Learning sets, debriefing groups: learning from doing

I've been helping organisations learn how to collaborate better.  One of my clients was interested in boosting their organisation's ability to keep learning from the real-life experiences of the people who I'd trained.

We talked about setting up groups where people could talk about their experiences - good and bad - and reflect together to draw out the learning.  This got me thinking about practical and pragmatic ways to describe and run learning sets.

Action learning sets

An action learning set is – in its purest form – a group of people who come together regularly (say once a month) for a chunk of time (perhaps a full day, depending on group size) to learn from each other’s experiences.  Characteristics of an action learning set include:

• People have some kind of work-related challenge in common (e.g. they are all health care workers, or all environmental managers, or they all help catalyse collaboration) but are not necessarily all working for the same organisation or doing the same job.
• The conversations in the 'set' meetings are structured in a disciplined way: each person gets a share of time (e.g. an hour) to explain a particular challenge or experience, and when they have done so the others ask them questions about it which are intended to illuminate the situation. If the person wants, they can also ask for advice or information which might help them, but advice and information shouldn’t be given unless requested.  Then the next person gets to share their challenge (which may be completely different) and this continues until everyone has had a turn or until the time has been used up (the group can decide for itself how it wants to allocate time).
• Sometimes, the set will then discuss the common themes or patterns in the challenges, identifying things that they want to pay particular attention to or experiment with in their work.  These can then be talked about as part of the sharing and questioning in the next meeting of the set.
• So the learning comes not from an expert bringing new information or insight, but from the members of the set sharing their experiences and reflecting together.  The ‘action’ bit comes from the commitment to actively experiment with different ways of doing their day job between meetings of the set.
• Classically, an action learning set will have a facilitator whose job is to help people get to grips with the method and then to help the group stick to the method.

If you want to learn a little bit more about action learning sets, there's a great briefing here, from BOND who do a great job building capacity in UK-based development NGOs.

A debriefing group

A different approach which has some of the same benefits might be a ‘debriefing group’. This is not a recognised ‘thing’ in the same way that an action learning set it.  I’ve made the term up!   This particular client organisation is global, so getting people together face to face is a big deal. Even finding a suitable time for a telecon that works for all time zones is a challenge. So I came up with this idea:

• A regular slot, say monthly, for a telecon or other virtual meeting.
• The meeting would last for an hour, give or take.
• The times would vary so that over the course of a year, everyone around the world has access to some timeslots which are convenient for them.
• One person volunteers to be in the spotlight for each meeting. They may have completed a successful piece of work, or indeed they may be stuck at the start or part-way through.
• They tell their story, good and bad, and draw out what they think the unresolved dilemmas or key learning points are.
• The rest of the group then get to ask questions – both for their own curiosity / clarification, and to help illuminate the situation.  The volunteer responds.
• As with the action learning set, if the volunteer requests it, the group can also offer information and suggestions.
• People could choose to make notes of the key points for wider sharing afterwards, but this needs to be done in a careful way so as to not affect the essentially trusting and open space for the free discussion and learning to emerge.
• Likewise, people need to know that they won’t be judged or evaluated from these meetings – they are safe spaces where they can explore freely and share failures as well as a successes.
• Someone would need to organise each meeting (fix the time, invite people, send round reminders and joining instructions, identify the volunteer and help them understand the purpose / brief, and manage the conversation). This could be one person or a small team, and once people understand the process it could be a different person or team each time.

For peer learning, not for making decisions

Neither approach is a ‘decision making’ forum, and neither approach is about developing case studies: they are focused on the immediate learning of the people who are in the conversation, and the insight and learning comes from what the people in the group already know (even if they don’t realise that they know it). In that sense they are 100% tailored to the learners’ needs and they are also incredibly flexible and responsive to the challenges and circumstances that unfold over time.

I learn it from a book

Manuel, the hapless and put-upon waiter at Fawlty Towers, was diligent in learning English, despite the terrible line-management skills of Basil Fawlty.  As well as practising in the real world, he is learning from a book. Crude racial stereotypes aside, this is a useful reminder that books can only take us so far.  And the same is true of Working Collaboratively.  To speak collaboration like a native takes real-world experience.  You need the courage to practise out loud.

The map is not the territory

The other thing about learning from a book is that you'll get stories, tips, frameworks and tools, but when you begin to use them you won't necessarily get the expected results.  Not in conversation with someone whose mother tongue you are struggling with, and not when you are exploring collaboration.

Because the phrase book is not the language and the map is not the territory.

Working collaboratively: a health warning

So if you do get hold of a copy of Working Collaboratively (and readers of this blog get 15% off with code PWP15) and begin to apply some of the advice: expect the unexpected.

There's an inherent difficulty in 'taught' or 'told' learning, which doesn't occur in quite the same way in more freeform 'learner led' approaches like action learning or coaching.  When you put together a training course or write a book, you need to give it a narrative structure that's satisfying.  You need to follow a thread, rather than jumping around the way reality does.  Even now, none of the examples I feature in the book would feel they have completed their work or fully cracked how to collaborate.

That applies especially to the newest ones: Sustainable Shipping Initiative or the various collaborators experimenting with catchment level working in England.

Yours will be unique

So don't feel you've done it wrong if your pattern isn't the same, or the journey doesn't seem as smooth, with as clear a narrative arc as some of those described in the book.

And when you've accumulated a bit of hindsight, share it with others: what worked, for you? What got in the way?  Which of the tools or frameworks helped you and which make no sense, now you look back at what you've achieved?

Do let me know...

Reflecting on a change that happened

Here's a nice exercise you can try, to help people base their thinking about organisational change on real evidence. Running workshop sessions on organisational change is a core part of my contribution to the various programmes run by the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership.  This week, a group of people from one multi-national organisation met in Cambridge to further their own learning on sustainability and organisational responses to it.  My brief was to introduce them to a little theory on organisational change, and help them apply it to their own situation.

Theory is all very well - I love a good model or framework.  But sometimes people struggle to make the links to their experience, or they use descriptive models as if they were instructions.

This exercise gave them time to consider their direct experience of organisational change before the theory was introduced, so that they had rich evidence to draw on when engaging critically with the theory.

Step one - a change that happened

At tables, I asked them to identify a change that has happened in their organisation, of the same scale and significance as they think is needed in relation to sustainable development.  All of the tables looked at some variation of the organisation's response to dramatically changing market conditions (engaging with a different customer base, redundancies).

Step Two - four sets of questions

I then asked the groups to discuss how this change really happened (not how the organisation's change policy manual said it should have happened).  I offered four sets of questions:

• First inklings e.g. How did you know the change was coming? How did it begin? What happened before that? What happened after that? What changed first?

•  People e.g. Who were the main characters who helped the change to happen? Who tried to stop it happening? Who was enthusiastic? Who was cynical? Who was worried?

•  Momentum and confirmation e.g. What happened that provided confirmation that this change really is going to happen, that it’s not just talk? How was momentum maintained? What happened to win over the people who were unhappy?

• Completion and continuation e.g. Is the change complete, or are things still changing?  How will (did) you know the change is complete?

Step Three - debrief

Discussions at tables went on for about 20 minutes, and then we debriefed in plenary.

I invited people to share surprises.  Some of the surprises included the most senior person in the room realising that decisions made in leadership team meetings were seen as significant and directly influenced the way people did things - before the exercise, he had assumed that people didn't take much notice.

I also invited people to identify the things that confirmed that 'they really mean it', which seems to me to be a key tipping point in change for sustainability.  Some of the evidence that people used to assess whether 'they really mean it' was interesting: the legal department drafting a new type of standard contract to reflect a new type of customer base; different kinds of people being invited to client engagement events.  These 'artifacts' seemed significant and were ways in which the change became formalised and echoed in multiple places.

After the evidence, the theory

When I then introduced Schein's three levels of culture - still one of my favourite bits of organisational theory - the group could really see how this related to change.

Let me know how you get on, if you try this.

Three legged stool

Last week I trained 14 people in facilitation skills, at the quirky and rather wonderful Creekside Discovery Centre (see more below).  I came up with a metaphor that I quite liked, to tie together the main strands of the training - the three legged stool.

The three legged stool of facilitation

Facilitators help the group through:

• Clarity on the purpose and aims of the meeting - helping the host, convenor, planning group be clear about these, ensuring the group is happy with them.  There's a download on this here.
• Choice of techniques, meeting design - to meet the aims, suit the time/space/people.
• Interpersonal skills - listening, reflecting, clarifying, responding, intervening to help the group hear and talk to each other, see what's happening and make choices about what to do.

Carpentry prizes for most beautiful stool?

But when I was explaining this, I realised that I hadn't given enough emphasis to the underlying basic assumption and values of facilitation: the desire to serve the group and the assumption that the group can, through conversation, work together to further its own aims and purpose.

So my three legged stool needs an addition: the group, supported by the facilitator, doing something great together.

No prizes for carpentry - it's about supporting the group.

It doesn't matter how well you clarify the aims, design the meeting and intervene, if at heart your intention is misplaced.  If you believe that you know best, or the group is not capable of finding its own best solution, or your intention is to show what a great facilitator you are....

So, the three legged stool is there to support the group, not to win carpentry prizes.

More on Creekside

This venue is just 5 minutes walk from Greenwich Station (DLR, Overground) in London, and has the most beautiful collection of found objects, scavenged from the Thames mud. Like this amazing old typewriter.

Thames Typewriter

It has some lovely more recent touches too - gates below.

"But can you blu-tack flip chart paper to the wall and move the tables?" I hear you cry.

Yes.

I trained 14 people and it was comfortable working flexibly with this number.

So check it out.

Facilitation training - can it work one-to-one?

I love to train people in facilitation skills.  It's so much fun! People get to try new things in a safe environment, games are played, there's growth and challenge, fabulously supportive atmospheres can build up.

What's the minimum group size for this kind of learning?

How about one?

A group of one

From time to time I'm approached by people who want to improve their facilitation skills, but who don't have a ready-made group of colleagues to train with.   I point them towards open courses such as those run by the ICA, and let them know about practice groups like UK Facilitators Practice Group.  And sometimes, I work with them one-to-one.

This one-to-one work can also happen because a client doesn't have the budget to bring in facilitator for a particular event, and we agree instead to a semi-coaching approach which provides intensive, just-in-time preparation for them to play the facilitator role.  This is most common in the community and voluntary sector.

The approach turns out to be a mix of process consultancy for specific meetings, debriefing recent or significant facilitation experiences, and introducing or exploring tools and techniques.

Preparing to facilitate in a hierarchy

A client had a particular event coming up, where she was going to be facilitating a strategy session for a group of senior people from organisations which formed the membership of her own organisation.  She had concerns around authority: would they accept her as their facilitator for this session?  She was also keen to understand how to agree realistic aims for the session, and to come up with a good design.

We spent a couple of hours together, talking through the aims of the session and what she would do to prepare for it.  We played around with some design ideas. I introduced the facilitator's mandate, and she came up with ways of ensuring she had a clear mandate from the group which she could then use to justify - to them and to herself - taking control of the group's discussions and managing the process.  Helped by some coaching around her assumptions about her own authority, she came up with some phrases she was comfortable using if she needed to intervene.  We role-played these. She felt more confident about the framework and that the time and energy we'd put into the preparation was useful.

Facilitation skills as a competence for engaging stakeholders

As part of a wider team, I've been working with a UK Government department to help build their internal capacity for engaging stakeholders.  As a 'mentor', I worked with policy teams to help them plan their engagement and for one team, this included helping a team member get better at meeting design and facilitation.  He already had a good understanding of the variety of processes which could be used and a strong intuitive grasp of facilitation.  We agreed to build this further through a (very short) apprenticeship approach.  We worked together to refine the aims for a series of workshops.  I facilitated the first and he supported me.  We debriefed afterwards: what had gone well, what had gone less well, and in particular what had he or I done before and during the workshop and what was the impact.  He facilitated the next workshop, with me in the support role. Again we debriefed.  We sat down to plan the next workshop, and I provided a handout on carousel, which seemed like an appropriate technique. I observed the next two workshops, and again we debriefed.

Instead of a training course

I worked with a client who wanted to develop his facilitation skills and was keen to work with me specifically, rather than an unknown and more generic open course provider.  I already knew his context and he knew I'd have a good appreciation of some of his specific challenges: being in the small secretariat of what is essentially an industry leadership group which is trying to lead a sustainability agenda in their sector.  His job is to catalyse and challenge, as well as to be responsive to members.  So when he is planning and facilitating meetings, he will sometimes be in facilitator mode and sometimes he will need to be advocating a particular point of view.

Ideally, I'd have wanted to observe him in action in order to identify priorities and be able to tailor the learning aims. But the budget didn't allow for this.

We came up with a solution which was based on a series of four two-hour sessions, where I would be partly training (i.e. adding in new 'content' about facilitation and helping him to understand it) and partly coaching (i.e. helping him uncover his limiting assumptions and committing to do things differently).  The sessions were timed to be either a bit before or a bit after meetings which he saw as significant facilitation challenges, so that we could tailor the learning to preparing for or debriefing them.  The four face-to-face sessions would be supplemented by handouts chosen from things I'd already produced, and by recommended reading.  We agreed to review each session briefly at the end, for the immediate learning and feedback to me, and partly to model active reflection and to get him into the habit of doing this for his own facilitation work.

In our initial pre-contract meeting, we agreed some specific learning objectives and the practicalities (where, when).  Before each session, we had email exchanges confirming what he wanted to focus on. This meant I could prepare handouts and other resources to bring with me.

And this plan is pretty much what we ended up doing.

He turned out to be very well suited to this way of learning. He was a disciplined reflective practitioner, making notes about what he'd learnt from his experiences and bringing these to sessions.  He was thoughtful in deciding what he wanted to focus on which enabled me to prepare appropriately.  For example, in our final session he wanted to look at his overall learning and to identify the learning edges that he would continue to work on after our training ended.  We did two very different things in that session: he drew a timeline of his journey so far, identifying significant things which have shaped the facilitator he is now.  And we used the IAF's Foundational Facilitator Competencies to identify his current strengths and learning needs.

Can it work?

Yes, it's possible to train someone in facilitation skills one-to-one.   This approach absolutely relies on them have opportunities to try things out, and is very appropriate when someone will be facilitating anyway - trained or not.  The benefits are finely tailored support which can include advice as well as training, coaching instead of 'talk and chalk', and debriefing 'real' facilitation instead of 'practice' session.

There are downsides, of course.  You don't get the big benefit which can come from in-house training, where a cohort of people can support each other in the new way of doing things and continue to reflect together on how it's going. And you don't get the benefit of feedback from multiple perspectives and seeing a diverse way of doing things, which you get in group training.

But if this group approach isn't an option, and the client is going to be facilitating anyway, then I think it is an excellent approach to learning.

If not me, then who? Leadership and sustainable development

Holding out for a hero

We’re in a hole and we’re not making headway on the huge challenges that face us as a species and as a society.  Our so-called leaders shy away from action which isn’t incremental and easy.  We’re caught in a web of interlocking dependencies shoring up the status quo.  And meanwhile environmental limits are being breached every way we turn.  Why doesn’t somebody DO SOMETHING?

But hang on, what if we are the people we’ve been waiting for?

We, too, can be tempered radicals, positive deviants or social intrapreneurs – different labels for essentially the same ambiguous role: change makers on the inside of our organisation or community, wherever this may be.

This antidote to ‘great man’ leadership is explored in two books: The Positive Deviant (Parkin) helps you prepare and plan, Leadership for Sustainability (Marshall et al) is an edited collection of tales from fellow travellers, shared with a degree of honesty and openness which is unexpected outside the safety of a coaching conversation.

Who will show leadership?

Both books rightly assert that leadership can come from anywhere.  The leader may be the boss, but leadership is something any of us can practice.  And that’s lucky, because we need whole systems to change, not just individual organisations.  And systems don’t have a boss.  Leadership is necessarily distributed throughout the system, even if some people have more power than others.

Parkin’s positive deviant is someone who does the right thing

“despite being surrounded by the wrong institutions, the wrong processes and stubbornly uncooperative people”.

They work to change the rules of the game.  Rather than waiting for stepping stones to appear they chuck in rocks, building a path for others as they go.

Effective leadership comes from surprising places within hierarchical structures, and can arise in situations where there isn’t any formal organisation at all.  This makes the positive deviant quite close to the tempered radical, yet Meyerson's work is a surprising omission from Parkin's index and bibliography.

Marshall et al see leadership

“as much [in] the vigilante consumer demanding to know where products have come from as [in] the chief executive promoting environmentally aware corporate practices.”

So none of us is off the hook.

What kind of leaders do we need?

If we are all in a position to show leadership, which qualities do we need to hone, to help us be really good at it?

Parkin is clear that we need to be ethical and effective.

Ethical

As Cooper points out in one of the chapters of Leadership for Sustainability, the scale of the transformation implied by how bad things are now means that doing things right is not enough: we need to do the right things.

It is not enough to show leadership merely in the service of your own organisation or community. With sustainability leadership the canvas is all humanity and the whole planet (All Life On Earth including Us, as Parkin puts it).  Regular readers of this blog, and participants on the Post-graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business will know that this is one of the distinctions I make between 'any old organisational change' and 'organisational change for sustainable development'.  See the slide 22 in the slide show here for more on this and other tensions for sustainability change makers.

To do this, the Positive Deviant has a ‘good enough’ understanding of a range of core sustainability information and concepts, and Parkin summarises a familiar set of priority subjects.  Less familiar are the snippets of sustainability literacy from classical antiquity which liven things up a bit: Cleopatra’s use of orange peel as a contraceptive and Plato’s observations of local climatic changes caused by overenthusiastic logging.

If you already know this big picture sustainability stuff, you may feel you can safely skip Parkin’s first, third and fourth section.  Not so fast.  I read these on the day DCLG published its risible presumption in favour of sustainable development.  DCLG’s failure to mention environmental limits and the equating of sustainable development with sustainable building is a caution: perhaps people who might be expected to have a good understanding of sustainability should read this section, whether they think they need it or not!

Effective

We need to understand the kinds of problems we’re facing.  Parkin offers use Grint’s useful sense-making triad to understand different kinds of problems which need different approaches:

• tame (familiar, solvable, limited uncertainty),
• wicked (more intractable, complex, lots of uncertainty, no clear solutions without downsides) and
• critical (emergency, urgent, very large) problems.

The problems of unsustainability are very largely wicked (e.g. breaking environmental limits), and some are critical (e.g. extreme weather events).

Complex, uncertain and intractable situations require experimentation and agility, according to Marshall et al.  Parkin echoes this:

“By definition, we’ve not done sustainable development before ... so we are all learning as we go.”

Marshall et al go further:

“we doubt if change for sustainability can often be brought about by directed, intentional action, deliberately followed through.”

Superficial change may result, but not systemic transformation.  So leadership demands that we embrace uncertainty and release control.  This is pretty much what I'm trying to articulate here, so you'd expect me to agree. I do.

Parkin is dismissive of understandings of leadership in the context of chaos or distributed systems.  She may be right that it is a perverse choice to lead in this way if you are within an organisation which functions well in a predictable external context.  But as we have seen, leadership is most urgently required in situations which are much less simple than this, where there isn’t an obvious person with a mandate to be 'the leader'.  Dispersed leadership is a more accurate description of reality and a more practical theory in these situations.  There are some well-thought of organisational consultants and theorists worth reading on this.  For example Chris Rodgers and Richard Seel have both influenced my thinking.  AMED's Organisations&People journal regularly carries great articles if you want to explore this side of things.

From the installation of secret water-saving hippos in Cabinet Office (Goulden in Leadership for Sustainability) to John Bird setting up the Big Issue or Wangari Maathai founding of the "deliciously subversive" Green Belt Movement (some of Parkin’s choices as Positive Deviant role models), the reader can’t help but be personally challenged: how do I compare, in my leadership?  Am I ethical? Am I effective?

How will we get them?

How can we make ourselves more effective as leaders, where-ever we find ourselves?   How can we help others to show leadership?

These questions bring us to the educational and personal development aspect of these books.

Education and training

Leadership for Sustainability is a collection of personal stories gleaned from people who have been through the MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice at the University of Bath’s School of Management (succeeded by Ashridge Business School’s MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility and the MA in Leadership for Sustainability at Lancaster University School of Management).  Parkin designed Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development.  So you can expect that both books have something to say about how we educate our future leaders.

Parkin dissects the ways business schools have betrayed their students and the organisations they go on to lead.  Unquestioningly sticking to a narrow focus of value, not understanding the finite nature of the world we live in, and avoiding a critique of the purpose of business and economy, by and large they continue to produce future leaders with little or no appreciation of the crash they are contributing to.

Marshall and her colleagues have shown leadership in this field, using a Trojan horse approach by setting up their MSc in the heart of a traditional business school, and seeding other courses.  Positive deviance in practice!

Personal development

Formal training aside, we can all improve our sustainability leadership skills.

Parkin argues that as well as having a ‘good enough’ level of sustainability literacy, Positive Deviants need to practice four habits of thought.  These are:

• Resilience – an understanding of ecosystems, environmental limits and their resilience, rather than the personal robustness of the change maker.
• Relationships – understanding and strengthening the relationships between people, and between us and the ecosystems which support us.
• Reflection – noticing the impact of our actions and changing what we do to be more effective, as a reflective practitioner.
• Reverence – an awe for the universe of which we are a part

Action research

Of those four habits of thought, reflection is the one closest to the heart of Marshall’s Leadership for Sustainability approach.

Marshall, Coleman and Reason are committed to an action research approach, seeing it as

“an orientation towards research and practice in which engagement, curiosity and questioning are brought to bear on significant issues in the service of a better world.”

In her chapter, Downey reminds us of the ‘simple instruction at the heart’ of action research

“take action about something you care about, and learn from it.”

Marshall et al tell us that action research was central to the structure and tutoring on their MSc.  I have to confess to being unclear about the distinctions between action inquiry, action research and action learning.  Answers in the comments section, please!

Marshall et al’s action learning chapters are useful to anyone involved in helping develop others as managers, coaches, consultants, teachers, trainers and so on – required reading, in fact, for those wrong-headed business schools which Parkin criticises so vehemently.

The power of the action research approach shines through in the collection of twenty-nine stories, which made this book – despite the somewhat heavy going of the theoretical chapters – the most compelling sustainability book I’ve read in a long time.  People have taken action about things they care about, and they have learnt from it.

Their stories demonstrate that we encourage people to show leadership in part by allowing them to be humble and to experiment, not by pretending that only the perfect can show leadership.  The stories do not trumpet an approach or sell us a technique. They are travellers’ tales for people who’ll see themselves in the narrative, and be inspired and comforted by it.

What does it feel like, to be this kind of leader?

Does this kind of leader sound like you yet?  It could be – anyone can show leadership.  But perhaps you’re sceptical or looking for a reason why it can’t be you?  It sounds like a lot of hard work and there’s no guarantee of success.

Marshall and her colleagues on the MSc course have evidently created a safe space for people to reflect about their doubts and uncertainties as well as their hopes and insights.  Chapters including this kind of personal testimony from people like Gater, Bent and Karp are intriguing, dramatic and engaging.

Karp’s story about food procurement shows difference between action learning approach and leader as hero – she’s as open about the set-backs as the successes.

I instantly recognised Bent’s description of holding professional optimism with personal pessimism, and many people I know have had that same conversation: wondering where their bolt-hole will be, to escape the impacts of runaway climate change.

Gater’s story in a brilliantly honest account of his work within a mainstream financial institution, moving a certain distance and then coming up against a seemingly insurmountable systemic challenge.  In a model of authentic story-telling, he describes tensions I have heard so many organisational change agents express.  He talks about visiting his colleagues ‘in their world’ and inviting them to visit him in his.  At the end of his story, the two worlds remain unreconciled,

“but it was okay – I had done what I could do as well as I believe I could have done it, and that had to be enough.”

Concluding

Both books start from the premise that we can’t wait for others to show leadership – we need to show leadership from where we are.

But we know that’s hard: Downey reminds us that

“…those who protect the status quo get rewarded for the inaction that slows down change, while disturbers-of-the-peace who send warning signals are disparaged, demoted or dismissed.”

But for her that’s not an excuse to hang back:

“we are not too small, and there is no small act. Either way we shape what happens.”

Transparency alert: Penny Walker is an Associate of Forum for Future, of which Sara Parkin is a Founder Director.  Penny has also been a visiting speaker on the MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice run by Judi Marshall, Gill Coleman and Peter Reason, as well as being a tutor on what might be seen as a competitor course, the Postgraduate Certificate in Sustainable Business run by the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership in conjunction with Forum for the Future.

A shorter version of this review was first published in Defra's SDScene, here.

Make more progress in changing your organisation!

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:

Organisational change theory 2011 generic

View more presentations from PennyWalker

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.

What does growth look like, for an alternative enterprise?

Growing Communities is an inspiring social enterprise which grows and trades organic, seasonal fruit and veg in Hackney, North London.  Transparency alert: I'm the chair of the Board. It has three core activities:

• growing food, mostly salads, in its urban market gardens.  The salad bags and other produce are sold through its own outlets, which are...
• ...a weekly organic 'veg box' scheme, with food going to around 3,000 people...
• ...and the UK's first weekly organic Farmers' Market.

The organisation was first set up by a small group of friends and neighbours paying in advance for produce to be produced on a single farm: a classic community supported agriculture scheme.  Later, grant funding from sources like the National Lottery, the Esme Fairburn Foundation and the Bridge House Estates Trust provided the capital for starting up new initiatives.  Hats off to all of them!

Trading fruit and veg through the box scheme, and an entrepreneurial can-do attitude meant that Growing Communities could, after a short time, move to being self-funding.  This freedom enables it to be nimble and to change rapidly as it learns about how to make this alternative local food system work.  Its work has always coupled a radical and strategic vision, with a deeply practical approach.  Standing on its own two feet financially is a value as well as a tactic. It demonstrates to customers, members, suppliers and the wider world, that an alternative food system can work even in the current context.

It also makes growth possible - bootstrapping rather than dependent on grant funding and subsidies.

Good growth

But what does growth mean for an alternative enterprise like Growing Communities?

Its principles and structure (its box-scheme customers are voting members who attend AGMs in surprisingly large numbers and elect the Board a.k.a. 'Management Committee') mean that it is community-led.  So a growth model which involves moving into a new area and opening up a mirror image of the Hackney original isn't good enough.  What about simply opening more outlets in Hackney, and growing the local customer base?  Yes, Growing Communities has done some of that, and intends to do more, with its satellite pick-up points for the weekly veg bags.  The things limiting the growth of the Farmers' Market include limitations on the space where it is held, limits on the amount of produce small farmers and growers can grow, and a dearth of small producers who fit the exacting criteria: e.g. local, organic, and producers / growers who sell their own produce, not someone else's.

Growing Communities wants to keep the community-led, local value while providing a stable and reliable market for sustainably-produced food which will enable more growers to build strong (albeit small) businesses.

The growth model also needs to be very lean - Growing Communities can't provide capital funding or flashy materials, and it can't expect fat franchise fees from the new organisations - which, like Growing Communities, will be social enterprises or some other form of not-for-profit structure.  And because every community is different, an emergent learning approach makes sense.

Mentoring and action learning model

So it's adopted a growth strategy which involves closely supporting other organisations which want to set up their own version of the Growing Communities model. The first few 'start ups' will be intensively supported with workshops, training, resources (things like copies of the ordering system, model contracts) and hands-on problem solving.  As the 'start ups' get going, their learning and experience will be captured in a series of on-line briefings, which will then be available to the next tranche of start-ups.  There will also be on-line discussions, so everyone can learn from each other.

This programme is being funded partly from the organisation's own resources, and partly by UnLtd, the social entrepreneur's organisation, which has provided some funding already. As it progresses, the idea is that successful start-ups will also help to fund the programme of live support and detailed guidance materials, and deliver parts of it.

Interested?

If you're interested in setting up a transformational pioneering food organisation, then check out the start up website here.

If you're interested in what it means for a sustainable organisation to grow, without being beholden to short-termist shareholders, being in debt to a bank or being dependent on grant funding, then keep an eye on Growing Communities.

2010 Training dates - IEMA Change Management workshops

We have three dates in the diary for this one-day workshop, which I've been running since 2005. The day is very interactive, with everyone sharing a specific sustainability challenge which they are working on, and using various frameworks and exercises to explore and understand the challenge better.

During the workshop, people

• Hear about some theory on organisational change and approaches to change, including a scale of strategic engagement, visioning, identifying key players, choosing a change strategy, identifying barriers to change and planning first steps.
• Apply this to their own organisational sustainability challenge.
• Hear from others in a similar situation, discuss common challenges and discovering sources of further information and support.

As you’d expect, the contents have evolved since I ran the first one.  But the approach is still one of making selected bits of change theory as accessible as possible to people, and giving them time to work on their own particular situation during the workshop. And everyone still gets a free copy of the workbook, so they can carry on making their own notes and using plenty more exercises and frameworks at their own pace.

If you'd like to come along, you can book through IEMA's website.

London: 28th April 2010

Leeds: 20th July 2010

Newcastle upon Tyne: 12th October 2010

Is sustainable development about more than the environment?

I've been running a training course today, helping sustainable development specialists get some insights from the world of organisational change.  As part of this, each person identified a sustainability challenge that's real for them and their organisation right now. One of the participants was grappling with how to get people from across the organisation to look at the sustainability impacts of the services they provide.   This will entail having a much better understanding of what the social aspects of sustainable development are, and how you might measure or assess your performance on these aspects.

We came back to this question about the social aspects of sustainable development when looking at Dexter Dunphy's phases of organisational strategic engagement with sustainability.  There's a pdf of a presentation summarising this here. One of the phases in this typology is ‘efficiency’.

If your focus is on the environment, it’s clear that this is about eco-efficiency or resource-efficiency.  If your focus is the economic aspects of sustainability, then financial and labour efficiency (productivity) are easy concepts to grasp.  But what does this mean when you are thinking about the social aspects?

With wonderful serendipity, I had just been reading Jonathon Porritt’s valedictory report, published yesterday.  Jonathon recently stepped down as Chair of the UK Government’s Sustainable Development Commission, and in this report he examines what he calls the mystery of why sustainable development hasn’t been better embedded in the various strands of government in the UK.  He blogs about it here and there's also a link to download the report.

As it happens, he provides a very useful summary of what social sustainability is and what efficiency means in that context.  He does it so well, that I’ll quote at some length here.

The two overarching ends [of sustainable development, as articulated in the UK Government’s 2005 strategy] (“Living Within Environmental Limits”, and “Achieving a Strong, Healthy and Just Society”) require very different approaches. The test of “living within environmental limits” is a strictly empirical test: define the limit (as in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, for instance, or threshold limits for pollutants in the air or water), measure levels of compliance against these agreed limits, and then adapt policies accordingly.  By contrast, “achieving a strong, healthy and just society” is a predominantly normative aspiration rather than an empirical test, with very different metrics and very different value judgements as to the weight that should be attached to different aspects of “strong, healthy and just”.

At the heart of the concept of sustainable development lies the concept of “dual equities”: inter-generational equity (living today in such a way that we aren’t ruining prospects for people tomorrow), and intra-generational equity (living today in such a way that we reduce – or even eliminate – current unsupportable inequalities in wealth, opportunity and broader entitlements).

In that respect, sustainable economic development means “fair shares for all”, ensuring that people’s basic needs are properly met across the world, while securing constant improvements in the quality of people’s lives through efficient, inclusive economies. “Efficient” in that context simply means generating as much economic value as possible from the lowest possible throughput of raw materials and energy.

…Once basic needs are met, the goal is to achieve the highest quality of life for individuals and communities, within the Earth’s carrying capacity, through transparent, properly regulated markets which promote both social equity and personal prosperity.”

This idea of efficiency in the use of the Earth’s carrying capacity to give as much social well-being as possible must mean, in some situations, redistributing carrying capacity from those who have an unfairly large share of it, in order that those whose needs are not being met can better meet their own needs.  This is the case because it is not possible to ‘increase the size of the pie’ – we only have one planet.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) produces the Happy Planet Index which uses official statistics to reveal, as they put it,  “the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered” in 143 countries covering 99% of the world’s population.  (I know you want to know – the UK score is 43.3, the USA is 30.7, and Costa Rica is 76.1.)

I wonder how this approach could be used to measure performance in organisations?

Who can help me make this change?

The latest issue of the environmentalist includes an article I've written, entitled "who can help me make this change?".  In it, I share an approach I've used successfully in training courses and (as my daughter would say) in true life: it helps people to systematically identify key internal and external players who can help them bring about the change they want to see. If a particular person or group are crucial to making the change happen, then you want them to be supportive of it.  Ask them what they'd like to see happening, and how you can help them.  Find common ground and enlist their support.

If someone is already very supportive, but not really needed, then see what they can do to influence or recruit those who are needed.  Or enlist them to support you.

Remember, the art of engaging people to help create transformational change involves listening and letting go.

Horror stories and denial - which makes me cringe more?

So I'm just topping up on today's environmental news feed (my feed of choice is The Guardian, a nice little app that even a web dilettante like me can add to their Google home page) and two stories stand out and demand a closer look. The first states, "Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes".   The second say, "CO2 is green", which is less self-explanatory.  In fact, it's an astonishing TV ad running in the US aimed at scuppering a cap-and-trade bill - thanks to Leo Hickman for picking this up in his blog.

What I notice is that while reading them, I get that creeping feeling up the back of my neck and round to my jaw, and the sinking in my shoulders.  I'm physically cringing.  Not very much.  But it's there.

And which had the biggest cringe effect?  I can't be certain, but I'd say that CO2 denialists make me more unhappy than the Met Office's truly dire research.

So I wonder: what can I learn from this?

That I'm more comfortable with things which reinforce my existing world view, however awful?  Perhaps.

That we need to pull together now and use all our considerable intelligence and organising power to avert the worst and prepare a soft landing, and that I'd rather the US pro-CO2 lobby would 'get with the programme'.

I'm happier owning up to that as a reason!

The other thing I notice is that these cringe-related feelings are not empowering and motivating.  What I plan to do now is

• forget I read either story,
• remind myself of some of my reasons to be cheerful,
• review my to-do list, and
• plunge into productive work.

Does that make me a denialist too?

IEMA Conference 2009 - how it went

Well as promised, here are my thoughts having attended the morning of the IEMA Conference 09.

Speeches

- I'd gladly hear Jonathan Porritt again.  He talked about the need to get off the hedonic treadmill, and the challenge of getting marketeers to sell austerity.  His slides are here.  I'm intrigued that he found Dr Steven Chu's speech to the Nobel Laureate's symposium inspiring - because JP says the speech was about energy efficiency.  And in the words of Theodore Roszack,

...prudence is such a lacklustre virtue.

I couldn't find a way to read, hear or watch Secretary Chu's speech (please let me know if you know of one) but the symposium site is here.  The other insight which caused me to stop short is that, apparently, family planning is the single best intervention in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, from a cost benefit point of view.

I didn't really understand what Lord Jenkin was trying to tell us.  Insufficiently relevant, at least to this member of the audience.  Sorry.

Peter Jones is always interesting, although his acrobatic mind can leave me behind sometimes.

Skills for Change

The workshop I ran was an hour's worth on skills for change.  I chose to focus on inter-personal influencing, through mirroring body language, asking facilitative questions, and sharing the six sources of influence that I learnt about through the 'all washed up' video which I've blogged about here.

The handouts from the session are here.

It was a lot of fun - it's amazing how quickly you can find three things that you have in common with a total stranger - and I hope stretched some people to think beyond 'awareness raising' as a way of influencing others.

I hope that it also helped people to be braver about networking later in the day, because making connections and building trust within a group such as this one, composed of IEMA members and fellow-travellers, will - in the long run - have far more impact than speechifying.

Listen and learn...

Too often, I meet with people who see stakeholder engagement as a more sophisticated way of selling their messages to potential critics. That's not the game I'm in!

Don't bother asking people what they think if you're not willing to change your plans as a result.

This article explains why you need to act in good faith when you're listening to your stakeholders.

Update: November 2010

I've been using a new categorisation recently with good effect, courtesy of Lindsey Colbourne and Sciencewise:

• transmit - "straight comms" - one way, putting out a message about something which has already been decided or already happened.
• collaborate - work together to co-create an understanding of the situation, problem, possible solutions, implementation plans and so on.
• receive - "extractive research" of the kind perfected by social researchers, market researchers etc.

There is absolutely a role for all three, and many processes or even single events will include ways of doing all three.

But if you want buy-in, and want those implementing the outcomes to want to do so, collaboration is the way.  And more fun, IMHO.

Facilitator and blogger Myriam Laberge has explored this a bit too.

Iconic, not incremental - the history of a leap forward

At an action research seminar organised by Bath University, Dr Gill Coleman shared a work-in-progress: a learning history of the iconic eco-factory built by MAS Intimates in Sri Lanka. By coincidence (if you believe in it), someone from MAS had been a student on the Post-Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business (on which I was a tutor) so I was intrigued to listen to this detailed inside story.

I've written more (in the environmentalist) about learning histories as an 'intervention', and about the eco-factory here .

IEMA Change Management Workshop

This Autumn's IEMA workshop, Change Management for Sustainable Development, will take place in Leeds in November.  As you'd expect, the contents have evolved over the four years since I first ran one.  But the approach is still one of making selected bits of change theory as accessible as possible to people, and giving them time to work on their own particular situation during the workshop. And everyone still gets a free copy of the workbook, so they can carry on making their own notes and using plenty more exercises and frameworks at their own pace.  They can also use these exercises with colleagues and in teams, to help get insights from a broad range of perspectives, and to build a coalition of change agents.

Sustainable tourism - whole-company training

From time to time I've been invited to work with Jane Ashton and her team at First Choice, now part of TUI Travel plc.  Jane understands the importance of enabling sustainable development to leave the safe haven of the CSR team, and spread virally through the organisation. One way that First Choice encourages this is through tailored training for people in different parts of the organisation, whether they work in retail shops, in holiday destinations, liaising with local suppliers of accommodation and activities, or in teams that dream up the new products to sell to holidaymakers.  I was delighted to be asked to work with Jane's team and the Travel Foundation to develop this training.

Once piloted by First Choice, the training courses and materials were made generic, so that any similar business in the sector could use them.  This won't just help staff become more aware of sustainable tourism, it will also help them plan together how to rethink their own businesses to make them more sustainable.

You can access those training materials here.

And speaking personally about climate change...

There are quite a few courses on offer in the UK to help people speak in public more confidently, knowledgeably and effectively about climate change. This article which I wrote for the environmentalist examines two of them, focusing on the key points that the trainers are trying to get across.