Aid on the Edge of Chaos

Sean Lowrie writes:

Vicky it has been a great pleasure and a stimulating learning experience to collaborate with you in this experiment.  Let’s do it again sometime!  Meanwhile having read your piece I offer here some thoughts to continue the conversation.

Let’s face it: the day was a significant departure from the norm established in the previous 7 complexity seminars.  We took a calculated risk in not offering expert presentations or in predetermining the discussion questions.  That said the day’s process was based on a sound conceptual and theoretical basis and our combined professional experience – some 50 years.  Our intention was honourable in that we wanted to explore conversation and complexity.  We did our homework in planning an environment that would enable that exploration to occur.  Yet, we had no control over how others would react to this intention before, during and after the event.

On the content

If one sees knowledge as a social construction, a conversation-based workshop can equally be seen as a space for new knowledge to emerge.  Here is a sample of what emerged that day for me:

The river metaphor.  In Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, one cannot change the river, only understand it.  In Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi one cannot teach the river, only learn it.  An example of the application of this metaphor to a complex process from a Canadian blog Connectivism: “Knowledge flow can be likened to a river that meanders through the ecology of an organization. In certain areas, the river pools and in other areas it ebbs. The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends on effective nurturing of flow”.  During the day someone explained how he uses the river metaphor in the context of organisational change: “you can’t stand on the river bank, wave your arms and shout at the river to change – you have to jump in the water and personally engage”.

East and West.  It was amusing to play with the proposition that complexity may be anarchic.  The discussion went like this.  Networks can co-opt people into a dominant discourse, and leaders are invested in the status quo.  Does a complexity approach challenge traditional 20^th Century ideas of leadership?  Along the same lines, is complexity threatening to Western Industrial Orthodoxy?  Would stereotypical Eastern thinking be more consistent with complexity than stereotypical Western thinking?  What would Milton Friedman say?

The group discussed complexity as a mindset, and someone suggested that it is a huge relief to come to this mindset (particularly if you’ve been trying to explain your deep psychological aversion to the Log Frame).  Yet if the experience of the group that day is representative, the mindset seems be a lonely and challenging place to inhabit.  We all seem to struggle with how to convey and apply it.

My understanding of our intent for the day was simply to explore conversation as a way to apply complexity.  I also believe that complexity thinking leads us to seeing the organisation as a network of formal and informal conversations.  If we are interested in change we must explore the role of conversation in organisations.  The workshop was a place to explore, and apply, these ideas.  This approach has been adopted before in the Sphere Project training of trainers programme:  “… Sphere ToT facilitators can facilitate learning about the Humanitarian Charter by creating a learning environment in which participants actually experience these principles and values in action…”.

So it emerged that the morning’s first big question was this: “what constitutes quality dialogue that helps us move forward in complex situations”?  And for me, the sub-text was: “presuming we are able to define quality dialogue, are we able to create it in this workshop”?

In response to the first question during a ‘knowledge café’ process, these points emerged for me:

• Someone felt that Dave Snowden’s ritual dissent method was useful in generating ideas, although it isn’t the same as having a conversation with someone
• Michael Edward’s idea of critical friendship as described in Future Positive might be a useful framework for quality dialogue: “the loving but forceful encounters between equals who journey together…”  Critical friends are able to be honest without jeopardizing the relationship.
• In describing what ‘quality dialogue’ was like, the following words arose: open, explorative, questioning, flexible, uncertain and non-linear.  Someone wondered if the outcome of a quality dialogue would be curiosity or inspiration.  Someone else wondered if quality dialogue would balance both safety and danger.
• In organisations, there are formal and informal processes happening in parallel all the time.  Would an explicit emphasis on conversation help reduce the gap between the formal and informal?  How else can organisational stereotypes be challenged?

On the process

It is one thing to talk about something, and quite another to do it.  The group reflected upon and gave feedback on the process throughout most of the day.  Here is what emerged for me from the day’s discussions about process.

• The café family of conversation-based methods – World Café, Knowledge Café etc. – usually involve some form of group mixing which seems beneficial in promoting deeper understanding about the topic being discussed.  The Café methods begin with a room filled with people who subdivide into small group discussions.  Each small group begins with the same question.  After a period of time the discussions stop and some people remove themselves and disperse to other small groups.  Once everyone is seated, the discussions continue.  There are several beliefs behind this mixing: it increases the density of relationships within a group, it maintains energy and creativity, and it produces convergence towards a single set of questions, ideas or issues.  In this experiment, we conducted three iterations (the groups mixed 3 times), although iterations didn’t lead to convergence.  In other words people didn’t finish the café exercise all with the same issues in mind.  However, the iterations did lead to a greater depth of awareness about the nuances of the issue being discussed, and a greater depth of understanding.

• The size of small groups is important.  They need to be small enough so the participants can establish safety amongst themselves.  In this event, once safety was established, small group conversations helped individuals clarify the questions in their own mind, as well as generate new knowledge.  Perhaps the main results of the small group conversations were new questions.  How did these new questions emerge?  The conversations seemed to start with the tangible and pragmatic, and then moved to the theoretical and philosophical.  At the same time, the small group conversations seemed to move from questions to discussion and resolution, then back to questions.  This oscillation between divergence and convergence, uncertainty and certainty seemed to be important.  To what extent is divergence and uncertainty necessary for new knowledge, creativity and innovation to emerge?

• There was quite a bit of emotion around ‘productivity’.  Some in the room felt that a conversation’s productivity depends on the overall task, and conversation must be practice-focussed.  This point arose because the workshop wasn’t actually focussed on a specific problem, and this made some people uncomfortable.

• There were varying degrees of comfort with the fact that the day was emergent.  This comfort was related to personality – some people like ambiguity, and others prefer certainty.  There was an intriguing gender aspect to this as well.   More men in the room were uncomfortable than women.

• What if the conversation was the work?  What if sense-making, as described in Karl Weick’s innovative organisational research, required placing oneself consciously in a position of uncertainty and discomfort?  Someone suggested the following metaphor to represent the challenge of placing oneself in a position of uncertainty.  Consider beliefs to be a slippery plateau.  Dotted around the plateau are basins of certainty, and in between these basins are plains of uncertainty.  Most people slide unconsciously around on the uncertain plains, seeking to settle, and become stuck, comfortably into a basin.  It takes work and effort to stay on a plain.

• Some would prefer to at least define uncertainty.  Is uncertainty about closure, or structure?  Is focus and closure to a conversation necessary?  How much structure is necessary?  Where does one choose to set boundaries?

• If international development is about change, and change requires a shift in boundaries, and that causes us to be uncomfortable, then how do we recognise when we are ‘appropriately uncomfortable’?  Boundaries and structures are different to different people.  How would you label your boundaries and how would you describe them?

• To me, therefore, much of the discussion about process that day was about emotions.  What does it feel like to work on the edge of chaos?  To what extent does fear inhibit our application of complexity thinking to international development?   How comfortable are we with uncertainty?   How can we communicate the value of working with uncertainty?  How can we reward people for working with uncertainty?

• One cannot talk about complexity and human social development without talking about how the brain works.  We are natural and automatic pattern recognisers.  We deliberately ignore information that lies outside our patterns, habits, regularities, mutual implications, and tensions.

 

What would I do differently the next time?

I would do two things differently the next time.  First, I would allocate more time at the beginning of the day to ensure a common understanding about the process, and a common agreement to work with uncertainty.  Second, I think it would be more productive and safe if the day would be more explicit about creative destruction.  In other words, we should try to be aware of those oscillations of convergence and divergence.

Some of my influences on this day

Patricia Shaw’s book is an inspiring read, although it took several years before I would have the opportunity to test her ideas.

The World Café people are the great popularisers of conversation, although prescriptive.  They emphasise extracting information and convergence, which may be useful in some contexts, but is counter-productive in others.

Theodore Zeldin is most human in his perspective that conversation is a meeting of minds that results in transformation.  “Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards”.  “The type of conversation I’m interested in is one in which you start with a willingness to emerge a slightly different person”

David Weinberger is one of the authors of this ten-year old collection of essays about the impact of social media on Corporate America.  “… if you think about the aim of Knowledge Management as enabling better conversations … you end up focussing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation”.

David Gurteen argues that knowledge sharing emerges from conversation-based events.  Having attended one of his ‘knowledge café’ events, I think he believes that tacit knowledge sharing is more important than explicit codification, and it best occurs when events are as loosely structured as possible.

Vicky Cosstick writes:

I am writing this for a blog as a means of reflecting and reporting on the day held on Thursday 29 October at the Holloway Road Resource Centre on Conversation & Complexity.  A number of people who were not able to attend requested a report of the day;  we are inviting everyone to continue the conversation via this blog. This blog is based on a much longer personal reflection I wrote after the event; it will also be followed by a reflection from Sean Lowrie, who co-facilitated the day.

Assumption No. 1:  Experiments, in order to be useful, need to be followed by an explicit sense-making process.  Writing may play an important role in this sense-making process.

The intentions for the day

The 29 Oct day emerged from a series of conversations that Sean & I had held over the past year or so.  Conversations between ourselves led to a conversation with two people from a large NGO about how conversation might be used as an intervention to facilitate strategy-making and change process.  Both Sean and I had attended several of the series of complexity seminars and read Theodore Zeldin’s little book on conversation, Patricia Shaw’s book “Changing Conversations” as well as other complexity authors – we had also had long-term interest in complexity — our discussions were therefore explicitly rooted in our understanding of complexity theory.

We had said to Ben Ramalingam that we thought there should be a session in the series on conversation.  During the Panos day in May Ben approached Sean, and Sean approached me, to suggest this next day.

The day itself was based on a number of assumptions:

Assumption No 2: One reading of complexity theory will lead us to a heightened interest in both the role and the precise processes of conversation in organisations.  Conversation is seen as a prime mediator of change in organisations.

I wanted to explore the hypothesis that complexity thinking leads us to see the organisation as a network of formal and informal conversations.  If we are interested in change and how change happens in any system (including or even particularly international development), we would want to explore the role and nature of conversation in that system.  And once there is a group in a room for a day, I would say that this is a system itself, subject to change processes, and engaging in a conversation.

The day was also seen as an experiment:  in leading a workshop on conversation, and, for Sean and myself, in working together.

Assumption No. 3:  one consequence for practice of a complexity lens is an interest in working with experiments.  If organisations are complex and inherently unpredictable, and if small interventions can have large and unintended effects, then we need to be prepared to run small-scale experiments and pay close attention to what is happening.

Sean & I were clear that the day offered a unique opportunity to work in a way which most likely would not have been possible with a paid client.  The day was offered at low cost and as it happened it actually cost us money.  It did sometimes seem as though Ben Ramalingam was acting to some degree as a client, in the sense that he had some expectations about how the day might be led, and we were very conscious that this day was one of a series of meetings on complexity and aid – with perhaps some implicit expectations about content, methodology and process.  Although we sensed some of these expectations and pressures, Sean & I were confident that we were engaged in a valid experiment.

The day entailed, however, some inherent risks:  we are independent consultants and our reputation is important; the day was opening up very new ground for us and could “fail”; we might not be able to actually work together effectively as facilitators on the day; there was also the financial risk – we had to pay for a room, and estimate numbers and catering.  We had no organisational resources and no funding of any kind.

Sean & I had four or five conversations by phone or in person which were explicitly concerned with planning the day.  A further assumption emerged quite early:

Assumption No. 4:  the methodology and process for the day should be coherent with the subject and aims – i.e. to have a day about conversation we would need to work in a way which engaged participants in conversation, and which included reflection on the process as well as the content.

We planned to arrange the room as a double circle of chairs, with Sean at one end and myself at another.  We would write notes on our lap so as to be able to engage with the group in the room.

A plan emerged for the day:

1. Welcome and Sean & I would introduce ourselves & raise some of our assumptions and how we were feeling about the day.
2. Group would introduce themselves and say why they had come.
3. Sean & I would have an unscripted conversation about what we had heard from the group.
4. We would ask the group what questions they had brought with them about complexity, conversation, organisations, change and development.  This would take us up to coffee.
5. Sean would choose a key question and move into an adapted world cafe process.
6. This would take about an hour, in small groups of about 4, with three iterations, managed by Sean.
7. We would debrief the world cafe before lunch – we were interested in “what changed for you during the conversation, and how did it change?”.
8. After lunch we would brainstorm more questions for the purpose of engaging in an adapted open space process, facilitated by Vicky.
9. Debrief
10. Evaluation of the day.

 

What actually happened?

One major development had a great impact on the process for the day.  On the Monday prior to Thu 29 Oct, there were 35 people signed up for the day, including Sean & myself.  By Wednesday evening this had dropped to 24, and on the day 18 actually came.  One  major effect was that the group became small enough to sit in one circle, and the lower numbers increased the possibility or even likelihood that an effective conversation would emerge in the large group.  This to my mind was a significant advantage.

It is also true that the falling numbers could have undermined my confidence about running the day – but long years of experience have ingrained in me one of the principles of open space:  whoever is there is who is meant to be there.

What actually happened in brief is that:

1. We began quite late, waiting for the maximum number of people to arrive.
2. Sean and I did introduce ourselves and invited introductions.
3. Sean and I then did begin a conversation about some of the themes from the introductions.
4. As I anticipated, a large group conversation did begin, which went on for a considerable length of time.  Sean and I did try to intervene, but interestingly, were ignored by the group – a fact which I pointed out with some amusement.
5. I was anxious about where we were going to go next, when one member of the group came up with a question he wanted to explore.  I suggested that we go with this as a question for the adapted world cafe process.  We were late for coffee and I was concerned about giving time to generating a number of questions and then needing to identify one for the world cafe.  It seemed convenient that a question had emerged from the group – perhaps too convenient?
6. We broke for coffee, came back and agreed on the core question [Actually I do not have a note of the question finally agreed on except on the flipchart – but it was something on the lines of:  “what kinds of quality dialogue can help us move forward in complex situations?”]  and split into four groups of 4 for 3 iterations of world cafe.  Sean facilitated the process and I “did a Patricia Shaw” – i.e. I experimented with joining conversations and joining in – although normally as facilitator I would have stayed outside the groups and only participated if there was some specific intervention I thought might be helpful.  (No-one commented during the day on the role I played – to me it felt a little artificial and uncomfortable – it took a while to understand what was going on in the group, and it felt like a wrench to leave a discussion and move on.   I gained only a sense of the disparateness of the discussions going on in the small groups).
7. Because we were late, we stopped for lunch without debriefing.
8. We came back and debriefed on the process – which led into another hour long conversation in the large group.   There was a debate about the usefulness of the discussion, with some expressing frustration (“I’m afraid I’m going to leave here without 3 or 4 clear learning points”) and others stating that they had already gained a lot from the process.
9. By now time was running out – people had a sense that there were questions they had brought with them or which had been raised by the process that were still unaddressed.
10. We generated these questions in the large group.  This felt somewhat uncomfortable and I asked the group how this exercise had felt to them.  One or two said they would like to have had some time to reflect before sharing questions.  After a bit there was frustration expressed that we were exploring process rather than getting into interesting questions.  We sorted the questions into two groups, broke for tea and then spent half an hour in the small groups before coming together for final evaluation.
11. There were a few minutes of final evaluation before ending the day.

Without going into detailed reflection at this point about the day, these are some of the questions that have emerged for me in reflecting on the day:

• What kind of conversation leads to transformation, creativity or innovation?  What are the conditions for such conversation, and how is it to be facilitated?  What inhibits such conversation from taking place?  What is the precise dynamic of a conversation in which individuals or groups discover new solutions or change attitude, belief or point of view?
• What does “edge of chaos” feel like?  Can we know that we are in it?   What in us as individuals, in groups or teams or in the organisation inhibits “edge of chaos” conditions?
• What are the inhibiting factors in conversation?  How does resistance to change or innovation express itself through conversation?
• One lesson of the day is that there are a number of people who do not see a relationship between complexity thinking and group process.  Can we understand complexity without being willing to explore it from the inside?
• What are the politics of conversation, and how do they mirror or challenge the politics of the context in which the conversation is taking place?  How is power expressed in conversation?  Is there an ideology of process?
• What is the difference between a process which moves into not-knowing, and not knowing what we are doing?  If we don’t know what’s happening, does it mean that nothing is happening?
• What is the role of body language and non-verbal communication in conversation?  What are the roles of laughter and silence?  What are the non-verbal ways of participating in conversation?  Who takes responsibility for moving the conversation on?  If we were to tape a conversation, how much of this is missed?
• If innovative conversation is non-linear, if it includes patterns of convergence and divergence, what is required of the participant and the facilitator?
• How do we deal with the expression of views different to our own?  Are we tempted to correct or lecture the other person?  What effect does this have on the conversation?
• What role do gender, race, expertise and other forms of rank play in a conversation?
• Is there a gender difference in people’s preference for or tolerance of different types of conversation?  If so, what are the implications for organisational life?
• The logframe can be seen as a tooth fairy – an illogical or mythical defence against anxiety.  Few people believe  that the logframe “really works”, any more than they believe in the tooth fairy.  How many other such defences against anxiety exist in an organisation?  How do we react when we experience anxiety in a group, a conversation or organisational setting?  How explicit can we be with ourselves and others about the anxiety we feel in our day to day work and the ways we resolve or defend ourselves against it?

• Is there permission to engage in experimental ways of working in an organisation?  How are we to learn what the implications are of complexity for organisations and development if we cannot engage in innovative experiment?  How much time, room and space is required for sense-making?  What kinds of process are required for sense-making?
• What are the many ways in which conversations take place in organisations?  Is there permission to experiment with different types of conversation?
• On the whole, people expect the facilitator to be in control, and if that control is released, some people will experience an unacceptable level of discomfort.  If we see complexity as a way of working, what difference does this make to the way we see or experience the role of the facilitator?

• What is the appropriate balance between attention to process and attention to content?
• How much do people need to “know” about complexity to engage usefully in a discussion?  Is the current series on complexity in aid and development offering enough background information and reading to help people learn more about different approaches to complexity thinking?

What might we have done differently?

I would like to have started with the open space methodology, coming directly out of the questions people had brought with them on the day, and then used world cafe in the afternoon, having identified a single question.

I think we could have debriefed on content first and process second (although I often do it the other way around in my own practice).

I would be confident to repeat such a day – and think if we were to do the day a second time, we would naturally be much clearer and more confident about what we were doing – and this would give the group more security and sense of structure.  But what would we lose by making the group more comfortable for participants?