For the first blog in this mini-series in which I interview Beth Smith, click here. Beth’s interview focused more on specific case study projects, some of which I’ve compiled as part of Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme’s case studies. So dive into some diverse case studies to get some inspiration for what your own project could look like. 

This post is about my chat with Anna Panagiotou. Anna has been a wealth of information for me to turn to as I have been finding my feet since starting work with The Cynefin Company just a year ago. So I wanted to ask her what it’s like facilitating projects within The Cynefin Company, from seedling ideas to applying the insights.

What is your experience of getting people’s projects up and running? What do you like about that process?

I especially like the connection part, when you see questions and aspects of sensemaking that were formerly disparate, come together, and see how they connect. That along with helping people to do things that they wanted to do for a long time but were hindered by not knowing how. 

The people who come to us want to connect with those doing the on-the-ground work, and don’t see things in black and white, either/or. We’re giving them the tools, so it’s wonderful to see them get excited about it. There’s a sense of joy of possibility and discovery. 

What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered? 

There’s two big challenges. One is to pay basic lip service to complexity and call the same things by a new name, but essentially, keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing before. The other day, a client described this perfectly: “I don’t want SurveyMonkey with triangles.” This can happen if you approach a different tool in exactly the same way as you’ve approached things before. The software isn’t going to do everything for you. It offers capacities and possibilities (affordances if you want to use the technical term) and it makes certain things easier. But it’s not going to force you to do things a certain way, you have to do it yourself. 

And most importantly, the second challenge: you’ve got your stories, you’ve got your data, and now what? The tool is not going to draw out insights and put them into action for you. You have to do it and do it with your team, organisation, community—and you have to do it in a way that works with your context. We can’t help that much with getting buy-in from the wider organisation. 

Is there any advice that you would give to people in relation to these challenges? 

I would give a piece of advice that is included in the Virtual Quickstart, but people tend to brush it off. Think about all those things in advance, don’t jump into planning or designing the SenseMaker collector itself. Plan and design getting buy-in from whoever’s relevant from the start because you might want to get community members, for example, involved in designing it. 

This is part of why I’m excited we’re focusing more on the methods. Hopefully it will make it easier to help people co-create the approach, but also approach the patterns and stories and generate insights and intervention ideas together with the group of people impacted by the changes. It will also be helpful in doing things in a live, ongoing way, rather than gravitating towards static approaches. This is how you explore the complex space; the data and the patterns are there to help you but they’re not a substitute for action, you have to decide how to apply them in your context and then go and try it out. 

What advice would you give to those people who are kind of approaching it like SurveyMonkey with triangles? What would you tell them in order to help them take a more Cynefin Company approach? 

When people are shown alternative ways of doing things, the vast majority of them want to try them out. They’ve come to us because the other ways aren’t working for everything they need to do. And when they get the logic of how and why things are different, they jump on it. Some might have challenges such as convincing quantitative researchers who spend years developing the perfect Likert scale (which can be great in some contexts!). But they find ways to work with those people in my experience. 

Sometimes you end up with things that are not perfect, but that’s not the goal, the goal is to take action, to probe so you can sense and then respond. 

Thanks for sharing that wealth of experience and insights Anna! 

Check out my other blogs in this series: here and here. And stay tuned for a blog coming very soon on How to Create A Citizen Sensor Network.

Featured image: Bud Helisson on Unsplash

From the valleys of Wales, to the streets of Malmö, and townships in Cape Town, The Cynefin Company has been on a journey through all kinds of wonderful citizen engagement projects and now we’d like to share our stories and learnings with you. 

I’ve compiled some of the Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme’s diverse case studies. They paint a picture of what we’ve been up to at The Cynefin Company over the last few years, and will hopefully serve as inspiration for what your project could look like. Read about our case studies in-depth here.

The case studies span a wide range of topics: from service, policy and legislation evaluation, to community development and planning for the future, and they have produced recommendations that have been turned into national policies. People have used SenseMaker to share their stories from their homes, streets, libraries, and many more places. 

I’ve been with The Cynefin Company over a year now, and there’s many things I love about the work. It’s a great design challenge; taking people’s ideas, research questions and the constraints of the area they’re working within and then helping them to design something that fits, is really fun. 

As a newbie to the team, I learned a lot by trawling through case study documents and talking to Beth Smith (manager of the Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme) about them. Beth, along with our colleague, Anna Panagiotou, are treasure troves of insider knowledge, so I decided to interview them and share their wisdom more widely. This post features Beth Smith, and I will publish a second post with all the insights from Anna Panagiotou so stay tuned for that. 

What’s one case study you really enjoyed and why?

I would probably say the very first project we did in Malmö, called My Malmö. It was organised mostly by a charity called Tjejer i Förening in collaboration with Forward Malmö and the local municipal government. Young people acted as story collectors (previously referred to as citizen journalists). What was really great about it was that the young people just ‘got it’ when it came to deeper forms of democracy. They were just enthusiastic about making a difference, they wholeheartedly believed in it and did the work to make it happen. Their drive came from a place of real integrity.

What was it like to work with them?

[Laughs] I didn’t actually do a huge deal. I enabled them to do things: put the tool in their hand and showed them how to use it, and they adapted it to their own context and ran with it. That was what was so wonderful about it: it proves that this stuff didn’t have to be hard.

The local government provided support too. They were willing to try something new, and had the attitude that even if it failed, there’d be something to learn from it. And they still learned a lot even though it didn’t fail.

What was one case study that you learned from the most?

I will always refer to the Valley Stories project as my baptism by fire. It exposed all antibodies of established ways of doing things. It brought the resistance to new things to light, and it proves that they weren’t insurmountable. Some people were hesitant to get involved with something that was so unprecedented, while others became champions of the project and citizen engagement. 

A lot of the value wasn’t recognised until afterwards. But once the path less trodden had some more footprints along the way, people became familiar with the language and methods and it was easier to explain what we’re doing and what value it brought. 

What project had a big impact?

Measuring the Mountain had big government implications. The first year of the project led to 16 recommendations, 15 of which were ratified by the responsible government minister. 

What would be your dream project?

I really like the idea of mixed public services; things like multi stakeholder, multi-agency public service work. So bringing multiple different public service sectors together around citizen voice. I think for me, it’s about getting a sense of place and understanding it from multiple different perspectives, to understand what it takes to make a place thrive. And this can be enabled by incorporating things like asset based community development. 

What advice would you give to someone trying to start a citizen engagement project? 

From my experience, start small and find people whose heart is in it and work with them, because as soon as you can demonstrate value with people who are passionate, others will start to pile in. And it’ll always be a bit difficult the first time because you have no real blue print, but it does get easier.

Nice one, thanks for all insider knowledge and learnings Beth!

Next week, I’ll share Anna Panagiotou’s interview about her experiences facilitating projects within The Cynefin Company.

Featured image: Tom Hermans on Unsplash

I’ve just started reading Mark Fedyk’s 2017 book The Social Turn in Moral Psychology which I picked up on an impulse in the MIT bookshop on my last visit to Cambridge.  I’m only one chapter in but I suspect it will end up on The bookshelf.  

To set the context for this I have long argued that one size fits all  approaches don’t work.  One of the main functions of Cynefin was to create a both/and culture in contrast to the linear succession of management fads, each claiming universal application, which have been a plague in management science and practice for many decades.  At the same time it is not a matter of saying anything goes or in the false cant of the Young Earth creationists – everything is a theory and therefore all theories have equal validity.   Many, many theories are incoherent to the facts and not worth persuing, others have coherence, they have explanatory and sometimes predictive power and their exploration is thus a worthwhile journey to embark on.

I also, back in 2016 I’m pleased to say, made a key distinction between explanatory and predictive power linked to scalability. A distinction that Fedyk also makes in looking at the biological and ethical roots or moral psychology.  All of this is a part of a series of key questions for those of us working in complexity science, namely how do we deal with inherent uncertainty and when can we say that something is right?   I’m not of the school of thought (although I think Ralph Stacy is but I could be wrong) that takes an extreme post-modern position is denying the possibility of material and evidential truth.  But that said this is a problem and some irony – in taking the science of complex adaptive systems I am starting from a realist philosophical position, qua materialist while talking about emergence and inherent uncertainty.

This is an ongoing issue and we will all make progress over time but Fedyk has helped me considerably with his idea of Mayr’s lemma (he references this to Ernst Mayr in a 1961 paper which introduced the proximate-ultimate distinction into biology.  Now I knew of this but had forgotten it (which is not unusual) so it was good to get a refresh with some added insight.  I’ll summarise Fedyk (pp page 31-32) before drawing some conclusions. 

1. Proximate explanations are mostly endogenous to the body of an organism, they cure within, and within the life time of the organism and provides sceptically plausible explanations of behaviour based on those properties: genetic, biochemical, neurophysiological etc.
2. Ultime examplanations are those that occur exogenously to the body and affect more than a single organism.  They exist over long periods of time and are almost always structure properties and constraints of the environment so we get population-leve phenomena such as natural selection.
3. Mayr’s lemma describes scientifically plausible uptime and proximate explanations that stand in a many-to-many relationship.  We can’t infer which proximate explanation is true from an ultimate explanation and it is also not possible in general to anger which ultimate explanation is true from a confirmed explanation either. 

Paraphrasing in the above is entirely my responsibility!  The differences here allow Fedyk to assert that contemporary moral behaviour is a subset of adaptive social behaviour, something supported by Jablonka and others. It means that an explanation of human morality while possible from a purely deterministic approach (Wilson’s Sociobiology) the fact that there is an explanation does not mean that Sociobiology is all we need; transdisciplinary approaches will all produce some form of explanation with varying degrees of coherence.  Critically this means that morality in humans may be more than the social behaviour of a species.

Now all this is very important for many reasons but I want to draw out two:

In terms of our work on ethics and aesthetics it means that there are qualities that cannot simply be derived from biology or context for that matter and we can thus work on holding people responsible for moral acts, and also we can develop moral sensibilities and education for leaders and others.

In terms of method I now have another dimension on constraint mapping and strategy formulation.   I’ll probably work those out teaching the advanced masterclasses in Reading and San Francisco later this year and in blogs post before and after those events.

I realise overall this post is  little obscure – but it is an important one never the less  and maybe seminal in terms of Cynefin development- now back to the book.

Banner picture is cut from an original ‘Lateral Root Emergence’ by  BlueRidgeKitties on Flickr used under a creative commons license – see link for terms

In text picture is of a Monocot Root: Epidermal Root Hair in Lilium from Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Library

The two illustrate the difference between exogenous  origin of root hair and endogenous origins of the lateral root.  Lateral roots original from the pericycle deep inside the root, while root hairs are superficial/

I was originally going to move on to post about constraints but a early meeting this morning involved a stimulating discussion with the senior partner of a law firm and as a result I’ve going to carry on from yesterday’s post and return to constraints tomorrow. In that meeting we were looking at how to do strategy in the complex domain. As a part of that conversation I drew the liminal version of Cynefin and combined it with some recent developments of what we call MassSense; the ability to gain multiple perspectives on a issue in near real time. Doing that with an intelligent and cynical (the good guys are always the cynics, they care) audience was useful and I continued to think and develop the ideas while drinking a much needed long black following a 0700 start! In a subsequent meeting we started to link all of this with work on leadership journey and 360 feedback so a lot of things came together.

For the moment I will focus on the use in strategy and start with some basic principles. If we are dealing with complex adaptive systems then we can’t plan to a desired future state (which doesn’t not mean we can’t have a sense of direction). The whole planning paradigm that grew up in a few decades ago, exemplified by the early Porter work, focused on clear analysis and strategic focus with proper role and and control of plans. Nothing wrong with that for aspects of an organisation or market that has a sufficient level of constraint to create repeatability – i.e. the complicated domain of Cynefin. But in the complex world things are different.

There is then a related set of issues with the whole planning approach in that it tends to be top down with engagement a matter of communication and persuasion. Aside from the ethical and other issues I would argue that there are pragmatic arguments against this approach in terms of engagement to gain minority views; the ideas that are not mainstream but which may contain a germ of truth. Somewhere in both organisations some people are thinking differently and may have the germ of an idea which would provide major strategic advantage. The problem with most planning cultures is that advocating a left field idea is career limiting and even if senior management are open, subordinates may not think they are. Surfacing outlier ideas is more important in strategy than accepting the dominant or consensus view. In practice a lot of organisations have understood that, but instead of rethinking how they scan, they hand over responsibility to the great leader.

So lets take a look at a different approach; and I reserve the right to amend this over time. This also needs SenseMaker® and high abstraction signification to work but it is building on existing work – all the elements arise out of practice but the assembly here is novel. Open to working with network members and their clients to develop this. So for the moment, pending a more elaborate white paper, here are the steps:

1. All of workforce engagement in generating micro-scenarios about the current and immediate future state of the organisation and its market. This can (and should) be extended to key customers and partners who can be engaged by in the effect the offer of a free service with report.
2. From that we can create a dispositional map of the various views and attitudes (I’ve shown this as a landscape map on the illustration).  From that dominant views and scenarios can be moved into a the complicated domain and subject to conventional planning approaches.   
3. Minority clusters are potential threats and opportunities and need to be subject to more focus from leaders.  Those are shifted or moved into the chaotic liminal state, looking for unarticulated needs, seeking exaptive links between existing capabilities and unarticulated needs; identifying hypotheses about novel or new ways of doing business or creating markets.  (I’m going to have to elaborate on this but for the moment that is it)
4. The experiments that come out of that are the safe-to-fail parallel experiments of the complex domain and I’ve written a lot about those.  As they mutate and form they shift in the complicated liminal space of Cynefin and they critically we need to hold them there for as long as possible to prevent premature convergence on a solution.  The results may be new experimental businesses or simply disruptive moves into the current markets to see if perturbations change the space to one more favourable to our own positioning.

In all of this we are seeking to change the energy gradients of the current state to one favourable to us, unfavourable to the competition. Picking up on my earlier work on apex predator theory this is different, depending on if the eco-system as a whole is stable or itself subject to perturbation. In the former case we work within the constraints of the system which evolve around and with the apex predator. In the latter case we inject experimental, low energy experiments to see if the new ecosystem can stabilise around our capability, or our adjacent possible capabilities.

Through the process we are constantly presenting and representing material to our networks of employees and partners to validate the approach and prevent pattern entrainment that is an inevitable consequent of small group interaction – or the pre-formed patterns of the large consultancy firms.

Now I plan to write that up in more detail, but that is the essence for conversation, questioning and practice.

The image that opens this post is another aspect of the 2011 Burning Man work Liminality by aleXander hirka

I’m picking up on my earlier posts on experts and professionalism by addressing the more controversial issue of workshops in modern practice. Now before anyone gets paranoid or over reacts I’m not arguing against workshops per se. after all I use them and have developed a range of methods that depend on workshop type interaction. However I am concerned about an over focus on what should be one technique in a wider process. I am also fundamentally opposed to workshop techniques that directly or indirectly take a therapeutic approach, or use methods derived from therapy. Such always seem to privilege the therapist and either infantilism of culturally filter participants. Hence my use of the psychotherapists couch as the illustration for this post. I’m not alone in thinking this. Participative Action Research (PAR) has been criticised by anthropologists (I have a reference but can’t immediately recall it) as privileging those who match the cultural perspective of the facilitators. I’ve long criticised many Appreciative Inquiry practitioners for determining what stories people are allowed to tell. By the way that criticism does not include the original stuff from Cooperrider but the industrialisation into a always look on the bright side of life that is the more frequent receipt based instantiation of his original ideas.

To give you and idea of my paranoia here, when I was originally developing methods while working in IBM I worked in Denmark so we could facilitate in English but people would speak in Danish with no possibility of the facilitator understanding the content. Our role was to enable a process, not engage with content. From my perspective the facilitator is always in a power relationship with the participants and no matter how much people protest that they don’t do this the more I am convinced of the issue. Creating methods based on perfection don’t work, building processes that don’t require perfection scale. So just as in SenseMaker® we allow the contributor the power to interpret their own narrative, so in facilitation we do our level best to de-privilege the facilitator by removing them from any and all engagement with content.

My other concern is that with workshop based approaches to change there is too much dependency on the event. In our work on citizen engagement we are looking at the ability of a community to stage multiple, contextual micro-events that generate small nudge like changes in the present rather than the idealistic future orientated plans that tend to emerge from workshops. I’ve seen far too many people judge the success of a change programme by how people feel at the end of an emotionally charged workshop, than what they actually do weeks or months later.

More on this in future posts but the simple less is this. If the method allows the facilitator or team to in anyway influence or be a part of content analysis or creation then I think you have a problem – both in authenticity of analysis and in power and effectiveness of the resulting interventions,

I thought I had better conclude yesterday’s somewhat dark with a reference to the value of hope, one of the three theological virtues. To despair, however tempting, is to son and sin most grievously. Another related sin in the Catholic tradition is the sin of presumption, which is a rejection of grace, something I referenced a few days ago. Ive chosen to illustrate this post with a painting bu the artist Frida Kahlo, who was crippled by a road accident, suffered a miscarriage and an abortion, but in her final painting we see inscribed Viva la Vida, or Long live life. Faith and Charity complement Hope and are considered a something bestowed by grace, rather that something achieved by effort or purpose. What I take from that is that hope is innate to the human condition. In the darkest times despair is a surrender, hope is life enhancing. Hope is also perilous, Frost sees it as “Betwixt and between, the orchard bare, And the orchard green”. Hope is the ability to see through current suffering to a future unknown, perceived “as through a glass darkly”, but a future in which there is the possibility for something other than despair.

So hope is a revolutionary act, a means to assert the right to create meaning in our lives, to believe that that is something, someway, to a better future. I can think of no better Christmas message; whatever happens maintain hope that we can transcend despair.