I recently participated to a facilitation workshop where we (the five students) were given a simple exercise by our instructor: we were to take just a few minutes to individually write down on paper any words that came to our minds that we personally associated with the word “Facilitation.” Then, we got together and counted the words we had in common. The result was as indicated below:
4x 3x 2x 1x
0 1 5 63
In summary, there wasn’t a single word that was common to the five of us while there were 63 words that had been uniquely identified by any one of us. Note that the reason we did not have more words in common was not because we thought the words did not apply to the idea of facilitation. Indeed, when we heard each other words we often exclaimed “Of course! Nice word! I should have thought of it!” In some rare cases, we said “That is not a word I would have connected to the idea of facilitation!”
While typical, this result is quite astonishing. (You can try this exercise with your team, your family, or a few friends, using another word.) Simply put, this means that words evocate different images and metaphors and have a different meaning for each of us. As an example, you may be surprised to hear that the word “collaboration” has had a very negative connotation for me until I moved to the U.S. 14 years ago. Yet, the reason is simple: in France, the word “collaboration” is associated with French people who collaborated with the Nazis and fought against the French resistance during WW2. If you are French, you don’t want to be called a “collaborateur”!
The theory of embodied cognition sheds some light on why we assign different meanings to the same word or why similar and related words evocate different feelings and images in us. Embodied cognition means that as ideas, thoughts, concepts and so on, are shaped by our education, past experiences and learning—our personal history—they get embodied as metaphorical thoughts within our brain. This phenomenon occurs when the same recurring experience activates the neurons in different brain areas and neural circuits get formed and connections reinforced over time.
In a recent article called “A Good Week for Science—and Insights into Politics,” the linguist George Lakoff points out:
“The meaning of every word is characterized in terms of a brain circuit called a “frame.” Frames are often characterized in terms of the usual apparatus of mental life: metaphors, images, cultural narratives – and neural links to the emotion centers of the brain. The narrow, literal meaning of a word is only one aspect of its frame-semantic meaning.
The second basic result is that this is mostly unconscious, like 98% of human thought.”
Lakoff goes on by explaining that the word “homosexual,” for instance, has a very different connotation for most people (i.e., is defined with a different frame) than the words “gay men and lesbians.” The use of the word “homosexual” in a poll will generate completely different poll results that the use of the words “gay men and lesbians.” (Note: the remaining of Lakoff’s article discusses the different uses of frames by republicans and democrats politicians; the article is worth a read.)
The above has great consequences for communication in general, and for facilitation, visioning, or conflict resolution, in particular. Indeed, how do we know if the words we use are being interpreted with the meanings we intended? Or, conversely, how do we know if we interpret words we hear with the meaning our interlocutors wished to convey? If we don’t check and ask, we can’t know for sure. And most often, we don’t take the time to do so. For the majority of our common daily activities, our interpretations are close enough to the intended meaning and sufficiently accurate to help us make simple decisions and coordinate actions. Life would be impossible if it were otherwise! But in situations where we are dealing with politically, ethically, or morally-charged issues such as climate changes, sustainability, poverty or healthcare, which generate very different emotional feelings in different people, clarification of content and meaning is key to a successful resolution of the issues at hand.
A facilitator’s important role is one of content clarifier. A skilled facilitator asks clarifying questions to draw out valuable information and get insights about the true meaning of what is being said. In addition, a facilitator must also ensure that the frames and mental models of the participants are made transparent to the entire group so that each participant can fully understand the diverse assumptions, rationale, viewpoints and perspectives behind what is being said.
There is an art to asking probing questions, but an art that can be learned. Next time you are in a conversation with someone you disagree with, do not argue and take a position. Instead, remember to inquire into the other person’s frames and mental models so that you can expand your own horizon of understanding of the issue you are discussing. You may end-up completely changing your perspective. At a minimum, you may gain a greater understanding of the gap between your interlocutor’s standpoint and yours. It is worth the effort!
I was recently asked to write a brief summary on the benefits of the application of living systems theory to Community Economic Development. What I am sharing below gives only a glimpse at the potentials and opportunities in this field; this topic deserves much more in-depth research. Please forgive me for the rather formal tone of the essay, which was not written for the purpose of a blog.
I appreciate any comments or feedback you may have.
Warmly,
Beatrice
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Community Economic Development (CED) approaches that aim at developing sustainable and regenerative communities should be holistic and integrative and must consider the communities’ challenges and strategies from an economic, social, and environmental perspectives, simultaneously. We believe that CED approaches benefit from the insights of Complexity Science, Systems Thinking, and Living Systems theory.
Communities are Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) or Living Systems (LS) whose components (the individuals, organizations, institutions, and all the diverse social-technical-political-ecological systems that are present within the community) continuously interact with one another to exchange information and resources; collaborate; compete; self-organize; and adapt under the influence of diverse economic, social and environmental pressures.
An LS approach to CED embraces the complexity of the community ecosystem. Understanding of the issues faced by a community can be gained by considering the complex interrelationships that exist between the community and its environment. An ecosystem map is a useful tool to visualize the diverse interactions within the community and between the community and its environment. This map can also be used to assess the level of diversity within the community—diversity that is critical for the system to thrive—and to determine what entities need to be added to rebalance the system.
LS theory provides insights on how to improve the adaptive capacity of communities by designing communities structures that facilitate the flow of information and the development of communication networks; connect diverse assets and resources to one another; support the development of collaboration; decentralize power and decision-making; and increase resilience in times of economic stress, hardship, or downturn.
A living community is a learning system, continuously searching for creative and innovative solutions to its problems and ways to generate value. In the process, the community develops and grows. Innovation is an emergent process that takes place when individuals, organizations and institutions self-organize while engaging in collaborative activities and collective actions. Consequently, an LS approach to CED focuses on designing structures that facilitate the collective coordination of action and the development of mutually beneficial relationships.
Finally, the design of living communities is an adaptive challenge—a challenge that requires individuals, organizations, and the community as a whole to redefine long-held values, beliefs, and mental models and to embrace a new world view. The role of the adaptive leader(s) is to mobilize and empower the community to do “adaptive work.” This means engaging the community members in dialogue that supports the development of shared-understanding of the issues to be addressed; the development of relationship based on trust; and the co-creation of shared meaning and purposes from which a new vision can emerge and new strategies can be designed.
Open dialogue, transparency, accountability, and constant evaluation of the process and its outcome—the qualities of reflective systems—are essential to the development of purposeful and conscious living communities.
Yet, we must remember that living systems cannot be directed but only influenced. There are no single prescriptions for success. Strategies must be context-specific and their implementation carefully monitored using feedback loops and other evaluation systems so that to continuously adjust and improve the system.
Last Wednesday, I was seating on a bench at the Portland Amtrak Station, waiting for my train to Seattle, on my way to teaching my Systems Thinking class and completely absorbed in the reading of one chapter of Donella Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems, when a man who was seating on the same bench not too far from me, approached me and asked me if I could watch for his bags for a few minutes. Of course, I accepted.
A few minutes later, the man came back (his name is Dennis), thanked me and asked me what I was reading. My answer drew another question and another and we started a conversation about what I was teaching and where, what I was doing for a living and so on and so forth. When time came to board the train, I gave Dennis my business card and said goodbye. But a while later, as the train was already on his way, Dennis came to find me in my car and asked if we could continue our discussion. We talked about things that matter to me: adaptive work and leadership; transformative work; living systems; sustainability; consulting; personal development. It seemed as if Dennis was drinking my words. He told me that he had been retired for a few years but was looking for something to do. Considering his interest in my “stories” and all the questions he asked, it occurred to me that he was ready to move on to his next challenge and start a new career—one that would truly make a difference in his life and in the life of others. I greatly encouraged him to find his new life purpose.
Meeting Dennis was like one of these serendipitous encounters that leave you with the feeling that you’ve made a difference in someone else life. After we had said goodbye and agreed to stay in touch, I felt a deep sense of joy and connection. Strangely, I also felt that this encounter had not happened purely by chance—that it was meant to have happened.
Yesterday, I received an email from Dennis who sent a little story and cartoon called: The Charlie Schultz Philosophy. I am happy to share it with you. Enjoy!
Let’s say I am a coffee shop owner. I want you to tell me what is better for the environment: using paper cups, hence increasing deforestation or, using ceramic cups, which I now have to wash using energy and lots of water? (Of course, much energy and water were used to make the paper cups as well.)
Perhaps you know the answer to this question but more likely you are like me and you don’t. Perhaps there are some experts out there who have done a comparative life cycle analysis of both solutions and who know the answer. Perhaps the answer depends on where the coffee shop is located—I would suspect the answer would be different in India or Africa than it is in the U.S. Perhaps ceramic cups are a better choice today while paper cups might be better in 5 or 10 years when we experience a major water shortage. Perhaps in 20 years neither solution will be a good one because we won’t have enough water to make our coffee, anyway. There may not be any coffee growing, by the way.
I may be over-dramatizing but you get the point. We all mean well and we are all trying to do the right thing and we truly care. Yet, driven by our mental models (yes, I know, I have been focusing quite a bit on them lately but they seem to me so critical if one wants to move to the next stage), we love to find easy technical answers to our complex problems and we love jumping to conclusions quickly. We also love to point fingers and blame others for their unsustainable behaviors. We bad-mouth our neighbors for not recycling; we complain about our employees who do not embrace our latest corporate sustainable initiative; we get upset with the grocery store that is raving about its sustainability strategy yet carries Chilean grapes in the winter; and while they may be making their baby steps toward transforming their business operation, we still blame large corporations for their unsustainable business models and for greenwashing.
Listen, I am not saying there is no greenwashing: it’s everywhere. I am not saying there aren’t people who do not care: there are still too many. I am not saying that all businesses getting involved with their Corporate Social Responsibility initiative are doing it for the sake of the environment, their local community and social justice: many are still doing it only for the bottom line and in many cases simply because they are forced to do so by stakeholders’ demand, regulatory constraints, and NGO pressures.
What I am trying to say is that we, the well-meaning people, have to rise above the pack and start asking the right and smart questions. If we want to lead, then we must lead in such a way that the results of our actions are truly making a positive impact on the world. We must acknowledge that problems are complex and that oversimplification is a very risky business. We must be aware of our own filters and mental models and make them explicit and open to the scrutiny of others. We must take a rigorous and scientific approach when investigating our problems and the strategies we are developing to solve them. And, at the same time and in the same way that we are using our rational brains for analysis, we must also open our hearts, use our intuition, and practice love and compassion because the use of soft skills and our ability to connect to emotional intelligence are critical to our ability to adapt, transform ourselves and ultimately impact the world around us.
More than anything else, we should not jump to conclusions too quickly. Is it difficult? Hell, yes! But by rolling up our sleeves and accepting the hard work; by acknowledging that we are both rational and emotional people and by honoring both reason and emotion as valuable human assets; and by learning how to mesh these in our personal and professional lives, all together we will be able to achieve our highest aspirations for a better world.
If you have seen the movie Avatar, you may recall a couple of scenes where Neytiri—the indigenous huntress—is telling Jake (or more exactly, Jake’s avatar)—the Marine who was sent to planet Pandora to gain the trust of the Na’vi indigenous people—that in order to learn the Na’vi’s culture and way of living, he must empty his mind. The learning process that Jake has to go through is not a mere accumulation of new knowledge but an adaptive learning process: to learn, Jake must challenge his assumptions and worldviews and develop the same way of “seeing” as the indigenous people. As Jake learns the indigenous way, he must abandon his old values and beliefs. His only option, then, is to join the Na’vi people in the fight against the army of his ex-fellow Marines. (My interpretation, of course.)
It is well known that we only see what we are prepared to see. In the book “The Art of Possibility,” authors Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander recall an experiment with indigenous people of Ethiopia who had never seen a two-dimensional image. When presented for the first time in their lives with a photograph showing people and animals, the indigenous people were unable to actually distinguish the characters represented on the picture. Instead, “they felt the paper, sniffed it, crumpled it, and listened to the crackling noise it made; they nipped off little bits and chewed them to taste it.”*
What I find most amazing about this story is not that the indigenous people could not “read” the photograph. No, what amazes me is the realization that I am just like them—that there is an entire world out there, made of things that I am unable to see because my worldviews are preventing my mind to begin to imagine those things even exist, and even less comprehend their meaning if and whenever my eyes are eventually able to notice them. We might be a very developed specie, yet we must nevertheless admit that we are still very much like the cavemen in Plato’s Parable of the Cave, mistaking the shadows we see on the walls of our “caves” (i.e., our minds) for reality. Albert Eistein was no fool when he exclaimed: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
The ability to empty our mind to make space for a new reality is a critical capacity in any developmental and transformative process. But how can we develop that skill? Before answering this question, let me present a bit of theory that will shed some light onto the nature of the learning and developmental process.
Living systems theory teaches us that the behavior of a system is less influenced by external forces than by the specific organization of its internal structure. For a human being, the structure consists of the mental models, assumptions, beliefs and values that the particular individual has accumulated overtime through her education and diverse life experiences. A living system learns and adapts over time by changing its internal structure while maintaining its identity. Over time, the history of structural changes in a system defines the system’s development path. Moreover, it is the structure of a living system that selectively determines which perturbations or information in the environment the system will notice or ignore, and which new interactions will be created between the system’s components. One says that a living system is structure-determined. This explains why the indigenous people of Ethiopia—having a completely different life experience than ours and, thus, different mental models—were unable to identify the objects photographed and only saw a shiny paper. The structure of their minds selected what they were able to see and dictated how to interpret what they saw. In other words, the mind constructs its own subjective reality.
The concept of structure-determined systems allows us to reconcile the notions of freedom and determinism within human beings. Indeed, this theory implies that our development path is both determined and free: we are determined by our own structure (i.e., mental models), yet we maintain the freedom to define what in our environment triggers our learning, adaptation and change.
In order to open our mind to a new reality, we must become aware of our own mental models; accept the fact that there isn’t an objective reality of the world and that, consequently, none of us owns the truth; understand that complete freedom is an illusion, yet we have the inner power to choose to challenge our assumptions; and know that our mind can be “unwired” and “rewired” to generate new thought patterns.
Here are some useful tools that can help in the process:
- The “Ladder of Inference,” developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, is helpful for understanding how our mental models are formed; it helps investigate what data from the world we select and how we interpret it to build meaning and take action.
- The “Eye of the Needle,” developed by Nancy Eubanks Oelklaus, is especially useful within the context of difficult conversations. The tool helps identify the parts of a conversation that remain unspoken and the feelings that underlie those responses so that by integrating our emotional and logical response we can communicate completely and from the heart.
- Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD) is a system modeling technique that provides a language for articulating our understanding of the dynamic, interconnected nature of our world.
- Meditation and other Buddhist mindfulness/awareness practices help free the mind from thoughts. With an empty mind, we can better connect to our Inner Self and Creative Source. (Note that in the Buddhist tradition, “emptiness” (sunyata) relates to the notion that all objects are empty of “inherent existence,” which is another way of saying that the way we perceive and experience the world is fundamentally different than the way things are.)
Finally, emptying ourselves to learn requires us to be very intentional in our learning process and to practice humility.
I wish you the best in your journey.
* The quote is from J.B. Deregowski, “Real Space and Represented Space: Cross-Cultural Perspectives,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1989), 57, cited by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, in “The Art of Possibility” (2000), Penguin books.
