Back in March 2011, I enjoyed working with the IEMA to facilitate a workshop for environmental professionals, ably supported by Debbie Warrener. The workshop was organised to give some of the UK’s most long-serving and successful internal environmental specialists a chance to share experiences of leadership around sustainable business practice, and collaboratively sketch out the skills environmental professionals need if they are to shift their organisations strategically towards sustainability.

There were no presentations – it was a collaborative venture where everyone in the room had wisdom and expertise to contribute.

During the workshop they created a mind map of key skills. This was done very rapidly, following several rounds of discussing challenges successfully met and skills used in doing so.

I came across my notes of this mind map in the nether reaches of my filing pile just now, and it struck me as one of those things which you could work away at for a long time and not improve much.

So here it is.

I was really pleased to see how much was to do with interpersonal skills, influence, collaboration and mainstream management and leadership skills.  We have heaps of fantastically technically expert environmentalists working in organisations. Too often they are marginalised and lacking in power or influence. They can find themselves shaking their heads sadly at the decisions made by the people with power, who don’t see the unsustainability of their actions or can’t see how to change.  Combining technical excellence with the savvy of the change-maker is essential.

IEMA’s current framework

IEMA have since developed a skills framework at a number of levels which draws on this work, and other research and engagement they have done with their members.  You can see it here and read more about how people are reacting to it here.

And there’s another framework mentioned in this earlier blog post and the article it links to.

Update

In November 2011, IEMA’s magazine published this, looking at the skills and aptitudes needed by some very senior sustainability people in UK businesses, and includes personal stories from a number.

I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of Peggy Holman’s new book, Engaging Emergence. Many readers will know Peggy as one of the authors of The Change Handbook, along with Tom Devane and Steven Cady.

I read it in bursts, and every chapter has something comforting and challenging in it. Peggy asks

“What if tensions inspired curiosity? What if we knew how to express our anger, fear, or grief so that it contributed to something better?”

There’s so much anger, fear and grief in conversations about ecosystem collapse.  I’d love it if that negative emotion could be composted into the fertile soil where new things grow.  There are positive reframings of disturbance and disruption.

I relished the permission she gives to let go of the things which bore or scare us, but which we do out of a misplaced sense of duty, and to embrace the aspects of the system which we are really interested in:

“Take responsibility for what you love as an act of service.”

I am developing some training on collaboration at the moment, and this exhortation to hold what’s important to you, whilst also deeply hearing what’s important to other people will become a theme, I’m sure.

Collaborative writing

An interesting footnote on why I was sent a copy: Peggy wrote the book as a blog, and invited anyone who wanted to post comments.  Because I interacted with this, I was offered a copy.  Fascinating peer review process and marketing wheeze rolled up together.  The blog (now inactive) is here and the list of all those who helped out is here.

My client drove me to the station from our rather remote venue this afternoon.  She said:

“Do you think about a workshop after it’s over, or…”

I mentally completed her sentence as “or don’t you manage to?” After a small pause, she finished

“…or are you able to let it go?”.

I was reminded of the usefulness of not assuming you know what someone else is going to say.

And I realised I’d filled the pause with my own self-criticism: because I’m intellectually committed to action/reflection, and thinking about a workshop after it’s over is a powerful reflection stage.

But sometimes I’m just too tired to concentrate on reflecting ‘properly’. And I might beat myself up about all the scintilating learning I’m missing by not journalling or even blogging as much as I might.

Instead, my mind wanders or I retreat into the self-indulgence of a journey home where I can read the paper, mess up the Kakuro or stare out of the window.

But this particular journey home has been longer than expected, and I’ve got my second wind. So I will ‘reflect properly’, drawing on what we talked about and thought about on the way to the station.

You’re working too hard

One of the things my assessors said after my CPF earlier this year was that I was working too hard. The group should be doing the work, I need to get out of their way.  Perhaps I can take the same advice about reflection on my facilitation: let my mind do the work and get out of its way.

Wandering mind

The drive to the station was quite long, so I did let my mind wander, sparked by my client’s question. We had one of those leisurely conversations which are interspersed with gentle silences.  And our conversation touched on spaces, client comfort and workshop plans.

Owning the space

My mind wandered to what we had done to own the space. This workshop was the third in a series of three and all the venues we used had their challenges. Two of the three lacked good smooth walls to stick flips on and write on.  Today’s was crowded and we had to prop up boards on tables and stacked chairs to be able to see the flips.

In every venue, we quickly assessed the room, decided which furniture to move around or move out of the room altogether, and worked out where we would display the flips we needed for various metaplanning-type exercises and for participants to be able to see the running record.

Over the years, I have had to learn about the importance of layout, gain the confidence to take responsibility for making spaces as good as they can be for the conversation we want to have, pick up some tips and tricks for improvising the space and equipment needed, and get more decisive about making changes rapidly. That experience has paid off today.

Over-identifying with the client: whose comfort?

I have been more conscious recently of my own tendency to over-identify with my client, when facilitating stakeholder workshops. I feel uncomfortable when I think the client team may be feeling uncomfortable. I feel relieved when I think they may be feeling relieved.

I’m confident that this is not having a significant effect on my facilitation, but I’m conscious that this is a danger and that I need to check my inner motivation when choosing to intervene (or not) in situations where I believe that I know what my client would like to hear. Holding the space in periods of discomfort, doubt, uncertainty, conflict, anger, disappointment – this is one of the special gifts which a facilitator can bring to a group, and I’d like to strengthen my ability to do this with ease, without being overly concerned about the client’s level of comfort.

As it happens, today I was impressed with how well the client team responded to some of the things stakeholders said, which were probably hard for them to hear. Defensiveness was mostly absent.  When the team thanked people for sharing their experiences, perspectives, frustrations and aspirations, I think they meant it.

If I had, even unconsciously, sheilded the client from this difficult conversation, then I might have avoided some temporary discomfort (largely my own?) but I would have prevented some important truth-telling and mutual understanding from emerging.  And the elephants in the room would have remained hidden in plain view.

Let go of the plan

In two of the three workshops, we radically redesigned the agenda part way through the day.  A wise facilitator once said to me that any fool can design a workshop, it’s being able to redesign on the hoof that is the mark of greatness.  I wouldn’t claim to greatness, but my redesigns were good calls!

Today’s was helped enormously by the intervention during lunch of a process-savvy participant who observed that what the organising team wanted to talk about was not what the participants wanted to talk about. We negotiated a ‘deal’ to split the afternoon’s work so that some time was spent on the more pedestrian but urgent client concerns (and the group threw themselves into this) but a larger chunk of time was allocated to some open space. This was agreed by the rest of the group.

As my client and I discussed this on the way to the station, I was reminded of some insights about planning.

• At this AMED event last Friday, we talked in passing about Eisenhower’s claim that “plans are useless but planning is indispensible.”
• A few days before, at an ODiN workshop organised by Chris Rodgers, someone talked about their frustration at hearing people use ‘opportunistic’ as a way of disparaging those charities which apply for funding without a nailed down strategic plan.
• And my reading of this new sustainability leadership book containing experiences written through an action research lens has helped me understand how intention, values and an understanding of what you feel drawn to do can be coupled with being alert to opportunity resulting in emergent strategy.  (There’s an explanation of emergent strategy here, but you may know of a better one – stick it in the comments.)

I think there’s a parallel here with workshop (re)design:

• some values underpinning your work as a facilitator,
• some shared aims (intentions) agreed with participants,
• an understanding of the expertise and resources (e.g. time, space, numbers of different kinds of people, access to information) available for the conversation.
• being alert to ‘what’s trying to happen here’ and getting out of its way.

If you have those things – as a result of doing some planning (having a conversation about planning) – then a strategy is able to emerge if you get out of its way.

Update: This today (1st October 2011) from Dave Pollard would call this resilience planning, rather than strategic planning. An interesting post.

The conversation goes where it goes – who knows what might have happened if…

What I didn’t follow up on was the confession which may have been present in my client’s question: does she find herself unable to let go after a workshop, dwelling on what might have been in a way which doesn’t help her learn but perhaps keeps her in that unconfident phase of believing that she hasn’t done well enough?

I don’t know.  That conversation may have been equally rich.  The coach in me would have gone down that route, but the coach in me was taking some time out.

But by not trying too hard, and offering my own meandering observations, I reflected properly on what I’d learnt from the day.

Spurred on by discussions over at the Involve blog, I want to share a really useful framework for those of you who are thinking about engaging stakeholders or (sections of) the public while you decide what to do about something.

At the start, discussions within the organisation which is asking for input need to establish clarity about what’s alread fixed, what’s completely open and what there are some preferences about but where there is room for change.

Pie chart

Pie Chart: Lindsey Colbourne

Not negotiable - At the start of your engagement process it is likely that what’s decided (and thus not negotiable) may be at the level of overall objectives, and timescales.  For example, a Government department may have a policy objective and a legal deadline to meet.   A local council may know that it wants to revamp a local park, and have a potential funding source whose criteria it needs to meet.

Negotiable – You may have some existing preferences, ideas or initiatives which have been piloted and could be rolled out.  There may be some technical information which will inform the decision or be used to assess options.

Open – There will be aspects of the decision which you have no preference about and where the decisions can be in effect (even if not in law) delegated to others.

Remember that you will also have decided-negotiable-open aspects to your engagement process – the people you talk to, the points at which you engagement them, the methods and channels which are used.

The conversation you have internally with your team about what goes in each slice of the pie can often be dramatically useful: flushing out assumptions which have hitherto been hidden, and exposing disagreements within the team in the safety of your planning conversations rather than in the less forgiving gaze of stakeholders.

The pie slices shift over time

At the start of the process, it’s likely that the ‘decided’ slice is slimmer than the other two.  As the process unfolds, things usually shift from ‘open’ to ‘negotiable’ and from ‘negotiable’ to ‘decided’. Principles and assessment criteria get agreed. Ways of working are negotiated. Working groups or consultation processes are established. Exploratory conversations crystalise into options which get fleshed out and then assessed. Some options get discarded and others emerge as front-runners.

Sometimes, things can move in the other direction: when opposition is so strong that you have to think again, or when new information emerges which shows that ways forward which had seemed marginal are now much more likely to work.  In extreme circumstances, this may lead to the initiative being abandoned altogether. The recent debacle over England’s publicly-owned forests is an example of this.

Tell people what’s ‘up for grabs’

There’s no point asking people what you should do about something if you have already made up your mind.

Nice cartoon illustration here (added 5th July 2011 – thanks to Joanna Knight for the link).

By all means ask for feedback which will help you communicate your decisions more clearly. Understanding people’s concerns and aspirations means you can address them directly in your explanations about why you have made a particular decision and how to expect to implement and review it.

Do people the simple courtesy of letting them know which aspects of situation you are most keen to get their feedback and ideas about – which information will most helpful in informing the decision, the dilemmas you’d like to think through with them, the innovative ideas you’d like to test out.

That way, everyone’s time is spent where it can make the most difference.

Simples.

Thanks to…

Acknowledgements to Lindsey Colbourne and others at the late lamented Sustainable Development Commission, InterAct Networks, Sciencewise-ERC and the Environment Agency who have been developing and working with this framework over the last few years.

A while back, that unstoppable author on CSR Wayne Visser invited me to write an entry on change management for the updated 2010 edition of his A-Z of Corporate Social Responsibility.

What a great opportunity!  Not having a very clear picture of the readership, I began by justifying the inclusion of the topic.

Some businesses are very good at CSR. Others find it a struggle or are only just beginning. If you want to improve an organisation, then you want to change it. Sometimes the scale of improvement which environmental champions or others want to see is quite large. So far-reaching organisational change may be desired.

What do we know about how organisations change, and how organisational change can be managed – or catalysed and steered?

The article goes on to contrast ideas about planned organisational change with perspectives which see change as an emergent phenomenon.  It also looks at what changes, when an organisation changes, drawing on Schein’s three levels of culture.

And as you’d expect, there are signposts to some practical advice.

You can read the chapter here (search for ‘change management’).

What did I miss?

If I’m asked to do an update for a future edition, what changes should I make to the article?

Further reading

You can buy a copy here (NB Amazon don’t seem to be able to distinguish this 2010 edition from the previous edition).

I’ve also posted a slide show which develops some of these thoughts, which you can reach via this blog entry.

Why do we find ourselves in conflict, instead of in disagreement?

One of reasons is the anxiety we feel when faced with uncertainty. Do we know the facts? Do we know the cause and effect relationships between them? How sure can we be that our actions will have the intended consequences?

I’m delighted to be able to bring you the latest words of wisdom on managing uncertainty, from Andrew Acland, facilitator and mediator extraordinaire and author of “A sudden outbreak of common sense: Managing conflict through mediation”.

Andrew says:

“Uncertainty is a feature of many of the situations in which mediators and facilitators are asked to work for several reasons. First, our work tends to be in fairly complex situations, and often uncertainty is one source of that complexity. Secondly, any situation that involves human beings involves uncertainty: we are a tricky species. Thirdly, uncertainty creates conflict – which is why we get called for in the first place.

The purpose of this note is to suggest what we can do with uncertainty when it rears its awkward head in the middle of an already difficult meeting.”

Click here to read Andrew’s full paper.

This blog entry is written for a very specific reason: I’ve just advised a group of people to look at my blog for initial sources on multi-stakeholder collaboration… but reviewing the blog I realise that it’ll be quite hard to find the things I mean, and some of them I haven’t even written about yet!

So, especially for them – and for you, dear other readers – here’s a quick brain dump of key sources and ideas which I think form a good set of starting points, mostly from my own experience.  Which means that if you have other great resources to tell people about, please do post them in the comments box.

Examples

There are some really interesting examples from the UK of the Environment Agency spending quite a lot of time and resources thoughtfully engaging in conversations with communities and other stakeholders when considering flood defences and coastal erosion risk.  For example, Shaldon and Medmerry [transparency alert - I worked on the Medmerry project] where engagement with stakeholders was carefully planned so that people could influence the decisions which the project team was making as the plans developed. Both schemes are ongoing.  See for example this report from the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission which includes Shaldon as an example, and this short case study from the Environment Agency on Shaldon.  A search using ‘environment agency’, shaldon, stakeholder and ‘liaison group’ will bring up other interesting views on the engagement approach and its success.There’s a bit more about the EA’s ground-breaking work in this area in this article on DAD/EDD.

Another place-specific collaborative approach is described in this article “Human Systems Intervention And The Natural Step” by Jenny Sardone & Magdalena Szpala, first published in AMED’s Organisations and People journal. I believe that it’s not available electronically, but I’m trying to chase down an e-version so I can link to it.

Much better known are the FSC and the MSC – now well-established multi-stakeholder organisations which tried to ‘get the whole system in the room’ to work out credible consensus-based criteria for what might be considered sustainable management of forest and marine resources.  They have had varying degrees of success over the years in getting buy-in from all the different interests (environmental, social, economic). I wrote about the MSC a few years ago, an article called plenty more fish in the sea.   Current examples include WWF-UK’s Tasting the Future, Forum for the Future’s work on tourism, and CPSL’s work on both climate and insurance. Some of these have crystalised into organisations, others are more fluid that that: fellow travellers collaborating with intention.

Theories, techniques and patterns

Fascinating to ponder on what the circumstances are which bring about authentic whole-system engagement, and what you have to do to get the right people in the room in the first place, and then to keep up the momentum. The best resource I know of at the moment on this is Peggy Holman’s Engaging Emergence.  But I’m sure there are lots of others: please help me collect them by posting your favourites in the comments box.

Favourite techniques which can help include World Cafe, Open Space Technology and Future Search. I’ve blogged about the first big Tasting the Future meeting here, which combined a number of techniques.

SDC resources on collaboration, dialogue, engagement

Since its demise, it’s really hard to find the engagement resources on the SDC’s website. So here are some direct links to some of them:

• SDC’s response to National Framework for Greater Citizen Engagement (2008)
• Final report on the SDC’s Supplier Obligation stakeholder and public engagement process “Household Energy from 2011″, with a description of process and findings.  There are links to other documents about this process here. [Transparency alert - I worked on the Supplier Obligation project.]
• An independent evaluation report about the SDC’s Engagement in Tidal Power process, which brought together stakeholders and the public to think about criteria and issues in harnessing power from the tides.
• The groundbreaking and really rather wonderful (for process geeks) guidance on designing engagement, published by the SDC but drawing on pioneering work done by InterAct Networks (Lindsey Colbourne, Lynn Wetenhall, Jeff Bishop, Richard Harris and others) and developed through practitioners at the Environment Agency among others. This work continues, for example through work Sciencewise-ERC has done with DECC.
• Some specific gems from this guidance include ‘engagement and the policy making cycle‘ and a ‘typology of engagement’ and some definitions of different kinds of engagement. [More transparency - I work regularly with Sciencewise-ERC and InterAct Networks]

Add your wisdom

This has been a very rapid post, and most of the examples and ideas are those which I’m personally familiar with. There must be lots of others, including some great compilation resources. Please use the comments space to link to your favourites and to critique what I’ve posted here.

There’s a typical pattern for sustainability change agents: enthusiastic spotting of an opportunity to change (a solution) followed by a flurry of activity and then the obstables begin to show themselves.

Then it can go two ways:

• reflecting on the ‘stuckness’, exploring it and finding a way beyond it,
• giving up.

Actually, you need to see the obstacles clearly to be able to deal with them, but that doesn’t stop people feeling downhearted if they’d set out imagining no obstacles at all!

Theories for the perplexed

I find it reassuring when a bit of theory (or framework, model, checklist) explains that the low points are predictable, expected and indeed part of the journey.

And theories can also help us make sense of a complex reality, find the patterns in chaos, see “what’s really going on here” and understand our unconscious assumptions.  If we bring them to conscious attention, we can make choices about doing things differently. Our assumptions might be about organisations (what they are, how they work, what’s amenable to change), or people (how to interact respectfully whilst intending things to change) or sustainability (what might the journey look like, how you know you’re going in the right direction).

And like the man said, there’s nothing so practical as a good theory. (The man in question being Kurt Lewin, social psychologist, of the unfreeze-change-refreeze model.)

So I’ve assembled some bits of theory which I find particularly useful and popped them in a slide show here:

There should be some notes pages with more explanation and references, but I haven’t managed to get Slide Share to show these yet. So here’s a pdf with the notes.  This is a presentation I give at the fabulous Postgraduate Certificate in Sustainable Business course, developed and run by CPSL and Forum for the Future.

Ideas into action

So theories are all very well, but what might it mean for your situation? I love to help people work out what their next steps might be, and a good way of doing this has proved to be the one-day Change Management for Sustainable Development workshop I developed and run with the IEMA.

We’ve got one in London on May 25th. So why not come along and we can help each other use some practical theories to make more progress? You can book here.

I’ve met some interesting and challenging facilitators recently who have helped me reframe and explore my facilitation work and my sustainable development aims.

Our conversations together have been so refreshing and enriching, we wondered if it might be possible to open them up to a wider group…

So we have created Deep Open.

It’s a one-day workshop for people who are interested in groups, conversation, change and sustainable development.  We hope to enable conversations which allow us to be aware of our feelings (physical and emotional), alert to difference and conflict, challenging and honest.  We’re going to experiment with having our feelings rather than letting our feelings have us.  We’re going to experiement with not distracting ourselves when things feel uncomfortable.  We’re going to try to resist being task-focussed, whilst staying together with purpose.

If you are intruiged by this – rather than irritated – then you might want to join us on 19th May in London for this workshop.

We’re running the event in conjunction with AMED. The others involved are Johnnie Moore, Debbie Warrener and Luke Razzell.

When the new editor of the environmentalist, Paul Suff, asked me to write a kind of ‘how to’ article on understanding what sustainability means to an organisation, it took me some time to figure out how to make it fit into a two-page article.

I’m pleased with the overall framework, and the questions which it seems to all boil down to:

• What’s the best thing we can do?
• What’s the best way we can do it?

See what you think: access a pdf of the article here.

This is the first edition of the environmentalist under its new editorship, and you can access the whole mag for a limited time here.