Systems Change and the L-Word

"To love is to surpass." —Oscar Wilde

One of the signature tools that the Garfield Foundation advocates for in its collaborative networks projects is system mapping. System mapping is a way of visually capturing the things that influence a system and their relationships to each other. Doing this can lead to insights about high-leverage ways to shift the system, which in turn can help groups act more strategically.

That’s the theory, at least, and it’s one that’s widely espoused. But it’s also vastly oversimplified with some problematic assumptions.

The first assumption is that people can make sense of these maps in the first place. It doesn’t take long before a map becomes challenging to understand. One of the best maps I’ve seen is the one that emerged from the Hawaii Quality of Life project.

This map was constructed skillfully and thoughtfully and is easily browsable thanks to the wonderful tool, Kumu. But it still takes some time to wrap your head around it, and most system maps are significantly harder to understand than this one.

The second assumption is that the map represents a good model of reality. This depends on your definition of “good.” The quality of the map depends on its sources. How do you know if those sources are correct? Furthermore, in complex systems, nuances are critical, because small shifts can lead to big changes. How do you know if your model has captured the “right” nuances?

My friend and mentor, Jeff Conklin, likes to say, “All models are wrong. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful.” System mapping is a wonderful way of building shared understanding and trust. If I see my worldview represented in a system map, and if that map is used in my conversation with other stakeholders, I can see that others are truly listening to me and vice-versa. We can see our (sometimes surprising) common ground, and we can better understand our differences. That leads to higher-quality strategy and collaboration.

Reframing the mapping this way helps route around these problematic assumptions while also placing greater importance on how the maps get constructed and how they are used. If participants play an active role in constructing the map, they will better understand it and feel greater ownership over it. If they see it as a tool for understanding each other, they are less likely to be led astray by the false gods of rigor. If they understand the inherent limitations of the model, they are more likely to treat potential strategies as hypotheses to be explored rather than hard truths to be followed at all costs.

The third assumption is that people will be able to change their minds once they see and agree on a map of the system. This is the most challenging assumption of all, because it assumes that we are rational, which we are not.

Our system mapper, Joe Hsueh, recently wrote a wonderful post, “Why the human touch is key to unlocking systems change,” where he explained the critical importance of starting with self before looking at others.

Systems change with multi-stakeholder groups in a complex system is very hard. People get stuck in their respective positions and entrenched interests, refusing to be told they are the ones need to change. One simple phenomenon about change – we like to change others, but none of us like to be changed. Just think about the ones closest to us – our spouses, children, parents – how often are we truly successful in changing others?

In my year volunteering at a Buddhist monastery and charity organization, I learned I cannot change people. What I can do is to cultivate my curiosity to see a person for who she is and the compassion to love her as much as I can. Seeing a person for who she is the first act of love. When I am being seen for whom I am without judgment, it opens up a space for me to see myself authentically and give me the self awareness and choice to be my best Self.

Similarily, through our work on systems change at the Academy for Systemic Change, Presencing Institute and SecondMuse, we found the highest leverage is not out there but in here. “What is most systemic is most personal,” is a quote I love from Peter. How can we co-create a space for us to be human, to see each other for who we are as human beings, and to inspire one another to our best possible Selves? Only when we see each other and feel being seen can we begin to inquire the possibility of a shared vision that connects us as human.

You don’t find many system mappers citing the importance of the L-word — love — but love is at the heart of systems change, as our facilitator, Curtis Ogden, recently explained in a beautiful post.

Sometimes the L-word is explicitly acknowledged, sometimes it’s not, but it is always present in stories of deep systems change. In the late 1990s, the groundbreaking Public Conversations Project quietly began convening a dialogue between leaders of both sides of the abortion debate. They spent six years in deep conversation and were not able to find common ground on the issues. What they did find was that they loved each other more. They wrote:

In these and all of our discussions of differences, we strained to reach those on the other side who could not accept – or at times comprehend – our beliefs. We challenged each other to dig deeply, defining exactly what we believe, why we believe it, and what we still do not understand.

These conversations revealed a deep divide. We saw that our differences on abortion reflect two world views that are irreconcilable.

If this is true, then why do we continue to meet?

First, because when we face our opponent, we see her dignity and goodness. Embracing this apparent contradiction stretches us spiritually. We’ve experienced something radical and life-altering that we describe in nonpolitical terms: ”the mystery of love,” ”holy ground,” or simply, ”mysterious.”

We continue because we are stretched intellectually, as well. This has been a rare opportunity to engage in sustained, candid conversations about serious moral disagreements. It has made our thinking sharper and our language more precise.

We hope, too, that we have become wiser and more effective leaders. We are more knowledgeable about our political opponents. We have learned to avoid being overreactive and disparaging to the other side and to focus instead on affirming our respective causes.

Since that first fear-filled meeting, we have experienced a paradox. While learning to treat each other with dignity and respect, we all have become firmer in our views about abortion.

We hope this account of our experience will encourage people everywhere to consider engaging in dialogues about abortion and other protracted disputes. In this world of polarizing conflicts, we have glimpsed a new possibility: a way in which people can disagree frankly and passionately, become clearer in heart and mind about their activism, and, at the same time, contribute to a more civil and compassionate society.

I believe strongly in the value of good, reality-informed strategic thinking. I have no doubts that a mapping process would have improved the Public Conversations Project discourse. However, I also don’t think it would have changed the final outcome. What mattered most there was that people were engaging with each other deeply and authentically. They were learning to appreciate each other’s humanity.

Any effective systems change process — whether or not you are using mapping to support it — is ultimately about helping us understand and love each other. What role is the L-word playing in your systems change process?

Navigating Complexity Through Collective Sensemaking

A core strategy for navigating wickedly complex problems is to try to make collective sense of the system. Like the blind men and the elephant, we all have a narrow and incomplete view of the system in which we’re operating. If we could somehow see and fit each other’s pictures together, new and powerful insights and actions could emerge.

That’s the theory, at least. But how do you do this in practice? What does the process feel like? And how do you reconcile this approach with my earlier assertion that collective intelligence is not about enabling individuals to grasp the whole system?

At last week’s Garfield Foundation Collaborative Networks initiative kickoff, Joe Hsueh walked us through his answer by drawing this graph. (Joe himself explains the graph in the above two-minute video.)

Navigating Complexity Model

We as individuals try our hardest to navigate complexity until we hit our mental capacity. Generally, that experience is so exhausting and dissatisfying, we find ourselves dropping back into simplistic, siloed thinking.

The goal of a collective sensemaking process is to help individuals endure greater complexity than we normally can handle. At some point, we still have to simplify the system in order to process it as individuals, but the hope is that, by raising the overall bar, you end up at a higher place than you were before.

With system mapping (which is the tool that Joe so skillfully employs), the map itself is of limited utility to individuals who have not participated in its creation, because they have not gone through that process of mental endurance. This is a critical point. The real value of system mapping isn’t the final artifact. It’s the process of developing shared understanding by collectively creating that map.

An Aside on Facilitation

You can’t design or facilitate these kinds of processes effectively unless you yourself have a strong framework around complexity and systems thinking. Good designers create the space for participants to live in this complexity.

Living in complexity is inherently disorienting, and people have different appetites for it. Part of the facilitator’s job is to help the group maintain their faith in the face of intense discomfort. One way you can do that is by walking the group through your framework.

Unfortunately, I often see facilitators make the mistake of spending too much time explaining frameworks up-front rather than giving the participants the space and time to experience the framework. It’s a tricky balance, and finding that balance is a sign of mastery.

At last week’s meeting, Joe offered the framework at exactly the right time. You could see the relief on the participants’ faces as he explained that the joint struggle and frustration that everybody was experiencing was all part of the process.

It reminded me of a similar moment with one of my mentors, Jeff Conklin, during the Delta Dialogues in 2012. The participants were getting frustrated by how much the conversation was jumping around (which was by design), and I felt like we were starting to lose them.

Jeff stepped in, and drew and explained a graph that described the different ways that people learn. It was beautiful to watch people’s faces light up with understanding. Jeff’s impromptu (and brief) lesson in theory not only helped orient our participants, it gave them language to describe what they were going through.

Tic-Tac-Toe and the Squirm Test: Building Trust and Shared Understanding

Elliott's Monster Face

Trust. Shared understanding. Shared language. I constantly mention these as critical elements of collaboration. But how do we develop these things, and how do we know if we’ve got them?

We can start by playing Tic-Tac-Toe, then by applying the Squirm Test.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Many years ago, one of my mentors, Jeff Conklin, taught me a simple exercise that gave me a visceral understanding of why trust, shared understanding, and shared language were so important, as well as some clues for how to develop these things.

First:

  1. Find a partner.
  2. Play Tic-Tac-Toe.

Try it now! What happened?

Hopefully, nobody won, but don’t stress too much if you lost. It happens!

Second: Play Tic-Tac-Toe again, except this time, don’t use pen or paper.

Try it now! What happened?

In order to play, you needed to come up with shared language to describe positions on the board. You probably managed, but it was almost certainly harder.

Third:

  1. Play Tic-Tac-Toe without pen or paper again, except, this time, play on a four-by-four board — four rows, four columns.
  2. Play until it’s too hard to play anymore, until someone has won, or until there’s a dispute about what the board looks like. When you’re done, both you and your partner should draw what you think the board looks like without looking at each other’s work. Now compare.

Try it now! What happened?

Research suggests that we can hold between five to nine thoughts in our head at a time before our short-term memory begins to degrade. This is why American phone numbers have seven digits. It’s also why three-by-three Tic-Tac-Toe (nine total squares) without pen and paper felt hard, but doable, whereas increasing the board by just one row and column (sixteen total squares) made the game feel impossible.

How many ideas do you think you’re holding in your head after just five minutes of moderately complex conversation? How often are you using some kind of shared display — a whiteboard, a napkin, the back of an envelope — to make sure that everyone is tracking the same conversation?

While you were playing, how much did you trust that the two of you were seeing the same board at all times? Were you right?

In cooperation theory, the most successful groups trust each other by default. You almost certainly assumed that your partner knew the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe and was playing it fairly to the best of his or her ability. If you already had a strong relationship with your partner, you probably trusted him or her even more.

But trust is fragile, and it’s not always relational. If it’s not constantly being reinforced, it weakens. A lack of shared understanding is one of the easiest ways to undermine trust.

With the Delta Dialogues, we were dealing with a uniquely wicked and divisive issue — water in California. As a facilitator, you always want to get the group out of scarcity thinking. But water is a zero-sum game, and no amount of kumbaya is going to change that. Moreover, we were dealing with a half-century legacy of mistrust and a group of participants who were constantly in litigation with each other.

We did a lot of unique, relational work that played an important role in the success of Phase 1 — rotating site visits, asking people to share their favorite places in the Delta, implementing a buddy system, leaving plenty of space for breaking bread. But we were not relying on these things alone to build trust.

Our focus was on building shared understanding through a mapping process that allowed the group to see their ideas and track their conversations in real-time. Prior to our process, the group had been attempting to play multi-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe with thousands of rows and columns… and no pen and paper. We brought the pen and paper, along with the ability to wield it skillfully.

Like many of my colleagues, I believe strongly in building and modeling a culture where people are engaging in powerful, constructive, sometimes difficult conversation. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to get people into a circle and to have them hold hands and talk about their feelings. The more wicked the problem, the more inadequate our traditional conversational tools become, no matter how skillfully they are wielded.

This recognition is what separates the Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks initiative from similar well-intentioned, but misguided initiatives in the nonprofit and philanthropic worlds, and it’s why I’m working with them right now. We happen to be employing system mapping (and the talents of Joe Hsueh) right now as our “pen and paper” for developing that shared understanding, but it’s how and why we’re mapping — not the specific tool itself — that separates our efforts from other processes.

The Squirm Test

How do you know how much shared understanding you have in the first place? And if you choose to employ some version of “pen and paper” to help develop that shared understanding, how do you know whether or not you’re intervention is effective?

Many years ago, I crafted a thought experiment for doing exactly that called the Squirm Test.

  1. Take all of the people in your group, and have them sit on their hands and in a circle.
  2. Have one person get up and spend a few minutes describing what the group is doing and thinking, and why.
  3. Repeat until everyone has spoken.

You can measure the amount of shared understanding in the group by observing the amount of squirming that happened during the presentations. More squirming means less shared understanding.

You can implement the Squirm Test in all sorts of ways, and it even appears in different high-performance communities in real-life. For example, the Wikipedia principle of Neutral Point of View is essentially the Squirm Test in action. If you read an article on Wikipedia, and it makes you squirm, edit it until the squirming goes away. If enough people do that, then that article will accurately reflect the shared understanding of that group of people and will thus achieve Neutral Point of View.

Toward the end of Phase 1 of the Delta Dialogues, we designed a whole day around the Squirm Test. We had participants capture on flipcharts what they thought the interests and concerns were of the other stakeholder groups. Then we had participants indicate whether these points represented themselves accurately and whether they found shared understanding on certain issues surprising. There was very little squirming and quite a bit of surprise about that fact. It was a turning point for the process, because the participants were able to see in a visceral way how much shared understanding had been built through all of their hard work together.

Last week, I was describing the Squirm Test to Rick Reed, the leader of Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks initiative. He pointed out a discrepancy that I had not thought of before. “People might not be squirming because there’s no shared understanding. They might be squirming because, after seeing the collective understanding, they realize that they’re wrong!”

This is exactly what happened with the Garfield Foundation’s first Collaborative Network initiative, RE-AMP. When you are able to see the whole system, including your place in it, you may discover that your frame is wrong. The kind of squirming that Rick describes is the good kind. Understanding how to design for it is a topic for another day!