I'll give it a normal two or three minutes for people to come in.
Okay, guys, if people can introduce themselves to each other in the chat if you want to or not, if you don't know this session is about a thing called trout that can Can I just I don't think anybody here is actually been through one of these from memory. Okay. Right, this was the original evolution of the method was when we started to run retreats within the centre. So we wanted to bring together experts from different backgrounds. And we didn't want to do it in a traditional conference format. So it was, you know, one of the other drivers on this was something which wasn't a keynote based conference, but equally wasn't an unconference. So you always saw that as a sort of pendulum effect. So you would see people who would complain bitterly about conferences dominated by keynotes, you know, with loads of groupies in the audience and sessions. So yeah. And then they set up an unconference, and then nobody would book on it, because the attractions were actually the keynotes. And I often felt a lot of the people who made these protests and in my experience, nearly all of them have been people who've been trying to get to be a keynote for at least 10 years and haven't made it so kind of like they decided to denigrate the role. Now, having said that, that was also a good point. Because to be quite honest, having done a lot of keynoting, it's, it can be fun, but it's a bit of a pain. I remember one big one in Atlanta with 2000 people. And like everybody lines up afterwards to shake your hand and say they you changed their lives in a profound way. And you know, they do that with every keynotes and you've had absolutely zero impact on them. So that's kind of like the negative side. The real value I found was an audience. When you have an audience who are happy to criticise, you're happy to have an argument with you, or kind of like knew the field. And also, there's a sort of academic process and I remember the first time I went through it at the Academy of Management in Washington. I just got an award for contributions to knowledge management, and it's nice To get the awards, but the price of it was to be beaten up for three hours by Max verso, and JC spender now who both of whom know at least as much, if not more about the subject, and I do so you present with two people grinning at you on the front row. And you know that they're taking notes to actually savage you in a minute, and then there's going to be a dialogue. Now, that is actually far more valuable. Because you're tested, you have to think what you say you actually develop things in the interface between the conflict. So that form seemed to me quite a good one. It was also true that in general, you had whole groups of people who didn't participate in either conferences or uncomfortable unconferences, they became passive observers in the process. So what I started to work on, it took us about five retreats, I think, to get it to its current state was a relatively simple process, I'll describe it high level than then I'll sort of go through it in detail. So the high level, what you actually have is three, three keynote speakers. And initially, this was for a four day event. So three keynote speakers, each of whom have considerable credibility in their field. But their fields are different. So you're not reprising existing conflicts within the field. You're bringing together fields who probably have something to say to each other, but don't traditionally interact. So that was kind of like a principle. Yeah. So for example, I brought together you know, when when we brought together Jessica, who's a Cirque du Soleil, a producer, and lead dancer, and also one of the fiercest intellects I've met. first time we ever met, we discovered five hours later, there was a dinner in Hong Kong, and we'd spent five hours talking to each other, and everybody else was sort of taking notes around the table. And we hadn't noticed he's a bright guy. But with him, we had rica who is actually a cognitive neuroscience for South Africa. And we have mocha Stan now, mocha Stoney, who's in a sort of similar sort of but related field from London that wasn't mo at that one. Suddenly, it was Gary Klein, that was it. So we had a cognitive neuroscience that we had Gary Klein. So you had three people who definitely had something to say to each other, but traditionally would not have had a conversation. Right? And then we had the audience arrange so that they could have smaller discussions and then come together for the bigger discussion.
So I now have to introduce a series of names. The first time we did this, we did it in Whistler, which is in Western Canada. And if you don't know, that's one of the areas where you get the Hydra folk, if you haven't seen bill Reid's pictures of the raven and the whale, you know, there's a very distinct indigenous culture based around animals there. And birds in particular, and the raven is, is special. So we ended up using bird names. So the three, and that's kind of like stuck, because it's just fun, right? The three speakers were called eagles. And so I'm now going to start to use a language Eagle one Eagle two, Eagle three. Yeah. So in the first session, Eagle, one would present. And then Eagle two, and Eagle three would respond. Now, throughout that we use silent listening. And now this is a established technique. It's on the it's on the wiki. Silent listening is where you're not allowed to say something until the speaker is finished. And then they're not allowed to say something while you had a conversation. Yeah, that's kind of like a principle. So we run that through and then then having louder Speak louder to response, no dialogue at that stage, then the facilitator will actually manage a discussion with the three speakers. And generally the facilitator was me or somebody like me, who also knew the field or brought people together. So that was a sort of high level discussion taking place. And everybody else in the group were grouped into groups of three. Obviously, in some cases, you might have to have two groups of four but it's funny how it nearly always works out. Everybody else is actually in sort of pods of three sitting around the three speakers. And once the Eagles have finished, then those groups of three leave the room and discuss what the speaker said. And they nominate one of their people to be that sessions Raven, so that will be Raven one. And then there'll be Raven two and Raven three. So then we come back into the group and all the raven ones sit in a circle and talk about what they've talked about. In the field, and everybody else has to listen and can't contribute including eagles. The Eagles now have to listen to people talking about what they said without the ability to respond or rebut. So that's kind of like session one. Yeah, Eagle one presents Eagle two and three respond. Everybody's in threes. They go out in threes. They discuss and nominate one of their number to be Raven, one Raven, one sit in a circle, discuss with everybody else around them. And nobody, only that they're the only actors in play, nobody else can respond. Yeah. And then you move into session to session two Eagle two presents, Eagles one and three respond. The trio's go out again. And now they have to nominate a second member of their team to be Raven to write you come back the raven to sit in a circle discuss what went on. And then you go back and effectively repeat two times the time Eagle three presents equals one and to respond. The group's go out in three. And now the third person is nominated as Raven three and they sit in a circle and have a discussion. So effectively over three sessions, everybody has been an active player. Yeah. And it kind of like sorts itself out because it tends to be the dominant character who wins the first battle to be Raven, one of the least dominant Raven two and so on. So that, yeah, this is context facilitation, you try and set things up. So the right thing will happen. But you don't try and manipulate it. Yeah. So that's powerful now. And then after you've done that, so now you move into session four. And this is where we form beaver groups. Sorry, we got into animals at this point. And so if I've got seven Raven groups, yeah. Then each, which they've got three people in it, then I ended up with three beaver groups with one person from each Raven group. Right. And their job is to synthesise what has gone on and come up with areas of work and action plans and things that should come out of the body of knowledge. Remember, this is a synthesis process. So they've heard things from people from three different backgrounds, they end up with a whole series of projects or ideas, or I'd really like to talk about this more, and so on. And while the beaver groups a meeting, the Eagles are rotated around the beaver in groups for fixed time groups. So they all get an eagle for a period of time.
Yeah, but that but that's it. Yeah. And then in the face of that session for. And then in session five, you basically put all the actions which came out of the groups, and then people clustered around the ones they want to work on. That's where actually used open space at that point, kind of like, here they are, what you want to work on, come on to it, deal with it. And from that point onwards, to be honest, it's more free format. Now, that's actually proved to be an extremely effective technique. And people enjoy it, it means everybody has taken an active part in a discussion without the need to volunteer for it. So the process removes a lot of the fear. And there's one other group who are called owls. So we now get introduced to more animal names. So the owls can like observe the whole process and keep notes and scribe. And to be honest, I first created owl. So people who didn't want us it was that I can't say anything, I don't want to be anything in this process. So I said, well, that's okay says at the back and take notes, because that will be valuable. And then we discovered that was valuable. Because actually, they were looking at it completely independently. And they were the sort of people who wanted to do that. So ours became useful. And to be honest, it was also a way of making sure that you had any, you know, seven groups of three or eight groups of three, because you just vary the Alto. And you can make our scribes for individual groups to get them functions and things like that. And then the last time we run it, we introduced a coyote. Sorry, I spent too much time reading indigenous stories, right? And if you don't know it, in Navajo legend, the coyote is the trickster. Yeah, so it's a pretty mysterious figure. So we then brought in people and last time we did it, we brought in artists, and we made the artists coyote so they could go and effectively like jesters, they could walk into any group and draw something or say something. They were there just to be disruptive. And to shake things up a bit. They didn't do any of that in the eagle groups that was deliberate, but they could move around the raven groups and they could move around the beaver groups. And there are some rules on that any intervention had to take less than a minute and then they have to leave, so they couldn't take over and dominate. So that becomes a fun process. All right. The fastest we've ever run, it is effectively over Two and a half days. So you got five sessions each session at half a day, but we I have actually done it with five sessions each session quarter of a day. So that means a day in day and a half in effect, and we found you needed to either another session at the end to synthesise everything. So you've had people working on these different groups, you then need another session for them to present back and see if there's things in common and do some synthesis and integration. That six sessions and then session seven is facilitation team going out for a good meal and a lot of gin. Alright, because it's actually quite stressful managing this one, right. So that's the process. Yeah, it's done in in the main when we did it in Whistler, which was beautiful. It was nice and easy because we had a we had a ski lodge in the middle of a, you know, with hummingbirds in the gardens. So people could go into the gardens go back into their cottages go back into their rooms when we did it. in Tasmania in tazzy in Australia, again, we had effectively a holiday cabin area because we tend to go to holiday locations in the offseason. Because then you've got lots of cabins that people can stay in and you've got open Glade. And in Tasmania we introduced a variation which then became standard. So about halfway through. What we actually did was to take people into an area so in tears, we were actually in Port Arthur. Anybody know Port Arthur, or been there? Yeah. Okay. Well, I have two relatives buried there. Right. And they were well, now there was Chartists Remember to Port Arthur was where they sent the recidivist prisoners from Australia. But they also sent the political prisoners. So the artists who were campaigning for one man one vote, yeah, were actually convicted of treason, for marching for that sentence to be hung drawn and quartered. And interestingly, Queen Victoria, who was quite young then didn't know that hanging drawing and courtroom was still on the statute book, and one of her servants. One of the world's charters was a relative. So it was committed to life imprisonment in Tasmania.
So if you've ever been to if you ever go it's I think it's one of the most profound places I know, in Australia or anywhere. Because it's a beautiful location. Now, it is absolutely beautiful. But you go across the isthmus to where the prison was, and there's what we call the dog line. So they changed half stuff masters across the line, and threw meat into the sea on each side to attract the white tip sharks, which are actually more dangerous than great whites. Yeah, on the basis of that meant people couldn't run away. And it's got the only pant optic. And I know. So the pan toptica was designed by Jeremy Bentham, I hate utilitarians, right? They always produce evil. And his idea was, if you had to silently contemplate your crime, and you never You were always been observed. That's what panopticon means you would reform. So there are beautiful prison cells, which are absolutely clean, and you have books to read. And you had an exercise yard to walk into, but you couldn't see or speak to another human being for your entire prison sentence. Yeah, it was compared at all stages, you were being observed, or you didn't know whether you've been observed or not. You never had any privacy. And the main reason people left the prison was suicide. Okay, so we would basically send people in fact, we've been working the subject that time was resilient. So it was perfect, is, you know, go walk around the place for three or four hours and come back and reflect on resilience. Yeah. And then Western, there's a thing called a train wreck where a train came off the tracks and fell into the word. And now the old characters are becoming a source of art. And we were looking at art and semiotics. So that was cool. So that was the way that Yeah, something which was a human disaster, was then turned into work of art, etc. So we started to introduce this sort of physical separation. Yeah, into the process of sort of almost not quite like a pilgrimage, but almost. And one of the things I'm going to be organising for next year is actually a real pilgrimage to do the compost cellar in Spain. Actually, as a tray optic, and while walking, I'm still working on that one. Because I want to do it and I want some good friends to do it with so I'm going to organise it as an event. And then it's also a fully tax deductible expense that will work for everybody. Hey, you got to make them and found that you've been self employed. So that's up to you now. There's an A lot of interest in this. It's been used by other people at conferences. So we need to document the method of doing it. And we also need to increase the number of artefacts, so we need to make it easier for people to do things. So things like bad because of orchestrating this can be difficult. Yeah, because so one of the things we want to do is to create an animation for the wiki says people can see the thing working, yeah, as it goes through. But also kind of like, we need to think about badges or tabards, or something. So people know be the ritualization of becoming the raven is actually quite important. Yeah. So if you're actually wearing the tabard, for example, that means you are the raven for that period and wearing your topo, you can't be challenged. And we want to make that a little bit more interesting. Alright. And the synthesis stage where the beavers comes in the role of the coyote is the rules around that, you know, things like a coyote, again, they might have to wear something, and they can only be disruptive while they're wearing something, which is actually a little bit humiliating, if you look at the role of the jester. Yeah, and I did this with British Airways, I hired an actor in three years. And he could walk into any British Airways executive meeting at any time and be told and ask them ridiculous questions, provided he was wearing his justice costume. He couldn't go in as an individual. Because that's kind of like the way it works. So increasing those sorts of elements in it also make it a bit more fun, but they also create that ritual separation between roles. So that's try optical process, I don't think and I think we can lay out work options over if you've got to do it in one day, two days, three days, four days. So you lay out different options over those days as to what you can do and what the plusses and minuses are. Now, the other reason we got to develop this is we need a one day version, or possibly even a half day worth version.
And this is for the EU Field Guide. So if you look at the weather, you will read it yet but there's a key thing called the operatic turning can every now is in a crisis, you move things into the operatic domain of confused. And then you have a series of accidents. You either do hypothesis generation, which is liminal chaos, you do safe to fail experiments around coherent hypotheses, which is complex. Yeah, you hand things over to experts if there is an expert who you should have listened to in the first place. But then the third, the fourth one, which is really interesting is there are experts from different domains who disagree with each other. Right now, this is actually very common in the crisis. I mean, if I look at the recent COVID crisis in the UK, there was a massive fight between behavioural economists and epidemiologists. Yeah. And political scientists, right? And if you're the executive trying to make a decision, what the hell do you do? All right, because you're pulled into multiple meetings, you're listening to people, everybody seems coherent. They're all experts at mastering the evidence. You don't sound like me, cats Johnson help. So what we did in the field guide is you said, you don't bother about that you create a trial. So you basically get the experts to nominate a representative. Yeah. And you put they become the Eagles. And then you get a whole bunch of junior lecturers or PhD students, PhD students in their fields, who will become the trios. So you literally orientate them in groups of three. So the Eagles present their evidence, each of them attacks the other person. So you start off with discipline, number one, you send people away in their trails. And I think there's two options here. One is the trios have three people from the same discipline, or they mix the disciplines. Yeah, I can see pluses or minuses on both of that. They go away and discuss what is being heard. And then they come back and Raven one sits in a circle, and they discuss what they heard. Yeah. So you can see if you know if we have everybody in the trio is from the same discipline, they're going to reinforce the prejudice, but then they're going to be thrown into a group. So the conflict will increase. If you have three groups, three, if you start with three people from different disciplines, they're likely to introduce more compromise. And that's kind of like an open question. Yeah, that you'd actually run. And so you run that you repeat three times. And then you take one person from each of the raven groups and you put them into the beaver groups. And they start to focus on Okay, what can we actually do, which we're certain about and we all agree on? Where do we need to run safe to fail experiments with We need to get more evidence. And the decision maker only just sits and watches this. Yeah, so it's a form of highly ritualised conflict. Yeah, which actually informs the decision maker, but does it in such a way that it can take place over a very short timescale? Yeah. And without the sort of more traditional committee type approach. So that we think is important. And of course, that will have to be able to be run virtually as very, as well as physically. Yeah, so there's kind of like a visual workflow to follow on this. Yeah. There are potential links with other techniques like entangled trails for evidence gathering. So you can see ways in which this would route into other methods downstream. Yeah. But high level summary, that's what if I optic on it. It's called trial to can partly because the concept is everything is observed. So that's why I took the patent opticon concept. So this is complete transparency, all the conflict is in the open, everybody can observe it. But you can't participate. You can observe but not participate unless you're in a participation role at the time. And that means you listen harder, which is actually important. And try for various obvious reasons. It's in groups of three. So it became a trial. Yeah, it did have a better name, which is more authentic, it was called it that nobody could pronounce it, and I couldn't remember it. So we went back to try to come and and that's all we got the and we actually got a, we've registered a domain name for that, in case we need to use it. I also see a third application of this, which is large scale up Dickens. So that's kind of like Third thing,
which is where you might look at global warming or climate change or income inequality. And so setting up Yeah, worldwide trout, Dickens. And you can run aspects of traffic and in parallel, so for example, if you have a big group of ravens, yeah, remember, you have to combine Raven groups. So seven Raven, groups of three become three Raven group, three beaver groups of seven. If you've got 21, Raven groups, that becomes that becomes unwieldy. So you probably cluster them into smaller groups. And then there's another integration stage at the end, then. Yeah. So you might have three three groups of ravens. Yeah. which results in three separate groups of believers. And then you might do another mix up at the end. And it this is this is all the sudden dance principles is you get people together, they all do the same thing in parallel, you break them up, put them together with people who've done the same thing so they can see the contrast. And then you got the standard complex facilitation question, which is what was the same what was different? What really surprised you? Yeah. Which is still one of the most effective facilitation techniques I think we've created because it forces people to think about what they've heard and not just jump to conclusions. Okay, that's it. Questions, comments, arguments, good ideas.
Dave, did you name this as an operatic method? Did you play No.
I mean, he it is an operatic but it's operatic, it's not operatic. It's liminal. complicated. So you know, that little bit of green which goes into complicated Yeah. So operatic operatic is all about deciding where you go. So you can go into expert assessment, try optical safe to fail experiments or hypothesis generation. Those are your three moves from the operatic liminal.
I have a few questions. Can I go? Go? Um, so the equals, are we limiting the equals to three always to three?
I think if you needed more than that, you probably need to orchestrate them. I'll be quite interested he could you do it with five and have groups of five? Yeah. Which would mean you'd need to run five sessions. And now if that's the case, they'd have to run shorter on all attention span thing. But it would be quite interesting, particularly on a simulation. So this is what the simulation looks like with three. This is what it looks like with five. Yeah, I don't think you could go more than five. Unless the subject matter was so important. And you had a whole week to do it. And that will be interesting. You might then be able to go to seven.
Unless you are going to parallel trial
to the Apollo is the other way to do you might have three groups of three. Yeah. But I think I think there is an argument you what identify what the dominant disciplines are and that determines what Do you should never be less than three? Now that's a golden rule, right? Because if you have less than three, there's always going to be conflict. Yeah. Two groups is conflict, three groups. There's a double accommodation going on. So it's harder. Yeah. But I think you could go to 4567. Yeah, if those are the disciplines that state and I think we should work those through, as I say, running a simulation on that would help understand how it would actually work. Yeah. But then you effectively it's a time box problem, you either shorten the time for each presentation, or you lengthen the overall time for the event.
That was my next question. When you're looking at the Eagles presentation, when you did it, what was the timeframe you gave them, and they
had an hour and a half session. So we run for hour and a half sessions per day, which is kind of like the normal thing you do at events. And so that that meant you had an hour and a half, which was generally, you know, 40 minutes, 45 minutes presentation to 20 minute responses. Yeah, and then a discussion. Yeah, or even groups. We tended to cut the raven group down to less than an hour in the end. So we have variable variable times. Yeah. But again, I
think a good chunk that time isn't just
gonna range. Yeah. So I think and I say, if you're using the, I think this is a general technique, so we got it. This is how you use it as a conference technique. This is how you use it to explore an area, which is where it came from, we want to actually this is me, to be honest here. One of the big focus areas I'm doing on is I'm fed up of being the one who creates the method. So I'm trying to create processes which generate methods. So the trial optica is actually a process to do transdisciplinary study. So it doesn't depend on having generalists around. But you can still do it. So that was one of the reasons for designing it. But then, when we did the field guide, it was the obvious way to handle the conflict between experts. Yeah, because we ritualize it and this cutland for that the pant optic in concept comes through, because the decision makers can observe the process. And I think if I was doing it in a politically fraught situation, I wouldn't allow the tray optic and group to know when they were being observed. And when they weren't. Yeah, I thought I'd set it up. So the idea that the decision making from wandering around the centre, the people have side discussions about what's going on. So it's almost like you really want it in a sort of, in the centre of a theatre in the round with people able to walk around the gallery and have a look at it and see what's going on or look at it on video,
you know, we can do that virtually. So that makes that gives us a positive approach, which we can do virtually. So if we put them in teams of threes, we can observe them without them knowing who we are observing My
mother was.
So just having said that, that there is a weakening of signals to decision makers virtually or physically. Alright, so that there's a whole body of olfactory and other clues we get. So we need to sort of flag that up. Because if this is a real crisis, you are a lot better having people in one area. Yeah, physically interacting. And also the other thing is conflict increases in virtually decreases physically. Yeah, so
I have one more question, I'm
sorry. The Ravens when we send the Ravens out the trial trios of the Ravens, and one Raven comes back to discuss now that they all can manage all biases and stuff, you don't get a lot
of First of all, that they all come back, and the people who aren't in the raven role, sit around and observe. Right as the Eagles reserve, they're not allowed to contribute they just a bit and it's quite that's actually quite interesting to say here, people. Yeah, and they realise how what they've said has been interpreted, but they can't correct it. And and that's kind of like really important, particularly for the Eagles. Yeah. And I think these are some of the options you make. So this idea, do you actually allocate the trios at random? Do you allocate the trios to maximise similar thinking within the trio? Yeah, which means when the Ravens come together, you'll get high contrast, or do you mix up the raven group, so some compromise takes place early on? And the thing one, yeah, I think these are things which need to be laid out in the documentation. You can do it this way. It has these pluses and minuses. You can do it this way. It has these pluses and minuses and then you choose how you do it.
That's me.
I am just thinking about In terms of kind of intra community conflicts, yeah. And, and, and because and just thinking about your, what you mean by expertise because I, because I'm really interested in how it might be used. And there's a kind of a different way that we might think about experts and expertise. So I could imagine people who've got opposing strong views and have a lot to say and have a depth of experience being able to present and it would be a different thing. And it would be a different way of handling that kind of presentation. So I'm just interested in in in any application or thinking you you've done around them.
And remember it. A lot of the methods came from when I was working in indigenous communities in Australia in the 1970s. Yeah, pink, caca do which was, shall we say, a formative experience. It's the first time I've ever seen somebody murdered is a mind security guard literally shot an Aboriginal activist in front of me killed him. And we went to the police. And they said, it's only an ABA. And we got taken out of territory. And the worst thing is nobody in the World Council chooses in Geneva would listen to me. Because Australia was an ally against South Africa. And they were really focused on apartheid. It was by the genocide in Australia, it was a tribal conflict that either way, I made myself unpopular. Yeah. So and one of the things that I mean, the concept of ritual conflict I got from looking at indigenous decision making. And nobody was nice about stuff. They were highly ritualised forms of argument. Yeah. So you would have a massive level of conflict, and then the solution would emerge from it. And actually, ritual descent came from them. And we did a big project up in Darwin on educational policy. And at the end of day, one, two things that happen, one is all the headmaster's walk out of the event. Because they said there were no clear learning objectives. Every time they were they were in a group, they got moved to another group. So the whole thing was incoherent. And they marched out in protest, right. But the minister just let them go, because for the first time ever, an indigenous group have taken part with a white group. We started off in separate rooms. And you can see the indigenous grouping, getting curious. And then one of the uncles came up to me and said, Okay, you've got you've got it. And remember, he said white fella got it. He said, we'll take part and they moved into the process, and there'll be never seen that before. Yeah, and the reason was we that I mean, that was the reason it was a highly ritualised conflict. It wasn't one which privileged the people who could play the verbal games and dominate a group. Because the ritual allowed everybody to have a voice but didn't allow anybody to dominate. And it wasn't a new age fluffy bunny, everybody voices or equal nonsense. It was, this is actually ritualised conflict. Yeah. So I think there's considerable potential for this. Yeah. And I think this is why I think we'll see this develop and spawn a whole body of sub methods, right. It also links in with the work we're doing on peace and conflict at the moment. So I'm still waiting to hear on this in the States. But that's where we're hoping that we will have schoolchildren as church youth, people and sports youth, people acting as journalists into their community. And once we see, once we've identified common problems across the political divide, then we'll put effectively Raven groups to work on the problems. But the raven groups will be mixed red and blue. So actually, we won't talk about the political divide, we'll have them doing things about things. They agree a common problems locally, it's a micro, it's a hyper localization approach. Yeah. And I think the trail optic can can be part of that. Now, I've actually had that discussion. But what's quite interesting is the peace and reconciliation, dominant ideological approach, you know, the Boston guys and the Georgetown guys. They're so locked into them running workshops itself is incredible. Yeah, they can't and it's the same with all of the cybernetics and systems dynamics guys, it's why they're attacking this stuff. Because the whole reason that true, you know, they want to be in dialogue in a two day workshop where they facilitate the process and everybody has to find three positive things in everybody of all of those techniques are about privilege in the role of the facilitator and giving the facilitator dominance. And as I famously said, once which Sangha has not forgiven me for you guys in neocolonialist because you've decided the solution to every every problem is to everybody become a white liberal MIT academic. And to think like them, and I said that that's not going to work because different cultures think in different ways.
So Can I just ask them that when in the settings, I'm thinking about the kind of three kind of x three goals? And might I'm just trying to imagine how you would do it where they might need a bit of support to get to the position of being able to present. And, and yet, I, I'm hearing what you're saying about not having that really obvious upfront facilitator role. And I'm just trying to imagine how I how I might sit, I
did think the screw the other day, all right. Because I was well, I was trying to think about is, can we have a position where the Eagles have experience but aren't able to articulate it? Yeah, yeah. And then the Ravens actually can act as academic observers. So the example I thought up is what happened if you wanted to, let's take the longitude problem. Right, that was a massive problem in navigation. Because we can measure latitude, but not longitude, there are multiple solutions to that. Now, what you could do there is take a Peloponnesian navigator, British naval captain. Yeah, and somebody that you could take people with different backgrounds who understood navigation, and get them to talk about how they navigate because anybody can articulate something that expert up. Yeah. And then have scientists effectively in the raven groups to observe the conversations of the people who do the work. I think that would actually be really interesting in some, some communities. Yeah. And I did one in IBM, where we got IBM executives to go into Yonkers, and find people who are natural leaders in the community. And actually just follow them around for two days, observe what they did keep notes and do whatever the person wants him to do. So that concept of observation, but staged observation, or you don't have to have a hierarchy in which the Eagles are the most expert going down. In terms of academic knowledge, you could have a reverse and then the Eagles just have deep experience and can talk about that experience. And then you can use academics as the raven groups. Yeah, to actually observe that. So it then it then, interestingly, becomes another type of research. So we've already got inductive research, which is dominant. So that's, you know, things like vike. Right, observed people as the expert draw conclusions. And we've got abductive research, which is what we do with sense maker, which is distributed ethnography. Yeah, no expert, this then becomes another type of another type of research. So effect, I mean, you know, dangerous, you have to be very careful that people treat when treated like love animals. Yeah. But it would actually be quite interesting. And it would also be interesting for the Eagles to be more like a raven group. So the eagle groups may appoint a spokesman who takes the eagle role. So that will be a pre Eagle process. So you might, for example, bring a group of people together from a project in Chicago. Yeah, from, you know, a township in South Africa and from, you know, somewhere on the outskirts of Alice Springs, which is the most depressing places I've spent my life in, and that bring them together in the group to discuss a situation without facilitation. And then they each appoint somebody to go into the legal role. So you have a sort of pre process on that. And again, I think that would be really powerful. So what what you've got is different components that you assemble in different ways. But you You're always running this concept of uneven numbers interacting with observation. Yes, that's kind of like an organising principle.
Thank you. Um, yeah, that's getting the club's going.
Thank you for the question was I should have raised those anywhere, but I completely forgotten about that. So you already know what you know when you need to know it as somebody wants it. anymore. Yeah, I
got a few. Maybe you mentioned this already, but I didn't get it. What would be the perfect number of there is for the amount of participants. I got the structure about the Ravens eagles, and I mean, but what about the participants?
We generally run it with sort of 21 seems to be a sort of much less than that you start to get a problem. Because you haven't got enough variety. This is anecdotal, I should say, right. If I was doing this as a as a peace in conflict process, that I could probably select people more. So I could manage with fewer people. But when we had open events, it's kind of like We need about 21 to get enough diversity because people chose to pay on it. I don't think there's an upper limit. Yeah, I think things changes, but I don't think there's an upper limit.
Yeah. Okay,
I got failures, the lowest possible number is 15, five groups. So you get five groups of three and three groups of five, I think you would have a real problem if you went below that. Yeah. But the upper limit is just a matter of orchestrating the dance, extending the time or whatever is my feeling. But I don't know, because we haven't yet run it on massive scale. And I've run complex facilitation with 2000 people in an army hanger for the US Navy. Yeah. And you can actually, it takes three days of preparation and five days of recovery. And two days of really intensive work, because actually is a facility when you do that. They actually built a gantry for me, because I said, I do not want to be able to go on the floor. So I'm the lead facilitator, I mustn't hear what people are saying My job is to orchestrate the interactions. And we'll have people reporting back to me, and I can manage it that way. So you the scale doesn't. Complex approaches don't seem to have a problem with scale. And given the science is actually all about scaling. That's complex system scale, by decomposition, recombination and interaction. So you only have a problem with scale where you over structure things.
Okay, so since the method is about people listening to each other, and the structured way, so if we get 100 people, it would be really difficult to mix them up in a way that everybody listens to each other. So is this No, that's where
you break it up. So what you might then have is four parallel streams. So instead of 21, people, you might have five groups of 21, working in parallel with the same process, and then add another session at the end where you integrate across the five groups. Yeah, so then you break that up that way? So this is if you think about it, it's all it's all dances? Yeah, within numbers. Yeah. And every time you increase the parallelism, you have to add another stage for integration, unless you choose is unless you choose to abandon.
Okay, and one more.
You.
So you mentioned several goals or purposes of this method, and one of them being too, like a replacement or better version of conferences where we can listen to experts and have different angles. And another one that's conflict solving. And I wonder, so in this moment, of egos or experts picking, and then they listening to people digesting what they heard, were there any moments of like, emotional rush? How does it go? How is it managed?
Yeah, it's quite interesting what I mean, I've let the last few All right. And the principle of complex facilitation is it's designed for lazy facilitators. Yeah, because you don't get involved and you don't walk around it and I keep on to explain this to people you do not walk around and go into the groups because then they'll depend on you. The whole process is about that. Come down here sit and have a cup of coffee in the morning or in the afternoon we do it what we actually found is sitting down with the eagles and the owls so while the raven groups were out the eagles and the owls would get together and talk and often that was the greatest synthesis because and certainly after the raven groups you were having different conversations. So then we kind of like started to tell the owls you need to record this stuff. Yeah. The other thing we do is we normally we normally video the process we don't video The Raven groups, but we video the eagle presentations and responses. Because that's kind of like the public performance that we don't video the other groups because that will inhibit people, and then that becomes an asset. Yeah, it also allows if you're slick on this and you can be set with modern technology is the raven groups can go back over the video if they want. And again, that's a way what you often find in small groups is somebody will dominate the memory. So actually having the artefact available, you know, is a way of democratising memory access. You do have to be careful though we have one and I've never forgiven the individual responsible. He didn't like the process. I think he was used to being the one in charge. So when he was the Raven, he decided To read a pony composed to reflect on the whole process, rather than contribute to the discussion. And I remember and it was one of the Eagles turned to me and say who's this potential is Pratap forgotten that? I was I was thinking it, but I didn't want to say it. But she said it. And so you did. I think one things we need on this is current codes of contact or behavioural for people. So you're the Raven, you have the raven card, and it actually summarises you know, you've got this long to present, you must do these things, you must do these things. So we need some of those sort of artefacts, particularly when you're ready. And that's why I think, you know, things like tabards and badges as you start to run at scale. So for example, when we did the big one in Darwin, we had 500 teachers in a hole. Yeah, and there were only three of us on the facilitation team. I mean, that was me, Viv and Sonia, right. But what we did beforehand is everybody had a badge with a bird name a badge with an animal name a badge with a plant name. And so I could say everybody with x, everybody with y. So I didn't have to worry about moving people around, you could create a really simple process to do it. And so that that sort of thing needs to be in the method as well, because you need you, you don't want the when you're moving between two people, between groups, it doesn't matter how clear you make the instructions, somebody will get it wrong, and then there'll be embarrassed. So creating artefacts, which means you always get it right now is more sensible.
Thank you.
So they've on the emotional component, this combination, recombination mixing people, it is pretty taxing because I did experience this. And I know that there were people who are ready to leave the whole event, right. And there were some who just loved it and left. So which one Whistler
did, we did remedy this by bringing the individual back, but it can be really uneasy. Yeah. And I think you know, one thing that I didn't know about that, which shows that the group self regulated, right, so you also now know who I'm talking about. So please don't report it. Right. I thought nobody's gonna hear from us, I think. I think one thing you have to understand the conference is cetacean in Darwin, or they have masters walked out. And they threatened to walk out unless I cooperated. And I refused. And I think you have to be prepared for that. No, I think you have to be honest about the process up front so that people are aware of that. And what I've generally found, and it may or may not be true in this case, I don't know. All right, the people who walk out to the people who are being frustrated because they used to be able to control the discussion. That's true. Yeah, that that's their problem. Right? There. They have a role that they normally play and then not been allowed to play because they just somebody else has to represent them. They don't like that. Yeah, they have to be silent for large amounts of time rather than being the dominant voice in the group. Yeah. And yeah, one of the one of the rules on complex visitation is be prepared for some people to walk out.
Sorry, Dave, I had a question. So with such levels of interactions, do participants feel sort of drained out? Has there been a point where they could not have anything to contribute?
We've never I don't think I've ever seen that we we did find that introducing the sort of walk or the physicality in the middle made life easier. And in some cases, we actually ran, for example, a trio session, so I can't read it was Whistler one or Whistler to Darius. Yeah. And with the one was traumatic for the reasons that we actually ran a trio group while walking. Yeah, rather than in the physical space, and I think that has value. I think the other thing we also found and Whistler was a beautiful site, is the physicality of the place made a difference. And that's one of my worries on virtual. Yeah. Yes. And also on the physical place. You have this sort of end of day gin outside, what's the having birds have a meal together? That that actually, I think in a virtual thing, you'd have to think of a way to substitute for that. Yeah, I agree. 100%. And in the end, it was very satisfying, right? Because those things started to emerge. But there was a moment of pause and lick have
they I would wonder, do we have any specific artefacts to be produced throughout the process is the other some formats we're working towards.
The artefacts we traditionally produced for the the retreat format is the videos of the speakers and a series of follow through integration projects, which people do or do not take out. Yeah. Now we want to improve that. So we actually want to get to a standard form or structure that people complete, so that they can see. So we want more structure to the sort of output. Yeah. I think when you move into conflict resolution, we got to think through that. I think that will require more artefacts, in fact, generally, I think the way methods really work is you artefacts are more valuable than facilitation. Right, because they're neutral. And everything I've been doing over the years is to reduce the role of the facilitator as much as possible. Yeah. And the more you got artefacts that manage that, the more the group themselves can take responsibility for
anymore, we need to just change the name of the facilitator.
And I, we thought about that, and I were really open to that, I think, because you're not a conductor, either, because the conductor is too dominant or character convener. Yeah, that's Yeah, that's good. And I'm happy without going back to my trade union background in the 70s. And I liked the concept of conveners and comrades. All right. But I think, I'm not sure I think we need to think about the role. It may it may be, to be honest, easier to give us an animal name. Yeah, they do the same sort of thing. The animal names come at work. Yeah. And if you know your legends, you'll know why I used Raven for the middle group.
Anyway, some, some way of explicitly identifying the conduct and the behaviour and that what sits behind the facility is really important. How are we doing that?
You need somebody who can intervene if things go wrong, right? You never quite get rid of that. That role. Yeah. But it could be a team role rather than individual roles. So one things I've thought about is making it an hour function. So you basically have a group of owls and you have artefacts and the owls can actually manage the process between them. So you don't have the single dominant individual that that's another possibility, but its pluses and minuses, right? In terms of the way it works, now, when I've been doing it, to be quite honest, I haven't done much on the process, because that's already been worked out in advance. My job is to ask questions and synthesise the Eagles. Yeah, and to contribute to that. So that's, to be honest, that's kind of like me approaching a generalist role. So it's spotting things in common between them to suggest them and such like that, which does seem to be necessary.
What about the magpie? Dave? Which last one?
Yeah, that was sort of playing with the magpie instead of the Coyote. Yeah, or the magpies cup as well. So magpies pick up bright, shiny things. And thanks for that, Doris, I forgotten that so that magpies pick up, pick up bright, shiny things and take them back to their nests. So that was another rule. Yeah.
Okay, guys coming up to the top of the hour, and I've got to start another one. Not on this subject, but on constraint mapping. So this was the first trip to concession it's being recorded, it will go into slack group. There'll be a second one I think, later on today or tomorrow. I can't remember which which will pick up the North American audience.