Who Decides?
In January, Nevada became the first state in the US to have women in the majority in the state legislature. This article from The Washington Post highlights how issues and bills are being debated that would “not have seen the light of day” in previous sessions: “Bills prioritizing women’s health and safety have soared to the top of the agenda. Mounting reports of sexual harassment have led one male lawmaker to resign. And policy debates long dominated by men, including prison reform and gun safety, are yielding to female voices.”
Having the people affected by decisions and policies participate in the debate and decision-making is a step forward. Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute defined the original dream of democracy as “the participatory determination of our collective fate.”
Some of the core principles of social and racial equity are: Who decides? Who has a voice? What inputs and experiences inform the decisions being made? Centuries before us, people revolted against monarchies in which one person held concentrated power. We have been slowly evolving toward more democratic forms of governance and decision-making. It feels we are in a time of cross-currents, where there are innovations and breakthroughs in participatory process and governance, but there are still many rooms of power where decisions are made that don’t include participation and input of those affected. Plus, there are polarizing developments, extreme concentrations of wealth and power, and authoritarian actions that undermine democratic process.
Evolving how we make collective decisions is imperative and will affect our ability to make sound decisions on many issues. This is a time to expand the practice of participation and good governance in decision-making, at every level. This applies in teams, organizations, coalitions, networks, philanthropy, and the political process.
Each issue is like a string connected to a web. We see the string and think the answers are simple and obvious. No one person can see all the areas where the string connects and affects other issues, people’s lives and the environment. When decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a few, we are less likely to recognize and avoid unintended consequences. Diverse participation widens our collective view and understanding, and it is crucial to shifting patterns of systemic racism and oppression.
Politics tend to divide people into camps and force complex multi-faceted situations into falsely simple yes/no choices. Simplified “for or against” framings, driven by politics, are problematic. Brexit is a case in point. I appreciated this comment on a listserv right after the vote, and see now how prescient it was:
It’s a perfect example of not understanding how to think and make decisions in complex systems; the relationship(s) the UK has with EU is far more involved than even a hundred heads could hold, and it’s suffered a linear intervention reduced to two options of ‘In or Out’. Linear interventions into complex systems explode in your face.
It is critical to adopt approaches to making decisions and governance that are attuned to the complexity and inter-woven nature of the challenges we face and that are rooted in an ethic of care for the well being of everyone (not just those who voted for a particular candidate). Emerging innovations in governance demonstrate that people have the wisdom to come to wise decisions together. Here are a few examples of the bright spots of promise:
- Participatory budgeting – a public process that gives people the power to “decide together how to spend public money,” being used in communities around the world. Check out The Participatory Budgeting Project for more information. [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- vTaiwan – a breakthrough, self-organizing democratic process using on-line forums for building consensus and face-to-face live dialogues. Tom Atlee has written about it in this blog series and here are more links shared by Rosa Zubizarreta, who wrote “As I’ve been telling my friends, it’s good to know that something good is happening on the political level, somewhere in the world…” [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- A Framework for Inclusive Governance and Rural Planning from Sierra Leone, an integrated process of people’s led planning from the local to regional to national level. [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- In philanthropy, conversations on equity and “who decides?” are leading to new models of community-led grantmaking, where community members, particularly those from traditionally marginalized groups, play a more direct role in deciding where grant dollars flow. [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- In response to climate change, the Extinction Rebellion in the UK has 3 demands for government action. The third is to move beyond politics: “Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.” See the Sortition Foundation for more information the process of citizens assemblies. They describe their work this way: “We campaign for a world free from partisan politicking, where representative random samples of everyday people make decisions in informed and deliberative citizens’ assemblies.” [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
- Democracy R&D is a new global network of organizations helping decision makers make hard decisions and build public trust, while strengthening democracy. Check out the list of countries and organizations to see how many are working on ways to involve everyday people in public decisions. [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
Originally published at New Directions Collaborative on May 30, 2019 by Beth Tener
Katy Mamen
Katy’s practice focuses primarily on network and social system mapping, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and systems-informed strategy as key avenues for transformative systems change that strengthens social justice and ecological health. As a facilitator, systems thinker, and content expert in the fields of water, food and farming, and climate change, Katy supports leaders, organizations, and collaboratives in navigating complexity to develop adaptive strategies that address the root causes of social and environmental problems.
Katy is a Fellow of the Academy for Systems Change, Senior Partner at Ag Innovations, and volunteers on several projects advancing healthy, just, and regenerative food systems. She holds a Masters in Holistic Science (with Distinction) from Schumacher College in the UK and a BSc (Honours, First Class) in Physical Geography from McGill University in Montreal. Katy lives in a land-based intentional community in Northern California, where she has honed her consensus decision-making skills over the past 15 years.
Scaffolding for System Shifting Networks
Networks come in all shapes and sizes. However, if you want to be a system shifting network you will need to put in place scaffolding so that transformation can emerge easily and quickly. In nature, billions of soil organisms and mycorrhizal fungal mats work together to form this type of scaffolding to distribute resources and support the growth of plants and trees as they create a forest.
There are 6 basic structures that work together to create an environment for rapid change. Some, such as innovation funds, have been prototyped by many different networks. Others, such as communications systems and governance systems, are still in their infancy. I encourage us to work together to experiment with these structures.
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1) A communications system that provides places, spaces, processes and protocols for individuals and projects in the network to communicate, interact, self-organize, learn and expand.
It includes a platform that has the capacity to provide for network-specific spaces, cross network spaces for networks to interact, and whole network of networks common spaces. Such a platform supports self-organizing: people with an interest to find each other, have discussions, move to action and be fully supported in that action, and then have easy pathways to share what is learned. This aspect of scaffolding is the least well-developed of all the elements and this lack is holding back the potential of networks to bring transformation of systems.
The next step is to develop a fully functioning platform. Four networks are planning to work collaboratively to develop such a platform. If your network is interested in joining a platform cooperative to work on this development, let us know.
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2) An innovation or activation fund that catalyzes and resources self-organizing, collaborative projects.
This aspect of network scaffolding is fairly well developed, with examples from the work of Leadership Learning Community (LLC), Go Philanthropy’s Networks in India, the Resonance Network and the WEB Network.
The idea is to jumpstart self-organizing and collaboration through small grants to collaborative projects. Only a few rounds of such funding are usually needed to tip the network into a self-organizing regime, where experimental, collaborative projects become the norm.
The next step in innovation funds is to have a second round of larger grants that grows out of what has been learned in the first round. In addition, more attention needs to be paid to harvesting learning from the set of projects funded.
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3) Communities of practice (CoPs) and learning popups where people, especially from Innovation Fund projects, can explore new topics, learn from each other, support each other with challenges, and share what they have learned with the larger network.
Communities of practice (CoPs) are also a fairly well-developed element. Most are monthly virtual sessions lasting 5-9 months with 25-75 participants. A typical session includes relationship building time often in breakout rooms, a short content/practice piece, a chance to practice a new process, with discussion on how to apply done in small group breakout sessions, commitments, peer assists for people with challenges, and sharing of what participants learned when they tried to apply a new process or technique.
Usually during a session new topics are identified and a learning pop-up (a one time session) is set up with a subset of the participants attending.
The next step is to more effectively capture the learning that emerges in these sessions and share it with the larger network and networks of networks.
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4) Catalysts: Catalysts help people in the network more quickly shift to network behaviors and processes (such as dismantling racism, self-organizing and learning). We have found that an investment in their training and making them easily accessible to projects and circles in the network can greatly amplify the speed of transformation. Both the Resonance Network and the WEB Network have facilitation pools that are working well.
A facilitation pool or network weaver pool is a group of already trained facilitators who learn how to become network facilitators, especially focusing on helping to facilitate and coordinate collaborative projects. However, they are acting as seeds of the new network culture, modeling behaviors, making sure that projects work on dismantling racism and hierarchy and showing participants new collaborative project skills and processes.
Learning weavers are people with writing, social media and graphics skills who capture stories and learnings and develop protocols for sharing learning. So far as I know, no networks have set up this role yet.
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5) A tracking and learning system for helping people change while also tracking transformative shifts and outcomes, along with a system for sharing learning within and across networks which can identify promising areas for spread and/or possible aggregated action with other networks. This area is just starting to be developed.
Some networks are using quick, web-based surveys (examples are those on network values, network leadership, collaborative skills, meeting assessment, and overall network assessment - most of these are in the resource section). These are reviewed immediately after taking and enable groups to identify strengths and challenge areas, then quickly design strategies to work on the challenge areas.
However, very few networks are consistently putting aside time for learning and/or sharing what they are learning in spite of the fact that without this element, networks are unlikely to be transformative. We need to make work in this area a much higher priority!
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6) A governance system: protocols for co-design, advice and consent to support participative creation of the network and especially of the elements described above.
Scaffolding can be network-specific but we are working hard to design scaffolding where elements can also be deployed cross-network. We believe we can design scaffolding that has some “bounded” elements that preserve the sense of belongingness but other scaffolding that allows people to maximize their reach and influence and pool of potential partners for culture of health work.
If you have added any of these elements to your network, please let us know!
Liberating Structures in Network Development
When working in a network comprised of technical folks, it is easy stay in the familiar territory of presenting knowledge when the network gathers. Sometimes assumptions are made about scientists, policy makers, or engineers and how they prefer to interact at a face to face meeting. "Watch that “fluffy” stuff!"
My sense is a lot of this push-back originates in bad experiences where “interactive methods” were used for interactivity and perhaps less focused on the purpose at hand. With this in mind, I had a blast developing an agenda and coaching the facilitators for the Floodplains by Design Network gathering. I wanted to reflect and pull out some of the highlights of the process, both to acknowledge the fabulous team and the network participants, and to give some clarity on designing for networks, especially technically oriented networks.
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- Ditch the tables: People walked into the room to find a chair set of concentric circles – and were surprised. Coached to put their coats and backpacks to the side, there was a sense of “what is happening?” The folks kicking off the meeting had to adopt a new position to speak to and within a circle, but they quickly got the beat. Without tables, it was as simple as turning to someone to engage in conversation, look across the room to notice faces. The conversational sound level never wavered! [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- Nurture network relationships: Networks balance on the three legs we often use to define communities of practice: community (relationship), domain (what we care about – in this case integrated floodplain design), and practice (what we actually DO!) It is easy in a technical field to skip the community element so we started the day with a round of Impromptu Networking facilitating three rounds of short conversations about what we are grateful for in this work. Three new or deepened relationships along with domain knowledge! No fluffy “icebreaker.” The team crafted the invitation so it would resonate with the people in the room – something, by the way, I would have gotten wrong had I designed by myself. TEAMS, people, TEAMS! [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- The knowledge is in the room: use it! We used a modified version of Shift and Share to highlight as many stories of integrated floodplain work as we could to spotlight both the small and big steps being taken, and surfacing useful lessons for spreading. Along the way, people connect and relationships are nurtured in these rotating, purposeful conversations. We divided the short 5 minute talks, each followed by 10 minutes of conversational Q&A into five thematic “pods,” each with a “poderator” to help track time and capture highlights. We fully encouraged everyone to vote with their feet and move between talks, stay in a pod, visit all the pods, or just hover and bumblebee around. I was surprised that quite a few people stuck to a single pod and suspect there was growing identification and affinity around the pod topics. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- Networks that rely primarily on voluntary participation need to focus on what matters, not on EVERYTHING. To help identify what to STOP doing, we did TRIZ, a reverse engineering process to identify the stuff we are doing that is not adding value. This one baffled some people in the room, leading us to consider how we might deepen the structure if we had a “do-over.” But we discovered later in debriefings that some people really got it and came to some tough conclusions about how the work might need to shift. So it may have also been a little bit of “elephant in the room” going on. I found it fascinating to watch the dynamics of acknowledging that sometimes the stuff we are doing doesn’t matter. A tough one. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- Always find the next step. From the TRIZ we invited people to think about their 15% solution of what they could stop doing, and recommendations to the wider network of the more gnarly things that require a bigger lift to stop at a larger level. There were a few very concrete network recommendations, and some people began to crack open that they DID have some agency to stop things — or start them. That is always the temptation, to add before we clear the decks a bit. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- Use the knowledge in the room. As we started the day by noticing the knowledge in each other, so we wrapped things up with Troika Consulting to get specific feedback on the 15% solutions. In knee-to-knee trios, people dug in to help each other. When we asked for a show of hands of who gained valuable “consulting” from their peers, almost every hand in the room went up. In after-event conversations people noted that this activity and the Shift and Share had high value for them. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
- Don’t forget the reflection with space for every voice. We finished in a circle, just like we started, with a “Just Three Words” debrief with everyone having a chance to say something or pass. Many of the words were captured on the right side of the visual above… you may notice a pattern. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
There were a lot of smiles at the end of the day. The facilitation team did a fabulous job – mama mia, were they talented. The feedback was both positive and criticisms were super constructive, instead of generally grumpy. There was, from where I observed, a tangible pulse of energy.
All kinds of people find value in engagement. Some need it a bit slower, some a bit faster, some need more space for reflection. But in a learning network, we need each other, so we need to design our meetings to truly BE with and ENGAGE with each other. Hats off to the Floodplains By Design team who had the courage to step outside of the “way things are done” and create that dynamic design. You KEEP GOING Heather, Carol, Courtney, Leah and all the shift and share speakers/poderators!
Read more…
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Originally published on 6.6.19 at Full Circle Associates.
Network Evaluation
In complex settings, causality is also complex. We cannot identify a single action that will produce the outcomes we want. We often have to experiment, trying out a number of actions or strategies and then notice what about those exploratory forays worked.
In the process of examining or reflecting on what we did, we often make breakthroughs in our thinking about the situation or problem and this helps us move to more effective actions.
For example, in combating infections in a hospital, we notice that when housekeeping staff work closely with – and are respected by – nursing staff and doctors, the resulting preventative actions are more innovative and effective. This insight leads us to become more inclusive in other aspects of our work, making sure that staff from many different roles work together on solutions. As a result, our hospital becomes a better place for both patients and staff. Complexity theorists use the term emergence to describe such new ways of operating that arise from this combination of self-organized experiments and reflection.
Of course, complex causality makes it difficult to determine whether a particular organization’s strategy is working or making a difference. And, in response to the complexity of problems, organizations in many communities have begun to work in networks so that they can utilize their differences to be more innovative and experimental and so they can access the power of scale, aggregation and diffusion.
A critical question then becomes: How do we determine the value of these networks? How are they contributing (or not) to the solution of problems? How can we tell if these networks are worth our investme nt?
We are just beginning to explore this terrain, but already we have developed a 3 faceted evaluative process that can be engaged in collaboratively by foundations, organizations and the individuals they are hoping to assist in some way. This evaluative process is meant to be inclusive and engaging, as well as developmental. Participants gain new understandings as a result of this process, and often need to restructure activities and even outcomes as they proceed.
Click here to download Network Evaluation.
Lisa Trocchia
Dr. Lisa Trocchia is Associate Faculty in the Sustainable Food Systems graduate program at Prescott College. She is also a network facilitator and consultant offering support in network communication and design, self-organizing, horizontal leadership, and visual storytelling. Lisa holds an interdisciplinary PhD in the Social Ecology of Food. She explores food-based social ecosystems from multiple perspectives, including Communication Studies, Sociology, Political Theory, and the study of networks and complex adaptive systems. Dr. Trocchia is a sensory ethnographer. She researches and writes about the performance of cultural foodways, food and the transmission of affect, and she examines the social ecologies of community-based food systems as sites of participatory and transformative change.
Start At Yes : building resilient networks
In working with communities to build resilient networks, I’ve noticed a pattern. Those who “start at yes” – listening for the possibilities, helping others make sense of their ideas, shining the light on contributors and the community as a whole – are vital to the health and hope of a network. As I encounter the “start at yes” people in my community work, I acknowledge to them the loveliness of their approach and ask how they acquired it. So far, only one said they didn’t know – they just assumed they were born with it.
Most of the people who start at yes say they had either a role model who emulated this attribute or someone who expected it of them – often, a parent or sometimes, a boss. Their self-awareness also interests me, because they realize they are making a choice about how they show up. If one person can do this, can a whole community? Can a community collectively change its mindset? Evidence suggests it is possible – but how to begin?
I began doodling a spiral list of phrases these “start at yes” folks use. The spiral looks like this:
At a community meeting one night, we started a conversation about mindset – and how people living there talked about their town. The pattern was one of discouraging phrases and fault-finding. While no one disagreed that a change was needed, there wasn’t a clear path to what would make it possible. We started thinking aloud about what we could do to experiment. This is when the fun began. Two people in the session were active in improvisational theater – improv. Why not try improv as an approach to a collective mindset shift? Doing what improv requires: Making a deliberate connection between the mindset of starting at yes – a willingness to go with it - and playing with possibilities.
The more we talked, the more we agreed that an injection of hope and making it second nature to incorporate others’ thinking into our choices and throwing the ball back to others and trusting them to act – could have a lasting effect. If nothing else, improv would allow community members to deepen connections, play together, better understand and temporarily inhabit a “we” mindset, and grow to trust their instincts. And if something falls flat, to pick themselves up and keep moving.
Improv relies on generosity – the success of one increases the possibilities of success of all, as is the case when building community. And improv is easy to get started – low cost, fun. If you’ve never done improv, I hope that you will be curious enough to explore it. One source that offers great information is http://www.improveveryday.com/resources. Somewhere in your network of connections or in your community, there are people well-acquainted enough with improv to help get things going.
One simple starting point is to take the phrases on the spiral, above, write one each on a sticky note. Introduce a story line – something a little far-fetched, like “I hear the train may start weekly runs to our town.” Then, have participants utilize the phrase on their sticky note to build on this story line. Begin by reading the story line aloud and choosing someone to go first, and let it go. Encourage people to play – be lighthearted and to let go of performance anxiety. The point is the interplay, not a perfect production.
Down the road, I will provide an update on any changes we see as a result of our improv collective leadership experiment. We realize that it will take early adopters, effort, repeated experimentation, and building new habits of mind to maximize the improv experience. We are building a pattern of play, learning, and un-learning. Stay tuned.
Please share your insights, experiences and questions in the comments section below.
Identifying Leverage Points to Focus Action
The idea behind the identification of leverage points is the assumption that working in some areas can be more productive than others. A leverage point is a place where, if people focus their collaborative efforts, they can begin to shift a system because there is a new opportunity emerging for change. This new opportunity might be a new openness and awareness in people (for example, the recent focus on dismantling racism and white supremacy) or change in policy or in the availability of new resources.
Instead of simply working on the most important action, identification of leverage points is helping people look for something that is most likely to succeed, and will build new momentum for change. The opportunity makes it more likely that any action the group does will be successful and make a difference.
Often working in a leverage point will bring together new partners who will have different perspectives on the problem and when the leverage group discusses what to do, they often make breakthroughs in the way they think about the problem or issue.
Another important aspect to leverage points is that they will start shifting the system on several different levels simultaneously. For example, when a group I worked with recently decided to work on dismantling racism and white supremacy, they read the article by Tema Okun, then discussed how they saw examples of white supremacy culture in their own behavior and talked about how they could shift that behavior. They took a network values survey that helped them see their strengths and challenges as a group around interacting in new ways and generated a set of actions to shift as a group. They also talked about how they could bring this awareness back to their organizations and communities.
Some networks do a system mapping activity to identify leverage points but this a process that takes more time. If you are interested in this, you can check out the course on System Mapping offered at no cost by Acumen.
The free resource for this week is Leverage Point Identification Activity which you can find in the Resources section here.
Learning Weavers
What are learning weavers? Why does your network need them?
I’ve often thought that we need to spend much more time and energy making sense of and learning from what we are doing. Along with that, think how much our networks could benefit if they could share the many great ideas and practices that are generated in collaborative projects and help others use those ideas and practices in their efforts.
But it just isn’t happening to the extent that is needed. So what are we missing? What needs to happen to help capture learning and spread it around?
Last week we came up with an idea: can we explicitly build a pool of people who are assigned to network and project sessions and whose job it is to capture the essence of the session and any new ideas or practices that emerge. We could call them learning weavers.
After the session they might snip short videos from session (of course asking permission of the person speaking) where someone is sharing something important and/or innovative and share them with some annotation on the network’s email list or newsletter. They also might write a blog post sharing a particularly interesting approach with the rest of the network. For example, a slide or two used during the session might offer a useful visualization of something that the rest of the network could benefit from. The group might have used an interesting survey, or implemented an activity that could be used in other settings.
For training sessions that would be of interest to many in the network, learning weavers could annotate the resultant video, noting who was saying what at different points in the agenda. (Youtube has a simple way to create something like a table of contents that can take people directly to a specific part of the video.)
They also might periodically interview working groups or project coordinators, or members of a network circle such as communications, to find out what they have been learning and then share with the network.
These learning nuggets could be productized - turned into a module and offered free or for sale in a network store (see our Resources tab on this site for an example of such a store).
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What skills would such a person need?
They would definitely need excellent writing skills, a knack for analysis, some video editing skills and maybe some graphics experience.
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How much would it cost for a learning weaver pool?
I estimate that you could find excellent weavers for $50-100/hour. Your network might start with a pilot project, bringing on a group of 2 or 3 learning weavers and using them for selected sessions where you know innovation is likely to happen. You might need to invest in their learning about networks so they know what to look for, and it would be good for the group to come together after a month or two of work and analyze how it went and what needs to be changed. Such a pilot might cost only a few thousand dollars.
Seems like a small price to pay to be able to capture and share all the innovation and learning that is happening in our networks. I’d be glad to work with anyone to help set something like this up!
Please comment below and let me know what you think of this idea.
Community Well-Being Warriors
The Well-Being and Equity Bridging (WEB) Network is spending the month compiling a list of Community Well-Being Warriors with the hope of amplifying their stories and fantastic work! Whether we know it or not, many of us are already practicing community well-being. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nurse, a firefighter, a parent, or a custodian, you play an important role in supporting the health of your community.
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Help us out nominating someone doing important work in your community today! Learn more: wellbeingandequity.net/challenge