I’ve been looking forward to the publication of Jim Ewing’s book Braving Uncertainty (Triarchy, 2024) ever since Graham Leicester referenced his work in a few pages of his book Transformative Innovation. Ewing was, until his death in 2014, a member of the group of practitioners convened by Graham at the International Futures Forum in Scotland.
The manuscript for Braving Uncertainty was drafted by Ewing before his death and for that reason we can think of this as his “legacy” book, even if publication has been delayed for a decade.
Change-making
Ewing explains his own personal journey in an introductory chapter. He was an engineer who grew to be more interested in helping organisations, and people, make change. Along the way he picked up and synthesised various intellectual influences that helped him to shape the change-making tools that he developed.
I’m going to discuss one of those in more detail to give a flavour of his approach, but this is at least as much a “doing” book as a “reading” book. There are five tools here, and Ewing makes the connections between them as he goes. They also have reasonably catchy names: The Insight Cycle; Stucco; Implemento (which generates options); Impacto (which gets to a decision); and TransforMAP.
I could describe all five, but I think it’s more useful to understand Jim Ewing’s practice and thinking by focusing on the first of these.
Changing the stories
At the heart of this, he is trying to help organisations and individuals to change their story. Making sense of our lives, individually and collectively, “is a fundamental human necessity.” As we encounter turbulence and change, we need to be able to incorporate it “into our existing narratives”:
This is the inner work of change – adapting the story we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are, where we are going and how the world is going to support us in the journey. Satisfactory changes cause us to grow, to use more of ourselves, to extend our being into added dimensions. Unsatisfying changes are frauds, because we just repeat the same old life patterns in a different guise (pp17-18).
The stories we carry are likely to be a mixture of the upbeat and positive and the downbeat and discouraging. When a shock happens, our temptation is usually to “fix” the cover story, to maintain “an illusion of predictability and control.” But this also disconnects us from the deeper truths that the shock might open us to.
Problem solving
It’s also worth saying something about Ewing’s philosophy of working with organisations going through change, because he characterises a hierarchy of help.
The first is problem-solving: a tax accountant can help you put the right numbers in the right boxes. When upheaval strikes, however, “fast answers” are like “fast food”, because we’re in a world where the outcomes are not known at the outset.
Ewing characterises this second level as “transformative enquiry”, and advice is not helpful here. (He recommends writing down the advice you might be tempted to give in a private notebook.) In this level,
The good news is we don’t have to be experts at all. We just pursue artful conversations and guide others into helpful frameworks of thinking (p29).
‘Deep in the muddle’
The third level is presence: “our client is deep in the muddle.” And that means we need to attend, in both senses of the word:
Platitudes and feel-good slogans are completely unhelpful… There is nothing to be done, so we show up as a wise and thoughtful witness. We just sit in the exquisite moments when someone confronts their core. Being a transformative presence is the highest form of our art (p29-30).
The first of these tools, the Insight Cycle, the core of Ewing’s approach, is designed to set the ground by helping individuals and organisations create a map of where they are and where they want to be.
On the face of it, the Insight Cycle is a simple enough device. It has four nodes and two axes. The nodes—compass points on a circle—are Situation (at the east), Mind, Behaviour and Influence. The first axis, ‘Doing’, runs east-west; the second axis, ‘Being’, runs north south.
Half-finished
The illustration for this “is a simple drawing, in the effortless style of cave drawing and hieroglyphics.” I immediately warmed to the roughness of this (the designer isn’t credited) in that they feel half-finished, rather than the crisp, tidy—and closed—geometric shapes seen in much consulting work.
Sketching this out. Ewing underlines that the language used to describe the nodes and axes should be neutral and non-judgmental. It is what it is.
Situation—the easterly node—is the collection of “physical conditions, outcomes, results, performance mechanisms… which we use to define how things stand for us in the world.”
Doings
Behaviour, at the west, is “our doings and not doings, our actions, steps and moves… business processes, procedures and systems.” This is
“not the system design, but how the system or procedure or team actually measurably behaves (p39).
Obviously we can think of many organisations that could have done with some candour about their actual behaviour before catastrophe struck, although they also seem like the last organisations that would have invited Jim Ewing into the room.
‘Navel gazing’
The “Doing” axis runs between these:
We find ourselves in a situation and we respond with behaviour designed to improve our conditions.
Most of the noise of organisations—when you read their reports or listen to their chief executives—are full of “doing”:
I had a witty colleague years ago who said that her company was full of ‘human doings. I think she was talking about an organisation with a huge bias to being busy and putting points on the scoreboard, driven to hurry up and deliver results without a lot of so-called ‘navel gazing, which another colourful human doing I know likes to call the process of thinking (p40).
Transformer
Onto the other axis. Influence is at the north, which connects Behaviour back to Situation:
It is a transformer which takes our behaviour and acts on it in some way to convert it into a changed situation in the East (p41).
But there is a cautionary note here:
Influence is a complex system of physical creation which runs constantly and which is way beyond anyone’s comprehension, much less control (p41).
The south of the circle is Mind. This is “a transformer… which processes situations into actions.” It holds
my beliefs, assumptions, mental models, experience, dreams and aspirations, intentions, passions and urges. Also my biases and prejudices… For an organisation, the domain of ‘Mind’ holds strategy, mission, brand, policies, rules and regulations, both spoken and unspoken. The so-called glass ceiling, above which some classes of people may not be promoted, is a product of the unspoken, organisational ‘Mind’ (p43).
‘The Game never stops’
Ewing suggests that Mind has three components—a version of heart (emotional), head (thinking), and hands and feet (physical)—and these are often out of sync with each other.
Between these last two runs the ‘Being’ axis:
Engaging this axis calls on our curiosity, patience, humility, and a willingness to endure uncertainty and ambiguity. On this axis be dragons (p44).
This is not meant to be an easy diagram, and nor is the journey around it. There are tensions and conflicts. It doesn’t have a neat ending: “The game never stops… The Cycle cycles.”
Rich dialogue tools
One of the things that makes the work harder, especially in organisations, is that different parts of the system only look at one element within it:
A financial analyst does just that by describing company ‘Situation’ measured solely in profit and loss. The Personnel department reports on employee attitudes and mood—measures of ‘Mind’. The Marketing team tracks changes in the ‘Influence called consumer expectations. Production managers offer a history of the operation of the order entry process, a story of pure ‘Behaviour’. None of these domains, taken by itself, is very interesting (p48).
I’ve dwelt on this to convey Ewing’s worldview. The book comes with stories and examples. Each of the four nodes has an additional tool attached to it, to amplify discourse and deepen understanding. Stucco (sic) helps with Situation; Implemento with Behaviour; Impacto helps with Influence; and TransformMAP—I so wanted this to be called Transformo—with Mind. As someone who does some of this work sometimes, these are clearly rich dialogue tools.
A lifetime of practice
It’s not a long book, but Ewing has, I think, distilled a lifetime of practice into it. As he says near the end, “These maps have been decades in the making.”
In a section near the end, he acknowledges some intellectual debts. Some come from grief therapists such as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Stanley Keleman; some from psychiatrists and Jungian psychology: Roger Gould, Hal and Sidra Stone; Roberto Assagioli; Piero Ferruci. Some of these names were new to me.
In these decades of map-making, Jim Ewing crafted these different voices into a humane set of practices to help organisations work with change. You get the sense from the book that he would have been a fabulous companion on that journey.
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Braving Uncertainty, by Jim Ewing, is published in July by Triarchy Press, but copies are available before then. EU customers are advised to buy the ebook, because Brexit. There’s a pdf of the introductory chapter here.
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A version of this article was also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.
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