In our work, we have benefited from using an approach of bringing together two seemingly unrelated concepts:  composting and jazz music.  Each applies to a separate phase of work, but they ultimately come together to create successful processes.

In the composting phase, you take the time to add the necessary ingredients for a successful project plan – timelines, tasks, responsibilities, and most importantly, frameworks and objectives.  At this time, you’re asking crucial questions like “What are we trying to achieve?”, “How will we approach the work?” and “What are the best methods to meet our objectives?”  Each one of these questions is like the green, brown and black material that you put into a composter to create vital, nutritious soil.

Take the time to "compost" in your process planning and it will pay dividends down the road.

I call this the composting period, because at this point in time, there is no big, exciting progress being made.  You’re learning about the project, the circumstances and any new information related to the community, organization or methodologies that you’re going to use.  A lot of people just want to get on with it and see this as a waste of time, but just like composting, if you are able to be patient and persistent enough in your project planning, you’ll see real benefits.

After a certain point, however, you need to stop planning and start acting.  In our work, this means the beginning of engagement with community members or staff of an organization.  Cue the jazz music. 

A key characteristic of jazz is improvisation.  The players in the band build off interactions with each other as they move through the music.  Our work attempts to bring out the collective wisdom of a community or organization.  The difference here is that we don’t prepare a plan for folks to comment on or approve, but we build something with them.  With so many diverse community or organizational members – the members of our jazz band – you really want to highlight and build off the views, experiences and talents that these diverse people bring to the process.  Unlike the composting period, you don’t have the luxury of reflecting and studying ad nauseum.  If the jazz musicians on stage stopped to discuss and think about a new direction they were going to take the music, it wouldn’t be much of a performance.  In our work, you have to be able to adapt and respond in a way that keeps the process exciting, engaging and moving forward. 

It’s at this point where the composting period and the jazz music come together.  When we start to build the music with the folks we are engaged with, we don’t make indiscriminate decisions based on rationale that changes from day-to-day.  Instead, we build off of the structures and key directions that we developed in the composting period.  Rather than creating an inflexible workplan, the time taken early in the process actually provides a level of clarity that allows us the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances while meeting our most important objectives.  Without this structure, it would just be chaos.  I’ll leave it to jazz legend Charles Mingus to conclude:

"You can't improvise on nothing, man; you've gotta improvise on something."

- Charles Mingus

Labels: complexity

¶ 10:06 AM 0 Comments

Labels: cities, complexity, sustainability

¶ 9:36 PM 0 Comments

In an April 6 essay in the Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon makes the case for the value of fear.  Homer-Dixon writes that conventional wisdom deems fear as bad and that fear just begets more fear.  In the article, he writes:

“But, in this case, conventional wisdom is wrong. The truth is that fear is good. The economic crisis we're facing is not at root the result of too much fear but of too little. If we had been more afraid for our economic well-being, we would have saved more, borrowed and speculated less, and been more cautious about letting financial wizards make bets with our money using opaque mathematical models.

Today, if we were more afraid for our futures and those of our children, we would be doing much more to address potential problems – such as climate change and nuclear terrorism – that could derail our societies tomorrow.”

Let’s look at the definition of these two key words Homer-Dixon is discussing: pessimism and optimism.  According to the dictionary on my trusty Macbook:

Pessimism is defined as “a tendency to see the worst aspect of things or believe that the worst will happen; a lack of hope or confidence in the future.”

Optimism is defined as “hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.”

As usual, Homer-Dixon makes a strong argument in his essay.  However, looking at these two definitions above, I would put a somewhat different frame on his discussion.  I would argue that neither optimism nor pessimism is helpful in and of themselves.  In my view, the real culprit is tunnel vision.  Many of the issues we face today – including the current financial crisis – are the result of tunnel vision.  Tunnel vision can result in looking at only one piece of the issue or just within one timeframe.  Sometimes entire populations are guilty of it, while other times individuals in key positions have tunnel vision.

In the case of the current financial crisis, tunnel vision resulted in a relatively small amount of individuals being focused on profit maximization over a very short term. There is possibly no human-made system that is more connected than the global economic system.  Those connections exist, yet were ignored.  The result is the crisis we see today.

Rather than keeping the blinders on, we need to start playing “connect-the-dots” in our decision-making. In his 2006 book The Upside of Down, Homer-Dixon carefully explains how our global systems are linked, or “tightly coupled” as he puts it.  These ever-increasing connections in our world require us to understand the linkages between our decisions and the impacts they have beyond just what tunnel vision allows for. Disregarding these connections and the impacts of decisions across economic, environmental and social realms is unproductive at best and irresponsible at worst.

Taken to the extreme, optimism and pessimism are both forms of tunnel vision.  Taking off the blinders allows for a better understanding of the whole, an ability to see connections and to understand implications over a longer timeframe.  For the natural optimist, connecting the dots will create a more thorough understanding of impacts to create a more holistic picture.  This will likely temper the blind all-is-going-to-work-out-for-the-best instincts of these folks.  For the pessimist, connecting the dots will enable an understanding of potential opportunities to move from the doom-and-gloom into more positive solutions. 

Either way, the focus should be on creating productive and realistic solutions.  Taking off the blinders is the best way to make this happen.

- John, April 8, 2009 

Labels: change, complexity, learning

¶ 11:57 AM 0 Comments

I just got back from Iqaluit - Nunavut, Canada’s capital city - as part of a climate change adaptation project through the Canadian Institute of Planners.  It was my second time there and during a drive-around tour, I was reminded of their local infrastructure setup and how a good portion of the houses in Iqaluit get water and remove their sewage.  Because parts of their communities do not have piped servicing, they have to receive their water and sewage services by truck. 

Each house in these areas has a light at the front with a red bulb.  If the light is out, it means they need water.  An illuminated red light means that they have an adequate amount of water.  Five days a week, a team of five trucks will head out on their assigned route and look for houses with that light out.  They will fill the water tank until the red light flips back on, letting them know the tank is full, and then move on to the next house.

Not quite a red light district like the infamous one in Amsterdam.

 Even on a stormy day, you can still see the red light is on at the right side of this house in Iqaluit. 

Iqaluit’s system got me thinking about the importance of information within bigger, more complex systems – whether it be our cities or natural systems.  Systems experts call this process of information dissemination “feedback”.  In Iqaluit, this information then causes the action of refilling the water tank.  This system of cause and effect is known as a “feedback loop.”  Another good example of a feedback loop is your nervous system.  If you put your hand on a hot stove, your nervous system creates a feedback loop from your fingertips to your brain to tell you to move your hand.  These feedback loops are vital to understand the world around us and to adjust our behaviour accordingly. 

With a system that is as (relatively) simple as Iqaluit’s water system or your hand on a stove, these feedback loops are fairly straightforward and provide the necessary information nearly immediately.  The trouble is that many of our natural and human-made systems are very complex, so there isn’t the direct relationship between one element to another.  An example is in the issue of traffic and how we build our cities.  Many people assume that there is a simple relationship between the amount of roads and traffic flow.  Gridlock?  Just build more roads!  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.  Transportation and traffic issues are a complex mix of city design, housing location and density, employment location, transit service, fuel costs, local economic makeup, personal choice and cultural norms.  Just to name a few.  There’s also the issue of “induced demand” – the phenomenon where building new road capacity actual creates demand for more road capacity.  Thus, the saying that “solving traffic problems by building more roads is like solving your weight problem by buying bigger pants.”

So what to do about it?  In these complex systems, it is necessary for everyone (including and especially our leaders) to find the deeper causes for issues that we face.  A good way to do this is to act like a 3 year-old and ask “why?” a few times.  Let’s give this a try:

We have gridlock in our city.

“Why?”

Because there are too many vehicles on the road at the same time.

“Why?”

Because they are all leaving the same area and heading to the same area all at once. 

“Why?”

Because we have separated where people live and work through our zoning.

In just 3 “why’s” we were able to get to a deeper cause than if we just reacted to a problem.  You could dig even deeper, but just this level of inquiry will allow you to make decisions at a more meaningful level.  Many times, people don’t have the time or the right job description to look for those deeper reasons.  Very few jobs reward understanding complexity.  This ends up causing us all trouble in the long run.

The other difficulty with complex systems is that there is often a lag time for getting the information (the feedback) to understand the consequences of decisions.  In the traffic example, the zoning decisions likely happened decades before the gridlock showed up.  In the meantime, the overall culture of the community may have shifted to a car-centric one – creating even more decisions that would eventually lead to the current day gridlock. 

Now what?  We need to continually work to shift how we perceive problems and look for solutions. 

In an interesting 2006 TED talk, Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging.com articulated this very well.  He stated that one of WorldChanging’s goals was to “make the invisible visible.”  This is a great way of putting it.  If we can do a better job of understanding the nature of our systems and see the connections, along with doing a better job of understanding the feedback loops, then many of the invisible causes or consequences in our world will become more visible.  At the end of the day, we will make wiser decisions.

So while many of the issues we face are daunting and complex, our communities, organizations and institutions need to transform how they think to find the connections between the parts of our world and positively influence the decisions they make.  We all need to look for – and create – the red lights like in Iqaluit.  

- John, March 15, 2009

Labels: complexity, feedback, sustainability

¶ 8:34 AM 2 Comments