Posts Tagged ‘problem solving’
Strange Loops and Sleepless Nights
Emily Tipton
I had lunch with a friend of mine the other day, who is struggling to get her nine- month-old son into a sleeping routine at night. As I was empathizing with her plight, I was reminded of my own struggles as a new mother with my eldest son, and how in retrospect I was able to use Reflexive Practice to help me to understand why it seemed I was caught in a loop and unable to make any progress.
I was educated as an engineer and had spent much of my career in various project management roles. So I must admit that I approached motherhood as a project and was quite confident that I would be able to strategize, organize and manage all aspects of this new role in my life. I was unprepared for the emotional side of motherhood, and my effectiveness was severely handicapped by lack of sleep. I’ve written in other blog postings about my birth experience, and the trouble that Ollie had afterwards (Trust), so I won’t revisit that here except to say that I believe the suffering he experienced in his early weeks impacted his ability to sleep through the night because he didn’t learn to settle himself as an infant. So, at nearly one year old he was still waking me several times a night and adamantly wanting to nurse, because that’s how he soothed himself.
At the time I felt like I was trying everything. But I found it challenging to be consistent – when he was teething, we were travelling, or I was just too tired to do anything else, I would succumb and nurse him, knowing that this was reinforcing the very behavior I wanted to stop because as his mother I wanted to soothe and nurture him. I found the situation difficult on so many levels – my rational and emotional selves were not aligned, I found it difficult to communicate the decisions I made in the wee hours of the morning effectively to my (very supportive, but frustrated and sleep-deprived) husband, and I was desperate for sleep. I believed that I was somehow failing to solve this problem, when it seemed like every other mother in the world had it beat.
It’s funny how, looking back, I don’t actually remember exactly how it all turned out. I weaned Ollie when he was 12 months old and I know that by the time my second son, William, was born, Ollie was 22 months old and sleeping all night long every night. But I remember clearly the intensity of the frustration as I descended into the depths of despair each time I realized I was cycling both Ollie and I through behaviours that were not serving either of us, or our relationship.
When I look at the situation retrospectively, with my Reflexive Practice lens, I can clearly see how we were in a strange loop. Each time I put increasing pressure on myself to “solve the problem” either by making rules for myself or finding some new tactic to try, I would react to setbacks in a very closed way – being unkind to myself and to Ollie by feeling like I had failed to implement solutions that should work, or that had worked for others. I would push expectations on my son that I couldn’t effectively communicate to him. When we failed, I would revert back to old habits and then stop trying, just feeling like I was never going to solve the problem. Then, I would see some kind of change in Ollie – he would sleep a little longer, or fall asleep on his own, without nursing, and all of a sudden I would be hopeful again. I would design more rules or research new methods, and enter the cycle all over again.
Strange loop pattern
What I didn’t understand at the time is that Ollie was not a problem to be solved. I had to start thinking about him, and his sleeping patterns, as a mystery to be explored. Relationships are complex and it was my role to try to understand and explore why he was behaving the way he was, not to compare him with other babies or push expectations onto him based on what I read in a book. Just that shift in perspective allows me now to see the situation completely differently. When I treat my children as opportunities to learn, instead of problems to be solved, my feelings about the situation or the “problem” shift. It was not wrong to design rules, or try different things I read in books, but it was wrong to place expectations on his response to these things, and feel like a failure when he didn’t live up to those expectations. I was telling a story about us both where we were failures. Instead, when I was able to openly observe and learn from how he responded, I could give us both grace, and stay out of the strange loop.
Self Managed Action Learning (SMAL)
Henry Senko
In the latest issue of the Action Learning Research and Practice journal, I read an article about action learning in which teams are self-managed and do not use a set advisor. The term used in the article was Self Managed Action Learning (SMAL). I immediately thought of the action learning process we had developed a number of years ago, and how our work now has a name. I remember the first time we attended an action learning seminar in England in 1996 and met Reg Revans. He had mentioned that the role of a facilitator was to “…hang coats and get coffee, getting out of the way of learning…”. Our search over the next few years was to try and understand and develop a process to help achieve what he meant by this statement. At the time, we were fortunate to have a number of people from various professions and walks of life who were willing to meet once a month with us to experiment with the process of action learning and develop a process that did not require a set advisor. After a number of years we were successful, and accompanied our clients, presented our findings at the Action Learning Conference in England, on the success of action learning and the use of this process.
We designed the action learning process to be completely self-managed by the action learning group. Over a number of years in testing the process, participants provided valuable feedback on the process, and what was required to make the self-management possible. The way in which our action learning process is structured:
- Provides the framework required for a group to conduct the process without any assistance from an external facilitator, consultant, or set advisor.
- Increases psychological safety because all of the instructions are written, and everyone can read and interpret them.
- Makes sure that thinking and acting are aligned with how people learn, rather than based on each person’s specific way of learning.
- Gives each member a chance to voice his or her perspective, while protecting the interests of the situation owner.
- Keeps members focused on the action learning process, and lowers the effect of distractions that may occur.
- Creates the conditions for the emergence of communal respect, trust, helpfulness, and effective communication.
When groups are first learning the action learning process, the structure provides ways in which members can feel psychologically safe while feeling incompetent at the same time. Even when no one in the group has ever participated in this form of action learning, the instructions put everyone on a level playing field. Everyone knows nothing about the process. The struggle of learning the process is minimized by the desire to solve a group member’s issue or problem. As a result, most group members willingly struggle through learning the process, and willingly self-manage the group.
Solving Real Problems in Real Time: Action Learning
It is an understatement to say that organizations are experiencing more change than ever before. In fact, most of us are finally getting used to the idea that constant change is a part of living and working within organizations. What is less understood is how to work within the uncertainty, instability, confusion, and loss of control that accelerating change creates. To deal with the conditions that change creates, we use all of the skills, knowledge, and experience that we have at our disposal. However, when we try to fix problems, we can make them worse than they were in the first place. Then, we ask ourselves questions to try to make sense of the resulting confusion: “What is going on? What are we doing wrong? Why can’t we make things better? Why do our fixes not work?” Common answers to these questions are even less helpful: “It’s their fault! We didn’t have enough time or resources to do it right! We didn’t get any help! We should have known what to do!”
The reason that we fail to solve these complex problems has little to do with being smart enough to deal with accelerating change. It has more to do with not being smart in a way that works when the degree of complexity is so high. Nothing that we have learned in the past has prepared us to deal with increasing complexity and the change that it creates. Unless we think and act differently, we will continue to struggle with problems we cannot seem to solve.
If we are to match the speed of change, or, perhaps, to slow it down and to change its direction, we need a completely different approach to dealing with complexity. Action learning is such an approach — a way of thinking and acting that enables us to solve real problems in real time, and to create the resilience required to deal with complexity and change.
Navigating Through Complexity: Systems Thinking
Without question, increasing change and complexity are creating a storm that few organizations are able to weather. As the storm gains momentum, it lashes out in unpredictable ways, leaving many complex problems in its wake. You may deal with the resulting problems by trying to control what you can. You may use tried-and-true methods to cope with the problems and opportunities that the storm brings, only to find that your efforts create little or no change in the situation, and may, in fact, make things worse. You may notice that almost every tack you take works less and less well, making you feel less effective. As change accelerates, it creates even more complexity, thus further eroding your sense of competency.
When you start feeling out of control, you can easily become a victim of forces that you do not understand. It is a vicious cycle: change and complexity feed off each other to create even more change and complexity! The end result can be an exhausted workforce, unable to deal with the overwhelming problems that change and complexity bring.
People are tired of dealing with the constant storm of complexity and its after-effects. This tiredness is a symptom of complexity overload. The symptoms of complexity overload can be found in every corner of the organization ¾ it is only a question of degree. To cope with complexity overload, people navigate through the storm by using current skills and knowledge, which may help them to reach the eye of the storm, but not to clear the storm altogether. Systems thinking is an effective way to navigate out of the storm, and to be prepared for other storms.
Creating a Generative Learning Organization: Organizational Design
The world as we know is changing, primarily because of how we think about it. Creating a generative learning organization is key to learning at the speed of change. To do this, an organization must be treated as a complex dynamic system of interactions between all people and the situations in which they are involved. This perspective helps you to see the organization as a system of interactions between its parts. By recognizing the parts of the system you can identify patterns of interaction. Recognizing patterns helps you to:
- Analyze your situation from a different perspective
- Solve complex problems
- Plan possible solution paths
- Act in ways that create the desired results within the system
Because complexity continues to increase, organizations need to be aware of the way in which they are responding to this increasing complexity and the changes that complexity brings. You may find that you need to analyze your situation differently, and to respond to situations differently, in order to produce the results you desire. The problems and opportunities that you face are found at several levels within the municipal system, including the people, the processes and the way in which the organization is designed. When you analyze your organization, you may find that energy and resources are being spent on certain parts of the system at the expense of others. Looking at the inter-relationships helps you to find appropriate actions that can, more often than not, lead to desired results. These actions require two things: energy from all individuals involved, and resources to make actions happen. Organizational design helps you to decide how to focus energy and resources on particular areas of your organization in a way that produces desired results, without causing harmful side effects.
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