From the Archives: Reflections on the FbD Learning Series

Screen shot of four videos from Floodplains by Design's "Collaboration Campfires"

Along time ago and in a place far far away, I supported an awesome network of folks at Floodplains by Design. When the pandemic hit we did a lot of the proverbial pivoting. Network work often entails a lot of meetings and we moved everything online. We ran a series of online facilitation workshops in 2020 and in 2021 and lo and behold today I resurfaced the videos of the sessions. The 2020 series was positioned as “Virtual Coffees” and the 2021 series was called the “Collaboration Campfire!” If you are so inclined, take a stroll through the videos here: https://vimeo.com/user142408470

Here are a few of the things that stand out for me from those two years of constant pivoting.

  • A small but consistent core of community leaders are the glue that enables intermittent and even one time participation to have value.  Our co-chairs and core members provided consistency, stability and network weaving through their wonderful relationships.
  • The community core (plus guests) designs as a TEAM, not the external facilitator designing and delivering. Team design yields experiences that meet a range of needs rather than one championed by a single designer.
  • Find that balance between process and content. Content is essential for the technical floodplains work, but the social bonds between members is nurtured through process. 
  • Vary the process, but not everything, all the time. We used a lot of Liberating Structures and we would try and use a structure more than once, but not the same set or string of structures every time. This gave both comfort (familiarity) and variety. More importantly, it built capacity for folks to go back and use the process on their home turf. Or river, as it were.
  • Don’t over-pack the agenda. Oi, some day we will all integrate this learning into our practices!
  • Reflect and learn after every round. There is always room for new insights and ways of doing things. 
  • Celebrate!

 

Franzen: Technology Provides an Alternative to Love

childs drawing of a network of hearts and the caption "love is powerful."

Jonathan Franzen wrote in a NYTimes piece back in January of this year something that keeps haunting me. This quote may be beyond what is appropriate – and yet, go read the whole thing. 

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

via Technology Provides an Alternative to Love. – NYTimes.com.

From the Archives: Alone, Together, Silent, Vocal, Collaborative

Image of a piece of paper with "freedom and responsibility" written on it
freedom and responsibility

Ah, 2017, such a quaint time when we still used Adobe Connect. 🙂 It was a pleasure to go back and re-read Jenny Mackness’ post, The power of silent learners | Jenny Connected.

While the post and the webinar it reflects upon focus on learning/education contexts, there is a lot we can extrapolate to today’s mix of online and F2F. It is always good to remind me, a person who thinks by talking (which is not just being an extrovert!), that people experience the world in different ways and we can use that diversity and design for it, or try to put it in a box. NOT!

The post gives a detailed report on the webinar Jenny attended, and why she liked it. What I like about her post is this question:

The main thought I have come away with is to question whether it helps silent learners to focus on them in this way. Jan Willem felt it does, because he feels that there is not enough recognition of what silent learners can offer. For me the danger is that in doing this we may reinforce the view that somehow silent learners are a problem and that we need to solve this problem by enabling them, empowering them, to become a bit noisier. Personally, I don’t think that learners can be empowered by others. They empower themselves, although they can be supported in doing this.

I appreciate Jenny’s observation. The more we try and HELP people, the more we risk actually diminishing them. 

It appears that the day I saved the URL to Jenny’s post, I also saw something from Fast Company that suggests we avoid the binaries of alone/together, introvert/extroverts and use a pattern of small/large group alternation. 

“The way to maximize creative potential is to flow between being alone and being in a group, and back again.”

This resonates with my approach to group facilitation and is, indeed, part of the fundamental patterns of approaches such as Liberating Structures. As noted in a previous post, this allows for nuance and context. 

Jumping Off Points for Deeper Nuance

Nuance is everything. I saw a very sweet 2×2 from Amy Edmondson while I was taking one of my rare peeks at Twitter. At first glance my reaction was “cool!”

Then the term psychological safety caught my eye because I have been wary of the term. Safety on whose terms? For whom? I have become cautious as I’ve increasingly realized that I have projected my sense of safety on others who have NOT experienced psychological safety at all in the “shared context.”

Here is the tweet, then some comments below.

Amy, I have penned this without reaching out to you to talk about it. If that would be helpful in any way, let me know. I understand that psychological safety is a core of your work, and that my knowledge in this area is experiential and probably peripheral. I have learned a lot from your work over the years. The observations and wonderings I offer here are mostly directed at myself along my learning path.

What I appreciated about Amy’s post is the recognition that learning (or doing, etc.) require us to being open to being challenged, that we need positive, creative abrasion to bring our best to a challenge. It was what she proposed as supporting that state that left me uneasy: the idea of lowering standards, and the perceptions (reality) of being wrapped in cotton wool. The words “apathy,” “anxiety” and “comfort” taking on what sort of judgement? Whose standards are we talking about? Whose perception of who is getting wrapped in cotton wool?

What in this 2X2 honors the individual humans, their identities, as well as the output of a team? What helps the group reveal what is working and what must change to get to “learning.” What values and lived experiences are behind the generalizations?

I am bothered that apathy is the term for “showing up with our hearts and minds elsewhere, choosing self protection over exertion.” At some point, how much do you ignore and when do you choose to self-protect? How is, for example, self protection against racism, ableism and sexism evidence of low performance standards? How much is this the individuals lack of psychological safety and how much is it evidence of an oppressive system? How are self- protection and exertion actually related?

If this were a self reflection tool, a nuance might be “how am I protecting myself through disengagement?” What is causing my disengagement? Who is causing it? What power do I have to change it? Example: how does this land for a woman of color in a male dominated tech meeting who is constantly disrespected or ignored. For a person in the room who is the only person doing primary care giving for a loved one and has a lot on both work and home lines and may appear distracted? For the person with no power in the group? For some, this may be the ongoing experience of white supremacy.

I realize here I may be conflating apathy with anxiety. Thus the simplification continues to break down my understanding… Who knows when most perceived apathy is actually expression of anxiety?

Then to Comfort Zone – what if this was Respect Zone? If we had sufficient understanding of ourselves and each other, then challenging the ideas going into the work or learning itself can be experienced in the space where assumptions about the individual are not subtext for the presence or absence of respect.

So how does the 2×2 help us understand and best choose our approaches and actions? How does it move beyond stereotype or generalization? NUANCE!

If the use of the 2×2 is a reflection by a manager on a member of the team or of the team as a whole, it could feel like judgement, unconscious or conscious bias or even harassment to team members. Or it could be the starting point of asking a new type of question to learn more, understand more deeply rather than judge about people’s experiences and behaviors.

If this is a starting point to reflect as a team about how we all can show up and explore what changes might be useful to the group, how do we do it without perpetuating more oppression and misunderstanding along the way? And if it is for the latter, how could the quadrants be more generative and less judgmental?

Even as I write this I think, whoa, there is so much going on here. How would I represent it in a different way? If we all stood on the same ground, we were homogeneous, shared values (and probably biases), it probably could be done. But in the diverse world we live in, a 2×2 won’t do it.

We could reexamine it from a different 2×2 approach like “Critical Uncertainties” and look at a pair of variables that are important to our work/learning and are out of our direct control. Then we could see what options we could take to get to the “Learning Quadrant” depending on how those variables played out. We would expose our assumptions and uncertainties rather than judge and compartmentalize. I am sketching something now to see if this idea might bear fruit. (Future post! Right now I’m still brainstorming the uncertainties)

So far I have been throwing my own wild generalizations. Probably not helpful. Eugene Eric Kim replied to my Tweet asking for an example of nuance that gets lost in this type of matrix. Good ask, Eugene, as always. Here goes. And I have not written here in my blog about working on my own racism and white supremacy, but that work informs this post – and I recognize I’m still learning and may not get this “right.” I also recognize I can take that risk. Ironic.

As a person who has in the past unconsciously facilitated the loss of nuance, particularly in terms of my privilege as a white person in the US (and even abroad), I will give an example on myself.

I prioritized my world view as a feminist and offered a suggestion to a woman of color with whom I was cofacilitating. We were talking about how men often ignored what women said in meetings. I suggested that mixing high status language with low status body language helped to get men to pay attention to the issue I was putting on the table, instead of being ignored. Some of this was classic self-effacement moves, use of humor to put the men at ease rather than feel intimidated by me.

Turns out this mixing of high/low status is a classic move in the Improv world. Turns out I have been unconsciously using this much of my professional life. AND it turns out it doesn’t work for everyone, particularly if they are the “other” in the room. What creates psychological safety for me may not for you.

My co-facilitator immediately shared that if she used the status mix, she would lose even more credibility as a woman of color. How she talked, how she dressed –everything was always being judged through the lens of the (mostly white) men in the room. So taking a risk with this mixed status approach could actually lower her status. This is not psychological safety from any point of view. While my use of it may launch me into that mythical upper right quadrant of the matrix, Learning, it may move someone else to feeling apathy or anxiety. My using such an approach as a facilitator, let alone as a participant, can (and has) done damage. What worked great for me, didn’t work for her. (By the way, this was a startlingly wonderful learning moment that came from my colleagues generosity and I still feel it cost her a lot to even engage with me about it that has NOTHING to do with apathy or anxiety. My learning cost her labor.)

The nuance of how we understand these quadrants, these words, let alone what psychological safety means and feels like for people different from us, is essential. Boiling it down looks cool. But without nuance, it could be damaging. (Just look at the figured in the image. They might be perceived as white males…)

From the Archives: A call for wiser research on collective wisdom

A group of people sitting on the floor in a circle in conversation

The amazing Tom Atlee wrote a post in 2014 calling for wiser research on collective wisdom. It is a powerful piece of writing and still worth your time to click on the link. What sticks with me is his attention to the need for (and inherent messiness) of including diverse voices in collective wisdom. From the days of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the voices and conversations that emerged, we need to consider Tom’s ideas more than ever.

Here is a teaser to get you started…

I take issue with another major assumption of the “wisdom of crowds” thesis advanced by James Surowiecki, author of The WIsdom of Crowds – specifically, his bias against conversation, dialogue, and deliberation. Harri Oinas-Kukkonen summarizes that assumption as follows: “Too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent.”

This principle exhibits a profound ignorance of the varieties of communication and conversation – an ignorance that prevents researchers in the field from even glimpsing – to say nothing of clarifying – more comprehensive and authentic forms of collective intelligence and wisdom. Most forms of collective intelligence and wisdom are deeply dependent on the interaction of diverse entities, usually in the form of conversation.

When Surowiecki and his followers speak out against communication among the guesstimators in a “wisdom of crowds” exercise, what they are actually speaking out against (without realizing it) are interactions that reduce the level of diversity in the system. What produces the crowd’s accurate collective answers is aggregation of its non-manipulated diversity. This is one way to “use diversity creatively” – a central feature of collective intelligence. But this “wisdom of crowds” aggregation approach is limited to getting collective answers to questions of fact – including predictions (future facts) and currently unknown facts (like the location of a sunken submarine).

 

via A call for wiser research on collective wisdom.