Facilitating Complexity: Methods & Mindsets for Exploration

On Facilitation
Methods and Mindsets for Exploration
WILLIAM EVANS
Copyright © 2016-2018 William Evans

“For apart from inquiry, apart from the
praxis, individuals cannot be truly human.
Knowledge emerges only through
invention and re-invention, through the
restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful
inquiry human beings pursue in the world,
with the world, and with each other.”
- PAU LO F RE IRE

Outline
1. Assumptions
2. Boundaries
3. Context
4. Framing
5. Divergence
6. Externalization
7. Convergence
8. Dissent
9. Take-Aways

Assumptions
We all exist and work within complex social systems.
We are all responsible for the design, development, and
maintenance of purposeful systems.
To build a great team, you must have an organization
design that enables teams to design great customer
experiences.
Before you can design an amazing customer
experience, you must design a team to create the
customer experience.
The most accute constraint organizations current face
is that their organizational design is incongruent with
their strategy; places to many policies, procedures,
reporting lines, and queues between the teams
delivering great experiences for their customers.
“Rational discussion is useful only
when there is a significant base of
shared assumptions.”
– Noam Chomsky

On Doubt
“If a man will begin with
certainties, he shall end in doubts;
but if he will be content to begin
with doubts, he shall end in
certainties.”
— Sir Francis Bacon

The process by which theory,
lesson, or skill is enacted,
practiced, embodied, realized,
reified and reflected in & through
action.
Facilitation is ultimately about
guiding agents through the
praxis of purposeful action.
On Praxis
SEMANTIC FOUNDRY ATELIERMADE WITH LOVE

Ontological Design is the
design of ways of being —
not just the purposeful
creation of mental
scafolding, but rather
facilitating the evolution
of human capability
within social systems.
Social systems focused on catalyzing,
facilitating, and enabling situated and
embodied human cognition and action.
Ontological Design
“To begin simply, ontological designing is a way of
characterising the relation between human
beings and lifeworlds.” - Anne-Marie Willis

Problematizing Facilitation
Think about the last exploration
session, meeting, brainstorming
meeting that you held.
Think about what the purpose of that
meeting was. Think about:
§ Who facilitated it?
§ Why were you there?
§ What decisions had to be made?

Use Post-its
§ On Post-its
§ 1 idea per post-it
§ 3-5 Words
§ All Caps

Question One
Write on a post-it silently*:
What problem arose during facilitation,
which prevented the group from
moving forward, for which there was a
simple, easy solution that everyone
could see?
* Do not discuss. Brainstorm quietly.
1 MINUTE

Question Two
Write on a post-it silently:
which prevented the group from
moving forward, which required
someone with deep expertise?
1 MINUTE

Question Three
which prevented the group from moving
forward, which required the meeting to
gather more data before a positive outcome
could be achieved?
1 MINUTE

Question Four
What problem arose during facilitation, which
caused the whole session to go sideways, where
there was no clear outcome, no goal, and people
just felt like they were wasting time?
1 MINUTE

BOUNDARIES
“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was
built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could
look right over it, and even a child could climb it.
Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate
it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of
boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For
seven generations there had been nothing in the world
more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was
inside it and what was outside it depended upon which
side of it you were on.”
— Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Setting Boundaries
§ Be on time
§ No laptops or cellphones
§ Respect each other (Don’t dominate
conversations, Don’t talk over someone).
§ Write your questions on post-its
§ Chatham House Rules
§ Follow instructions
§ No laptops or cellphones.
M ET A:
“Is there any reason you can’t be
100% present for the entirety of
the next 90 minutes?.”
“The purpose of this session is
to create Options, not
Solutions.”
“Do we have the right people in
the room?”

“Ultimately, all organizations are
socio-technical systems in which the
manner of external adaptation and
the solution of internal integration
problems are interdependent”
— Edgar Schein
Sensemaking Systems
FROM “ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND CULTURE,” EDGAR SCHEIN

Discuss Problems
With the people at your table, present all
the problems that people came up with
on their post-its.
Try to quickly process all the post-its
while giving enough time for people to
understand the nature of the problem.
1 MINUTE

CO M P LEX
Cause and effect are only coherent
in retrospect and do not repeat
Pattern management
Perspective filters
Complex adaptive systems
Probe-Sense-Respond
Exploring
Complexity
CO M P LI CAT ED
Cause and effect separated
overtime and space
Analytical / Reductionist
Scenario Planning
Systems Thinking
Sense-Analyze-Respond
CH AO S
No cause and effect
relationships perceivable
Stability-focused intervention
Enactment tools
Crisis Management
Act-Sense-Respond
OB V I OUS
Cause and effect relations
repeatable, perceivable, and
predictable
Legitimate best practice
Standard operating procedure
Process reengineering
Sense-Categorize-Respond

FROM “EXPLORATION VERSUS
EXPLOITATION IN DESIGN-
DRIVEN ENTERPRISES,”
WILL EVANS
M Y ST ER Y H EUR I ST I C
ALGO R I T H M
Exploring
Complexity

“The notion of context has been adapted to
computing from its original use referring
to language, which is reflected in the
structure of the word itself: con(with) text,
either written or oral, intended to be
interpreted by one or more people.
The text is not an encapsulated
representation of meaning, but rather a
cue that allows the anticipated audience to
construct appropriate meanings.”
- TERRY WINOGRAD

Three Horizons View
FROM “EXPLORATION VERSUS EXPLOITATION IN DESIGN-DRIVEN ENTERPRISES,” WILL EVANS

Dispositions to Domain
WARDLEY, SIMON, “ON PIONEERS, SETTLERS, TOWN PLANNERS AND THEFT.”

Situational Dynamics
WARDLEY, SIMON, “ON PIONEERS, SETTLERS, TOWN PLANNERS AND THEFT.”

Contextual Awareness
What are requisite variety of dispositions and
practices for pioneers (heretics), as well as the
processes and methods deployed which are
fundementally different in the Complex Domain?

practices for pioneers (heretics), as well as the
It’s about the movement between domains, and the
interactions between teams and across domains
where novelty can turn into capability.

practices for pioneers (heretics*), as well as the
It’s about the movement between domains, and the
interactions between teams and across domains
where novelty can turn into capability.
Exploration is expensive, and must be managed
through the appropriate application of constraints.

Mapping
§ Spend 10 minutes clustering all the problems together
that seem to be similar.
§ All the ones where the problem / solution was
relatively obvious.
§ Ones that required an expert to help out.
§ Ones that needed more information, more data,
perhaps some experimentation.
§ Ones that seemed completely hopeless, no one knew
what to do, why they were there, what the goal was.
10 MINUTES

Constraints
“Just as the constraints of syntax allow
meaning to be expressed, constraints on
behavior thus make meaningful actions
possible.”
- A LIC IA J U A RRE RO
FROM “ENABLING CONSTRAINTS,” ALICIA JUARRERO, LEANUX15

Constraints
•Within different groups, introduce
new constraints related to context,
channel, customer, budget,
timeframe to spur new ideas.
•Introducing different contexts can
catalyze exaptative innovation
(application of a solution from one
context into a totally new context).
Ex a m pl e :
“You team’s solution cannot rely
upon digital devices, smart phones,
or the internet. Only analog solutions
you can buy at a hardware store.”
“Your concept cannot use language
or words to provide affordance to
the customer/user.”
“Your concept should be something
the team can execute in 5 days.”

“A frame is, simplistically, a point of view;
often, and particularly in technical situations,
this point of view is deemed “irrelevant” or
“biasing” because it implicitly references a
non-objective way of considering a situation
or idea.
But a frame – while certainly subjective and
often biasing – is of critical use to the
designer, as it is something that is shaped over
the long-term aggregation of thoughts and
experiences.”
— Jon Kolko

Timeboxing
The first constraint to apply in
facilitating co-creative activities in the
complex domain is time.
It is better to have 4 cycles of 10
minutes than 1 60 minute cycle.

Externalization
By taking ideas, concepts, perspectives out
of the cognitive domain (your head),
removing it from the linguistic realm
(oral/aural/ talk), and making it tangible in
the physical world in one cohesive visual
structure (post-it, sketch, wall), designers
are freed of the natural memory limitations
of the brain and teams can begin to map
visualizations to internal patterns and
mental models.
Ex a m pl e :
Sketch concepts that solve for
the problem. No bulleted lists, no
sentences. Just sketches that
solve the problem. If it’s not in
the sketch, the element doesn’t
exist.

Divergence
Abduction goes upon the hope that there
is sufficient affinity between the reasoner’s
mind and nature’s to render guessing not
altogether hopeless, provided each guess is
checked by comparison with observation…
The effort should therefore be to make
each hypothesis…as near an even bet as
possible.”
— charles pierce
Ex a m pl e :
Quantity over quality.
Generate at least 6 different
concepts that solve for the
problem. Each concept must be
unique.

Assent and Expansion
In the first few rounds of critique, only
positive aspects of the concepts can be
commented on.
Similar to Improv’s “Yes, and…”
Absolutely nothing negative can be said.
Only positive additions to the design.
Ex a m pl e :
“Highlight two concepts you
absolutely love, or elements
that you would steal, integrate
into your own concept.”

Cognitive Displacement
In the second round of generative
ideation, it’s important to seed the
ideas of one person into the head of
another.
The easiest way to do this is through
“Cognitive Displacement,” or having a
person pitch a designed concept they
have not created.
Ex a m pl e :
“Hand your concept to the
person to your left. You cannot
explain it and you cannot look
them in the eye. They have 5
minutes to pitch your concept
back to you.”
This allows the person who’s
work is being presented to
check their concept for
coherence and identify gaps in
their communication. It also
has the benefit of building
empathy.

Convergence
Convergence is the slow contraction
of available options through the
application of constraints and the
checking for coherence.
Does a concept or designed element
make sense? How does it solve the
problem? Of all possible options,
which are most elegant?
Ex a m pl e :
You have 4 minutes, using
coloured dots, to indicate only
the designs and elements that
should be carried forward to
the next round. These may be
integrated with other
concepts, with weaker ideas
falling behind.

Ritual Dissent
“A complex problem is not the sum of its
parts. It cannot be broken down with each
solution aggregated; it must be solved as a
whole. Another issue is that of
entrainment, especially in consensus-
seeking environments. The more time we
spend in a group, the more groupthink sets
in, and we can create our own reality, only
to suffer a rude awakening when we
engage with the external world.”
— Dave Snowden
FROM ” EVERYTHING IS FRAGMENTED—THE ART OF “RITUAL DISSENT”, DAVID SNOWDEN

Ritual Dissent
• The approach involves a spokesperson (for a
team) presenting a series of concepts to a
group of stakeholders who listens in silence.
• Spokesperson only has 5 minutes to prepare,
5 minutes to present
• Team must imagine they are a group of
stakeholders hearing a pitch to fund a new
initiative to be added to the portfolio
• No questions can be asked of the
spokesperson
• Spokesperson must face away from
stakeholders, and listen whilst taking notes.
They cannot challenge any critique.
• Stakeholders must find all the things wrong
with the concept, why it solves no problem,
the problem is not worth solving, the concept
is not elegant, requires too many resources,
etc…
• Absolutely nothing positive can be said
about the solution
• Only dissent the concept, not the people.
FROM ” EVERYTHING IS FRAGMENTED—THE ART OF “RITUAL DISSENT”, DAVID SNOWDEN

ACTIVITY
Phase
EXPLORE
Research
SELECT
Synthesis
EXPERIMENT
Ideation
SELECT & SCALE
Execution
A
Solving the right problems Solving problems the right way
WE KNOW
Should Be
WE GUESS
Could Be
B

Design Studio Process
1. Framing the Problem
2. Solo Ideation (Silent, 8 Concepts)
5 minutes
3. Generative Critique (Yes, and…)
5 minutes
4. Steal & Integrate
5. Solo Ideation (Silent, 1 Concept, 5 minutes)
5 minutes
6. Cognitive Displacement
(Pitch another’s concept)
5 Minutes
7. Solo Ideation (1 Concept, 10 minutes)
8. Transference & Seeding
9. Synthesis (Team Design, 1 Concept)
30 minutes
10. Ritual Dissent (Only Negative)
10 Minutes
11. Active Decision Making
(Ignore, Innovate, Remove, Best Practice)
10 Minutes
12. Kill Your Babies
13. Final Design, Ritual Assent
60 minutess
FROM “THE DESIGN STUDIO METHODOLOGY,” WILL EVANS

“It is hardly possible to overrate the
value… of placing human beings in
contact with persons dissimilar to
themselves, with modes of thought
and action unlike those with which
they are familiar.”
— John Stewart Mill

Final Thoughts
§ Start with the context
§ Concrete Experience, Reflective Observation,
Abstraction, Active Experimentation
§ Start by explicitly stating freedoms, removing
tacit constraints
§ Clearly articulate the problem
§ Tight cycles, Timeboxed
§ Adjacencies & Exaptations
§ Displacement & Coherence
§ Optionality & Experimentation

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