We often apply methodologies such as socio-metric line-ups and intra-group conversations to surface diverse views, whilst at the same time allowing for differentiating and integrating views to emerge. When it comes to decision-making time, we assist the group in establishing its common ground from which to move forward. There are occasions though, on which agreement on some issues that are crucial to progress cannot be reached. So, what to do with those issues within a group process about which there is no natural consensus and that cannot simply not be agreed upon? Or those issues around which there is a lot of (potential for) conflict?

I recently participated in the Deep Democracy Foundation Course under the impressive guidance and mentorship of Myrna Lewis, one of the founding developers of Deep Democracy and author of “Inside the No: Five Steps to Decisions that Last”. It has taken more than fifteen years of intensive work to hone Deep Democracy into the straightforward, five-step methodology used in all sectors of society and in over 20 countries worldwide. This transformative facilitation methodology is designed for anybody who works with groups and relationships. Rooted in insights from process-oriented psychology, it offers tools to improve the ways in which people work together in complex and sometimes turbulent situations.

Deep Democracy goes beyond more conventional group decision making processes such as compromising or majority rule. Instead it recognizes and effectively integrates minority voices, thus creating wiser, more sustainable agreements, with full participant buy-in. Applying the Deep Democracy model allows us to do justice to and accommodate the minority voices, i.e. those in a group or system, who are usually defeated in a majority process (either by numbers or weight of other votes). Finding the so-called “wisdom of the No” and including it in the “Yes” allows us to get the best of both worlds and avoid the so-called “terrorist line” that so often obstructs change processes, to gain strength.

In addition to Collaborative Decision Making, Deep Democracy is also enables us to work with interpersonal and group dynamics in that it enables effective interpretation of what is actually at play in groups and relationships. It allows for seeing through what is being said, recognizing unspoken emotional issues that block progress, and suggesting ways to work with them. Lastly, Deep Democracy recognizes and works with the creative tension that is present in every conflict. It offers a safe way to engage with strong views and emotions, leading to innovative solutions and strengthened relationships, and thereby becoming a powerful conflict resolution tool.

I got much more than what I bargained for initially by taking part in the Foundation Course, in that I also learned a great deal about my own “role anatomy” and how it impacts on others. I feel inspired and challenged by the power of Deep Democracy as a facilitation methodology that allows for the wisdom of the minority voices to not only be surfaced, but also integrated in the majority decisions. The Deep Democracy tools are surprisingly simple, but their sheer power may blast you away if you come unprepared to acknowledge your own polarity…

Visit www.deep-democracy.net to find out more about Deep Democracy.

The Emergence Phase lies at the heart of a change process and is key to enabling something new (or existing but reaffirmed, and hence from a different quality) to surface, based on peer-to-peer learning and insights gained. Allowing for sufficient time and an appropriate space that is safe, not too prescriptive, yet contained enough, we enable a group to come up with innovative ways forward, rather than rushing into finding (the same or slightly different) solutions based on the same old perceptions or paradigm (i.e. doing what hasn’t worked so far differently). We thus refer to Emergence to describe the pivotal moment in a transformative event.

I was very fortunate to attend the Presencing Foundation Programme in Cape Town recently under the very capable and most inspiring guidance of the wonderfully mutually complementing female trio: Marian Goodman, Beth Jandernoa and Kassee Mhoney. The theoretical foundation of this programme is Otto Scharmer’s “Theory U”.  We spent three and a half days in a learning community of about 45 participants. It was an amazing journey that allowed me to gain clarity and reassurance on my own Self, my Purpose and Work; and find great inspiration to further improve our Emergence Practice.

Most importantly, I experienced the power of Emergence or rather, in the Theory U terminology, “Presencing” – “going to the place of silence and allowing the inner knowing to emerge”. In the U jargon the sequence of change events is referred to as follows: Co-intiating (uncover common intent), Co-sensing (observe, observe, observe), Presencing (connect to the source of inspiration and will), Co-creating (prototype the new) and Co-evolving (embody the new in ecosystems).
“Presencing,” a blend of the words “presence” and “sensing,” refers to the ability to sense and bring into the present one’s highest future potential—as an individual and as a group. Theory U offers both a new theoretical perspective and a practical social technology. As a theoretical perspective, Theory U suggests that the way in which we attend to a situation determines how a situation unfolds: I attend this way, therefore it emerges that way. As a practical social technology, Theory U offers a set of principles and practices for collectively creating the future that wants to emerge (following the movements of co-initiating, co-sensing, co-inspiring, co-creating, and co-evolving).

The Presencing Process is a journey that connects us more deeply both to what wants to emerge in the world and to our emerging, higher self. I-P-K is now represented in the Global Presencing Institute Community as well as the local Cape Town Theory U Practitioner Group. I look forward to applying my learning and insight around Theory U and Presencing and sharing as I go along with all of you!

For more information you might also want to visit www.presencing.com. The Presencing Institute (PI) is a global awareness based action research community for profound societal innovation and change. The PI community focuses on advancing presencing and related awareness based social technologies and making them available to change makers, innovators, and communities around the world.

We then try to demonstrate (and convince people) that there is another way of designing these events. What we keep hearing is that (and I quote from an e-mail of a senior manager of a large organisation) “more substance should be reflected in the programme, instead of the process”. What we see is this constant misconception that it is either content or process, that process stands against content, that the two are a zero-sum. This is fundamentally untrue:  process is the underlying structure that creates the container for content and leads to results (or not – if badly chosen).

The relevant comparison is rather the following one:

When we come to process and the format of the event, we find ourselves with the choice between two paradigms:

So we could rather say that we have to choose between content and results – and the process is the underlying means to determine which alley we go down…

Some participants struggled to grasp the abstract nature of working on measures to influence national policy formulation and other frameworks (macro level) – they had an inevitable tendency to fall back into discussing and suggesting issues and measures linked to the three other levels, such as: changing the socio-economic context (meta level); providing training (micro level) and; financial assistance to women entrepreneurs (meso level). For many participants thinking on the policy and framework level might have been a new experience, for others it wasn’t. At the start of the second workshop day we, however, successfully clarified the difference between the four different intervention levels using the following graphic illustration.

It was a bilingual workshop and the fact that about two thirds where Portuguese speaking (of which probably about half were also fluent in English) and the other third of the participants were English speaking posed certain challenges. We were fortunate to enjoy the services of two simultaneous interpreters as well as many of the bilingual participants helping out with interpreting during the small group working sessions. The small groups were formed randomly in a self-organising fashion, which sometimes led to language imbalanced groups in which in some instances the minority language monolingual speakers felt isolated from the rest of the group. We conclude from this that at our next bilingual event, we would like to try giving participants clearly recognisable “language tags” next time around, i.e. English only, Portuguese only or bi-lingual. This way we could ask participants to form more balanced language groups when re-grouping between the different sessions. We would still not recommend sticking to monolingual groups at a bilingual event, as we feel it would be a missed opportunity in terms of captialising on the experience of learning across borders and working across country and language barriers, and thereby creating more cohesion and understanding amongst the different participating countries and organisations within a project/ programme.

We can look at a “conference” as a large group event and largely shape and organise it according to the principles, design patterns and with methods we use in our work elsewhere. However, we must be aware of some particularities of conferences and cater for those. Roughly we can separate them into three areas: a) the purpose and goal of the event, b) the nature of participants and subsequently c) the event structure and organisation.

Purposes and Goals of Conferences

In contrast to other events, the goal often lacks in terms of clarity and stridency. Goals are often formulated like sharing knowledge; allowing exchange; comparing ideas, notes and experiences; getting updated; having dialogues; etc. For other workshops, that usually wouldn’t do it – all these goals would rather be means to achieve a higher purpose like transforming an issue, deciding and committing on a particular change or so. What many conferences lack (in distinction to a strategic event or so) is the unifying goals, the direct collaboration of participants in their daily work routine (eg. they mostly are not members of one and the same institution, they don’t need to achieve concrete outputs jointly), conferences hardly ever have any particular decisions to take (let alone the power to take binding decisions) and there are very little obligations that bind participants to each other (often more on a moral level if any at all). People want something from each other, not with each other (ie. they want ideas, information, but there is no need nor expectation to achieve something jointly beyond the duration of the conference).

In many events and for many methods, we can define some basic conditions for success. They constitute somehow a magnetic core, a centre of gravitation and cohesion, the engine of the event. These conditions could be summarised as I) a burning issue at stake, II) authority to prepare or take decisions, III) some sort of conflict or tension (even if its just latent) at the centre, and IV) ideally a decision time of yesterday, ie. a sense of urgency. None of those is given in many conferences as we know them, which poses questions and challenges in terms of cohesion and commitment.

Last but not least we made the important observation that there mostly are parallel definitions and expectations of purpose: sponsors and organisers of conferences may have their very own agenda, ie. they want to elaborate a declaration, they want to promote an issue or product, or they may look for answers to certain questions they are carrying. However, in many instances the majority of participants may have an entirely different motivation or agenda to take part. These may be to network, make and cultivate old and new contacts; to promote their own ideas, viewpoints or issues; to use the event as a platform to promote and sell their own services and products; to do fundraising or gain new mandates or contracts; to find a new job; or many more. Obviously these purposes can clash and a conference needs to cater in some way or another for several of those or it risks to produce frustration, dissatisfaction and disruption.

The Nature of Conference Participants

Conference participants are a quite a special kind of species – often quite dissimilar to participants in other workshops, trainings and large-group events. Many participants however can and do play different roles, but already the term „conference“ can trigger a particular role and thus a corresponding set of attitudes and behaviours, which the same persons would not hold and show in different situations.

There is also a large group of „conference tourists and habitués“, who attend countless conferences every year. They show a pronouncedly “veteran” behaviour. For instance they will only participate on a very selective basis, show up at around 11:00 in the morning (no matter what time the event actually starts), grab a programme and then select just a few sessions where they expect to hear something of particular interest or meet specific people they are after. In a conference, there are often several side events and parallel workshops (of a formal or informal nature, they can be planned and announced or spontaneous/ad-hoc, they can be declared and open or confidential and closed) and people will not really bother to follow the main stream of events and sessions – the latter often more being the “hub” and providing the occasion and legitimisation to attend in the first place.

First of all this leads to conferences being quite unforeseeable in terms of participants: how many persons will attend when, who will be in which room or session when and for how long? Questions of a more oracular nature. And even if a session starts with a particular number and group of persons, it will say little about who will be there in the end. All of this demands for much increased flexibility in terms of organisation, facilitation and proceedings.

Secondly this high fluctuation and unpredictability in terms of attendance poses a problem if the conference – in the style of classical large-group/ whole-system events – is carefully designed and choreographed, where the succession of sessions follows an inherent logic, where one module builds on top of the previous ones. In these events, it is crucial that the overwhelming majority of participants jointly go through a learning and transformation process to gain shared understandings, build common grounds and jointly co-create visions and action items.

Lastly, we must be aware, that (in sharp contrast to many workshops) participants mostly travel and attend at their own expenses. Therefore they expect to be offered some sort of show and excitement. They will only accept instructions on an entirely voluntary basis and there is no authority to issue directives. And last but not least the credo of whole-system events to bring the whole system into one room (ie. to make sure that all perspectives on an issue are represented in the sessions) is very questionable and fragile, because important parts of a system, crucial “view-holders” may be unable or unwilling to raise the funds to participate in the conference – after all there may be nobody who has the power to dictate people to attend.

Event Structure and Organisation

In our events we apply the pattern of “Divergence → Emergence → Convergence” as the fundamental structure of sessions. Participants undergo a phase where they learn from different sources, open up their minds to new ideas and become very broad; on this basis they co-create a shared vision of what to achieve, something new and innovative; lastly – when considering action to follow up (concrete steps and measures, a plan, …) they narrow down again in an excluding move towards agreeing on one “plan” or “set of measures” or “guideline” or whatever the intention and hence the outcome of the workshop should be.

Conference however can be considered as a “once-in-a-lifetime” gathering. Even if it is repeated or people know each other from before, the event as such very much stands as a once-off event. People gather from very different backgrounds and converge in their discussions towards a common understanding of the issues at stake. At this stage they have the unique opportunity to elaborate jointly something new, eg. a set of recommendations, a new idea, a guide or so (emergence). Lastly they take this “novelty” and reflect about how to carry that back home into their own, particular context and what to do with it – eventually everyone on his how – very much a divergent movement. In this sense a conference can be looked at as an inversion of the same pattern to “Convergence → Emergence → Divergence”.

A conference often cannot achieve more than recommendations, because this is the highest degree of obligation that is attainable. Unlike an intra-institutional workshop a conference does mostly not allow for joint action planning because participants do not have a shared institutional framework but they all work for/ act in individual organisations.

Given the “voluntary” character of attending a conference, participants want to have a certain degree of personal choice. The conference is more a kind of container or even “biotope” for various different modules, which cater for different styles of engaging and learning. This however requires new, more sophisticated guidance systems to allow participants at any given time to orient themselves and find their individual way to whatever attracts their interest.

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During the first day participants explored the scholarly communication ecosystems at the different participating institutions (creation of a Mind Map) and gained a sense of the SCAP background and context (participatory Fish Bowl discussion). They also had a first glimpse into the suggested methodological approach by attending a “Speed Geeking” session on Activity Theory, Change Laboratories and Cost Analysis. There was a lot of discomfort and confusion on the end of the first day due to the (only limited) exposure to the unfamiliar methodological approach. This prepared the ground for the next two days in which participants crafted their vision for Scholarly Communication in Africa and started identifying possible areas of SCAP activity as well as ideas for possible measures, stakeholders and activities. They concluded by looking into how strategic partnerships could best be leveraged to ensure an even broader impact of SCAP.

Whilst some of the participants expected “a room full of scholars feeding them with a lot of information” they were surprised to experience the “magic of working in small groups”, achieving more than they expected by surfacing more internal knowledge than is usually the case in more formal workshop set-ups. They also remarked that the workshop methodology enabled different ways of intuitive thinking and that it created a nurturing environment for expressing views, ideas, drawing connections and insights.

We wish SCAP well in taking up the various project activities scheduled throughout the course of the next two years and look forward to learning about the progress made in the different Change Laboratories. Many thanks for a wonderful collaboration and viva Innovation in Scholarly Communication in Africa! To learn more about Scholarly Communication Access to Knowledge in Africa you may also want to visit http://www.sca2kafrica.org/.

The Handbook explains our own, particular approach to change processes, that builds on the idea of looking at social groups and institutions as complex systems. It contains various sections: starting with a brief general outline of how we believe we can deal with complex systems in a change context, it then draws practical conclusions on designing and delivering change events (such as workshops, meetings, conferences, …) – in particular in terms of the architecture of such events; it then creates an overview over methods and tools which allow to select and assemble them into a meaningful order that directs the event towards results.

What initally had triggered off the writing of this Handbook was the need to have some sort of “training script” for our facilitation and change trainings. We since have successfully held our first training events and are very happy about how people received and appreciated this tool. If you’re interested to learn more about possibilities and maybe a tailor-made training for your context/organisation, please touch base!

If this Handbook is useful to you, then we are very pleased. We welcome any comments, ideas, also for improvement! Please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Catherine & Marc

To download, click on the cover above or visit our “Resources & Downloads” section, where you find it under “General”

The I-P-K training approach is built on three levels:

1. The conceptual level provides participants with a complexity-based understanding of social change, ie. the system of thought around complex-adaptive systems and how to cause transformation in such a system. We consider it absolutely essential to see the big picture underneath in order to competently design change processes and events. After all, there is nothing more practical than a good theory! Furthermore, if we want to avoid a devaluation and disrepute of many of the tools and methods, we must contain the risk of their inconsiderate and mechanical applications. Yet, we introduced the complex ideas and concepts of complexity on a playful way, ie. by playing and simulating complex systems, an experience for every participant we could constantly refer to.
2. The second level of training deals with “practice”, which contained two kind of modules:
   • Sessions on more general, yet very practical aspects of faciliation, such as the role and behaviour of the facilitator, promoting diversity and dealing with conflict, and similar areas, which help the faciliators to consiously improve their own practice in any faciliation situation.
   • We introduced a series of methods and tools by practicing them in the training itself. Participants hence had a first-hand experience of how these methods “look and feel” and had an immediate insight in possible applications and the practical aspects of applying them.
3. The third level aimed at the experience of participants. Participants submitted “clinic cases”, ie. real events they will have to organise, design and facilitate themselves in the next three months (in distinction to “case studies” which lie in the past, “case clinics” are in the future and have more relevance and urgency for the participants). At the beginning of the workshop, they introduced their cases (in a Speed Geeking session, a method which they thereby learned) and then they worked in groups on their cases for 1 hour per half-day, immediately applying what they had learned. They walked out of the workshop with a clearer understanding of their upcoming tasks and new agendas for the events, where they will immediately use the methods learned.

The training cycle consist of three phases. We now held a basic training of three days consisting of modules on all the levels mentioned above. Subsequently, participants will now hold their events between now and December, thereby making their own first steps and gathering own experience. Towards the end of January, they will return and in an advanced training, we will capitalise this experience, discuss and understand it, and complement it with more sophisticated approaches and methods.