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Archive for the ‘Facilitation’ Category

Why Managers Haven’t Embraced Complexity

Posted in Economics, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Research, Strategy, Technology on May 10, 2013 | 3 Comments »

This is a cross-post from the HBR written by Richard Straub, and is one of a series of perspectives that will be published leading up to the fifth annual Global Drucker Forum in November 2013 on the theme of Managing Complexity.

Nobody would deny that the world has become more complex during the past decades. With digitization, the interconnectivity between people and things has jumped by leaps and bounds. Dense networks now define the technical, social, and economic landscape.

I remember well when the idea of applying complexity science to management was first being eagerly discussed in the 1990s. By then, for example, scholars at the University of St. Gallen had developed a management model based on systems thinking. Popular literature propagated the ideas of complexity theory — in particular, the notion of the “butterfly effect” by which a small event in a remote part of the world (like the flap of a butterfly’s wings) could trigger a chain of events that would add up to a disruptive change in the larger system (such as a hurricane). Managers’ eyes were opened to the reality that organizations are not just complicated but complex.

Why did this interest and work in complexity not lead to major changes in management practices? There are, I think, a few major reasons that it didn’t — and that also suggest that the overdue change might now finally take place.

Complexity wasn’t a convenient reality given managers’ desire for control.
The promise of applying complexity science to business has undoubtedly been held up by managers’ reluctance to see the world as it is. Where complexity exists, managers have always created models and mechanisms that wish it away. It is much easier to make decisions with fewer variables and a straightforward understanding of cause-and-effect. Here, the shareholder value philosophy, which determines so much of how our corporations operate these days, is the perfect example. Placing a rigid priority on maximizing shareholder returns makes things clear for decision-makers and relieves them of considering difficult tradeoffs. Of course we know that constantly dialing down expenses and investments to boost short-term margins inevitably damages the long-term health of the company. It takes a complexity approach to keep competing values and priorities and the effects of decisions on all of them in view — and not just for management, but equally for investors, analysts, and regulators.

Technology was not yet powerful enough to capture much complexity.
When systems thinkers and theorists turned their attention to economies and organizations in the 1980s and 90s, the tools simply did not exist to model their workings at a level that would yield practical insight. Now, the exponential increase in computing power and the progress in mathematics and statistics have propelled us into a new era. With the ability to draw on data bases and map networks at scales that were unthinkable before, we can hope to understand communication flows through large organizations, and the impact of disturbances and managerial interventions on these flows.

The prospect of non-human decision-making is unnerving.
More recently, with the surge of computer processing power, another nagging concern has formed in some people’s minds. Does the fact that massive computing power is required for systems-level comprehension mean that the interpretation of information, sense-making, and learning will become “extra-human” activities? Will the computer take over the role of the knowledge worker? Will we soon reach a tipping point when human brainpower is obsolete? Some technophiles (many of them inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s ideas) respond to questions like this with a resounding yes. Yet for most of us it is a disturbing thought, because we have seen so many of the models designed to predict the future state of complex systems (from economies to climates) fall short of accuracy, to say the least.

The eager futurists talking about machines taking over evaluation of situations and decision-making have set back their own cause, as others see them ignoring an essential fact: sense-making is always informed by values. The idea that we might look for value judgments from algorithms is just badly flawed. But fortunately, the recognition is growing that, while computers can provide us with enormous extensions of our storage and processing capacity, they must and will remain only inputs to human brains, where the ultimate evaluation and deliberation must continue to take place. Think of the brain as our own “complexity processor” and itself our most complex organ: It helps us to address complex issues and yet come up with seemingly simple solutions. Those are made possible when we unconsciously see through the myriad of information elements that are stored in our brain as raw material to build meaningful patterns, or the famous “big picture” that humans can develop best.

The recognition of complexity is at its core a view of the world that that makes us more humble and more open. It is the awareness that too often our interventions will not achieve what we wanted and we will be shocked by unintended consequences. (The fact that, following the creation of the Cap-and-Trade Carbon Emission Scheme as a clever new artificial market, more coal is being burned in Europe than before is a mind-boggling example.) At the same time, it is the acknowledgement that simplistic “can do” thinking and linear approaches in organizations and markets, which are by definition complex, won’t be sufficient. And it is the prod to us to better understand why.

There has been no watershed event to make it true that managers will apply complexity science to their work today, whereas they could not, or would not, yesterday. Rather, there has been a gradual change in mindset, pushed along by the increasingly evident damage of narrow, simplistic thinking. The toolkit that allows us to understand the dynamics of large systems has continued to evolve. And the reassuring truth has been reasserted that, on top of the logic of algorithms, human values and judgment are essential.

Managers, I think, should now get ready to face the full complexity of their organizations and economic environments and, if not control them, learn how to intervene with deliberate, positive effect. Embracing complexity will not make their jobs easier, but it is a recognition of reality, and an idea whose time has come.

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The Aid Explorer: Mapping the Hyperspace of International Aid

Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Research, Self organisation on May 2, 2013 | 1 Comment »

The team behind the Atlas of Economic Complexity (see my post on this here) have come up with a fascinating network-based approach for analysing the global aid system.

As they put it:

International development is a complex global goal that faces massive coordination barriers. The difference in income between rich and poor has expanded over the years from a four to one factor to a hundred to one. Where there once were only a handful of development agencies, thousands have now emerged. The system that connects donor agencies, recipient countries and development challenges is extremely complex and should not be managed with a top-down approach… The Aid Explorer was developed as a tool to facilitate better aid coordination. The Aid Explorer enables users to understand what issues face which countries and which aid organizations are aligned to address these issues.

Some specific pointers:

  • The Aid Explorer’s Profile pages enables us to see which issues face which countries and which organisations are best aligned to address them
  • The Network maps can be used to explore how issues, countries, and organizations relate to each other
  • The Rankings presents the findings and the best alignments of countries, issues and organizations

The process of developing the dataset, and how to use it, is described in more detail in the accompanying paper “The Structure and Dynamics of International Development Assistance“, published earlier this year in the Journal of Globalization and Development.

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Whose Paradigm Counts? Guest Post 2 of 2 By Robert Chambers

Posted in Accountability, Evolution, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy, Technology on February 15, 2011 | 10 Comments »

Expanding Paradigms

In my first post in this two part guest series, I presented an account of the contrast between ‘things’ and ‘people’ as it was framed in my 1997 book Whose Reality Counts? and as many people in the development sector still perceive it. As numerous responses – both here and on other fora – have noted, things aren’t as simple as all that.

The binary contrasts of things and people as I saw them back in have some very obvious limitations. In comparing the two columns in the table in my earlier post, there can be the temptation of the Animal Farm syndrome: ‘four legs good, two legs bad’.

Reductionism, on the things side, is for instance often painted as bad, and inclusive systems as good. However, this fundamentally depends on context and purpose. There are examples where the opposite holds true. There are also many useful cross-overs between the paradigms, applying things approaches to people, and vice versa. The binary is blinkered and misses much. It lacks subtlety and nuance. And there are many things that do not fit.  It disguises as much as it reveals.

And yet on so many levels it is appealing precisely because of these shortcomings. It is liable to set up a ‘them and us’. It is liable to place responsibility for failures on the ‘other’. Binary oppositions can harm when they polarise the way we see the world and how we determine what is important.

The emergence and evolution of complexity science – and its multifarious insights and analogies – span the physical world, digital computer technology, biology, ecology, economics and social domains. Besides edge of chaos (the idea which gives its name to this blog) other ideas and ways of thinking and seeing things from complexity science take us into a new realm. These ideas collectively make it easier to appreciate, legitimate and accommodate uncertainty and unpredictability – regardless of whether we are talking about things or people.

Because it finds patterns in many diverse phenomena, complexity science provides us with a means by which to read across and change our understanding of these different paradigms. Nobel laureates have argued that complexity thinking presents us with a new opportunity to bridge the divide between physical and social sciences – the world of things and the world of people. I suspect they might be right.

As a 2008 ODI working paper on complexity sciences (Ramalingam et al, 2008), notes:

scientists and thinkers [have been faced] with opposing paradigms since classical times right up to the present day, e.g. the contrast between the hard rock of Aristotle and the swirling mysticism of Plato, echoed in the differences between the approach of neoclassical economics compared with that of cultural anthropology.”

That paper concludes that complexity theory provides a means of ‘steering a middle ground’ between such polarities.

Among the more striking and relevant of the concepts are non-linearity, adaptive agents, co-evolution, and sensitivity to small differences in starting conditions. The paper cited above is a comprehensive introduction to many of these ideas. These concepts have illuminated and validated the creativity, diversity and unpredictability of the  paradigm of people and processes in combination with things. The world is not just things, nor is it just people. The world is not just physical, biological, social, behavioural, psychological, cognitive – it is all of these at the same time.

Complexity science has thus opened up new ways of seeing and understanding phenomena from an interdisciplinary perspective. It offers a lens to re-think the nature, utility and relevance of our work, wherever on the scientific spectrum we sit.

Bridging Paradigms

Revisiting the paradigms of things and people which I set out in the earlier post, we can now see that our conceptualisation needs to be adapted and allowed to evolve. There are new worlds between the certainties of the ‘things’ paradigm and the ambiguities of the ‘people’ paradigm. In fact, there is some astonishing common ground.

For example, characteristics of new technologies, deriving from the ‘things’ paradigm, are now to be found on the people side. Modern social media and communications technologies differ from the more fixed and more mechanical technologies of the past. Separately, new movements have emerged in participatory methodologies, for example, towards the use of numbers and measurement, leading to quantification of experiences that are normally considered qualitative, including empowerment and social change. Poor people can correct, validate and themselves generate statistics, and these can empower them in their relations with organisations and government. They can bring a rigour to evaluations that is all their own, if we or they are able and willing to facilitate good participatory processes and to be open to the outcomes.

Such paradigm-bridging approaches have a growing legitimacy in scientific endeavours, and need to be brought into the mainstream of development thinking. Participation underlies both the examples above, and this – to my mind – is no coincidence. Participatory methods are increasingly being seen as key to effectively navigate so-called wicked problems and as such play a central role in achieving such paradigmatic win-wins. But participation too needs to evolve in order to accommodate this dynamic new world. The methods we have long facilitated with poor people need to be brought into organisations to improve the quality of dialogue and collective problem solving. Facilitators and facilitation open up a win-win future. And the methods also need to adapt and transform to keep up with, and maximise the benefits of, new technologies.

Importantly, complexity can also contribute to reformulating paradigms themselves – giving us a different way of understanding what a paradigm is. From a complexity perspective, each paradigm is an interconnected and interdependent pattern that coheres through mutually reinforcing elements.

In the light of these reflections – the things versus people paradigms need to be redefined, expanded and re-presented.

Re-thinking paradigms

Today, then, we can see two broad paradigms at work in international development. On the one side are Neo-Newtonian practices – those processes, procedures, roles and behaviour which emphasise standardisation, routines and regularities in response to or assuming predictabilities. On the other side, we can see what I call adaptive pluralism, which demands creativity, invention, improvisation and originality in adapting to and exploiting change.

How these paradigms are presented also needs to shift in the light of understanding of complexity.  The diagrams below build on the definition of paradigms I set out in my first post. They suggest some of the ways in which  different elements of each paradigm are mutually reinforcing.

Elements in a Paradigm of Neo-Newtonian Practice

alt

Elements in a Paradigm of Adaptive Pluralism

alt

A whole book could be written in elaboration, justification and criticism of these representations. The details and contrasts are, to mix metaphors, flying kites, going out on a limb, and provoking bulls with red rags.

Readers can judge whether the kites fly, the limb breaks, or any bulls are provoked; and will I hope accept my challenge and invitation to do better. Through a plurality of ideas we may get closer to what will make sense of our rapidly changing world.

There are two points to make now. First, it is not an either-or. These ways of thinking about the world need to co-exist in a much healthier manner than they do currently. Rosalind Eyben has written about how the formal, reductionist side of the aid system often overlays the adaptive side of the system, resulting in cognitive dissonance. It must be possible to get a better, more honest, and realistic, balance between the two.

Second, and to build on this, establishing a better balance needs to be grounded in the challenges we face right now, otherwise it is likely to be abstract and meaningless. Let me ask for suggestions of approaches, things we know that can be done better, where we might attempt paradigmatic win-wins. Maybe it is about furthering the results agenda through participation and local ownership. Perhaps it is developing more socially grounded alternatives to the logical framework. Maybe it is about how large databases and social networks can be developed in tandem in order to enhance aid transparency. Perhaps it is about how uncertainty and context can be better addressed within planning frameworks of aid bureaucracies. In the wider world, areas come to mind where bridging the paradigms may be increasingly essential: climate change, urbanisation, HIV-AIDS, and the link between farming and animal health are some immediate thoughts. I am sure you will have your own examples.

However, here my own prejudices have to come to the fore. There is little doubt in my mind that the neo-Newtonian paradigm has become more and more dominant in development action, if not development thinking. It exerts a powerful influence – for better or for worse – on the way much of the system works. For balance, we need a countervailing pull. For the paradigmatic win-wins which I touched upon earlier to be recognised and acted upon, we need to understand better how adaptive pluralism can add value to development efforts, and how it can be accorded the status it deserves.

In general terms, we must each start by looking to our own paradigms and see what scope there is for challenging how we personally think about, approach and deal with a given problem. Do we feel our own paradigmatic preferences imposing themselves onto a situation before we have even fully understood it? Do we react strongly to a certain way in which development problems are framed and communicated? Is there a ‘them’ in our own organisation to whom we should be speaking but don’t because ‘they don’t see things the way we do?’ If we can answer yes to any of these things, we each have a good place to start.

Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed this two part series as much as I enjoyed writing it and engaging with Ben in discussions around it (the extent of which really make us co-constructors and co-authors). I hope that at the very least, it will have triggered thoughts and provoked disagreements. I would appreciate reactions and reflections – not least on whether the concept of these paradigms works, whether their treatment makes sense to others, and suggestions for refinements or other articulations.

Let me conclude with a point which relates directly to the readers of this and other blogs. Email, internet, search engines like Google, mobile phones, Web 2.0, blogging, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter….these have already created a culture and practice of continuous adopting, de-adopting, adapting, learning and changing - demanding alertness, nimbleness and creativity. It has even led to adapting and revising this Guest Post series on the fly.

In this emergent aid blogosphere, we as people are all engaged in adaptive pluralism, using physical technologies that are built on neo-Newtonian principles. As such we are reminded daily that the world is things and people, all at the same time.

Let me hope that we in the development community can use the potential of this new space to explore new possibilities, to challenge ourselves and to push beyond our existing mindsets and attitudes, and to do so in ways which create more paradigmatic win-wins.

Our guiding philosophy can be a simple one – in words of the migrant worker, social philosopher and writer Eric Hoffer (pers. comm. Ruth Meinzen-Dick 2004):

In times of change, learners will inherit the earth, while the learned will find themselves well-equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

And one more, from Tom Stoppard:

It is the very best time to be alive, when almost everything you believed is wrong.

I am grateful to Ben Ramalingam for the idea of this blog, for co-constructing it, and for contributions to the adaptive revisions of an earlier draft.

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Whose Paradigm Counts? Guest Post 1 of 2 By Robert Chambers

Posted in Accountability, Evolution, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Public Policy, Self organisation on February 10, 2011 | 12 Comments »

Last year I wrote a paper called Paradigms, Poverty and Adaptive Pluralism. In it I explored how technological advances and complexity sciences were together helping to reframe a longstanding divide between two opposing paradigms in international development.

Because of the relevance of this to current debates on complexity and aid, I welcome this opportunity to share these ideas here. I warmly invite feedback from the across the aid blogosphere, which (as I explain in my next post) I see as a new and vitally important feature of the international development ‘system’.

Exploring Paradigms

‘Paradigms’ is one of the most over and mis-used terms in the social or physical sciences. This is arguably because it is so potentially useful. For Thomas Kuhn, who did so much to bring the term to popular attention, a paradigm was a strong network of commitments – conceptual, theoretical, instrumental and methodological. Of course, he was writing about the physical sciences. In comparison, I define a paradigm as a coherent and mutually supporting pattern of:

- concepts and ontological assumptions;
- values and principles;
- methods, procedures and processes;
- roles and behaviours;
- relationships; and
- mindsets, orientations and predispositions.

I find the above useful because it explicitly includes social, values-based and personal dimensions of paradigms – all things which matter a great deal to social scientists.

In my 1997 book Whose Reality Counts I presented two alternative paradigms - as I then understood them – which contrasted things with people, as shown in the table below.

The ‘things–people’ distinction is useful for identifying and understanding relationships between many phenomena and for diagnosing problems. It points up the contrasts between disciplinary and professional orientations: the things paradigm is more associated with engineering and economics, the people paradigm more with anthropology and sociology. And the contrasts in the two  columns indicate differences which are evident in much practice. At the same time, there are many cross-overs and cross-applications.

One key difference is that the things paradigm works in contexts (including human contexts) in which inputs and receiving environments are relatively uniform and controlled, and there is clear causality leading to desired outcomes.

Because of this narrow applicability, many of the errors and failures of development policy and practice have stemmed from the dominance of the things paradigm. This dominance goes back at least to the Marshall Plan, to the creation of the International  Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to development projects in the 1950s  and 1960s devoted to infrastructure such as harbours, railways, roads,  communications, dams and irrigation projects, and to the idea that Third World  countries had to catch up with capital investment in ‘infant industries’. These  all gave primacy to things over people.

Engineers and economists were in charge. It was they who set norms and procedures. For the infrastructure projects of the time, these largely made sense. But the things paradigm was then embedded in the values, culture, hierarchies and staffing of the World Bank and of bilateral and other organisations.

Non-economist social scientists were few, of low status, and regarded at best as useful to call in to deal with any ‘people problem’ in implementation once the planning had been done. So top-down, standardised approaches and methods came to be imposed on diverse, uncontrollable and unpredictable people and conditions, often with bad results.

There followed a long and continuing struggle for a better balance that put people first, with their participation from the start and throughout in projects and programmes. There were calls for a new professionalism to shift the balance, effectively from things more towards people. There was progress. For many reasons the balance did indeed shift.

Some attempts to introduce top down routinized procedures were abandoned. Participation and empowerment became part of the rhetoric even if less often of the reality of development. Local people were much less regarded as a residual. People living in poverty, women, children, those who were vulnerable, marginalised and socially subordinate, were given more priority. Though there remained far to go, their knowledge, aspirations, capabilities and priorities were better recognised and brought more into development processes. Especially in the 1990s, the centre of gravity of the balance between things and people began to shift towards people.

But the 2000s brought reversals. ‘Things’-related procedures were increasingly imposed on processes and people. In much development practice, problems were aggravated by the way linear logic, assumptions of predictability, objectively verifiable indicators, impact assessments, logframes and results-based management were more and more required by donors and lenders. More and more the assumption took hold that ‘we know what to do’ and all development required was more money. Good practice and performance, so often dependent on intangible personal and inter-personal unmeasurables like commitment, honesty, energy and trust, were undermined and sapped by the spreading culture in much development of targets, indicators and measurement, and the implicit and even explicit orientation of ‘If it can’t be measured, it won’t happen’.

‘Rigorous’ impact assessment was increasingly demanded. The so-called gold standard for this became randomised control trials (RCTs). These can make sense for medical research where there are many highly standardised units (people and their bodies) and inputs (immunisations, medicines, treatments) but misfit the realities of the complexity of social and much other change, with their uncontrolled conditions, multiple treatments, multiple and indeterminate causation, and unpredictable emergence .

In such contexts, RCTs are liable to postpone and limit learning, and to be costly, slow and inconclusive. Another contested manifestation of this control orientation has been the logframe. Thought by many in the late 1990s to fit realities and programme and project needs so badly and to have so many defects that it would die a natural death, the logframe has to the contrary flourished and spread to become a methodological monoculture in donor requirements.

So in the name of rigour and accountability what fits and works better in the controllable, predictable, standardised and measurable conditions of the things and procedures paradigm has been increasingly applied to the uncontrollable, unpredictable, diverse and less measurable paradigm of people and processes.

The misfit is little perceived by those furthest from field realities and with most power. But then all power deceives. Aid recipients do not tell donors what they experience. They think about future funding. Because funds and power are involved, these tightening and constraining shifts pass largely unremarked and unchallenged.

And what can be called ‘things procedures’ like the logframe are convenient for understaffed donors: they transfer transaction costs and any blame to those whom they fund. Recipients of aid funds are like frogs in the proverbial slowly heating pot and they adapt; but more than the frogs, they increasingly feel the pain. They do less and do it less well. They would like to jump out but fear for their survival if they did.

In my next post, subtitled Expanding Paradigms, I examine the limitations of this simple binary opposition of things and people. Shifts in technology and advances in the complexity sciences are starting to transform these paradigms, helping bring nuance to and even transcend these longstanding divides.

In the meantime, I do welcome readers to share your thoughts and ideas on the above.

Robert Chambers 10/02/2011 Institute of Development Studies, Sussex

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A Q&A on Positive Deviance, Innovation and Complexity

Posted in Evaluation, Evolution, Facilitation, Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Resilience, Self organisation, Strategy on February 8, 2011 | 15 Comments »

Positive deviance (PD) is a fascinating approach, a decade and a half old, and the focus of growing interest in health, education and numerous other sectors in domestic public policy. Interestingly, given PD saw first widespread application in an aid programme, it is still less well known than it should be across the international community.

This post compiles information from a variety of sources into Q&A form to explore the ideas and assumptions of positive deviance. Rather randomly, it is posted on the same day as another PD-related post, by Duncan Green.

What is Positive Deviance?

According to Richard Pascale, co-author of The Power of Positive Deviance:

It’s an oxymoronic term, in a way, but it’s a very simple observation that in many situations—both in companies and in societies—there are problems that seem absolutely intractable,  where you tried everything and you can’t get anything to work, and you just end up accepting things by saying, “that’s just the way it is.” Yet in almost every one of those situations there usually are a few people with the same resources as everyone else, who, against all odds, are succeeding when everyone else is not. So the simple idea is to look at those people who are deviant in a positive direction, and who are prevailing when the conventional wisdom says you can’t.

Where did Positive Deviance come from?

From the PD website:

In 1991, the Jerry and Monica Sternin faced what seemed like an insurmountable challenge in Vietnam. As new Director of Save the Children in Vietnam, Jerry was asked by government officials to create an effective, large-scale program to combat child malnutrition and to show results within six months. More than 65 percent of all children living in Vietnamese villages were malnourished at the time. The Vietnamese government realized that the results achieved by traditional supplemental feeding programs were rarely maintained after the programs ended. The Sternins were mandated by the government to come up with an approach that would enable the community to improve and sustain their young children’s health status…and quickly!

Building on Marian Zeitlin’s ideas of positive deviance, working with four communities and a population of 2,000 children under the age of three, the Sternins invited the community to identify poor families who had managed to avoid malnutrition despite all odds, facing the same challenges and obstacles as their neighbors and without access to any special resources. These families were the positive deviants. They were “positive” because they were doing things right, and “deviants” because they engaged in behaviors that most others did not. The Sternins and the community discovered together that caregivers in the PD families collected tiny shrimps and crabs from paddy fields, and added those, along with sweet potato greens, to their children’s meals. These foods were accessible to everyone, but most community members believed they were inappropriate for young children. The PD families were also feeding their children three to four times a day, rather than twice a day, which was customary.

The communities developed an activity which enabled all of the families with malnourished children to rehabilitate their children and to learn how to sustain their children at home on their own, by inviting them to practice the demonstrably successful but uncommon behaviors which they had discovered in their communities. The pilot project resulted in the sustained rehabilitation of several hundred malnourished children and the promotion of social change in their communities. (PD website)

So it’s basically a way of identifying best practices? Great, just what we need!

Steady on there, not so fast.

Of course the initial reaction of any hierarchical organization is, “this is a best practice, let’s do it everywhere.” The strong counsel of both the villagers and Jerry and Monique Sternin was, “Absolutely not. Every community has to be curious about the question. They have to accept the invitation, if you will, to do something about a problem they regard as really essential. They’ve got to be at the front end to figure out what’s going on, what’s working.

Then they’ve got to find the other positive deviants and learn what they’re doing. Then they have to figure out to disperse this information within their community. But if you go out and say to people in another village, ‘Gather and eat shrimps, crabs, and greens,’ they’re going to say something like, ‘You know, we’re different. Those guys eat weird things.’ You’ve got to get the community to own it.”

So what differentiates this from best practices in most applications is that there is always this invitation, an authentic invitation, that has to be accepted by the target group. (Richard Pascale in interview)

So what are the principles behind Positive Deviance?

It’s pretty simple:

…The standard model… is this hierarchical principle of experts and people in authority having the answers to our problems. That notion seems to be baked into the human psyche. It’s just generally true throughout the world. You always begin, and not wrongly, with looking for a technical solution. So [vaccines are] a great answer, and you don’t really need a lot of community mobilization if you’ve come up with a silver bullet and can prove that it works—that’s not a particularly hard sell.

But really hard problems—what we call adaptive problems—are imbedded in a  complex social system. They require behavioral change, and they’re rife with unintended consequences. These kinds of problems, like the ones that we’re facing all around the world: developed societies with governments that can no longer afford the social safety net, the healthcare problems in the United States, and any number of issues like that, are not just technical problems. They’re really adaptive problems.

You try the technical solutions. For reasons that are imbedded in the complex social system and behavior, they don’t work. When you impose them in a top-down fashion, you don’t get closer to anticipating all the unintended consequences. So they don’t work.

More philosophically, this is a quote from the PD website, from Lao Tzu
Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people all remark
We have done it ourselves.”
~Lao-Tzu Tao Te Ching

That all sounds very good. But what impact has it actually had on the ground?

Here’s the great bit. The successful application of the PD approach has been documented in more than 41 countries in nutrition and a variety of other sectors from public health to education to business. The following is an illustrative sample of PD-informed program impacts over the 15 years:

  • Sustained 65 to 80% reduction in childhood malnutrition in Vietnamese communities, reaching a population of 2.2 million people.
  • Significant reduction in childhood malnutrition in communities in over 40 countries around the world.
  • Reduction in neo-natal mortality & morbidity in Pashtun communities in Pakistan and minority communities in Vietnam with near universal adoption of protective behaviors and social change.
  • Estimated  50% increase in primary school student retention in 10 participating schools in Missiones, Argentina.
  • Documented reduction in girl trafficking in impoverished communities in East Java, Indonesia.
  • Thousands of documented female circumcisions averted in Egypt and the formation of 12 “FGM free” communities.
  • In the Spring of 2005 Merck Mexico began a project to address the issue that only 13 out of 21 districts at Merck Mexico had a sales coverage of 100% or greater. Within  8 months  all districts (100%) were covering their sales target.

Wow. So how exactly does PD relate to traditional approaches to innovation?

According to the classic diffusion-based approach, innovation is based on the following principles:

  • it comes from the ‘outside’
  • it is pushed and promoted by a change agency anf through expert and  knowledgeable change agents
  • these agents use persuasive communication strategies to plug existing knowledge-attitude -practice (KAP)
    gaps among the client / user audience
  • they harnessing the influence of charismatic opinion-leaders, who serve as visible  role models of adoption for the non-adopters.

PD turns this model on its head. As one account puts it:

We are not suggesting the PD approach substitute for the classical diffusion of innovations paradigm. Rather, we argue that the PD approach provides additional options. We believe that often the wisdom to solve intractable social problems lies within the community. Diffusion in the PD approach is an “inside-out” process, in contrast to the classical dominant framework of “outside-in” diffusion.

As Pascale and Sternin put in a 2005 HBR article:

When identification of a superior method is imposed, not self-discovered, cries of “We’re not them” or “It just won’t work here” predictably limit acceptance. By contrast, a design that allows a community to learn from its own hidden wisdom is, among other things, respectful. Innovator and adopter share the same DNA. Community members invest sweat, and, in the process, they become partners to change.

Where has it been applied so far?

Hundreds of places. Here is a list of applications by organisation. Don’t be surprised if you see your own organisation on the list.

Can PD be applied to every problem?

Of course not. When there are proven remedies to technical problems—the Salk vaccine to polio, supply chain management practices, hardware and software solutions—companies can use them to work harder, faster, or smarter. And problems that rely on brainpower but that don’t require major behavioural adjustments are unsuitable for the positive deviance approach.

The method works best when behavioral and attitudinal changes are called for—that is when there is no apparent off-the-shelf remedy and successful coping strategies remain isolated and concealed. In such cases, change from within, discovered, celebrated, and implemented by the people who need to do the work. People are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting.

Sounds a bit familiar. So what’s the connection to complexity and evolutionary sciences?

The Power of Positive Deviance, the 2010 book, suggests that complexity science is a key part of the rationale for Postive Deviance. Specifically:

the [PD] process excels over most alternatives when addressing problems that (1) are enmeshed in a complex social system, (2) require social and behavioral change, and (3) entail solutions that are rife with unforeseeable or unintended consequences. It provides a fresh alternative when problems are viewed as intractable (i.e., other solutions haven’t worked).

And later on:

PD works like nature works… this isn’t an analogy; it is the way it is… nature tinkers with a different shaped bird beak or a slightly larger brian… natural selection does the rest, favouring variations that improve access to food and reproduction… In nature, this all plays out in evolutionary timescales of centuries or millennia. Emploring identical principles, the PD process achieves change within months or a few years…

How can I find out more?

Check out the September 2010 field guide and the PD website. Also take a look at the excellent book ‘The Power of Positive Deviance‘ – an excerpt is available here.

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Towards the Twig-Frame: Update on Complex Adaptive System Conference in Arusha 31st Sept – 3rd September

Posted in Agriculture, Evaluation, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Meetings, Organisations, Resilience, Self organisation, Strategy on September 20, 2010 | 5 Comments »

Two weeks ago we blogged about a fascinating event taking place in Arusha, convened by World Vision, which aimed to explore how complex adaptive systems thinking can be used to transform approaches to rural development.

Below is a round-up of the event. Special thanks are due to Miriam Booy of World Vision for  both synthesising the material and co-authoring this post, and to all the participants for openly sharing their thoughts and ideas.

The conference ran from Tuesday August 31st-Friday Sept 3rd and attracted 50 participants from 11 different countries including South Africa, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Rwanda, DRC, Tanzania, Kenya, Canada and UK. Participants included World Vision staff, community members, international organizations, academics, the private sector and the government. A major focus was the World Vision Governance-Ecosystem-Livelihoods (GEL) programme, a 3 year program (now coming to a close) that integrated complex adaptive systems as its principle programmatic approach.

The emphasis of the event was reflecting on complex adaptive systems approaches and adaptive management practices, through presentations, group discussions and practical exercises.

To paraphrase one of the presenters, a key shared message was that complex adaptive systems approaches suggest that aid agencies need to reconsider the social problems which they are working to address. Specifically, complexity means that agencies cannot afford to ignore the interconnectedness and interaction between diverse elements of the social systems within which they are working. This in turn challenges linear cause-effect thinking to which many aid agencies are wedded. The widely cited example of bed nets as a solution to malaria was highlighted by another presenter:

…the eradication of malaria is not limited to giving out nets and medicine. It is a result of business interests, economic well-being, civic competence…  To intervene and eradicate this problem, we need to go beyond the technical and understand its roots… our intervention may require us to address complex administrative and political issues of coordination as well as the simple technical issues of providing nets…”

The presentations themselves were rich and detailed – see below for the pdfs (with warm thanks to all the presenters for agreeing to share them more widely)

Just as important as the presentations were the open discussions that followed them in which participants were able to share their own ideas and personal experiences. A major recurring theme of the discussion will be familiar to Aid on the Edge of Chaos readers, namely: how to promote adaptive management in risk-averse communities and rigid organizational structures such as those found in international aid?

Recognizing that complex systems approaches and adaptive management practices require both time and flexibility, there was much discussion around how such a large international organization (like World Vision) with a wealth of existing policies, logframes, donor deadlines and standardised linear approaches might be able to respond to and encourage adaptability and flexibility within ongoing and new programs.

The wonderful phrase ‘twigframe’ was introduced by Anja Oussoren, the Operations Director of Kenya based Ivory Consult, as a metaphor for a programming model that might be more appropriate to development contexts: after all, twigs are more flexible, diverse and ‘multi-directional’ than logs.

Participants worked through different ideas for bringing complex adaptive systems approaches into the mainstream of aid work. A key realisation was that complex adaptive systems is more of a ‘mindset’ and an approach, rather than simply a set of tools to be implemented into programming. The mindset change necessary was beautifully summarised by one participant:

…I realize that there is often a disconnect between what we are actually doing and what we would like to achieve. We are perhaps focusing too much on addressing individual symptoms rather than dealing with root causes of problems – in part because we don’t understand the system or simply don’t acknowledge the complex network of connections…”

One of the conclusions of a session for World Vision staff which followed the conference was that the new ‘Integrated Programming Model’ currently being rolled out by the organization could potentially be augmented and strengthened the use of the ideas of complex systems approaches and adaptive management. In particular, it was seen as vital to involve communities themselves in mapping out the complexity of their lives – this was seen as a powerful opportunity to improve the relevance of programming approaches. However, it was also recognised that even the biggest NGO in the world was unable to completely change the system on its own – other parts of the aid system would also need to be engaged and convinced.

In this light, participants were intrigued by the fact that the Governance-Ecosystem-Livelihoods (GEL) program was actually funded and implemented by two very large, bureaucratic aid organizations that have a heavy reliance on logframes, preset goals, fixed timelines and linear approaches. But as one of the conference hosts put it:

…GEL was funded on the basis of broad goals that the project set out to accomplish, allowing the communities to define the specific activities to be carried out based on their own systems analyses. This does give hope that different projects reflecting the CAS approach can emerge from within ‘the formal system…”

Knowledge and learning efforts were also seen as a potentially useful entry point for complexity-oriented approaches. As another participant put it:

…we do need complex adaptive systems in research, capacity-building, and community development, as opposed to the linear, technical approaches, that fail because they fail to address other variables key to the problem as well…. systems approaches can be complex and impractical, but there are processes in it that can make it practical. One key entry point is knowledge management…”

The third day of the conference featured a very energised World Cafe session.  This process was also designed to demonstrate complex systems in action, with emergent themes, linkages between processes and the involvement of multi-stakeholders with potentially divergent perspectives. The key themes for a “way forward” which emerged from this exercise were

  1. the need to create community space and capacity to implement this approach,
  2. the need to build staff capacity to facilitate adaptive processes and
  3. the determination to seek out ways to introduce appropriate levels of flexibility and adaptability in the use of traditional tools such as the logframe and within wider organizational systems

As one participant summarised:

The theory presentations and discussions were very engaging and definitely inspiring and I hope to somehow integrate complex adaptive systems approaches into how my organization approaches community development. It has certainly influenced my own perceptions of how to approach community development especially in relation to conservation and it has challenged me to rethink our approach to interventions.”

And finally:

…[the meeting] has helped me to think seriously about the impact (or lack of impact) of many of our community projects especially in terms of what our goals are as a conservation and development organization…”

The conference proceedings can be found here, and the GEL ‘lessons learned’ summary report will be circulated in the next couple of months. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the programme or the meeting, post them in the comments section and we will respond accordingly.

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IMPROV-ing Aid Through Creative Rigour

Posted in Chaos, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Resilience, Self organisation on September 7, 2010 | 8 Comments »

Lessons from theatrical improvisation have clear parallels with group dynamics in other social systems, including aid agencies…

Outside of work, theatre is one of my main passions. In my tentative attempts to learn more about different aspects of stagecraft, I have stumbled across some fascinating thinking which is of real relevance for Aid on the Edge readers.
In a previous post, I touched upon jazz improvisation as an analogy for a new wave of economic thinking, and here I am interested in looking in some detail at theatrical improvisation (or improv for short, hence the Cleese-defying* title for this post) as a source of valuable insights in its own right.
One of the most interesting thinkers in this area is Michelle James, CEO of The Center for Creative Emergence,who has a theatrical background but has also run improv-based programs at major organisations like Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente and the World Bank (yes, I did a double-take at that last one too!). James is clear about the minimalist starting points of effective improv:
No structure. No outline. No character or plot development. Nothing, except for 2 locations we get from the audience at the beginning of the play. The play is then titled, “The Space Station and the Bathroom” or whatever locations we get from the audience. Two of us then run on stage and start interacting, and thus the play begins…

However, sometimes the ensuing play worked, and seemed easy. And other times, it was clunky, and seemed hard. This led James to ask some searching questions:

What creates peak level creativity in our group? What allows a complex, coherent, sense-making structure to emerge from nothing but a simple location? What is the “magic formula” that allows a fully formed, organized play – with believable characters and plot – to emerge before the audience’s (and our own) eyes? And what gets in the way? Why does it work seamlessly sometimes and not so well other times?

James’ explorations found direct correlations between the principles of improv in a performance and being able to adapt, create and perform effectively in any social system. Specifically, “the same principles that allow a performing group to improvise a 90-minute play out of nothing but a location are the same principles that allow groups, teams, and organizations to solve problems in new ways and reach peak levels of creativity and innovative thinking. The principles form the “container” that allows the group to self-organize to emerge what’s next.”

James went on to do work with the Plexus Institute (one of Aid on the Edge’s favourite think-tanks) which helped her see clearly the connection between complex adaptive systems and improvisational theatre groups:

Both are open, inclusive, non-linear, dynamic systems that use interactive agents, feedback loops and multiple variables. Both require resilience, collaboration, structure and flow, spontaneity, and engaging the unknown. Both result in a surprising emergence. In our troupe, we don’t go on stage with a pre-formed notion of our characters, plot, conflict, challenge or situation. We just let them emerge based on our interactions, actions and reactions. The “magic formula” is the adherence to the basic improv principles. When we adhere to the principles of improvisation, something emerges that is more intelligent and creative – and intelligently organized – than any one of us could have planned…

Through this work, James has managed to identify  seven basic principles of improvisation, each of which is relevant to, and challenging for, international aid agencies’ work:

1. ‘Yes and’ (not ‘no but’)… Fully accepting the reality that is being presented, and then adding a new piece of information, allows a group to be adaptive, move forward and stay generative. Each ‘actor’ interacts with what is offered and should be seen as offering a unique contribution.

Compare this with the international NGO manager who said, of a national partner organisation: ‘they have to be really special to turn to us and say, they want to do things another way’.

2. Make everyone else look good That means actors do not have to be defending or justifying themselves or their position – instead they should trust that others will do that for them and they will reciprocate. Minimising the burden of defensiveness or competition means all actors are free to create.

As highlighted in a recent piece I wrote with Michael Barnett entitled the Humanitarian’s Dilemma, we need to find ways of making aid agencies care more about each others success…

3. Be open to changed by what is said and what happens At each moment, the changing context and new information it generates is an invitation for actors to have a new reaction or experience. “Change inspires new ideas, and that naturally unfolds what’s next.”

But aid agencies, in the damning assessment by Richard Dowden, pay less attention to context than their colonial forerunners. And they are  also often described as maladaptive in the face of change, most recently by the Humanitarian Futures Programme.

4. Co-create a shared “agenda” This principle involves the recognition that even the best-laid plans are abandoned in the moment, and that it is important to serve the reality of what is right there in front of a given actor. The reality is that any agenda is being co-created in real-time.

My observation in this context is that aid agencies are all too often stymied by the need for consensus, and for delivering against pre-established goals. This radically reduces the space of possibilities, as opposed to co-creation which expands them.

5. Mistakes are invitations to change the pattern In improv, mistakes are embraced – they are the stimuli that invite actors to shift to new levels of creativity. Techniques such as ‘acknowledging any mistake’ can be transformed into surprising plot point or dialogue that never would have happened in following a conventional pattern. In improv, this creates order out of chaos. Mistakes that are acknowledged can help break existing patterns and allow new ones to emerge.

It hardly needs to be said that learning from mistakes is not an area where aid agencies excel. As the old proverb puts it: the person who fails to learn from their mistakes is condemned to repeat them.

6. Keep the energy going through uncertainty No matter what is given, or what happens, there is a fundamental need accept it and keep the energy gong. Unlike in everyday life, where people stop to analyze, criticize or negate, in improv there is a need to keep moving. A mistake happens – let it go move on. The unexpected emerges – use it to move on. Trust the process and just keep moving – after all, human systems are never static – they are alive and dynamic.

By contrast, aid works through big pendulum swings, cycling repetitively through trends, fashions and reforms in a way that is tremendously disheartening for the long-term observer. Few sectors can turn a romantic into a cynic quicker than international aid….

7. Serve the good of the whole By always carrying the question, “How can I best serve this situation?” actors will have a better sense of when to run in and when to stay back, when to take focus and when to give it, how to best support their fellow actors and how to best support the situation. By focusing away from how they will individually appear to serving the larger good there is scope for following more creative impulses and identifying new resources in unexpected places.

Again, the Humanitarian’s Dilemma piece highlights this as a vital but neglected issue on the humanitarian side of the aid sector. All too often, and often for very pragmatic reasons, individual mandates overwhelm the collective good.

The principles that allow effective improvisation seem simple and easy. However, in practice, they would appear to be almost the exactly opposite of the ways in which aid agencies navigate their strategic and tactical challenges.

James is clear about what makes improv hard, and this too is sobering stuff:

Simple: any violation of the principles. If one of us tries to orchestrate, or worse impose, our own agenda or plot on the piece. If one of us tries to be the “star” and take too much focus. If even one of us is not present to what is unfolding, moment-by-moment. If one of us worries about the plot, and starts to figure out how to “save” it. If we expect that someone should respond in a certain way. In short, anything that gets us out of the moment and what is emerging – and into our ‘controlling’ heads.

The key would seem be to find clear and convincing ways of arguing that such alternative improv-based approaches are in fact the most appropriate way of dealing with some of the longstanding problems faced in the aid sector. Take urbanisation, climate change,  institutional change, global crises… the list goes on and on. The body of knowledge is growing, as are the voices calling for radical changes in aid policy and practice. Bill Easterly’s call for scrapping Aid Planners in favour of Aid Searchers is perhaps the most high-profile and vociferous example.

Increasing numbers of aid practitioners, academics, analysts, bloggers, tweeters and external observers are now arguing that a more anticipatory, adaptive and innovative approach to development and humanitarian work is essential if aid agencies are to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world. Time will no doubt tell if they are right.

There is one parting lesson from James to bear in mind - just because you are being creative, doesn’t mean you can’t also be rigorous and tireless in your pursuit of what works and why. I find myself as inspired by her approach and the processes she has employed, as by her results and findings. Maybe that’s the secret to all successful improv.

*FOOTNOTE: John Cleese’s 3 rules – No puns, no puns and no puns.

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Governance, Ecosystems and Livelihoods: New Strategies for Transformational Development

Posted in Agriculture, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Organisations, Resilience, Strategy on August 31, 2010 | 2 Comments »

This week sees what promises to be a fascinating event bringing together practitioners and scientists to reflect on issues of complex adaptive systems and rural development, organised by World Vision Canada in Arusha.

The three day conference has a special focus on the lessons from an innovative programme to enhance aid agency staff and community leaders capabilities to “deal with the changing and complex nature of poverty and development”.

Governance, Ecosystems, Livelihoods (GEL) is a three-year program funded by Canadian International Development Agency, World Vision Canada and the Manitoba Council of International Cooperation (MCIC) and is aimed at improving community resilience in four African countries.

What makes GEL stand out, to my mind, is the explicit attempt to bring complexity thinking into aid policy and practice, and at the largest international NGO, no less.

The GEL program proposes the use of complex adaptive systems (CAS) approach as an effective and sustainable framework for World Vision Canada and its partners to promote good governance, advance environmental sustainability and create a better environment for economic development.

As the GEL programme information suggests:

The need for this program emerged from a growing awareness that, despite the best of efforts, many poverty and health indicators in sub Saharan Africa are actually getting worse. Traditional sector based approaches were not fully addressing the complex underlying causes of poverty. Development assumptions have been made and strategies developed, on the fact that the needs of people were based on a homogeneous and essentially static knowledge of communities and environments. The situation of individuals within communities varies temporally, spatially and socially at a variety of scales. Attempts to “sector” peoples lives have often ignored important external problems, influences and feedback loops that affect poverty. The current challenge is the need to develop tools and frameworks to deal with this complexity. New strategies for transformational development are needed.

The speakers at the event include David Waltner-Toews, Chris Burman and Harry Jones (who worked with me on the ODI working paper on Exploring the Science of Complexity). I managed to speak to David and Chris before the event, and they both had some fascinating insights to share which will resonate with regular Aid on the Edge readers. Here are a couple of their insights, rapidly transcribed – I hope I have done them justice!

David:

…complexity enables us to simultaneously address technical, ethical and political issues – it allows you to do so, in fact, done right it even forces you to do so. There is a strong tendency in large development bureaucracies to separate out these things – so for example, there may be a new strategy which says, we are doing agricultural development, and therefore we want to increase productivity and value for money. But if you ask, what are the implications for equity, community, gender, taking into account that women tend to do better in the informal economy and men in the formal economy, the standard response is, that’s not our department, go to health, or the place where that is dealt with… Give me a legitimate theoretical basis for saying ‘this is just agriculture, this is just health, this is just environment’. We need to bring together disciplinary perspectives on the same complex reality because ultimately the world we live in is all of these things…

Chris:

…complexity enables us to begin to get people to think about the world in different ways – which means they have an expansive learning field as opposed to a rigid learning field… much aid learning is very limited and it has almost no space for creativity – it is learning as a bureaucratic tick-box. Complexity approaches open up new potentials and horizons within which learning can take place, and if we can play around with new ways of situating learning in the context of peoples lives, we can find ways of moving beyond the linear and predictable. The key is to use complexity to reframe the context for learning…”

Compelling stuff. I will be blogging more about the event in the next week, hopefully with some of the presentation files and real-time updates from the participants, and will also be writing about the some of the lessons emerging from the GEL programme in the coming weeks.  Watch this space!

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The Aid Leadership Paradox

Posted in Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Resilience, Self organisation, Strategy on August 24, 2010 | 6 Comments »

“In these troubled, uncertain times, we don’t need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone’s intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.”

Traditional perspectives on leadership are based on a view of organisations as mechanical systems. Organisations are made up of  prescriptive rules, formalised control mechanisms and hierarchical authority structures – all adding up to clearly defined responses to a changing but knowable world.

This machine model of organisations is prevalent among international agencies, as ALNAP research identified in 2008, and carries with it some clear assumptions about what effective leadership means in the aid sector.

The aim of the machine organisation is to achieve routines, equilibrium, stability and order, and leaders are expected to contribute to this stabilisation through directive actions, based on planning for the future and controlling organisational responses.

However, in complex systems, as regular readers of this blog will be well aware, the future cannot be perfectly predicted and change cannot be precisely directed. Russ Marion and Mary Uhl-Bien have undertaken over 10 years of research which suggests that in complex systems there is a need for distinctive leadership qualities.

Empirical research in many different organisations – they range from church-based community organisations to Al Qaeda – has highlighted a number of vital ‘complex adaptive leadership’ qualities. Some of these findings resonate with Marshall Ganz’s analysis of the 2008 Obama Presidential Campaign, examined in a previous Aid on the Edge post.

Specifically, ‘complex adaptive leaders’ are characterised by their ability to 1) disrupt existing patterns; 2) encourage novelty; and 3) use ‘sensemaking’.

  • Leaders disrupt existing patterns in organisational behaviour by creating and highlighting conflicts, rather than stabilising the organisation. For example, in the organisations under study, successful leaders made several radical and controversial changes, internally and externally, and used communications to bring attention to these changes as a way of highlighting the importance of the ongoing change. This contrasts with the traditional leadership approach of creating predictable behaviours by minimising conflict and eliminating uncertainty. Another way for leaders to disrupt existing patterns is by acknowledging and embracing uncertainty, refusing to back away from uncomfortable truths, talking openly about the most serious issues, and challenging institutional ‘taboos’. This can encourage more open thinking about these issues, and provide legitimate ground for new ideas and patterns to emerge. Again, the traditional leadership approach was to shy away from difficult conversations and focus on hoped-for certainties.
  • Leaders encourage novelty by actively looking and promoting innovation rather than standard operating procedures. They do this by generating and reinforcing simple rules which could allow innovation to emerge at local levels. Such “distributed leadership” is based on ‘tenacious rigidity about principles and complete flexibility in how to go about carrying out the principle’. Facilitating interactions was also key, enabling staff to start interacting with each other in new and different ways. Instead of creating a single ‘assembly point’, successful leaders kickstarted many small group interactions, increasing connections between people and creating a richer and more unpredictable dialogue within the organisations in question. This contrasts with the traditional model of a leader as using command and control approaches, and maintaining strict hierarchies of reporting relationships.
  • Finally, leaders act as ‘sensemakers’, helping to interpret rather than ‘forge’ or ‘drive’ change. Leaders so this by giving meaning to what is happening, acting as ‘tags’ (Holland, 1995). Tags enable specific behaviours by directing attention to what is important and what things mean. Leaders become tags when others recognise that they symbolise deeper messages of change. Leaders also make sense of emergent and unanticipated events through reframing, either in the principles of the organisation, or in the context of the hoped-for changes and how important they are. And leaders label behaviours in ways that provide coherence and shared understanding. Using language carefully, leaders are able to articulate meanings, lend weight to collective action, and clarify the hoped-for image of the organisation.

The overall conclusion of this research was that the leaders of successful organisations did play a key role in radical transformations of those organisations, but not by specifying it or directing it but by creating the conditions which allowed for the emergence of such change.

The contrasts between traditional and complex adaptive leadership are shown below, drawing on research from the University of Minnesota.

  Conventional View of Leadership Complex Adaptive Leadership
Leadership is… a position or role of authority an activity or behavior that can arise anywhere in a human system
Leadership flows… in one direction: from the top-down in all directions
Leadership is exercised… by individuals with special leadership traits collectively by groups and/or by individuals informed by the collective
Effective leadership comes from… accurately anticipating a predictable path to a predetermined outcome recognizing and influencing patterns that are present in human systems at all levels
Leadership requires… certainty, clear vision, and the power of persuasion and control willingness to embrace uncertainty, listen to all voices and take adaptive action, often in collaboration with others
Leadership creates… harmony and stability conditions that are conducive to groups moving forward — which sometimes means disrupting the habitual patterns of engagement so that groups, communities, or organizations can set the conditions for a preferred future
The purpose of leadership is to… fix problems and leverage opportunities to achieve goals enable adaptability, learning, and innovation so that groups make progress on the issues they care about –even in unpredictable and changing conditions
Leadership can make a difference through… one large strategic intervention designed to fix a problem or achieve a goal recognizing emerging patterns in human systems and making meaning out of many small changes

This is challenging, not least because it subverts the sources of power traditionally relied upon by leaders for their authority. This is especially the case in the aid sector, which relies on a degree of certainty for its very existence (“give us more aid so the flood victims suffering will be eased”, “give us money so we can make poverty history”, etc etc etc).

Instead of a culture of compliance, so predominant among aid agencies, leaders need to foster a culture of curiosity. This leads to a paradox of leadership in complex settings such as those faced by aid agencies: leaders need to undercut their sources of power, while simultaneously retaining people’s confidence and trust. They need to outline the uncertainties they face while simultaneously eliciting trust of key stakeholders (for more on trust, see the previous Aid on the Edge post). This may ultimately mean that aid agencies need to go for smaller, more humble, more realistic, but ultimately more effective approaches.

This is the aid leadership paradox – if anyone wants to truly lead an aid organisation in complex settings, they need to give up on conventional ideas of being a leader of an organisation.

This calls for being less worried about growth, and more focused on relevance; less about branding and profile, and more about partners and relationships; less concerned with ’being the first and the best’, and more obsessed with the collective, longer-term effectiveness of aid efforts.

A good guiding principle might be the old Teddy Roosevelt quote: “There is no limit to what a person can achieve if they don’t mind who gets the credit”.

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Rethinking Trust (and a Doggy Footnote)

Posted in Conflict and peace building, Facilitation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on August 19, 2010 | 7 Comments »

For one reason or another, I have been thinking about trust this week. Trust is regularly cited as a critical factor in effective aid organisations, is seen as the essential for partnerships, and creating it is seen as a primary task for aid leadership.

But all too often trust is mentioned as if it can simply be designed, imposed and managed. As a concept, trust is both over-used and poorly understood.

From the viewpoint of aid organisations as complex social processes, and drawing on Chris Rogers’ Informal Coalitions approach, trust has three specific features which are overlooked or ignored.

First, trust is a property of relations and interactions. Second, trust is multidimensional. Third, trust is emergent. It’s worth looking at each of these in turn.

1. Trust as a property of relations and interactions

…people’s sense of trust is embodied – or not – in the unscripted detail of each and every interaction that they have with one another.  It is personally and socially constructed – both consciously and subconsciously – in these moments that people come together.  As such, it reflects participants’ past history of interactions, their future hopes and expectations about this and/or other important relationships, and the current immediacy of the exchange. At the same time, the emerging outcomes of this ongoing process shift the ways in which ‘the past’ is recalled, ‘the future’ is constructed and the present is lived – all in the here and now.”

2. Trust is multidimensional:

…we might believe that someone is being genuine and truthful when they say that they intend to do something, and yet still not trust them to do it because we don’t think that they have the necessary competence.

The dimensions include:

- character (perceived integrity and trustworthiness)…
- community (whether the person is recognized as being ‘one of us’, with shared perspectives, common interests and sense of identity)
- communication (perceived openness, honesty and straightforwardness);
- confidentiality (sense that it is ‘safe’ to share confidences) – “I believe that I can be open with you, without fear of you taking advantage of me or breaching that confidence.”
- credibility (whether or not the ‘story’ makes sense and is believable in it’s own right) – “I believe that your ‘story’ (proposition, strategy, system etc) is credible and makes sense in its own right.”
- capability (perceived knowledge, skills and abilities in relevant areas) –“I believe that you have the necessary capacity and competence to do what is needed in this situation.”
- commitments (dependability in keeping agreements and promises) – “I believe that I can depend on you to do what you say you will do.”
- context (whether the patterns of taken-for-granted cultural assumptions are tending to channel behaviour in ways that enhance or undermine trust) – “I believe that the organizational culture and climate fosters an environment of trust.”

3. Trust is Emergent

Complexity science has long been used to understand issues of trust and cooperation. In his now-classic work, noted complexity thinker Robert Axelrod showed how trust can emerge even in situations where there are self-interested actors with no central authority. More generally,

People derive their sense of trust from the detail of the actions, interactions and transactions that comprise everyday life in the organization. The sense they make of their world, including the feeling of trust (or mistrust) that this evokes, emerges from this ongoing interactional process.  Also, the more that a particular ‘sense’ of trust is ‘taken up’ by others, through the diverse interplay of conversations across an organization (or fragments of it), the more generalized it becomes. It is then more likely to be taken up in similar ways by those same people in future – and, potentially, by others with whom they interact… It is the self-organizing process of ‘shared’ meaning-making, through which patterns of assumptions emerge and become taken-for-granted over time. These patterns create expectancy and tend to channel ongoing sensemaking, imperceptibly, down familiar ‘pathways’.  Since this patterning process is self-organizing, it means that trust cannot be ‘designed and built’ by managers, as part of a structured ‘culture change programme’. However, a major influence on this ongoing sensemaking and action-taking is people’s observation of the behaviours of those in formal leadership positions – throughout the organization.”

These different properties of trust may be essential to understand if we are serious about furthering aid efforts. For example, in aid reform processes, trust is repeatedly highlighted as one of the enduring challenges facing progress. On the development side, the Paris Declaration advocates for harmonisation between donors and mutual accountability with national governments; on the humanitarian side, the Cluster approach seeks to coordinate international relief efforts by bring the NGOs together in UN-led, sector-specific networks. Both approaches have been stymied by, among other things, a lack of trust between diverse actors.

The central take-away from the above should be that trust is not some box to be ticked in order to achieve aid success. Trust takes time, effort, presence, engagement, commitment and humility. Trust means putting a human face on overtly technical endeavours. Trust means starting something without necessarily knowing how it is going to end. Creating the space for trust in aid may mean re-casting aid as being primarily about relationships, as Ros Eyben and others have argued, and seeing what might emerge as a result.

Scary, eh?

FOOTNOTE: All of this makes the recent revelation in the Economist all the more intriguing. New research seems to indicate that just having a dog around can boost human cooperation levels—potentially altering well known game theory results.

….The researchers explored how the presence of an animal altered players’ behaviour in a game known as the prisoner’s dilemma…Having a dog around made volunteers 30% less likely to snitch than those who played without one.”

So, should the next Paris Declaration meeting have canine observers??

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