Collaborative Strategy with Liberating Structures

00:00:08: Johannes Schartau: Welcome to episode 18 of Transform Together, the Holisticon podcast meetup. I'm Johannes Schartau, and today I'm talking to Nancy White.

00:00:17: Johannes Schartau: Nancy White is an internationally recognized facilitator, consultant, and founder of Full Circle Associates.

00:00:24: Johannes Schartau: For more than three decades, she has worked at the intersection of collaboration, learning, technology, and communities of practice, helping groups make progress on complex challenges. She's the co-author of Digital Habitats, and, together with Keith McCandless, the new Liberating Structures Fieldbook.

00:00:42: Johannes Schartau: Her work pays particular attention to participatory facilitation, distributed communities, and collaborative approaches to strategy development. Nancy, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:53: Nancy White: Thanks, Johannes, and this is fun because you've chosen a topic that is near and dear to my heart, so I can't wait to get started.

00:01:00: Johannes Schartau: I was dying to get you on the show just because I feel like we have so much overlap, and we actually never talked about this. And this… I always take the chance to talk about it publicly, so maybe other people will benefit from this as well.

00:01:14: Johannes Schartau: So, do you want to dive into it?

00:01:16: Nancy White: Sure, go for it!

00:01:19: Johannes Schartau: Great.

00:01:20: Johannes Schartau: I have a two… Maybe to, get people introduced to the topic.

00:01:28: Johannes Schartau: How would you say strategy is typically created, and how does your approach differ, or maybe our approach

00:01:35: Johannes Schartau: That we might find out we have in common.

00:01:40: Nancy White: Well, I was… as I was watering the garden this morning, I was thinking about, you know, people say, let's do strategic planning, what the heck they actually mean?

00:01:49: Nancy White: And in my experience, it is often about leaders wanting a plan that they can say is done and bought into.

00:01:58: Nancy White: And often leaders come in with a sense of what they want the plan to be, but want to include everyone, good intentions.

00:02:05: Nancy White: So it's about, will you come in and, believe in the plan that I put before you? I'm not sure it is really about tapping the intelligence of the community, the organization, the team.

00:02:18: Nancy White: To figure out what to do.

00:02:21: Nancy White: And what to do next to get there.

00:02:23: Nancy White: So I think the first thing is…

00:02:26: Nancy White: Really challenging ourselves to ask ourselves when we begin a strategic planning, quote-unquote, process, what it is we really are

00:02:34: Nancy White: what our purpose is. And I think that's true about the step for strategic planning. What is your purpose? Why does this matter?

00:02:42: Nancy White: And…

00:02:44: Nancy White: I think business practices particularly have just absorbed strategic planning as something that has to be done. If you're working in the nonprofit world, it's something the funders require. If you're working in the government, it's something the accountability requires, that it's just something to be gotten through.

00:03:02: Nancy White: And…

00:03:03: Nancy White: Rarely is there, the breadth of life between the process of developing a plan and the process of executing on a plan. I think that's the first

00:03:12: Nancy White: big tension. How is it that we can want to have a strategic plan and we're not strategic at the same time, you know?

00:03:20: Nancy White: I think the second piece is the gap between Bringing a plan to life.

00:03:27: Nancy White: And having a plan.

00:03:29: Nancy White: And…

00:03:30: Nancy White: That is more work than most people want to do. They want to go get their thing done, right?

00:03:36: Nancy White: So I think it requires a shift in the way we operate, and I don't know if you've read the work of Bev and Etienne Wenger Traynor.

00:03:44: Nancy White: and their work around learning to make a difference, and it came out of, originally out of Etienne's work with Communities of Practice.

00:03:53: Nancy White: But he at… Bev and Etienne have developed what they call a value creation framework, and when I think about strategic planning now, I think about

00:04:01: Nancy White: How do we get ourselves engaged in strategic planning? How do we do it? How does it have value? How does it have value?

00:04:09: Nancy White: And what Bev and Etienne have brought to the table is, thinking about value creation from the very light, immediate things. So.

00:04:18: Nancy White: for me, an immediate piece of value that you created in your introduction was you named that we have an overlap in our practice, and that you noticed that we really haven't talked about it in a long time, and that's a real sweet spot. So, what happens to me when you notice that value.

00:04:35: Nancy White: I noticed that value, and the next thing I'm like, oh, when should I talk to Johannes again? Johannes should talk to so-and-so. Immediately, it transforms from a moment when something happened to creating

00:04:46: Nancy White: Some little nugget of value.

00:04:49: Nancy White: And then as we… let's say we decide to do something next, and that value might begin to be operationalized, and then we figure out how to make it better, and pretty soon, we're creating a higher level of value, and we are moving towards a higher order goal, and…

00:05:05: Nancy White: The higher order goal, I'll circle back to later, is something that really comes out in the Fieldbook.

00:05:10: Nancy White: But Bev and Etienne's theory is that if you don't notice the little things, you won't get to the big things. And it's the ability to notice.

00:05:19: Nancy White: and adapt what you do as you notice, and as you build this value. So.

00:05:26: Nancy White: the approach to strategic planning now that has become kind of the way I live and breathe strategic planning.

00:05:32: Nancy White: First of all, it calls out the need to understand why we're doing strategic planning, what value we're trying to create, and then

00:05:41: Nancy White: Structuring it in little chunks so that we can stop and notice

00:05:45: Nancy White: what we're learning, what value we're creating, and we can iterate and continue to build value, or say, oops, we need to pivot. And today, you know, I hate to even use the word pivot, because it's been beat to death, but the rate of change right now is just mind-numbing.

00:06:01: Nancy White: And if we can't stop and notice.

00:06:04: Nancy White: we're… we could misalign, we can shoot off in a non-productive direction, we could shoot off in a productive direction, too. I mean, I'm not saying noticing is the magic sauce to everything.

00:06:14: Nancy White: But if we create value all along the way, it's easier to get to that greater value. And I'm going to stop there, because I just threw a lot at you at one time, and I didn't realize I was even going to talk about the value creation framework until I opened my mouth.

00:06:27: Johannes Schartau: Fantastic, but what does that look like in practice? Are there specific steps that you follow, or what can people expect when they start working with you?

00:06:38: Nancy White: Well, first of all, it's really lovely. I'm retired from paid work, so they can expect a lot of annoying behavior on my part. Like, why are you doing that? Why are you even bother doing that? I mean, sometimes I get in there and say, like, you don't want to do strategic planning.

00:06:50: Nancy White: You wanna do… you wanna have a plan.

00:06:52: Nancy White: That's not strategic, or it could be strategic, but they're two different things. So, you know, for those of us who work with groups, individuals, I have to do a plan for myself, yes, it's true, even at a personal level, is just stop and figure out why you're doing it.

00:07:05: Nancy White: And if you're rubber stamping, just tell everybody you're rubber stamping, okay? That may be the reality, but don't waste my time. I'm not gonna waste your time, let's not do it. So I think it is not contracting in the contract… in the consultant speak, but contracting in, here's what we're going to do.

00:07:20: Nancy White: And here's why we're gonna do it, and here's how we can adjust it as we go if we need to. So that's the first part. It reminds me, like, when people used to hire me to do consultations.

00:07:32: Nancy White: And pretty soon, I realized they didn't really care about the consultation, they just had to do it.

00:07:36: Nancy White: And they were gonna do what they were gonna do anyway.

00:07:39: Nancy White: And they were taking away ownership.

00:07:41: Nancy White: of the work by never even

00:07:44: Nancy White: Including the ideas of the people they were consulting.

00:07:47: Nancy White: recognizing that the people own their own ideas, you can't appropriate them. So there's a lot of systemic things you… you start poking when you start talking about strategic planning, but let's… let's… let's get specific. So,

00:08:00: Nancy White: I like to use this approach, that emerged from the Liberating Structures community and other people before us, right?

00:08:09: Nancy White: So, David Sibbet at the Grove, I would say, is one of the seminal ideas who… person whose ideas were part of… of Knotworking. And…

00:08:19: Nancy White: It… It was experimented with in lots of forms, and As we iterated with it.

00:08:25: Nancy White: We realized it's the six questions that we ask that form the basis for developing a strategic

00:08:34: Nancy White: I don't want to say plan, it's almost a strategic way of being, a strategic way of acting, a strategic way of noticing, a strategic way of adapting.

00:08:44: Nancy White: So, Knotworking itself isn't a strategic plan builder. It's a strategic muscle builder, right?

00:08:51: Nancy White: It changes the way we see our work and allows us to interact together to improve that work.

00:08:58: Nancy White: And that then immediately throws everything

00:09:00: Nancy White: we used to do out the window as, you know, what's our goal? Who's going to get it done by when? I mean, that stuff's fine. When you… when you know what you want to do, use purpose to practice, right? You know, who needs to be involved, what steps are involved, let's just go frickin' do it.

00:09:15: Nancy White: But when you're dealing in uncertainty or complexity.

00:09:18: Nancy White: you, you can say, this is the direction I want to go.

00:09:22: Nancy White: But… You're not even that sure of that direction, so you have to take a step.

00:09:27: Nancy White: You have to take a step, and you have to know why you're taking a step. So the six questions start with, what is the purpose of my work? So why does it matter, or the purpose of our work? And exploration, and often people

00:09:40: Nancy White: Walk into a room thinking they know what the purpose of their work is. Until they explore that question.

00:09:46: Nancy White: you're not going to get very far, and it's a good probability they'd walk out with a different purpose. I was working with a group of

00:09:54: Nancy White: researchers and practitioners in a healthcare field, and we were invited in to help them develop a strategic plan. And I was a subcontractor on this, and I said, well, let's try this thing called Knotworking.

00:10:06: Nancy White: And we started with Ecocycle Planning.

00:10:11: Nancy White: Which is a way for people to see where they're at at any moment in time with an initiative, in terms of

00:10:17: Nancy White: Capabilities, relationships, resources.

00:10:21: Nancy White: And this group First, used Ecocycle Planning for their departmental-level work.

00:10:26: Nancy White: And then we put it together into a big Ecocycle Planning. And for those not familiar with Ecocycle Planning, Ecocycle Planning allows us to look at our work in terms of four main domains. One is maturity. We know how to do it, we can keep doing it, we can reliably get

00:10:40: Nancy White: outcome. The second domain is creative destruction. So we may have been doing things forever in maturity, but they're no longer delivering any sort of value, and we need to blow them up. We need to take them out of the repertoire and make space for what's new, or maybe even just make space.

00:10:57: Nancy White: And then the third domain is the place of networking, or idea generation, where we're imagining new possibilities, new futures. And then that moves into birth, where we experiment until we can get something, we move it back up to maturity. And if you look at the visual, it's an infinity loop.

00:11:17: Nancy White: And between…

00:11:19: Nancy White: the ideation and the birth, often we get stuck in the scarcity trap. Oh, we don't have time to do that, we don't have the people to do that. And between maturity and creative destruction is, oh, we've always done it that way. I'm gonna stick in my comfort zone. I'm not going to move it to creative destruction. And within this ecosystem.

00:11:37: Nancy White: we can also see where we sit, well, I'm the… I'm always there complaining about things. Maybe I'm the agent of creative destruction, and if I could be used more positively, I can contribute to the team in a new way. Or if I'm the ideator, but I never get anything done, I need to be matched with people who could say, I can take that, I can prototype it, you know, I…

00:11:54: Nancy White: So you begin to see the ecosystem of your organization. And when you look at your purpose for your work and you map it there, what do we know how to do? What do we need to blow up? What do we need to think about anew? What do we need to prototype? All of a sudden, you can see your purpose differently. So, God, it was… I don't know what year it was, but Fisher…

00:12:13: Nancy White: Qua said, Knotworking is just a different way to work with Ecocycle Planning.

00:12:19: Nancy White: And I found that… that was, like.

00:12:21: Nancy White: Oh, yeah. Because every story I told about doing Knotworking started with breakthroughs of seeing work in a different way by looking at Ecocycle Planning. So this group of researchers, when they put their Ecocycle Planning maps all together.

00:12:34: Nancy White: They realized they started out as innovators of this new way to work in the healthcare system.

00:12:39: Nancy White: People recognized the value, and people started throwing money at them in order to train people to do this new way of working.

00:12:47: Nancy White: So they went from a research and an innovation group to a training group. All the money came to the trading group, so the research and innovation group

00:12:57: Nancy White: Kind of receded into the background of getting the next grant that keeps the institution open, which is a training grant.

00:13:06: Nancy White: And the first discussion about their purpose was actually very difficult, because most of the people worked in the training area and immediately thought, you know, this is the end of us.

00:13:18: Nancy White: Well, as they worked it, as they worked the questions, they began to realize that they needed to offload the training into its own subset.

00:13:26: Nancy White: Because it was a revenue generator, but more importantly than that, it spread the practice and rededicate to the research side of things. And then they started figuring out how to do that, and everybody's blood pressure came down a little bit, because it wasn't about blowing them up, it was very much about creative destruction.

00:13:43: Nancy White: But it was about realigning resources and talents, and they could then explore the subsequent questions that we ask in Knotworking. And I'm going to take a breath here, Johannes, because I haven't explained it yet in its fullness, but I'm wondering what you think, if we should stop and do that, or maybe you should do that.

00:14:01: Johannes Schartau: I think we should definitely get into the next steps. I think it's great that you dedicated so much time to purpose, because that's also my experience that… I was kind of blown away by this in the beginning, that when you actually start looking at this, how deep this question goes, and…

00:14:16: Johannes Schartau: You would assume that the people present in the room have a shared understanding of it, and in reality.

00:14:23: Johannes Schartau: this couldn't be farther from the truth, in my experience. So I think we should really…

00:14:31: Johannes Schartau: Pay attention to purpose, and make sure that this is the foundation that we start off from, to then ask the next questions, right?

00:14:39: Nancy White: Yeah, absolutely. And what I tell people is when we start with purposes, this is a placeholder.

00:14:45: Nancy White: Because as we explore the next questions, oh, that's not exactly what we meant, or that is not at all what we meant, and we… and they discover new purpose, and we hold that…

00:14:55: Nancy White: Legitimately, is… uncertainty is part of a strategic planning process in a complex context.

00:15:03: Nancy White: It is not a deviation, it is not a distraction, it's not a problem, it is an opportunity.

00:15:08: Nancy White: And I think when…

00:15:13: Nancy White: asking the questions for people to engage in this process, you are asking them to step off a little cliff, because they don't know what's going to happen, and that makes some of us ecstatic and giddy. We love it. And other people, it's terrifying.

00:15:27: Nancy White: And sometimes it's threatening.

00:15:30: Nancy White: So I… I think we need to hold…

00:15:34: Nancy White: As those of us who introduce the process, is that we need to maybe sometimes take care of people's reactions to things that can be traumatic.

00:15:41: Nancy White: So you're holding this space over here, so let's slow down here, but let's get to the next step. So, the next step, it's funny, when we first started playing with Knotworking as a community of practice, there's probably a dozen of us who met monthly, and

00:15:57: Nancy White: The order of the questions has shifted.

00:16:00: Nancy White: And, we, we've moved to, the second question being,

00:16:08: Nancy White: Where are we actually? Where are we starting, actually? So this is, again, where the Ecocycle Planning can become a container to hold

00:16:16: Nancy White: People's observations of where we are.

00:16:19: Nancy White: So, you know, what are our strengths, what are assets? It's stuff that you'd actually find pretty familiar in a traditional strategic planning process, but framed

00:16:30: Nancy White: with this idea that it's not black or white. There's this continuum of our resources. So where are we starting, honestly, is the second question, and we use Ecocycle Planning to do it. And again, where are we starting in our purpose may be very aligned, or they may be, like, in two different planets and going, like, how did that happen, right?

00:16:48: Nancy White: or,

00:16:50: Nancy White: nobody knows what everyone else is doing, so when I've done strategic planning with multiple subgroups for the larger organization, when they share their Ecocycle Planning maps, it's like, what are you doing?

00:17:00: Nancy White: I didn't know you were doing that, or, oh, I could help you with that, or oh, could you help me with this? Or, oh, we're really stuck in a model that actually has nothing to do with our current purpose. So, you know, by this point, people's minds are kind of going like.

00:17:14: Nancy White: This is not what I expected.

00:17:16: Nancy White: So, and when you introduce this approach, expect, surprise.

00:17:21: Nancy White: So, you want to say anything else about the second question before we move to the third one?

00:17:27: Johannes Schartau: Fantastic. Let's get to the third one.

00:17:30: Nancy White: So the third one is, what is happening around as the demands change? And this is the outward-looking question and the inward-looking question. Some people sometimes think it's just all, what are our competitors doing?

00:17:41: Nancy White: or what's happening in policy in our country that would… it is also about what's happening in us. Aging workforce would be one of those classic internal views. Or,

00:17:53: Nancy White: One of the things we're seeing a lot in organizations, the missing middle. There's the senior people and the junior people, and all these other people have been let go, or moved on because they were frustrated, and

00:18:04: Nancy White: That totally changes how an organization operates, because often this middle part is where knowledge and practice gets exchanged. These may be a little senior, but they can't mentor everybody, right? So, you know, you… we can… we can look and see,

00:18:18: Nancy White: what is demanding change in that, and those… those may have come out of the Ecocycle Planning and the purpose. So again, we're backing up to purpose. Do we need to recheck that? Oh, let's add that to the Ecocycle Planning. And I think here, it's when the Ecocycle Planning begins to be a place to visually capture the insights that are emerging from the conversations.

00:18:38: Nancy White: And so, I often put the Ecocycle Planning in the middle of a big MURAL board, or MURAL board, or paper on the wall if I'm face-to-face, and we use it as a data collection point, and we use post-its because our interpretation of the data changes the deeper we go.

00:18:55: Nancy White: So where we thought something was to maturity, it was actually stuck, and it needs to be moved to creative destruction. So we begin to…

00:19:03: Nancy White: Layer the information, And use that visual piece

00:19:08: Nancy White: to begin to build a narrative of what we're doing. And you have… I know you have a question about narrative, and I don't know whether to bring it up here or to hold it till later, but to me, this is where the storytelling

00:19:20: Nancy White: plays a role in sense-making. So I tell the story of what is demanding change. You might tell a different story, and then it gives us an opportunity to either reconcile that, or hold it as

00:19:32: Nancy White: a difference.

00:19:34: Nancy White: And one of the things about strategic plans is if we think it's all about acquiescence, agreement, bow down to the source of authority, we're gonna get ourselves into a narrower and narrower trap. But if instead we can hold that

00:19:49: Nancy White: dissent or disagreement, or different points of view. Through the process, we may begin to see where it fits in the Ecocycle Planning as a productive force rather than a dividing force.

00:20:00: Nancy White: So again, we're trying to, like, move forward and hold some of this unknown stuff in our hands at the same time, which…

00:20:09: Nancy White: We'll make people squirm, you know? And I don't think squirming is bad. I think it's a productive way… it's a pressure valve to help us understand what's going on underneath.

00:20:18: Nancy White: So if everybody's, you know, holding back and looking a little panicked, well, you think, oh, there's something to discover here. It's not a problem to be solved.

00:20:27: Nancy White: So, we've done 1, 2, 3, right? Purpose, baseline, What demands change?

00:20:33: Johannes Schartau: Right. On the topic of context, my experience is that

00:20:38: Johannes Schartau: I'm constantly surprised by how oblivious lots of people and organizations are to the context, and that I often actually invite them before we do any kind of strategy session.

00:20:52: Johannes Schartau: to start thinking about what is going to influence their work. Do you have the same experience, or… because I noticed that it's difficult for people to come up

00:21:03: Johannes Schartau: With these insights on the spot, because they often have never done it before.

00:21:08: Nancy White: for me, it… it varies by context. There's some groups that are more attentive to context than purpose.

00:21:18: Nancy White: And there's some groups that are more…

00:21:20: Nancy White: the opposite, or any of these things. So, it's figuring out Where they are, but…

00:21:26: Nancy White: You know, there's one thing… I love to use TRIZ when context feels stuck.

00:21:31: Nancy White: And they're just kind of giving the obvious, well, AI's on the rise. Okay, yeah, what? So what, baby? You know, what does that mean to you? What is the impact on you? Who's doing it? Who do you want to partner with? We use creative destruction instead. It's called creative destruction now, not TRIZ. I should… I should learn in, you know, what's in the book, right?

00:21:51: Nancy White: Buy the book, Nancy. And when you ask people to design for perfect failure, all of a sudden, they notice context in a new way. So you can use… you could do a round of creative destruction where

00:22:04: Nancy White: go back to that list and see what is the context that would make that happen, so you can use iterations to surface stuff, and I think one of the things that constantly surprises me is you can do Knotworking

00:22:15: Nancy White: a strategic Knotworking, just using 1-2-4-All, you know, first alone, then in pairs, then in quads, to understand the pattern and the answer to the questions. Or you can bring in other structures, and… and that's great. What…

00:22:29: Nancy White: seems to be true, whether you use one structure or a handful of structures, is sometimes repeating the same thing over again, either with the same prompt or with an adjustment of the prompt, is the place where something can get unlocked. Because we tend to go to the obvious, the safe, or I want to prove you how smart I am response.

00:22:48: Nancy White: Right? Which aren't necessarily getting into the… to the substrate. So doing it again… let's do that again. Let's see if we can go deeper.

00:22:56: Nancy White: And… it can unlock things. Again, it can annoy people.

00:23:01: Nancy White: I think… I didn't realize this until we're talking about this, is that Knotworking can be very annoying.

00:23:08: Nancy White: Because it taps into things that trigger us to respond.

00:23:14: Nancy White: And maybe in ways that either surprise us or are uncomfortable. And I think it's okay to tell people that this can be uncomfortable or annoying.

00:23:23: Nancy White: It's like, why does this have to be, like, sweetness and light all the time? Sometimes being able to tap into that friction is what we need to do.

00:23:32: Nancy White: So, I think there's this…

00:23:35: Nancy White: interesting dark side of Knotworking that I find very attractive if we can hold it

00:23:42: Nancy White: With an open attitude and a playful attitude, so you can have fun and be uncomfortable at the same time.

00:23:48: Johannes Schartau: That's funny, that's also what I started telling people, that it's going to be uncomfortable, it's going to feel messy, sometimes, and then it's going to be productive at some point.

00:23:58: Nancy White: Yeah, yep.

00:24:00: Johannes Schartau: Okay, so we have purpose, baseline, context. What's next?

00:24:04: Nancy White: Yep. Okay. So that's three, so 4 is… what challenges or tensions do we have to face? And there's a number of ways to frame this, and I always mix up my language, so forgive me for being inconsistent. It's the privilege of age, I think.

00:24:22: Nancy White: It is… Where are there… 2… Very true, but opposing

00:24:29: Nancy White: facts or conditions that we're facing with. What are the challenges that seem…

00:24:36: Nancy White: So gnarly and so twisted into a giant hairball.

00:24:40: Nancy White: That we don't even know where to start with them. And typically, identifying those areas of challenge

00:24:48: Nancy White: again, can be un… it's a theme, it's uncomfortable,

00:24:53: Nancy White: But it begins to change how we see the world, and…

00:24:59: Nancy White: basically, we're expressing the challenge in a new way, or possibly a new way. And,

00:25:06: Nancy White: In Liberating Structures language, we often use wicked questions.

00:25:11: Nancy White: But there's a lot of ways to crack that nut. And I find, at this point, because the people have used Ecocycle Planning to map their work to understand their baseline, they've looked internally on their purpose, externally on the context, this is when the results begin to have them go back and look at the purpose. Oh, our purpose isn't to keep being a giant training institute.

00:25:32: Nancy White: Our purpose is to spin that off to a group that is in the business of training, and we're going to develop the next wave of what needs to happen with these practitioners. We're going to rededicate ourselves to research

00:25:45: Nancy White: in a way that can always be linked to practice through the Training Institute. So, in fact, you're building the next level of

00:25:53: Nancy White: collaboration that will take the work further, rather than saying goodbye to training or goodbye to research. They become two separate but intertwined things, and that

00:26:04: Nancy White: came out of wicked questions, right? This came out of, you know, the reality of what's around us, and the huge ambition of our purpose.

00:26:13: Nancy White: Which is to change people's lives, right?

00:26:16: Nancy White: So, to me, this is always a turning point, and sometimes, for me, the most challenging one to be hosting.

00:26:24: Nancy White: Because…

00:26:25: Nancy White: sometimes I find we step into a wicked question, and it is a distraction. It isn't the point, so I'm kind of curious how you handle this one.

00:26:37: Johannes Schartau: what I'm noticing is that,

00:26:40: Johannes Schartau: the questions that we usually avoid is the ones that we need to tackle here, and that we come back to this feeling of not being comfortable, because,

00:26:51: Johannes Schartau: most people I work with, like you said in the beginning, they kind of want to jump straight to what's the plan, what do we need to do?

00:26:59: Johannes Schartau: But they've been evading all these questions for a long time. But that's where all the power lies, right? So if we actually make progress on these questions, or just acknowledge that maybe there's something that we can never fully solve.

00:27:13: Johannes Schartau: That we just have to navigate all the time. Then suddenly there's movement that becomes possible, or you kind of…

00:27:20: Johannes Schartau: Just unlocks possibilities for the group.

00:27:24: Nancy White: Well, and then you've got to question 5. Based on what we've learned, what is now made possible?

00:27:29: Nancy White: Yeah. And…

00:27:30: Nancy White: that's not the first question we ask, it's the fourth question we ask. And leaders often want to get to that right away, right? You know, what could we do, and what are the first steps? And those are really important questions, but they have to be grounded in a fuller understanding of

00:27:47: Nancy White: what we want to do, and the conditions within we want to do it. So,

00:27:51: Nancy White: Step 5 is like this moment of breath for me, right? Kind of holding it in, we've gotten all these tough things.

00:27:58: Nancy White: And now we get to play with what might be possible.

00:28:01: Nancy White: In an expansive way, in,

00:28:05: Nancy White: In some ways, a low-stakes way.

00:28:08: Nancy White: Just imagine what we might do. Go beyond, you know, like, we're gonna put the product on the shelf by Thursday. Go beyond that. What does that look like?

00:28:17: Nancy White: And… To me, this is a point where either you have a really clear trajectory for a plan emerging.

00:28:25: Nancy White: Or really clear that we don't know where we're going still.

00:28:29: Nancy White: And again, this may be a doubling back, or rethinking, or restructuring about how we do this, and I think this is where Knotworking got itself stuck a number of times, is people felt they had ideas, and maybe

00:28:42: Nancy White: you know, a sense of going forward, but it wasn't a plan. It doesn't say who does what by when, and to me, that's an indicator you're in a complex context, because you can't predict the future, you can only do safe-fail experiments towards that future.

00:28:54: Nancy White: Right?

00:28:56: Nancy White: And, and having a strategic plan

00:28:59: Nancy White: is an idea that we have, that there's clarity all the way, and there's steps all the way, and you know, it's like a Gantt chart, we know when everything's going to happen. And if you're working in a complex situation, that isn't going to be the truth. So, one of the things I say about Knotworking is, if you have a very simple problem.

00:29:16: Nancy White: Don't bother doing Knotworking. Go do Purpose to Practice, right?

00:29:20: Nancy White: it's just about organizing work rather than thinking and being strategic. And when you get to question 5,

00:29:27: Nancy White: About what becomes possible We want to begin to think about how we're creating value over time.

00:29:33: Nancy White: Right? We want to actually not just think strategically during the retreat, but we want to become a strategically acting and thinking organism.

00:29:42: Nancy White: And this is…

00:29:44: Nancy White: This probably goes back to how we contract of what we get out of this process, and how we bring people along

00:29:52: Nancy White: So that they can begin to breathe into the space of, there's many possibilities, I need to choose some, and then I need to check on them and go back. And I think this is where the concept of developmental evaluation starts.

00:30:05: Nancy White: permeating into,

00:30:08: Nancy White: Knotworking, and also ties back, should you love the Wenger-Trayner Value Creation Framework, it gives you an actual developmental evaluation tool to use. But question 5 tells us, what should we start with now?

00:30:20: Nancy White: what experience we should start? And then question 6 is, what are the first steps? Like, who does what by when, and how will we know we're making progress?

00:30:29: Nancy White: And by building the developmental evaluation question into the actual plan.

00:30:35: Nancy White: We are giving ourselves the track ahead of us to adjust where we're going.

00:30:41: Nancy White: And get into that maybe unpredictable space with a little more comfort and…

00:30:48: Nancy White: strategic capacity to learn from it and adjust as we go forward. So if you're just making widgets.

00:30:54: Nancy White: use something else, but if you're in that complicated space, you've… you've developed ideas, so we're going to split off the research and the training institute. What's the first step that has to happen there?

00:31:06: Nancy White: And all of a sudden, we have to renegotiate our relationship with the university. And we need to begin to build new relationships with training institutes, and all these things that were, like, not even on the radar screen began to pop up.

00:31:22: Nancy White: And then you ask, how will that move us towards our goal? And there's a trap, you know, let's go back to the comfort of being the training institute, right? We need our creative destruction there really strong enough to get us through there.

00:31:33: Nancy White: How are we going to check on that? So, every time there's a new grant, are we going to apply for it, are we going to co-apply for it, or are we going to hand it to the Training Institute?

00:31:41: Nancy White: And those become very concrete, strategic steps. There is a concrete plan there, but it's not a plan for everything. It's a plan for the next phase. And then to check, is that still taking us to our purpose?

00:31:52: Nancy White: It's our purpose shifted.

00:31:54: Nancy White: And all those things begin to be possible, but not freaking outly

00:31:59: Nancy White: Too many things to deal with, right?

00:32:02: Nancy White: And then you can go back.

00:32:04: Nancy White: to your Ecocycle Planning and reassess where you want to go. You can use that to help chart your next steps. You could use your Ecocycle Planning to check 6 months in, are we making progress? You could use your value creation framework after every major meeting. You begin to have things that

00:32:20: Nancy White: Help us see, did the step I designed, is that the step I want to have? And this is the difference between having a complete plan in the traditional sense, like, for the next 3 years, this is what we're doing. This is not going to deliver that to you.

00:32:32: Nancy White: This is going to deliver you your direction and your way to make sure the direction's adding value to your purpose and adjusting along the way. So it is not a strategic plan.

00:32:42: Nancy White: It's a strategic way of being.

00:32:44: Nancy White: And I think that is…

00:32:47: Nancy White: To me, a fundamental, it took me a while to figure that out for myself.

00:32:53: Johannes Schartau: But this question of how do we know we're making progress, and also the question of what's the first step, that already kind of points at the iterative nature of

00:33:03: Johannes Schartau: Strategy Knotworking, instead of this linear, we'll just set a plan, and we'll just assume it's going to work, and we don't need to change anything.

00:33:11: Johannes Schartau: Right.

00:33:12: Nancy White: Yeah, and then what I have people do at the end of a session is tell the story about what happened by walking through the

00:33:18: Nancy White: Questions?

00:33:20: Nancy White: And they go like, I don't know. They stand up there, you know, they start talking, and they're using the Ecocycle Planning, and they're looking at… and all of a sudden, a narrative of their understanding emerges.

00:33:31: Nancy White: not a narrative of the plan, but a narrative of how they are moving towards a more strategic direction for their work, and how they're going to get there. And sometimes it takes two rounds of storytelling,

00:33:43: Nancy White: But it's… there's something between the seeing and the talking that has always surprised me and delighted me when I've run this with groups, and sometimes…

00:33:52: Nancy White: The first time we did it, it, like.

00:33:54: Nancy White: shattered so many things, they had to quickly go back and run the six questions again, because they had the insight in that moment of meaning-making. It was like.

00:34:06: Nancy White: I get carried away, Johannes, I'm sorry.

00:34:09: Johannes Schartau: It's beautiful to see you.

00:34:10: Johannes Schartau: get carried away. I like it. We should…

00:34:14: Johannes Schartau: definitely maybe, set up another session for multiple hours, just for you to get care anyway. I did have more questions. You basically just answered one, because I… I noticed that often in the strategy planning, or the whole process of strategy creation, what people are kind of looking for is some form of

00:34:34: Johannes Schartau: narrative that just sounds good, or it might be so harmless that no one can say anything against it. And you already just…

00:34:42: Johannes Schartau: You already captured how the whole process is kind of designed to create a substantial narrative, but is there anything else that you do when you notice a group slipping into this habit of

00:34:54: Johannes Schartau: this performance theater kind, you know, this, will make it sound good, or it's just kind of this wishy-washy corporate speak? Do you have any techniques for…

00:35:07: Johannes Schartau: For grabbing a group and making it more substantial.

00:35:11: Nancy White: Well, if they're really falling back, or as we love to call it, snap back into their old habits.

00:35:17: Nancy White: Creative destruction is a really… I could tell you stories after stories of people denying that this is… that this is happening, and then the minute you do creative destruction, that's exactly what they're doing! And they've named it, right?

00:35:30: Nancy White: I think sometimes it's a matter of working with the leader.

00:35:35: Nancy White: and saying, we contracted to this approach. I see you falling back into…

00:35:41: Nancy White: the safe space. Is that really where you want to go?

00:35:45: Nancy White: do you want to be held accountable for that safe space? And I'm not talking about psychological safety of space, I'm talking about, you know… And sometimes that works, because

00:35:56: Nancy White: It is often…

00:35:57: Nancy White: the fear of the leader, or the fear that people have of their leader, that holds people back, because why should I take this risk? Why should I jump off this cliff? You know, why… why now? Why me? Why now, right? And, I think that's part of it.

00:36:13: Nancy White: There's a fabulous quote. I was on another call last week, and I was talking to two facilitators, and I was in a gathering of senior OD people at a university in Ohio many years back, and I was graphically recording, so I was mouth shut, ears open, which is

00:36:32: Nancy White: Really, if you know me, it's really important.

00:36:34: Nancy White: Because sometimes I just talk. I'm one of those people who thinks by talking. So I'm sitting there, you know, graphically recording, Peter Block gets up in front of the room.

00:36:43: Nancy White: He doesn't say anything, he just stands there, and then he goes.

00:36:46: Nancy White: If this meeting were to be a failure, what would be your role in that failure?

00:36:52: Nancy White: And I remember If this meeting, you know, writing away… blown, mind totally blown.

00:37:00: Nancy White: And yet, that is the question.

00:37:04: Nancy White: What responsibility do we all have?

00:37:09: Nancy White: Not just to the leader, or the facilitator, quote-unquote, or the consultant, or the dominator, but what role do each one of us have? And Knotworking answers that question.

00:37:21: Nancy White: We all have a role in our failure or our success, or…

00:37:25: Nancy White: I think more importantly, what we learn and how we improve along the way, because there's always failures and successes. And sometimes from failure come the most important insights. So it's rethinking from strategic plan to strategic being.

00:37:44: Johannes Schartau: Period.

00:37:45: Johannes Schartau: Seriously.

00:37:46: Nancy White: It was a strategic silence there.

00:37:51: Johannes Schartau: Okay, one more thing, so…

00:37:52: Johannes Schartau: You mentioned in the beginning the purpose of strategic planning, and when I ask organizational leaders what they want to achieve with some kind of

00:38:03: Johannes Schartau: strategy process, they often say, I want everybody to pull in the same direction, or we want, like, full alignment, we want everybody to be on the same page. Is that realistic? What is the experience here? Is… is…

00:38:16: Johannes Schartau: this full agreement, is that even desirable? Because you mentioned sitting in discomfort for a bit. How do we handle this tension of actually wanting some form of alignment, and not, you know, the group not completely pulling in different directions, but also having these disagreements alive in the conversation?

00:38:37: Nancy White: Well… First of all, I'd say alignment is a principle, not a plan.

00:38:44: Nancy White: And seeking alignment doesn't have to mean agreement, right? It can mean, in our alignment, here's the areas we disagree.

00:38:52: Nancy White: In our alignment, here's some areas we're uncertain about and need to challenge our thinking in a different way. And this is when you look at, again, on Ecocycle Planning, the domain of creative destruction. Instead of calling it whining and complaining.

00:39:07: Nancy White: call it discovery of what we need to think about differently. You know, what if we blew that up?

00:39:13: Nancy White: what would happen? What tiny idea could we have around that? What kind of experiment can we have around that? And all of a sudden, disagreement becomes a tool of learning, and…

00:39:26: Nancy White: improving.

00:39:28: Nancy White: But… If you're the person who's noticing that problem, and you've been squashed down so many times.

00:39:35: Nancy White: You either shut up, or you become a pain in the ass, or you get fired, or you leave.

00:39:38: Nancy White: Right?

00:39:40: Nancy White: But instead, if you're seen as, like, some of our secret sauce is… because Nancy notices when it's not working, right?

00:39:47: Nancy White: So, Nancy, I want you to notice the very moment when it's not working.

00:39:51: Nancy White: And call it to our attention.

00:39:53: Nancy White: Right? It becomes a completely different game. So we're in alignment towards the success of the group, but we're not necessarily alignment in every way, because that may be a blind spot, right?

00:40:04: Nancy White: So, I think… Along with the fact that alignment is a principle and not a destination is…

00:40:13: Nancy White: We also have space for discomfort and disagreement.

00:40:18: Nancy White: And we can be aligned around that, you know?

00:40:21: Nancy White: It's just about… it's a reframe, actually.

00:40:28: Johannes Schartau: Last question.

00:40:30: Johannes Schartau: What is a small thing that anyone, or especially organizational leaders, can do tomorrow, next week?

00:40:37: Johannes Schartau: that… Drives them a bit closer, it gives them the power to start with a more collaborative, strategic process.

00:40:46: Nancy White: Ask them to not work their own leadership.

00:40:51: Johannes Schartau: Oh, no.

00:40:52: Nancy White: And either you're gonna gain a huge, huge ally, and you're gonna work together in an amazing… or you're gonna… the person's gonna go, this is not for me.

00:41:00: Nancy White: Because that's the… when people want everyone to have buy-in, right? What is buy-in, right?

00:41:06: Nancy White: Is it skin in the game? Is it…

00:41:11: Nancy White: Being heard and hearing other people.

00:41:14: Nancy White: It's rethinking, you know, what we think is agreement.

00:41:19: Nancy White: Into a place of shared ownership, of moving ourselves towards our purpose, and working in lockstep to something that may or may not be working.

00:41:30: Johannes Schartau: This has been exquisite.

00:41:32: Johannes Schartau: Thank you so much, we…

00:41:35: Johannes Schartau: I think we covered 2 or 3 of my 15 questions, so you will have to come back.

00:41:41: Nancy White: It was a gas, I loved it.

00:41:44: Johannes Schartau: Where can people go to find out more about you and your work?

00:41:48: Nancy White: Well,

00:41:49: Nancy White: the Liberating Structures Fieldbook, which came out in June, and you can find it at Liberatingstructures.com, would reflect the Liberating Structures point, and I have a very old-fashioned, bloggy

00:42:03: Nancy White: website that actually is pretty defunct, and I'm trying to… so maybe somebody could help me figure out what to do with it, because it started with my work in online facilitation in the late 1990s, when online community meant all text-based community, might I add.

00:42:19: Nancy White: through… I probably, you know, write one or two posts a year now, but that's at F-U-L-L-C-I-R-C dot com.

00:42:26: Nancy White: And that will give you a sense of how random and nonlinear my thinking is.

00:42:32: Johannes Schartau: Fantastic. Nancy, thank you so much for being here. Like I said, we'll have to do this again.

00:42:38: Nancy White: Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me.

00:42:40: Johannes Schartau: I hope this session has given you some concrete ideas for your own transformation challenges. At Holisticon, we provide companies with holistic support from strategy and technology to organizational change. If this sounds interesting, please feel free to contact us. You can find all the information you need at holisticon.de.

00:42:57: Johannes Schartau: And please don't miss our next Transform Together session. I'll see you then.