Adam Kahane's latest book Solving Tough Problems stresses the importance of speaking candidly and listening openly, in order to allow resolutions to complex (wicked)
problems to emerge. The book is principally anecdotes of Kahane's
experiences as a facilitator of groups trying to grapple with seemingly
intractable problems. What's most interesting about these stories are
the archetypes of people, roles, posturings and preconceptions they
raise, which exemplify the barriers to bringing about change in
organizations. He quotes one I particularly like, that I bet you'll
recognize in your own organization, or perhaps even in yourself:
"I've
worked with these senior managers for decades. They have no energy.
They have turned into turnips. They don't want to do anything. They like having excuses. They are all making big salaries and feeling no pain. They have the perfect cover for anything: Our bosses won't let us do anything. There was a time when they had spirit, but they have been emasculated. Their spirit has been sucked out of them."
As
I read through these stories and listed the negative archetypes
(Kahane's stories have lots of heroes, original and reformed, but
they're not nearly as interesting as the astonishingly recognizable
negatives), I tried to organize them into groups, but I couldn't do it.
Twenty of them are listed in the diagram above, and their 'thought
clouds' are as follows -- be honest and admit how often these thoughts
have gone through your own mind in meetings and other supposedly
collaborative activities:
- "I don't see any problem here."
- "I/we already know the answer to this problem; why are we wasting time discussing it?"
- "There's no commitment to do anything about this problem, so why are we wasting time discussing it?"
- "The staff are making a mountain out of a mole hill here -- this isn't an important issue."
- "Management doesn't want to hear what the real problem is here, because it's their fault."
- "This is a problem for us managers to deal with, not the people in this room."
- "What's the rush on this? I/we have more urgent matters to deal with."
- "He/she's going to pay for that remark."
- "Why am I here? I've got three critical issues to deal with today."
- "No one's going to listen to my/our ideas."
- "I have nothing to offer here. I'm going to work on something else while they talk."
- "I never did trust him/her/them."
- "There's no answer to this problem. Everything that could be tried has been tried already."
- "We tried that already. It didn't work."
- "What's he/she doing here anyway?"
- "They're not listening to me. I already told them how to solve that."
- "I'd like to (censored) X and slowly (censored) Y."
- "What
a dumb idea/disloyal comment: I have to remember to describe it as
'disappointing' since that's the PC way to publicly criticize a
subordinate."
- "This is hopeless. We're just going in circles.
Everyone's already made up their mind and no one is listening,
including me from now on."
- "I wish they'd shut up. I know exactly what I'm going to say next."
- "This is taking far too long, given what little action/insight we can expect to get from it anyway."
- "I can't get a word in here. I give up."
- "...and if you believe what I just said I have a bridge to sell you."
Many
of these thoughts are going around in the heads of people at a lot of
meetings and collaborative events. Kahane's solution is to practice,
enable and encourage more open speaking (candour) and listening
(attentively, without prejudging), to prevent these dysfunctional
thoughts from arising at such events, and get them on the table when
they arise anyway. The Open Space approach would suggest that one
critical way to do this is through crafting the invitation
for such meetings appropriately, so that the right people (and a
minimal number of the archetypes pictured above) show up and
participate enthusiastically, with commitment, passion and
responsibility, and listen intently and allow collective insights and
ideas that could address the issue at hand to emerge.
In an earlier article I re-told the children's story There's No Such Thing as a Dragon.
The archetypes who bring the baggage of these dysfunctional attitudes
and prejudgements to collaborative events are like a roomful of
dragons, unrecognized and tacitly unnoticed by the organizers and
participants.
So one solution is to (politely) not invite the
dragons in the first place. And, if that is done and no one then shows
up, the event organizers should appreciate that potential participants
have opted to avoid what they see as a meetingful of dragons, and
redesign the event so that the desired participants are more
enthusiastic.
A second solution, also borrowed from Open Space,
is to allow participants to 'vote with their feet' -- to leave and
possibly start their own conversations on the issue elsewhere if they
believe they are not getting or providing value to the event (i.e. if
they find too many dragons in the room, or find they are turning into
dragons themselves).
Kahane suggests these additional approaches
to clear the dragons from the room, and get the participants working
together on all cylinders:
- Pay attention to your state of
being and to how you are talking and listening. Notice your
assumptions, reactions, contractions, anxieties, prejudices, and
projections.
- Speak up. Notice and say what you are thinking, feeling, and wanting.
- Remember
that you don’t know the truth about anything. When you think you are
absolutely certain about the way things are, add “in my opinion” or
“from my perspective” to your sentence. Don’t take yourself too
seriously.
- Engage with and listen to others who have a stake in
the system. Seek out people who have different, even opposing,
perspectives from yours. Stretch beyond your comfort zone.
- Reflect
on your own role in the system. Examine how what you are doing or not
doing is contributing to things being the way they are.
- Listen with empathy. Look at the system through the eyes of the other. Imagine yourself in the shoes of the other.
- Listen
to what is being said not just by yourself and others but through all
of you. Listen to what is emerging in the system as a whole. Listen
with your heart. Speak from your heart.
- Stop talking. Camp out beside the questions and let answers come to you.
- Relax and be fully present. Open up your mind and heart and will. Open yourself to being touched and transformed.
- Notice
what is happening. Sense what shifts in your relationships with others,
with yourself, and with the world. Keep on practicing.
Even
when the room is dragon-free and the participants are collaborating
effectively, there are still two more enormous obstacles to overcome:
- The participants all see the world through their own frames
and, as Lakoff has shown, we tend to discount anything we hear that is
not consistent with those frames, and accept uncritically anything we
hear that is consistent with our frames. Like the dragons illustrated
above, even the most open-minded of us still enters every collaboration
with our frames standing between us (our candid talk and our open
listening) and our collaborators and their frames.
- Most
participants have been taught to address 'problems' in certain
traditional ways that are well-suited for simple and complicated
problems but often ill-suited to complex situations. We tend to embrace
these inappropriate techniques too readily, instead of using the more
difficult, unfamiliar and time-consuming processes appropriate to
dealing with complex issues, and allowing understanding and resolutions
to emerge instead of jumping to quick, comfortable, traditional
'solutions'.
No wonder, then, that it usually takes an
enormous sense of shared urgency and commitment and highly skilled
facilitation to create the kind of events that, like the ones in
Kahane's encouraging success stories, not only clear the room of
dragons but enable the unencumbered participants to achieve remarkable
results through true collaboration. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
