 Thank you very much for coming to the messy middle part of navigating uncertainty and complexity. My name is Donna Jones. I grew up in the countryside basically and I'm always grateful to come to Sweden because the connection between Swedish people and nature is probably the most I've seen in any country I've been in and I've traveled around the world a couple of times so that says quite a bit. But anyway I spent a lot of time and when the world didn't make sense to me as a kid I would go into the bush and just sit there. And I didn't know it then but what I was doing was taking in absorbing if you will an understanding of interdependencies and just the living system how living systems work. That part got confirmed years later when I picked up a book called Nature Deficit Disorder which spoke to how kids are being cognitively compromised by not spending time in nature by not having a lot of their developmental years spent in nature. So flash forward to my professional career as a facilitator facilitating in just about every context every sector most often transformation of team performance organizational change or leadership development you know a long list. And I started seeing some similar some very interesting arcs if you will I call them marks of transformation that just sort of were the places where good intentions would be well set in front and then all of a sudden there'd be this messy confusing bit where people would want to run back to where they were before for safety. Accidentally or by design I'd like to say it's more by design but really it was accident I also started mentoring people and I wouldn't call it of that to be honest but it's the best word I have I would trip over someone who was heavy duty addiction into drugs and they needed someone to listen to them and I so I would listen to that story I learned a lot about that world and some things I didn't ever want to know about but it was it was an interesting experience. I also ended up attracting or and they found me or I found them a lot of kids who had been disenfranchised dysfunctional super dysfunctional situations and in the hours and I mean hours weeks of listening just listening that's all I did nothing more I would watch them move from suicide to hope and they did it but in that that's the messy part that's the part that you know now if we take it to Agile transformation and we take a look at it there that's what makes reading the deep dynamics very easy to do because of the capacity to read not what's on the surface not to just judge the first take but to see beneath that and look underneath do I just point this here I'm challenged with these things yeah push oh maybe it's that one yes here we are at Agile transformation where you're you've got two worldviews that collide quite dramatically and so what I'm going to attempt to explain is why you have agile anti-agile patterns backlash if you will why you have conversations that have agile language on top but command and control behavior sitting underneath or right on the surface actually most often and and it's quite simply because there's a lot of embedded assumptions and beliefs that that sit inside each of these worlds and a lot of values that are interesting some of them not positive values one of them is on the on the non on the traditional side of management it's it one of the values is harmony and what that amounts to is prevent pretend perfection so let's make it look like everything's fine even though it's not there's so much of a high value around stability in traditional environments that when agile trots in as a disruptor it messes up that nice neatness that goes with everything has its order we can predict the outcomes we actually engineer them so that makes it extra easy then along comes agile and it challenges all of those I just did a workshop on navigating the messy middle in Belgium in the spring and we had a project manager who openly confessed to saying look here's how we implemented agile we we did business as you be a you business as usual but we filled out the forms at the end of the week and sent them in nobody checked it worked and so that's that's one version of fake agile I also just moderated at the world agility forum in Portugal and there I learned there's another term I think Toyota mentioned it called dark agile which is I mean I imagine that we're close to Halloween I'm pretty sure you can come up with some images that would fit with that so it's like the dark side of agile perhaps the Darth Vader side so so there's that's the underpinning then is there's these collisions then between the the certainty the predictability the familiarity the design for stability and and the creative the zone that says let's try this we've got 90 day you know 90 day delivery times but let's try this out and see how it works so there's a lot of interplay in there and in the zone in between is exactly where the opportunity for leadership comes and I'll expand on that as we go so my job over the years has been to detect the underlying dynamics this came up that comes up for me in multiple ways it comes up for any professional facilitator we've we've all seen it at some point or another but it's the undertow it's the part where you want to you know big ambitions like I was organ facilitating a group they had these wonderful ideas about moving forward and literally you know they they move forward and then rolled back meaning they got incremental results and that was 2003 the epiphany struck me it struck me that oh my gosh if the best we can do is incremental we're in big trouble because it was easy to see from that point of view where we would be today with respect to climate change and other large global issues we had to evolve and as long as we were getting incremental results in major transformation initiatives we weren't going to get there so that was that was the easy part the harder part was you know how do you actually map this out how do you you know how do you support people and shift making these shifts the undertow is made of I'm going to just give you three things it's made of a lot of things but the three things that you will easily witness it because it's very subtle stuff so some of the gross thing that like the big obvious things are metrics metrics that reward individual behavior you heard that this morning from the conversations you know metrics that reward individual behavior but ask for collaboration beliefs that say competition is the way to go to get results that's how we win in business but we're going to collaborate and do something creatively it's like yeah that's not how you win so so it's those kinds of polls that that work at the metrics level and there's tons of other the big one that everybody's been railing against is you know shareholder value tied to CEO compensation and the worst ethical breaches have been built around that relationship obviously so that's once fairly straightforward when you look at a system you see how it works you know the metrics one is easy one to remove barriers and that's a wonderful role for managers who are looking to be a part of this new shaping this new world we're in in terms of work and and humanity's future on the planet and so forth the other one is is conflict in traditional organizations there's been this long thing and I've I've been a part of it because I've been delivering training and stuff for eons and so in conflict most of traditional organizations center around resolve it let's get rid of it and so the idea is kind you know if you avoid it it'll go away it's actually not how it works if you avoid it it gets worse a lot worse and I'm sure you've seen this and so the shift that we're looking at you know in that in that jump is to really use conflict to connect to develop you know understand empathically what's going on here because the surface is just the surface underneath that our hearts and souls wanting to contribute I have a tech project on depression and anxiety and building empathy through that and also on building and restoring the capacity to work with the crazy notes of the world to really restore how you how you do that and and it all it all centers on on understanding that we are very complex beings at just in the same way you're working in a complex organization with a lot of interdependencies we are complex and so when you use conflict not to get rid of it and pretend that it's everything's good but to actually walk into it and say what's going on here what can we learn from this what can we all learn from it together that's where diversity starts paying off to organizations so I'm giving you some of the things that show up out of the undertow that aren't being used for a lot to a large extent to develop agile leadership to develop capacity to work with all of the things we're working with in today's world and finally focus focus is one and one of those things that when you wake up in the morning you're focused on getting up and trying to remember what you're doing for the day focus is subtle it's when you want to move forward in action you use mental focus a lot organizations to a large extent run off of mental focus but when you want to find out what's going on you suspend focus and you just listen with the widest radar or you know like big thing it's like a big just look at yourself as a receiver on the top you know that you have in television all that you're just taking in information your mind will sort it out later it's a sense making device it's very good at that but your information and your data is coming in widescreen so you're getting social data you're getting emotional data you're getting all of the stuff that informs a solid decision going forward and most people know me for the decision making stuff but it's all grounded in in the deep dynamics let's see push this again all right so I'm really grateful to Dave Snowden because some years ago I came here talking about energetic sensitivity which is the science of intuition and not everybody relates to that so Dave kindly used the word sensing which you'll see is contextually you know crosses every context in in the kind of an and hopefully I said that right kind of in my lunch most people are familiar with what Dave's done but the beauty of the sense sense sense sense in each of those four areas is that it gives you a way and this is something robots and AI can't do this is yours alone you sense into these environments and then you can understand what you're working with to be able to identify am I am in a complicated environment or is this complex is it is it a kind of environment where things are very tangled up but not in a cause causal way but more in a very interrelationship kind of way so causal meaning if I if I if this then that that's the kind of thinking if I do this this will happen more predictable but in in complex environments there's nothing terribly predictable about them and that's precisely the environment that you're in and organizations for the most part and also we're in in the world today I really appreciated Dave Packard former founder of Hewlett Packard a friend of mine worked for him and she told me the story that somebody they ran across him in the hallway and when he was asked the question you see on the screen how can you tell when the HP way is working he said well I can't but I can sense when it isn't and I so that sort of gives you the executive level of how these skills play out now I'm sure you've all seen you know look agile is working cut it quickly and you look at the decision you go how did they get there well this is data that comes from and and if you were here in 2016 when I was last year uh Jonathan Reems presented this data but in a different way and I dug deep you know I asked him for his back end and he he shared uh Taylor Dawson and tons of great articles on on medium by her by the way uh her data and so because I'm from Canada what we're used to seeing in Canada is US data so I called her up and said you know is this American what am I looking at here and can I use it and she said no no this is global so what they've got in the in the electrical scale is a way of measuring your capacity individual capacity to work with complex concepts to work with complex work with complexity period and what they've discovered is that as you can see from this lovely graph is that there's a gap between as the more senior you get the bigger the gap now in that gap are the anti sit the anti agile patterns sit the confusion around what is agile selling and telling to management it's all of that package of how do we get this move forward in the in the management mindset but also sitting in that gap is the opportunity for greater leadership skills and development that everyone shares everyone not no one gets left out of out of that part of it it takes us back to a time this was um four you know like oh gosh I can't remember how many years ago numbers are many are challenging but there was a time when navigators from Polynesia had absolutely no instruments they would get in their boats and ship you know their boats and they would travel 4 000 kilometers across the south pacific using no tools whatsoever using themselves they would use birds they would use the ocean swells top at multiple layers of current all the way down so the undertow picture that I showed you earlier is a picture of an actual undertow wave under the water the one that sucks you out into the ocean if you get into it and don't know how to swim out of it but that's what they use they use the stars so what they're doing is the same thing what they did then is the same thing we're doing now we're drawing on very ancient skills to take multiple streams of data and pull it in and make sense out of it now that's both a cognitive function here but it's also very much so draws on a whole lot more of your intelligence than than anything intellectual could ever do so both men and women were trained for this they started very young they would be at the age of one or two from the time they're you know they would be left in tidal pools to get used to the currents start to feel what those waves felt like and so forth and then they would develop them you know like a very rigorous training and and so the sentence with the blank in it is for the men because both men and women were trained but the gentleman in the photograph who's still here you know he sees the one that's alive you know now still practicing these skills at 14 he tied his okay so imagine men the most sensitive part of your body the part that when you get kicked bad things happen imagine taking that body part and tying it to the mast to the top of the thing so you could sense the currents impacting the boat that yes that's a little bit of an out-raven for women so it's it's one of those things that but that's the level of commitment that they had to being able to detect the multiple currents the layers of currents that that are part of navigating the uncertainty part navigating the waters so that's the skill set we're using everybody has it some to a more or lesser degree usually the people with the most sensitivities are on chronic disease chronic sick chronically ill either can't function in those environments at all so or or they have gotten into fallen into depression deep depression because the world makes so little sense and it's extremely noisy i was just in a steven caughtler workshop um doing flow for writers flow is the challenge it's the gap between the challenge and the skills so we've got that graph shows we've got a gap in the skills the challenge is big worldwide and organizations quite often personally but the the gap is where we close that and it's a peak performance state which meant means that when you know how to create that when you use these challenges to go into flow states and peak performance states you actually reduce cognitive overload so a whole lot of bad decisions get made because people are just overloaded cognitively they just they chip out front prefrontal cortex goes offline and and really dumb decisions come out of it the good news is scientifically you don't have to stretch far four percent base jumpers and people that fly off tops of buildings they're they're they're doing it more dramatically you don't have to do that uh four percent is fine but then the bottom line is you always make the call you decide how far you go the core skill set uh there's a lot of core skills that go with it but the most obvious one is to shift perspectives this is a fly's eye and a fly has each one of the little dots on there is a its own camera it's sensitive to light and darkness it can move around and so using that the fly knows what's coming out at any point in time if you're trying to hit a fly it's not challenging it's not easy they're very quick and they can know you're coming so but a fly's eye when you put that all together you get the bigger picture and that's the way you make decisions in in complexity it's also the way you build bridges diverse points of view are part of that so can we let's see if i can how do i do this so the other part of what goes on in complexity and and agile thing is is emergence do you know how to turn this on so i'll give you a feeling of what emergence looks like in the most dramatic way possible yeah he paddled right into the middle of a humpback feeding moment and you can see from sorry now we need to get off just wanted to give you that feeling but the emergence is usually not look like that it's not usually gross oh my it's like you know these humpback whales blow up in front of your kayak it's more subtle than that so you're really looking for nuances and reading the nuances whoops uh i want to back up several steps more because what's going on and the way in which i made sense of the wider things of what's going on in the world today is that we are in the middle of what what the systems theory theorists called bifurcation and it is a place where where um there is a split it works it's it's a law of transformation in in non-linear systems and so we've been moving we've been designing our organizations on linear we've been running everything on linear decisions that based on linear which is why we're dealing with climate change and a whole lot of other issues that that have been created that way uh or at least amplified that way and and so it's a it marks a radical change in the evolutionary trajectory where we either the whole thing just collapses or we transform it so we each one of us plus everybody and we stand in that gap we stand in the moment where you can create the future you want where you create a new word you know the whole thing out of it but it's it's through that gap in complexity that we we uh we do that thank you