When planning in uncertainty you could specify as little as possible and let the forces on the systems to do their job.
When you are aware of the problem’s context and you know the interrelationships at play you can dance with the system instead of laying out detailed plans.
In that case you need to work with a solid group of well-tested collaborators. Trust, alignment and synergy become the strongest assets to chart the course while navigating.
Be ready to fail. If you don’t have the capacity and the luck to steer when needed or to abandon when required you might have to try several times to succeed.
That is what usually happen in a continuous innovation environment where you can afford to high efforts and low outcomes.
When you have no precise details about your goal, storytelling can help. You can have at least two approaches: broad, high-level epics with fuzzy information and specific scenarios where you describe exactly what will happen.
The high-level speculation helps to set the broad context. It’s helpful to have the buy-in of all internal stakeholders and to give a chance to the less-informed or the more-distracted to have a sense of where the story is happening.
The down-to-the-detail speculative story, instead, requires courage. You take all assumptions as validated, and you chain them in a sequence of potentially connected concepts. It’s essential to stretch your imagination in this way. Otherwise, it becomes challenging to have practical tasks to act upon.
Everything could be wrong, but time and resources are not wasted because you better grasp the subject and its context. You exercised your imagination, and that primed your brain to be more creative. You tested the group on a collaborative effort that is only preparing you all better for the next move
Storytelling can be your only solution to tell complexity. Sometimes you have to deal with a problem so complex in such a little time that it is impossible to know everything about it. You should map it out, identify all components, and delineate all relationships between them. Knowing boundaries, constraints, forces, and influences is fundamental to make sense out of something complex. But sometimes you have no time to do it. So, putting together a story, in its simplest form, a context: somebody needs to do something because they want it or because somebody else wants it, they learn something about the possible roads to take, they take into consideration possible scenarios and, finally they make a decision with all of the implications and consequences that it entails.
You won’t create a perfect and durable solution. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, you will be wrong or very wrong. But telling a story using the elements you have at your disposal and adding a bit of imagination allows you to get unstuck and get out of the paralysis from analysis. Most of all, a story is the most immediate means you have to communicate your lacks, your missing pieces, your speculations. It’s a way to work, productively and provocatively, without knowing exactly what the work is that you have to do.
We decided to build opportunities to think and work together. Having people and friends to experiment together is one of the things I love the most. It’s an opportunity to grow, to learn, and to create experiments that could become real work.
What can we learn from each other?
What can we learn together?
What’s the service we can offer by combining our roles?
How can we be accountable for each other professional growth?
We will do a mini-masterclass, on a turn, each of us, to the remaining members.
The Plan
Matteo Carella will talk about complexity thinking and coaching in organizational and business environments.
Marco Valente will treat the discipline of facilitation and will share his experience about how to be a more effective and efficient facilitator.
Massimo Curatella will show how to get the best of the Design Thinking and Human-Centred Design approaches applied to Facilitation.
Working-Out-Loud
I will use this occasion to apply principles, methods, and techniques to this in-house lab experiment and I will write about it. It’s a meaningful opportunity to systematize my experience and to put it to an engaging test.
I have had frequently obstacles and difficulties in researching participants, attendees, and trainees to my courses, seminars, workshops, and like. It has always been a problem with schools, universities, maybe less with private organizations. I will need to look into the recent developments in a more agile and lean way of researching your users when you cannot research your users. It’s going to be fun.
“How to understand & explain complex topics?” is the impossible subject we will tackle together. We discuss our need as designers to understand & explain complex topics to enable collaboration –while #complexity cannot be reduced or simplified by definition.
Enjoy the video recording, with a summary of the key point that emerged. Oh, and that pandemic haircut style has gone, for now.
Index of the topics discussed in the podcast
0:00:00 Intro
0:01:05 Massimo’s self-introduction & topic
0:03:46 Easing the learn/act (thinking/doing) tension
0:05:39 A good designer is also a leader
0:10:25 Making complexity actionable
0:14:38 Sensing & changing a company’s culture
0:22:31 The need for persuasion
0:24:52 Becoming an agent of change & collective intelligence
0:29:24 Overcoming the space-for-action barrier through complexity
0:39:15 Leading through uncertainty
0:51:14 The link between critical, systems, and design thinking
0:55:04 Is “metacognition” or “metathinking” undervalued in design?
1:01:15 Conclusion
A Summary of the podcast
Edited and summarized for your convenience (and your English grammar sensitivity)
01:05 Max introduces himself
Massimo Curatella
I am Massimo Curatella, Max If you want, I live in Rome. And I am a designer of systems. I am specialized in service design, UX design, and interaction design. Although I am basically having experience in doing the entire workflow. I’ve been a software engineer for 25 years then I went to the other side of the Force. I have also experience in facilitating, in writing, I was a technical journalist and I have been teaching in different universities.
I decided to take the challenge of picking an impossible topic: simplifying complexity. By definition, complexity cannot be simple. So my question is, how can you make complexity manageable and understandable? It’s a huge topic. It’s absolutely surreal for me to face it in 60 minutes. But I think it’s really productive and inspiring to talk about it, especially with a person like you because I really appreciate your blog and the things you publish and the links you share. It’s really informative and stimulating. So that’s the right place to be.
Kevin Richard
Thank you. It’s totally likewise, I love what you’re writing. I love what you’re sharing in general. So I think this is the reason we are discussing it together.
03:47 Designers are philosophers with hands.
Kevin Richard
I read somewhere “designers are like philosophers with hands,” like people who can act, not just think. How do you learn things that are actionable? It’s like a dichotomy between thinking and doing.
05:26 Designers are Systems Leaders
Massimo Curatella
You’ve touched a lot of good starting points, especially when you talk about learning, designing, or being “a philosopher with hands”. I was thinking of another metaphor: a good designer is also a leader. Because if you think well, and if you build the right path for other people to understand well the context, you are leading, you’re showing the way. The problem is when you think about a designer in the ivory tower, imposing their hands,” this is what you need to do”. Rather I would say a designer as a leader is a Systems Leader because they can understand the context in which they are moving, together with the stakeholders, the clients, the end-users, the colleagues and they are co-designing possible solutions. They are making sense together of what is the environment.
06:36 Sensemaking as driving at night
Massimo Curatella
How do you write a novel? Or how do you do anything? It’s like driving at night, maybe you know the road but you cannot see far away, to the horizon. You have your car lights, and you can travel like that until you reach your destination. Designing, when you are in our complex settings, –which is basically always– it’s almost like driving at night. You must have the skill of being able to drive, you need to be careful, you need to stay awake, to be in good health, but you also have to look around you as things are happening. And this is really a good metaphor for design or for understanding complex topics because, of course, it is important for you to have a background, to be qualified, to do your research. But most of the time it’s difficult to make sense out of something and to produce a synthesis that is brief, elegant, and smart and smooth.
This is the philosophy at the foundation of Design Thinking, Iterative Design, or Design Sprints. According to what I can discover together with you we can learn together the problem we are studying. We need, sometimes, to make decisions that are sharp and well defined. Some other times you need to put in place some experiments to see what happens if we do this or that. And that is really the craft and the skill of a designer because there you need to have the skill, the capability of being fast and quick in prototyping and really be a master of tools.
Digital Tools for Thinking Together
Massimo Curatella
That is the place in which I keep on experimenting with digital canvases like Mural, Miro, Figma. It doesn’t make any difference if it is posted on the wall or if it is pen and paper. I just need to be fast and effective. So sometimes I share my screen with the clients or I show my wall. Some other times I show a Google Drawing. Nowadays I’ve discovered a new tool, Whimsical, it seems to be almost a toy. But it is so limited in the things that you can do that you are forced to be tidy and clear because you have only some boxes to move on the screen. And so, simple tools and simple rules to make sense out of complexity. The great effort is to be alert, to stop and reflect: “what are we seeing?” “What did we discover together?” Sometimes this is missing completely because you don’t have time, you have to go fast and you need to deliver. You don’t have time to do a retrospective. Or to evaluate the quality of your thinking. This is the kind of creative pressure, the fight to be rational, systemic, and systematic, but then you have to deal with reality. You just have to do it.
10:27 Models: Making knowledge actionable
Kevin Richard
On the simplification of complexity, not in the sense of making it more simple or stupid, but more in the way that you can create a concept that is easy to grasp, to understand. This is a good way to introduce something more complex and let people maybe go deeper, but it’s enough to act upon it. And you use the metaphors to do it, like with the spotlights of your car.
This is like in science when we say, we know that all models are wrong, inaccurate representations of reality but a good model in science is one that helps you to predict some stuff. And if it does well this work, that’s enough, we don’t need more until we reach the end of the usefulness of this model.
How can we create metaphors, models that are simple enough to explain something? Models, that are also useful enough to be actionable?
We use a lot of visual stuff, visual models to explain complexity like the iceberg model. This is a really great one because, visually, you understand that there’s something on the top and in the water, you have a lot more.
Mapping and Sensemaking in videogames
Kevin Richard
I have one model coming from a videogame I played in the past, Civilization, and I loved the fact that you don’t see the map. It’s foggy everywhere. The only way to discover the map is to make some of your pawns to move on the map. Yes. Even though you discovered all the map, you see some key elements that are static, but everything which is dynamic is hidden from your view. You need to have a pawn which is close to something that is moving to see it. And this is a great representation of how far you can see. It’s limited to the field of view of your pawn, and that’s it. And as a god-like creator in this in this game, you can see all the viewpoints of all your pawns, which is already more than what you can do in reality, that I think it’s a great way of saying when you want to map, if you are alone, it will take you a lot more time.
You can draw some parallels with the co-designactivity. The more points of view you can have the farthest you can see and understand your context.
Better having more opinions
Massimo Curatella
You need not only to have the capability of looking around you in a dynamic and adaptive way according to what happens. But you need to create a network of sensors. You want to be able to have a network of probes that would send you back signals. So you can improve your capability of looking farther away, both in space and in time, it’s a superpower: you can see longer/farther than others. And that puts you in the position of having more opinions. Maybe most of them are right compared to those who have only one opinion or their strong intuition.
This is something related to my practice of design because I usually struggle and fight with clients when they say: “We have this inventory of UI pages of 150 pieces. Can you do that? What’s your estimate?” And I used to say, “yeah I can hire a couple of people. We can do it in one week or two weeks or three weeks. And I just used to do it. Then after months, I discovered that that software didn’t make sense at all. Because it was beautiful and the first impression was:” Wow, this is a cool UI, cool graphics, cool icons”. But then you click through, and you discover that there are steps missing, and things that you cannot understand, or pieces flying away. So I stopped completely having this kind of linear and restricted view on design. I need to have the broadest and deepest view of what you want to do. Either if you allow me to do that, or not, because otherwise, I’m not able to do a good job for you. And I’m not interested in just earning the money for the sake of selling pixels by the weight, And so it started the process of actually changing the culture of the client. So I started to educate them. “This is how you’re supposed to design software”. There are some well-defined steps: you need to research users, you need to empathize with them, you need to extract a synthesis of your research. To make sense out of it. You need to design according to an iterative model where you refine your prototype until it is almost perfectly fitting the real needs and desires of the users.
That is basically the UX Design mantra. But when you need to explain it to them (that is the first problem with complexity) It takes time. So you need to show use cases, and then you need to sell it.
So you need to go through the struggle of explaining why it’s important to co-design and co-create. And that’s s a change of mindset. And so piece by piece, by iterating this kind of approach in explaining “this is why I did that”. The button is there for specific reasons, and because of research findings.
Moving up the Strategic Design ladder
Massimo Curatella
This takes time. It’s a lot of effort and it changed completely my role as a designer. That’s why I like to think that I’m more on the strategic design side of the job. This is difficult. It’s really more rewarding. But it also brings you to be more selective and demanding for clients. You cannot work with all kinds of client, they need to have this kind of fertile conceptual ground.
19:13 Meaningful design is co-design
Kevin Richard
Totally agree with you. Yes, educating clients, people that are not used to work in a certain way to make them work with you, That if only we were doing our work on our side, and we could be alone and do our stuff and come back and say, Ta-da, that’s that done. There are people that that are doing the design this way, but we know where it goes to that. People struggle to implement it. People struggle to see meaning in it.
So when we need them with us during the research, we need them with us during the ideation and probably we need them with us when we start materializing those ideas into whatever screens, whatever artifacts, so they the see the connection between the steps you’re going through. And to get them here just to embark them into this endeavor. You have to come with them and you need to influence their contexts, you want to change behaviors, even before changing their mindset because you cannot change their mindset if they didn’t experience anything.
Well, it’s really hard to do it, you want them to be part of it because the experience leads them to learn with you during the steps. And it’s easier to make them change their point of view on something if they experience it in some ways.
And this is where need to incentivize them on this and changing their context when we are external to their contexts. I think it’s the point where it’s really hard. And this is why you need to be selective, In that sense. You need people where there’s already some thought process around their way of doing, where there’s something that you feel that they are ready to go into this process with you.
22:28 Having a triple positive impact by being a strategic communicator and an agent of change
Massimo Curatella
Sometimes I tend to be naive in thinking that I want to get the most out of my time because I want to have a purpose and a meaning, I want to have a positive impact. So I want to change people’s lives, whatever it is, even if it’s a small thing. So I tend to think that everybody else in the world is like me, this, sometimes, is a desire and a delusion. But of course, I’m not so naive to think that it’s the reality. So some other times the entrepreneur or the client, they just want to make money. There’s nothing wrong with it. And they want to have success, nothing wrong with that. So you need to be a strategic communicator, you need to persuade them. That’s a specific word that sometimes has a negative connotation, I don’t want to convince you about anything. I don’t want to change your mind or to influence you. I want to show you a workflow, a method that is going to be more efficient and effective and pleasurable and sustainable than what you are doing right now.
So I don’t want to convince you because I am better than you and I want to save the world and you’re not. Maybe you don’t care. And we don’t have to talk about this. This is not the point. The point is, you’re ambitious, you have a complex project that might have a strong impact. Well, let’s do things in the proper way. Let me show you what could be a proper way that is not my way, it’s going to be our way, I cannot do it alone.
That’s the change of mind. So you’re right when you say we need to change behaviors. This is difficult because it’s an actual change in the widest sense of the word. When you need to change an organization, a behavior, a habit.
Goals, purposes, principles, values for me, my family, my clients, society, the planet.
So that is the key place where a designer becomes an agent of change. At the smallest level, the smallest scale within you, yourself, your family, your organization, and then in the community or in the ecosystem where you are designing a product and a service. And that is really hard. But it’s really exciting.
You need to explain why we are doing certain things. And you need to facilitate the process because we are going to do it together. Because I don’t have the solutions. I don’t have even the right path to go through. We need to build our little collective intelligence, collective mind and we need to be aligned and effective in being fast and quick and precise about learning in the fastest and in the best way possible, but also to make sense out of what we are learning because what is our purpose?What do we need to know? everything or do we need to focus on certain things?
And this is exactly the sense of exploring complexity, sense-making together, but also design research and design synthesis, because it’s not enough to say: these are the sources where to look for information, these are the experiments, then you have to make sense out of it, are you able to explain it in a concise way, but also showing the value of it towards the purpose that we are having as an organization not because or any arbitrary point of view?
That is why, as a designer, you need to be a good communicator, a good thinker, sound systems thinker. It would help if you were good at finding the biases you might be a victim of, the mental traps. And this is hard because you’re a human being.
26:48 We can only design meaning together
Massimo Curatella
If you have the ambition of doing all of that alone, good luck with that. It’s impossible. you need to grow your organization, your network of thinkers. Because otherwise how can you grow your system of probes, of sensors?
You need to curate your thoughts, your sharing, you need to make a synthesis, and to put things in context. You need to make a connected report about what’s useful to us. And this needs to be curated, maintained, and kept alive as a garden.
Designers as gardeners: from “me” to “we”
Massimo Curatella
That’s the other beautiful metaphor of curating a product or service or a knowledge base as a gardener, you are there to nurture it, like plants, every day, you cut a little dried ranch here and there. You move things around. You take care of the sunlight, of the water of the ventilation. And that’s the most beautiful metaphor closer to be a systems leader rather than just a maker or designer. And it entails a lot of things because you need to be less about yourself, about your ego, It is less about ”me”, It’s more about what can “we” do together,
This needs to be sincere, I need to be open, available to listen to you. I need to be also graceful and tolerant of your faults, your limitations. Otherwise, how can we work together? So it’s not just a matter of “are you qualified or not?” But “can we learn this together? Can we grow together?” And this is a different way of thinking about a company and organization in which you have your cubicle. You have your role and you have your things to do. You do it with your head down. When it’s five in the afternoon, you can’t wait to go home. That’s hell to me.
29:25 Space for action within the Organizational Silos
When you hit the wall of the buyer, of the company, which are organized in a really structured way, where the constraints are here to force you to go in into the walls they created between stuff because this is the way they make it manageable. And you want to move stuff, you want to do things differently.
Unless there’s a real will to change stuff and to change how the organization allows being looser on some rules. Most organizations have a safe space for learning until so far and you’re not able to do is always as you want it to do.
Yes, so this space for action will determine what you will be able to do and where you will be able to go. And so what you will be able to discover, and this needs to be solved because it’s circular. You don’t know really where to start you have to move the space for action for the buyer, but to do it you need first to change stuff and changing stuff means hitting against this buyer.
It’s a wicked problem. It’s really hard to get through it and sometimes you have to accept you cannot change it and the fact that you accept that to maybe play by the rules At some points. Then you see an opportunity to inject something new in it. And this may help change stuff, but it’s slow. And it’s not always the easy way.
33:18 Face complexity with complexity
Massimo Curatella
I can really relate to what you’re saying. I have diverse experiences in trying to change workflows, processes, or even organizational cultures for very small or very big organizations. And I failed most of the time, but I’ve learned a lot of things. When you were talking about the fact that it’s hard and sometimes if you are an employee, you can explore and find the space for action up to a certain point. It’s true. That’s why I am usually an external consultant and I used to be a freelancer. So, I have way more space for actions because, if things are like they are, I don’t have to die in this organization, you’re just a client. But sometimes I really want to have an impact, I want to have success. So, maybe I have a long contract. So, I need to do something.
And the concept of some properties of complexity emerged and it became useful and I want to tell you how. for instance, when you talk about organizational design and development, the first thing that is important for you is to understand what is the official internal organization, in an organizational chart you can know all official roles: this is the CEO, this is the CTO or these are the managers of the first line, or you have the departments, etc.
And then you need to understand what is the real social network because the real managers are the real people doing key things and frequently they are not overlapping with the real roles.
Make the real system visible
Massimo Curatella
Now to do that, you are almost on stealth, because you are doing maybe interviews, and you have access to a sort of synoptic view of the organization like nobody else in any other place is having. So you have a superpower of seeing things like they are not seeing it. This is true for complex processes that are going across departments. So you have silos, they know the first part of the thing, they don’t know the second part of the thing, and so on.
In a project for the European Commission, we made a six-meters-by-two chart on the wall for 30 engineers, after 3, 4 months of research, and we said: “look, this is your process.” you are here, you are there. And then the leader said, “Well, I’ve never seen the process like this. I didn’t know we were doing all of this in this way.”
Leverage on network effects
Massimo Curatella
This is the first thing that you have as an organizational designer. This is a superpower that you have. And this is the place in which you have to face complexity with complexity. Because, as you were saying, it’s difficult to go person by person and say, “Look, it would be better if you do this, this and that.” Or if you ever go down from the top, the leader is imposing right now that you have to do this. And it’s going to be failing. It’s a failure. So what I’ve been experiencing was to create a network from the ground up, of the same people in this same role, but with a new motivation of getting connected with their company. So, by having the buy-in from the leadership, and starting, internal projects, they needed, following my suggestions, to establish a link with the other departments. So basically, you would have not just one top manager working in a single direction, but networks starting to mesh together. So, you would have a real internal network of forces trying to interact. And then when you set up something like this, and you are on the starting line, you can feel the power of something which is much more complex than you giving orders or imposing actions. You have people working with you trying to reach a common goal. This is the real power. Of course, if one day they say, Well, you know, Max, thank you, but we sold the company. We don’t need you anymore. It’s done. It is the end of it.
The future of organizations and the future of work
Massimo Curatella
How can we leverage this concept in our more sustainable way by building companies like this instead of having the old dear hierarchies? With the kings and queens and the slaves because this is what it is.
Or you have maybe a more modern way of putting people together and you give to the individual the responsibility of following a purpose which has a meaning to them. So they don’t have to be motivated by incentive or by money. They are doing that because they want to do it, they need to do it. This is my dream. This is what I tried to do. I failed a lot of times, but I keep on trying. If you have a company like this, you are unstoppable. Nobody can stop you because the value is not just earning the money. But we are here because we have a vision. We have our North star and our Near Star and we are doing this because we want to win together. Another dream and maybe another delusion. Let’s see.
39:11 The hard thing with hard things
Kevin Richard
This kind of organization is hard to create because first I think if it’s done is it’s always the kind of an exception to most. And this “fun” fact is enough to make it hard to make.
Massimo Curatella
That’s also the reason why we’re here tonight! To make it not only just an exemption but maybe the normality, the new normality This is the new normal that I want.
Kevin Richard
If you reach the point where you make this kind of organization, then you have to deal with the fact that people are not used to it. It creates a lot of uncertainty for them.
In an organization, there’s certainty about the rules. And so, it creates the illusion of certainty of the goals, the successes.
But if you remove this layer of rules, even if we agree with the fact that everything else is pure illusion, If you remove this layer, then people see reality like uncertainty, complexity, as you said, you have to deal with this. And for most people it’s the fear, managing people that feel uncertainty. This is the part of leadership which is challenging. You don’t have anything to control them, you cannot control that through the rules and you have to find other ways to do it.
And co-creation and participatory organization, it makes sense but then people would say “okay, but we cannot do everything in this way.”
You have all the uncertainty behind so it’s hard for people to feel comfortable with it. And then when we put people on a process, in general, this is like this as well, you say we will do some research and we will find insights and from those insights we will draw the next sections, even though we add some kind of phases and we know the kind of stuff we will do in the future, we are not certain of what will be the outcome of each of these phases and we cannot say, okay, in two months we will do this and this will be exactly lead to this kind of output and this will exactly lead to this kind of successes.
And people don’t feel comfortable with this kind of answer, because they love the illusion of certainty some way. Because everyone is setting some kind of certainty at some point.
That’s a summary of all of it. So everything you said it’s absolutely the truth. The point made by The Matrix, it’s absolutely this. Of course, it’s a movie, it’s a science-fiction movie. But think about the certainty of being an employee before February 2020. And then the pandemic. Where is your certainty? And how can you say that, since they are the CEO, they know what is going to happen in two months? I don’t believe in astrology, why should I believe in your predictions? So I know that it is really comfortable to live with certainties. And of course, people tend to live with this kind of luxury. But can we afford it? It’s something that needs to be absolutely challenged. And the other concept is the concept of control. Why are you supposed to control me? Why?
44:51 Who controls the controllers?
Kevin Richard
I still agree. I think all systems set that we have around that are rules to control are meant to control people. They’re meant to control outcomes. But as we are living through these systems and through these rules, one of the means to manage the outcomes is managing, as well, everything that leads to those outcomes. So if you want to make sure that we have a certain outcome we need, In a way, if we follow logically the philosophy of this kind of ethics, we need to control every step of the process that leads to outcome x or y. And that means people as well, even though it’s not the first point.
Massimo Curatella
This is Taylorism. This is scientific management. It seems to be something from the past, although it’s something that somebody still wants to use today.
If you cannot know your future and mine, why are you supposed to set my future for me? And if you want to get some outcomes, why don’t we build together a plan rather than you controlling the steps? Because when you had to create some simple objects in a factory, 100 years ago, of course, you need to control the steps, otherwise, you could get hurt, and you wouldn’t have the throughput. But what about creating software today? Can you control the steps? Are you building software? Can you control the steps of building software? Are you able to predict what’s going to happen every step of the way? Because this is what I’m doing day and night and nothing is controllable. We are really driving in the night on a foggy night while the car is on fire and the brakes are not working. This is today. and think about government, policymaking, healthcare. How do you wear your facemask? Like this or like that? Should it be one meter or two? I mean everywhere is like this. How do you educate your children? Is it easy?
47:12 Try raising children
Kevin Richard
Yeah, that that’s a good one. How do you raise your kid? I have just one point on this when we are teaching them: “Oh, the first rule, you should not lie,” Right? Because then you face reality and you lie, you lie every time instead.
Massimo Curatella
The human mind can learn to reason better. I talked to my kid about this podcast days ago, I said, look, I have a friend, it’s Kevin, I need to talk to him. I am basically putting myself in a difficult situation because I said I want to talk about how to explain simply, difficult things. What can I do? What should I do? Tell me, please help me. He said, why don’t you talk about ecology? The problem we have with the environment, the fact we are losing a lot of species, we don’t have to pollute, we have to take care of the fact that we are eating too much meat. And I said, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And this is a win. And I said we have hope. And this is what I like to do with any other people. If you take the time to explain things, but you have to do it in an efficient, effective, and pleasurable way. Because if you’re not fast, you’re going to lose them. You have three to six seconds. if you learn this lesson you can persuade and influence people, but you need to become a good thinker first and a good communicator, second. Otherwise, how can you do that? This is somehow my mission, my will of being present in the moment, and providing value in everything that I do. This is my challenge. Even now, even today. Even preparing for this podcast and this is making me happy. I feel alive and I feel that I am pursuing my goal, and I like it.
50:50 Learning how to think better
Kevin Richard
I agree with a lot of things and I think there was a point behind, this point about control, and all you said now is related to it. If you want to make others think and you want them to make to think about things in a proper way… there’s a lot about critical thinking around this topic. And there’s a lot about learning about your biases and how you can overcome them. You cannot remove them. but you can be more aware of them. And then find the ways you can correct yourself when you see the evidence of one of your bias is there.
Massimo Curatella
That’s another big topic. And that’s why during the years, I started to collect my interests around the magnets of systems thinking, critical thinking, design thinking, and they seem to be always together. They’re not separate. But this makes thinking and acting and designing heavier, not lighter. It’s even more difficult. If every step of the way you need to be sure, there are no biases and you are mitigating them, that you are inclusive with all the stakeholders and you are taking rational and structured approaches to get the best outcome out of it. That’s really a challenge. But this should be the aim of every human being not for designers only.
Systems-thinking: A Little Film About a Big Idea
So, this is about the metacognition, this is thinking about thinking, do you ever think about thinking? When I do that my mind blows up. If you want to analyze how you were thinking about how you should think you start to go meta, and it’s even harder. And then you discover that when you do things like that you take a distance between you and the other people who are not used to that. I don’t want to say I’m superior in any way. I don’t want to mean that. But I went through a path, a journey in which I, I tend to be aware of this. So I know when I have in front of me, people not aware of this. And they are the prey to any possible trap and pitfall, then. There, that’s the point where you can make a difference because you need to be patient and you need to facilitate a better thinking process. Longer, harder. Can you afford that?
55:03 Good design and bad design?
Kevin Richard
Don’t you think that bad thinking in design is a bit too present today in general? Because sometimes, to be honest, sometimes I feel like it’s hard to talk about this In Design. And “thinking meta”, as you said, is like, we are too philosophical, too under theories and not enough in the practice and then I don’t know where’s really the limit between the two and I don’t want to create one. But most of the time, it feels like people want to create those limits like: “design is practical, before anything else”. Maybe I’m totally wrong.
Massimo Curatella
That’s a good question. I have to say that I’m coming to design from an engineering background. But actually, I have always been doing design in the sense of understanding deeply the user needs and building something by optimizing resources in terms of actually delivering value by keeping an eye to the ecosystem. This is what is design to me. Or, better, this is what I want Design to be. If you look at people like Bruno Munari, the Italian guy who in the 50 to 60 said basically the same things that Design Thinking is saying today, so nothing new. Being a designer is a frame of mind that is a way of being. So when you talk about creating cool UI, like the dribble.com things, that is, that could be the bad thinking. That could be the bad education for a designer because you look at the cool visuals without thinking about the process, you don’t know what’s the context behind it. That’s why I like a definition of the design that I do that is interaction design, I design interactions. So before creating the artifacts, the tangible thing you interact with, I need to understand the entities, the actors, and the relationships, and we need to create a better system that will suit you. Then we think about communication design, visual design, UI design, and also the development. But I am always part of all the phases even talking with the client or making a strategy. And I got there but after 20 years. This is the place of the designer, this is where a designer should be, sitting near the entrepreneur, or the project manager, the project leader, or developer. That’s the point where designers should be. And if you think that designers are just there to receive your specs, so they can execute, this is not Design to me. Not at all, not anymore. So, I don’t know, because they could do a fantastic job. Maybe that is the place where you could do bad thinking in design. Or that’s another way to look at it. You are in the right place. You have access to users, you can gather the needs. You are conscious of the ecosystem, but you’re not applying anything that is rational. You are full of biases. (I didn’t say the word you were thinking of). So every place can be a place for bad thinking but there are certain configurations that are more strategic and may be ideal for good design. Some others maybe are more prone to bad thinking in design.
You can do bad design for instance, when you do user research, design research or interviews, If you are not able to extract the knowledge in the right way if you are not establishing a loop of verifying and assessing the knowledge and the assumptions. And there, you need to be confident in making mistakes. Not everybody is able to say, “Well, I was wrong. Let’s iterate and refine it”. This is not really well seen. You’re supposed to say, “I have the answers. And I’m right”. You’re not supposed to say “I’m a senior strategic designer. Yesterday, I was wrong. Let’s redo this thing!” you need to have guts to do that. And I do that every day. This is my job, to be wrong. And to prove to you why I was wrong because this is the value delivered to the company. But you need to be in the space for action.
Kevin Richard
That’s a good ethic, I think, in fact.
01:01:11 That was only the Table of Content 😎
Kevin Richard
Thanks a lot for this discussion. We, I think we’ve covered a lot in one hour. It’s like we can take each of the points and talk about it again, for hours. So Well, I hope we will do this exercise, more than once.
Massimo Curatella
Yeah, absolutely. We can even go deeper into specific subtopics or we can go as we are doing and I really would like to extract some highlights and insights. I want to write about it so we can have a conversation ongoing, and we can invite other people to join us.
Kevin Richard
Yes. with pleasure and to have more people can be only a good way to explore.
Massimo Curatella
Yeah, I agree. So thank you very much, Kevin, for your invitation. It’s been a pleasure and I’m really looking forward to doing more of this.
Kevin Richard
Yeah. Thank you. Me too. Bye
Massimo Curatella
Bye. Ciao.
How I prepared for this Podcast
It was fun and stimulating. I consider this an evolution of my “learning out loud” process in discovering more and more of what I don’t know about complexity and design. I’ve collected a lot of stimuli, prompts, and motivation to go deeper into my ignorance.
If you want to learn more about this adventure of mine, discover how, by leveraging on the collective intelligence of my connections on online communities and social media, I have been Preparing for the Podcast “Making Complexity Simple”.
Do you want to receive updates about my future articles?
After an exchange on Twitter with Kevin Richard about complexity, how to face it, how to manage it, and how to communicate it, I had a deep, improvised, and intense online conversation with Kevin. We’ve spoken as we’re being friends for 20 years. We went into the weeds of an intense conversation about the topics that we love to discuss on our own blogs and online circles.
It was natural to think about doing something more, together. So Kevin invited me to his podcast, to talk about the same topics. This time, we would record a podcast episode.
Excited about the possibility I did what I usually do when stars collide: I tried to put my thoughts together on the topics which have been on my list for a long time, now. What do I know about Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, Design, Management, Leadership, Communication? Not a Ph.D., for sure, but I’ve thinking, writing and trying to apply them, in one way or the other in everything I do.
Let’s talk to me
I went to the place I like to go frequently: my mind. And I did what it became natural to me when I need to think: I wrote. Or, better, I talked. I recorded some drafts, impromptu conversations about those topics in a smooth and seamless way. I went into the flow of expressing what interests me, what I feel, and, most of all, what questions I have still unturned. I did transcribe my notes, yes, they went into my journal. But I did not reread them, nor I’ve added them to my Zettelkasten. It was a needed exercise to remove the pressure of thinking too much privately and expressing it too little with words, which somebody can hear.
You cannot contain complexity
That’s when I had the first symptoms of the phenomenon we’re talking about. You cannot contain complexity in straight talk. You cannot express it fully and make it clear, just because you take all the time to put your thoughts in line. And this was the taste I would have been supposed to feel during the podcast. This is talking about complexity, you cannot use it up, you cannot exhaust it. And that’s what gives me thrills of joy and fear. That’s my element. That’s what I need to explore. That’s what I don’t know.
Let’s talk to the Collective Mind, Then
Not happy, and really busy with work and life, I let my diffuse brain cogitate on it, in the background, while designing my life out. But, what if I make good use of the many communities I am following? What if the right scope and functions of people in those communities are to contribute to my loud thinking? Without too much hesitating I’ve prepared a draft message in the spirit of a quick call to friends, just to ask a simple question. And I started to post it in my favorite online circles.
When someone asks “how do you deal with complexity”, I was trained to reply “by reducing it“. That’s probably a very common takeaway when you read about general systems theory.
You cannot transfer complexity 1:1. It’s like how you cannot understand the world as-is. The complexity has to be reduced: in the case of humans, we have limited sensory input (one reduction), a couple of filters (another), and on it goes. (Check out some overviews of epistemology; […]
[…]. So we never deal with the world per se, but with our representation of the world as we understand it. The reduction step is one part of the puzzle.
The other is the re-creation of internal complexity inside the system, aka us humans, through experience. Even our simplistic representation of the world gets richer and more nuanced; never the real deal, but more complex than the representation of a 1-year-old child.
How do you understand complex topics …– by reducing the external complexity of the unknown/the world/the topic, and recreating an internal representation with its own complexity —
… and explain them in an efficient and effective way for those people who can act to solve wicked problems? Now all of that sounds like a bit too much to discuss in one sitting. Richard Feynman did a great job at reducing the complexity of physics and explaining it to others.
[…] “wicked learning environments” that (Epstein 2019) said he got from (Hogarth 2001), but I haven’t checked!, which is: [T]he rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. (Epstein 2019, p 21)
sfast was lapidary:
I never explain anything to people who are the ones who take action. And I never accept anything from a person who does not take action but theorizes about a problem.
This makes me think. And I am not sure yet what I think about it.
Ethomasv provides a practical approach:
[…] complexity is somewhat individual assessment.
Whenever I have something that I can’t grasp I do:
1. Find practical examples – seeing how something works in practice helps
2. Find special cases – those cases live on the edge of complexity, usually they are unique because they rely on the theory, but they have specific conditions so that a big portion of complexity can be reduced with abstraction.
3. Find more than one explanation of the same thing – sometimes the obstacle is not complexity itself, but the way explanation is phrased. I always look for different authors and textbooks, they will deal with details in a different way, organize info in a different way, and one of them will resonate more with the way I think and connect information internally.
4. This brings me to the last point, there is no one universal way of explaining something because in order for someone to understand you, you need to use their mental models to describe something to them. Your mental models won’t work. So when I am trying to explain something to others, I try to build up complexity instead of reducing it. I start with very simple building blocks that we are familiar with and then combine them into this complex thing I am trying to explain.
A great synthesis with essential concepts related to understanding, explaining, communication, and mental models. Well done.
Jeannelking connected:
[…] my colleague, Dan Roam, said that has stuck with me: “the person who can best describe the problem is the person best-positioned to solve the problem.”
@ethomasv presents a great example of this in their post above. When we can find a way to understand the problem well enough to describe it effectively to another, that can bring both of us to a place of greater clarity and understanding, where meaningful solutions may begin to be explored.
this speaks to being able to explain them in efficient and effective ways for people to be able to take action. Alan Alda’s Center for Communicating Science at SUNY Stony Brook focuses on helping scientists communicate huge – and wickedly important – ideas in ways that non-scientists can understand.
Dan’s statement focuses on increasing clarity for yourself, which can then be shared with others. Alda’s book focus on how to do that sharing in effective ways through connecting, relating, and storytelling.
Jamesrregan links
Uncertain times The pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity – seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all.
GeoEng51 refer to the Bongoist
I believe Richard Feynman had a quote along the lines of — if he wasn’t able to teach a physics idea in a first-year undergraduate class, he didn’t really understand it himself. So, one tactic might be to strive for that level of understanding and clarity on an idea first for ourselves, before we attempt to enlighten others 🙂
And that’s exactly what I like to do when I want to create clarity on my mind about complex topics.
What’s the podcast theme and who is its audience? What do they listen for, typically – answers or questions to make them think? Are you a fan/listener of the podcast yourself? Are you typical of the type of person interviewed, or are you a break with tradition (ie something different for the audience)?
Always start with your audience. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, how can you curate what you know into meaningful learning and take them on a journey?
The podcast host should be able to tell you about who their listeners are and why they’ve invited you on the show.
Also, how long is the interview? Your topic so far is actually three topics:
How do you understand complex problems?
How do you make other people understand them?
How do you create a positive, efficient and effective movement of change-makers?
Unless you have half a day :-), I suggest focusing on 1 and 2.
And “always starting with your audience” is an universal permanent design principle.
Writing Group in the Inner Circle of Ozan Varol
I wrote:
I am going to be interviewed for a podcast about design, Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and complexity.
I have been so wise to choose an impossible topic: “How do you understand complex topics and explain them in an efficient and effective way for those people who can act to solve wicked problems?”
I know it is just impossible. That’s exactly what frustrates me and move me, at the same time.
I was looking for your thoughts, inspirations, quotes, suggestions but also provocations, critiques, pitfalls, traps.
Of course, I am taking into good consideration the continuous efforts I am putting into my Zettelkasten. It grows. In a messy way. With joys and pains. I have one “Ah-a!” for 10 letdowns. But I know it’s my chance to really augment my brain.
I have a few online pen friends, there, following the evolution of my writing endeavors.
Kathleen Marie (Kmarie6) fueled my fire like this:
Is understanding complex topics a process? Are you looking to find a system that can take one through the process that accepts let downs, seeing the letdowns as steps towards the ah-a?
I’ve always liked the idea of asking “Why” 3 to 5 times as a way to get to the root of a problem. What has been your own process in creating and continuing your work on Zettelkasten?
I feel the toughest part of your topic is explaining in such a way that one can then be effective in solving wicked problems. How do we take into account everyone’s different learning styles, biological frames of mind that integrate with one’s personality, etc. in order to explain in such a way that they “get it”.
Critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication, appear.
Rage-panda gave it a go:
I would love to learn more about, and discuss this topic. As my role in product management, we often have to take a large complex problem and break it down into smaller solvable problem to solve. To increase complexity, the solutions themselves are also complex, which requires breaking down the solution into atomic elements that can be implemented sequentially based on dependencies and value.
Once that’s one, I review the atomic elements to determine dependencies and ensure what sequence it needs to be supported, or built.
Finally, now that I have the protagonists (the solutions), the antagonists (the problems), the journey (the sequence of events), I can start to build the story or narrative to explain the problem or the solution or both depending on the audience and objective.
See how the essence of complexity emerges? Reductionism, finding dependencies, telling a story to unroll the complexity.
You may find a good resource in Tesler’s Law / Law of Conservation of Complexity. There’s some good resources in the appendix on more recent copies of Obvious Adams, too. Tesler’s law is my most useful. After a certain point complexity is not going to go away, however, you can make a choice about who deals with it.
An interesting law I was already supposed to know and a weird book. Nice!
Hidden in the word ‘complex’ is the feeling of frustration that you can’t get the answer right away. If you could look at it and get it, then you wouldn’t call it complex, you’d see it and call it simple.
Your attention is focused on something large thinking it’s large and difficult, and because of that, you aren’t focusing on the details which make up the complex. For example, we know we need a car to drive, but we may not know all the parts of why we drive. We just drive.
Simplicity when dealing with complex tasks comes after repeatedly identifying small chunks of the complex, reducing them to simple, and repeating over time. We know how to drive because we learned each part of driving.
So, there are two ways to make complexity simple:
Construction of the Simple Make infrastructure that is easy to interact with for the purpose you desire. I wake up and brush my teeth, because I believe brushing my teeth is necessary, so I will do it whenever I wake up. Every marketer’s dream is to be your toothpaste.
Understanding over Time(UoT) Reducing a complex observation to details you understand. And doing this until you can recreate the complexity in a easier light for others, so they can(at the least) believe that the complex is simple(i.e. construction above).
Simplicity hides the feeling of confidence that we understand, just like complexity hides the feeling of frustration that we don’t understand.
That was straightforward yet articulated and rich with metaphors. Really great contribution. I can see the concepts of living in systems of systems, zooming in and out according to the focus, reductionism to make complexity acceptable. And the beautiful metaphor of driving a car is something I already used in the past and I will definitely use it in the upcoming podcast.
Cestjeffici postulated
Complexity by definition can’t be simple. Framing the issue as making complicated simple would be easier. Most people don’t understand the difference. Looking at the Cynefin Framework definitions of complex and complicated will help.
In a complex system there is cause and effect but it is impossible to find because they are so intertwined.
In a complex system you probe and evaluate.
In a complicated system the cause and effect relationships are clearer. There are logical interconnections that can be discovered.
To make a complicated system simple you find the few places that have the most connections to other elements in the system. Changing one of those points changes the entire system.
I like explaining things to kids. Or to elderly relatives. To someone with little patience, but considerable intelligence, and who I also love.
A big part of explaining is also listening – especially if the topics are complex. Your explanations are best posed as a mutual exploration, where your listener is discovering your topic, and you are discovering their course.
To which, Liberalintent, replied
I’ll second the listening part, I learn by putting aside what I thought was correct and acting as if I thought like someone else. I think the more of yourself you put aside, the easier it is to observe the reality, rather than try to tie it up in a neat simplification. The simplification always cuts out valuable parts of the reality.
And this is what I like to do. Exactly this. I love the concept of mutual exploration and putting your self aside to explore reality. Men and women, this is like being at the Luna Park, again.
Glinglin would strive for clarity, instead:
How can I develop a practice to explain things as clearly as possible?
A complex concept, when explained clearly, may not become simple, but will simply be understood. If a concept is understood, it can be practiced by people with the power to make an impact.
A model that you could use is the structure of Wired’s 5 Levels series. This series will take a complex abstract concept then explain it to:
You could model this by breaking a topic up into engaging explanations for each of the 5 levels, then using the explanation that best matches the ability of your target audience.
And that’s communication! The clarity in making things understandable, not necessarily simpler or reduced.
A rock in the water, without waves
This is what didn’t produce any useful feedback:
"How do you understand complex topics and explain them in an efficient and effective way for those people who can act to solve wicked problems?" I know it is just impossible. That's exactly what frustrates me and move me, at the same time.
Being so inspired and full of prompts and inputs I jotted down an outline, kindly set up by Kevin in Dropbox Paper. Nice tool, btw. Not in a sequence, not exhausting, it is more of an anchor than a sequence of concepts.
Podcast with Massimo
Topics to discuss
How I prepared for this podcast. Internet as a Collective Mind/Personal Learning Network
Doing hard things
As Bruno Munari said “To make things hard is easy, To make things easy is hard.” it is not easy for a facilitator to create a successful facilitation event. And successful facilitation must be easy for participants.
“Evil comes from a failure to think.”― Hannah Arendt
The reason is a double-edged sword: “…our reasoning mechanisms focus on arguments that support our initial views and are content with relatively shallow arguments.” taken from Dan Sperber’s, The Enigma of Reason
How to communicate complexity (if and when you have it understood)
Reducing the level of approximation of information about the user
I started to have a synopsis for a book. Something good to inspire a semester to teach. Great! This is really impossible to do in one hour!
Are we ready for this?
Of course, I am… not. What did you think? How can one be ready for complexity? You cannot.
But the fantastic amount of suggestions, books, links, articles, thinkers, and connections I received from online fellows is really astounding.
I was able to calibrate my thoughts, to refresh several concepts, to improve my bibliography, to refine some quotes, and to put together a better hierarchy of things to discuss thanks to an outline.
How to facilitate group processes in solving simple, complicated, and complex Problems. Methods applied in the 1st Collective Intelligence Workshop of OsservAgro on the Sustainability of agri-food systems. Part of a series on Collective Intelligence Design.
Series Navigation Collective Intelligence Design and Facilitation
Facilitating Collective Intelligence to solve complex problems
To find solutions we need first to understand the problem we are trying to solve.
Not all problems are created equal. By distinguishing between different types of problems we can choose the processes that are better suited to solve them.
How to solve a problem?
You can work to solve a problem only if you have a clear model of the problem you want to solve. To avoid being busy just for the sake of it, wasting time and resources, we need to do some preliminary thinking about the problems we’re passionate about or which are creating pain to us.
Working at the definition of the problem is the first important step towards solving it. Problem setting is a part of the solution method.
In any design method, as the Design Thinking method, for instance, the initial effort is dedicated to understanding, clarifying and defining the solution we are designing for. The “design-as-a-plan” process includes a research and exploration phase which helps to clarify what the “design-as-a-noun” is supposed to be.
Identification of a “North Star”, a future vision where the problem is solved (or changed as we will see, later on).
Identification of a “Near Star”, the next big achievement we need to steward the system to, so we can concretely move towards our North Star.
How to define a problem?
It’s always difficult to put one problem, an abstract concept with tangible consequences, into clearly defined boundaries. But “boundary” is a key concept at the foundation of the Systems Thinking approach when talking about a system. How can you point your finger at “a system” if you cannot put it within finite and defined boundaries? We would go, of course, beyond the realms of concepts which we can easily grasp and manage, to reach the field of philosophy (what are the boundaries of the sky?).
Still, by arbitrarily setting possible boundaries to a system, it becomes easier to talk about it, to have the possibility, and sometimes the illusion, to manage it and, to a certain extent, to understand it.
Stretching our minds to define boundaries (think about nation-state borders, can you see them in real life?) is a needed step to start working with systems and to collaborate on understanding them.
That is why there are so many different thinking approaches, sometimes overlapping, other times contradicting each other.
Navigating and adapting to tides and currents are much better analogies when we talk about facing complex challenges. How do you command your boat in white waters? What’s the wind like?
Problems: making distinctions
It’s natural and intuitive for most of us to distinguish between two main types of problems: easy and hard. Sometimes we use words as “complex” or “complicated” by meaning the same thing: that is a difficult problem. By going deeper we discover that we can put the systems in which our problem lives in a more articulated set of categories. The most apparent to us are: simple, complicated and complex problems.
What is a simple problem?
Simple problems have a straightforward solution. They represent the “known knowns”.
If the water faucet is leaking I can call the plumber who will fix it.
I am not thinking about any other consequence besides calling another person, explaining the problem, setting an appointment, paying for the service and… using again the faucet.
This problem could become a completely different one if I start to consider:
I am in a nationwide lock down due to a pandemic. Can I call a plumber?
What if I try to fix it myself: am I able to do it? Should I study how to do it?
What if I don’t fix it? How much water am I wasting? Am I contributing to wasting public resources which could be precious in time of need?
As you can see the context I am setting to define the boundaries of my problem are directly affecting the consideration of the nature of that problem.
What is a complicated problem?
My car broke. While my grandfather’s car would have needed just a look under the hood, today, I just got an “error code XYZ.”
It doesn’t matter how much effort I make to classify this problem as simple: “My car just broke.” And, because of a more “modern” context I could not just lift the hood and “have a look at it”. Really, I wouldn’t know where to put my hands. I could even make more harm than good but intervening.
This is a complicated problem to me. It is part of my “known unknowns”. Sure, there will be hundreds of people able to fix this problem. But those would not include me. I am not skilled to solve it. I can only call somebody who is an expert on this and ask them to fix my car for me.
When we are able to recognize complicated problems we should have the humility and the wisdom of calling an expert to solve them.
What if by looking for the error message produced by the car information systems in the reference manual we discover that it means: “You ran out of fuel. Go to the nearest fueling station.”? Would that still be a complicated problem?
What is a complex problem?
By eliminating simple and complicated problems we remain with others less intuitive categories of problems.
What if there is no straightforward solution as in the leaking faucet case? What if there is a leak happening in several different places for several different reasons? What if my car doesn’t work anymore because there is no more oxygen in the atmosphere to allow the internal combustion engine to produce power? What if imposing a lock down to only some regions of the country, to prevent the spread of a virus, pushes people, instead, to run away to other regions, accelerating the contagion?
When we don’t know what is happening and why it is happening, when we don’t even know the things that we don’t know, we are descending in the realm of complexity: the “unknown unknowns”.
How do you solve complex problems?
Complex problems have no right answers. The relationships between many causes and many effects are difficult to identify and continuously changing.
It’s only by experimenting, reflecting and adapting our actions that we can find leverage points on complex systems.
Problem-solving approaches
Once you decide how to differentiate between simple, complicated and complex problems you need to choose possible problem-solving approaches. This will allow you to leverage existing methods and tools which worked on that type of problem.
Dave Snowden has been researching and publishing about approaches to problem-solving and organizational design for years. He devised a problem definition and solution framework called Cynefin.
What is the Cynefin framework?
If not all problems are created equals, we should be careful in choosing how we are designing solutions. We need, first, to understand the nature of the problem and then deploy a solution strategy.
The Cynefin framework provides thinking and collaboration tools to make sense of systems. Although it is not a way to classify problems it allows us to make decisions according to the systems they fall within. In this regards the Cynefin framework breaks down systems in five domains:
Obvious (Simple). Relationships between cause and effect are clear.
Complicated. Clarifying cause and effect requires expertise.
Complex. Cause and effect are clear only after they happened.
Chaotic. Cause and effect are unclear.
Disorder (in the middle). When you don’t know in which of the previous four your problem resides.
How to collaborate to solve complex problems?
Hunger, Sustainability of food systems, education, peace are just a few of the most crucial examples of complex problems we are facing. A pandemic as the Coronavirus in 2019 and 2020 (I really hope I will not have the need to revise the years in this sentence) is one of the global challenges which are not simple nor complicated. And we need to keep this kind of global issue out of the Chaotic and Disorder domain if we want to keep on walking on this Earth.
The workshop was titled: “The Common Heritage of Knowledge” and was aimed at re-establishing the dialogue between diverse stakeholders coming from all fields: science, research, policymaking, education, activism, business, and common people.
The facilitation agenda
The facilitator organized the session of about 2,5 h with about 30 people as follows:
Introduction and context description. Presentation of the rules of engagement. Organizers/Sponsors give short context on OsservAgro
Post-it
Filtering and clustering
Post-up
Topic selection
World Café
Presentation and Open discussion
Closure
1. Introduction and context setting
The facilitator, in charge of keeping time and establishing pace, stated the rules of how participants will collaborate and introduce the topic.
Sponsors, briefly, explained the reason why they’ve organized the session and suggested their expectation (rather than outcomes) by the end of the work.
The rules for inclusive collaborative thinking:
Dialogue is important to solve complex problems;
We don’t have to agree on everything except on the need to explore together;
Let’s admit uncertainty and not-knowing.
2. Post-it activity: What is Simple, Complicated and Complex?
We finally had participants activating their brains to fuel the collective mind. On each of three posters, hanged, each participant stuck a post-it mentioning, one by one, what they think is:
“What we know that we know”, that is the simple problems (Everybody knows it)
“What we know that we don’t know”, that is the complicated problems (Ask the expert)
“What we don’t know that we don’t know”, that is the complex problems (what we have to discover together)
Example outcome of “What we know that we don’t know”,
Is there a standard system of indicators for biodiversity?
Which diet should I do?
Is Bitcoin an opportunity?
What are the benefits of the Mediterranean Diet?
How can we produce more without polluting more?
Example outcome of “What we don’t know that we don’t know”
Trust
When should we ask the expert?
How will Artificial Intelligence impact our lives?
How can we give value to our local products?
How can we be intelligent together?
What does “good food” mean?
How can we protect planet Earth?
3. Filtering and clustering the emerging topics
By pushing towards creative divergence, participants generated ideas and had the opportunity to be part of the game. As in the brainstorming phase, when it is forbidden to criticize or reject any idea, participants created free thoughts and shared them in written format.
After that, it was time to refine the material produced. The facilitator asked participants to split in groups and create clusters.
To keep the session consistent, facilitators need to guide participants in refining the ideas produced by decreasing the level of approximation of knowledge and by minimizing redundant and irrelevant content.
In our case we had four key topics to emerge. Emergence is an important phenomenon of Systems Practice and, in this case, as facilitators (observer and Systems Changers/Stewards) we act on the conditions which promote the emergence of the outcome we desire.
An example of the clusters emerged
Simplicity
Food and nutrition
Health
Ecology
Knowledge
Complicatedness
Environment
Biotechnology
Health
Diet
Fintech
Epistemology
Complexity
Empathy
Method
Sustainability
4. Post-up: presenting and discussing the refined ideas
Each group, in turn, represented by one person, presented their findings.
This is an important setting in which participants interact: we finally had comments and exchanges on the various topics selected. I could feel the group to be productive, motivated, focused. This is the moment in which the magic of facilitated Collective Intelligence manifests itself in a joyous and satisfying way.
5. Topic selection
The facilitator had to make the participants converge. Usually this is a difficult moment to manage because people are excited, stimulated and while discussing others’ ideas they come up with new ones of their own. They want to talk. They want to participate!
And you have to stop them…
It seems to be counter-intuitive but when you have a limited amount of time, (2 hours!) you cannot allow discussion to roam free. At least not for too long.
At the end of the post-up session the group agreed upon summarizing the discussion in one key topic represented by the question: “How can we integrate diverse knowledge to create a sustainable agri-food system?”
Although the outcome of the first part of this session could seem to be taken for granted to you, and not novel, it’s part of the facilitation method to “rediscover the obvious”.
It makes an enormous difference to convene 30 people in a room and start with something like “Ok, thank you for coming, now split in groups and discuss how we can integrate the diversity of what you know to create a sustainable agri-food system.”
Participants have not been part of the process, they would not feel involved nor motivated to contribute.
What are the benefits of a facilitated collaborative process?
These are some of the reasons why you need to facilitate alignment for a group of diverse people:
To allow them to know each other
To promote diversity in the ways they are called to collaborate
To gain their trust in the collective thinking
To maximize their creativity and productivity
To increase the ownership of the outcomes
6. World Café: let’s imagine solutions by mixing minds
You have now original material produced by the convened participants. They can split in groups and move to a more hands-on activity. The World Café facilitation technique entails having participants break out in smaller groups, we had 4, and having one person to stay at the group table while the rest are moving and rotating among the other groups.
Diagram of how participants are moving in a World Cafè session.
The “rapporteur” who stays at the table will be the group facilitator, keeping the conversation’s continuity and presenting the outcome at the end.
Facilitators need to be prepared to manage high levels of noise and people moving around. This can be messy and loud so it’s important to establish some ground rules:
One rapporteur per group will lead the local discussion
All group members must be involved and included in the discussion
Using a poster, participants should write down their contribution as much as possible, in a collective collage which will build up the final artifact.
The lead facilitator needs to check timing and give the cue to switch groups considering the remaining time. At least two switching iterations are suggested.
The lead facilitator needs to prevent dominant participants to emerge and promote a balanced dialogue between everybody.
The lead facilitator needs to signal when delivery time is approaching to the rapporteurs to allow them to refine their posters.
7. Final presentation and plenary discussion
At the end of the World café activity, participants prepare to present their posters through the voices of their rapporteurs.
Facilitators set the allocated time slot for each and signal the beginning and the end of each presentation.
This is where presentation skills are useful. Still, participants are not supposed to be skilled presenters. That is why facilitators need to coach presenters so they are clear, timely and to-the-point.
In our workshop, we had 4 groups with four presentations illustrated on four posters.
Example of the posters produced by the 4 World Cafè tables.
Emergent benefits of Collective Intelligent facilitation
I won’t go into the details of the content produced in this session but I want to highlight the type of reasoning and expectations you can have:
Strangers, work together to produce a common idea.
People know each other: relationships and collaborations will bloom.
Sparse and disordered knowledge gets refined and its clarity is increased.
Lots of doubts and questions are raised: this enriches the key question and the foundation of the Sponsors’ mission.
Taken-for-granted knowledge and well-established definitions are put to a test. Examples: sustainability, collaboration, intelligence, problem solving, design, etc.
A more holistic and systemic thinking is naturally nurtured. A diversity of opinions promotes wider perspectives.
More inclusion. Shy, less represented, unengaged people are included in a collective process relevant to them.
Systemic Design. A more structured, design-based, rational process tends to emerge. Empathy for stakeholders increases. Consequences of actions are considered.
Critical Thinking. A more critical approach to thinking is reinforced by the diversity and the knowledge of participants. A more rational thought is a better thought.
Leadership. Participants get in touch with the process of governance, decision-making, management and leadership. Some of them, unfortunately, for their first time.
Personal development. A bond is created between participants. If they were motivated to participate in the first place, and if they had a great experience in the workshop, they will feel even more motivated to go deeper and to do more.
Did we solve our problem? How to measure the solution’s effectiveness?
This kind of workshop can be done dozens of times while discovering new knowledge, new ideas and useful insights, each time. The key concept is to iterate and adapt while integrating the discoveries and the clarification into an organic knowledge base. Facilitators and organizers, when it is not possible to delegate to participants, become the custodian of the new knowledge built. A heritage of refined knowledge which needs to be carried on the next steps, next actions or the next editions of workshops. With the same participants or with new ones.
That is why a workshop like this is to be considered the start of a process. At the foundation of a movement of people wanting to understand better the context of the complex problems they want to mitigate. Those same people, to have their time worth, need to meet, again and again, to apply Collective Intelligence techniques and methods if they want to see, in perspective, possible action to take, to dream about a solution. Or, a new possible and better future.
So it is difficult to talk about success criteria and metrics in this type of participatory workshop. It’s the group who decides what is useful and worth to produce, to write down and to transfer to the future activities. A lively and moderated discussion should be encouraged by the facilitator to promote reflection on the results and envisioning of the next steps to take.
And now what? What did we learn?
If we don’t reflect, together, immediately in the final part of the workshop and soon after with the organizers we risk to lose the best of the results. It’s important to reach the final part with focussed energy to spend. All the work done so far was to allow higher thinking and reflection upon the insights gathered.
Sponsors, organizers and facilitators should absolutely do a retrospective after the workshop. What worked? What did not go well? What have we learned? How can we refine our strategy by adapting the next workshop? Second-order thinking is the cornerstone of the entire work, otherwise, it is just a bunch of people talking.
An example of the outcome of this workshop:
We decided to share the material produced online to invite the discussion to continue.
Suggestion to apply, immediately, any new learning in everybody’s day-to-day life, especially in their organizations.
Identified the need of writing a manifesto to express our common intent.
Promoting each’s organization involvement to guarantee a more stable presence and participation to the next workshop events.
Initiating a systems change process by identifying specific actions to take.
The final message was: “(On the road to sustainability) we do what we must do. What will be possible will happen!”
A leader’s framework for decision making by David Snowden, Harvard Business Review, 2007. The Cynefin framework is a sense-making device aiding decision-making, created by Dave Snowden.
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