THE ANSWER SHEET, QUESTION SHEET AND DEEP SENSING WHAT IS EMERGING

Years ago, I was part of a small team that developed the first course for aid organisations on ‘Operational Security Management in Violent Environments’. Our second workshop was held in the UK and brought together aid workers from different countries. One moment has stuck with me ever since: Having worked in small groups on case scenarios we came back in plenary and shared the insights gained. As facilitators we listened and clarified a few things and then started moving to the next session. We were halted by a participant saying: Hey, you cannot move on yet, you haven’t given us the answer sheet yet!? Which led me to explain that we could not provide an answer sheet because participants came from very different contexts and what might the right or a smart answer in one context would not necessarily be so in another. We were developing a resource for use around the world. We could identify a few ‘must do’ and ‘must not do’ instructions, valid everywhere. But most of our resource material consisted of various attention points and a structured question sheet to help the user think through her or his situation as thoroughly as possible. And some considerations around possible answers. There was no claim or pretense that we had identified all attention points and all relevant questions and elaborated all possible considerations. In their work environments, their answer to their questions could benefit from this resource, but also required contextual understanding and situational judgment. That our generic guidance could not provide. Situational judgment, we underscored, was absolutely important: In the same context, what was a sensible action in February might no longer be so in November!

That moment led to a lasting appreciation of the difference between the answer sheet and the question sheet, but also between ‘answers expertise’ and ‘questions expertise’.

We need ‘answers expertise’, I need it. When I have a water leak and my kitchen floor is wet, I need a plumber who has the answers, who can provide me with the solution. The same goes for so many problems related to complicated issues that require technical expertise. But there are limits to that: Most of the problems and challenges faced by those I work with, are not complicated but complex (in the terms of Cynefin framework): There are neither simple nor sophisticated ‘technical answers’ for it. Secondly, when we outsource our problem-solving to someone else, we are not learning ourselves. Next time I have a plumbing problem I will have to call the plumber again.

Over the years, I have been developing my ‘questions expertise’. This is not superficial. To find a solution, we may have to first find the right question. Also: the quality of your solution will depend on the quality of your framing question. Einstein agreed as you can see in the cover picture with his quote. (There are slight variations in how this quote circulates, but you get the point). So there is a skill called ‘the art of asking powerful/generative questions’ – formulating questions that help us think more deeply, more broadly, more creatively, more afresh.

There is a second purpose to this: the person or organisation I am working with is going to continue facing complex situations - and tomorrow I will no longer be there. If you outsource the thinking to me today, you will not develop the skill that you will still need tomorrow, and the days, weeks and months after. You need to strengthen that skill, just as I will have to if I know that for the next extended period of time, there will simply not be any plumber on call!

Try it out: It is remarkable how powerful a structured set of generative questions can be. Coming in from the questions rather than the answer angle can also lead to fun situations, like when you are invited as a speaker or a ‘trainer’, and you start by asking the would-be learners: ‘What are your questions?’ or ‘I may have an answer but what is the question?’ Likely there will be a moment of silence, of bafflement from the surprise caused by the unexpected approach. But then many if not most will shift from passive to active learners, to explore the issues with you and not just sit listening critically to your thoughts.

We can take this to another level of collaborating: that of going on a joint learning process into the unknown. After all, the world today has not only become more complex, it has also taken on stronger VUCA qualities: it is full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Inevitably, to quite a degree, answers expertise but also questions expertise lean on the past. But what are the questions that can stimulate our intelligent and wise engagement with an emerging future in which so much is new and still shrouded in fog?  The question becomes: What are the fit-for-the-future questions? This we can only discover by exploring, testing, experimenting, and constantly reflecting and asking ourselves: what are we learning, what is this still emerging experience telling us? Our psychological ability to be OK with uncertainty and ambiguity is almost more important now than our intellectual abilities. We need to control our impatience, our impulse to want to have quick and decisive answers, ‘solutions’ now! Haste will be as counterproductive as sitting still and not exploring, not trying and testing anything.

My questions expertise here is no longer ‘expertise’:  I will have to tap into deeper sources of learning and use more what is referred to as our ‘second brain’: our instinct, intuition, gut feeling, metaphorically or not situated around the stomach area. It is a deeper quality of ‘observing’, ‘learning’, ‘discovering’, ‘sensing something’ that we have, though most of our formal schooling approaches disconnect us from it with their heavy concentration on the first brain, in the head. It expresses itself differently: The answering expert will quickly come up with the answer or say ‘let me examine this a moment’ or ‘let me look this up’ to find what the problem is, because then we know what answer to apply. The questioning expert goes a bit slower, spends initially more time identifying what the questions are, and how to frame them in the most generative way. Tapping into and using our second brain works differently: First, we need to significantly calm the first brain: its busy-ness, the clutter of its thoughts actually stand in the way and prevents us from connecting with it. That is why animals are better at it: they spend more time sensing and less time caught up in their own thoughts. Handy, to sense danger before you can see or hear it. Then we need to ‘listen’, not with the external ear but to what comes up from that deeper sensing. That is also how it expresses itself: ‘what comes up in me now is…’, which is not an answer or a sharply defined question, more an image, with emotional dimensions to it, a form that we are beginning to discern but which still has many unknowns to it – but that we now can begin to probe and explore more intentionally. This is not woolly stuff: it is tapping into the same source we need and use for creativity, for innovation.

Explore this: This evening, look back on your day and see where you have been providing answers, where you have used your questions skill (not: ‘calling into question’ – but helping a positive development through the skillful use of catalytic questions), and where you have tapped into your deeper sensing ability. If you look back at different situations: did you use the most appropriate approach and skill? All are relevant, all are useful, all are potential resources to enable positive developments. Mastery lies in being able to tap into all three and using the most appropriate one for different situations.

For an intro to the Cynefin framework https://clear-impact.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Intro-to-Cynefin-Model.pdf

COMPLEXITY, CONTRACTORS & CONSULTANTS. When is outsourcing appropriate?

Many of us engaged in humanitarian action, conflict management & peace work, human rights, state formation and governance improvement, use or are consultants and advisers. Generally speaking however, there is a very monochrome or one-dimensional understanding of ‘advisers’ and ‘consultants’. Here are three key attention points to introduce more nuance and enrich the advisory or consulting relationship.

1.     Differentiate Between a Contractor and a Consultant.

When we see our engagement as ‘implementing a project’, the task appears ‘complicated’. When however our objective is to catalyse positive change, particularly in volatile and even violent environments, and with a multitude of actors with a high degree of autonomy, the situation and task usually becomes ‘complex’.

Insights and approaches to ‘complexity’ have been articulated in different quarters, for example the FSG group or Matt Andrews & others who advocate for ‘problem driven iterative adaptation’. Snowden’s Cynefin framework offers one quick way of grasping the important differences in the consulting relationship.

It differentiates between four broad ‘types’ of situation: simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. The key difference lies in what we understand about the relationship between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’: Is it fairly straightforward (simple), is it multi-layered but still understandable by experts (complicated), or is it only perceivable retrospectively (complex) or not identifiable at all (chaotic)?

Outsourcing a task is generally appropriate in situations that are ‘simple’ or ‘complicated’. You need a dam built and the irrigation canal system extended; you need a new flow design to better manage the traffic in your city; you need national identity papers that are very hard to falsify. None of this is simple, but there are (teams of) experts who can deliver on such complicated tasks. For 17 years construction teams tunnelled away from both sides on the 57 km long Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland. When the two sides met under the mountains, their respective tunnels matched almost perfectly. Very complicated indeed, but not with our current expertise in precision engineering.

Compare this with the much more modest ‘successes’ in e.g. overcoming ethnic divisions in Kosovo, building effective institutions in ‘fragile’ states, or reforming the welfare state in countries with ageing populations. Contrary to what we are made to believe when we have to write detailed proposals and work plans and what we ourselves may be telling the donors and the public, for such complex situations and challenges, we don’t have a ‘best practice’ roadmap that works in most contexts. Catalysing socio-political change is not a technical problem.

What is ‘complicated’ can quickly become ‘complex’: Introduce land right issues and development-induced displacement dynamics into your dam project, and you have corrosive acid into your precision engineering. Mix up the issue of who is entitled to citizenship with the national ID document, and in many countries you have a recipe for trouble.

Short of very authoritarian approaches, fairly generic solutions will not 'resolve' complex problems. From ‘Grand Design’ we will have to shift to ‘Location, Location, Location’, and discover the approaches that fit best in particular contexts. Rather than simply ‘implementing’ the ‘plan’, to achieve our higher strategic objectives our practice will have to be one of ‘probing’, of trying and testing, with quick feedback loops about what effects our actions seem to produce and what other factors also affect the situation. And then adjust and adapt. As we move along, we partially discover, but partially also create the ‘pathway’. We may have some good principles for practice but our actual practice will be ‘emerging’.

There is a, probably prevailing, school of thought that argues that the right approach to complex situations is to break the problem down into more manageable chunks, and work on those. The assumptions are that sub-sets of problems have a relative independence and that the cumulative effect of many sub-problems solved will add up to the significant change in the overarching problem. We therefore have created a large number of ‘specialist profiles’ for this, also in the consultancy world. Their work is relevant and helpful. But did the cumulative input of thousands of expert advisers and consultants in Iraq 'add up'? 

On the other hand, we have the ‘systems thinkers’, who take a holistic view and hold that we cannot ignore that different factors and different levels are actually interconnected, and that more systemic (i.e. more sustainable) change will not happen if we only work on parts of it. That awareness is gradually seeping in, with new language e.g. references to the ‘eco-system’. From that perspective, bringing in a specialist to review your organisational finance systems and bring them up-to-standard might be a sensible move – but doesn’t add up to ‘organisational development’. A broader OD perspective would consider for example how finance procedures relate to human resources and programming, and whether they are actually enabling or constraining. A real OD resource person must be a systems-thinker.

The prevailing expectation of consultancy reports is that they present preferably actionable recommendations. This is appropriate for those tasks or challenges that are ‘complicated’ and for which there is genuine expertise. But at the more strategic level, and for situations with a high degree of complexity, no outsider will have the fail-free solution for you. Most restructuring processes, even accompanied by expensive management consultants, go awry, create much grief and often don’t deliver on the expectations. In contexts with a multitude of semi-autonomous actors, ‘solutions’ in any case will have to be negotiated. So while it may be quite clear which courses of action are unlikely to work, there can be no certainty over which ones will guarantee results.

What are some of the implications?

• Understand where you need ‘technical’ and where you need ‘strategic’ advice, and what sort of experience and personality enables the latter. Broad comparative experience; an excellent ability to grasp the specifics of a context, with its own history, values and multi-actor dynamics, and to look at it from different angles and perspectives; a fair degree of comfort with uncertainty; an ability to ask probing and catalytic questions and to zoom in and out between the relevant detail and the bigger landscape, are all relevant characteristics of a consultant adviser in complex situations.
• Where you need strategic analysis and advice, do not fully outsource the task as if to a contractor, but explore and learn together with the consultant. Focus on the ‘findings’ and the ‘new questions’ of the joint inquiry, and don’t jump hastily to overly confident ‘recommendations’.

2. Consider What Role(s) an Adviser/Consultant Could Usefully Play

How many Terms of Reference include attention to possible roles? Already in 1990 Champion, Kiel & McLendon framed the different roles that consultants, advisers and change agents can play in a 9-grid model. 

With an X axis that focuses on results and a Y-axis that focuses on , we can see how the outsourcing approach comes in the bottom-right corner. You expect your contractor to do the job for you, to provide you with solutions. The role-opposite in this grid is the coaching role in the top-left corner. A coach guides your inquiry and discovery with little more than stimulating questions. A joint inquiry and learning process between you and your consultant is going to play out in the spheres of modelling, partnering, training/teaching and mentoring. Your consultant may bring much experience, but doesn’t pretend to have the success-recipe for this particular context. You probe together for what might be a good fit ‘solution’ for a particular situation. (From a return-on-investment perspective, this is actually a better-value approach, as you learn beyond the timeframe of the consultancy.)

Very experienced consultants (rather than ‘technical experts’) know that they are likely to play different roles in the course of an assignment, sometimes within the span of the same day. They have invested in personal and professional development, so they are comfortable playing most of them and can discern which one might be situationally most appropriate.

3. Expect Different Types of ‘Advice’.

The prevailing expectation is for consultants to make ‘recommendations’. There is generally little thought and appreciation for what can be very different types of ‘recommendations’. Too often they are phrased as ‘X should do this or that’. Not only is the paternalistic tone of ‘should’ not so helpful. More importantly, there is an implication of confidence here that may be overstated.

At least four different types of advice or ‘recommendation’ are possible. Each can be appropriate, but the appropriateness depends on the type of situation and challenge under consideration!

• Solution: A specific advice that will solve your problem. Appropriate for ‘simple’ situations, but usually not elsewhere. As I learned from a colleague who had himself been a military adviser to the Afghan army: different countries had their own advisers helping to build the Afghan national army. Each of them was actually replicating their own national model as the ‘solution’– no one was building an ‘Afghan’ army, fit for the specific challenges and context of Afghanistan and its region.
• Options: Political advisers are trained to provide their principals with options – three is a preferred number. Experts helping you with complicated problems will also offer you options: there are usually different choices that provide an a ‘good enough’ solution. Appropriate for complicated situations and challenges. Problematic for complex situations when taken, not as ideas to test out, but as different ‘turn-key’ solutions of which you choose one. What do the political processes over Syria and Libya most look like: the pursuit of a chosen solution or muddling through?
• Ideas: Nobody can rightfully claim to be very confident about what will work in a particular complex situation. But your consultant can offer you a set of ideas – some of them from other contexts where people had to deal with similar challenges – but just for inspiration, not to copy. Others can be out-of-the box ideas, that challenge core assumptions on which your action was based. The only way to find out what may work in your particular context however is ‘try, test, learn, adapt’. Emerging practice.
• Process advice: What would be a suitable process to identify a contextually appropriate approach that has a fair chance of achieving meaningful progress? One such can be for a multi-stakeholder process. After all, the other types of advice focus solely on the client. But one factor that creates complexity in our type of contexts is the multitude of actors. Typically, no single agency, however well resourced, can resolve the problem alone. There has to be enough convergence among key actors and stakeholders to get broad support for positive change. An appropriate advice may be to run a multi-stakeholder process to get to that point. The subsequent course of action cannot be predetermined: it will emerge from the process.

Let me illustrate this with two examples.

Case 1: Together with a team of locals, we spent several weeks on an intensive listening exercise in a place that had gone through a secessionist war but with also a lot of infighting. Through focus group discussions and individual interviews, we gained the perspectives of the local population on a broad set of conflict, peace, security and development related issues. One of the core findings was the strong disconnect and distrust between the population and their autonomous regional administration. The first draft of our report consciously presented the ‘findings’ without recommendations. We wanted particularly the authorities and their international partners to really focus on the findings, and think through themselves what the implications might be for what they could constructively do. The reaction of the authorities was: Where are the recommendations? Used as they were to international advisers and consultants presenting them with ‘solutions’, they were not prepared to engage with the findings, but wanted to jump directly to the team’s recommendations. As our participatory inquiry concerned vital issues of violence or peacefulness in the area, my local co-team leader was aghast and told them: ‘We need to stop outsourcing the thinking!’ Yet we couldn’t get attention for the report until we had put in our ‘recommendations from the team’.

Case 2: More recently, I was asked to do an evaluation of an organisation’s programme over several years in a MENA country. The small programme team was very reflective but hadn’t gathered much in terms of monitoring data. There was also an expectation that I advise on where the programme should go in the next 2-3 years. Time in country being very limited, I turned the exercise into a strategic review. The report contained some specific recommendations, especially related to ensuring that in future the programme would gather essential monitoring data. Most of it however consisted of showing where and why the programme had now developed to such a point that, in different aspects, it was now facing a strategic crossroads, and identifying some of the possible choices the agency could make, with some reflection around each. No recommendations were offered however on what choices the agency should make. For three reasons: While I had learned a lot, I knew that there certainly were important elements that I hadn’t picked up in the short time available. Secondly, different considerations would have to be weighed against each other, and any choice would involve trade-offs. That was the responsibility of the agency, not of the consultant. Because, thirdly, the agency would have to live with the consequences of its choices, not the consultant. In this case, the paucity of firm recommendations was not seen as a problem. Rather the reasoning behind presenting primarily ‘reflection and discussion points’ was well understood and appreciated.

In conclusion: Decades of experience should have told us that many situations we thought to be ‘complicated’ are actually ‘complex’. But we still plan as if they were ‘complicated’ and hire outside ‘experts’ with the general assumption that they can provide us workable solutions. Fortunately, the now very rapid pace of change in the world is helping us realise that our old approaches may not be the most appropriate and that nobody has confident ‘answers’. The broader use of ‘hackathons’ and ‘crowd thinking’, creative formats to try and find new ideas and approaches to seemingly intractable problems, are a manifestation of this.

So when looking for external support, consider the nature of the situation and the challenge you want support for. Hire experts for what is ‘complicated’ but ‘strategic advisers’ for what is complex, and consider what role(s) the latter can usefully play and what types of advice you might get from them. You can outsource to the first, but inquire and think together with the latter.