Complex Adaptive Systems and the Future of Facilitation

PART I

The last two weeks were fascinating for me professionally. First I went to Santa Clara to attend a conference put on by the Santa Fe Institute on the basics of complex adaptive systems. Then last week I was able to attend the Legg Mason Thought Leader Forum in Baltimore. The line-up of topics between these two conferences was impressive:

• Geoffrey West on scaling laws in living systems up to the size of cities
• Murray Gell-Mann on an overview of complexity science
• Josh Wolfe on the future of nanotechnology from a venture capital perspective
• Richard Foster on creative destruction in companies and industries and the future of the healthcare industry
• Bill Gurley on massively multiplayer Internet gaming
• Sue Becker on the evolution of the Internet over the next ten years
• Scott Page on the role of diversity in economics and organizations
• Graham Spencer on evolution in open source systems with Wikipedia as an example
• James Surowiecki on the wisdom of crowds
  
• Bill Miller on capital markets and complex adaptive systems

In some ways the last two weeks were the highlight of my career. In another way they represent only the beginning or perhaps a turbocharger to push me on to new ideas. I've been interested in complex adaptive systems (CAS) since 1990 when I first read the book by M. Mitchell Waldrop. I have worked ever since to fold some of the ideas that I've encountered into my business--facilitation of large groups of people through the creation of new ideas, to strategies for positioning them, to planning for implementation.

Traditional facilitation places a facilitator in the front of a room of people, adds a documentor (or a scribe to draw on flip charts) and equips the facilitator with two sets of tools: human behavior tools so he can manipulate the contribution of various group members (encouraging some to speak up and others to restrain their verbosity for example); and some rudimentary tools for managing the time, usually wrapped up in the creation of an agenda, or sequence of discussion topics.

Facilitation has been evolving, though, since the 1970's when Doyle and Strauss popularized the method I sketched above in their book How to Make Meetings Work. Today, I consider Harrison Owen to be one of the most evolved practitioners in the field. First of all, his method, called Open Source Technology is open source. Anyone can read the book, apply the ideas, and adapt them. Second, in his model, the facilitator spends a brief period of time at the beginning of a session to set the stage (literally) and create an envelope of energy to support the process as it unfolds. Then the participants actually create the design for their session in a sort of marketplace approach where sponsors for topics of conversation post advertisements for their sessions on a large matrix event calendar and everyone signs up for what they want to participate in. When done correctly the result is a group of people working in a sequence of parallel discussions. The biggest challenge that I haven't understood yet is how the group coalesces around emerging solutions and actually goes through a selection process followed by planning. I see how the approach uses parallel work to generate ideas and subsets of a solution but I don't yet see the mechanism for cross-breeding, testing ideas for fitness, and the use of some selection criteria before the surviving ideas fold back into another iteration. These additional components would truly let a group of people generate, plan and execute even a complex strategy without much centralized intervention. Traditional business management would scoff at or shudder at the thought but more curious managers and business leaders will one day figure it out. At that point, no hierarchical organization will be able to move fast enough to compete against an organization that employs massively parallel strategy formation and execution.

The next steps in thinking about how to facilitate large groups of people should be very interesting. On one side lies the development of a host of online tools to aid in the process. Right now the tools are based on old models instead of the concepts of complex adaptive systems and don't really open up the full potential for massively parallel planning (MPP). The people who solve this issue will come from the gaming world where companies like Second Life are learning how to allow the creation and evolution of communities of people online. The group problem solving world probably can't grok this kind of evolution. Bill Gurley's talk illuminated some possibilities along these lines. If people will pay real money to buy fantasy real estate and pay rent to develop it, they can learn to run businesses collectively online.