Co-Created Solution Design Workshop at Chicago Bioneers

I hope you will join me November 2nd in Chicago for a workshop on Co-Created Solution Design at Chicago Bioneers.

This workshop is for you if:

you work with others that you don’t have total control over to come up with new ideas or actions
you want to tap into the wisdom of a group and go beyond what any could do alone
the same old problems are present and you know you need to approach them differently to get better answers

My goal for the workshop is two-fold:

give people ways to redirect conversations to be more co-creative
offer several different approaches to achieving co-created solution design

Why Co-Created Solution Design?

Since January 2011, a small group of facilitators working on social entrepreneurship and international development have come together to find ways to impact the system of social innovation globally. We call ourselves ci2iglobal, which is short for Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. With a collective 100 years experience in the area, we pooled our experiences together to figure out where we can be most useful. We believe a crucial part of the difference we can make is spreading the work of co-created solution design.

Collaboration might be the hot word of today, but we believe co-creation gets closer to our intent to help solutions arise from group creation. Too often gatherings come together and the path or outcome has been pre-determined. And it limits the engagement of all stakeholders, which is vital to successful social innovation. Co-created solution design provides a method – a process – to create solutions, but it does not presume answers. It opens questions to be answered by the group.

While much of what we do is about getting something done together, what actually gets done depends heavily on the relationships between the participants and their commitment to action.

I remember very vividly learning first hand the difference between advice and self-generated solutions. On the second day of my coach training, we were asked to provide advice to our partners on how to achieve one of their goals. We talked at them for 30 minutes. Then we were asked to listen as they thought through another challenge. The difference startled me. I am a quick thinker and prided myself on my ability to offer useful advice. However, the solutions my partner came up with had deep understanding of all the forces at play. Most importantly, my partner hesitated in implementing my solution, whereas the partner eagerly looked forward to testing the self-generated solution. The difference in engagement and commitment was tangible for me. I have tried to listen more and advise less ever since.

Co-created solution design is just like that, except it is working with groups and even groups of groups on larger systemic issues.

Strategies

I will be highlighting three different strategies for doing co-created solution design:

Engaging Exploration – Use when there is not much of a time limit and a need to see and act within a large landscape of possibilities.
Flash – Use when there is very little time and a strong base of existing knowledge and awareness.
Creative – Use when you need a very well fit and very novel solution.

So, how do we do it?

Come to the Co-Created Solution Design workshop to find out! After the workshop, I will share some of the materials from the workshop here for those of you who can’t make it.

Multi-dimensional Constructions

by Thriver

For simplicity’s sake, we often pretend we live in a one or two or maybe three dimensional world. By which I mean, for example, in the world of “identity” I am a white woman from the middle class. Those are two “planes” of the conceptual realm. The first thing we need to correct is that these categories have some clear boundaries (are points) rather than being spectrums (a line of even a plane) where very little lives in the “ideal position” really.

The next thing we can do is layer them, especially when we talk about power. I have a sex, gender, and sexuality… I have a color, I have a financial upbringing and current financial status, I have an education, I have a professional background. I am a point where all these instances intersect across many planes.

Source: bustler.net via Jean on Pinterest

I have particular empowering and disempowering experiences… I have a degree of many different kinds of intelligences and physical abilities/inabilities. I have an age. I have a religious upbringing (or not, really, in my case) and a spiritual practice that is current. I can go on and on! All of these layers/planes of dimensionality, connect me to communities, some of them make me more central in those networks and some of them push me to the edges. Some of them conflict with each other, shoving me away from those communities.

The conceptual world is not flatland. The world of identity is not a flatland (despite how social networks used to try to singularize identity). Live in the rich multi-dimensionality of being human – of your existence and awareness. I try to… it is an ongoing practice in a flatland world.

———

This was originally posted to Facebook and then modified and posted here. On Facebook, the following comments were particularly delightful to me:

Alexander Laszlo

and if you are not a being at all (or only in the expository fixedness of our linguistic forms), but rather a continual emergence? More like an aroma, shifting, flowing, emerging – more becoming than being. Then the dimensionality of which you write ebbs and flows through multiple domains in which we find the confluence of others. And it is these others which, in the final appreciation, form and flavor our sense of self.

Charles Hope

Luck and success hide in the cracks between, in the contradictions, in the rounding errors glossed over and stubbornly ignored by the pragmatic grown ups.

John Manoochehri

This makes a certain kind of sense, but leads to, as a lot of emancipatory philosophy, a world of texturelessness and unmanageable complexity. There are countless dimensions, you rightly describe, to being and experience. But which are the most important? And how do navigate without those kinds of obvious signals? I can’t spend all my life interpreting each moment’s dimensionalisation, can I?If my child is hungry, and I am focussed on another dimension of their life, their capacity for artistic creativity “hey, don’t cry about food, let’s do one of those great paintings you do! come on!”, or I am not sure which of their dimension to relate to “ok, I know they are hungry, but what about their art – or their capacity for body movement, or what about nature, maybe we should learn about gravity, or or or …” – I am obviously failing them.So, multidimensionality is good. It is also a dangerous abstraction.

The problem with a lot of equalising, emancipatory thought is that it dismisses all hierarchisation, priority setting, difference, as necessarily normativising, power-brokering, wrong.

Bad move. We must learn to tame benign hiearchies, differences. Otherwise, we drown in righteous speculations and make judgements based on post-modern whim or worse.

Jean Russell

John Manoochehri, I think you are right to be concerned about being lost in noticing the dimensionality. I think of it more as a perspective tool. For example, am I feeling locked out of things because I am a woman? If so, what other dimension do I have more power to achieve my goal? Maybe I have social power at a different level? Maybe I have intelligence of a certain kind. If you feel blocked in motion because of one dimension, look at the other dimensions within you. That is not to promise a just world to those who are resourceful – it isn’t just and won’t become so. It is that there are many hierarchies, and we navigate their power, in part by being at different points on different planes. All in fluid flow. #gratitude

Jean Russell

I don’t want to get to to tied to the instance of identity – as my point is that conceptual fields that relate to things like geographical landscape, limit our ability to grasp the full dimensionality of them. This dimensionality may explain to some people how my brain has learned how to think about things (twisting planes and intersections acting as an axis point to pivot).

Facilitation Algebra

by Thriver

We have all attended events in which we had to yawn. The pace is slow and laborious. We are stuck in a chair listening the whole time, and the mind wanders to what is on the buffet table that we can nibble on.

Imagine if we assigned a rating for degree of engagement when we gather people together for group work. Let’s say we collapse, for simplicity, the difference between engagement of speaking, learning, or connecting, and just say engagement.

If I have forty people in the room and only one is speaking, the engagement of the speaker, I hope, is maximal. Some percentage of the room, depending on what is said and their interest, is in various states of engagement. We might be able to calculate, if we knew those degrees, the sum of the level of engagement in the whole to what is being said (minus degree of engagement on other devices or to other topics in mind).

Let’s say the activity is introductions, and each person is speaking for 1-2 minutes about themselves, so the group knows itself. It will take 60 to 80 minutes to go around the room. It will also, usually cost, the facilitator energy to police the 1-2 minute limit unless they use a device like a pre-written 3×5 card to keep people brief. (I have used these cards to keep within intro time limits and then made harvest documentation by having them post to a wall using an association method, which can be quite helpful in knowing ourselves as a whole.)

Now, let’s say, instead, I ask those forty people, as part of their introductions to each other, to organize in space around the room as if it was a map of the world. I give them a compass point and four locations to work from. In 3 minutes the group has some sense of where everyone is from and who is near them. They all used their bodies, and had to talk with 2 or 3 others to be sure they were in the right relation to proximal people. What is the algebra of engagement of this activity? Assume there was no need to move chairs or change the room to do the exercise. In 30 minutes of these sorts of exercises (align yourself on a spectrum of interest in… or belief about…, for example). For documentation, you can have someone take photos of the arrangements.

The art of facilitation is the crafting of optimal processes for engagement and achievement of collective goals. There are no perfect solutions, and every group has needs to be addressed that shape the processes that can work. Facilitation is the art of creating process that moderates the flows of individual engagement and catalyzes the flow of necessary information leading to action.

Abra cadabra – work with the algebra of group energy to achieve outcomes to make magical experiences of flow and contribution.

When designing group process ask:

who will be in active engagement during this process?
who will be in passive forms of engagement during this process?
is there another way to achieve this outcome that would change the active and passive engagement ratio?
if each person’s time and attention has a numeric value, and I do the algebra, have I optimized the value in the group? Is there excess capacity that I could/should engage?
how simply can I explain what the process is?

photo credit: www.metaphoricalplatypus.com

Recent Fascinations

by Thriver

Things that have been fascinating me for a couple years… things I believe are crucial to the emerging age:

Relationship of node to network in defining context and therefore meaning. Picture the image and quote misattributed to Lincoln on Facebook. Lots of stuff on the web is creating a crisis of context. Globalization produces a crisis of context. Nomadism destabilizes contexts. Blurs boundaries.

Not only is it hard to maintain context once we unhitch from absolutes, we need to get a better grasp on what portability information has. And how it gets corrupted as it travels. I am not going to argue that it should not get corrupted, this is part of cultural dispersion and the lifecycle of ideas, but we need to better understand that lifecycle in a world in which things are evolving at different paces concurrently.

Trust and how it operates with specificity within a context. I don’t just “trust” the way the word is often used vaguely. It is specific. Specific person, specific action, specific timeline. Trust is a lubricant (for better or worse), so how do we encourage it and discourage it when cultivating flows?
Emotions in decision making and motivation. We aren’t as rational as we thought or wanted to be. We are highly emotional. Knowing this about ourselves, how do we use that to our advantage? How do we work gently with these emotional creatures around us?
Boundary spanning. Boundary crossing. The dance of discernment and integration. I think a lot in network diagrams…. I have always been someone on the boundaries between in some critical way. Much of the last 20 years has been about shifting away from silo models, whether in education, organizations, or social networks. We integrate again. And yet, disaggregate too.
Multiplicity. I am not a single identity. I have several online. I have many more inside me. I belong to many tribes, many networks, and many communities. I flow between them, but not with the same people. How does the multiplicity within me and within networks encourage resilience? How does it make things brittle?
Time. Again, this is about discernment. Something is going on with time. Asynchronous communication, synchronous around the globe. Time on a clock. Duration. The varying experience of time. Time as a distance. Time as a frequency or beat within a pattern…. What is going on with time? And how does it influence all of the above.
Do you have insights on these? What might I read to figure out more?

We_b2 and Ci2iGlobal

by Thriver

I am incredibly excited to announce our affiliation with ci2iglobal, the Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. We have been hard at work behind the scenes for over a year, working together to share our wisdom, create useful tools, and facilitate powerful events and laboratories. Our event, We_b, in January at the HUB Brussels brought together some of the inspiring innovators we know in the social sector to test out our individual offerings as a collective.

Standing on the wisdom of that experience, we will be having We_b2 in Brussels June 16-17.

Are you (or someone you know) looking for new ways to:

Break through some big challenges that have been baffling you?
Play with new ideas in a collaborative, cross-cultural context?
Explore frameworks that help you make decisions and navigate risk?
Expand your own impact?

If so, then make plans to come join us.

Why am I incredibly excited about this collective and our events?

Because this is the most phenomenal team I have ever been honored to work with. We are 6 women with a cumulative experience of over 100 years in facilitating social change in global contexts! How often are you in a room with that much experience? More than that, we live and work on three continents now, but we have lived and worked on 6 continents. It doesn’t get better than that until you go to Antarctica!

We have experience scaling up social initiatives around the globe, fostering international collaborations, bringing micro-finance to developing countries, measuring impact for Ashoka fellows, and working with the European Council.

I think it is also important that most of us are old enough to have had long careers in international development while being young enough to be early and eager mavens in social technologies. We get social technology. We get cross cultural dialogue. We get impact assessment. Not just ideologically, but practically and experientially.

The power and capacity that puts in the room when we hold an event is enormous, but that isn’t all. There is more! All of us have done enough of the personal development and group process work to show up in these spaces with egos in check, curiosity in front, and driven by purpose focused on the group outcome.

Somehow the magic combination of this led all of us to explore system sciences and thus we come at our social change work with a core value being the health and evolution of ecosystems – be they human or environmental.

I find that to be incredibly exciting. Intoxicating, in fact. come get intoxicated with wisdom for your life and social change efforts. June 16-17, Brussels HUB for the We_b2 Co-Creation Lab.

The Art of Dialogue in Public Space

by Thriver

You know when something bugs you enough, you just have to give voice to it. This is one of those moments. I guess I make some pretty big judgments about public speakers based on their ability to answers questions in public forum. Often based on standards I am not sure I could meet, but so it goes. Today, I will play the critic.

photo credit: MilitaryHealth

Bugs

Last fall I had a chance to see Tufte speak at his art gallery. I arrived a tad late and snuck into a chair off to the side. He took questions at the end. As he answered each question, my jaw lowered closer to the floor. I slouched down in my seat, feeling defeated. My hero! He was failing me! Later I was able to come back to an appreciation of his work, even if I don’t appreciate his ability to respond to questions. But let’s look for a minute at what triggered me to sit there aghast.

1. Asked a question about infographics for social media, Tufte basically responded that professional journalists do a good job of creating ways to understand this data. This answer completely fails to understand the nature of the medium… the publsihing by anyone should also be data-fied by anyone and not left to the old world of media.

2. Asked a question about infographics for biologists by a biologist, Tufte said that Scientific American and another magazine have great infographics by biologists. For all he knew the questioner was one of those published in said journal looking for more help! He didn’t do anything to narrow down the question to respond to the specific needs of the person asking, and thus made a vacuous circuitous answer that provided nothing of value. And it took him seven minutes of pontificating to do it.

Part of this issue is that many of us are not good at asking questions. It isn’t just Tufte being dull.

Fascinating

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing the totally fascinating Alain de Botton speak on his latest book, Religion for Atheists. First, let’s be clear that Alain demonstrates fabulous speaking talent. His stories are delightful, the logic of them disruptive and curious, and the pattern he uses is both refreshing and at the same time clear enough that you know that you too can repeat what he is doing with other cases you think of. The success of his talk comes from the alignment of layers of skill. He asks interesting questions that makes you see something familiar in an unexpected way. He selects stories that take you on a journey of experiencing to see for yourself. He has an emotionally engaging and comfortable presentation style that works for his presence of being. All those things we love in a compelling speaker, and more than that he can answer questions. Or things that are offered as questions but aren’t indeed questions.

People who said things during the question period at the end of the talk did one of several things that drive me totally nuts with that kind of slow-down-for-the-accident fascination…

Let’s make a list of all the fascinating car-wreck ways to “ask” questions:

Minutiae. Pedantic. Make a statement adding something minor and unimportant to the topic for broad audience. Shows a profound disregard for other people’s time as well as lack of being able to discern relevance and importance. Usually publicly perceived as someone over-ambitious to be acknowledged as adding value.
Evangelist. Affirm the topic of the talk and add a personal quip to it. Again, shows a lack of regard for time constraints and relevance. Usually publicly perceived as a narcissist or pawning for affection.
Contrarian. Finds any random point to disagree with. I say random because the effort seems so clearly to be an attempt to spark verbal brawls and so little to do with finding deeper understanding. Whether they admit it or not, the goal seems to be to diminish the speaker. Usually publicly perceived as a bright individual with a vengeful need to upset others through their talents.
Wanderer. Means well, but can’t focus their thoughts well enough to offer any clarity in their inquiry. You wonder, did they ask a question? What was it? How many parts did it have? How are those things related? Reveals disorganized thinking. Associative thinking is great for brainstorming, it isn’t appropriate in public questions responding to a prepared talk. Usually publicly perceived as a naive fool, harmless beyond the time consumed by their traveling story/statement/question.

What other characters have you seen show up?

And I can certainly think of times I have played most of these roles. It is hard to meet someone you revere and think clear enough to ask a decent question.

Alain did a brilliant job of dealing with each of these characters as they showed up to “ask” a question. For bonus points he would even answer a two part question to completion, even if answering the first part led him through a story. He was gracious and good natured. A model of elegance. If I achieve such a level of skill when I am twice his age, I will be quite happy.

How to Ask a Question
photo credit: quinn.anya

When I read How to Ask a Question in the Chronicle, I thought it would be useful to summarize for you here:

Pick one thing you want to know – that you think others might want to know to.
Check to see if you are coming from curiosity. If not, be quite until you are.
Whether you agree or disagree with the points stated, does your offering to the dialogue add value and display respect?
Does it feel like improv? a) does the content feel fresh or new? b) do you “yes, and” to allow the speaker ground to stand on even if you qualify a statement or clarify a concept? c) does it feel like we are here together, sharing the stage for a larger audience?
As the article linked above suggests, avoid the meta-speech. I wonder if this point involves meta-speech already? Say the point, not the internal dialogue you have.
If you are going to disagree or start a debate, begin by voicing respect for the speaker. Say what you like abou their perceptiveness or viewpoint, then ask about the point where your view diverges from theirs.
Watch the “I am a” statements. Identity politics is obscures how different we each are. You are you, speak from that and for only yourself unless you officially represent a group.

We are here to learn from and with each other. Let’s foster a question/answer culture that promotes it.

ps. most of these “ask a question” points also apply to conversations and apply broadly. 😉

Hold Space

by Thriver

Recently a friend commented on how crucial holding space is. It needs unpacking. What do we mean when we talk about holding space – both interpersonally and in groups?

A room holds space. A circle of chairs holds space. My arms around you hold space for you.

The foundation of a house holds space for the house to be built. It touches the ground. It makes the house stronger and more resilient. But you don’t go looking at the foundation unless you are buying the house or it seems to have trouble.

Holding space seems invisible. It is hard to see, but you can sense it is there. When it isn’t there or isn’t strong, the lack of it is very noticeable.

As a facilitator, holding space for a group of people to do something together involves:

creating physical space that is conducive to the task.

What do people need to do with their bodies?
What relationship do their bodies need to have to each other?
Is there light, fresh air, refreshments to keep bodies fueled?

creating emotional space that enables action on the task at hand.

How do people feel welcomed and invited to engage?
Is the emotional desire to get what matters done greater than the emotional desire to rest, resist, or sabotage?
Are there clear boundaries for good behavior? Who enforces boundaries and how?
Does each participant feel respected and appreciated – valued for their time, skill, and experience?

creating intellectual space that sparks wisdom and creativity.

How do people know they can safely contribute wild ideas?
How is the critical (refining) phase made distinct from the generating phase?
How do people know they can move beyond impressing each other to doing something together?
What helps contributors feel like they are a part of something larger than themselves?

In one on one dynamics, holding space for an individual to do something transformative, vulnerable, or bold mostly involves:

creating physical and intellectual space

Same questions as a group for both, plus
Does the individual feel safe – physically, from distractions, eavesdropping, etc?

creating emotional space

Can they have their experience of their emotions without having to defend, justify, or argue them? (even if that is painful to the listener)
Can they explore a thought or feeling without being interrupted or distracted?
Do they feel a respected? Experience engaged neutral listening?

Holding space for someone is not about responding to the emotions or words and gestures. It is about observing the emotions with the individual. Being beside them in the experience they are having, not as a respondent (even if it is about you), but as a companion in the experience.

And this can make holding space for someone really really hard for us. We have to move out of ourselves and into a space of an objective compassionate observer.

When you make a chair or a house, there is a tangible visibility to the work. You can see it happening, measure it, check against specs, and watch it function over time.

When you are holding space, there is a very intangible and invisible quality to the work. Conspicuousness in holding space shows a lack of grace. You can’t see the “magic” of it. You can’t touch it. When space is well help, people feel at ease, as if they can be themselves. At the highest level, it can be about stepping deeply into another person to experience with them what they notice and feel, which requires an incredible amount of vulnerability on their part.

And this is magnificent gift, when space is well held people can bring forth their best self.

Adventures in New Giving

by Thriver

I am super excited to see Adventures in New Giving http://www.adventuresinnewgiving.com/. And perhaps a bit jealous. If I could focus the time and energy, I think Nathaniel is doing what I would do. (see his video here: http://vimeo.com/37718193 ) For years, I have lived a double life working in traditional progressive philanthropy to pay rent while working on bootstrappy social enterprise as a passion. In my consulting work within traditional philanthropy, we talked about the democratization of philanthropy. However, I did not see much of it in practice.
That seems to have come from somewhere else. Tech start-ups culture maybe? Socent pragmatism? Microfinancing brought home? Whatever the path, it has been interesting to watch the birth of efforts like kickstarter and startsomegood.

It seems aligned, naturally, somehow with the collaborative consumption “Mesh” culture. All of which seem part of a larger movement toward network production. So I am super excited to see Nathaniel capture the stories of this practical democratization of philanthropy.

I am also curious to see how this will hybridize with traditional philanthropy. I have visions of foundations and philanthropists using crowdfunding as part of their due diligence. Something of an early market testing and reliability assessment before or as part of larger funding efforts. Picture a foundation giving a matching grant – matched via startsomegood. This could be really a good time saver for family foundations with intentions to give and little time for sorting through applications.

I can’t wait to see what Nathaniel does with Adventures in New Giving.

I can’t wait to see how we all play together in evolving new giving.

To help fund our awareness of ourselves in this evolution, pitch in at

http://startsomegood.com/Venture/adventures_in_new_giving/Campaigns/Show/adventures_in_new_giving

Facets and Heterogeneity

by Jean Russell

Do we wear many masks? Or just one? Are they really masks? Or can we perceive them as facets of a multi-dimensional self?

Masks has a connotation of being false. Thus it is hard to pair a mask with authenticity. I have been using the words – facet or aspect. And I tie it to a metaphor of a gem – we are one crystal with many facets. Each facet faces a different tribe. A few people close to the edges of these facets may see a more than one of our facets and connections to more than one of our tribes. Some of us are pretty translucent gems, while others prefer to be – or need to be – opaque.

This is deeply tied into a model of a human we use when designing social software. When we presume that a human is an integrated whole who shows all people the same depth and dimensions of our being, we create too superficial of a tool. And we end up with several dilemmas.*

Show the whole self and bombard people with TMI (and later get held accountable for your intimacy).
Show only one dimension of the self (and get accused of not being authentic or of not being a part of one of your tribes)
Create multiple identities (and then try to keep track of them and which facet you display in each… and later get pushed out by “real names” social software.)

We are too often seen as a single facet (race, religion, work, location, affiliation, purpose, etc.) when we are many. Social Network Analysis, of which I am an avid fan and advocate, still usually only maps for one dimension of the self. Imagine the real social network map – the layers and layers of connections and the participation in the many tribes we belong to and participate in. This map may be so full of links and nodes as to be unread-able at anything but perhaps the most local scale. (and of course overwhelming if we move the static map into active motion of real-time interactions) (Let’s not even begin to talk about degree of association/depth of connection which adds another layer/filter to what we share and who we share it with.)

Network maps have yet to really reveal this inter-lacing because they draw links, usually, on one facet or connection type. But, in practice, most tribes are deeply interlaced. (Cults try to diminish this interlacing – by reducing other tribal affiliation and thus increasing dependency on the cult.) For example, I may live in a blue state, but I have relatives that are red voters, which keeps me informed of other positions besides the blue I seem embedded in. This is the counter argument to homophily and the risk of sameness that some are recently arguing the internet encourages (you filter for that which you are already a part of and thus only reinforce your beliefs).

Our resilience rests in our heterogeneity which brings us the diversity of viewpoints we need for a better, more complete view of our world. We build relationships by focusing on a sameness, however that need not obscure how we may be different. For example, Alexis and Xavier connect because they both believe in building better local economies. Alexis has a background in marketing. Xavier has experience developing collaborative conversations. Together Alexis and Xavier create an event for local businesses and potential entrepreneurs to meet and discuss with local government figures how to support developing local economies. As Valdis Krebs says: “connect on your sameness and benefit from your differences.”

* To keep things light, I only mention the design of social software, however, we also limit people in our in person social interactions by presuming an integrated human as if they only have one persona in their minds. Voice dialogue offers a powerful process for letting us open to the multiplicity of voices we have within us and act with greater awareness of the dynamics between those inner facets of the self.

A Thrivable World Emerges

by Jean Russell

Thrivable from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.

Gratitude to Symbionomics and Alan Rosenblith for content and production.