The post Do you think about boundaries? appeared first on Alice MacGillivray.
]]>Framing Post: (the text of which is also pasted below):
In Human Systems Management, the brilliant systems thinker C. West Churchman wrote a thought piece called “Poverty and Development.” It is as difficult to convey insights of this piece through excerpts, as it is to convey the richness of a tapestry through threads pulled from its fabric. But I will try to illustrate with Churchman’s words:
I have on my desk two pictures. One is of a young boy who is crying; behind him is his mother lying on the ground…The other is of a woman, nicely dressed, wearing a handsome necklace…My own face, which I cannot see, probably has that strange academic curiosity, the can-I-write-an-essay? look. Of course, we cannot see the photographers’ faces, or the magazine editors’ faces. Or even you, the reader’s face…
Let us turn now to the first word of the constitution of the United States, and the Charter of the United Nations. It is “we” (“We the people of…”)…consider the UN and other organisations’ estimates of baby mortality caused by poverty around the world: 35,000 daily, or one million each month that die of poverty…Where is the “we” in these figures?…
I have been talking about a wide world “Weltanschauung”—a (WWW) in Internet language—in which poverty is created out of wealth. In this case wealth produces necklaces, roads, temples, large corporate headquarters and smooth-running ships, planes and autos; is there a “Therefore”? That is, is the real story that once upon a time a lady owned an eleven-million-dollar necklace and therefore a boy in Rwanda was crying for his supper, and that therefore his mother could not feed him?
Churchman is speaking to a fundamental leadership challenge. A decision may seem successful and ethical within one boundary, yet damaging and unethical within another. Creation of jobs in India may parallel job losses in the U.S. Profit for an oil company may link to spills that destroy food sources for Indigenous communities. Praise for a charismatic leader may discourage employees who did the work. A decision for efficient clear-cut logging in North America might lead to boycotts of products by European customers. We must be reminded that we construct boundaries socially, even if we think of them as real (Richardson and Lissack). And that social construction comes with built-in values.
The concept of boundarylessness became fashionable via Jack Welch of GE and others. We often complain about silos, communication barriers and knowledge gaps. Yet, there are times when boundaries are useful. Do leaders invest enough effort in thinking about the value of different boundary approaches? Do they think about the power implications of boundaries?
In his Theory of Boundary Critique, Midgley (2000) describes how powerful groups form bounded, influential cores. Each core group can value or devalue anything on its margins. Citizens can be valued or devalued by government; immigrants by longer term residents; visible minorities by visible majorities; field staff by headquarters and so on. If these boundaries and value choices are not attended to, dynamics between the core and margins can consume considerable resources.
Once boundaries are drawn, we tend to face inward. Our dominant focus is on governance, structures and processes within [fill in the blank: our country, or department, our race, our firm, our school, efficiency, financial profit…) The Harwood Institute is one organization that helps groups shift focus from inward to outward. Through this shift, organizations learn much more from communities, customers or clients and can better serve them.
Gerald Midgley is an internationally recognized systems theorist and practitioner who has worked with intractable community challenges. He considers “boundary” THE central concept in systems thinking. Can we ignore it?
About the author: Alice MacGillivray has a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University, where she is a Fellow with the Institute for Social Innovation. Her interest in boundaries began as a child, when she noticed the richness of intersecting natural systems. Alice’s dissertation explored ways in which respected leaders understand and work with boundaries. She lives on an island near the 49th parallel in Western Canada.
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If you want to dig into boundaries more deeply, the publications area of this site has some of my papers, and I really like Kurt Richardson and Michael Lissack’s paper on the nature of boundaries.
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]]>Later in my afternoon of intermittent lurking, I came across this blog post about biases against lurkers. It explains how a community tried to exclude anyone who was not visibly active and drew a humorous parallel: “How about if Wikipedia limited access to only those who had contributed on a definition?”
I recall years ago in a CPsquare Foundations Workshop helping a group that wanted to dispel some prejudice through a project they called: “Let’s get more positive about the term lurkers.” I guess that work still has some room for application.
I wonder about the leanings of the people crafting these rules (degree of introversion, degree of desire for control, affinity for rules or software “solutions”). I wonder if they do similar things in their living rooms: “Now remember, you have to leave if you don’t talk…and don’t forget you can only speak once in 5 minutes.”
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]]>Juanita Brown, who developed The World Cafe concept in theory and practice, is like many professionals in these fields: she has been generous with her ideas. There seems to be a healthy degree of adaptation and customization around elements of TWC practice (and arguably work that stretches the boundaries a bit too far or purports to be the work developed solely by consultants who have stamped similar activities with their own brands). I am always aware of the tensions, risks and benefits around differentiation and the blurring of boundaries.
David Gurteen is another generous practitioner whose work I respect. He runs what he calls knowledge cafes. In January (2010) Singapore blogger “thinkaloudalot” contrasted The World Cafe and Knowledge Cafes.
How does your experience with The World Cafe or Knowledge Cafes map with his thoughts?
What are your thoughts about pros and cons of differentiation and boundary blurring with concepts such as TWC and KCs?
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]]>I think the fields have considerable overlap, but have been isolated from one another for several reasons. The networks of practitioners don’t overlap much, knowledge management work is associated with organizations much more than communities and society, and dialogue and deliberation work is associated with the public, communities and society much more than with organizations.
Their purposes are similar. Knowledge management can help people in organizations make better decisions: decisions based on learning, context, varied input…and decisions that are better understood and more readily adopted. Here are obvious links with deliberation. KM can also help people in organizations generate new knowledge and enable innovation. Again, deliberation has the potential to generate knowledge that gives us a new way of looking at intractable problems.
Tools are similar. Sometimes they overlap directly (World Cafe, for example).
They both have many layers. I still enjoy Karl Wiig’s piece about the four facets of KM, including the social movement layer.
There are many ways in which the fields could learn from each other, including:
For people familiar with D&D and less familiar with KM, here is a wonderful site with KM resources by David Gurteen. For those more familiar with KM, sample sites include the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), the International Association for Public Participation and the Kettering Foundation. Several organizations and universities offer workshops and programs in both fields; I’ve taken the D&D program from Fielding.
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]]>In the mid 1990s I worked with a Ministry of Education, helping to weave themes and philosophies–such as gender equity–into the K-12 curricula. One of my projects was to work with Susan Simmons of the Association for the Promotion and Advancement of Science. We were to help female teachers build confidence and skills in their work with computers, which had magically appeared in classrooms with little orientation. Susan was a confident and energetic internet user and an advocate for good girls’ education. She had written a science activity book for girls that was very well received in field tests, though not approved by the Ministry because it “cheapened science,” turning it into “kitchen science.” Think how many layers of bias are woven into that decision.
We designed workshops for teachers. In one of our planning sessions, we showed a university website of 50 Great Canadian Scientists. One of the women (from Women in Trades & Technology) commented that there weren’t any women on the list. “You should complain” said Susan. “Yes, I suppose I should write a letter” she replied. “No: you can contact them through the internet–right here…” So the woman who worked with trades had her first experience with the networked world.
In our next planning session, we pulled up a reply that there were no women on the site because the scientists had to be “great.” There was a woman in the room who had recently researched female Canadian scientists, and had a list of 100. Again, the internet was used to reply and a few of the names quickly made it onto the university’s website. These were transformational moments for several people in the room.
I have no idea what Susan is doing now, but based on the enthusiasm, tenacity and passion of our time together, I know she has influenced more than she can imagine.
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