NCP Inquiries into Systems Practice - 10th post of 3rd Project

This is the tenth blog post in a series on the Jerusalem Vision Project, which is the third Systems Practice project undertaken through the Acumen course using the Omidyar Group’s approach to pragmatically applying Systems Thinking. 

The project took my rudimentary knowledge of Systems Thinking as a basis for obtaining a better understanding of Systems Practice and applied it to a complex challenge - Israeli/Palestinian relationships in the City of Jerusalem of which I admittedly knew relatively nothing.

This specific blog post is going to again review this endeavor, not of achieving better relations between Palestinians and Jews in the City of Jerusalem but in the utilization of Systems Practice to address such complex challenges. These points have been made before but across disparate posts making their assertion somewhat disjointed.

These continuing endeavors seem to have worked well in attaining a better understanding of the Systems Practice methodology having initially made a late start in properly applying the methodology the first time with an inquiry into food trucks for homeless camps but still having concerns about the process afterward nonetheless. The second time, looking at plastic pollution of the ocean in Bangkok, Thailand, gaining a better understanding and a somewhat more successful application but still having questions that remained or continued to be needed to be tested to confirm certain aspects in terms of how Systems Practice could be utilized in developing new community paradigms.

The difference then between this Systems Practice project and the previous two projects is first, a better understanding of how a Systems Practice approach works and second, instead of focusing on each project step by step this project waited until completion to get a better overall view of the process. Both to determine how the Systems Practice process unfolded and to assess how Systems Practice might be integrated with Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.

However, endeavoring to absorb the entire process after its completion raised a number of complications particularly when attempting to communicate the worthwhileness of the effort with anyone who has had little to no experience with Systems Thinking or Systems Practice. It is not a difficult challenge to get those interested in Systems Thinking or Systems Practice to take a look at another example of the methodology to either agree with or disagree and critique. You can simply ask them, the community is especially helpful.

It is more of a challenge to get those neck deep in dealing with real-world messes to consider Systems Thinking and Systems Practice as viable approaches to finding solutions. This takes us back to the first paragraph. Any contribution I made to specific projects was not based on my first-hand knowledge of the particular challenge under consideration but my relatively better understanding of applying Systems Thinking and increasingly, a Systems Practice approach to these challenges, in cooperation with others who had committed to trying to apply the approach with their enrollment in the course.

The Jerusalem Vision Project had its own particular challenges being based on both more complicated and conflictual issues, in addition to its complex nature. Complicated and conflictual because of political and historical reasons but also somewhat internally conflictual, though collegiately so, because of distinctions between different mental models used by the project participants. The complex nature of the challenge though may not be as readily apparent because of the confusion arising from the complications and inherent conflict.

While I feel confident that those with whom I went through the three Systems Practice projects found it beneficial, this is harder to convey to those who weren't brought to such efforts for their own reasons. All the harder as both Systems Thinking and Systems Practice can be conceptually abstract when people are often anxious for so-called concrete solutions.

Systems Thinking provides a logical construction in finding solutions but is not always explicitly empirically evident. Further complicating the matter is that Systems Thinking, though it has certain foundational aspects, can be categorized by different approaches and underlying philosophies that seemingly conflict. Conceptual conflicts by Systems Thinkers, seeking a solution to be imposed, that may sometimes be made too readily the crux of the matter rather than the detrimental impacts of the challenges themselves.

This can obscure the viability of System Thinking’s fundamental principles but it isn't the primary hurdle to convincing the uninitiated to make the commitment to a Systems Thinking or more specifically a Systems Practice approach which can be substantial.

The primary hurdle is an essential change to a mental model that is linear, analytical, reductionistic to one that incorporates a perspective that is also non-linear, holistic, synthetic. The basis and need for the change and resulting implications can be easily underappreciated while the siren call to grasp at an immediate concrete solution can be addictive. The basis for this distinction and requirement for convergence is explained, more succinctly than I can, by this video from Complexity Labs.

The Acumen/Omidyar Systems Practice approach overcomes this hurdle by having its implementation be dependent upon the convergence but not explicitly so. It follows the logic of some Systems Thinkers that like Fight Club, Systems Thinking shouldn't be talked about. It does lead those who habitually follow a path by reductionistic, analytical, linear thinking so often used by command and control top-down management to the alternative of thinking defined by synthesis, holism and non-linearity without making the transition too obvious.

The Omidyar Group’s approach to Systems Practice though does not only steer most participants, whose primary experience has been following that habitual path to an alternative one but also navigating those supposedly versed in Systems Thinking away from too quickly determining a final path to a solution to whatever complex challenge is being faced. This was my error with the first Systems Practice project, to immediately begin mapping towards a solution.

While the course does present the case for synthesis and Systems Thinking in a general sense early on by examples, it instead takes participants through a number of steps that unless used and tested can seem contrary to how we usually approach such challenges even when using Systems Thinking as individuals. While their purpose may be explained with each step taken, their cumulative effect cannot be fully appreciated until more fully implemented. Until that occurs participants are encouraged by the course to have trust in the process.

What the Omidyar approach does is take the internal, and usually implicit mental maps of each of the individual participants regarding the system in which the mess or complex situation occurs and asks them to hold it in abeyance then work to first create a common goal through the Guiding Star, Near Star and Framing Question. More importantly, though, is a process of disaggregating those individual maps by collecting the factors making them up without any of the connecting relationships unique to each.

This collective set of factors is then jointly categorized as being either enabling or inhibiting and then rearranged into new collections defined by common traits or themes. This process helps not only to open up pathways to the internal mental maps of individual’s that may have been previously closed but also sets the basis for finding a set of new and collectively determined relationships. This arguably has a far stronger basis for democratic deliberations. At no point in the process so far has a systems map or map of any type been started. This took some personal adjustment.

The next steps in the Systems Practice process, upstream and downstream relationship configuration and S.A.T. (structural, attitudinal, transactional) Analysis were touched upon for the third time in recent posts. Despite having my own ideas on S.A.T analysis and its implications, I have come to appreciate its viability in contributing to the process, having been able to anchor it to basic Systems Thinking concepts such as the Systems Thinking Iceberg model and integrating it into basic Causal Loop Diagrams.

However, it needs to be admitted openly that Systems Practice does not provide a panacea. Surely no surprise on its own but it is important to be clear on why. The first goes back to the beginning of this post. I may have made an abstract, conceptual argument for the viability of Systems Practice but in the meantime, I completely abandoned the challenge it was supposed to address - Palestinian/Jewish relations in the City of Jerusalem.

The individual embedded in the system of concern, be they Palestinian or Jew, needs to be convinced of the viability of the process. That has not been accomplished except perhaps for a few individuals. To be even more honest, none of the projects undertaken so far came up with a final answer to their challenge. These were, to be fair time restricted, limited, basically academic projects taken on by groups of strangers globally separated by different time zones. In those cases were doing more was sought out, the complications and often stochastic nature of the real world hampered such efforts. On a broader and long term basis the challenge though is one of implementation and the problem is a Knowing-Doing Gap discussed in previous posts.

Despite these limitations, I have become convinced that Systems Practice can make a valuable contribution to creating new community paradigms. I recognize though that my rationale as presented will have little potential to influence those living with complex, wicked challenges without at least addressing those challenges more directly. I will attempt that in the next post.

Using Systems Practice to Unravel Complexity (Conceptually)

This section of the SP UK course focuses on the diversity of activities considered to constitute ‘managing’ in working with others involved in a complex situation. More specifically, managing undertaken by a systems practitioner of both the complex situation being investigated and the relationships between those involved in that complex situation including the systems practitioner. The course asserts that systems thinking can simplify complexity by taking multiple partial views but admits that this needs some explanation. The process being undertaken by this blog could be deemed asynchronous co-learning because again, it is not meant as a substitute for actually taking the course.

An unfolding network of conversation and relationships. ‘Managing’ involves maintaining a network of asynchronous relationships in the context of an ever-changing flux of events and ideas. As any manager engages in one conversation, others are engaged in different conversations. As individuals participate in different conversations a coherent network of conversations results (adapted from Winter, 2002, p. 67 and p. 83).

Many complex situations involve many different people with different perspectives. Understanding multiple perspectives involves first recognizing and acknowledging one's own worldview then reflecting on the relationships one has with the other participants and with the complex situation itself. Although this is hard to do for other people as we cannot truly experience or know their perspective on the world as they see it there are tools and techniques which can help you ‘imagine’ what those other perspectives might be. We can use systems tools and approaches to bring out other people's perspectives in ways that respects and represents their views. This, however, entails its own challenges.

The course advises besides being clear and explicit about one’s own point of view and considering different perspectives, using techniques such as systems mapping or as termed by the course systems diagramming as a means of mediating the different perspectives.

A particular type of systems diagram then is used to get participants to structure and capture their own thinking about a given situation and that diagram with any accompanying or recordings is then a set of perspectives for grounding a systems investigation.

Involving others through a diagram, according to the SP UK course, can take two main forms, co-creation of a collective diagram and using a diagram as the focus for a mediated discussion of the situation that the diagram represents. While agreeing with both techniques being powerful in helping those involved to gain a shared understanding of a situation by drawing out the different perspectives, they don’t seem truly separate but more intertwined. Co-creation is arguably always the better option as people own what they create but a systems practitioner with more experience may also have to meditate at certain times to allow co-creation to continue.

This, according to the course, depends on the relationships involved and whether one is taking the role of a ‘manager’ who is part of the situation or of a ‘researcher’ who is an observer of the situation or better to my mind both. Furthermore, it shouldn't be thought, in my view, that there is only one manager or one researcher. All participants can take on these roles to some extent.

The course advises that as a ‘researcher’, “One needs to understand and acknowledge the limitations and constraints that a particular diagram brings to your study and to build in processes that ensure a reasonable degree of robustness to the information gathered and how it is analyzed and reported”.

Contribution to a group process includes proposing new ideas, seeking clarification, providing information, summarizing what has been said, providing support for other people’s ideas, and being open to other people’s arguments. Impeding a group's effectiveness could include attacking other people’s suggestions, being perhaps very defensive about their own suggestions, talking at the same time as someone else and talking aimlessly without adding to the discussion.

If several people work together to produce a single diagram as their perspective on a system then they have to find some way of coming to an agreement, which takes one of two paths. Either they aim to achieve functional, but superficial, conformity, which was my primary concern with Systems Practice US and other forms of democracy by app or algorithmic programming, or they take the time to aim for a deeper consensus.

Sometimes behavior and action can be changed as a result of thinking being changed without any need for explicit, written action points. Often though it may require developing a negotiated set of actions for moving on to say implementation, as in connecting ideas together for strategic application to begin overcoming what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton called the Knowing-Doing Gap.

The course cites C. W. Churchman (1971) who identified nine conditions for assessing the adequacy of any purposeful system's design. He argued that these conditions must be fulfilled for a system to demonstrate purposefulness. These nine conditions were later reordered into three groups of three conditions each, with the addition of each group having a particular corresponding category of social role – client, decision-maker, and planner. Churchman seems to have never named the groups themselves.

Werner Ulrich (1983) later added two allied categories "role-specific concerns" and "key problems” with each of the associated social roles. Ulrich also identified each group with a term reflecting a primary source of influence - motivation, control, or expertise for the social roles of client, decision-maker, and planner (or ‘designer’) respectively. The course sets the groups of Churchman & Ulrich’s purposeful system's design roles, conditions, and influences in Table 1 provided by the SP UK course here.

Although purpose in relation to such a system’s approach is addressed, the focus of the section is more on ‘involvement’ in a purposeful system's design which is being interpreted as the influences a social role has and what influences that social role, along with other associated categories.

The decision was made to create a systems diagram or systems map, as featured the previous week of the course (but to be dealt with in the next post) based on Churchman & Ulrich’s purposeful system's design chart, using the Kumu mapping system. The emerging objective came to be moving from an apparently complicated, management-oriented but constrained configuration to a more complex and while still contained more unbounded configuration requiring greater collaboration.

This presumes though others are not only familiar with systems diagrams or maps but also familiar with the Kumu mapping program. If several people are all contributing to the development of a diagram then it’s likely their knowledge of the particular diagramming technique, their disposition towards it, and expectations of what will come from it will be different.

This is in addition to asking others to have changed their basic vantage point of thinking primarily longitudinally or by reductionistic and algorithmic means instead of expanding their perspective by thinking latitudinally or more holistically in their own understanding of the situation, as discussed in previous posts, and being able to apply different systems thinking methodologies.

For this reason, a Kumu presentation, intended to explain to anyone unfamiliar with Kumu navigation, was created (finally, after lengthy but lackluster good intentions), as well as a Kumu presentation on the alternative systems maps, of Churchman & Ulrich’s purposeful system's design, conveying the information in more of a story format. The intention is to break down the complexity into smaller chunks. This still adds a good deal of data though beyond the complex issues themselves with which others must contend.

When the purposeful system's design is placed graphically on a page, the three groups can be seen as separate, with a particular source for which there is one for each group, in the center. The three conditions for a particular group are placed then around with each one connected to the source, each other, and a corresponding category. It is these categories that are most apparent to the world. This worded explanation is arguably not as intuitive as the picture should be.

This section of the course dealt in large part with abstract, conceptual ideas of managing complexity and creating purposeful system design but it addressed these issues through the hands-on approach of diagramming, at least conceptually if not practically. This is the main difference between the SP UK course and the SP US course with the later putting far greater emphasis on hands-on group diagramming. Different types of diagrams will be the focus of the next post.

The Difference between Mapping Pathways and Traveling the Road

During week 5 of Active Citizen in a Digital Age, the course guided us in considering how to allocate responsibilities in addressing our shared social goal. Our team's stated mission was to reduce the economic inequality of low-income people by providing access to affordable healthcare, education with job training, and housing. How we were going to do this was a little less clear.

Our plan was to include advocacy activities such as who would volunteer, donate or seek donations to a particular association or charitable nonprofit. How would this make a difference in achieving our goal? Also, who would spend time or money or both specifically focused on policy change or political action? This could include attending public hearings or council meetings on certain topics, organizing people to vote, participating in peaceful protest activities, or donating or seeking donations.

The plan was intended to focus on the type of influence or change that was to be made in one year's time. The one-year time frame provided the potential for including all aspects including ending up with a vote through an election or action by a political body.

We were to explain how the different tactics are meant to fit together and our reasons for choosing those tactics and any tradeoffs we had to make.

When I looked at the assignment, there were a number of questions that came to my mind. My questions were pretty basic. Were we focusing on all three of our objectives in general or picking one and focusing on a particular aspect of an issue? How were we providing access? How were we making it affordable? What type of influence or change were we seeking? Specifically, what policy change or political action were we going to be focused on?

It also seemed that the theme of the first part of the assignment was concerned more with the civil sector while the second part of the assignment was concerned more with the political sector. Which were we going to focus on, the first, the second bull, or both?

If focused on the civic realm then how would our actions make a difference in achieving our goal? If focused on the political realm then at what level of government? If organizing people to vote then I presumed we were speaking of an election through a vote by a political board was also a possibility. If both, how are they then to be related together to explain how our different tactics are meant to fit together? Peaceful protests would seem to be in reaction to a political action. Seeking donations would seem to be as important as making donations (they have a course on that).The one-year time frame provided the potential for including all aspects including ending up with a vote through an election or action by a political body.

As is often my habit, I decided to create a Kumu map of the course’s state Mission and Actions, based on a self-selected choice of healthcare, to make more explicit the relationships between various factors or elements. Opening the map and mousing over the text in the left-hand column will highlight relevant parts of the map but I will also discuss here. The map consists of a Civil Sector and a Political Sector which is organized in such a way that they are seen as working together. Their limitations are made more discernible when viewed separately. The civil sector has difficulty making fundamental changes being often relegated to merely holding the line in terms of social damage. The political sector can’t access the deeper perspective of civil society.

My own potential personal path of involvement was based in part on my past experience working in city government and past and still, unfinished work exploring Effective Virtual Collaboration and its expanded perspective Community Based Virtual Collaboration.

This was fine as far as it went but I needed to include my path as one component of a Collective Action Plan with the others on the team. I had access to everybody else’s narrative as they had access to mine as well as to the basic map I created. With this information, I endeavored to map out a path for each of the team’s participants. My pathway connections' thicker widths make it possible to see where my pathways and the pathways of others overlap.

The team leader Participant 1’s Path emphasized the political sector more though hopefully growing out of an educated and enthusiastic base of support. The far more challenging undertaking though would be carrying this forward to final attainment of the goal.

Participant 2’s Path incorporated the new platform Educate Evangelize which I came to see as very important. One has to change people's mindset before they can change much else. I put Participant 2's path more on the civil side leaving the subsequently educated and enthusiastic to decide for themselves which political path to take. This doesn't preclude political action by Participant 2 but to educate truthfully about something means to my mind connecting with people in the field.

Participant 3’s Path towards change was seen as emphasizing the civil sector connections with various associations and nonprofits and by working with them to impact policy change by working hand in hand with political change. Again, this did not preclude political action by Participant 3 simply that there was an emphasis on working with groups like the American Medical Association (AMA), American Association of Retired People (AARP), American Hospital Association (AHA) and Federation of American Hospitals (FAH), American Cancer Society (ACS), National Physician Alliance (NPA) and Planned Parenthood through which one can leverage these organizations and participate in their efforts to influence elected officials.

Participant 4’s Path towards change emphasized the promotion of financial contributions expanding beyond personal giving.

Each of these paths is a different story which is not being revealed here. The map simply demonstrates how those stories could interact in creating a larger story. It was interesting to note that despite not having any input into the selection of the team members, the Paths of All Participants covered nearly all of the platforms and actions put forward by the course. The All Paths loop brought together all of the individual paths through collaboration. Besides connections related to Crowdfunding to be discussed below, only one connection was missing and that was spending money to organize people to vote which likely needs another level of organization and effort.

Week six of the Active Citizen in a Digital Age course got into the market sector of democratic advocacy including boycotts. Other advocacy support financial tools cited were Crowdfunding like IOBY (In Our Backyards), impact investing as with B corporations and Embedded Giving.

Crowdfunding which was also included in the Combined Paths map connecting the personal actions of spending money, what the course referred to as political spending and donating or seeking donations, what the course referred to as financial support of civil society efforts with the various platforms for action, working with associations or nonprofits, taking political action, working on policy change, or the added education and evangelizing.

The Crowdfunding element’s influence could then be further extended integrating other elements together. Crowdfunding obviously raises money but it could also work through the advocacy systems connector loop, integrating even further.

We created and I mapped out pathways to achieving the goals for which we were advocating. What became obvious to me is that no one path would be enough. The issue I had is that we had no specific modes of traveling those paths. As has been asserted before, "There is also still the further need to move from basically abstract ideas to connecting ideas together for strategic application, to the why, to begin overcoming what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton called the Knowing-Doing Gap (page 7)".

People like systems change, they just don't like thinking about it (systems) all that much.

In the previous post, Collective Impact is seen as being fundamentally about systems change, which has really been an underlying theme throughout this exploration. In this post, the central article of the sector map Four Early Insights (map) {remember you don’t have to open every (map)} begins incorporating equity considerations into Collective Impact work more directly. 

What is missing in my view is more on systems thinking, at a deep level, to help successfully navigate these system changes. Any systems thinking connections so far have though been raised by this blog and not the Living Cities' Collective Impact course. I realize that I am going up against the systems thinking fight club rule but without understanding its potential role we cannot achieve the level of change required.

The first actual inclusion of systems thinking in the course is Jeff Raderstrong's Living Cities article, Racism, Collective Impact and Systems Change: Tying it all Together (map) which cites the classic systems thinking piece, Donella Meadows’ “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (map) as required reading for anyone working for social change.

“The most effective means to intervene in a system being the power to transcend the paradigms or mindsets out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.” 

What needs to be avoided is thinking of the twelve leverage points as merely a check-off list. Yes, they can be used in that way but they also point to something more suggested by the systems thinking iceberg model which has been cited a number of times previously. There are four levels of the iceberg but it is still one iceberg with the majority of it out of view.

One of the four insights is that conversations about race and class can be incredibly difficult to navigate because of the sensitive nature and that some communities may not have the capacity to constructively facilitate them because of where they are as a community as a whole or perhaps different components of the community are at different stages.

As discussed in Putting Community in Collective Impact (map, includes video link), first introduced in Module 1, from the Harwood Institute and in Stanford Social Innovation Review (map), working at a deeper and holistic level calls for systemic community intervention. Also closer in line with the foundational levels of the systems thinking iceberg model are the original Stanford Social Innovation Review Collective Impact article (map) and Putting Community into Community Engagement (map).

Another insight is the need to recognize the difference between equity and equality in community engagement and I would venture community empowerment.

The poster above is a common way to demonstrate the difference between equality and equity on the Internet. This blog is going to question some of the assumptions behind it a bit more.

It makes the valid argument that treating everyone the same is not the same as treating everyone fairly. This is part of the reason though why this conversation is so difficult because much of it rests on perception.

In the “equality” picture, each person is given the same sized box, meaning the tallest person still has an advantage over the shortest. In the “equity” image, the shortest person is given, not the biggest box, but two boxes to stand on, achieving the no doubt admirable social goal sought by Collective Impact or similar endeavor by overcoming perhaps historical disparities such as lack of early childhood nutrition. Invariably glossed over it seems though is the question where did the boxes come from, who made them, and how was the box taken from the biggest person, bringing them down to minimal visibility?

Some could argue that it must have been the biggest person, or the rich or entrepreneurs or business people who made the boxes possible in the first place. The poster assumes that the biggest person willingly gives up his box but while some may appreciate the need to address historical discrimination, they don't necessarily want to substantially give up on that which they see themselves as having had personally worked hard for.

This means one of two things, either the biggest person believes in a community goal of letting everyone in the group see the game or the two others, through a majority vote say, took a box from the biggest person and gave it to the smallest, with no loss to the middle person. The first is becoming less true because the rich can pay for the social goods they wish for bypassing community means of addressing those issues. The second is also unlikely to be achieved because it proposes the middle class working directly with the disadvantaged class which does not seem to be the common tendency. Where this has been true, it has likely been a combination of both appealing to the sense of community of upper income and establishing political pressure from income levels below. These assumed distinctions are, no doubt, very simplistic but they recognize a reality that must be dealt with. It is a visual analogy, so it shouldn't be stretched too far but it can hopefully provide some additional insights.

Living Cities does this by recognizing the need to include both grassroots and grass-tops. Engaging grassroots community members to shape and guide collective impact initiatives are intended to mitigate the potential disconnects grass-tops leaders can face in understanding community needs and should cover several different considerations to take into account when developing specific engagement strategies. This is where the questions raised above about equity and equality can come into play.

Living Cities’ Collective Impact insight into attempting to redefine power recognizes that power conventionally resides in the leaders and institutions that have authority to make unilateral decisions. It is not quite as apparent though that the ability by community members to quickly identify what is and isn’t working is also power in the same fashion.

The Living Cities’ Collective Impact insight into defining community is bifurcated in part to those people who will be impacted by the changes the Collective Impact partnership seeks to make, and in part to those who have been historically left out of the decision-making process. Addressing one group doesn't mean addressing the other even if they are the same people.

Collective Impact partnerships can help overcome this by highlighting the importance of incorporating community feedback into the work of the larger partnership but as suggested in Feedback Loops Keep Collective Impact Impacting we need to go further to understand the feedback loops comprising the system itself. As demonstrated in Systems of Public Participation - Ideal Design versus Entrenched Reality, what is presumed to be working within a system may not always be the case.

There is also still the further need to move from basically abstract ideas to connecting ideas together for strategic application, to the why, to begin overcoming what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton called the Knowing-Doing Gap (page 7). 

We can then move to the upper levels of the systems thinking iceberg model with again StriveTogether (map), a network of cities addressing cradle to career education systems working with the Equitable Engagement Workgroup (map) in cradle-to-career work, which can include local students and youth as well as communities of color.

The reality is that it is not enough to give all community members an equal opportunity to engage in the Collective Impact effort to be successful. There still remains the need to actively meet communities where they are and create targeted opportunities around the unique needs of community members, in particular, those historically disengaged from civic decision-making. These tough, courageous conversations are an important starting point for any movement towards overcoming the Challenge of “Necessary but Not Sufficient” in Introducing Racial Equity to Grantees (map) in addressing Living Cities' Work on Racial Equity and Inclusion (map).

Next blog post we move on to the Working with Communities on Racial Equity sector map and determining the best means of Working with communities to advance racial equity and eliminate disparities (map).

Exploring with the Dialogue, Deliberation and Systemic Transformation Community to Discover New Possibilities Part 1 of 3

About a month and a half were spent during the end of last year and the beginning of this, engaging, initially with a set of Hackpads (now replaced with Dropbox Paper), with the Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation Community, portrayed as a  "community of inquiry and action" regarding the role that dialogue and deliberation can play in addressing the mega-crises of our time.

The last blog post chronicled certain aspects the journey and Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation Community, an associated Kumu project's relational maps, mapped out some of the primary realizations coming out of the engagement.

There is still a matter of the chronicling and mapping of the actual process of engagement itself, which can be mapped out with one of those Kumu maps, the DDST Hackpads Map. The primary purpose was to study a forum of extended, online group interactions, closer to soft system thinking methodologies, as an active participant though it meant the writing would be more self-focused than usually desired. This post and subsequent ones will go through a guided tour and endeavor to tie it all together with previously presented new community paradigm concepts. 

The entire experience was new having had neither direct experience in the associated fields nor any real, established academic background of many other participants. Everyone involved, particularly in the interactions in which I participated, was unknown prior to becoming a member of the DDST Community. Not only were their backgrounds different, but also personality types were far more varied. I lean towards being introverted, thinking, intuitive and judging type. All 15 other Myer-Briggs classifications were likely involved and I know I met at least a few IFSP types.

Discussing ideas on LinkedIn means working with particular groups and having people, often like-minded, connecting with your ideas and you with theirs. A good deal of cross-fertilization is achieved posting across different groups but the interaction with very different types is likely limited to some degree. 

My full formal written introduction to the group can be accessed through the Kumu DDST Hackpads Map A-H Intros for the DandDTrans Inquiry. Clicking on the link provided in the narrative section of the map opens the specific hackpad page with introductions of the appropriate letters A-H starting their last name though not in order. Mine is the third one down.  

My online social media background was used to answer the question, “What would you like to share about your work?”  More recent, ongoing efforts were included in a written response to, "What motivates you to be a part of this inquiry? “ providing the rationale for participating.

It was the word systemic in the title that attracted me. One of my new pathways of inquiry is systems thinking. I have been experimenting with the integration of systems thinking with direct democracy (by which I mean the effective combination of participatory democracy and deliberative democracy). That led me to a recently ongoing NCDD Codigital project to use as a proxy for a thought experiment in democratic collaboration. I want to find ways of getting past what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton named the Knowing-Doing Gap. I am also just starting to learn about the work of Christopher Alexander and am in the very early stages of exploring ways to integrate his work into my explorations, particularly how patterns thinking could better fit in with systems thinking (not my map).

For the most part, Kumu maps were provided as examples of past work.

Christopher Alexander was mentioned because it seemed that Patterns Language would play a role. 

The essential, defining question being asked of the entire DDST Community was:

What do we, as members of the dialogue and deliberation community of practice, have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems? 

This was focused on more personally and deeply with the questions of What's Possible?, and became a focus of the last blog post and Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation Community Kumu map.

“What is the crossroads where you find yourself at this stage of your work in service to systemic transformation?” and “What declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform the community and inspire you?”.  

I mentioned having completed the Systems Thinking Certification course.  Adding my current hypothesis that:

“I believe that to be truly effective and sustainable that direct democracy involving both participatory democracy and deliberative democracy could greatly benefit from both soft system approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry and World Cafe, and hard or dynamic systems approaches such as Systems Dynamics.” 

Concerning my personal perspective on the question of possibility:

Right now my view is that we have to create the conditions for possibility. The NCDD's recent convention also had four basic questions for the organization that could also apply to the creation of possibility, two seem particularly relevant. How might we eliminate structural barriers that inhibit conditions for fully realizing possibility? A big part of the problem in my view is that much of the existing system(s) that are not working for people is nonetheless what I call 'entrenched' and we keep merely whacking at the leaves and not the roots systemically speaking. How might we overcome the lack of trust in our Democracy, leaders, and one another? Without trust, the possibility seems exceedingly limited but possibility opens up the channel for trust if we can demonstrate that possibility can be realized. 

This was different from the actual person-to-person interactions with other members of the community. There were three modes of group dialogic interaction in which I participated in two, World Cafe and Open Space Technology, all of which took place online through MaestroConference or other means. I did not participate in the Bohm Dialogues. 

The first opportunity, based on a World Cafe format came on December 15, 2014. I have had little direct experience with the World Cafe. I had recently participated in another online World Cafe Community event, "World Cafe As Method, Metaphor, and Movement, w/Juanita Brown” so I had a basic idea of the process. The last time that I had mentioned World Cafe was December 28, 2011, in the blog post, Governance through Community, as one of the organizations featured in the Governance through Community wiki-page. One of the main focuses of the World Cafe approach through the DDST Community was the extension of the "What’s Possible" question. In that setting, in one of seven spaces, I initially introduced myself, more informally, as retired and exploring what is next.

Despite having a personal agenda, I never explicitly pushed it, wanting to be more of an observer on my initial exploration. Even though I did not push my own agenda, when an opportunity presented itself, I did insert certain of my own ideas if they seemed applicable to the conversation. I endeavored to do more listening than talking but to be truthful if any silences lingered too long I would pop in either with an observation or asked someone for theirs. 

I should mention here before getting too far that being a scribe or recorder at one of these online interactions, which I did attempt a few times, was challenging, especially when also actively participating.  This did create a challenge in fully expressing ideas within the allotted time. The person expressing the ideas was not always the person writing them down. Not everything that was said was written down, that which didn't always come out right the first time, grammar and spelling sometimes lapsed trying to keep up. So it was often necessary to go in to make changes and that was not always done.

One, presented more fully here, is that we are not likely at this point in time to find one overarching answer to all of our challenges or a grand theory of community engagement as Charles Darwin did with evolution. Instead, we are in the period preceding in which work was being done by numerous persons mostly remaining unknown by history. One exception though as he seems to have been instrumental in Charles Darwin's development is Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, for noting the importance of the evolutionary-intergenerational perspective. Erasmus Darwin is the one who is made to look like a monkey in the drawings from that time. The analogy being that what may appear to be crazy, or monkey’s uncle's ideas today could be an important aspect of creating what I am calling new community paradigms in the future. 

We begin exploring that myriad of different ideas in the next round.

Bridging Differences in Approaches through Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking

It has been more than a month since the last blog post. Seasonal holidays were partially to blame but a good measure was due to pursuing some new concepts discovered over the last series of blog posts along with their related Kumu maps. These sought to combine ideas concerning direct democracy, involving both participatory and deliberative aspects of democracy together, with systems thinking.

A Map for Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking (Kumu map) began the integration of the two and incorporating the insights of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) on dialogue and deliberation. Direct Democracy and System Thinking Map - Some Potholes on the Journey continued with a closer critique.

The last post, Systems Thinking as a Bridge between Democratic Issues and Democratic Principles and its related Kumu map endeavored to test this line of inquiry by running a simulation, in parallel, of ranked group voting with an actual NCDD Codigital voting project (Download the NCDD/Codigital report here). That NCDD project, in turn, was based on a previous NCDD Codigital project (details), launched at the 2014 National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) conference in Washington DC to deal with four perceived barriers to the dialogue and deliberation community’s success through four essential questions.

1. How might we eliminate structural barriers in our democratic systems? 
2. How might we more clearly delineate our field of practice for ourselves and for those we seek to serve? 
3. How might we make our D&D work more equitable, inclusive, and empowering? 
4. How might we overcome the lack of trust in our Democracy, leaders, and one another? 

The last post dealt more with the differences between the NCDD/Codigital project and the Kumu map that paralleled the process to highlight some limitations of both systems.

The Kumu map has the inherent limitations of all models, being wrong but hopefully useful (via George Box). The last post also discussed some limitations of ranked voting systems. These issues are expanded upon and discussed more fully in Arrow's impossibility theorem - Wikipedia and the article in the Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Apr. 1954), pp. 114-123 which discuss Arrow's work.

The primary difference though between the NCDD/Codigital approach and the Kumu map approach was one of process and intention. The later moving from basically abstract ideas to areas of application, to connecting ideas together for strategic application to begin overcoming what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton called the Knowing-Doing Gap. The point is never an evaluation of NCDD or its activities but a means of testing the concept of integrating systems thinking with community-based systems of direct democracy and whether the integration of the two could be mutually beneficial.

This blog post looks at the similarities or where the two approaches could potentially agree. The juncture of the two is created by the extension of elements of the Kumu map, Stage 3 Priority Issues, and Stage 4 Cluster Maps to incorporate some of the top-ranked NCDD objectives. Kumu clustering reveals connections between different ideas and suggests how they could be made to work together toward common goals. It is still a simulation or an imaginary model but it could be feasible for a community to adopt such a strategy proposed by the Kumu map, and hypothetically even more feasible is the combination of the two approaches.

Below are some of the top-ranked objectives of the NCDD/Codigital project clustered with prioritized and other connected Kumu map objectives to attain common goals.

"Focus on D&D work at the local level, where engagement efforts are much more likely to influence decisions” was the top-ranked idea in the NCDD project for the question, “How might we overcome the lack of trust in our Democracy, leaders and one another?” and a priority community issue under the Kumu mapping system.

"Engage members of NCDD, IAP2, IAF, OD Network, AoH & other overlapping through different networks to explore how we might support each other's work & combine efforts where appropriate" was ranked third under “How might we more clearly delineate our field of practice for ourselves and for those we seek to serve?” While made a priority issue under the Kumu map it was also seen as a community issue and connected to a number of other related issues including the priority Trust objective of focusing on D&D work at the local level.

For the question “How might we make our D&D work more equitable, inclusive and empowering?”, the top NCDD objective was, Framing: Ensure that the community is the key framer of the issue(s), was seen as a civic issue but not a priority one. It was connected though through clustering to similar concerns from access, trust, and barriers. The priority Kumu issue to which it was connected was “Celebrate individuals who have opposing views rather than attempting to marginalize them”.

The second-ranked NCDD goal, "Co-design the process with the community, developing appropriate and accessible materials and engaging and mentoring community members as peer facilitators" was also seen as a community issue, was made a priority and was connected through clustering to ‘Focus on D&D work at the local level’ and other objectives.

The third-ranked objective, "Go beyond the D&D to involve the fields of social justice, community development, environmental justice, civic renewal, etc., to bring principles of equity and mobilization to D&D, and for D&D to offer these fields our principles of deliberation" was seen as organizational because it was NCDD defining itself. It was not seen as a priority issue as it was seen as going in the wrong general direction for NCDD (raising a point of personal bias, mine). It was, however, a clustered connection because indirectly the work of NCDD could help bring this about.

The 'Why?' of the four questions, important in overcoming the Knowing-Doing Gap, was not sufficiently addressed, at least directly by either of the two approaches. In particular from the Kumu perspective of moving from an organizational setting to a community-based setting. Much of the why for the NCDD project had been likely settled at or shortly after the conference but as far as I can tell never explicitly documented. Not that it would have been necessary for their internal purposes. The why of the goals may have resonated so well within their community that they did not need to be made explicit.

The supposed ‘why’ for new community paradigms would still be an extension of the simulation but I believe would still have resonance and further lend support to the hypothesis that such a system could be made to work if implemented. Such a perspective though would include systems thinking objectives which admittedly were not included in the NCDD approach nor did they reach priority level within the Kumu map. It is the reason that systems thinking is seen as a system of scaffolding the means for direct democracy. The lessons thus learned are to endeavor to transform the organization and its members to bring about the desired transformation of a community and its members.

The why of the four essential questions also work from the perspective of finding pathways to new community paradigms and overcoming different types of barriers, including from a systems thinking point of view.

What are the structural barriers in our democratic systems from a systems thinking perspective? Is there a real or perceptual difference between structural barriers (seen as static) and systemic bottlenecks (seen as dynamic)? What are the sources and what are the points of leverage? How are these points of leverage implemented to achieve elimination and maintain the elimination of barriers to ensure continuity of the new configuration? Are these changes to be implemented internally or externally? What is our field of practice and whom do we seek to serve? What stops us from serving them besides the structural or systemic barriers to our democratic systems? What can be done to overcome these additional impediments? What are the apparent sources and actual sources creating a lack of trust? These questions have as much importance for establishing new community paradigms or any community building process as they do for the organization of NCDD.

This blog will continue to exam these and other related questions and has established a new wiki-bridge page Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking for this purpose. However, that still leaves one or two elephants in the room. First, all that has been at least reasonably established is that such a system as described above could work if implemented but so far it has never been and any means of doing so have not been adequately laid out. Second, it could be readily argued that within the examination of these questions more attention needs to be paid to the soft systems aspect of the Map for Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking (Kumu map), the R1 Deliberative Democratic Dialogue loop, as opposed to the more dynamic systems thinking approaches of R2 Working with Systems Thinking loop. It was pursuing these new avenues of inquiry that kept me occupied since the last blog post and will likely do so for some time in the future. One avenue being participation in an online discussion on "Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation” that arose as an outcome of the NCDD project, another being continuing learning about Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language recently introduced but proving to have important connections and third being to once again develop the concept of democratic directed disruptive design which is seen even more as an essential catalyst for meaningful, substantive and sustainable community change.