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.

One of the little known secrets of facilitation is that the facilitator is the servant of the two masters. They are, to use a different metaphor, riding two horses, and if they don’t keep both in hand, and in head, they will get torn apart.

I don’t often write about facilitation, although I do quite a lot of it. But I was reminded of this inherent truth at an event earlier this month. We were in a punctuation session, a quick plenary as we transitioned from one part of the process before we moved on to something else. It was going slowly, and we were getting close to time when someone reframed, elegantly, the issue that the event had been convened to discuss. Suddenly, four or five hands shot up. You could feel the change in the energy in the room, which many facilitators would be pleased about.

Instead, the facilitator chose to follow the clock:

I’ve got time to take one point before we move on.

There were reasons for this. We were in a borrowed room, and it wasn’t clear how quickly it would be needed by others. But all the same, this is a classic facilitation trap – for good facilitation requires that you serve the process (you represent the client’s interest) while also, simultaneously, serving the room (representing the interests of the dialogue between the participants in the room).

This is not always a straightforward task, and when these interests diverge too far, perhaps because one has been privileged over the other, the workshop process starts to break down.

My most difficult facilitation experiences

Looking back, I can see that some of my most difficult experiences as a facilitator was when these two interests have stretched too far apart. Sometimes this can be inadvertent. Doing some facilitation about new ways of thinking about customers for a multinational company, for example, one group of people in the room concluded that an unstated purpose of the workshop was to dissolve their business unit into another one. There was no such agenda, as it happened, but unsurprisingly they started to act out. On another occasion, the group which was being consulted had had poor consultation experiences with the workshop organisers in the past, and disbelieved me when I said that this was an open process. They thought that I was there to get them to approve some pre-agreed outcomes for the client.

So how to stop this happening? Some of it comes down to the conditions of engagement, simply making sure that the client plans to have an open process, rather than herd people through to their preferred conclusions (I once heard this called “facipulation”). After all, you don’t have to take the work. Some of it is down to the “conditions of engagement” that good facilitators propose to the room at the start of the workshop, where you spell out what the session is designed to achieve, and how.

Reflecting the process

But more usually, as in the present case, it is because the facilitator is not fully in the moment in the room, and they’ve stopped concentrating, for a moment, on their duty to the quality of the conversation between the participants.  The answer is for the facilitator to step back for a moment, and to reflect the process – all of it – back to the room. In this case, this reflection might have gone like this:

[Jane] has just raised a really good question, and I can see that there a lot of people who want to respond to it. I’m sure that we’ve got time to take some of these points, though we’ll have to juggle the schedule a little bit to catch up later on.  But I’m concerned that we may be about to run out of time in this room. So while I take some of your comments, I’m going to ask one of the organisers to check on how much longer we have in here.

The point is this. A competent facilitator can (almost) always drive a group through a process, as agreed with a client, and drive out a set of outcomes. But if they do this in a way which doesn’t respect the interests and desires of the participants – who have made time to attend – they might as well not have bothered. Both you, and the client, will have burnt reputation and credibility through forgetting your role. Yes, you’ll have some outcomes. But you won’t have consent or commitment.

The picture is from triangle.com, and is used here with thanks.

Participatory Workshops,which was published seven years ago, is described as a ‘sourcebook’, and its organising conceit is that it is divided into 21 sets of ideas and activities, and within each set, in a suitably holonic fashion, there are 21 ideas or activities. Perhaps for this reason one review described it as being like a cookbook.

I run a lot of workshops, and have found quite a lot of the literature on workshop process and facilitation to be on the formal side, not to say downright stodgy. Some of the things I like about Robert Chambers’ book, in contrast:

• He has worked in a wide range of countries, and so he has multi-cultural view of facilitation – which also tends to mean that he prefers low-tech to high-tech approaches to workshops.
• There is simply lots of stuff – it is a very rich compendium, which covers everything from exercises (of all sorts) to icebreakers to feedback techniques to room layout to facilitators’ tips (e.g. “How to avoid lecturing”) to workshop and process design.
• He has a refreshingly honest perspective on what goes on in workshops – as evidenced by the sections on ‘dealing with dominators’ and – more radically – in ’21 tips for surviving participatory workshops’, which includes sub-sections headed ‘hide’ and ‘evade responsibility’.
• He has a good eye for power issues in workshops (I don’t mean the electricity) and how to manage them.
• He is also engagingly open about facilitation and facilitator’s errors. The chapter on ‘Messing Up’ contains a section called ’21 Mistakes I Make In Workshops’, which is a list which every facilitator should keep their  own version of, if only to keep them honest. (The ’21 horrors’ list which follows it starts with arriving late – and then finding the room locked and the janitor absent).

It’s a few years since I first read the book, and it tends to stay on my shelf – although I’ve lent at least two copies to people which have never found their way back to me again. But looking at it again, I realised how much of his guidance I’ve incorporated into my facilitation work over the years – especially about using the many techniques he recommends to make workshops more informal and more fluid.