Full Circle Associates

It seems every conversation I have with someone here or overseas  starts with some comment about “these times we are in.” Moreso for my US colleagues, but the change in economic times is on everyone’s mind. I’m doing more work online and less on the road. Budgets for current projects are sticking pretty steady, but no one seems to know what tomorrow will bring. For us independents, this uncertainty is nothing new, but clearly the playing field has changed.

However, I am blessed that I don’t have to lay any one off. I read about closures and layoffs and friends are losing their jobs and it breaks my heart. I feel pretty powerless and am doubling my efforts to help others in my network find gigs. Relationships and networks matter now, more than ever.

But what are leaders of organizations to do when their budgets are slashed by 20, 30 and even 50%? I look at my State’s budget shortfall and know there are no easy paths. Difficult times call for leadership in many forms and at every level, both formal and informal.
When I read Dan Oestreich’s Reflective Leadership in the Age of Layoffs, I said “aha!” I must share this with my husband who, as a middle manager, is fighting the budget and morale battle every day. Dan writes:

Most managers I know do not feel they’ve actually been given much guidance about how to proceed with cost cutting and, particularly, layoffs. As the first line of a recent Harvard Business Review article asks,“Why aren’t layoffs taught as a subject at business school?” I assume the reason is that the subject is both very complex and comes far too close to what it really means to lead, touching that sensitive cross-over point between personal values and professional conduct, a place where theory definitely has its limits.

Dan encourages us to slow down, to reflect, to ask questions that matter. This is good advice for any tough decision regardless of the economic environment.  Dan writes:

…in addition to the fact that the leaders all seemed pretty much adrift and self-enclosed, is their push to simply get together in a room, have some hurried discussion, and then decide what needs to happen. The role of reflection seemed to be bypassed in this rush to create the right strategy — and then, ipso facto, to know what to do. Surely, when the financial heat is turned up, there’s no time to waste, but this is also a time when alignment with real brand values — a topic that requires reflective leadership as a team and as individuals — is likely to be the most reliable long-term guide. Understanding and applying these values demands decisiveness founded on thorough and creative consideration, not some three hour “tall grass” meeting where competing self-interests have a field day, followed up by a briefing and hand-out from Human Resources.

It’s as if no one wants to ask the telling question, “Wait a minute, what was this place supposed to be about, anyway?”

I encourage you to read Dan’s article. It is fabulous from beginning to end and offers some practical advice about how to lead in a time of layoffs.  Then think about your strategy for decision making and leadership in uncertain times.  What are you doing?  What values are driving your decisions? How are you living those values in every step? How can we prepare ourselves to make these hard decisions? How do we account for our responsibility to others in our decisions?

For me, here are some of the things I’m doing with my clients. They are tiny, piddling things when compared to the scale of things in organizations.

• Do we have to meet face to face at this moment in time, or can we save time, money and carbon into the environment and meet online and on the phone? Doing this with a recent client saved them a $600 ticket and 16 hours of my billable travel time. The final outcome of the work is not visible yet, but I think I delivered quality consulting in a way that was probably more flexible than if we had met face to face. (And I have more time with my family!)
• Is some  one else doing something similar to what you have to do and can you do it together to share the costs (and benefits!)? Right now I have two pairs of clients who are cross fertilizing their work and sharing some things with each other. This is bliss for me and saves them time, money and they can focus on their own work more closely.
• What can be deferred? What is most important and valuable now? I think this is the toughest one, because it is easy to become short sighted in tight times. Really asking ourselves the hard question about how we invest our time and resources is critical. We can’t forget about tomorrow as we consider today.
• How much can I not spend to keep my costs down? Both in terms of my own business and with my clients? I tend to be thrifty (some say ‘cheap’) but it is easy to fritter money away on things that don’t really matter. It helps that I work at home, away from shops and places to eat out. When I do shop and eat out, I am trying to patronize businesses in my local neighborhood.

Related to this is a great piece by Peter and Trudy Johnson Lenz  on Six Habits of Highly Resilient Organizations .Here is a snippet of the habits. Do read the whole article! It makes me reflect on my own little one-person organization!

1. Resilient organizations actively attend to their environments.
2. Resilient organizations prepare themselves and their employees for disruptions.
3. Resilient organizations build in flexibility.
4. Resilient organizations strengthen and extend their communications networks – internally and externally.
5. Resilient organizations encourage innovation and experimentation.
6. Resilient organizations cultivate a culture with clearly shared purpose and values.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I know our family is blessed and recognize so many are struggling. I’d love to hear your advice about how you are leading in difficult times… Again from Dan…

In troubled times, reflective leaders step back to witness…and to learn.

(I wrote this in January - never finished, nor published it. I’m cleaning out some blog drafts and it felt worthwhile to try and tidy this one up and get it out. )

As I chew over my learnings of the past week in Rome for the Share Fair and work at IFAD (the International Fund for Agricultural Development, another UN Agency), one lesson I clearly needed to learn was the boundary between edge of disagreement and the pit of cynicism.  As a facilitator, I am often accused of abusing political correctness, or even of being a Pollyanna. In my advocacy of communities, I have been cautioned about the negative influence of groupthink and the erosion of tolerance for diversity. 

I often think of these admonitions as reactions reflecting past negative experiences of something. “I had a group exclude me, therefore groups are more about who is out than who is in.” Or “the politically correct forget the value of critical thinking.” I have always struggled to respond to these comments because they are always correct - some of the time. There are counter examples in every case, and counter patterns. Everything has a dark and a light side, so our generalizations are as damaging as they are helpful.

My only way to cope with this is to try and practice a set of principles that work to promote as generative and useful contexts for working as I can. But heck, like everyone else, I fail. All the time. I abuse my own values. 

I noticed one situation last week that really stuck out for me. I was getting very frustrated with the planning process of the Share Fair over the last few months. I felt a sense of fear to really live into the spirit of knowledge sharing. A protection of organizational rather than collective values as five organizations collaborated to create the event, and the oppressive weight of political formality that is embedded in some of the organizations.  I even got petulant and threatened to not come. Uh oh. 

But I flew to Rome. I was frustrated that the sessions I was to facilitate were labeled as “discussions” - faint cover for “traditional panel sessions,” and that I was assigned a technical session I knew little about. In short, I found a lot to complain about and expected little. Uh oh.

When did I slip from disagreement to cynicism? How could I then let my cynicism dampen or even hurt others who were trying their best to make a positive outcome? One of the lead facilitators, who was overburdened not just with the Fair, but with other work and the typical string of mishaps outside of work, said something to the effect that she had chosen optimism as her approach in the face of challenges. 

Where is the line between constructive disagreement and engagement and the heavy dampening of cynicism? How do we continue to push forward and not fall back to old habits, work with all the negativity, and still retain a sense of possibility and optimism? And why is this so important?

During the Fair, sure, there were a lot of cool things we could have done. Did they go as far as they could have? In many cases, no. But did they go far ENOUGH? There was a palpable sense of learning permeating so many of the sessions. There were people huddled in conversation in the booths and over coffee. (I have to say, I’m SO happy that the decision to have  a dedicated coffee/food bar IN the actual event area was preserved. I can’t say enough of the magical power of food and good Italian coffee to convene knowledge sharing moments.) So what if the opening was stiff and formal. What about the excitement of participants in the blogging session who said “NOW I know what blogging is all about.” Or the colleagues from different organizations who sat together in a panel discussion and discovered important intersections in their work.

In our aspirations to make something the best it can be, we can be blinded by the “rightness” of our own ideas. So, they might be right. But they are not the only possibility. Big ships turn slowly, but the people on them can still be individually and collectively nimble. Cynicism dampens the human spirit. Constructive and positive (in attitude and spirit) disagreement can stimulate innovation and growth. We should no more keep quiet with new ideas just because they are disruptive than we should condem others because they don’t see nor appreciate our divergent ideas. 

I was in a conversation with one of the responsible staff for the fair. I was chastizing him and his organization for not taking the leap of leadership into experimentation for positive change. I said people were being too safe. 

He looked at me, an outside consultant, and said “thats what we hire you for.”

If this is true, then my role as external agent of disruption must continue to offer divergent perspectives, but not fall into the trap of cynicism. Then my value disappears.

Photo: Uploaded on January 18, 2009 by Laura Whitehead

This morning on Twitter, Idocente pointed me to The Girl Effect. WOW! As some of you know, I have been a champion of the GiGis (Girl Geeks in service of the World Cafe community) and have long been a (prejudiced) champion of females in changing the world. So it is no surprise I had a positive response to this site.  Take a look at the video.

Over breakfast today in Bonn, where I’m doing some work this week, my friend Ulf and I were talking about where we have seen positive change take place.  (Check out his cool work with Science-Connects.) We shared stories about how things seem to work better from the ground up. Where people with passion and ownship make things happen, building on assets and in spite of barriers. Girls and women are certainly catalysts for this in many parts of the world. Take a look at this data from The Girl Effect fact sheet (pdf).

• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. (United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 1990.)
• An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school: 15 to 25 percent. (George Psacharopoulos and Harry Anthony Patrinos, “Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update,” Policy Research Working Paper 2881[Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002].)
• Research in developing countries has shown a consistent relationship between better infant and child health and higher levels of schooling among mothers. (George T. Bicego and J. Ties Boerma, “Maternal Education and Child Survival: A Comparative Study of Survey Data from 17 Countries,” Social Science
  and Medicine 36 (9) [May 1993]: 1207–27.)
• When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man. (Phil Borges, with foreword by Madeleine Albright, Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World [New York: Rizzoli, 2007], 13.)

Since I was in Israel and Palestine last month, I have been struggling on how to write about my experience in a way that is not about judgement, but about reflecting what I saw. The tyranny of person over person is heartbreaking, regardless of the reasons and justifications we create. But from what I saw and learned about, women and children are victims as Israel and Palestine continue without a solution for sustainable peace. The statistics around maternal and child health paint a compelling picture that war, occupation, and the patterns that trigger them are bad for women and children. High levels of maternal depression correlate with poor child nutrition. Raising rates of stunting in children from persistent malnourishment (low nutrition and poor nutrition) are staggering. Cultural challenges that resist healthy patterns of breast feeding and trigger increased poor child health and adult obesity and heart disease in Palestinians.

Where is the hope for something better? For basic human rights of food, shelter, clothing, clean food and water and yes, even peace?

It is with the women.

The women of Palestine and Israel, both, who build bridges across the divides were the most compelling points of light I experienced amongst the bleakness that presented itself. At the conference I was attending, I met a midwife who works for the Jazoor Foundation for Health and Social Development who gave me one of the few moments of light and hope I felt during my visit. She was passionate about her profession of helping women have healthier babies. She was passionate about teaching others to be midwives, even amongst professional disdain from other health care professionals. (US midwives will remember the time when they were dismissed by doctors, and are now an important part of the maternal child health system.) Her brains, her heart, her attitude radiated light. She worked with other amazing, passionate advocates for health, social development and peace in the organization, led by another brilliant, passionate woman. (I’m kicking myself for not having her name handy, but it is on my home computer and I’m on the road!)

Women who are catalyzing positive change.

I would name this radiant midwife, and share a short video we made of her, but I have not asked her permission. I’ll try and remmber to do that when I get home to let you experience a bit of her light.

So the message of The Girl Effect site resonated with me this morning. Wherever we work - in businesses, education, non profit, or independent spirits in the world, what are we doing to foster this light in girls and women? Because so far, they are the best bet I can see for making positive change in the world. By no means am I dismissing boys. But girls are so often dismissed, when they may be the best chance we’ve got.

(A small suggestion to the Girl Effect folks. Your about page is in flash, making it hard to copy and share the stats. Yes, I know I can download the data, but that is one more step. Plus data is still locked in a PDF. For strong virality, making it simpler and easier may be more important than making it slick. )

Introduction

The blog has been quiet because I have been on the road for 18 days, first to Rome to co-facilitate the second CGIAR/FAO Knowledge Sharing Workshop face to face phase, then on for a quick stop in Prague (cheaper to fly to Israel from Rome via Prague) where I met my pen pal of 40 years face to face for the first time, and finally to my first time in the Middle East in Israel and Palestine.

Four countries, many sets of new and old relationships and a profoundly moving and challenging experience of a new set of complex cultures has left me so much to reflect on that it will take a while. But in the spirit of learning, I wanted to capture some of it here on the blog because it has, for me, profound connections to the work so many of us do around working and communicating across all kinds of lines. And how everything changes, always.

Even as I start typing this at 7 in the morning, I am amazed how it is so dark, for only 18 days ago the sun was up at this time of the morning. How the leaves changed and the last tomatoes gave up any chance of ripening. I was not the only thing changing. Everything changes. As we seek to facilitate change, we are changed.

Interspersed with this reflection will be personal stuff. Political stuff. It is unavoidable when we travel outside our home territories, to become vulnerable and open to new things. So if you read my blog for the more professional stuff, you may either have to skip these posts, or read them with whatever filter you need.

Part 1 - The Power of Doing TOGETHER

I have been doing work with the Consultative Group on International Research (CGIAR) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the UN for many years. This year, I had the pleasure of doing work for them both at the same time as they collaborated on offering the second iteration of a Knowledge Sharing (KS) workshop some of us developed for the ICT-KM project of the CGIAR earlier this year. The workshop is a three phase online/face to face/online offering focused on learning about choosing and applying knowledge sharing tools and methods in the context of real work. Learn, do, revise, learn, do…. This time we had 35 people from around the world join the workshop with a variety of needs, levels of practice and, as always, time available to participate.

We have learned from similar workshops in the past that the mixing of participants from different organizations has provided some specific benefits. The diversity gets us out of any of our own “organizational ruts.” You know — the things we think we can’t do in our own organizations, the barriers that we feel are always surrounding us. We tend to put those aside when we are with others. The diversity of experience and perspectives opens us up to seeing the work in a new way. What is less-than-useful social “chatter” for one is critical trust building process for another. If we can’t see these things at work in a group, we have a harder time understanding their role in our work. We tend to design knowledge sharing processes based solely on our own perspectives and preferences. When we learn about them in a diverse group, we see them in new ways. This was very present in our online and face to face phases. The diversity does present challenges, but with some persistence and reflection, we can process them as a useful part of the learning. Together.

The F2F workshop was three days of learning about knowledge sharing tools and methods while using them. We spent 1.5 days in Open Space learning about a variety of tools and methods. We used video, audio and graphic recording to debrief our Open Space experience. We broke the ice each day with different methods. We learned together while doing peer assists and Samoan circles. We brainstormed and picked topics with Dotmocracy to Speed Geek about new technologies. It is so hard to really get the essence of these tools and methods simply by reading about them or having them presented. But when you do them, and debrief them afterwards, the learning feels richer and deeper. From the informal participant feedback, this seems to be the case. I’ll be interested to learn more as we do the rest of our post-workshop evaluation.

Debriefing and Crystallizing Learnings

I want to call out specifically the importance of the debrief. After each session which used a knowledge sharing tool or method, we took time to debrief both the experience of the method, how it was facilitated and why it was chosen, leading to a brief discussion of when something may or may NOT be useful. We tried to capture all these debriefs in our wiki notes and blogs, and I hope over the course of the next few weeks, we can weave what we learned in the debriefs into the specific tool and method pages on our shared webbased resource, the KSToolkit. Recently there has been a very rich thread on the KM4Dev (development) email list about capturing lessons learned from F2F events. If you are interested in this topic, take a peek. Look for the posts entitled “Documentation: More than Just Minutes.”

My Key Learnings

• People make meaning through the construction of their own experience so having a chance to try methods like Speed Geeking and Open Space are important moments, even when we have other constraints which might suggest other methods.
• Give people ownership of their participation. At the start of the workshop I commented that many people had laptops open. I said I was not going to tell people to close or open them, but that they should make choices about their use of their laptops based both on their own needs and their perception of how their choices might impact others. In other words, we are responsible both for our own actions and to be attentive to the needs and actions of the group. This is right in line with Open Space’s “Law of Two Feet.” At the end of the workshop, a couple of people commented on how important this was for them, and how different from the “usual” where we are told what to do and how to do it.
• As I noted above, the power of debriefing and shared meaning making.
• Try to have your workshop close to lodgings. It took a lot of energy to get us from our hotels in Rome out 30 minutes to our meeting location. The location and hosting of our workshop by Bioversity was fantastic, but the travel took a lot of energy that could be used elsewhere. You do what you have to do, but just in case you CAN be close, be CLOSE!
• I’d like to do more participant “capturing of learning” with video, audio and other media. We did this a bit and I think there is a lot more that I’d like to experiment with.
• We missed time for people to plan their next steps in their work. Last time we spent too much time on this. This time I think we spent too little.
• Plan a dinner the night before to start the socializing.
• When doing Speed Geeking, we did NOT have expert practitioners for each station and in retrospect, that would have been a good idea. I loved that people created useful groups around things they wanted to learn, but I think this mixed up too many things and Speed Geeking might be best with just one intent.
• Find ways to engage the participants in the facilitation. We did this a bit and I’d like to find more ways to increase others’ chances to facilitate.

Amazing Participants and Co-Facilitators

The joy of work like this is the people I get to work with. The participants of the workshop were diverse, engaged and they didn’t just passively take in information, they engaged and challenged us. And as always, facilitation and learning is not a solo sport, and I want to thank Pete Shelton and Gauri Salokhe, my F2F co-conspiritors, and Simone Stagier who supported from afar.

Soundtrack while writing: the guitar playing of Sungha Jung

Earlier today I blogged about learning from mistakes/failures, particularly with After Action Reviews. John Smith points out another method, Agile Retrospectives (although he is talking about this in the context of communities of pratice). Learning Alliances » Communities of practice by any other name.

Take a peek at the video… Agile Retrospectives