On Vision — Nuances from Spirit and Complexity

A good friend, Caitlin Frost, asks yesterday through email for ideas about teaching vision and working with vision. She’s smart on her own. She’s also smart to ask.

I respond quickly, delightfully distracted by her question, and putting aside my current todo list. Nuances of spirit, of the unseen often take me like this.

“One of the things I’m leaning into these days is the ‘arrival’ of vision, not just the ‘creating’ of it. As you say, connected to emergence. I encourage the group to ‘look away’ from some intense thinking and see what ‘sticks.’ Or give them multiple modalities. I love the way that drawing, for instance, changes the impression (true for ‘non-artists’ also). I want them to welcome it to arrive — not just work at it.”
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I love, and need, approaches rooted in discernment and a self-organizing premise. It’s related to, but different from tenacity. Gut feel is related to, but different than powering up for thirty more pushups. Discernment and self-organizing trusts a natural process (water runs down hill). It’s an alternative to more engineering (you can make water run uphill; it just might not be the most simple way).
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Chris Corrigan also responded. Chris knows as much as anyone I know about working from a complexity framework.

You can have a vision of a full bath tub of steaming hot water. You can have a vision of making your home run on rain water alone. You can have a vision of safe drinking water for all humans.

The first is simple, short term and you have all the tools and abilities to make it happen.

The second is more complicated and you require a few experts to make it happen, but with the right people and resources, you can achieve it.

The third is not up to you. It is a complex and adaptive system. You may be motivated by a desire to see safe drinking water for all humans but you are unlikely to achieve it because it is a complex problem. Intention can make a difference here and instead of working TOWARDS a tangible vision you can work FROM an intention and guide your actions against that.

Read the rest of Chris’ post here.

Nuances can make all of the difference. Often with things that are presumed that “we all know,” including words that are so common like vision.

Thanks friends. It’s good to walk the path together.

On The Myth of Managing Culture Change

One, I love challenging myths. It’s fascinating to me to see how an idea, once fuzzy and only one of many choices, can become calcified in certainty and encrusted as habit and insulated truth. Whether that’s simple stuff like cutting the ends off the roast, as Grandma always did (aha, to make it fit in the pan), or more involved stuff like attributing all power and intelligence to an individual leader (aha, it turns out the group can be smarter and more sustainable).

Two, I often find myself trying to “buy room” with people I’m working with by inviting the term “culture change.” It has enough legitimacy to shift attention from projects that are good, but only part of the puzzle — most people know this but just need a bit of leadership support to see the bigger picture. Culture change invokes seeing more of the horizon, more of the forest and not just the trees. It invokes a change of being, not just more fierce commitment to managed doing.

Three, I love what Chris Corrigan wrote on this topic recently. Chris is smart as hell and fiercely committed to the dynamics of the system at work. He is a myth buster among many things, who offers grounded tools and theory to change even the myths about change.

Changing the dynamics of how a system of people interact with one another is the game. It is setting the table for emergence to occur — the naturally arising dynamic of life. It is helping people, all of us, experience being in relation with emergence and growing in our comfort to be in the clarity and messiness of that. Pause with that thought — it is key — being in relation with emergence.

Culture change is not selling a grand idea and manipulating others to get on board with power, coercion, or even charisma. The game in culture change, the real importance, is a process change in how people engage with one another. Culture change is less planned and managed. It is more encountered and adjusted. What would it take for any of us to be more comfortable with encountering and adjusting with each other?

Check this from Chris’ site. I love his articulation and think out loud ability, to take on a myth.

Principles

  • Culture is an emergent set of patterns that are formed from the interactions between people. These patterns cannot be reverse engineered. Once they exist you need to change the interactions between people if you want to change the patterns.
  • Culture includes stories but it is not a story. This is important because simply changing the story of the organization will not change the culture. Instead you need to create ways for people to interact differently and see what comes of it.
  • Cultural evolution is not predictable and cannot be led to a pre-determined character. You can aspire all you want to a particular future culture but it is impossible to script or predict that evolution.

Practices

  • Start by getting clear about the actual work. In my experience people use the term “culture change” as a proxy for the real work that needs to be done: improving employee relations, becoming more risk tolerant, shifting leadership styles…whatever it is, it’s best to start with getting clear what is ACTUALLY going on before assuming that the problem is the “culture.”

  • Look at what actually is. Studying the way things are is important, because that helps you to identify what you are actually doing. It seems simple, but it’s important to do it in a way that doesn’t bring a pre-existing framework to the work.  You have to look at the patterns from the work that you already do, not from how it illuminates a pre-existing model.

  • Work with emergence to understand patterns together. Using tools such as anecdote circles, organizations can discover the patterns that are present in the current environment. Anecdote circles generate small data fragements that describe actual actions and activities. Taken together and worked through, patterns become clear, like the process of generating a Sierpinsky triangle.  Out of large data sets, hidden patterns appear.

  • Identify those patterns and discuss ways to address them with safe to fail experiments. Run a session to create several ideas that are coherent with the patterns, design multiple small experiments to try to shift the patterns.  Institute rigorous monitoring and learning and allow for experiments to fail.

  • Support new ideas with appropriate resources. If you really want to change the interactions between people you need to resource these changes with time, money and attention. The enemy of focused innovation is time. Even allowing employees to work on something a half day a week could be enough to create and implement new things. Butif they have to do it on top of the full workload they have, nothing will get done.

  • Learn as you go. Developmental evaluation is they way to go with new forms of emergent practice. To be strategic about how change is happening, it’s important to design and build in evaluation at the outset.

Essence — Attractors and Boundaries

Any time you can get to essence, that is a gift. To center an inquiry. To cut through distraction. To feel it in your belly.

Pal Chris Corrigan shared one of these essence gifts in his post on attractors and boundaries and self-organization. His elevator speech.

Love it. As one studying, teaching, dreaming, writing, wondering, hosting, seeing, wrestling, sharing…about self-organization since the 1990s.

Self organization works by a combination of attractors and boundaries.  Attractors are things that draw components of a system towards themselves (gravity wells, a pile of money left on the ground, an invitation).  Boundaries (or constraints) are barriers that constrain the elements in a system (an atmosphere, the edges of an island, the number of syllables in a haiku)

Working together, attractors and boundaries define order where otherwise there is chaos. We can be intentional about some of these, but not all of them. Within complex systems, attractors and constraints create the conditions to enable emergence.  What emerges isn’t always desirable and is never predictable, but it has the property of being new and different from any of the individual elements within the system.

Self-organization is where we get new, previously unknown things from.

Thanks Chris.

Choice, Friendship, and Welcome

Today, a friend that watches out for me sent me this.

“Love is the ability and willingness
to allow those that you care for
to be what they choose for themselves
without any insistence that they satisfy you.”

It is from Wayne Dyer, the American philosopher and self-help author, who died in 2015.

Yesterday, I was being interviewed about relational dynamics in leadership, by a PhD candidate working on his dissertation. I remembered this, from one of my closest pals, Chris Corrigan.

“Friendship is our business model.”

I’ve modified Dyer’s statement.

“Friendship [Love] is the ability and willingness
to welcome [allow] those that you care for
to be what they choose for themselves
without any insistence that thy satisfy you.”

Choice, and friendship, and welcome — they make all of the difference.