Open Curiosity

One of the guidelines that I use to approach my day is to leave things better than I find them, whenever the opportunity presents itself. When we work in a rented space, we remove all trace that we were there, and often go the extra step to clean up after others or do minor, needed repairs.

I remember one facility we used, the toilet seats were screwed down so loosely that I found it hard to believe anyone had successfully sat on them in months. Despite the fact that there were only two toilets in the facility, no one had taken the 30 seconds to tighten down the nuts holding the seat.

If you’re thinking “ugh!!!”, “ewww!!” or “that’s what they have maintenance staff for!!”, then you just failed your coLead interview. Because at one of our events, you would have avoided the job.  And that means someone may be distracted by a wobbly seat (or worse, would have fallen to the floor) just as they were having a moment of insight.  Instead of being able to act on their insight, they are now distracted, or in a foul state of mind; their idea would be gone – at least for that day, and possibly forever. Our job is to enable the capture of those ideas. Sometimes, that requires basic plumbing skills. Whatever is needed to take care of the space.

Being of service to a system can be a messy job. It doesn’t often ask more than what can be taken care of with hot soapy water, but it’s not the most glamorous job there is. It simply requires doing what needs to be done.

And that brings me to coffee cups and other stuff. Once an event is started, and is off in a direction, my key role for much of the remainder of the event – one of many – is to pick up coffee cups, juice glasses and other assorted detritus, constantly. My coLeads also have specific, assigned tasks (which does not abdicate them from picking up the cups they pass), so I attend to the more general needs of the human system, as each individual goes about doing the work that only they can do.

I take my wisdom where I find it. One of the more striking moments came in the reading of an autobiography written by Sir Bob Geldof, shortly after he MC’ed the first, and perhaps most fantastic, global jukebox: Live-Aid. Now, say what you will about uppity Irish pop singers or the invalidity of sending money to feed starving peoples, but there was a moment when two of my favourite then-living saints, Bob Geldof and Mother Teresa, met. Reading about it changed the way I live my life.

The context isn’t altogether that important; Mother Teresa had just strong-armed some high-ranking politician into building two orphanages he would have rather not built. Sir Bob commented on the enormity of their tasks, and Mother Teresa’s reply was succinct:

“Remember this. I can do something you can’t do and you can do something I can’t do. But we both have to do it.”

Every time we interview a  potential coLead we use the coffee cup test. It’s, quite simply, a coffee cup that needs caring for. And an interviewee who walks away from an adjacent cup (or far worse, their own empty cup) has just failed the approach to life part of the interview.

What I expect of each of my fellow Leads and coLeads, and in fact from anyone who intends to take care of a human system, is that they do what needs to be done, in a spirit of service, and expecting nothing in return. It is, in the end, your privilege to be of service, and not the other way round.

Take care of what’s around you.

A part of our engagement process – the most noticeable part – is the workshop element, the events. Events are where a client brings 1 or 501 friends, stakeholders and neighbors into open collaboration for a day or three, using our processes to enable innovation or transformation, as the situation may require.

The question asked around the client core team table is the same one asked after a wedding date has been chosen: who should we invite? Clients usually choose to go small, selecting a lesser subset than might be ideal, and they tend to invite their friends.

While this makes sense and is fundamental human nature, it adds substantial risk to the outcome – and remember, the outcome is not a happy-making event. The outcome is enabling the existence of something that previously did not, or even could not, exist.

Doing this sort of work effectively requires you to invite two groups of people:

• the people who care; and
• the people who will make the conversation difficult.

The second set are included in the first, but since you as a client may specifically exclude them, consciously or not, we mention them explicitly here.

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Invite the people who care

Who will care? You are making changes. They will affect people. Who will they affect? This is an analysis we undertake along with our clients as part of preparatory work. If you are changing policy, don’t just invite policymakers. Invite the people who will be affected by the policy. Invite the people who will have to enforce the policy. Invite the people who will have to bring the policy into law. If you can, bring a couple honest brokers – people entirely outside the system who have nothing to gain or lose whatsoever . Sometimes they are the only ones who will name the elephant in the room.

Ensure your invitation list is broad and highly heterogeneous. If there will be conflict, if the policy will fail, let it fail here. Let it be stress tested in our living lab, where the space is designed to handle conflict, and to resolve it in the service of the required outcome.

Invite youth and the aged; they represent the future and wisdom. Invite men and women. Sit data entry clerks next to deputy ministers next to truck drivers next to chief executives. They are all human beings, they all have points of view. If they share an interest in the challenge under discussion, they deserve to be in the room. Even those who want nothing other than to stop your venture in its tracks.

Which brings us to the second group.

Invite the people who will make the conversation difficult

There are some people that you know will make talking difficult.  They’re the tough ones to invite. They’re the ones who are angry, or bitter, or obstructionist; who see the world in a radically different way or who “just don’t understand.”

Because if what you’re doing matters at all (and if you’ve come to work with us it probably matters a lot), then these people are going to stand up against you at some point. They are going to pick a battle.  And this battle may prove much more costly, much more detrimental, to the project, to your brand, to everyone, if you choose to save that battle for later.

No, you probably don’t want to pay for their coffee, much less for their travel. But you will pay a cost to those who would stand against you. You may pay it now, you may pay it later. From our experience, it’s less expensive, and more successful, to pay for hotel nights and coffee breaks now than to pay for lawyers, tarnished reputations, and poorer results further down the line.

In the worst possible case, your innovation will fail in our session. But it will be a controlled fail. It will be a financially manageable fail. And it will be a very well understood fail. You can have your initiative fail in the broad public eye, or you can have it fail in our labs. In the worst case, as I said, I can assure you that the latter choice will be far more palatable to all concerned than the former.

We believe that human systems are highly intelligent. Far more intelligent than any computer simulation could ever be. And the larger and more diverse the human system, if it is made up of caring individuals, even if they disagree with you passionately, the better the chance that you will find the optimal solution space if one is at all possible, and the quicker you will determine failure and its root causes, if that is necessary.

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Invite the people who care. All of them. We’ve had almost 400 caring, concerned people work together on a question for three days, and all of the time was highly functionally. Twice that number of participants would only be a matter of logistics – the methodology is highly robust. So invite the people who care.

And then invite the people who are going to make the conversation uncomfortable. You know who they are. Invite them. Because they care, even if they walk in the door holding the opposing point of view, working in our environment maximizes the potential that the assembled human system will develop the most robust solution set possible, if one exists.

Get the best set of people in the room that you can, and then enjoy yourself.

I assure you, we will.

Harrison Owen gave us all a big hand up when he gifted us with his graceful Open Space Technology, but it is not that of which I speak. Today, I’m thinking of a far more generalized opening of space, one that is referenced in the practice of Zen. The idea is that people in open states will be able to take in a lot of information from a wide variety of sources. Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi explains this concept quite well.

It is the job of a Lead Facilitator (on our team, at least) to open space, to hold the space open, and to open (or re-open) space for individual attendees throughout the course of the event.

At a large event, a Lead may be open to a hundred participants (or more), her coLeads, the event location staff, the ambient temperature, and the frequency of replenishment of the coffee, all while synthesizing in real time and constantly assessing the need for event redesign to be of greatest service to the human system.

One of the rules of opening space is that she who is the most open holds the responsibility for holding, and then for opening, the space for those around her so that they could have the possibility of acquiring more useful (open) states. Opening the larger space is different from opening individual spaces, and both are the challenge behind extensive training.  Opening a large space effectively is the challenge of all that we do – spoken to in the principles, the intention question, my philosophy, the 12 useful things you can do…in short, everything is about opening a space effectively.

In a blog post, it’s tough to talk about “everything” – so I thought it might be helpful to point towards opening a small space – opening space for one individual. And rather than focusing on how, I thought I might just tell the story of what, and hope that might be illustrative.

Yesterday morning, I went for a quiet Sunday coffee at Planet Coffee, my favorite coffee shop here in Ottawa. It was a fabulous, cool, sunny day. I was on the Byward Market early in the morning, before the tourists had woken from their slumbers. Planet Coffee’s setting, on a quiet cobblestone lane surrounded by old stone buildings and veiled by trees with leaves of lace, was utterly soothing. Sadly, Planet Coffee was not.

The girl at the cash, by nature a relatively open, resourceful person, was closed down something furious. The espresso machine wasn’t working – not a good thing in a coffee shop – and she found this out only after taking payment from a German tourist for his morning cappuccino.

As time passed and he became more concerned, not because he needed a caffeine fix but because he needed some liquid with which to take his morning medication. His poor English and her high self-expectations for great customer service clashed until she was a human knot when she finally turned her frustrated glance to me.

I was in an open state. Quite open. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, I had my health and my freedom, and I was secure in my surroundings. The rule of openness therefore applied.

In a non-manipulative, caring way, I engaged her curiosity and playfulness, very gently. I asked her to tell me about one of the desserts they had on offer. What was it? How good was it? Would she promise me I would enjoy it? She assured me I would. Then I asked her to recommend my morning tea – what tea would go with this amazing dessert she had promised me, to make it an unforgettable experience?

She told me about her favourite tea, and then suggested blending it with a second set of leaves for a more enjoyable experience.  By the time our interaction had ended, she had regained the lightness and resourcefulness that she is more customarily known for, and had attained a more useful state that she could then bring to bear to the stream of customers who were coming into the shop.

Taking a look at the how, for a moment, you can see how carefully the elements flowed. I asked questions – questions that she was highly competent to answer. I challenged her passions, asking her to design an experience that I would enjoy – and assuring her that she would not fail.  I had thusly engaged her in play, and enabled her to change state, regaining her composure, her tranquility and her open state. (Note that you cannot CHANGE someone’s state, you can only invite them – everyone retains free will in life.)

This is a relatively trivial example of opening space, but hopefully it points towards one of the many roles and responsibilities of Leads and coLeads at our events. Your training first helps you to more consistently attain and maintain open, useful states, and then provides you with an enhanced ability to engage others, inviting them to more open places.

Through the course of a client engagement, and specifically at client events, Leads and coLeads will be constantly extending invitations to participants, individually, in small groups, and as a whole, inviting them to a more open space.

Where new ways of thinking can lead to new possibilities and new futures.

Why is it that we have time to do things over and over, but we don’t have time to do things right the first time?

I find that to be especially true with meetings that are of strategic importance: new product/service development, strategic planning, personnel discussions, reorganizations.

In many of these meetings I find that clients want us to come in “for an hour or two” to tackle issues that need a couple of days of honest thought. This is the next year of your life, I suggest to them – don’t you want to make the most of it?

Tasks like pulling together a new team and choosing a path forward – these cannot be done in three-hour time blocks. Caring, careful people that we are, we will generally be polite for about three hours. I’ve found this to be true at least for Canadians and Americans who live in the Northeast, as well as in Ireland. I’ve worked with stakeholder groups in all of these areas, and as much as each client assures me that “this group is different”, I’ve yet to meet people who, as a human system, get down to real work until they’ve spent a good three hours checking things out, building trust, and “buying in” to invest themselves in the process.

Yes. You can do your 2012-2017 strategic plan in two hours. Yes. You can build a strategic partnership between billion-dollar multinationals over a golf game or a long lunch. But these are just Barney engagements – I love you, you love me, and none of the hard stuff gets discussed. For there to be effective change down at the coal face, you need to give the human system more time to process, to engage, and to innovate.

Short meetings don’t allow honest conversations and real work to happen.

This means your short meeting is not ideal if:

• You need to innovate
• You need to strategize
• You need to build trust
• You need to develop a common vision/vocabulary/direction
• You need to build cohesion
• You need to collaborate meaningfully

There is math (that to my knowledge has not been discovered) that will tell you the time investment required for useful conversations, based on the size of the system in the room, the health of the system and the difficulty of the challenge that lies before you. We tend to work in 1-2-3 day increments, and have found these broad brush strokes to be useful.

Tactical, binary decisions, low risk information-push sessions; these sorts of meetings can absolutely be held in three hours or less. In fact, you’d do well to challenge that type of meeting to find ways to make them shorter still – or to vanish altogether – email is likely fine for the bulk of it.

But for the heavy lifting, I must say: If you can’t spare (at least) a day, don’t waste three hours.

How do you change an organization? No, how do you REALLY change an organization?

Organizations, human systems, are in a constant state of flux – change is one of the few constants. But organizational transformation speaks to a whole other level of change – it speaks to what we often refer to as “culture change”: changing the fundamental attitudes that support the choices made on a moment-by-moment basis by the stakeholders within the system in all of their core activities and functions. That’s the whole enchilada that we call “organizational transformation”.

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Transformation

So what does it take to make organizational transformation work?

There are two necessary components, operators that are also sufficient, in the short term at least. They are:

1. changes to the rules, and
2. the application of sufficient resources to the task.

With sufficient force, applied through rule changes and enough resources, any human system can be transformed for some period of time. Perhaps it may seem Machiavellian to suggest it, but a leader does not need democratic consent, stakeholder buy-in or any of these related niceties in order to enable organizational transformation.

It is easiest to demonstrate this sort of forced organizational change by applications that are grossly apparent, like the traumas and injustices wrought by despotic regimes the world over, across time. But there are lesser examples that are abundant around us.

Every hare-brained scheme that was the brainchild of a misguided leader who thought he or she knew better, every government policy that went in place without clear business logic or social well-being as an underpinning, every pointless corporate re-organization; each of these demonstrated the two conditions listed above. Every one of these had the capacity to transform human systems for as long as the resources and the ability to enforce manage the rules rested with the leader.

These transformations, effective for however long or short a time period, are not healthy changes. I would question whether these human systems ever really “work”. We begin our consultative work from the point of view that believes that all human beings want to do good work – healthy, useful work that provides a net benefit to both the stakeholders within and affected by their system, and in the overall environment at large.

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Healthy Transformation

I would suggest that an organizational transformation that truly “works” is one that does draw on the wisdom of the system, and one that acts in service of all stakeholders – that the force is applied by the system itself. When the systemic changes are self-managed by the system, through an attitude of service and mutual well-being, then they can truly be said to have worked.

The application of healthy, enduring, service-focused organizational transformation follows a ten point plan, as follows:

1. The moment of insight – that instant where a possibility is born.
2. Engaging with a core team to coalesce the initial thought into a basic concept that is ready for testing.
3. Open collaboration with an extensive subset of the system to nurture, challenge and enhance the concept.
4. The development of irrefutable logic – whether a business case or social policy or any other instrument of net benefit, this is the place where the engaged team creates the “reason to believe”.
5. Identification of the key rules that need to be shifted. A deep analysis of the key outcomes leads to an understanding of which rules, when augmented or diminished, will most fundamentally support the whole-system transformation.
6. Determine the core actions and resources required to enable and to support the transformation.
7. With situational authority, the leadership at all levels of the system shifts or changes the rules. Whether this is done formally (laws or policies) is wholly dependent on the system.
8. Communicate broadly and continuously the irrefutable logic, the nature of the rule shift, the supporting projects and the resources available.
9. Assess continuously and regularly the effect of the change. Be prepared to be surprised, negative benefits may unwittingly accrue.
10. Iterate.

Look closely. Items 1 and 2 on the first list are items 7 and 8 on the second list. A leader who “knows better” can (and will) skip steps 2-6, deeming them a waste of his or her time. At some point, however, just because our universe seems to work that way, the “be prepared to be surprised” portion of step 9 will catch him or her unaware, and the organization will transform in a really big way; one in which he or she probably won’t find comfort.

Changing – transforming – an organization requires changes to rules, and the application of sufficient resources. Without both of these, the status quo is the only remaining option.

However, making transformation work requires additional steps, additional insight and additional rigour in analysis.

It’s not easy. But your human system is incredibly intelligent, and wants to make the change.

All you need to do is engage.

All of our client engagements are guided by an intention question. In fact, I’d recommend to anyone that every meeting you hold, short or long, will be more useful if it is held in the service of a question. It lets people know why they are there, and that their input is possible – and more important– valued.

In a recent engagement, one of our client groups decided that never again would they call a meeting, except in the service of a clear question. Plagued by incessant, pointless meetings, they rarely had time to get to their day jobs, spending days travelling from one boardroom to the next, always wondering “why am I here?”

My hope for them, if they’ve managed to follow through, is that they are having a lot fewer meetings, and that they are getting a lot more done, in shorter spans of time, when they do gather in their conference rooms.

That said, let me caution leaders everywhere who want to ask the big questions. Are you prepared for the answers? For a human system to improve, some element(s) of it must change. Rules must change, and the “rule” in question might be your long-standing belief that the attitude you brought to play in your rough-and-tumble startup is still applicable in your mid-sized enterprise. Sometimes the change that your system determines is necessary is contrary to what’s comfortable for you.

Are you working in service of your system, or in service of yourself? At times like this, with dozens or hundreds of stakeholders watching, it can get really (REALLY) awkward to be a leader, if your heart is, ummm….misplaced. In one rather memorable client engagement (a story I don’t tell), it wasn’t.

Oops?

I’ve long told clients to “be prepared to be surprised.” That the point of engaging our team is to effect real change in their human system. A human system is inherently brilliant. I hold this belief quite close to my heart. If you ask a human system a challenging question, they will tend to drill through the bullshit and get to real value. Some leaders don’t really expect that to happen. Unfortunately for them, with honest, open dialogue and meaningful collaboration, it usually does.

Change is messy. You can’t get around it. So when you ask a big, hairy, audacious question, and you tell the system that you are looking for their honest input – be aware that they may start discussing (and deciding) things that make you REALLY uncomfortable.

There are further ramifications (there always are). Your system will have now clarified the areas requiring change so that they can move toward greater health. Being sensible, healthy critters, they will naturally presume that, with this new clarity in place, the system will make (and you will actively, passionately support) the changes that move them toward greater health. Your level of activity over the coming days, weeks and months with show your stakeholders the extent to which they can trust you to follow through on critical activities that will enable a more useful state.

I have seen wholesale defections of high performance teams on several occasions in the months after an event. Realizing at a conscious level that their human system is dysfunctional, even toxic, and that leadership is unwilling to act in the best interests of the system, key team members will sometimes choose to leave rather than fight.

So one more time I will caution: the answer may make you really (REALLY) uncomfortable. Do you really (REALLY) want to ask that question?

Yes?

Give us a call.

I recently mentioned some wonderful visual facilitation training that we took in at The Grove, in San Francisco. Well, we were hardly back and off the plane before I had the opportunity to put some of the training into practice. We were facilitating a two-day planning meeting for a client group, and it was imperative for each manager to “tell their story”, so that all attendees would have a richer understanding of what their peers were doing in service of the common goal.

An image seemed a natural way to convey this information in a common format, and very quickly, the restaurant analogy was born. It was playful and instantly understandable (although the kitchen door to the right representing the “resources” the waiter was drawing upon was not as obvious as I had hoped). Our plans to have a single poster reproduced by our regular printshop were scuttled, so on the morning of the first day, I was moving from sheet to sheet, drawing all six templates on 40″ x 72″ sheets of white paper. I made the first tentative sketches in a light yellow, and then moved from chart to chart a second time, going over the outline in black. A fascinating note – the charts are numbered in the order of creation, and you can see how the motions became more fluid as I got into a groove.

When the participants arrived, they were somewhat surprised to see all of the “cartoons” on the wall, in addition to the 12 Windows exercise we normally start with and the Principles that we normally have posted. However, when we got to the exercise and explained it, the six managers were quick to see the utility in the tool, and each filled out the template as met the particular concerns of their group. After 20 minutes filling out their individual templates, each manager “told the story” to the person next to them, as a way of firming up the content before the presentation to the broader group.

Much of the remainder of the first day was taken up in a template by template review of activities. The team moved around the room, some sitting, some standing, as met their needs. Each manager presented their work, and the assembled team worked together in a challenge function, ensuring that each key activity was in service of the overall strategic direction of the Branch. All agreed that the simple, unified template was highly useful.

We do a lot of work overnight on two day engagements, and this one was no different. Although the WhiteBoard Photo images don’t show it off very well, we pastelled each image overnight. The effect was quite pleasing; I am always amazed at how well pastels make images “pop”. The attendees as well seemed to appreciate the added colour; it added a bit of playfulness as well as some individuality and vibrancy to the room – always nice to have.

In the end, reduced for the final Book of Proceedings, these images look much more professional than I felt they did as full size images on the wall. Particularly as Visual Facilitation is a new addition to my toolset, I tended to see the weaknesses, and not the strengths of the individual templates. The images provide an impactful reminder of what was discussed and decided, and helps the attendees to tell the story to co-workers back in their home offices.

Will we do it again? Absolutely. Would I recommend the Grove Visual Facilitation training to anyone who was serious about adding to their facilitative toolkit? Again, absolutely.