May 05, 2020

May 05, 2020h in Cognition & Communications, Collaboration Strategies, Community Building, Global Learning, Inspiration, Leading Change, Mental Models, Personal Transformation, Social Change, Sustainability, Transformational Leadership by

In politics a “pivot” is a turn in another direction. Lots of different turning is called “spinning.” When we stop spinning and begin to collectively listen and find common ground, it can birth a new story. And new stories can guide new decisions. And belief and energy in a new story is stirred by paying attention to what is actually happening, not from fitting what we see to our favorite filters, but from together saying “this is what is actually happening.” And then how long does it take for a new story to become a societally embraced turning? While my own mind hungers for some grounding and confidence, I know that now is the time for real questions. That is what this blog post will explore.

buttermilknewgrowth

New Stories Coming Up

The idea that real change might be possible is already pushing up like the flowers that are coming this spring. That raises the question: what is real change? I and every organization consultant I know is pivoting from face-to-face meetings to virtual work, and redesigning workshops to run on-line…in a matter of weeks. It’s remarkable how fast this has happened. But is that real change? We’ve been working virtually for a while. What I’m watching for are the tendrils and roots of a truly new story, one that has a hope of sustaining itself into my grandchildren’s adult years, that has the chance of restoring trust and co-creativity.  And I’m observing that the hopeful new is confusingly pushing up through a bramble of the old reasserting itself, and fast replicating species and memes filling the space for new growth. And I also learned that this kind of fast-growing material, like fireweed, helps a burn heal in an eco-system challenged by fire. Can the tender new survive in the rapid attempts to reopen the economy and restore some “normalcy?”

Some Inner Questions

I experience the tension of competing inner stories in my own responses to the Covid pandemic. One day I stopped trusting touching— out of the blue. It started in the first days when reporting on the outbreaks of illness in China and Italy dared to write the words “worldwide pandemic.” That day I used a paper hand towel to pump gas!  Then “shelter-at-home” arrived.  I stayed home.  I felt vulnerable. But I also began wondering. Am I experiencing the beginning of another kind of virus, a viral social meme—that “distancing” is essential for health? Before Covid-19 I would have said that touching is essential to good health.  And I find reassurance in this idea as I experience new levels of connectivity and reaching out that doesn’t require physical touching. But is this enough? Is this enough for people who need healing touch? Is digital touching enough for the elderly who are dying alone?

On another channel I wonder if a new story is forming that rationalizes getting stuff in a day from a company that is notorious about how it treats the human’s socketed into its matrix of efficiency and puts most of its stuff in plastic? Is this going to be the new story of shopping? Or is the new story about how the environment is actually healing a bit in this pause, and people are renewing their love of simple walks, and friendly hellos across the street to neighbors? Will we release a bit from defining ourselves by material gain?

How Can Society Pivot?

These kinds of questions leave me wondering a lot about what allows me, the groups I belong to, or the larger social body to truly pivot. How can this happen when disruption advantages the fast growing and recklessly propagating? What starts a hopeful new story? What holds it long enough to become a true turning point? When did the horrors of the plague transform into excitement about the wonders of science and medicine? How long did it take to accept that seeing the Earth revolving around the sun is more useful than calculating the sun going around the Earth? When in the depression did people turn to believing that people deserved a social safety net? Perhaps societies don’t pivot quickly but turn slowly.

I don’t have to know details to know that right now we don’t have a story that represents a real paradigm shift. And I don’t need to know the future to know that our answers to what it is may well have a direct impact at an extinction-level scale. So, I’m turning my attention to identifying where the meaningful conversations are occurring about this, and who is controlling the discourse. There will be a new story. I want to be part of helping mid-wife it.

Breaking Habits

Some of the work will be releasing from old, limiting stories. For instance, the current news from doctors about the COVID virus and how to treat it is uncovering huge limitations in our public stories about health. “Put people on ventilators if they can’t breathe,” was an early story of how to response. It sounded hopeful. But this response rested on several old ideas—seeing sickness response as a fight and needing weapons in the battle—focusing on reacting to the presenting illness rather than prevention and testing. And the stories became political. “The government isn’t organized to get us what we need.” And “The states aren’t doing enough.”  But much of the discourse stayed within the dominant story of western medicine.

Looking more closely at what is really happening it appears that deaths on ventilators are reaching 68% or more. It’s quite possible these intrusive measures, compounded by isolation from family, and the confusion of being drugged collapse people’s immune systems even more than the virus does. Some colleagues communicated recently about that their Chinese doctor friends report that, on a widespread basis, the Chinese blended traditional practices like acupuncture and Chinese herbal remedies with other responses for Covid patients. This hasn’t been news but could be the tender shoot of a more open orientation to health and support for immune systems. As hospitals fire and furlough workers because their business model is dependent on “actions” rather than results and prevention, will the core story of what’s needed for health change?

I’m wondering now, beyond any specific thoughts about health care, whether any new, long-term habits will set in without a widely held story. I pretty sure they won’t, and that it won’t be easy. Old stories start collecting resources to rebuilt themselves right away. After all, it’s a lot of work to generate a truly hopeful, enduring new story. Let’s just jump back on this old successful habit!

Where Do We Truly Need Turns?

I’m reflecting on all this as a facilitator and consultant who plays a role in helping people generate new stories and deal with real change. What is my role as we emerge from the supposed “worst?”  What conversations do I need to be facilitating? Can I step up to inviting people to consider that in many ways, the global pandemic is a small catastrophe compared to global warming. (There will be no vaccination that will protect us from melting ice caps. If you live in the coastal lowlands subject to king tides sheltering in place would be nonsense). Can I step into figuring out how we can move forward paying attention to equally impactful but slower moving phenomenon, like the economic undermining of the middle class, the systemic health and economic impacts of racism, or the steady erosion of educational access and quality for young peopl

Don’t Attach to Prior Thinking

One morning I was listening to Carol Sanford and a series of daily half hour talks on “Transforming Uncertainty into Action.” She’s deeply immersed in thinking about living systems and regenerative organizations and was quite clear about how our habit of hearing and seeing new ideas through old lenses gets in our way. How do we not do that, I thought.? But then she said, “I like to use frameworks, but not ones that have answers, but ones that guide my attention.” Aha! This is the value of providing change models and theories that function like mental keyboards. This is my work. I felt hope springing up. These might support different kinds of systemically sensitive conversation.

So, what are the new structures that might work on a wider social level and provide scaffolding and language for a new story?

Carol went on. “Think fundamentally about what makes a system whole and complete—what is necessary for thriving?” Her example was democracy. This is a system that needs an educated electorate as a fundamental element to work. (No surprise that Benjamin Franklin focused on newspapers in the early days of the colonies.) Is democracy “whole and complete” when our leaders not only promulgate false information, but question science, learning, and focus on keeping people watching TV and twitter? Can democracy pivot from a deep attachment to materialism as a superordinate value? Are their frames for thinking that champion optimization of resources over maximization?

 A Bigger Pivot is Needed

As I and others are turning to digital meetings under the threat of coronavirus, new “rules” for creating connections and gatherings are emerging, and with equal vigor people are shoehorning the old patterns into the new medium. With everyone on-line, for a while at least, we might expect some remarkable invention. I’m hopeful about this. But I suspect it is WAY too early to know if this is truly a pivot, or just the platform for the conversations that will matter.

I find myself thinking that a much bigger pivot is needed. Our scientists have almost unanimously agreed that the laws of cause and effect are at work in regard to global warming and the irresponsible application of fossil fuels to every imaginal task. It’s a development that has literally fueled the rise of enormous big ag and steadily undermined localized farming. It has literally fueled big pharma, big plastic, big box stores, big shopping centers reached by car and a global economy fueled by ubiquitous air travel. These things have all created a kind of coherence and logic that most of us were going along with. Is this what we are trying to “turn on again?” But questioning all this means questioning some of our most beloved beliefs. What about Black Friday? What about Christmas? What about traveling wherever we want?

I agreed with Carol that for any of these forces to generate a turn, large numbers of people have to become educated about living systems. Will people be able to learn that diversity is one of the strongest counterforces to viral phenomena in nature. Will people come to appreciate that historically in society, local cultures, local agriculture, diverse and indigenous local practices all have long histories of persisting and sustaining themselves. But are any of these responses being considered? If the body is an integrated system, and the lungs and breath are central, what truly supports the lungs and breath? It goes well beyond oxygen. What about our relationships? What about the condition of our spirits? Are our leaders, or we consultants, sustaining a systemic point of view?

JesusinOliveWoodThe Story of the Resurrection

I began writing this blog on the day before Easter. We were all at home, socially distanced. I was on my virtual piano lesson in the morning with Randy Craig when Gisela came up and said. “I’m yearning for a new story, a hopeful story!” she said. “It’s Easter.” A bell rang for me.

What if this generation’s resurrection experience was the rise of truly hopeful new story? I thought about the seeds of it that my GLEN colleagues are generating. Embrace the possibility of collective wisdom, Alan Briskin writes. Collaboration and optimization echo the reciprocal patterns of nature and the way our nervous system functions, Mary Gelinas observes. What if the resurrection was an arising again of the story that Christ died for, the story of the power of compassion and forgiveness, as Gisela and I began hoping after visiting Jerusalem in January? And what if our new story included the transformative power of paying attention to what is actually going on, as Carol suggests—without preconception—and together asking, what needs to truly “turn” and be released to have our system be whole and complete?

 



Jun 18, 2019

Jun 18, 2019h in Cognition & Communications, Community Building, Contribution to the Field, Global Learning, Inspiration, Leading Change, Mental Models, Organization Development, Personal Development, Process Theory, Social Change, Systems Theory, Visualizing by

A recent communication from the Organizational Development Network that outlined a definition of the field and its core values led me to think about the evolution of my own thinking about the field. I’m writing here to futureofodshare this reflection, and to share my hope for the future of the field. I’m not writing a history of OD, but of the quilt of understanding that provides me with direction as a process consultant, and might be useful to other practitioners who work in or with organizations.

Context

My “training,” or should I say first experiences with OD, were at OD Network conferences in the 1970s.  I didn’t know what the field was back then but found out about it when trying to hire Sandra Florstedt for our Coro Leadership program in San Francisco. She worked at Kaiser as an OD Practitioner and explained to me OD was an application of behavioral science theory for organizations, working to see the whole organization as a living organism and creating conditions that would allow people to find solutions to their own problems from within. I remember her telling a story about early practitioners drawing on the work of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, crediting him with founding general systems theory. He was trying to understand open systems in nature. She also shared about Kurt Lewin, a German who helped found social psychology, arguing that a values orientation and democratic processes were critical to achieving planned change. I had been working to get Coro Fellows to understand the city as a whole system and Lewin’s advocacy of action learning and group dialogue was inspiring. Sandra subsequently introduced me to the OD Network conference at Snowmass in 1976 where I presented about Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process and Group Graphics and became a practicing member of the network.

Evolving a Personal Perspective on OD

The seed idea of seeing organizations as living systems, and seeing change as a social process quickly put down roots in my work as I began to develop a practice. Initial work as a graphic facilitator evolved to supporting teams and developing the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model,  then learning and facilitating strategic planning with Rob Eskridge and Ed Claassen, and now doing change consulting and multi-stakeholder processes on large systems. My current work with Gisela Wendling and The Grove’s new Global Learning & Exchange Network (GLEN) is living at the edge of inquiry into collaborative methodology. It is all driving back to the seed thought that open, living systems need different kinds of support than machines. In the process  my quilt of understanding pulled in ideas from complexity theory, cognitive psychology, social constructionism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Earth Wisdom practices. And always, tracking the tension and sometimes polarization between a materialistic and a holistic way of thinking about organizations and change.

Still Thinking About Whole Systems

My graphic work is inherently about making systemic sense out of people’s thinking, so the seed impulse for OD is still strong, but I’ve reached out to other thinkers beyond the field of OD.

I’ve been personally deeply inspired by the holistic work of Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process. He didn’t deal with organizations, but as a cosmologist set out to reconcile the knowing from metaphysics with the best findings of physics and mathematics. He was a systemic thinker through and through, but insisted that purpose and process are more fundamental than objective structure, though purpose and process need these structures to express themselves.

I also discovered that researchers in complexity sciences support his orientation, finding that living systems organize around flows of energy from which structures emerge and embrace open, not closed, rule sets for interaction. Flows include money, information, constituencies, climate, and people themselves.

This process orientation has led to my paying attention to Frederick Laloix’s Reinventing Organizations , inspired by Spiral Dynamics, an orientation that is developmental at its core. It’s popular in Europe and leading people to experiment with much less hierarchical organizations out of trust that if people are taken seriously, they can manage and solve problems in a more “emergent” way. (There are missing elements I will explore in later writing). I also think that Theory “U” in its inclusive embrace of spirit, soul, mind and body is a clearly process oriented methodology that is very compelling.

Past Reflections, CURRENT EDGES

As the crises rising from climate change and accompanying mass migrations accelerate, I can’t help but believe that a huge amount of adaptation and change will be required in the future. People could (and are) reverting to img_5446fear-driven authoritarianism, simplistic, bunkered responses but might also be (and are) called to step up to higher level of collaboration. It’s not a given. What will support    this second option?

Will the lessons from neuroscience and social psychology about brain biases and hi-jack reactions help practitioners create safe spaces for collaborative co-creation of new alternatives and avoid numbing and dissociation?

Will reclaiming the role of ritual and ceremony and traditional practices bring nourishment and feeling into systems wrung out with efficiency? (My current life partner, Gisela’s, work on liminality and change is now recasting many of my assumptions about traditional OD approaches as I see how shut down people become without attention to the inner process of change or the creativity that lies in the in-between spaces where cultures meet.)

Will learning from Earth-wisdom practices and indigenous methods help restore our connection to nature and each other?

Under it all I wonder if somehow we can transform the deeply entrenched materialistic paradigm into something that respects relationship and spirit as much as objective truths? Can we reclaim an anchoring in core values that are deeply moral?

The original thinking of the founders of OD reflect many of these perspectives, reacting as they were to the trauma of world wars. But methods birthed in humanism have become canonized and abstracted to a degree that some of the original curiosity and experimentation gets lost. There are  exceptions. Lisa Kimball, a pioneer in computer conferencing and former OD thought leader, advocated an approach called Liberating Structures that deliberately mixes and matches different modalities to stimulate new awareness and jump out of siloed thinking. Bob Marshak and Gervase Bushe surveyed many new OD approaches is their book, Dialogic OD:The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change.  They see World Café, Open Space, Future Search Conferences, The Art of Convening, and other high engagement methods focusing more on new narratives and emergent, generative imagery than on diagnostic processes.

Are Organizations Even the Right Focus?

But deep down I’m personally awakening to the possibility that organizations may not be the most relevant focus for those of us who work for and within organizations. Today people and organizations are so interconnected and interdependent— embedded in overlapping networks and consortia, fields of practice, value webs, and a booming world of free agents—amid constant change—that “context” may be a more important frame for attention. And by context, I mean much more than paying attention to customers and constituents. It includes the environment, cultures and their values, other sectors and organizations, and larger social networks and relationships.

Some of my current GLEN colleagues’ are working explicitly with energetic fields and collective intelligence, using the learning from neuroscience to create “safe” environments for engagement and using design thinking for social change. Philanthropic organizations are funding for collective impact, asking for NGOs to cooperate and collaborate in facing important issues. Multisector collaborations and networks are arising to face systemic issues. The adaptation requirements of global warming will force us all into levels of reinvention we’ve never even imagined, well beyond nicely bounded organizations.

I also wonder how my and others’ years of focusing on “the organization” has contributed to our field supporting many organizations just becoming better at maximizing the extraction of value from people and the land and avoiding responsibility for impacts, and completely ignoring context.

What if OD Were…nasanorthamerica

So, wrapped in this quilt of reflection, I wrote out my own definition for a field of OD that I could live into.

“The field of Organization Development is inspired by the question of how to support human systems that are alive, evolving, and more like true ecosystems than mechanisms, although they depend on these for expression.

We help leaders, teams, organizations, communities, and larger networks learn to connect with purpose, motivate themselves to act, find appropriate processes to guide collaboration and co-creation, and create results that both improve the effectiveness of their organizations and contribute to the quality of their communities and the Earth as a whole..

We are not afraid of the complexity and inquiry required to respond to these questions. We learn by doing and do to learn. We continue to seek out and test theory that helps our clients make connections in the midst of turbulence and fragmentation. We are capable of being, at heart, a community of practitioners, schools, and networks believing that humans have only just begun to tap the full potential of people working together for the common good.”

I want to be part of a future in a field that differentiates itself not by the value of its answers for organizations alone, but by the depth and sensitivity of its questions in service of the whole.

Jan 05, 2017

Jan 05, 2017h in Collaboration Strategies, Global Learning by

ds_2017_journal_image_01_2017As the new year begins, I am pleased to introduce my newly revamped website at davidsibbet.com. It’s the same URL as before, with lots of new content from my work seeding the field of visual facilitation. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Fusing Visual and Dialogic Practice

Looking ahead in 2017: for years The Grove had as its tag line “transforming the art and practice of collaboration worldwide.” Our work has helped countless organizations and has generated a whole field of visual practice. Now the ‘valley of concerns’ has deepened, and we need to reach further. People who actually know how to collaborate will be needed more than ever.

This is why The Grove will be launching our new membership support network, the Global Learning & Exchange Network (the GLEN) in the next few months. The GLEN will focus on change practitioners—internal and external leaders and process consultants—who feel called to step up to the problems of our time with collaborative approaches. Not all participants will be visual practitioners. Some are steeped in dialogic practice. We believe that empowering people to work expertly with both modalities will advance the field.

Read more…

Jul 22, 2014

Jul 22, 2014h in Global Learning, Leading Change, Visualizing by

My second visit to Berlin is haunting me. I think I’m glimpsing our collective future here. The evidence wasn’t in the obvious things—the daring architecture and rebuilt Potsdamer Platz, site of the old wall—but in the corners and crevasses, the young people, and the Michelberger Hotel!

Rachel Smith (Grove Director of Digital Facilitation), Gisela Wendling (the Grove’s Director of Global Learning and a native of the area near Cologne), and I were in Berlin for The Grove’s Advanced Visual Facilitation Workshop, scheduled to coincide with the EuroViz conference the following week.

MichelbergerBar

Read more…