Lost together
Posted on July 13, 2016
A post certainty world
Doing new things to create social value means going into the great unknown, yet our fear of being lost need not prevent us from innovating, wisely and sustainably. Instead of being lost alone, we can be lost together.
I’ve heard it all so many times before
It’s all a dream to me now
A dream to me now
And if we’re lost
Then we are lost together– Blue Rodeo (Lost Together)
Humans have real problems with uncertainty. Risk mitigation is an enormous field of work within business, government and politics and permeates decision making in our organizations. It’s partly this reason that our politicians too often speak so cryptically to the point of basically uttering nonsense – because they want to avoid the risk of saying something that will hurt them. The alternative perhaps is to spout so much untruth that it no longer matters what you say, because others will create messages about you.
Thankfully, we are still — and hopefully into the future — in a world where most of what organizations do is considered and evaluated with some care to the truth. ‘Truth’ or facts are much easier to deal with in those systems where we can generate the kind of evidence that enable us to make clear decisions based on replicable, verifiable and defensible research. Ordered systems where there is a cause-and-effect relationship that is (usually) clear, consistent and observable are those where we can design interventions to mitigate risk with confidence.
Risky options
There are four approaches to risk mitigation.
- Risk Acceptance involves awareness of what risks are present within the system and establishing strategy and an organizational culture where the nature, type and potential consequences of risks are (largely) known, accepted and lived with.
- Risk Avoidance takes the opposite approach and seeks to steer operations away from activities where risk is limited.
- Risk Limitation seeks to curtail and mitigate the effects of risk where possible and often involves contingency planning and balancing activities with higher levels of uncertainty with areas of greater confidence and certainty.
- Risk Transference involves finding ways to offload risk to a third party. An example can be found in many partnerships between organizations of different sizes or types where one is able to absorb certain risks while others cannot for various reasons and the activities allow for one partner to take lead on an activity that isn’t feasible for another to do so.
Within social innovation — those activities involving public engagement, new thinking and social benefit — there are few opportunities for #2, plenty for #1 and #3 and a growing number for #4.
Risk is a core part of innovation. To innovate requires risking time, energy, focus and other resources toward the attempt at something new to produce a valued alternative to the status quo. For many human service organizations and funders, these resources are so thinly spread and small in abundance that the idea of considering risk seems like a risk itself. Yet, the real problem comes in assuming that one can choose whether or not to engage risk. Unless you’re operating in a closed system that has relatively few changing elements to it, you’re exposed to risk by virtue of being in the system. To draw on one of my favourite quotes from the author Guiseppe di Lampedusa:
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
So even keeping things away from risk involves risk because if the world around you is changing the system changes with it and so, too does your position in it. If this makes you feel lost, you’re not alone. Many organizations (individuals, too) are struggling with figuring out where they fit in the world. If you want evidence of this consider the growing calls for skilled knowledge workers at the same time we are seeing a crisis among those with a PhD — those with the most knowledge (of certain sorts) — in the job market.
Community of flashlights
There is a parable of the drunkard who loses his keys on his way home at night and searches for them under the streetlight not because that’s where he lost them, but because it’s easier to see that spurred something called the Streetlight Effect. It’s about the tendency to draw on what we know and what we have at our disposal to frame problems and seek to solve them, even if they are the wrong tools — a form of observation bias in psychology. Streetlights are anchored, stable means of illuminating a street within a certain range – a risk zone, perhaps — but remain incomplete solutions.
Flashlights on the other hands have the same limitations (a beam of light), are less powerful, but are adaptive. You can port a flashlight or torch and aim it to where you want the light to shine. They are not as powerful as a streetlight in terms of luminosity, but are far more nimble. However, if you bring more than one flashlight together, all of a sudden the power of the light is extended. This is the principle behind many of the commercial LED systems that are in use. Small numbers of lights brought together, each using low energy, but collectively providing a powerful, adaptive lighting system
This same principle can apply to organizations seeking to make change. Like an LED flashlight, they need a housing to hold and focus the lights. This can be in the form of a backbone organization such as those advocated in collective impact strategies. It can also be a set of principles or simple rules that provide a set of guides for organizations operating independently to follow, which will stimulate a consistent pattern of activity when applied, allowing similar, focused action on the same target at a distance.
This latter approach differs from collective impact, which is a top-down and bottom-up approach simultaneously and is a good means of focusing on larger, macro issues such as poverty reduction, climate change and city-building. It is an approach that holds potential for working within these larger issues on smaller, more dynamic ones such as neighbourhood building, conservation actions within a specific region, and workplace health promotion. In both cases the light analogy can hold and they need not be done exclusive of one another.
Let there be light
A flashlight initiative requires a lot of things coming together. It can be led by individuals making connections between others, brokering relationships and building community. It requires a vision that others can buy into and an understanding of the system (it’s level of complexity, structure and history). This understanding is what serves as the foundation for the determination of the ‘rules’ of the system, those touch points, attractors, leverage points and areas of push and pull that engage energy within a system (stay tuned to a future post for more detailed examples).
Much of the open-source movement is based on this model. This is about creating that housing for ideas to build and form freely, but with constraints. It’s a model that can work when collective impact is at a scale too large for an organization (or individual) to adequately envision contribution, but an alternative to going alone or relying only on the streetlight to find your way.
You might be lost, but with a flashlight you’ll be lost together and may just find your way.
Image credits: Author (Cameron Norman)
The healing power of curiosity
Posted on July 9, 2016
It has been a heavy few weeks in the world. In times like this we often raise our voice to speak when perhaps we ought to listen more, for it is in listening and asking questions that we may be better positioned not only to understand what’s happening around us, but resist having these events control us and risk repeating unhealthy patterns.
It’s hard not to get discouraged with all of the things that are going on; these are heavy days filled with conflict, tension and confusion.
- We’ve witnessed a mass shooting of gay revellers in an Orlando nightclub.
- Yesterday we saw law enforcement officers struck down in an ambush during a peaceful protest spurred on by two other terrible incidents where law enforcement officers in the United States were on the other end of the gun, killing unarmed black men on two separate days.
- Massive losses of life were further incurred at Istanbul’s airport and Baghdad with bombs set off, leaving hundreds of lives lost or permanently scarred.
- Britain voted to leave the European Union, cleaving that country into two in terms of opinion and further damaging relations between citizens of Scotland, Ireland and England. This has caused turmoil all through Europe and markets everywhere.
- In Toronto, our annual Pride parade was paused/disrupted by a Black Lives Matter protest group that held a 30-minute sit-in that was ended only after a list of demands were agreed to (and then dismissed) prompting a heated debate among groups from many stripes about the appropriateness of the action and its rationale and — sadly and perhaps predictably — racial hate messages.
These are dynamic, difficult times. It’s easy to get discouraged, but it’s also easy to get lulled into a pattern of thinking and behaviour that could serve to later perpetuate some of the very problems that these issues partly arise from: dealing with difference.
A curious thing…
A funny thing happens with certainty: you stop asking questions.
I don’t question how to tie my shoes: I simply know how to do it. I’m not curious about whether there are better ways to do it, more enjoyable or more efficient strategies or ones that will leave my shoes better tied. I’m Ok with that. But what happens when my certainty extends to things with more dimensions to it like what to eat for dinner, places to live, potential career paths, friendship or partner choices, or attitudes toward social groups or political situations? The consequences of excluding other perspectives and options are more substantial.
It reminds me of a scene in the first Men in Black film when the character played by Will Smith is confronted with a truth that he is living among aliens from other planets. Tommy Lee Jones’ character explains how it is that people resist the idea of accepting other possibilities because of what they ‘know’.
When we judge something or assert knowledge, we dampen or even shut down our curiosity. Particularly with complex systems, there are tremendous advantages (and need) to see them from different perspectives by asking questions and being curious.
Curiosity is what protects us from developing a locked in mindset focused on singular solutions and opens up possibilities.
Seeing the situation from others’ points of view may not shift your beliefs about that issue, but can make you better able to deal with it.
Contemplating alternative paths to love
Contemplative inquiry is one manner of doing this. Contemplative inquiry allows for seeing past events and anchoring those signals to the present and future desires. It is a very old way of doing things with more modern sensibilities. Arthur Zajonc, a professor of physics and former president of the Mind and Life Institute, has written about contemplative inquiry in a book with the same name. The approach is rooted in traditional mindfulness practices and brings, in many ways, the same focus and discipline that you would to science. Scientists ask questions and always seek to disprove their ideas for it is only then that they can make a confident assertion of something being ‘fact’ or evidence.
Contemplative inquiry is about advancing understanding to produce love. Adam Kahane of Reos Partners has written about the tensions between power and love, saying that it is in that quest for love and understanding of power that much of social change takes place. These are times where power and love are colliding and opening ourselves to being curious about perspectives that are different from us, hold alternative currency, or are simply alien to our way of life will help ensure that we don’t allow things like violence and aggressive conflict to consume us, lest we become the very thing we struggle against.
The Beatles sang “all you need is love”, but love on its own is blind. Curiosity with love is what help you to see.
Photo credits: Protest by Jennifer C., Black Lives Matter by Bille Grace Ward, and Curiosity by Jason Armstrong all used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thank you all for sharing your work.
Culture and heritage: Social systems in four dimensions
Posted on July 7, 2016
International sporting events like the World Cup and the Olympics provide intriguing examples of the complexity and situated-nature of culture and heritage as people from all walks of life reveal, (re) create, adopt and adapt to some form of unique and shared identity, even if temporarily. This situated-ness is what illustrates one of the most substantial challenges for organizations and governments alike as they wrestle with complexity in their mission.
This past week my home country (Canada) celebrated its 149th birthday as a nation on what we call Canada Day. Three days later, our neighbours (the United States) celebrated their birthday on a holiday known jointly as the 4th of July and Independence Day. The latter title is something that former UKIP leader and advocate for the Brexit Leave campaign, Nigel Farage, proclaimed the UK should adopt in light of the UK’s narrow vote to secede from Europe.
Countries and nations are strange beasts. They are both real and fictitious imaginations of human beings to organize people, places and (sometimes) things in ways that are both useful at times and harmful at others. John Lennon implored us to imagine there were no countries and that there would be “nothing to kill or die for” as a result. A look at the environmental and conservation challenges facing our planet has inspired people like Michael Quinn Patton to begin looking Blue Marble Evaluation as a means of encouraging us to go beyond the boundaries imposed by the nation state to look more deeply at tackling challenges facing our planet that transnational and have no consideration for our created borders.
It could be argued that, aside from borders (which can be arbitrarily drawn, although the effects of such drawing is far from arbitrary), what defines a nation is culture and heritage. All one has to do is witness how the world changes when major international sporting events take place and how individuals who may have a citizenship or residency in one country suddenly transform into someone from another by donning a jersey, raising a flag or chanting a cheer.
And to complicate matters, this is often done without leaving one identity behind, but putting on another as well or even creating a hybrid. This is what makes culture — national, organizational or community — so interesting and also so challenging to deal with. It is what keeps governments on their toes and organizations on their heels.
History, geography, time
At present the European football championships (the Euros) are concluding in France and as a fan of ‘the beautiful game’ I find myself confronting these challenges of culture and heritage head-on when I consider supporting a team. To begin, my family is Canadian through many generations. My mothers’ parents arrived from Germany and Romania when they were very young at the start of the 20th century. My fathers’ family has roots in England and Norway (via the United States) that go back into the 18th and 19th centuries. If I was to pick a side based on family connection to a nation, who’s colours should I wear?
One way to determine that might be time away. In that case, should I pick Germany and Romania because they are more recent in my family past, or Norway or England? But then, there is that bit about family having come from Europe through the United States, so should I be rooting for the USA (assuming they were involved in the Euros for a moment)?
Further complicating this was that the Germany my grandfather was born into in the early 1900’s was barely 30 years, as it had been pulled together in 1871 from many independently run ‘micro-states’ which formed from an earlier dissolution of more than 500 states nearly 70 years before. About that same time Romania had become unified, separated from the Ottoman Empire and then reformed as a Kingdom all within the last 50 years of the 1800’s. It was another ‘new’ country too.
While the administrative configuration of these countries was new, the cultures and heritage of those who were in or out or back in the country had been long shared. All one needs to do is consider the enormous social, economic, religious and geographic complexities unleashed by treaties like the one at Versailles in 1918 which substantially altered the global post-colonial landscape that had been established by European powers, or those that led to the “creation” of Iraq and in 1948 “created” the state of Israel. In the latter examples, there are cultures thousands of years old who were well-established long before ever being declared a country.
The point is that what we call a country is a perfect example of a systems thinking maxim that points to the importance of understanding a system from where one sits within it. In the case of looking to defining a country, we need to look at many things (vantage points in a system) and that includes time, history. It means we need to consider 4 dimensions of spacetime to really understand complex conditions like countries, nations, identities and cultures.
The elsewhere home
I know someone who is a die-hard Irish even if it was her great, great grandparents that came to Canada. She might be more Irish than others I know who were born in Ireland and have only been here for a few years and are now permanent residents. So, who of the two lays a better claim to “being Irish”?
These arguments are not just philosophical, but illustrative of the challenges we face in creating community and identity in the modern world. For those intending to change that world — on whatever matter — these issues of identity are important. People come together for many reasons and a sense of shared culture and heritage are two of the most powerful, yet also nebulous markers. Culture might be expressed through food, rituals, practices of faith, symbols (e.g, badges, jerseys, flags, slogans and cheers) and fashion.
And despite the protestations of many who might disagree, there is no such thing as a pure culture; it’s always remixed, repurposed and re-imagined. Consider the Icelandic football team that performed better than anyone imagined and progressed to the quarter finals of this years’ Euros. Their fans have developed a Viking war chant as part of their repertoire of cheers (seen below) . And while the Vikings were certainly part of the heritage of Iceland, it’s the cultural identity that Iceland’s citizens gravitate to because of that shared (and constructed) heritage, even if the Vikings never played football.
And to see how quickly cultural practices spread, consider this same ‘viking’ chant was performed brilliantly with supporters from my hometown football (in Toronto, Canada) just days after the video above was shot (see below). There are no vikings in Canada — even though they were our first visitors from Europe.
Indeed, this cultural ‘home’ is almost always elsewhere as well as ‘here’.
4-D sports and other models
If we are to be effective at making positive contributions to influencing social systems, we can learn a lot from sport and the way it serves to facilitate and amplify culture — positively and negatively. From the chants and cheers to the banners, scarves, jerseys, hats and costumes that people wear to games and as signs of support or affiliation provide us with ready-made labs to help us understand how culture and heritage are manifested.
Stories are told, a shared narrative emerges about a club or country related to a sport, and icons are created. These become myths, but also sources for inspiration and, if not carefully considered, sources for social exclusion and violence. We can create the same conditions in our communities and organizations to different degrees if we pay attention. At the same time, we can learn how identities can be shared and mixed. To come back to my story of support, I actually was interested in three teams in this tournament for different reasons. England, partly because of history, but more because my favourite club team was well-represented on them, I have many friends from there, and have been to the UK many times and really like it there. Italy, not because I have any familial connection to them, but because I like the country and my best friend and I share that love and found ourselves over the years watching the games together and that shared cheer just added to the strong bond we have.
Lastly, and (for particularly for the current state of the tournament), Germany.
Some might say that I can’t support multiple countries. Some might suggest that the logic behind any of these choices is flawed. But that’s the thing with culture, heritage and the way we bring these together. We create the logic that justifies why we are or are not part of a group. We attach the meaning to the flag, the colours, the music the tastes — what social theorist Pierre Bourdieu critiqued as markers of distinction (PDF).
So with that, come on Germany — go win the Euros! (And if not, you’re just a socially, temporally and culturally constructed entity that provides me with a sense of affiliation to certain members of my family, fond memories of eating German-inspired food and speaking German to my Grandmother, a respect for the way that you play the sport and the approach you take to developing players, and a connection to thousands of strangers worldwide who will, for the moment, dress like me and cheer when I do. And that is as good of a reason to support them — or any country — as any).
May we all find ways to create this in the various ‘teams’ (communities, organizations, countries) we find ourselves sharing.
Photo credits: Germany vs Poland 0-0 by George Groutas used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thanks for sharing George; hope you had fun at the Euros!
Ethics and Systemic Change
Posted on July 5, 2016
Systems change is a goal for many social advocates — whether aimed at politics, climate change, social norms or beyond — because often it’s only through changes to the interrelationships and boundaries that contain a system can lasting shifts be noticed. With great potential and power comes a responsibility to ensure that change yields more benefits than drawbacks and that’s not as simple to determine as we might desire.
In the week after the historic Brexit vote we’ve seen massive destabilization in the United Kingdom, Europe and markets worldwide as the British populace seeks to understand what happened and what happens next for them. In the wake of the vote we’ve seen the sitting Prime Minister David Cameron, and Remain vote advocate, announce he will be stepping down and two of the most prominent leaders of the Leave campaign — Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage — announce they would not be seeking to lead or be heavily involved in what comes next.
The resignations by Mr Cameron, who’s decision to hold the referendum in the first place, and Mr’s Johnson and Farage, who led the winning side, stung many on both sides. The argument is that they were largely responsible for what has been described as a mess and yet have opted not to take responsibility for implementing what they created. It is something of a Mary Shelley novel.
Great Britain (and Europe) will be forever changed by Brexit and it will remain to be seen what balance of positives and negatives will come from it. While even dark decisions can yield positive outcomes (that silver lining we often look for in the clouds) there is a responsibility that must come from our actions and design choices to ensuring they minimize harms.
Ethics and Systemic design (thinking)
For a field that is literally shaping the world, design discourse is remarkably devoid of conversations on ethics. Only recently did the first book appear that took ethics in design research as its topic. Yet that is design research, the amount of work on design ethics — how we choose responsibly about what to create along with how to create it (and what role, if any, designers choose to take once something has been sent into the world) is painfully thin. While there’s been a growing movement towards sustainability and environmental responsibility in product design, there’s not as much on social system design.
One area where we are seeing these discussions starting is in the area of systemic design. Systemic design is, as its name suggests, a systems-focused, design-oriented approach to changing human systems. Systemic design is not just about changing social conditions in an ameliorative approach to change, but shaping the very conditions in which those conditions arise. In many ways is it the design manifestation of community psychology. Systemic designers seek to transform the world. However, much like the (mostly) men who led the Brexit Leave campaign, there is a need to have one’s intentions clear and ensure that what is designed is responsible and responsive and that’s not what we’ve seen in that case.
This might be because motivation for change is often very blunt — perhaps based on fear or dissatisfaction — that might not have a specific focus. This is the challenge for systemic design. Systems thinking is a powerful vehicle in systemic design, however its often a tool to determine where to intervene and what could transpire if certain actions are taken once chosen, but not as good as determining what actions are best suited. This is where design thinking comes in and together the two approaches inform systemic design.
Peter Jones, a systemic designer and professor at OCADU (and colleague of mine), has written on this and draws on his experience with healthcare and the Occupy Movement as part of his work in advancing systemic design research. In his paper on systemic design principles (PDF), Jones points to the limits that design thinking approach — that solution generation aspect of systemic design — can present:
Design thinking has been influenced by rapid prototyping culture. When virtual trials and failures are cheap, multiple prototypes are less expensive than in-depth analysis and research. However, this design thinking bias leads to a short-term bias that rewards immediate responses to prototypes.
Jones adds that this approach is suitable for certain products (and arguably, system types), but that this approach can fail to address systemic problems if not critically applied:
For industrial products, those bias’ risks are minimal. However, for complex social systems a prototyping mindset evaluates component subsystems (at best) selected by a saliency bias. This bottom-up approach fails to acquire a system-level understanding and even erodes a holistic view. New system relationships are formed through iterative trials and informal sample evaluations, but current relationships are not necessarily discovered, leading to significant gaps in systemic understanding.
From design thinking to conscious creation
Systemic design, if not carefully done, can end up creating these gaps as we saw with the ‘grassroots’ movements in both the Leave and Remain campaigns in the Brexit debate.
A powerful, simple technique to determining causes and consequences of current behaviour is to ask the question ‘why’ as many times as possible. Five ‘whys’ asked on any issue will likely lead to a revelation about fundamental drivers behind a particular activity. Systemic design seeks to address change at this level as much as possible by creating, with intention and purpose (i.e., by design), structures that support and shift behaviour and thinking to transform the situation and context that can lead to a more profound and sustained change.
A corollary to this approach to understanding root causes might be the five whats? What might happen if we do X? What might happen after that takes place? And then what? And so on. This is similar to The Future,Backwards technique that Cognitive Edge has developed based on research into foresight, strategic planning and systems thinking. Just because we can change something doesn’t mean we should and wise design informed by systems thinking, strategic foresight and ethics can help us understand what ought to be done rather than simply highlight what can be done.
To that last point, a fair criticism of design is that it too often focuses on possibility without responsibility. Even on social issues we see design jams, hackathons, and ideation sessions that produce more ‘stuff’ (too often an ‘app’, as if the only solution to the worlds’ problems originate from a handheld electronic device) that is cool, sexy and disruptive without paying attention to what kind of disruption comes with that ‘solution’. A recent story on CBC Radio on the future of farming considered this as it explored how robotics are shaping how food is being produced. One of the comments made was that the ‘savings’ that often is incurred by having robots do more work is the kind of ‘lock in’ that it produces as farmers now get committed to buying, maintaining and upgrading technology for the long-term.
Conscious creation and technology adoption is something that groups like the Quakers and Amish have mastered and might be worth more of a look by more people — particularly designers. For design — and particularly systemic design — the ethics of what we make, maintain and adopt affects not only us, but all of those around us. For that reason, we need to build in ethics to our design work, by design.
Note: If you’re interested in learning more about systemic design consider attending the 2016 Systemic Design conference (RSD5) in Toronto, Canada October 13-15. Registration is open until the spots are filled.
Photo credit: Sea Ice Patterns by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thanks NASA — as always, you rock (and space and sea and space and….) 🙂
Diversity / Complexity in Focus
Posted on June 27, 2016
Diversity in focus?
As cities and regions worldwide celebrate Pride the role of diversity, understanding and unity has been brought to mind just as it has contemplating the British public’s choice to leave the EU with Brexit. Both events offer lessons in dealing with complexity and why diversity isn’t about either/or, but more both and neither and that we might learn something not just from the English, but their gardens, too.
It’s a tad ironic that London has been celebrating its Pride festival this past week, a time when respect and celebration of diversity as well as unification of humanity was top-of-mind while the country voted to undo many of the policies that fostered political and economic union and could likely reduce cultural diversity with Europe. But these kind of ironies are not quirky, but real manifestations of what can happen when we reduce complexity into binaries.
This kind of simplistic, reductionist thinking approach can have enormously harmful and disrupting effects that ripple throughout a system as we are seeing with what’s happened so far in the United Kingdom, Europe and the world in the past week.
Complexity abhors dichotomies
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t
The above quote (which has many variations, including one attributed to author Tom Robbins that I like) makes light of the problem of lumping the complex mass of humanity into two simple categories. It abstracts variation to such a level that it becomes nearly meaningless. The Brexit vote is similar. Both are lessons in complexity lived in the world because they reflect a nuanced, mutli-faceted set of issues that are reduced into binary options that are clustered together.
It is no surprise that, in the days following the Brexit vote in the UK, that there is much talk of a divided, rather than a united kingdom.
Diversity is difficult to deal with and is often left unaddressed as a result. The benefits to having diversity expressed and channeled within a complex system are many and articulated in research and practice contexts across sectors and include protection from disruption, better quality information, a richer array of strategic options and, in social contexts, a more inclusive social community.
The risks are many, too, but different in their nature. Diversity can produce tension which can be used for creative purposes, liberation, insight as well as confusion and conflict, simultaneously. This as a lot do with humans uneasy relationship with change. For some, change is easier to deal with by avoiding it — which is what many in the Leave camp thought they could do by voting the way they did. The darker side of the Leave campaign featured change as an image of non-white immigrant/refugees flooding into Britain, presumably to stoke those uncomfortable with (or outwardly hostile) to others to fear the change that could come from staying in the European Union.
Staying the same requires change
The author Guiseppe de Lampedussa once wrote about the need to change even when desiring to keep things as they are, because even if we seek stability, everything around us is changing and thus the system (or systems) we are embedded in are in flux. That need to change to stay the same was something that many UK citizens voiced. What was to change and what was to stay the same was not something that could be captured by a “Leave” or “Remain” statement, yet that is what they were given.
It should come to no surprise that, when presented with a stark choice on a complex matter, that there would be deep dissatisfaction with the result no matter what happened. We are seeing the fallout from the vote in the myriad factions and splintering of both of the main political parties — Conservative and Labour — and a House of Commons that is now filled with rebellion. Is the UK better off? So far, no way.
This is not necessarily because of the Leave vote, but because of what has come from the entire process of mis-handling the campaigns and the lack of plan for moving forward (by both camps). Further complicating matters is that the very EU that Britain has voted to leave is now not the same place as it was when the Brexit vote was held just five days ago. It’s also faced with rising voices for reform and potential separation votes from other member states who saw their causes bolstered or hindered because of the UK referendum. This is complexity in action.
Tending the garden of complex systems
The English know more about complexity than they might realize. An English garden is an example of complexity in action and how it relates to the balance of order, disorder and unordered systems. A look at a typical English garden will find areas of managed beauty, wildness, and chaos all within metres of one another.
What also makes a garden work is that it requires the right balance of effort, adaptive action, planning and compensating as well as the ability to let go all at the same time. Gardening requires constant attention to the weather, seasons, the mix of diversity within the system, the boundaries of the system itself (lest weeds or other species seek to invade from outside the garden or plants migrate out to a neighbours place) and how one works with all of it in real time.
Social systems are the same way. They need to be paid attention to and acted upon strategically, in their own time and way. This is why annual strategic planning retreats can be so poorly received. We take an organization with all it’s complexity and decide that once per year we’ll sit down and reflect on things and plan for the future. Complexity-informed planning requires a level of organizational mindfulness that engages the planning process dynamically and may involve the kind of full-scale, organization-wide strategy sessions more frequently or with specific groups than is normally done. Rather than use what is really arbitrary timelines — seen in annual retreats, 5-year plans and so forth — the organization takes a developmental approach, like a gardener, and tends to the organizations’ strategic needs in rhythms that fit the ecosystem in which it finds itself.
This kind of work requires: 1) viewing yourself as part of a system, 2) engaging in regular, sustained planning efforts that have 3) alignment with a developmental evaluation process that continually monitors and engages data collection to support strategic decision-making as part of 4) a structured, regular process of sensemaking so that an organization can see what is happening and make sense of it in real-time, not retrospectively because one can only act in the present, not the future or past.
Just as a garden doesn’t reduce complexity by either being on or off, neither should our social or political systems. Until we start realizing this and acting on it — by design — at the senior strategic level of an organization, community or nation, we may see Brexit-like conditions fostered in places well beyond the white cliffs of Dover into governments and organizations globally.
Photo Credits: The London Eye Lit Up for Pride London by David Jones and Hidcote Manor GardenHidcote Manor GardenHidcote Manor Garden by David Catchpole both used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thanks to the Davids for sharing their work.
(Re) Making our World
Posted on June 24, 2016 3 Comments
Britain’s vote to leave the European Union is a nod to the future and the past and both perspectives illustrate how citizens everywhere are struggling with how to best make their world – and to what extent that’s possible. These are design choices with systems implications that will be felt far beyond those who are making such decisions.
We only understand systems from a perspective, because where you sit within a system determines the relevance of properties that are of that system. These properties look different (or may be wholly imperceptible) depending on the vantage point taken within that system. This is what makes understanding and working with systems so challenging.
This morning the world woke up to find that the British people voted to leave the European Union. For the Brits this was a choice about where they wanted to place a boundary around certain systems (political, economic, geographic) and how they perceived having control over what took place within, around (and indeed the very nature of) those boundaries. Boundaries and constraints are principally what defines a system as that is what shapes what happens inside that system. For Britain it was a choice to redefine those boundaries tighter with a hope that it will bring greater good to that nation.
Boundary critique in complex systems
There is a guide for systems thinking that says if you’re trying to understand a system and find yourself lost you’ve probably bounded your systems too loosely and if you’re finding yourself constantly seeking explanations for what happens in a system that occur outside those boundaries than you’ve bound it too tightly.
The choice of millions of Britons about their own country, their boundaries, has influenced the world as stock markets shake up, currencies are devalued and entire economies rattled — not just now, but potentially for a period to come. Oil prices have fallen sharply in the wake of the decision, which will impact every part of the economy and further delay any shift away from carbon-based fuel options. The European Union and the entire world is feeling the effect from 51% of Britons who voted (of about 17M citizens) deciding they would be better off outside the EU than within it. Consider how a small number of people can have such an enormous impact — a perfect illustration of complexity in action.
And as England seeks to re-draw its boundary, already there is discussion of another Scottish independence vote in the wake of this, which may re-draw the boundary further. These votes are intentional acts and perhaps the most straightforward expressions of intention and self-determination within a democracy, but their impact and outcomes on citizens and the world around them are far from straightforward making such direct-democracy far more problematic than those in support of such votes make out. This is not to say that such votes are necessarily good or bad, but they are certainly not simple.
Co-design and its problems
The Brexit vote invites memory of a quote from one of Britain’s famous leaders who famously quipped that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. Democracy creates the opportunity for co-design of our political systems, policy choices and boundaries. By having an opportunity to voice an opinion and engage in the act of voting we citizens have a role to play in co-designing what we want from our country. The downside is that we are engaging in this exercise from where we sit in the system, thus the design I want might not be the same as someone else in my country, nor may we see the same information the same way or even consider the same information relevant.
It’s for this reason that we’re seeing strange things in politics these days. The volume of information available to us and the complexity of the layered contexts in which that information applies makes a simple decision like a vote for or against something far more challenging. Complexity is created by volatility, lack of certainty, an absence of predictability and dynamism. Co-design introduces all of this and, on a national scale, amplifies the impact of that complexity.
This is a massive challenge for everyone, but in particular those who come from the design and systems science realms. For design, co-design has been touted as a desired, if not idealized, principle for guiding the making of everything from learning experiences to services to products to policies. In systems thinking and related sciences, too often the focus is less on what is created, but how it impacts things — offering more description and analytical insight than guidance on what ought to be developed and how. Bringing these two worlds together — systemic design — may have never been more important.
Systemic design, boredom and critical making
Roseanne Somerson, President of the Rhode Island School of Design, recently wrote about the importance of boredom in spurring creativity in design. In it she speaks of the term ‘critical making’ instead of using design thinking. I love that term. It does a better job of reflecting the thinking-in-action praxis that is really at the heart of good design. In this article she refers to the insights and bursts of creativity that come from her students when she allows them — rather, forces them — to be bored.
What boredom can do is prompt a form of mindfulness, an emptying of the thoughts allowing the opportunity to escape the rush of stimulation that we get from the world and permit new insights to come in. It is a way of temporarily freeing oneself from the path dependence that is created by an entrained thought pattern that seeks out certain stimulation (which is why we tend to re-think the same thing over and again). This is an enormously useful approach for supporting organizations and individuals operating in complex systems to see things differently and not to get swept up in the power of a prevailing current without being fully aware that such a current exists and evaluating whether that is useful or not useful.
Creating the space to be mindful and to understand better ones place in their system as well as the potential consequences of change within that system is one of the key contributions that systemic design can offer. It is about engaging in social critical making and perhaps, it may be away out of the trap of creating simple binaries of stay versus leave or yes vs no. Surely no Britons thought that membership in the EU was all bad or good, but to divide the choice to be in or out might have been a case of taking a simple approach to a complex problem and now we will see how a simple choice has complex reverberations throughout the system now and into the future. Time will tell whether these — and the resulting choices of other nations and regions — will bring us closer together, further apart, or something else entirely.
Photo credits: Brexit Scrabble by Jeff Djevdet and Sad Day #brexit from Jose Manuel Mota both used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thanks Jeff and Jose for sharing your art.
Flipping the Social Impact Finger
Posted on June 21, 2016
Look around and one will notice a lot of talk about social enterprise and social impact. Look closer and you’ll find a lot more of the former and far less of the latter.
There’s a Buddhist-inspired phrase that I find myself reflecting on often when traveling in the social innovation/entrepreneurship/enterprise/impact sphere:
Do not confuse the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself
As terms like social enterprise and entrepreneurship, social innovation, social laboratories and social impact (which I’ll lump together as [social] for expediency of writing) become better known and written about its easy to caught up in the excitement and proclaiming its success in changing the world. Indeed, we are seeing a real shift in not only what is being done, but a mental shift in what can be perceived to be done among communities that never saw opportunities to advance before.
However exciting this is, there is what I see as a growing tendency to lose the forest amid the trees by focusing on the growth of [social] and less on the impact part of that collection of terms. In other words, there’s a sense that lots of talk and activity in [social] is translating to social impact. Maybe, but how do we know?
Investment and ROI in change
As I’ve written before using the same guiding phrase cited above, there is a great tendency to confuse conversation about something with the very thing that is being talked about in social impact. For all of the attention paid to the amount of ventures and the amount of venture capital raised to support new initiatives across the social innovation spectrum in recent years, precious little change has been witnessed in the evaluations made available of these projects.
As one government official working in this sector recently told me:
We tend to run out of steam after (innovations) get launched and lose focus, forgetting to evaluate what kind of impact and both intended and unintended consequences come with that investment
As we celebrate the investment in new ventures, track the launch of new start-ups, and document the number of people working in the [social] sector we can mistake that for impact. To be sure, having people working in a sector is a sign of jobs, but the question of whether they are temporary, suitably paying, satisfactory, or sustainable are the kind of questions that evaluators might ask and remain largely unanswered.
The principal ROI of [social] is social benefit. That benefit comes in the form of improved products and services, better economic conditions for more people, and a healthier planet and wellbeing for the population of humans on it in different measures. These aren’t theoretical benefits, they need to be real ones and the only way we will know if we achieve anything approximating this is through evaluation.
Crashing, but not wrecking the party
Evaluation needs to crash the party, but it need not kill the mood. A latent fear among many in [social] is likely that, should we invest so much energy, enthusiasm, money and talent on [social] and find that it doesn’t yield the benefits we expect or need a fickle populace of investors, governments and the public will abandon the sector. While there will always be trend-hunters who will pursue the latest ‘flavour of the month’, [social] is not that. It is here to stay.
The focus on evaluation however will determine the speed, scope and shape of its development. Without showing real impact and learning from those initiatives that produce positive benefit (or do not) we will substantially limit [social] and the celebratory parties that we now have at the launch of a new initiative, a featured post on a mainstream site, or a new book will become fewer and farther between.
Photo credit: Moonrise by James Niland used under Creative Commons licence via Flickr. Thanks for sharing your art, James.
The more we get together
Posted on June 18, 2016
As we forge ever-greater connections online to each other and the world of ideas the thinking was that we would be far better off, more tolerant, educated and wise and yet there is much evidence to suggest this isn’t the case. What does it mean to come together and how can we do this that brings us closer rather than driving us further apart?
The more we get together, the happier we’ll be – lyric from popular song for children
Like many, I’ve grown up thinking this very thing and, for the most part, my experience has shown this to be true. However upon reflection, I’m realizing that most of this experience is related to two things that could reveal a potential flaw in my thinking: 1) I’m thinking of face-to-face encounters with others more than any other type and also 2) most of the relationships I’ve formed without aid of or post use-of the Internet.
Face-to-face interactions of any real quality are limited in nature. We only have so many hours in a day and, unless your job is extremely social or you live in a highly communal household complex, we’re unlikely to have much interaction with more than a few dozen people per day that extends beyond “hello” or something like that. This was explored in greater detail by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who determined that our social networks are usually capped at 100 – 250 individuals. Dunbar’s number (the commonly held mean number of people in these networks) is commonly considered to be 150.
Why does this matter? When we engage others online, the type of interactions and the number of ideas we engage can be far larger, or at least is certainly different in how those relationships are managed. We see comments on discussion boards, social media posts, videos and pictures shared online, and are exposed to media messages of all types and through myriad news (official, professional and otherwise) sources. Ethan Zuckerman, who I’ve written about before, has written extensively about the paradox of having such incredible access to diversity in the world and yet we often find ourselves increasingly insular in our communication patterns, choosing like-minded opinions over alternative ones.
Looking ahead by looking back at Marshall McLuhan
Journalist Nicholas Carr, who’s written extensively on the social context of technology, recently posted an interview with Marshall McLuhan from 1977 speaking on his views about where media was going and his idea of “the global village”. His piece, the global village of violence, was enlightening to say the least. In it, Carr points to the violence we are committing in this global village and how it doesn’t square with what many thought were the logical outcomes of us connecting — and does so by pointing back to McLuhan’s own thoughts.
McLuhan’s work is often a complicated mess, partly because there is a large, diverse and scattered academic culture developed around his work and thus, often the original points he raised can get lost in what came afterwards. The cautions he had around hyper-connection through media are one of those things. McLuhan didn’t consider the global village to be an inherently good thing, indeed he spoke about how technology at first serves and then partly controls us as it becomes normalized part of everyday life — the extension becomes a part of us.
As is often the case with McLuhan, looking back on what he said, when he said it and what it might mean for the present day is instructive for helping us do, just as his seminal work sought to help us do, understand media and society. Citing McLuhan, Nicholas Carr remarked that:
Instantaneous, universal communication is at least as likely to breed nationalism, xenophobia, and cultism as it is to breed harmony and fellow-feeling, McLuhan argues. As media dissolve individual identity, people rush to join “little groups” as a way to reestablish a sense of themselves, and they’ll go to extremes to defend their group identity, sometimes twisting the medium to their ends
Electronic media, physical realities
These ‘little groups’ are not always so little and they certainly aren’t weak. As we are seeing with Donald Trump‘s ability to rally a small, but not insignificant population in the United States to join him despite his litany of abusive, sexist, inflammatory, racist, discriminatory and outwardly false statements has been constantly underestimated. Last week’s horrible mass shooting in Orlando brought a confluence of groups into the spotlight ranging from anti-Muslim, both anti-gay and gay rights, pro-gun, along with Republican and Democratic supporters of different issues within this matter, each arguing with intensity and too often speaking past each other. Later this week we saw British MP Jo Cox murdered by someone who saw her as a traitor to Britain, presumably on account of her position on the pending ‘Brexit’ vote (although we don’t yet know the motivation of the killer).
There are many reasons for these events and only some that we will truly know, but each matter points to an inability to live with, understand and tolerate others’ viewpoints and extreme reactions to them. The vitriol of debate on matters in the public sphere is being blamed for some of these reactions, galvanizing some to do horrible things. Could it be that our diversity, the abundance of interactions we have and the opportunities to engage or disengage selectively
If this hypothesis holds, what then? Should we start walling off ourselves? No. But nor should we expect to bring everyone together to share the tent and expect it to go well without very deliberate, persistent, cultivation and management of relationships, collectively. Much like a gardener does with her garden, there’s a need to keep certain things growing, certain things mixing, certain things out and others in and these elements might be different depending on the time of year, season, and plants being tended to. Just as there is no ‘one garden’ style that fits everywhere, there is no one way to do ‘culture’, but some key principles and a commitment to ongoing attention and care that feed healthy cultures (that include diversity).
As odd as this may sound, perhaps we need to consider doing the kind of civic development work that can yield healthy communities online as well as off. We certainly need better research to help us understand what it means to engage in different spaces, what types of diversity work well and under what conditions, and to help us determine what those ‘simple rules’ might be for bring us closer together so, like the childrens song above, we can be happier rather than what we’ve been becoming.
Complexity isn’t going away and is only increasing and unless we are actively involved in cultivating and nurturing those emergent properties that are positive and healthy and doing it by design, and viewing our overlapping cultures as complex adaptive systems (and creating the policies and programs that fit those systems), we put ourselves at greater risk for letting those things emerge that drive us further apart than bring us together.
Photo credit: Connections by deargdoom57 used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thanks deargdoom57 for sharing your work!
Authentic baloney and other sincere problems
Posted on June 6, 2016 1 Comment
What does it mean to be authentic in an age of design and complex social systems? It’s not as simple as you think and, as two high-profile psychologists point out, not something that’s easily agreed upon, either.
Over the past week, two high-profile psychologists and authors Adam Grant and Brene Brown have been engaged in a “debate” (or public disagreement? argument? — it’s hard to really tell) over the concept of authenticity and the role it plays in life — professional, personal and otherwise.
The debate was started by an op-ed post in the New York Times written by Grant who starts by referencing a description of Authenticity used by Brown in her work:
We are in the Age of Authenticity, where “be yourself” is the defining advice in life, love and career. Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world. As Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, defines it, authenticity is “the choice to let our true selves be seen.”
Brown, reacting to this piece on LinkedIn, corrects Grant by offering a better definition she’s used and criticizing his narrow-framed perspective on what authenticity is, which she states as:
In my research I found that the core of authenticity is the courage to be imperfect, vulnerable, and to set boundaries.
For Grant, it’s about dropping the filters and saying what’s on your mind all the time, while for Brown it’s about embracing vulnerability. The two are not the same thing, but nor are they opposites or incompatible with authenticity, rather they point to the problems of creating firm positions in complex systems.
A matter of boundaries
Brown’s definition adds something Grant’s interpretation leaves out: boundaries. It’s how we draw the boundaries around what we’re doing, and how and for what effect that determine the appropriateness of filters, expression and vulnerability. It’s also about context. Grant’s argument tends to be the one-sized-fits all with the kind of blanket statements about what he believes others want and need to hear. In his Times article, he ends with this pronouncement for readers:
Next time people say, “just be yourself,” stop them in their tracks. No one wants to hear everything that’s in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out of your mouth.
That Grant was so quick to equate authenticity with no-filtered thinking is somewhat surprising given his background in psychology. It shows a remarkably simplistic view of human psychology that isn’t befitting his other work. Yet, he’s managed to not only publish this piece in the Times, but doubled-down on the argument in a follow-up post also on LinkedIn. In that piece, he again equates authenticity with a sense of absoluteness around always saying what’s on your mind by drawing on research that looks at self-monitoring and expressiveness.
Here are some of the items—you can answer them true or false:
- My behavior is usually an expression of my true inner feelings, attitudes, and beliefs.
- I would not change my opinions (or the way I do things) in order to please someone else or win their favor.
- I’m always the person I appear to be.
People who answer true are perceived as highly authentic—they know and express their genuine selves. And a rigorous analysis of all 136 studies shows that these authentic people receive significantly lower performance evaluations and are significantly less likely to get promoted into leadership roles.
In some fairness, Brown’s work can be easily muddled when it comes to the matter of boundaries. While she’s responded very clearly to his comments and work, there’s been a lot of slippage between boundaries in her work. Anyone who has read her books and seen her talks knows that Brown models the embrace of vulnerability by drawing on her own personal challenges with being authentic and valuing herself, illustrating points from her research with examples from her own human struggles. Yet, I recall reading her books Daring Greatly and The Gifts of Imperfection thinking to myself the stories often stumbled from being instructive, supportive and healthy examples of vulnerability to feeling like I was being used as a platform for supporting her self-development, rather than to learn from her.
For me, this was less about any one particular story of her being vulnerable, but the cumulative effect of these stories coming together as told through a book. It was the volume not content of the stories that shifted my perception. By the time I finished I felt like I’d been witness to Brown’s self therapy, which weakened my perception of her being authentic.
This cumulative effect is partly what Grant is referring to when citing work on self-monitoring. He’s not commenting on moments of vulnerability, rather it’s on creating a presentation of personhood that lacks a sense of boundaries.
The answer to authenticity might be in that complex middle space. If Brown is open to and eager to share her vulnerabilities it’s important that I as a listener be willing (and able and prepared) to welcome in that discussion. But what if I am not? In Grant’s demarcation of boundaries that might not matter, but then we end up with a set of rules based on his (and many others) view of authenticity, which can devolve into something that Brown connects to a traditional, stereotyped ‘male’ expression of authenticity:
Many of the behaviors that Grant associates with authenticity don’t reflect the courage to be imperfect, vulnerable, or to set boundaries. They actually reflect crude, negative gender stereotypes. Male authenticity is associated with being hurtful, arrogant, manipulative, overbearing, and, in plain speak, an asshole. (italics added)
We must not stop listening, but we also must be cautious in how much (and when and in what context) we share and tell. Too little and we simply replicate the power positions of the past and surrender our true selves to social norms. Too much or done poorly and we might get a little closer to where Grant is.
Authentic baloney
What is authentic baloney (or Bologna Sausage for it’s original name)? Baloney is a indeed a thing, but it’s also a fake, synthetic meat product all at the same time. It’s a prepared meat that is designed to combine various ingredients together in a particular way that doesn’t really fit in any other types of sausage, yet is still ‘sausage like’. It’s difficult to describe using the language of sausage, yet also doesn’t have another peer to compare to (except Spam, which is a similar strange version of something familiar).
It is, in a sense, an authentic artificial product.
These two things — authenticity and artificiality — can coexist. Herb Simon wrote about design being partly about the science of the artificial. Stating in his book of the same name:
Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.
Design is about what could be. Authentic is about what is and what could be, speaking about intention as well as reflection on what one believes and wishes to project to others. Baloney is just that. It’s a manifestation of a design of a meat product that is intended to reflect how a meat product might be when one combines some of the less sought after cuts of meat together with spices, herbs and fats. It’s not real meat, but it’s not fake either.
What is our authentic self?
Our authentic self is changing. If one believes we come into the world and grow into a form, then who we are as a child is largely deterministic for what comes afterward.
It’s interesting that this ding-dong on authenticity from Brown and Grant come when my colleague Mark Kuznicki from The Moment published a long, extensive and revealing piece into the process that his firm engages in to recalibrate and strategically plan its future. Taking Grant’s view, this level of openness in discussing the challenges and opportunities could quite easily be construed as over-sharing self-monitoring. Brown might argue that this kind of public self-reflection indicates a reflection of that organization’s true self. I think it’s both and neither.
Authenticity is very much like baloney, which takes many forms, has different cultural interpretations and expressions and levels of acceptance and quality within it. What makes for good baloney really does depend on a great many factors and the person who’s consuming it. Just like baloney, what gets lost in these arguments is position within the system.
Systems perspectives are partly about understanding where one is positioned in them, which determines what is seen, how something is perceived, what kind of information is available and, most importantly, the meaning that is attached to that information in order to assess what to do and what impact it might have.
Part of that perspective is time.
A developmental perspective
My authentic self is not the same as it once was. Part of that is because at various stages of life I was more (early childhood) or less (teen and young adult years) comfortable with expressing that authenticity. But interestingly, as I got older, what was truly authentic was becoming more complicated and harder to assess. It’s because I’ve become far more complicated and with experience, knowledge and the accumulation of both I’ve transformed that original person into someone different (and also very similar).
To provoke developmental thinking I often ask students or audiences the question: Is a 40-year-old an 8 times better 5-year-old? Is a person who was five and said: I want to be a princess / astronaut / firefighter and ends up being a senior policy advisor for the government, an accountant, a social worker or designer just someone who failed at their goals?
Are these even relevant questions? The answer is: no. I once wanted to be a firefighter, but now I can’t imagine doing that job. Why did that change? Because I developed into something different. My authentic self sought different challenges, opportunities and required other things to nurture itself. I still love to draw, doodle and play sports, just like I did when I was five. That part of me, too is authentic.
As authenticity becomes more of a fashionable word and thrown out for use in many contexts it is worth considering more about what it is, what it means, and how we really nurture it in our work. As I think both Brene Brown and Adam Grant would agree: Authenticity is too important to fake, lest it become baloney.
Photo credit: Untitled by themostinept used under Creative Commons License via Flickr.
Reflections said, not done
Posted on May 27, 2016
Reflective practice is the cornerstone of developmental evaluation and organizational learning and yet is one of the least discussed (and poorly supported) aspects of these processes. It’s time to reflect a little on reflection itself.
The term reflective practice was popularized by the work of Donald Schön in his book The Reflective Practitioner, although the concept of reflecting while doing things was discussed by Aristotle and serves as the foundation for what we now call praxis. Nonetheless, what made reflective practice as a formal term different from others was that it spoke to a deliberative process of reflection that was designed to meet specific developmental goals and capacities. While many professionals had been doing this, Schön created a framework for understanding how it could be done — and why it was important — in professional settings as a matter of enhancing learning and improving innovation potential.
From individual learners to learning organizations
As the book title suggests, the focus of Schön’s work was on the practitioner her/himself. By cultivating a focus, a mindset and a skill set in looking at practice-in-context Schön (and those that have built on his work) suggest that professionals can enhance their capacity to perform and learning as they go through a series of habits and regular practices by critically inquiring about their work as they work.
This approach has many similarities to mindfulness in action or organizational mindfulness, contemplative inquiry, and engaged scholarship among others. But, aside from organizational mindfulness, these aforementioned approaches are designed principally to support individuals learning about and reflecting about their work.
There’s little question that paying attention and reflecting on what is being done has value for someone seeking to improve the quality of their work and its potential impact, but it’s not enough, at least in practice (even if it does in theory). And the evidence can be found in the astonishing absence of examples of sustained change initiatives supported by reflective practice and, more particularly, developmental evaluation, which is an approach for bringing reflection to bear on the way we evolve programs over time. This is not a criticism of reflective practice or developmental evaluation per se, but the problems that many have in implementing it in a sustained manner. From professional experience, this comes down largely to the matter of what is required to actually do reflective practice or any in practice.
For developmental evaluation it means connecting what it can do to what people actually will do.
Same theories, different practices
The flaw in all of this is that the implementation of developmental evaluation is often predicated on implicit assumptions about learning, how it’s done, who’s responsible for it, and what it’s intended to achieve. The review of the founding works of developmental evaluation (DE) by Patton and others point to practices and questions that that can support DE work.
While enormously useful, they make the (reasonable) assumption that organizations are in a position to adopt them. What is worth considering for any organization looking to build DE into their work is: are we really ready to reflect in action? Do we do it now? And if we don’t, what makes us think we’ll do it in the future?
In my practice, I continually meet organizations that want to use DE, be innovative, become adaptive, learn more deeply from what they do and yet when we speak about what they currently do to support this in everyday practice few examples are presented. The reason is largely due to time and the priorities and organization of our practice in relation to time. Time — and its felt sense of scarcity for many of us — is one of the substantive limits and reflective practice requires time.
The other is space. Are there places for reflection on issues that matter that are accessible? These twin examples have been touched on in other posts, but they speak to the limits of DE in affecting change without the ability to build reflection into practice. Thus, the theory of DE is sound, but the practice of it is tied to the ability to use time and space to support the necessary reflection and sensemaking to make it work.
The architecture of reflection
If we are to derive the benefits from DE and innovate more fully, reflective practice is critical for without one we can’t have the other. This means designing in reflective space and time into our organizations ahead of undertaking a developmental evaluation. This invites questions about where and how we work in space (physical and virtual) and how we spend our time.
To architect reflection into our practice, consider some questions or areas of focus:
- Are there spaces for quiet contemplation free of stimulation available to you? This might mean a screen-free environment, a quiet space and one that is away from traffic.
- Is there organizational support for ‘unplugging’ in daily practice? This would mean turning off email, phones and other electronic devices’ notifications to support focused attention on something. And, within that space, are there encouragements to use that quiet time to focus on looking at and thinking about evaluation data and reflecting on it?
- Are there spaces and times for these practices to be shared and done collectively or in small groups?
- If we are not granting ourselves time to do this, what are we spending the time doing and does it add more value than what we can gain from learning?
- Sometimes off-site trips and scheduled days away from an office are helpful by giving people other spaces to reflect and work.
- Can you (will you?) build in — structurally — to scheduled work times and flows committed times to reflect-in-action and ensure that this is done at regular intervals, not periodic ones?
- If our current spaces are insufficient to support reflection, are we prepared to redesign them or even move?
These are starting questions and hard ones to ask, but they can mean the difference between reflection in theory and reflection in practice which is the difference between innovating, adapting and thriving in practice, not just theory or aspiration.
