It was about ten years ago now that I heard the term, coined by Donald Schon, "swamp problems" to refer to messy, confusing problems that defy technical solutions. Schon pointed out that the problems of greatest human concern lie in the swamp, rather than on the high ground, where we develop most of our technical knowledge and apply the rigor of research.
Ron Heifetz talked about this kind of problem as an "adaptive," challenge as opposed to a technical challend and in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers, developed an approach to leadership in a world of adaptive challenges.
The problem is our social problem solving approach is still stuck in technical, rather than adaptive mode.
Check out the May 19 2008 issue of the New Yorker and Bee Wilson's review essay called "The Last Bite" for a doozy of a swamp problem. He is writing about the need to radically change the system of Western food production, "right down to the spinach." According to Wilson, as of 2006, there were eight hundred million people in the world who were hungy, but they were outnumbered by one billion who were overweight. As he puts it, "Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market."
This complex and interconnected challenges, which includes food producers, large food companies, consumers, advertisers and a host of other players, will be difficult to solve. It was created in part from a failure to develop the habit of looking at the pieces of the problem as a whole -- as a system where a solution in one place may create an unanticipated problem in another.
A place called the "Sustainable Food Lab," is trying to back out of this mess, http://www.sustainablefoodlab.org/overview/ by taking a different approach, and acknowledging this as a swamp problem. Check it out to see what they are up to.
More in subsequent posts.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
Habits and culture
Stephen Covey, in his 7 habits of Highly Effective People, was one of the first to put forward the idea that being effective in today's and tomorrow's workplace requires intentionally creating new habits of thinking, communicating and acting. Covey defines a habit as "an acquired pattern of behavior that often occurs automatically."
Habits are unconscious ways of being -- we use the phrase "get into the habit of..." going to the gym regularly, for example. Or we talk about "breaking the habit of..." -- for example eating all the potato chips that come with your sandwich at lunch.
Personal habits -- what we do with our bodies for example, are only one kind. Alexis De Toqueville talked about "habits of the heart" to refer to the particular norms of American culture that make Americans different from Europeans and American civic culture so robust.
Widely shared habits -- how we think, talk and communicate -- can add up to shared culture. Once these habits are shared, largely unseen and made more stubborn and enduring through their use in schools, businesses and politics, cultural change becomes difficult. Some would even say it is impossible.
The emerging conventional wisdom in neuroscience would suggest othewise. The idea that brains are more changeable than was originally understood -- what's called brain plasticity -- may well make a big difference for what kind of culture change is possible. While there are grooves of thinking -- literally ruts along with nueral signals travel -- that are unlikely to change, it is possible to create new neural pathways, that can run along side the old, and become habitual themselves. Kind of like the super highway built alongside the old and slow country road.
Janet Rae-Depree had an interesting article in the New York Times business section two Sundays ago (May 4). While we tend to see creativity and innovation as coming from habit breaking, increasing numbers of brain scientists, coaches and others who work with people and organizations to develop innovation and creativity are saying the opposite. Innovation comes from habit-making. We can, writes Rae-Dupree "create parallel synaptic paths and even entirely new brain cells that can jump our trains of thought onto new innovative tracks."
All of this has great implications for how we as a society go about solving our most pressing social problems. What kind of habit making and habit breaking do we need when it comes to addressing climate change? Or fixing our educational system?
More on that in later posts.
Habits are unconscious ways of being -- we use the phrase "get into the habit of..." going to the gym regularly, for example. Or we talk about "breaking the habit of..." -- for example eating all the potato chips that come with your sandwich at lunch.
Personal habits -- what we do with our bodies for example, are only one kind. Alexis De Toqueville talked about "habits of the heart" to refer to the particular norms of American culture that make Americans different from Europeans and American civic culture so robust.
Widely shared habits -- how we think, talk and communicate -- can add up to shared culture. Once these habits are shared, largely unseen and made more stubborn and enduring through their use in schools, businesses and politics, cultural change becomes difficult. Some would even say it is impossible.
The emerging conventional wisdom in neuroscience would suggest othewise. The idea that brains are more changeable than was originally understood -- what's called brain plasticity -- may well make a big difference for what kind of culture change is possible. While there are grooves of thinking -- literally ruts along with nueral signals travel -- that are unlikely to change, it is possible to create new neural pathways, that can run along side the old, and become habitual themselves. Kind of like the super highway built alongside the old and slow country road.
Janet Rae-Depree had an interesting article in the New York Times business section two Sundays ago (May 4). While we tend to see creativity and innovation as coming from habit breaking, increasing numbers of brain scientists, coaches and others who work with people and organizations to develop innovation and creativity are saying the opposite. Innovation comes from habit-making. We can, writes Rae-Dupree "create parallel synaptic paths and even entirely new brain cells that can jump our trains of thought onto new innovative tracks."
All of this has great implications for how we as a society go about solving our most pressing social problems. What kind of habit making and habit breaking do we need when it comes to addressing climate change? Or fixing our educational system?
More on that in later posts.
Friday, May 9, 2008
tales from the edge
Where are the people and organizations who have already created the new habits of thinking that will maximize our creativity for solving social problems in a new era? Sometimes it is important to look backwards for examples. In retrospect, cultural change is always easier to see. And cultural change has always been about getting unstuck -- moving from one paradigm of thinking and behaving to another.
One of the most powerful stories of this comes from Roman times. The story is of a rabbi named Yochanan ben Zakkai. Jerusalem was in flames, and the Romans were about to destroy the temple, the very core of Jewish practice. Ben Zakkai went to the Roman general Vespasian on behalf of the Jewish community but made an unexpected request. Instead of calling for a truce or begging for mercy, so that the precious temple could be restored, he asked the general to give him the city of Yavneh. Yavneh was where the embryonic new rabbinic movement was developing. A place of conversation and debate about Jewish law and practice and how to adapt it to changing times. It was also a magnet for a new kind of Jewish thinker and teacher – the people who became known as the rabbis who wrote the Talmud. So he asked for a place and for the “human capital and talent” that had begun to gather in that place.
It was a daring move on his part. Instead of fighting to preserve the old ways – the institution and related practices that formed the very essence of what most people thought defined Jews as a people -- he asked for a place for conversation to invent the new practices that would shape Judaism in its next era, in the face of a world in which practice was no longer centralized and where the temple priests were no longer the primary arbiters of what was right and wrong.
It would not be difficult to change the names and the places and see this story’s relevance for our time. What the rabbis went on to do was to suspend prior ideas about what was Jewish or not; what defined core Jewish practice, and to look at what was emerging and what was most alive and true in their own era.
What would it mean to do this in our times? Where are the people and places that have developed the new habit of standing back and looking at what is emerging, rather than immediately imposing upon it the categories they bring from the past. Those places are most likely on the edge of established institutions. They may not be on the radar screen yet as having significance. I'd bet on them.
One of the most powerful stories of this comes from Roman times. The story is of a rabbi named Yochanan ben Zakkai. Jerusalem was in flames, and the Romans were about to destroy the temple, the very core of Jewish practice. Ben Zakkai went to the Roman general Vespasian on behalf of the Jewish community but made an unexpected request. Instead of calling for a truce or begging for mercy, so that the precious temple could be restored, he asked the general to give him the city of Yavneh. Yavneh was where the embryonic new rabbinic movement was developing. A place of conversation and debate about Jewish law and practice and how to adapt it to changing times. It was also a magnet for a new kind of Jewish thinker and teacher – the people who became known as the rabbis who wrote the Talmud. So he asked for a place and for the “human capital and talent” that had begun to gather in that place.
It was a daring move on his part. Instead of fighting to preserve the old ways – the institution and related practices that formed the very essence of what most people thought defined Jews as a people -- he asked for a place for conversation to invent the new practices that would shape Judaism in its next era, in the face of a world in which practice was no longer centralized and where the temple priests were no longer the primary arbiters of what was right and wrong.
It would not be difficult to change the names and the places and see this story’s relevance for our time. What the rabbis went on to do was to suspend prior ideas about what was Jewish or not; what defined core Jewish practice, and to look at what was emerging and what was most alive and true in their own era.
What would it mean to do this in our times? Where are the people and places that have developed the new habit of standing back and looking at what is emerging, rather than immediately imposing upon it the categories they bring from the past. Those places are most likely on the edge of established institutions. They may not be on the radar screen yet as having significance. I'd bet on them.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Capacity building
John Esterle is an unassuming man who runs the Whitman Institute out of an apartment in San Francisco's Embarcadero neighborhood. He's been at it for twenty years, though the foundation has become better known since it shifted from being an operating to a grantmaking organization just a few years ago.
This tiny foundation is at the leading edge of supporting the development of capacities the individuals and institutions addressing our most pressing social problems need. But he is very much alone in this task. While "capacity building" is the concern of the hour in the foundation world, most foundations define it much more narrowly and only in conjunction with their own grantees.
Here is the Whitman Institute's mission: "promotion of open-mindedness, cross-perspective dialogue, and engaged communication to improve the process and quality of public and private decision-making. Our ultimate goals are to broaden the public conversation about the importance of critical and collaborative thinking and to link that deepened awareness to effect individual and social change."
More specifically, the foundation is committed to the following capacities (from their website: www.thewhitmaninstitute.org:
This tiny foundation is at the leading edge of supporting the development of capacities the individuals and institutions addressing our most pressing social problems need. But he is very much alone in this task. While "capacity building" is the concern of the hour in the foundation world, most foundations define it much more narrowly and only in conjunction with their own grantees.
Here is the Whitman Institute's mission: "promotion of open-mindedness, cross-perspective dialogue, and engaged communication to improve the process and quality of public and private decision-making. Our ultimate goals are to broaden the public conversation about the importance of critical and collaborative thinking and to link that deepened awareness to effect individual and social change."
More specifically, the foundation is committed to the following capacities (from their website: www.thewhitmaninstitute.org:
- exploring diverse viewpoints broadly and deeply
- engaging across difference, discipline, sector, and geography
- discovering how language affects perception
- approaching problems and decisions from multiple perspectives, particularly perspectives that may challenge their own
- recognize and question assumptions underlying their beliefs and action
test the logic behind their thinking - become aware of, and learn from, the interplay between thinking and feeling
develop a capacity for empathy - creating sustainable processes for inquiry and reflection
As Esterle says, there are really no other players in this field currently. They hope that there will be more. All of the foundations are in perpetual strategic planning mode, he said. They are struggling for a new paradigm. What could that mean? Something is changing in philanthropy, and focus on capacity as a primary grantmaking area, not a secondary one, is critical.
In our discussion we realized that there are three pieces to getting unstuck: changing incentives; making the time for a different kind of decisionmaking; and tools for shifting our habits of decisionmaking.
Imagine, I said to him, that we are now at the point regarding tools-for-thinking and decision making --call these social technologies -- that information technologies were in the early 1980's before PC's and the internet penetrated and shifted every aspect of our individual and organization lives. He and I are betting on the idea that ten years from now, every educational program, every organization, every political campaign, will have integrated the available tools to the point that they can barely remember life without them.
Monday, May 5, 2008
crossing boundaries
I sat down recently with Charlie Halpern at a sunny Bay Area cafe. Having just read his memoir in preparation for the meeting, I realized how intimate this meeting suddenly felt and how different he seemed to me now that the layers of his life had been uncovered in the book. I also felt a new bond with him since I now knew that we shared a passion and a commitment to bringing the internal practice of wisdom to the work of solving our society's most pressing problems.
In the foreword to Halpern's new book, Making Waves and Riding the Currents (Berrett-Koehler: 2008), Robert Reich points out that Halpern's personal journey "illuminates and integrates two overarching social movements that have occupied what is commonly referred to as "the Left" over the last forty years. One has focused on the potential for a more just society and the world...The other, by contrast, has looked inward. It has focused on the potential within every person for a full and meaningful life. These two overarching movements --one exterior and the other interior, if you will -- have evolved separately...By findging the means of weaving the movements together in his own life, Halpern invites you to do the same in yours..."
Integrating these two pieces is countercultural for each of these movements. Getting unstuck in addressing our most pressing problems requires this integration.
Halpern tells his own story through memoir, which is probably the best way someone trying to illustrate the importance of what he calls "cultivating the practice of wisdom" could. It is a story of changing from the inside out -- from beating the doors down as a public interest lawyer convinced of the rightness of his position in the face of abuses of power and injustice, to someone who thinks that solution is only partial -- that change is more likely to come from within, which entails having compassion even for your opponent, listening rather than debating, and opening your mind to unlikely potentials for new forms of understanding with your opponent.
There are several wonderful scenes in the book that illustrate Halpern's struggle to integrate the world of law and social justice with that of meditation, yoga and other techniques for gaining inner wisdom.
Halpern has been a pioneer in trying to bring contemplative practices into the world of advocacy, law, medicine and even academia. First, when he was president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, he created a funding program for integrating contemplative practice with social change efforts. Now he is the chairman of the board of the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society which has developed a number of programs and fellowships to do the same www.contemplativemind.org
Getting unstuck from the inside out --using ancient and new wisdom practices -- and bringing the cultivation of wisdom to the work of social problem solving is one of the most important trends of our time. How many others like Charlie Halpern are there who embody this trend?
In the foreword to Halpern's new book, Making Waves and Riding the Currents (Berrett-Koehler: 2008), Robert Reich points out that Halpern's personal journey "illuminates and integrates two overarching social movements that have occupied what is commonly referred to as "the Left" over the last forty years. One has focused on the potential for a more just society and the world...The other, by contrast, has looked inward. It has focused on the potential within every person for a full and meaningful life. These two overarching movements --one exterior and the other interior, if you will -- have evolved separately...By findging the means of weaving the movements together in his own life, Halpern invites you to do the same in yours..."
Integrating these two pieces is countercultural for each of these movements. Getting unstuck in addressing our most pressing problems requires this integration.
Halpern tells his own story through memoir, which is probably the best way someone trying to illustrate the importance of what he calls "cultivating the practice of wisdom" could. It is a story of changing from the inside out -- from beating the doors down as a public interest lawyer convinced of the rightness of his position in the face of abuses of power and injustice, to someone who thinks that solution is only partial -- that change is more likely to come from within, which entails having compassion even for your opponent, listening rather than debating, and opening your mind to unlikely potentials for new forms of understanding with your opponent.
There are several wonderful scenes in the book that illustrate Halpern's struggle to integrate the world of law and social justice with that of meditation, yoga and other techniques for gaining inner wisdom.
Halpern has been a pioneer in trying to bring contemplative practices into the world of advocacy, law, medicine and even academia. First, when he was president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, he created a funding program for integrating contemplative practice with social change efforts. Now he is the chairman of the board of the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society which has developed a number of programs and fellowships to do the same www.contemplativemind.org
Getting unstuck from the inside out --using ancient and new wisdom practices -- and bringing the cultivation of wisdom to the work of social problem solving is one of the most important trends of our time. How many others like Charlie Halpern are there who embody this trend?
Friday, May 2, 2008
Cognitive age
David Brooks' column (I find myself in surprising agreement with him much of the time) points out something really important about our current policy dialogue and a way in which it is stuck. He makes a distinction between globalization as a process, and how that affects American workers on the one hand and technological change that requires different cognitive capacities on the other. Calling this the "cognitive age," he says that our focus needs to be on skill building, rather than tweaking and critiquing trade agreements. The focus needs to be within not pointing fingers at foreigners.
While the business community, and to some extent the military, has focused on skill building for a long time, the policy community is behind -- not just in devising policies to develop and fund skill building for all, and at all levels, but in focusing on its own need for skill building --in the complex of institutions that develop, talk about and implement solutions to society's most pressing problems.
What those capacities are, the tools we already have to build them, and how important they are for solving our most complex problems going forward is the topic of my book.
While the business community, and to some extent the military, has focused on skill building for a long time, the policy community is behind -- not just in devising policies to develop and fund skill building for all, and at all levels, but in focusing on its own need for skill building --in the complex of institutions that develop, talk about and implement solutions to society's most pressing problems.
What those capacities are, the tools we already have to build them, and how important they are for solving our most complex problems going forward is the topic of my book.
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