did we?

Self-sabotage exists for many reasons including a discomfort with change (staying the same is easier than changing), preservation of status, and a variety of inter-personal, relational reasons as psychologist Ellen Hendrikson explains.

Seth Godin suggests you need to find something else if you’re afraid of success and that might work. I’d prefer that organizations do the kind of innovation therapy with themselves, engage in organizational mindfulness, and do the emotional, strategic, and reflective work to ensure they are prepared for success — as well as failure, which is a big part of the innovation journey.

DE is a strong tool for capturing success (in whatever form that takes) within the complexity of a situation and the trap is when the focus is on too many parts or ones that aren’t providing useful information. It’s not always possible to know this at the start, but there are things that can be done to hone things over time. As the saying goes: when everything is in focus, nothing is in focus.

Keeping the parking brake on

And you may win this war that’s coming
But would you tolerate the peace? – “This War” by Sting

You can’t drive far or well with your parking brake on. However, if innovation is meant to change the systems. You can’t keep the same thinking and structures in place and still expect to move forward. Developmental evaluation is not just for understanding your product or service, it’s also meant to inform the ways in which that entire process influences your organization. They are symbiotic: one affects the other.

Just as we might fear success, we may also not prepare (or tolerate) it when it comes. Success with one goal means having to set new goals. It changes the goal posts. It also means that one needs to reframe what success means going ahead. Sports teams face this problem in reframing their mission after winning a championship. The same thing is true for organizations.

This is why building a culture of innovation is so important with DE embedded within that culture. Innovation can’t be considered a ‘one-off’, rather it needs to be part of the fabric of the organization. If you set yourself up for change, real change, as a developmental organization, you’re more likely to be ready for the peace after the war is over as the lyric above asks.

Sealing the trap door

Learning — which is at the heart of DE — fails in bad systems. Preventing the traps discussed above requires building a developmental mindset within an organization along with doing a DE. Without the mindset, its unlikely anyone will avoid falling through the traps described above. Change your mind, and you can change the world.

It’s a reminder of the needs to put in the work to make change real and that DE is not just plug-and-play. To quote Martin Luther King Jr:

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.”

 

For more on how Developmental Evaluation can help you to innovate, contact Cense Ltd and let them show you what’s possible.  

Image credit: Author

complexityeducation & learningpsychologysystems thinking

Complex problems and social learning

on September 14, 2017

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Adaptation, evolution, innovation, and growth all require that we gain new knowledge and apply it to our circumstances, or learn. While much focus in education is on how individuals attend, process and integrate information to create knowledge, it is the social part of learning that may best determine whether we simply add information to our brains or truly learn. 

Organizations are scrambling to convert what they do and what they are exposed to into tangible value. In other words: learn. A 2016 report from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that “organizations spent an average of $1,252 per employee on training and development initiatives in 2015”, which works out to an average cost per learning hour of $82 based on an average of 33 hours spent in training programs per year. Learning and innovation are expensive.

The massive marketplace for seminars, keynote addresses, TED talks, conferences, and workshops points to a deep pool of opportunities for exposure to content, yet when we look past these events to where and how such learning is converted into changes at the organizational level we see far fewer examples.

Instead of building more educational offerings like seminars, webinars, retreats, and courses, what might happen if they devoted resources to creating cultures for learning to take place? Consider how often you may have been sent off to some learning event, perhaps taken in some workshops or seen an engaging keynote speaker, been momentarily inspired and then returned home to find that yourself no better off in the long run. The reason is that you have no system — time, resources, organizational support, social opportunities in which to discuss and process the new information — and thus, turn a potential learning opportunity into neural ephemera.

Or consider how you may have read an article on something interesting, relevant and important to what you do, only to find that you have no avenue to apply or explore it further. Where do the ideas go? Do they get logged in your head with all the other content that you’re exposed to every day from various sources, lost?

Technical vs. Social

My colleague and friend John Wenger recently wrote about what we need to learn, stating that our quest for technical knowledge to serve as learning might be missing a bigger point: what we need at this moment. Wenger suggests shifting our focus from mere knowledge to capability and states:

What is the #1 capability we should be learning?  Answer: the one (or ones) that WE most need; right now in our lives, taking account of what we already know and know how to do and our current situations in life.

Wenger argues that, while technical knowledge is necessary to improve our work, it’s our personal capabilities that require attention to be sufficient for learning to take hold. These capabilities are always contingent as we humans exist in situated lives and thus our learning must further be applied to what we, in our situation, require. It’s not about what the best practice is in the abstract, but what is best for us, now, at this moment. The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to is decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of what our situation is.

The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to under the guise of learning is so often decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of how, whether, or why it matters to us in our present situation.

To illustrate, I teach a course on program evaluation for public health students. No matter how many examples, references, anecdotes, or colourful illustrations I provide them, most of my students struggle to integrate what they are exposed to into anything substantive from a practical standpoint. At least, not at first. Without the ability to apply what they are learning, expose the method to the realities of a client, colleague, or context’s situation, they are left abstracting from the classroom to a hypothetical situation.

But, as Mike Tyson said so truthfully and brutally: “Every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

In a reflection on that quote years later, Tyson elaborated saying:

“Everybody has a plan until they get hit. Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.”

Tyson’s quote applies to much more than boxing and complements Wenger’s assertions around learning for capability. If you develop a plan knowing that it will fail the moment you get hit (and you know you’re going to get hit), then you learn for the capability to adapt. You build on another quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said:

“I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

Better social, better learning

Plans don’t exist in a vacuum, which is why they don’t always turn out. While sometimes a failed plan is due to poor planning, it is more likely due to complexity when dealing with human systems. Complexity requires learning strategies that are different than those typically employed in so many educational settings: social connection.

When information is technical, it may be simple or complicated, but it has a degree of linearity to it where one can connect different pieces together through logic and persistence to arrive a particular set of knowledge outcomes. Thus, didactic classroom learning or many online course modules that require reading, viewing or listening to a lesson work well to this effect. However, human systems require attention to changing conditions that are created largely in social situations. Thus, learning itself requires some form of ‘social’ to fully integrate information and to know what information is worth attending to in the first place. This is the kind of capabilities that Wenger was talking about.

My capabilities within my context may look very much like that of my colleagues, but the kind of relationships I have with others, the experiences I bring and the way I scaffold what I’ve learned in the past with what I require in the present is going to be completely different. The better organizations can create the social contexts for people to explore this, learn together, verify what they learn and apply it the more likely they can reap far greater benefits from the investment of time and money they spend on education.

Design for learning, not just education

We need a means to support learning and support the intentional integration of what we learn into what we do: it fails in bad systems.

It also means getting serious about learning, meaning we need to invest in it from a social, leadership and financial standpoint. Most importantly, we need to emotionally invest in it. Emotional investment is the kind of attractor that motivates people to act. It’s why we often attend to the small, yet insignificant, ‘goals’ of every day like responding to email or attending meetings at the expense of larger, substantial, yet long-term goals.

As an organization, you need to set yourself up to support learning. This means creating and encouraging social connections, time to dialogue and explore ideas, the organizational space to integrate, share and test out lessons learned from things like conferences or workshops (even if they may not be as useful as first thought), and to structurally build moments of reflection and attention to ongoing data to serve as developmental lessons and feedback.

If learning is meant to take place at retreats, conferences or discrete events, you’re not learning for human systems. By designing systems that foster real learning focused on the needs and capabilities of those in that system, you’re more likely to reap the true benefit of education and grow accordingly. That is an enormous return on investment.

Learning requires a plan and one that recognizes you’re going to get punched in the mouth (and do just fine).

Can this be done for real? Yes, it can. For more information on how to create a true learning culture in your organization and what kind of data and strategy can support that, contact Cense and they’ll show you what’s possible. 

Image credit: Social by JD Hancock used under Creative Commons license.

businesscomplexityevaluation

A mindset for developmental evaluation

on September 7, 2017

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Developmental evaluation requires different ways of thinking about programs, people, contexts and the data that comes from all three. Without a change in how we think about these things, no method, tool, or approach will make an evaluation developmental or its results helpful to organizations seeking to innovate, adapt, grow, and sustain themselves. 

There is nothing particularly challenging about developmental evaluation (DE) from a technical standpoint: for the most part, a DE can be performed using the same methods for data collection as other evaluations. What stands DE apart from those other evaluations is less the methods and tools, but the thinking that goes into how those methods and tools are used. This includes the need to ensure that sensemaking is a part of the data analysis plan because it is almost certain that some if not the majority of the data collected will not have an obvious meaning or interpretation.

Without developmental thinking and sensemaking, a DE is just an evaluation with a different name

This is not a moot point, yet the failure of organizations to adopt a developmental mindset toward its programs and operations is (likely) the single-most reason for why DE often fails to live up to its promise in practice.

No child’s play

If you were to ask a five-year old what they want to be when they grow up you might hear answers like a firefighter, princess, train engineer, chef, zookeeper, or astronaut. Some kids will grow up and become such things (or marry accordingly for those few seeking to become princesses or they’ll work for Disney), but most will not. They will become things like sales account managers, marketing directors, restaurant servers, software programmers, accountants, groundskeepers and more. While this is partly about having the opportunity to pursue a career in a certain field, it’s also about changing interests.

A five-year old that wants to be a train engineer might seem pretty normal, but one that wants to be an accountant specializing in risk management in the environmental sector would be considered odd. Yet, it’s perfectly reasonable to speak to a 35-year-old and find them excited about being in such a role.

Did the 35-year-old that wanted to be a firefighter when they were five but became an accountant, fail? Are they a failed firefighter? Is the degree to which they fight fires in their present day occupation a reasonable indicator of career success?

It’s perfectly reasonable to plan to be a princess when you’re five, but not if you’re 35 or 45 or 55 years old unless you’re currently dating a prince or in reasonable proximity to one. What is developmentally appropriate for a five-year-old is not for someone seven times that age.

Further, is a 35-year-old a seven-times better five-year-old? When you’re ten are you twice the person you were when you were five? Why is it OK to praise a toddler for sharing, not biting or slapping their peers, and eating all their vegetables and weird to do it with someone in good mental health in their forties or fifties? It has to do with developmental thinking.

It has to do with a developmental mindset.

Charting evolutionary pathways

We know that as people develop through stages, ages and situations the knowledge, interests, and capacities that a person has will change. We might be the same person and also a different person than the one we were ten years ago. The reason is that we evolve and develop as a person based on a set of experiences, genetics, interests, and opportunities that we encounter. While there are forces that constrain these adaptations (e.g., economics, education, social mobility, availability of and access to local resources), we still evolve over time.

DE is about creating the data structures and processes to understand this evolution as it pertains to programs and services and help to guide meaningful designs for evolution. DE is a tool for charting evolutionary pathways and for documenting the changes over time. Just as putting marks on the wall to chart a child’s growth, taking pictures at school, or writing in a journal, a DE does much of the same thing (even with similar tools).

As anyone with kids will tell you, there are a handful of decisions that a parent can make that will have sure-fire, predictable outcomes when implemented. Many of them are created through trial-and-error and some that work when a child is four won’t work when the child is four and five months. Some decisions will yield outcomes that approximate an expected outcome and some will generate entirely unexpected outcomes (positive and negative). A good parent is one who pays attention to the rhythms, flows, and contexts that surround their child and themselves with the effort to be mindful, caring and compassionate along the way.

This results in no clear, specific prototype for a good parent that can reliably be matched to any kid, nor any highly specific, predictable means of determining who is going to be a successful, healthy person. Still, many of us manage to have kids we can proud of, careers we like, friendships we cherish and intimate relationships that bring joy despite no means of predicting how any of those will go with consistency. We do this all the time because we approach our lives and those of our kids with a developmental mindset.

Programs as living systems

DE is at its best a tool for designing for living systems. It is about discerning what is evolving (and at what rate/s) and what is static within a system and recognizing that the two conditions can co-exist. It’s the reason why many conventional evaluation methods still work within a DE context. It’s also the reason why conventional thinking about those methods often fails to support DE.

Living systems, particularly human systems, are often complex in their nature. They have multiple, overlapping streams of information that interact at different levels, time scales and to different effects inconsistently or at least to a pattern that is only partly ever knowable. This complexity may include simple relationships and more complicated ones, too. Just as a conservation biologist might see a landscape that changes, they can understand what changes are happening quickly, what isn’t, what certain relationships are made and what ones are less discernible.

As evaluators and innovators, we need to consider how our programs and services are living systems. Even something as straightforward as the restaurant industry where food is sought and ordered, prepared, delivered and consumed, then finished has elements of complexity to it. The dynamics of real-time ordering and tracking, delivery, shifting consumer demand, the presence of mobile competitors (e.g., food trucks), changing regulatory environment, novelty concepts (e.g., pop-ups!), and seasonality of food demand and supply has changed how the food preparation business is run.

A restaurant might not just be a bricks-and-mortar operation now, but a multi-faceted, dynamic food creation environment. The reason could be that even if they are good at what they did if everything around them is changing they could still deliver consistently great food and service and fail. They may need to change to stay the same.

This only can happen if we view our programs as living systems and create evaluation mechanisms and strategies that view them in that manner. That means adopting a developmental mindset within an organization because DE can’t exist without it.

If a developmental evaluation is what you need or you want to learn more about how it can serve your needs, contact Cense and inquire about how they can help you. 

Image Credit: Thinkstock used under license.

behaviour changecomplexitysystems thinking

Reframing change

on August 10, 2017

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Change is one of the few universal constants as things — people, planet, galaxy — are always in some state of movement, even if it’s imperceptible. Change is also widely discussed and desired, but often never realized in part because we’ve treated something nuanced as over-simplified; it’s time to change. 

For something so omnipresent in our universe, change is remarkably mysterious.

Despite the enormous amount of attention paid to the concept of change, innovation, creation, creativity, and such we have relatively little knowledge of change itself. A look at the academic literature on change would suggest that most of human change is premeditated, planned and rational. Much of this body of literature is focused on health behaviours and individual-level change and draws on a narrow band of ‘issues’ and an over-reliance on linear thinking. At the organization level, evidence on the initiation, success, and management of change is scattered, contradictory and generally bereft of clear, specific recommendations on how to deal with change. Social and systems change are even more elusive, with much written on concepts like complexity and system dynamics without much evidence to guide how those concepts are to be practically applied.

Arguments can be made that some of the traditional research designs don’t work for understanding complex change and the need to match the appropriate research and intervention design to the type of system in order to be effective.  These are fair, useful points. However, anyone engaged in change work at the level where the work is being done, managed and led might also argue that the fit between change interest, even intention, and delivery is far lower than many would care to admit.

The issue is that without the language to describe what it is we are doing, seeing and seeking to influence (change) it’s easy to do nothing — and that’s not an option when everything around us is changing.

Taking the plunge

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan Watts

Dogs, unlike humans, never take swim lessons. Yet, a dog can jump into a lake for the first time and start swimming by instinct. Humans don’t fare as well and it is perhaps a good reason why we tend to pause when a massive change (like hopping in a pool or a lake) presents itself and rely both on contemplation and action — praxis — to do many things for the first time. Still, spend any time up near a cottage or pool in the summer and you’ll see people swimming in droves.

The threat of water, change of fear of the unknown doesn’t prevent humans from swimming or riding a bike or playing a sport or starting a new relationship despite the real threats (emotional, physical, and otherwise) that come with all of them.

Funny that we have such a hard time drawing praxis, patience, and sensemaking into our everyday work in a manner that supports positive change, rather than just reactive change. The more we can learn about what really supports intentional change and create the conditions that support that, the more likely we’ll be swimming and not just stuck on the shore.

Whatever it takes

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”—General Eric
Shinseki, retired Chief of Staff, U. S. Army

“It’s just not a good time right now”

“We’re really busy”

“I’m just waiting on (one thing)”

“We need more information”

These are some of the excuses that individuals and organizations give for not taking action that supports positive change, whatever that might be. Consultants have a litany of stories about clients who hired them to support change, develop plans, even set out things like SMART goals, only to see little concrete action take place; horses are led to water, but nothing is consumed.

One of the problems with change is that it is lumped into one large category and treated as if it is all the same thing: to make or become different (verb) or the act or instance of making or becoming different (noun). It’s not. Just as so many things like waves, moods, or decision-making strategies are different, so too is change. Perhaps it is because we continue to view change as a monolithic ‘thing’ without the nuance that we afford other similarly important topics that we have such trouble with it. It’s why surfers have a language for waves and the conditions around the wave: they want to be better at riding them, living with them and knowing when to fear and embrace them.

What is similar to the various forms that change might take is the threat of not taking it seriously. As the above quote articulates, the threat of not changing is real even if won’t be realized right away. Irrelevance might be because you are no longer doing what’s needed, offering value, or you’re simply not effective. Unfortunately, by the time most realize they are becoming irrelevant they already are.

Whatever it takes requires knowing whatever it takes and that involves a better sense of what the ‘it’ (change) is.

Surfing waves of change

To most of us, waves on the beach are classified as largely ‘big’ or ‘small’ or something simple like that. To a surfer, the conversation about a wave is far more delicate, nuanced and far less simplistic. A surfer looks at things like wind speed, water temperature, the location of the ‘break’ and the length of the break, the vertical and horizontal position of the wave and the things like the length of time it takes to form. Surfers might have different names for these waves or even no words at all, just feelings, but they can discern differences and make adjustments based on these distinctions.

When change is discussed in our strategic planning or organizational change initiatives, it’s often described in terms of what it does, rather than what it is. Change is described as ‘catastrophic‘ or ‘disruptive‘ or simply hard, but rarely much more and that is a problem for something so pervasive, important, and influential on our collective lives. It is time to articulate a taxonomy of change as a place to give change agents, planners, and everyone a better vocabulary for articulating what it is they are doing, what they are experiencing and what they perceive.

By creating language better suited to the actual problem we are one step further toward being better at addressing change-related problems, adapting, and preventing them than simply avoiding them as we do now.

Time to take the plunge, get into the surf and swim around.

 

 

Image credit: June 17, 2017 by Mike Sutherland used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thanks for sharing Mike!

behaviour changecomplexitydesign thinkingevaluationpsychology

Exploding goals and their myths

on July 20, 2017

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Goal-directed language guides much of our social policy, investment and quests for innovation without much thought of what that means in practice. Looking at the way ideas start and where they carry us might offer us reasons to pause when fashioning goals and whether we need them at all. 

In a previous article, I discussed the problems with goals for many of the problems being dealt with by organizations and networks alike. (Thanks to the many readers who offered comments and kudos and also alerted me that subscribers received the wrong version minus part of the second paragraph!). At aim was the use of SMART goal-setting and how it made many presumptions that are rarely held as true.

This is a follow-up to that to discuss how a focus on the energy directed toward a goal and how it can be integrated more tightly with how we organize our actions at the outset might offer a better option than addressing the goals themselves.

Change: a matter of energy (and matter)

goal |ɡōl| noun:  the object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result • the destination of a journey

A goal is a call to direct effort (energy) toward an object (real or imagined). Without energy and action, the goal is merely a wish. Thus, if we are to understand goals in the world we need to have some concept of what happens between the formation of the goal (the idea, the problem to solve, the source of desire), the intention to pursue such a goal, and what happens on the journey toward that goal. That journey may involve a specific plan or it may mean simply following something (a hunch, a ‘sign’ — which could be purposeful, data-driven or happenstance, or some external force) along a pathway.

SMART goals and most of the goal-setting literature takes the assumption that a plan is a critical success factor in accomplishing a goal.

If you follow SMART, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound (or Timely) this plan needs to have these qualities attached to them. This approach makes sense when your outcome is clear and the pathway to achieving the goal is also reasonably clear such as smoking cessation, drug or alcohol use reduction, weight loss and exercise. It’s the reason why so much of the behaviour change literature includes goals: because most of it involves studies of these kinds of problems. These are problems with a clear, measurable outcome (even if that has some variation to it). You smoke cigarettes or you don’t. You weigh X kilograms at this time point and Y kilograms at that point.

These outcomes (goals) are the areas where the energy is directed and there is ample evidence to support means to get to the goal, the energy (actions) used to reach the goal, and the moment the goal is achieved. (Of course, there are things like relapse, temporary setbacks, non-linear changes, but researchers don’t particularly like to deal with this as it complicates things, something clinicians know too well).

Science, particularly social science, has a well-noted publication bias toward studies that show something significant happened — i.e., seeing change. Scientists know this and thus consciously and unconsciously pick problems, models, methods and analytical frameworks that better allow them to show that something happened (or clearly didn’t), with confidence. Thus, we have entire fields of knowledge like behaviour change that are heavily biased by models, methods and approaches designed for the kind of problems that make for good, publishable research. That’s nice for certain problems, but it doesn’t help us address the many ones that don’t fit into this way of seeing the world.

Another problem is much less on the energy, but on the matter. We look at specific, tangible outcomes (weight, presence of cigarettes, etc..) and little on the energy directed outward. Further, these perspectives assume a largely linear journey. What if we don’t know where we’re going? Or we don’t know what, specifically, it will take to get to our destination (see my previous article for some questions on this).

Beyond carrots & sticks

The other area where there is evidence to support goals is from management and study of its/ executives or ‘leaders’ (ie. those who are labelled leaders and might be because of title or role, but whether they actually inspire real, productive followership is another matter). These leaders call out a directive and their employees respond. If employees don’t respond, they might be fired or re-assigned — two outcomes that are not particularly attractive to most workers. On the surface it seems like a remarkably effective way of getting people motivated to do something or reach a goal and for some problems it works well. However, those type of problem sets are small and specific.

Yet, as much of the research on organizational behaviour has shown (PDF), the ‘carrot and stick’ approach to motivation is highly limited and ineffective in producing long-term change and certainly organizational commitment. Fostering self-determination, or creating beauty in work settings — something not done by force, but by co-development — are ways to nurture employee happiness, commitment and engagement overall.

A 2009 study, appropriately titled ‘Goals Gone Wild’ (PDF), looked at the systemic side-effects of goal-setting in organizations and found: “specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.” The authors go on to say in the paper — right in the abstract itself!: “Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.”

Remember the last time you were in a meeting when a senior leader (or anyone) ensured that there was sufficient time, care and attention paid to considering the harmful side-effects of goals before unleashing them? Me neither.

How about the ‘careful dosing’ or ‘close supervision’ of activities once goal-directed behaviour was put forth? That doesn’t happen much, because process-focused evaluation and the related ongoing sense-making is something that requires changes in the way we organize ourselves and our work. And as a recent HBR article points out: organizations like to use the excuse that organizational change is hard as a reason not to make the changes necessary.

Praxis: dropping dualisms

The absolute dualism of goal + action is as false as the idea of theory + practice, thought + activity. There are areas like those mentioned above where that conception might be useful, yet these are selective and restrictive and can keep us focused on a narrow band of problems and activity. Climate change, healthy workplaces, building cultures of innovation, and creating livable cities and towns are not problem sets that have a single answer, a straightforward path, specific goals or boundless arrays of evidence guiding how to address them with high confidence. They do require a lot of energy, pivoting, adapting, sense-making and collaboration. They are also design problems: they are about making the world we want and reacting the world we have at the same time.

If we’re to better serve our organizations and their greater purpose, leaders, managers, and evaluators would be wise to focus on the energy that is being used, by whom, when, how and to what effect at more close intervals to understand the dynamics of change, not just the outcomes of it. This approach is one oriented toward praxis, an orientation that sees knowledge, wisdom, learning, strategy and action as combined processes that ought not be separated. We learn from what we do and that informs what we do next and what we learn further. It’s also about focusing on the process of design — that creation of the world we live in.

If we position ourselves as praxis-oriented individuals or organizations, evaluation is part of regular attending to the systems we design to support goals or outcomes through data and sensemaking. Strategy is linked to this evaluation and the outcomes that emerge from it all is what comes from our energy. Design is how we put it all together. This means dropping our dualisms and focusing more on integrating ourselves, our aspirations and our activities together toward achieving something that might be far greater than any goal we can devise.

Image credit: Author

 

 

complexitysocial systems

Time. Care. Attention.

on May 17, 2017

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A read through a typical management or personal improvement feed will reveal near infinite recommendations for steps you can take to improve your organization or self. Three words tend to be absent from this content stream and they are what take seemingly simple recommendations and navigate them through complexity: time, care, and attention.

Embedded within the torrent of content on productivity, innovation and self-development is a sense of urgency reflected in ‘top ten lists’,  ‘how tos’ and ‘hacks’ that promise ways to make your life and the world better, faster; hallmark features of what has become our modern, harried age.  These lists and posts are filled with well-intentioned strategies that are sure to get ‘liked’, ‘shared’ and ‘faved’, but for which there might be scant evidence for their effect.

Have you seen the research on highly productive people and organizations and their approaches, tools and strategies that speak to your specific circumstances? Probably not. The reason? There’s a paucity of research out there that points to specifics, while there is much on more generalized strategies. The problem is that you and I operate in the world specific to us, not generalized to the world. It’s why population health data is useful to understanding how a particular condition or issue manifests across a society, but is relatively poor at predicting individual outcomes.

Whether general or specific, three key qualities appear to be missing from much of the discussion and they might be the reason so little of what is said translates well into what is done: time, care, attention.

Time

When words and concepts like lean startup, rapid cycle prototyping, and quick pivoting dominate discussion of productivity and innovation it is easy to find our focus in speed. Yet, there are so many reasons to consider time and space as much as speed. Making the space to see things in a bigger picture allows us to act on what is important, not just what is urgent. This requires space — literal and figurative — within our everyday practice to do. Time allows us to lower that emotional drive to focus on more things at once, potentially seeing new patterns and different connections than had we rushed headlong into what appeared to be the most obvious issue at first look.

If we are seeking change to last, why would we not design something that takes time to prepare, deliver and sustain? Our desire and impetus to gain speed comes at the cost of longevity in many cases. This isn’t to suggest that a rapid-fire initiative can’t produce long-term results. The space race between the United States and Russia in the 1950’s and 60’s proves the long-term viability of short-term bursts of creative energy, but this might be an exception rather than the rule. Consider the timelessness of many classical architectural designs and how they were build with an idea that they would last, because they were designed without the sense that time was passing quickly. They were built to last.

Care

Care is consideration applied to doing something well. It is tied to a number of other c-words like competence. Those who are applying their skills to an issue require, acquire and develop a level of competence in doing something. Tackling complex social and organizational problems requires a level of competence that comes with time and attention, hence the research that suggests mastery may take as much as 10,000 hours of sustained, careful, deliberative practice to achieve. In an age of speed, this isn’t something that’s easily dealt with. Fast-tracked learning isn’t as possible as we think.

Care might also substitute for another c-word: craft. Craft is about building competence, practicing it, and attending to the materials and products generated through it. It’s not about mass production, but careful production.

Care is the application of focus and another c-word: compassion. Compassion is a response to suffering, which might be your own, that of your organization or community, or something for the world. Compassion is that motivational force aimed at helping alleviate those things that produce suffering and includes empathy, concern, kindness, tolerance, and sensitivity and is the very thing that translates our intentions and desires for change into actions that are likely to be received. We react positively to those who show compassion towards us and has been shown to be a powerful driver for positive change in flourishing organizations (PDF).

And isn’t flourishing what we’re all about? Why would we want anything less?

Attention

The third and related factor to the others is attention. Much has been written here and elsewhere about the role of mindfulness as a means of enhancing focus and focus on the right things: it’s a cornerstone of a socially innovative organization. Mindfulness has benefits of clearing away ‘noise’ and allowing more clear attention toward the data (e.g., experience, emotion, research data) we’re presented with that is the raw material for decision making. It’s an essential element of developmental evaluation and sensemaking.

Taken together, time, care and attention are the elements that not only allow us to see and experience more of our systems, but they allow us to better attend to what is important, not just what is urgent. They are a means to ensuring we do the right things, not the wrong things, righter.

In a world where there is more of almost everything determining what is most important, most relevant and most impactful has never been more important and while there is a push for speed, for ‘more’, there’s — paradoxically — never been a greater need to slow down, reduce and focus.

Thank you, reader, for your time, care and attention. You’ve given some of the most valuable things you have.

Image credit: Author

complexityinnovationpsychology

Jaded: Whether You Are a Plant or a Stone Makes All the Difference

on May 11, 2017

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An attempt to innovate – do something new to produce value — is always fraught with risk and a high likelihood that things won’t go as planned, which can leave people jaded toward future efforts. Whether that metaphor of jade is one of a rock (static) or a plant (growth) makes all the difference. 

Innovation is hot. Innovation is necessary. Innovation is your competitive advantage. Innovate or die.

You’ve probably heard one or all of these phrases or one of the myriad variants of them out there. Innovation is a hot word. To innovate is to transform new thinking into new value, but it is used euphemistically to represent all kinds of ‘hot’ things without appropriate framing. It’s not just doing something different, it’s about producing something new that improves on the situation at hand, even if the solution might actually be an old idea re-introduced.

A recent article for the online version of Harvard Business Review suggests that many companies are just giving up, ceding the ‘innovation’ space to large firms with a reputation for innovation. Why? One of the reasons cited is that the developing social and technological change has created a situation where “many firms seem to be unable to keep up with the pace at which this development is unfolding.”

The painful experience of failure

Another reason might be the problem of failure. Failure has become another cool word in the language of business and social innovation (even, government) to the point of being fetishized as something noble. The issue with failure is not just accepting that it can happen, but learning from it and acting on that learning. It also means understanding what failure is and whether an outcome is even best described in terms like “success” and “failure” . Too often in innovation, particularly social innovation, we actually don’t know what success looks like so how is it that we can use the term failure so readily?

Failure is a word with enormous negative cultural baggage. Despite all the positive rhetoric of failure, corporations, social enterprises and governments are judged on their ability to deliver what is expected of them. Expectations are really the key here. If you’re a corporation that promises to deliver a certain rate of return on investment over a specific time period, you’re going to be held to task for that. We can speak of failure positively all we’d like, but try explaining the ‘learning’ outcomes to a group of angry shareholders?

Politicians don’t get judged on their ability to manage complexity, they are judged by making and keeping promises — even if those promises are based on (overly) simplistic ways of viewing complex problems. As we entangle ourselves with more complex problems, the promise of a simple solution will be harder to come by. Yet, it’s that hope for the solution that is what ultimately gets us. As I once read in a newsletter advertising an online dating service in a very cheeky manner:

It’s not the rejection that kills you, it’s the hope.

It’s actually quite true. If you don’t expect to succeed, “failure” isn’t really that bad.

Lowered expectations, risk avoidance & path dependencies

When you’re jaded, you tend to lower your expectations. The analogy of online dating above is also an apt descriptor for ways in which lowered expectations changes the very game of innovation in real ways in people’s lives. As divorce rates approach 50%, it is becoming common that many people are starting over sometime in their 30’s and 40’s and trying, once again, to find love. What’s interesting in terms of dating is that, particularly if you’ve been dating a little, you face two big issues: 1) you’re a bit cautious about what you do or say because you know that things might not last and you want to conserve your energy and 2) you’ve become accustomed to the way you do things on your own.

The result might be less adventurousness, more conservative thinking about the choice of partner, a greater willingness to settle for what is, rather than what could be (risk avoidance). An established pattern of living might also predispose you to looking for partners who are a lot like you, which maintains a level of consistency (path dependence). An argument can be made that this is more about knowing yourself and your preferences than being set in your ways, but there is a fine line between that and resistance to change.

This is exactly what we see in organizations around innovation.

They have tried innovation before, it’s failed to deliver what they expected (because they probably set their expectations poorly, not realizing that the outcomes of innovation could be something other than they had designed for), and now don’t want to try. Or rather, they don’t want to try enough. This is why we see so many organizations trumpet themselves as innovative, when what they are really doing is the most basic, simplistic forms of innovation. Rather than a moonshot, they are looking to simply move the yardsticks just a little.

Plant vs stone

Jade is both a plant and a stone. A jade plant is a solid, semi-broad leafed plant that is well suited to dry climates and a variety of light situations, making it a great houseplant. It’s adaptive, easily transplantable and hearty. Jade, as a stone, is relatively soft and while it is also adaptable, once carved into a shape, it’s no longer going to change.

The jade / jaded metaphor is designed to consider the ways in which we approach developing our innovation potential. A jade plant is still firm, but flexible. It grows and changes over time, but isn’t as free flowing as others. The jade plant offers a useful metaphor for ensuring that lessons learned from past actions inform future strategy, but not to the point where the fear of risk calcifies the organization into a static state, unable to change.

A plant exists largely because it has a steady stream of nutrients, water, sunlight and a reasonable stability of growing conditions, yet conditions that can change and will change over time. This consistency as well as requisite variety (in systems terms) is what keeps a plant alive and thriving. The same is true for an organization. Ongoing, steady innovation, consistency over time and the occasional change in conditions to keep things on their toes (and used to adaptation) are all a part of what makes an organization or individual innovative. Build in a regular practice, become a mindful organization (or practitioner) and consider changes in the way you speak about innovation to yourself and others.

Bruce Lee would advocate that his students become like water. Innovators? They should become more like plants for that water.

Image Credit: Jade Plant by Andrew Rivett used under Creative Commons License. Thanks for sharing Andrew!

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