Sometimes, it’s only at the end that we realize we’re just scratching the surface.
16 years ago, I facilitated a four-day event “Fixing Food” for the state of Oregon. The participants were farmers, agricultural workers, food wholesalers, grocers, academics, and restaurant owners. Everyone was excited, confident that the collective expertise and experience would be able to explore and tackle the important issues and problems they were experiencing.
It was only during the last hour of the event, that everyone became aware of the sheer quantity and complexity of the concerns. Instead of springing into action to implement solutions, the participants realized they had just scratched the surface of what they had uncovered.
In 2022, I designed and facilitated a leadership summit on the future of the meeting industry. Two years of the COVID19 pandemic had devastated the industry. Now it looked as though meetings were starting to rebound. What would they look like? Would new partnerships between stakeholders and suppliers develop? How would the dizzying number of new digital technologies change events? What could and would engagement become?
We had seven hours, spread over two mornings, to explore these and other lofty topics. The participants included some of the most experienced leaders in the meeting industry. Though we didn’t know what we might conclude, we had high hopes of finding some agreements and paths forward.
But, as you might suspect by now, the summit ended with many questions and fewer answers. We realized, for example, that we didn’t even share a common understanding of “engagement” — different sectors of the industry regarded and measured it in significantly different ways. Once again, we were just scratching the surface.
Why do we often underestimate the difficulties involved in solving problems? One human evolutionary advantage is our drive for sense-making. Our sense-making prowess allows us to build models of the present and make decisions about potential future behavior. This has led to our incredible ability to reshape the world.
But there are two dangers that arise from our drive to make sense. (Check out the link for more details.) One of them, retrospective coherence, makes us overestimate our ability to explain why things happen. The other, premature convergence, leads us to prematurely abandon uncovering relevant questions, information, perspectives, and ideas before we start formulating solutions.
Fixing Oregon’s food problems or forecasting the future of the meeting industry are examples of what are called complex problems in the Cynefin framework. Complex problems are those where we struggle to figure out what questions to ask and cannot accurately predict what the consequences of an action would be.
The meetings I design are especially well suited to exploring complex problems. But a few days of work, even by a community with significant expertise and experience, is rarely enough time to even define, let alone solve problems of this type.
So should we stop trying to explore and solve complex problems when we meet together?
No.
For one thing, we often don’t know whether our problems are simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic until we explore them. Many participants’ questions uncovered during the events I design turn out to have simple or complicated answers that can be provided by the collective knowledge of the group.
Secondly, regardless of big picture outcomes, well-designed participant-driven and participation-rich meetings create a rich variety of valuable experiences for participants. Important connections get made or strengthened, useful resources are uncovered and shared, and future collaboration and action are sparked.
And finally, there is tremendous value in the discovery of the magnitude of complex problems per se. Gaining a more realistic perspective, however daunting, is useful and important. As my mentor Jerry Weinberg used to say, “It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the end of an illusion.”
Hopefully, you’ll agree with me at this point that scratching the surface, though less satisfactory than going deep, is not a waste of time. But it may still be a frustrating experience. Can we make it less painful?
I think so. When we start to work on a new problem, we don’t know in advance whether we’ll be scratching the surface or going deep. What we can change are our habitual expectations. Practicing risky learning makes dealing with feelings of failure easier. And becoming accustomed and willing to “lower our standards” also helps.
To conclude, I encourage you to always, at least, scratch the surface. Because sometimes you’ll find the gold underneath. And even if you don’t go deeper right away, you’ll have invariably experienced and learned something useful.
Photograph of my green fluorite crystal from the William Wise Mine in Westmoreland, NH
Image attribution: Cynefin illustration by Edwin Stoop (User:Marillion!!62) – [1], CC BY-SA 4.0
What makes attending conferences worthwhile? As I described in Conferences That Work, the two most common reasons for attending conferences are to learn useful things and make useful connections. But there are numerous other ways that conferences provide value to stakeholders. In this post I’ll focus on, arguably, the most useful conferences we can design: those that solve participants’ problems.
When thinking about solving problems, the Cynefin framework provides a helpful taxonomy of problem types. It’s useful because each Cynefin domain requires a different problem-solving approach. Cynefin describes five domains, usually named as: obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. Check out the above Wikipedia link to learn more about them.
As we’ll see:
Here’s a little more detail on the obvious, complicated, and complex problem domains. For each domain, I’ll include examples of meeting processes you can use to satisfy participants’ problem solving wants and needs.
Obvious problems (“known knowns”) have known solutions, often called “best practice”.
For example, how do I:
These examples might remind you of the kinds of topics that routinely appear as the titles of traditional conference sessions. That’s because these are problems to which experts know the answers, or, at least, have plenty of good advice to share. Their expertise can, therefore, be shared with participants via traditional presentations.
Sadly, traditional lecture-style sessions are only good for solving participants’ obvious problems. What’s more, the session will be of little use unless the session content happens to match a participant’s current problem.
Peer conferences reduce problem solving limitations in the obvious domain, by allowing participants to influence the content and scope of meeting sessions in real time during the event. So it’s much more likely that participants’ top-of-mind obvious problems will be effectively addressed at a peer conference.
Unfortunately, the majority of our day-to-day challenges are not obvious. (That’s why we spend much more time and energy working on them than obvious problems.) Complicated problems (“known unknowns”) succumb to expert analytical judgment.
For example, how can I:
Traditional conference lecture-format sessions provide almost no time for solving participants’ complicated problems. Typically, complicated problems can only be addressed up during a question and answer period at the end of the session, when there is little time to perform the kind of analysis a session expert might be able to supply.
Interactive conference sessions allow more opportunities for participants to share specific complicated problems and get targeted advice. However, few presenters incorporate significant interactivity into their sessions, and this format is more the exception than the rule.
Once again, peer conference sessions provide significantly more ways to solve participants’ complicated problems. There are two reasons for this. First, as above, peer sessions are far more likely to address the actual problems participants are currently facing. And second, peer session formats use the resources in the room — not just the session leadership — to uncover and resolve top-of-mind participant problems. (For more information on how to do this, see my book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need.)
Complex problems (“unknown unknowns”) are even harder to resolve.
Here are some examples. How should we:
Such problems are complex because we:
Unlike the obvious and complicated domains, we have to approach complex problems by doing experiments. Cynefin describes this process using the word trio [probe–sense–respond], as opposed to the trios for the obvious [sense–categorize–respond], and complicated [sense–analyze–respond] problem domains.
Complex problems have to be tackled in the same way that scientists use experiments to probe the world around us and gradually build understanding of it.
Thus exploring complex problems requires a probing experiment, from which we observe outcomes, and then, with our understanding perhaps slightly improved, we probe in an appropriately different way again. With persistence and luck, over time we may be able to formulate some helpful responses to the problem.
It may seem strange to run experiments at conferences, but I’ve participated in (and designed) a few conference experiments over the years, and have invariably found them to be some of the most interesting and illuminating meeting experiences I’ve ever had.
Here are three session-based examples:
Finally, there are conferences that are entirely experiments!
In the meetings world, the most well known are the series of EventCamps that were held around the world between 2010 and 2014. These were volunteer-run, meeting experiments that explored a wide range of meeting and session formats and technologies. For example, we designed and held some of the earliest hybrid meetings, and introduced the meeting industry to peer conferences, gamification, improv, sustainability issues, and many other, now common, meeting components. These events made a profound impression on pretty much everyone who participated. Many of the people I met remain friends today.
Since 2016, I’ve been participating in the annual, invitation-only Meeting Design Practicum conferences that have been held all over Europe. A rotating crew of two or three volunteers organize these wonderful events. They plan an experimental program and ask participants to contribute in various ways, but are the only people who know the entire program in advance. Truly a unique and different experiment each year!
Conferences that are entire experiments are rare because they are risky. Experiments, by definition, have unpredictable results, which means they may “fail” to produce “desirable” outcomes. The understandable default assumption for most meeting industry clients is that their meetings are “successful”, and clients who are willing for “success” to include novel learning from innovative experiments are rare.
Nevertheless, whether held by the meeting industry for itself or for clients, meeting experiments provide the potential for the participants to work on some of their most difficult problems, those that are complex. Bear this in mind if you see an opportunity to create experimental sessions or events!
Whatever kind of conference you design, remember the value of incorporating sessions and formats that solve participants’ problems. It’s no accident that the experiment-rich Solution Room is the most popular and highly rated plenary I offer. Give your participants opportunities to solve their top-of-mind problems at your meetings and you’ll make them very happy!
Image attribution: Cynefin illustration by Edwin Stoop (User:Marillion!!62) – [1], CC BY-SA 4.0
I recently came across some principles for “making large-scale change happen“. I think they’re worth sharing.
Here’s the text version:
I like and agree with all of these principles. In particular:
Number 6. focuses on creating lasting process and culture that supports and normalizes change in an organization. This is a superior approach compared to the traditional lumbering change programs that are generally irrelevant long before they are “completed”.
Number 8. emphasizes the importance of small, quick experiments. The hardest problems organizations face are chaotic and complex (the Cynefin model). Therefore, they require novel and emergent practices: experiments to learn more about how the problem areas respond to action and probes.
I have one caveat. Number 3. “more virtual connection” is certainly appropriate if it adds to the repertoire and quality of connections or reduces access privilege. But be careful not to replace important face-to-face connection opportunities with virtual ones. Until we get the holodeck, virtual doesn’t provide the quality of connection and engagement that routinely occur at well-designed face-to-face events.
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
Image attribution: The Horizons Team at National Health Service England