Learning from conversations about complexity

Introduction

Recently I conducted an experimental workshop themed around 3 things that are important to me: conversation, complexity and international development. This experiment was a collaboration with Vicky Cosstick. Following the experiment, we each wrote sense-making reflective articles for Ben Ramalingam and Harry Jones’ Aid on the Edge of Chaos blog. Here is my piece, ‘continuing the conversation’:

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 20th 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 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.