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…)

Groups are smarter with women (no duh!)

FinalMeetingImageGender keeps coming up in my work a lot lately, both as a theme for meetings and work, but also in my lived experience. I have a colleague who has taken over one of my clients because we both feel the client will take on the coaching and feedback better from another man than from me. In a conversation about social capital related investments, another colleague says his rule of thumb is to ad 10% to women they are investing in over the equal-on-paper men just because he knows it pays off. Women’s role in agriculture is finally being recognized in the international development world. And in many cases, it is the development of good data to support these hunches that is finally helping us get traction in USING what we know about gender. So this article comes as no surprise. Don’t stop at the first quote… read to the second one!

“If you want to create a team that works intelligently, put more women on it than men. According to studies conducted by , Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence…“More women was correlated with more intelligence,” he says.”

Here are the three factors that emerged from the research:

  • The average social perceptiveness of the group members.
  • The degree to which members participated equally in the discussion.
  • The percentage of women in the group was a predictor of the group’s intelligence.

OK, so now everyone jumps up and down and says, yeah, but this is different online when there is more ease of contribution and no need for eye contact. Yeah. Right.

“Interestingly, the findings hold up in electronic collaboration among a group as well as they do in verbal collaboration. In some tests, the groups came together online and could only communicate by text chat. “It turned out that the average social perceptiveness of group members was equally applied, even when they can’t see each other’s eyes at all,” Malone says. He believes this means that a high score in the ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ test must be correlated with broader range of social skills and social intelligence.”

Online facilitators, TAKE NOTE!
via Groups are smarter with women, MIT research shows | Profit Minded – Yahoo Small Business Advisor.

Zoom and Re-Zoom for Facilitators

Last month I finally got a chance to use a facilitation activity called Zoom which I found on the Wilderdom’s Game resource page — a great resource!  I deeply appreciate that they put the “copyleft” designation on all their resources. THANKS!  As I learned and read facilitation ideas from other sites, I realized I should share some of my experiences as well. Here is the description from Wilderdom’s resource page (which also includes all instructions – I’ve attached a pdf copy at the bottom for taking to an event, but please DO visit their page!):

This game is based on the intriguing, wordless, picture books “Zoom” and “Re-Zoom” by Istvan Banyai which consist of 30 sequential “pictures within pictures”.  The Zoom narrative moves from a rooster to a ship to a city street to a desert island and outer space.  Zoom has been published in 18 countries. The Re-Zoom narrative moves from an Egyptian hieroglyphic to a film set to an elephant ride to a billboard to a train.

I’ve done similar activities, but I love the multicultural perspective of Istvan Banayi’s books, so now I’ve stocked up on multiple copies of both ZOOM and RE-ZOOM, and have on my to do list to break them down and put into protective pages. I left the last set with my colleagues at ICRISAT in Hyderabad. I am also keeping my eye out for used copies, because I like the idea of leaving the book pages behind for groups to use with OTHER groups they work with. Viral facilitation and collaboration!

We did the exercise with a large group of social scientists who work in different parts of the world. Most of their work is done in smaller teams, but there was a real need to connect as a whole team as well. It was very interesting to observe the exercise. First we started with the version where you can’t show your card to anyone else. The group didn’t make much progress finding their order. Imagine if we had tried the “no talking” version! With the “no show” round, I asked if they were ready to show and see if they got it. There were some totally confident and others totally sure they did not have it. So I asked them to put themselves in order (again without showing the cards) and then we’d check.  Uh uh, not even close.

Then they used visual clues to reorder the series. This is where a few individuals really went to work and the rest of the group stood back. It was an interesting shift in agency. When there was a higher degree of “not knowing,” more of the team participated in working the solution.

When we debriefed, I did notice a shyness to share some of the observations people gave me individually as the power dynamics in the group made some of these things harder to say. I try not to be the voice for others in the room, so I had to represent my observations as just that — my observations. But I need to think more critically how to handle this during the debrief.

Here are a few angles on our play together…

zoomcollage1

 

Resources from Wilderdom, copyleft – please share with attribution out of kindness!