Make Sense of Complexity and Co-Create Value with Viv Read | Ep 21

Viv Read of Complexability joins us from Brisbane, Australia! We talk about complexity, sensemaking, and co-creating value for clients and customers – even in times of crisis and upheaval!

Viv has extensive experience as a manager and consultant in systems change, stakeholder engagement, culture change, and strategy and innovation. Building on expertise developed in major workplace reform projects for organizations such as Lend Lease, Carlton United Breweries, Department of Employment.

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Transcript

Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

MARK:
All right, Viv, why don't you just start off by telling us what attracted you to complexity and what called you to help individuals and organizations to understand it better.

Viv Read:
Well, when I first started my in the world of work, I didn't know it was called complexity. I was just drawn to working in making sense of the world of work, having the world of work be a better place for people. I started my life actually as a social work degree, but became very clear that the bureaucracy and I didn't actually have a very good fit. And in my final year at university, I discovered a industrial relations course. I discovered Professor Bill Ford and did industrial relations in my final year and that took me on a fairly right-hand turn. And Bill saw industrial relations as a sociological event rather than a legal event. So I got involved with teaching industrial relations, studying industrial relations. And so my early world of work for me was all about what made things in the workplace tick and how could it be a better way of people and work. It was only later that I understood that what I had the... fortunate to be involved with was a whole lot of natural complexity workers. In those days we called them mavericks or people who were prepared to challenge the status quo and do things differently. And in the 70s in Australia there weren't very many women involved in the world of industrial relations and I was fortunate enough when the Labour government got elected in the early 70s. and they had a manifesto of saying there needed to be women on all inquiries. There weren't very many of us involved in industrial relations. So I got caught up in government inquiries and major change initiatives and so on, which provided a pretty fruitful platform of learning for me. So I didn't know it was called Complexity at the time, but looking back now when I met Dave and there were models and frameworks and language, I could go, Aha! that actually makes sense of things that we were doing, but we didn't necessarily have it inside that theoretical framework at the time.

MARK:
I always find it interesting how so many of us are on a path and you're into it, but you don't know you're into it until

Viv Read:
Yeah!

MARK:
you read a book or you get a definition and then you start to pull on

Viv Read:
Yes,

MARK:
it a little harder.

Viv Read:
yes. So I guess the theoretical frame came from socio-technical systems, which was coming out of Europe and Sweden, and there was a lot of work happening at that time in the OECD, but it was very focused on workplaces and work environments, as opposed to the work of Dave in knowledge management and other places, but the principles were very much the same. which was about how to understand the systems of work and social systems better, and how do you make an impact of change differently.

MARK:
And you mentioned Bill Ford was a mentor

Viv Read:
Yeah,

MARK:
to you to get you started

Viv Read:
yes.

MARK:
in this.

Viv Read:
Bill was an interesting guy. He was a mature age student who actually came to the US and was a member of the Freedom Rides here in Mississippi. Bill was then lectured in industrial relations at New South Wales University. But he was really ahead of his time. So he was an advisor to the OECD, to the Swedish government, Japanese government, and had a view about the world of work and of change. And he coined terms like multi-dimensional change. I've just been looking at some of the old work that we did early as 1999. He and I were giving papers around entrepreneurial project management, how to shift the focus and so on. And we got involved in doing some pretty significant big systems change in workplace reform when there was a big change in the Australian system in the late 80s. So I started off as his student and we ended up working together in a number of significant projects. So he died. five or six years ago, but yes was a very important part of my life for 30 40 years

MARK:
And as you carry on the work, I mean, we were talking at the beginning before we started recording about how systems drive behaviors. Was

Viv Read:
Yeah!

MARK:
systems the first stop on the way to complexity thinking?

Viv Read:
Yes it was because the industrial relations system when I first was working in Australia was very legalistic. We had over 60% of the workforce was unionized and it was a very legalistic system controlled by rules, regulations and so on. So whatever change you wanted to do what we would see as a very ordered and compliant system, if you use the terms of complexity now. We had a view of the world that was imposed, which said it was about equity standardization. So one size fits all and so on and so forth. So looking at how to implement change inside that environment absolutely had to be not about how do you change the behavior of people, because it was about how could you shift the system to provide enough space so that different behaviour was possible before you remotely started to look at what you could, what behaviour change was required for people.

MARK:
Hmm

Viv Read:
And so the big system change that happened in the 80s of moving from that way of looking at rewarding people to another meant that we could then start doing some very different things around and a systems level would then open up the space for people to behave differently. How can we challenge the assumptions about all unions are bad or all unions are this or all unions are that, some of the stereotypes and assumptions that we're running. So that was my... the basics and the foundations from whence I came. And nothing over the last 50 years of my employment has shifted me from that being a reasonable start point. Yeah.

MARK:
getting that making sure that the systems promote the right behaviors, effective behaviors.

Viv Read:
Well, and are coherent. And so for example, I see things like people, organizations spend huge amounts of money, for example, on we want to be customer focused. So they'll train lots and lots and lots of people in being customer focused and spend huge amounts of money on training. And then when you look at what are the, so here was the classic. I walked into one organization and there was a into the call center. and I could see people talking on the phone, but with their other hand they were picking up a phone when it rang and after three rings they'd pick it up and they'd put it down again. Because the performance requirement was answer a phone in three rings. Not talk to anybody, but to answer the phone in three rings. So they were meeting the performance objective of being customer focused by

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
answering the phone in three rings. Nobody was counting how many times. these poor customers were being cut off, but they were meeting the performance objective about being customer focused. So the system was creating the most appalling number of dissatisfied customers. So it didn't matter how many hours of skills training you put those staff through, there was not gonna be an improvement in customer satisfaction. because the system was wrong and what they were measuring was wrong. And the measurement systems don't get me started. Anyway, we then go to something like, let's have collaboration. Oh, yes, let's have cooperation and collaboration. And yet all of the measurement systems often are about individual performance, which are all against collaborative effort.

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
So we have managed only on a few occasions to get shared collaborative performance requirements at the very top and you have to start at the top. One organisation we managed to put in that 60% of performance expectations of the senior team could only be met through collaborative effort with at least three others of their colleagues and their business units. Now didn't that change behaviour?

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
It didn't matter again how many hours and days and months of training about how to be collaborative and what are the skills and performance requirements and character, good characteristics of a collaborative leader. I mean, I can fill in more forms around that till the cows come home, but

MARK:
Right.

Viv Read:
I'm not going to change unless the system says this is now what is expected and more than that, this is now the environment now makes it possible for you to collaborate.

MARK:
So you see, say I'm a CEO of a big corporation or I'm

Viv Read:
Yup.

MARK:
the executive vice president for sales of a massive distribution organization and we've got high octane performing people and we're gonna put them on these metrics and they're gonna have so many meetings

Viv Read:
Hahaha

MARK:
and I'm gonna reward Viv. She's got the most meetings. She has the most capacity in her schedule. And then we get to the point where we realize that These numbers are coming back and these salespeople look phenomenal, but we're not making any sales. We're not, we're not driving

Viv Read:
Yup.

MARK:
any business. We're not, we're not making any customers better off. What do you, what do you say to those leaders? How do you bridge that?

Viv Read:
It's about, if you go to something like, this is where I find the Kenevim framework really useful, to talk to people like that and without going to the theory. Because one of the things that I have learnt to talk about is you have to monitor and measure everything that matters. Now the numbers do matter. It does matter that I have appointments and that I see people. But it's also important that you understand what impact am I making. It's not just how many meetings that I go to, but the impact that I'm making and the feedback that I might be getting in terms of the relational component about what I'm not just what I'm doing, but how am I doing it and what influence am I leaving behind. So that would be one of the things I would say. The second thing I would say to them is, look, there's a cultural thing going on, and contextual thing going on, and the sorts of things that I might do in some part of your company or with some part of your product may be very different to what's needed in a different part, either because of the nature of the product or the nature of the cohort to whom I'm selling. And so to have a standard set of metrics irrespective of your product line, or of the cohort to whom you're selling, doesn't make any sense. And so you have to be a little more nuanced than you are currently being. It's a bit heavy handed.

MARK:
Hmm

Viv Read:
So I would suggest to him that there would be a way of thinking about being a little more sophisticated around the way in which you're to get a very different kind of dashboard created. Because... he needs to think about his very big organization as a conglomeration of smaller groups who collect up to make his big organization rather than one big organization operating as a single entity because if he thinks about it that's not the way the world operates. So

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
how do we get an ecosystem going with groups who make sense in a collective that come together? rather than trying to find a single scoreboard. Now if at that

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
stage she's glazed over and looking and saying that's all too hard, then we part company, which happens often.

MARK:
Yeah. Now

Viv Read:
Because

MARK:
is that because

Viv Read:
there are.

MARK:
I was going to say, you know, the, well, the, the big giant consulting company that came in, they had

Viv Read:
Hahaha!

MARK:
all these spreadsheets and numbers and

Viv Read:
Oh yeah!

MARK:
they told me that, and if that didn't work, we'll just get rid of 10%.

Viv Read:
Absolutely, absolutely. And you can do that for so long, and then you are either in crisis or you're being bought out.

MARK:
Yeah. So for the companies that are out there that in earnest, um, believe that, so, you know, that we talk about John Boyd on

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
our show and

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
our work. Um, he had a, he had a, uh, uh, uh, uh, that admonition people, ideas, technology or people, ideas, things, or people, ideas, hardware, always in that order that people always had to come first. So as I, as I look over the work that you're doing, it seems to me that when you go into a company and you explore what's going on, you're getting to the bottom of what the people are thinking and the perspectives of the people. And you're measuring, you can see numbers, but get context behind it, purpose, why, what's really going on. Is that a fair restatement?

Viv Read:
Look, absolutely. One of the things, if I go back to my history around doing this, when we, when Bill Ford and I and other colleagues first started to tackle how do you do things differently inside a very, and some of these were pretty toxic industrial relations environments, they had years of patterns of tents. conflict and so on. How do you change those patterns? It's a very human issue and it's deeply embedded. I was working in environments like the waterfront, your longshoremen, mining industries, manufacturing, construction and so on. They were deeply embedded and deeply entrenched patterns that had been there for a very long time. But at the end of the day, it was absolutely about people. And so the assumptions that we went in with were, at the end of the day, people wanted to do a good job. So that was the first assumption that we made. People didn't wake up in the morning and say, we want to come to work and be a bunch of bastards and get up each other's noses. And generally, we started with the assumption whether they were the managing director or the guy on the line, people actually wanted to do a good job. That was assumption

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
one. Assumption two was that there were ingrained patterns. that needed to have, and in today's language we say we had to shift perspectives and be able to show that there was another way or many other ways that there were options to do things differently. And so our job was to create options. And the third thing was it had to be within the environment that they were used to. So it wasn't a matter of so much of the early throw everything out, there had to be the burning platform, the whole world had to be different. What we knew to be true was, it had to be within the world that they knew, so that there was safety in making some shifts. One of my other mentors was the late, great Charlie Fitzgibbon, who was the federal union organizer for the waterside workers in Australia. And he took me aside one day and he said, listen mate, you can't change the world all at once. A bit at a time mate, a bit

MARK:
Huh.

Viv Read:
at a time. And I will always remember that because even if you have the grand vision, for people it's a bit at a time.

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
And Charlie and I came up with this notion of, and it became known as the one-off no prejudice. We'd get people to say, Just try this once and if it doesn't work, we can go back to the way it was. Because what Charlie and I both knew was, as soon as you got people to change just a little thing, try something once differently. It could never go back to the way it was

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
because you'd shifted perspective.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
So Charlie and I and his colleagues and a number of others on the waterfront, this is when we were introducing containerization into the Port of Brisbane. back in the 70s, rather than trying to sell the great big grand change plan and tell everybody how wonderful the world was going to be and so on and so forth, which was the fashionable change strategy at the time, we did things like just let one ship in and depending on where it berths, we'll have these sorts of arrangements and then when that's done, We'll sit down and we'll work out what worked and what didn't and whether we can do it again. And we did it slow, slow, slow, slow and we got container ships into the Port of Brisbane without a single day's stoppage. And it's the only port in Australia where that happened. And that was under the guidance of these guys because I was prepared to listen and they took this poor little young sheila under their wing. I ended up there, how I ended up there is a whole other story. But they taught me. complexity. They taught me how to do this, learning by doing, in

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
a way that made sense. But it was always about, yes we wanted change in the system, but the people had to be part of it right from the word go. It wasn't sitting in some back room with grand strategies and grand plans and then delivering it unto. It was always bringing in along them a step by step kind of thing.

MARK:
Hmm.

Viv Read:
basis and that's always been part of it.

MARK:
Sounds like you... Oh, I said it sounds like you waged something of a complexity insurgency.

Viv Read:
Yes, and I guess another, because as I say, there were not very many women involved in this work in Australia in the 70s and 80s, and I made a very conscious decision that I wasn't going to be pigeonholed and only work in organisations or industries that were dominated by women. So my stubborn pig-headed Irish background, ancestry, meant that I ended up very deliberately working in places like the waterfront and the mining industry and manufacturing and so on. And it was a bit of an insurgency, it was a bit different, but I was also fortunate that there were enough mavericks, people who were prepared to be trying to do things differently that provided opportunities for me to do some interesting work and some learning by doing and over the years we did some stuff which was revolutionary inside a fairly traditional system.

MARK:
was a lot of it more bottom up.

Viv Read:
with support from the top,

MARK:
Yeah. So,

Viv Read:
had to

MARK:
so

Viv Read:
have

MARK:
a

Viv Read:
top

MARK:
flow

Viv Read:
cover.

MARK:
kind of a flow up and down. Yeah.

Viv Read:
Absolutely. A couple of greenfield sites in the mining industry. There was a very special man called Mike Blackwell, late Mike Blackwell. This was with CRA Mining, South Africa. He had worked in mines in South Africa, Papua New Guinea and Northwest Western Australia. There was going to be a new open cut mine in New South Wales. He pulled together a group of us, about five I think, and he... put us in a room for a week and said, design me a mine that's got nothing to do with the way mines are currently run. However, it must be unionized, it must meet all of the regulations. So when I sit back now, he could have been using the principles of complexity in the Kennebun framework, absolutely, but in 1970,

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
whenever it was, we didn't have it. But it was very clearly, he gave us the boundaries. And he said, now design me a work system. And so we had a multi-skilling four level mine designed in 1978 and operating in Australia for CRA. Now, most of the rest of their mines were fairly traditional but it was then picked up and run by Argold Diamond Mines and a range of others. And... we ended up doing things like, instead of the traditional very detailed behaviour codes that dominated the mining industry at the time, which again in complexity terms would sit in the very ordered space of long, long, long, long lists of bags, what I call the bags of schoonz, what you must and must not do. At Woodlawn, and then was picked up by a couple of others, there was a single statement. everyone on this site will be fair, safe and honest. Now that was signed off by everybody. There was nothing else but that single statement. No visions, no values, no things on walls of people flying and eagles and people in canoes and none of

MARK:
Ha

Viv Read:
that,

MARK:
ha.

Viv Read:
one single solitary statement. And the only other thing that then accompanied it was, and if you think that somebody is breaking this, this is what you do. And the guarantee was that a group would be convened within the hour of someone making a complaint to have the conversation to decide whether that had been broken and if so what would happen about it. And it applied to everyone.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
Now the first time a group of guys raised a concern with a manager from the mill, there was a collective holding of breath to see how serious it was that the company would follow this. They were right, he was a brilliant boffin, but a lousy people manager. And

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
because of his boffin-ness, he was unsafe.

MARK:
You might have to translate that one for the

Viv Read:
Okay,

MARK:
gringos

Viv Read:
Boffen.

MARK:
in the audience.

Viv Read:
Okay, right, okay, Boffen. He was highly technical and scientific and

MARK:
Ah,

Viv Read:
so

MARK:
technocrat.

Viv Read:
caught up with... Technocrat, thank you!

MARK:
Yeah,

Viv Read:
And he was so

MARK:
okay.

Viv Read:
caught up with

MARK:
I like

Viv Read:
all of...

MARK:
boffin better. I'm gonna start using that one.

Viv Read:
Okay, it's an Australian word. So often he and so what meant what that meant was he kind of forgot sometimes about the basics for people management and safety. So the end result was they made sure that he could continue to be his scientific excellence. Something else was put in place for the people management and people and things progressed. So

MARK:
So sort of self-regulated.

Viv Read:
Yeah, yeah. And what that meant in the mill was different to what it meant on the mine site, was different to what it meant in the maintenance area. But the principle, the operating

MARK:
Principles,

Viv Read:
principle was

MARK:
yeah.

Viv Read:
absolutely the same. Then when we picked that up and took it to Argyle Diamond Mines, now it was the first and only, I think, workplace in Australia where special legislation had to be passed that enabled random strip searching. because it's a diamond mine.

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
So we had a really interesting dialogue going on. How do you make coherent, fair, safe, and honest with random strip searching?

MARK:
That sounds

Viv Read:
So this,

MARK:
complex.

Viv Read:
well it was, but what it simply meant was that we had to have a conversation about on what basis would these external security guards, what did it mean for them to be fair, safe and honest in the way they exercise their role of random strip search.

MARK:
Hmm. Again, very self regulatory, very, very

Viv Read:
Absolutely,

MARK:
organic.

Viv Read:
absolutely

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
and the people on the site had that conversation.

MARK:
What do you think when you think of these power CEOs or these power executives that have gone to all the quote unquote right schools and they have all the quote unquote right graduate degrees, what's their reluctance to experiment with these things that tap into human nature, that tap into the way people actually work and interact with each other?

Viv Read:
It seems to me there's a couple of things from my experience. The first is that what gets taught is often... and a belief that what they are being taught is right. And if they only do this, then it will be so. So

MARK:
And

Viv Read:
this

MARK:
if it

Viv Read:
upset.

MARK:
didn't, if it didn't happen, then they didn't do it hard enough

Viv Read:
or it was somebody else's fault.

MARK:
or somebody else's fault. Yeah.

Viv Read:
There's the thing of the cult of finding, of copying, whether it was in their day, whether it was the Jack Welshes or the Bill Gates or whoever it would be like these people, the case

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
study of. There's a... tendency to here's the aspirational if you if you only do this you will be successful you will be wonderful you will be you will be you will be. I'm reminded of G.J. Dusseldorf created Lend Lease Foundation which was one of the most successful organizations in Australia for many years and civil and civic lend lease and so on and I did some work for them many years ago and he once said to me he said you know Vivian I'm going to have to leave this company. Because as the founder, I find myself surrounded by incompetence and sycophants and sometimes in the same package. I am not getting honest information.

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
So he found ways, he very deliberately found ways, including employing ratbags like me on occasions, to come in and give information that he wasn't getting honestly.

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
Now we've got very different ways to get unimpeded information to be cut through. So I think that part of it's about What kind of information are they actually getting that is true and honest, that truly reflects what's going on as opposed to what's being filtered?

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
That is part of, it's part of the deal. The second thing I think that I come across all the time, and even now is who else has done it and have they been successful and proved it to me. So this fear of not being successful means that they often are not successful

MARK:
Mm.

Viv Read:
as they sit in the fear of not being. and not being the extent to which short term measurements for shareholder return and bonuses and so on get in the way. I'm not so sure about the American system, but in Australia we certainly don't have payoff for long term vision. Everything's on short cycles.

MARK:
Yeah, short-term

Viv Read:
So if you're

MARK:
thinking.

Viv Read:
trying Absolutely, and the payment in terms of share prices and bonuses and so on. So if you're trying to get somebody to buy into something which has maybe got a two, three, four, five year payoff

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
as opposed to a quick fix, then the people who come in with a quick fix, even if it's going to get much more traction than someone like me who comes in and says, hey, this is going to be. longer term but over the longer term you're going to get bigger pay off

MARK:
It's almost like, let me,

Viv Read:
and again

MARK:
let me

Viv Read:
it's

MARK:
come in and let me give you this pill. Um, and

Viv Read:
Yep.

MARK:
that way you don't have to exercise and eat correctly and, and get good night's sleep and other things. So I'll just give you this very quick fix.

Viv Read:
which is again a systems issue. Now one of the reasons why we could do so much good work in their lease is because at the time it was a private company. It wasn't listed. It was a very successful company, but it wasn't listed. And so the way in which people were enumerated, the kind of things they were prepared to do, for example, Civil and Civic was their project business. And at the very top, amongst the project group, project managers, if they couldn't find enough projects that their skills were needed in, then they knew it was time to leave. They didn't have to be sat. They redunderised

MARK:
Mm.

Viv Read:
themselves. There's probably no such thing.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
But as key project managers, I mean, Civil and Civic had all sorts of projects, they had to find enough work for themselves. This is at the top. This is not the subcontractors. G.J. Düsseldorf had a whole range of very different ways. He would go on site to a project manager, and if that project manager couldn't tell him when he last had a beer with his counterpart in the union movement, couldn't answer questions about that guy's family so that all of the relationships had been built up. prior to when there was a drama, and construction at that time was pretty rough and ready in this country, two strikes and he was gone,

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
because he absolutely believed in building the relationships before there was trouble, so that when there was trouble, so all of that was happening way, way before, in the 80s, because of the nature of the man. And

MARK:
Hmm.

Viv Read:
it was an incredibly successful company. But that's not the thing that people wanted to see or to. And one of the things I have always wondered is why organizations which have been incredibly successful, people will want to hear, go to conferences, hear the case studies, even go and visit, but are very reluctant to actually pick up and do anything themselves.

MARK:
Mm hmm. You got to do the work that we say that a lot

Viv Read:
Oh

MARK:
on

Viv Read:
yeah!

MARK:
our show, you have

Viv Read:
Yep.

MARK:
to do

Viv Read:
Yep.

MARK:
the work and a lot of people are averse to doing the real work. Yeah.

Viv Read:
they want to just copy?

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
So this country had a love affair with all things Scandinavian on a couple of cycles and I can remember my friends from the colleagues from the then Swedish Institute for Working Life saying do you think you could ask them teach them how to ask the right questions? Because all people were wanting was give us the the obvious the rules and a copy of the papers not understand that underneath it sits assumptions and processes and things that have to be in place in order to make it work.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
Wanting the quick fix.

MARK:
So there's, so, so let's say there's a business leader out there that has taken over the helm of a company and, and he or she is that maverick and says, you know, I'm not going to have a decimation on my watch, you know, like the, like the, the previous, the previous administrations. Um, why don't we try something different? Why don't we try, uh, getting numbers with narratives. Talk about that. How do we connect with those companies

Viv Read:
Sure.

MARK:
to get those narratives that really matter and in the end unlock the cognitive power and the profitability and as you said earlier, once that cat comes out of the bag, it doesn't go back in. And that's a good thing when you're unleashing the cognitive power of humans.

Viv Read:
So there's a couple of things. If we go to the complexity principles, which is in a complex environment, you have to start with understanding the current state. And understanding the current state is about the people who are in the system telling their stories, their experiences about what's currently going on. And there's a variety of ways you can do that and that people will include in terms of the ecosystem. The thing that you're looking at could include customers or clients or staff, whoever it is that it might be. Now there are ways of doing that using the software, which is the sense maker software, which we

MARK:
Right.

Viv Read:
use, but you can also do it without the software if need be. So the first thing we do, the first stage if you like of any assignment we do, big or small, is the discovery. What on earth is going on around here? But we don't ever purport to say we will ever understand at all, because you never will in a complex system. You're understanding enough in order to get enough agreement to take some action to see if you're making a difference in order to then monitor it

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
and so on. So it becomes a dynamic kind of process. So the first thing is discovery and there are different ways of doing it. Certainly using the software is one if you want to make sure that you collect the data and you can get feedback. from the quantitative and qualitative data.

MARK:
Well,

Viv Read:
And

MARK:
it

Viv Read:
we've

MARK:
certainly

Viv Read:
done that

MARK:
helps

Viv Read:
in a month.

MARK:
direct, right? Like that, that certainly

Viv Read:
Oh

MARK:
helps

Viv Read:
yes.

MARK:
not paint the picture and isolate where some of the challenges might be.

Viv Read:
Absolutely. And typically when we do that, there are all sorts of insights and challenging assumptions that people have about what's going on around here. The second thing that that does is it removes some of the filters because everybody gets to see the same data and it's not filtered by anybody. And filtering is not evil. We do it all the time. We can't possibly process all of the available data.

MARK:
Right.

Viv Read:
So part of what this process is about doing is saying, let's get a shared database that is available for everybody to do two things. One is to make sense of it, but then is to make meaning. And make meaning is where we can make sense of this. But what does that mean for us in this context?

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
And the context might be different if we've got a go back to my. our colleague with a very big organisation, the context might be different. Or if I put it in my world, I live in Queensland, in Brisbane, but Brisbane, Queensland's a very big state. And what happens in South East Queensland, dense metropolitan, it's not going to be the same in the Cape, in remote Indigenous communities, it's not going to be the same as some of our regional towns or so on and so forth. So, If I've done some work with Queensland Health, what's going to make sense for a hospital in metropolitan Brisbane, is not gonna make sense for a hospital in Rockhampton or in Winton or whatever. So collecting the data about what's going on around here then allows people to say, of this data. How do we make meaning of it for what's going to be useful in different parts of the system so that people can then take action, monitor whether it works for us and if not, why not, and modify it and move it on from there. What it also then does is set up dashboards for immediate feedback to the decision makers so that they can track progress. And it becomes a much more dynamic change process and strategy.

MARK:
So for that person that loves the dashboard and looks to see the graphics, they still get that. They're just

Viv Read:
Oh

MARK:
getting

Viv Read:
yeah!

MARK:
better. They're still, yeah.

Viv Read:
But the three things, I guess, that make it different and why some people get anxious. The first is the client owns the data, not the consult. So what that means is that for many consultants, they get very anxious about this because it takes, it puts the power, shifts the power significantly to the organization. The joy about sense maker as a process is that as soon as somebody puts data in, it's available. So the dashboards are immediate. It's almost real time feedback.

MARK:
Oh yeah.

Viv Read:
And the power again goes to the organization. Now that I see as a real value. Some organizations stop us from doing the projects because we can't guarantee, for example, one CEO said to me, right at the last minute, but you can't guarantee me enough positive stories so I'm not gonna do it. Okay?

MARK:
They didn't want to hear

Viv Read:
Okay?

MARK:
the negative mismatches.

Viv Read:
And they don't want to, so if you don't want to know what's really going on, if you want some sanitized version,

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
then go a different place and space. It absolutely is about transparency, it's about being able to do things fairly immediately and feedback on an ongoing basis. And then what it permits people to do is to have the portfolio of measures. Yes, you've got the hard typical measures of inputs and outputs and outcomes and so on, but you can also measure impact. And what complex systems need is impact over time and little things happening that you can very quickly enhance or shut down because what we also know is that small interventions can have lots of unintended consequences and you need to be able to monitor them really, really quickly. so that you know which of our circle all the way back round, which is what Charlie Fitzgibbon taught me on the waterfront. Little things often because you have to be keeping an eye on what's happening because if it starts going pesh, if it starts going pesh up mate, you've got to get in there quick. Right? Fabulous, right?

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
So it's like understanding your environment so that you do things not in some sort of idealized seven steps to the nirvana change strategy, that you're actually working with the people.

MARK:
Yeah,

Viv Read:
And

MARK:
that's

Viv Read:
the

MARK:
what

Viv Read:
other

MARK:
I

Viv Read:
thing

MARK:
love

Viv Read:
that,

MARK:
about

Viv Read:
that

MARK:
it. I mean,

Viv Read:
yeah.

MARK:
you're working, that's, that's the best part about it and you're helping them improve, you know.

Viv Read:
Well, the learn by doing means that the people, you're doing capacity, all of the buzzwords of capacity building and empowerment and all that stuff, it happens as you're doing it.

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
It doesn't happen, it's not separated out from it, it's part of it.

MARK:
Yeah, like we would say it's how we co-create value together

Viv Read:
Absolutely.

MARK:
with a company and a client. You know,

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
they're the hero of the story, but we're going to help them write that story as best as they can. And what you use the term that we use a lot, that's right out of the mouth of John Boyd, challenge all assumptions. And he said that if we don't challenge all assumptions, what becomes doctrine today will become dogma forevermore. And then

Viv Read:
Yes.

MARK:
you're in a lot of trouble. So this is

Viv Read:
Sick!

MARK:
when you, yeah, I was just going to say we're doing things like this and we're extracting narratives and we're focusing on people, ideas, things in that order. Something like SenseMaker unlocks a lot of that power and that co-creation of value that permits us to challenge assumptions that everybody should benefit. Leaders should hear not only good news, right? I mean, they should get the negative news. Otherwise, they don't know where the gaps are, right?

Viv Read:
It's about being realistic and saying this is the way the world is. The world isn't all happy clapping. One of the things

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
that was really interesting in my early days of using SenseMaker, and I've now been using it since its first inception, I will have done... and in a couple of environments, one was a particularly difficult industrial environment in the electricity industry and I was and management had not been able to sit, workers and management had not been able to sit together in the same room without a full-time official for 10 years. So I was called in by the industrial commission to help in the environment and we used SenseMaker to do a culture audit. And the resistance from management was, we'll only get negative stories. And I said, you're wrong. In my experience, what we will get from the shop floor will not all be negative stories. And I would like to challenge your assumption. And anyway, they couldn't stop me because I got the approval from the Industrial Commission to do it and from the unions. And I was right. In my experience, you don't get all negative stories. That is the filter through which the assumptions of management and pose on the shop floor. Of

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
course there were some people who were anti, but

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
at the end of the day my assumption is that the people want to do a good job, they're frankly peed off at the stuff that from their perception gets in the way of them doing a good job. Now whether

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
that perception is right or not, that's a whole other ball game.

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
That's what needs to be dealt with, is the perception about in today's complexity language, the perception about whether the constraints are or are not appropriate getting in the way, whether they're all of that stuff. It's not, but we need to change the way in which the engagement happens.

MARK:
You're

Viv Read:
So

MARK:
right.

Viv Read:
we ran the Sense Maker twice and the thing got... sold on, but it is my experience that the level of negativity is never as bad as management believes it's going to be.

MARK:
Right.

Viv Read:
But there's a whole lot, one of the things that these sorts of processes, if we've got the software, fantastic, but even if we don't, that my colleagues and I use. demonstrates is that we have got a whole bunch of assumptions of stereotypes and things that need to be cut through. that get in the way of being able to engage and get to some kind of a way forward. And that's the responsibility not of the external facilitator, but of creating the environment that enables them to find the way forward for themselves that is theirs.

MARK:
Yeah. Yeah. That's the, I think that that's really the, the, the benefit of it. And like with any, with anything, it's common, like a, like an exam or a biopsy, right? As you await results, there's always going to be some, some butterflies or some apprehension, but if you don't get those results, how would you know how to diagnose, how would you know how to treat, uh, treat things effectively? Because you see these other surveys, I won't mention any names of companies, but they say, Hey, we got the survey back. Boy, everybody's just fine. Everything's just great. Yeah.

Viv Read:
It's really interesting. The surveys that ask the questions, I'm currently working, we're currently working with an organization who is signed up for one of the traditional surveys,

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
Engage, so-and-so Engage, right? The engagement stuff. And we're going to run a sense maker sort of separate too. And it's interesting because The obsession around running this engage thing is because it's comparison and benchmarking and all of that kind of deal, but it doesn't provide context.

MARK:
Right. Yeah. You think

Viv Read:
Um...

MARK:
that a blockbuster thought they were the number one video store in the world and everything was just fine. And we didn't have anything

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
to worry about, you know,

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
externally or

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
internally. But then one day

Viv Read:
Yeah,

MARK:
it happens, you know.

Viv Read:
so both end world. But I guess the other thing that I just wanted to pick up on, which is this, it's about shifting all of those, the external consultants, facilitators, et cetera, et cetera, who for so many years have been the experts coming along to provide the solutions. The shift has to be, and this is the whole world of complex facilitation, which is one of my passions around complexity, where... We become catalysts and enablers, but we ain't the answers. And one of the things that many organizations have yet, and senior people have yet to understand, is it's back to the thing you were talking about, is they have to do the work. It's not about signing

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
the cheque to get somebody externally to come and write the big report and do a big, you know, and now it's done. It is about doing the work. And so if you're really working in complexity, I can, I think the biggest one that we ever did, Dave Snowden and I and Sonya, we had 350 people in the basketball stadium in Darwin, looking at the future of education in the Northern Territory, this is now some years ago. And the elapsed time of two days, clean sheet to 70 specific recommendations across the Coneven framework. We knew as much about the education system of the Northern Territory at the end of two days as we knew at the beginning, which was zero.

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
Our role as complex facilitators was to provide the environment to enable

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
350 people to engage with data and each other and so on and so forth to get to know from discovery through sense making, meaning making, insights and agree action.

MARK:
The-

Viv Read:
Our

MARK:
the-

Viv Read:
role is not to be saying, look at us, aren't we clever? We know what it is that you need to do, and we can write the report.

MARK:
Right.

Viv Read:
And it's a whole different mindset shift for which it's not just the companies that are resistant, my goodness, so are the consultants and facilitators.

MARK:
Yeah, because they don't want to co-create value or they they're afraid that they're not the heroes of the story.

Viv Read:
Absolutely.

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
There he go won't get out of the way either.

MARK:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that, um, the other beautiful thing about, uh, understanding complexity and, and, and working, uh, in this space and working on this with companies is the fractal nature of it. So as you say, I could do it with a very small group of six, uh, 60, 600, 6,000, 60,000 it, it, it,

Viv Read:
Yes!

MARK:
it's scale. It scales.

Viv Read:
Yes, it does.

MARK:
And I did borrow those numbers from your work.

Viv Read:
Okay, and

MARK:
I did

Viv Read:
that's

MARK:
my homework.

Viv Read:
fun.

MARK:
I did my prep.

Viv Read:
Oh, well, there you go, and that's

MARK:
I

Viv Read:
fun.

MARK:
could have said

Viv Read:
And yes

MARK:
five

Viv Read:
it does.

MARK:
or 50 or 500 or 5,000, but I wanted to be authentic to complexity.

Viv Read:
Okay,

MARK:
So,

Viv Read:
that's fine. No problem.

MARK:
yeah.

Viv Read:
Absolutely. Yeah.

MARK:
No, I mean, that's the power of it. I think when you're sitting down with a leader and you're helping them understand that. that these principles are timeless, they're universal, they're fractal, they work, but they also require you to do the work and they also require, Dave has used the term lessons learning, not

Viv Read:
Yes.

MARK:
lessons learned. You have to keep learning and you have your teams and the people that you lead, they have to continue to learn as well.

Viv Read:
Absolutely. One of the projects I'm most proud of is a few years ago, again here in Queensland, and another maverick was in charge at the time of a government department who had some money to do something new for the first time. And of course it has to be evidence-based. You've heard the term, I'm sure. In government it always has to be evidence-based to make sure that you're right.

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
If it's got to be evidence-based and you're going to do it for the first time, typically what would happen, you then go and look at all sorts of other jurisdictions to get what they've done and pick it up and move it across. Now this CEO had worked with me long enough and was of understanding complexity. He finally, after a long time, convinced our finance department that we should be able to do innovation in context. i.e. apply the principles of the Coneven Framework and Complexity

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
and do up to a dozen or 15 little experiments about this particular government initiative program

MARK:
Hmm.

Viv Read:
and that we would attach to them action learning people. They're all of the principles in terms of who would get funded and only those that succeeded would get ongoing funding. Now one of the initiatives, which we all thought was brilliant, was closed after three months because no clients came.

MARK:
Hmm.

Viv Read:
It was, but nothing ended up on the front page of the local newspaper about wasting money or any of that kind of stuff, because the agreement about what success would look like was looked up, was set up at the front. Lessons learning, we attached, actual learning people to the project all the way through,

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
and the agreement about, and so on and so forth. Now, have we been able to repeat that? No, because... it was all a bit too frightening for a bunch of bureaucrats, he moved on in total frustration. But it's the application of complexity principles par excellence, that innovation in context is cheaper, it's cheaper to do it

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
than all of the other stuff and it's far more politically, it's politically safer to do it. But yes.

MARK:
I think, isn't it interesting that you could be dismissed as a teacher of complexity or a complexity

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
facilitator and you get dismissed by the leaders that know it all, that went to all the right schools, that have all the right degrees and they know everything and they subscribe to whatever it may, and they know.

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
And boy, wouldn't it be interesting if you say, okay, well, fine, but what if your competitors understand complexity? And what if your competitors

Viv Read:
Yes.

MARK:
are doing these sorts of things, extracting narratives from their people, and they're finding out what's really going on? What's the competitive advantage that leaders need to be aware of that things like understanding what complex adaptive systems even are and what sense-making and the academic framework even is, the competitive edge that it gives you?

Viv Read:
And I think what's interesting is, in my experience of working with this stuff now, well, since I met Dave, which was 2000, but even before that, the early take up of this work was always in the not-for-profit space, a few

MARK:
Mm.

Viv Read:
mavericks. many of whom have now gone, certainly in the Australian environment. In the private sector, occasionally banks and Dave will save pharma, and again we've had some work in the pharmaceutical world.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
I think post-COVID there's probably now a range of people who are starting to get a bit, certainly in Australia, what it What COVID demonstrated is the fragility

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
of the global supply chain and a range of other things and people have had to do are starting to have to do some radical rethink

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
of strategy and approaches. But at the end of the day, I don't see yet in this country sufficient recognition

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
that they have to really radically rethink.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
There may be the beginnings of that. I think until we know what's going to happen with the current financial crisis, maybe there's people's diverted in other places and spaces. It seems to me there's a couple of areas where we're likely to get significant take-up. I would hope that what we could at least do is run, which again in the past we've done, is run at parallel to the more traditional systems. So rather

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
than either or, it's both and. So some years ago in one of our big banks here who were obsessive at that stage about lean, it's moved on I know. By the way, my dear friend Bill Ford used to say lean, lean mean and hungry equals starved to death. You know,

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
if you keep being lean, lean, lean, you've got no reserve skill capacity, you can't take up opportunities,

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
you end up outsourcing everything, including your knowledge. But there's a way of running some of these things in parallel,

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
so that I'm reminded when one of the big, one of their big initiatives went pear-shaped on the day and there was going to be, you know, the traditional. investigation of what went wrong

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
and instead we ran a one-day lessons lessons learned at the time a one-day lessons learned using canine and and complex processes and at the end of the day had the this is what we will do next time to do differently as opposed to the three-month witch hunt which shifted the whole so the other thing i would say mark that i have learned around this I get success by saying to an organisation, give me 15 people and half a day and a complex issue. And let me show you what I can do and if at the end of the day it's got no value, let's part friends.

MARK:
Love that,

Viv Read:
because

MARK:
yeah.

Viv Read:
there is no way I can explain it in any way that makes any sense and resonates at all most of the time. I have never won a tender because either they don't know, they don't understand or it's too hard or it's too scary

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
and that's in umpty umpty years of it but what I do know I've won, we've done a lot of work when I've said to, so one of the big pieces of work we got for a university who was going to go through a huge amount of a big change and there was a person there who knew some of this stuff and was having great difficulty with the Vice-Chancellor and I said look just give me, ask him for 15 of his senior people and me for half a day and I won't charge, I'll run a process which includes doing some stuff and mapping it onto the Kenevan framework and so on and if at the end of the day he doesn't think it's going to add value let's bark friends. At the end of three hours he said, uh, when can you start?

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
So,

MARK:
Yeah. Once you, once

Viv Read:
one

MARK:
you

Viv Read:
of-

MARK:
see it, you can't unsee it.

Viv Read:
Absolutely.

MARK:
Once you get it, once you get it, you get

Viv Read:
So

MARK:
it.

Viv Read:
the fir... Absolutely. The first time I saw Dave in the Kenevan Framework, I left the room, I rang my father and I said, Dad, I can now explain your daughter. I know where I live and I know where the rest of the family lives and I can now explain

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
why it is. There's a point at which sometimes we have great difficulty. Exactly. And so one of the things about all of this is finding the way to translate, find the language, find the stories, find the examples, do it in a way that has meaning for people in their context. is the greatest success that I have had over the years. And I've worked with it in Cambodia, in the Philippines, and dusty villages, in all sorts of places and spaces. And it's about getting out of our own important theory heads

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
and getting to where the people are in their context and asking the question, what is it about... where they are and what their context and their issue is and how can I translate, interpret, re-jig the language and the ideas so that it will resonate for them and make meaning and shift this thing along.

MARK:
think in a time of, if this is a time of great crisis and upheaval, this is certainly the time to really consider understanding complexity and Kenevan framework and the theories of John Boyd and other things,

Viv Read:
Yes.

MARK:
because those things did not get us to the point. If we're experiencing crisis, it's not because of practicing those things. We can assure you that.

Viv Read:
Absolutely, absolutely. And those who have and are finding a way out of the current difficulties are those who find their way out of their own egos in my view

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
and truly are able to embrace and accommodate. accommodate diversity, accommodate multiple perspectives, and understand that it's not about changing people.

MARK:
Yeah. What do you say? So, you know, when, when you direct an executive, let's just say, I know nothing of all this. I want to learn more.

Viv Read:
Yep.

MARK:
I mean, obviously

Viv Read:
Yep.

MARK:
they go to complex abilities website. They go to our podcast. They go to our company,

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
AGLX website. You know, what are some of your favorite, uh, maybe primers on, on sort of understanding these in a way that's accessible, that doesn't scare anybody. That's not too, uh, maybe overly theoretical theoretical or. You know, could give somebody some real tangible points that they can consider and realize that I really do need to learn this stuff. Maybe I don't know, maybe a book or something that you think of.

Viv Read:
Well, one of the people that I think is fabulous because she sits a little to the left or to the right, whichever way you want to put it. One of the things people I get them to listen to is Alicia Gerrero. Because she talks about, and one of her recent podcasts, and I'll remember which one in the moment. Because she talks about complexity and it's linked to nature and so on in a way that is separate to organizations, but connected to organizations, and it makes them go to a different place so they're not fighting about. with their own preconceived notions about organisational design and structure and so on. So I start with Alicia, I don't start with Dave, I would start with Alicia. I then would follow with Dave.

MARK:
Dave was our first guest.

Viv Read:
I know, hey, I know, and I know Dave really well, and I think some of, it also depends on who I'm talking to. So if I'm

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
talking to

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
somebody,

MARK:
The context is huge. It really does.

Viv Read:
the context

MARK:
I agree.

Viv Read:
is huge,

MARK:
Huge.

Viv Read:
absolutely.

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
So some of the podcasts from Dave are also important. What I would often do, however, is ask them to talk to me first about what are the sorts of things that they are wanting to deal with? And sometimes what I will do is refer them to talk to people that we've worked with, rather than go to the theory. So if they want practice first, so we've done, I've worked with, for example, Meals on Wheels here in Australia for over 10 years. Les McDonald who's the CEO, we've done lots and lots of work with them. So if they're in the not-for-profit sector or in the social issues sector, I will give them someone like Les to talk to.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
So some people need a real person, they don't need the theory.

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
Some people need theory, then I'll give them a mixture of Alicia, Dave and a couple of things to read. Sometimes I will give them If they're interested in SenseMaker, then the work of Palm Health Foundation, who've got the stuff up on a website, Gallery Walk, how the stories and so on and so forth are used, and so on. So part of it depends on context, and what it is that's going to give them an opportunity to engage with what it is that they think that they want. And there's reports and those who want... who want the theory end of it. For many people, the scary thing about, am I the first, what will happen if, all of those sorts of things, it's often talking to people other than consultants is the thing in this world, is gonna tip them over the edge. In terms of SenseMaker at the moment, the angst about cyber

MARK:
Mmm.

Viv Read:
security. of course is currently through the roof.

MARK:
Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's the other power of speaking with people like us and you and

Viv Read:
Yeah!

MARK:
it is about providing the context and understanding their situation because it's not so easy just to recommend some say as you say, Hey, go on and watch Dave give this presentation on Kenevan or punch has a great talk about the flow

Viv Read:
Yeah

MARK:
system or Viv

Viv Read:
Sure

MARK:
you were on Suzanne's podcast.

Viv Read:
Yeah!

MARK:
You know, like I've been, I get interviewed on podcasts as well. Um, intersections with, uh, Kwan Collins and others. Um, so that said, I think what that's showing is that you have to, all of us are voracious learners and we're always learning

Viv Read:
Yes.

MARK:
from people and you can't stop the, the learning. I mean, I, I think when I talked to Dave on our podcast, I probably went and then bought like an extra 10 books that I, you know,

Viv Read:
Yeah!

MARK:
But the key point is that you do have to do the learning. You do have to do the work. It's not enough to just say, Viv, give me a recipe,

Viv Read:
Exactly.

MARK:
give me a formula and I can just step back and it's not so simple. And that's what hopefully does not get lost on people.

Viv Read:
Well, I think that's right and interestingly the other day we were asked to do a demonstration of SenseMaker to a not-for-profit here in Brisbane and they brought along one of their board members and he was an evaluation guy who'd been doing traditional evaluation for many years and he arrived obviously ready to be a skeptic. And at the end of it... He said, what I can say at the moment is this is not a toy. Now that probably was the best endorsement of SenseMaker we've

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
had in a very long time because he was expecting just another piece of, sorry, but equivalent of a quick little survey monkey thing,

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
but what he said was this is not a toy, this has got some real... So Part of what I'm saying, and I agree with you, is that this is not for something that you just dip in and dip out of. And you can go and read the next five steps to Nirvana, six characteristics of, nine bits of, whatever. There's much more to it than that. And if people seriously want to engage... And one of the things that I say to people is, if you want to understand where Dave's coming from, then you have to also go and look at Gary Klein's work. You have to go and look at Alicia Giararo's work. You have to go and look at Anne Pendleton-Julian

MARK:
Hmm

Viv Read:
and her colleagues' work. You have to go and look at all sorts of other people. And then when you've done that, now go look at Max Boiseau. Now go and look at, and would you like the... articles, you know, the 45 articles that I have, Dave, since 2000 and, and, and. Um, and then you've started to scratch the surface because then you need to go and then you need to, Oh, by the way, would you like to, and so on. So

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
this is not, this is not for the faint hearted. However, you can also start learning by doing with some very core principles. Um, And there's one of the things that Julie, my colleague, a business colleague and I are currently working on is what's the minimum viable understanding of the theory and the principles that are needed for community activators to work with these principles. So we're

MARK:
Hmm.

Viv Read:
working with three organizations, the faith-based mob in, sorry, mob group cohort. mob is indigenous in Brisbane, grouping out of Florida in the US community group and another in Sydney. And this is about empowering community organizing people to work with their own communities using complex facilitation techniques.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
So we've... been working with them on and off for the last few years. And we're now at the stage of saying, well, okay, if we put a resource kit together, what's the minimal viable amount of theory to practice is needed that a group of people can work with their own communities. They may have run a sense maker, they've got some data, they're now doing insights to action stuff. So we've supported

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
these. So yes, there's all of that, but then there's, parish priest, to take an example, I've got a group of my congregation, we're facing maybe having to close down, I want to run processes differently, what do I do, how do I do it, and from our perspective, what do they need to know about complexity to be able to do it in an okay way that doesn't require the deep, deep, deep, deep embedding. So that's... currently what we're working on.

MARK:
Well, I think it's really cool about the things that you've shared. If people are listening, it's multidisciplinary. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. It doesn't matter public,

Viv Read:
Yep.

MARK:
private. It doesn't matter profit, nonprofit.

Viv Read:
Yep.

MARK:
These principles are universal and can be applied

Viv Read:
Yeah.

MARK:
everywhere. And that's another one of the beauties of understanding this. You know, it seems

Viv Read:
Yes.

MARK:
like it's, it's not too hard to convince business leaders that the world is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, right? I mean, they They get it. It's, it's harder to show them what to do about it, you know, and the effective ways to do about it, because they generally tend to follow contagion and trend to do what everybody else is doing, but getting the same results over and over again.

Viv Read:
There are three things I think which get in the way. One is the obsession about what to measure.

MARK:
Mm-hmm.

Viv Read:
And this nonsense about if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Well, okay. It's about understanding that you can measure impact. It's having a different perspective about what is measurement. And if you only have a short term, perspective about measurement. So what Dave says, and what I absolutely agree with, there's measure and there's monitor. And in a complex system, you monitor. So sure you have measurement, but you also have to have monitoring. And once you wrap your head around monitoring, then you can say to an executive, you are not losing control, because what you have got in place is a dashboard that monitors trends. in a way that still gives you control over time.

MARK:
Yeah. And you still have that.

Viv Read:
And you don't need an external consultant to do that for you with expensive surveys, however long. You can do that in real time with a distributed sensor network of your staff and your clients and so on and so forth in a much more sophisticated feedback way than you've currently got. So one of the things is about shifting perspective around that. The second is modifying current systems of things like reporting is one and the other is budgeting and all of the other kind of systems which currently haven't got enough flex in them to cope with the part of the system that is complex. So for example some years ago I worked with a with an organization where they adopted the principle that said let's look at those things which we know sit in the in the audit space and then there's 30% of the budget will be totally unallocated and we will manage it dynamically because that's the part of our world which is unpredictable, we never know, we want to be opportunistic and manage it dynamically. It comes out of the work of Beyond Budgeting and

MARK:
Hmm.

Viv Read:
we applied it inside. Right, that's known, that's knowable, we'll allocate that, we will have 30% of our entire budget. Now, people had conniptions and went into absolute, oh, because you're

MARK:
Ha!

Viv Read:
supposed to allocate everything and then fight every time there's something that comes, right, because the pattern had always been. But changed the pattern and they had a much easier life that every time an opportunity came along, there were resources available to allocate. So, it's about being able to understand that control is different. Changing the... conversation about risk, the definition of risk for complexity. Risk is failure is inevitable, but risk is about early detection, excellence in recovery. So if you change it from avoiding risk to detection strategies, that then in the health system has become, in my experience, in some of the work we've done in health, change not totally, but changed some of the ways in which people were prepared to be able to, particularly in emergency departments. So sometimes it's finding the principle that's the trigger, that's the pain point that's allowed me in. It's not always worked, but it's been trying to find the complexity principle that's the pain point trigger that has opened up a conversation. for us in this world, I think offers some real promises that our indigenous colleagues have endorsed SenseMaker and the complex facilitation processes as the most appropriate decolonized methods that they've ever seen. So

MARK:
Hmm. Tell me more

Viv Read:
that

MARK:
about that. Meaning that it's more in line with the way the universe works, not so much a system works or

Viv Read:
And it's more in line with what they believe is appropriate for the way we should engage that Indigenous and non-Indigenous people should work together. So Complexability now has a partnership with an Indigenous consulting group, Right Ways Wondu. And shortly we've done one piece of work creating a third space. facilitation methods and there's a major project about to happen here where we've got access to a big piece of land to do regenerative agriculture and a range of things and that will involve collaborative co-creation and consultive processes with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups and we'll work

MARK:
That's fascinating.

Viv Read:
but also co-created consultative processes. And so they are prepared to say that in terms of non-colonial, non-patronizing co-created processes, they're prepared to endorse the complex facilitation approach and sense maker as appropriate for working with indigenous communities.

MARK:
That's absolutely

Viv Read:
So

MARK:
fascinating.

Viv Read:
that's a pretty rigging endorsement. Yeah,

MARK:
Yeah,

Viv Read:
so we'll...

MARK:
no, I should think so. Maybe I could seg into the close of something that I think you just alluded to. I mean, it's amazing to me how principles that are universal within studying complexity, it never ceases to amaze me. It always amazes me. It always surprises me how the most unlikely groups come together and can coordinate and direct action together. that are synthetically taught to not like each other

Viv Read:
Yes!

MARK:
from social media or media or tribes or whatever it could be. When we

Viv Read:
Oh

MARK:
talk

Viv Read:
yeah.

MARK:
about things that are universally true for all of us, it is amazing, um, how you can bring people together and whether it's in a company, whether it's in a for-profit, not-for-profit, that's, that's a, uh, it's, it's a, it's a very amazing way to run an organization. And I think the good news is, um, is that there's so much opportunity because there's still a lot of companies that need to come over to this way of thinking.

Viv Read:
Look, absolutely. And I would think that if there is any way forward out of the kind of mess we've created, it's moving. to places and spaces where we find the opportunity to be able to behave differently, collaboratively and collectively.

MARK:
Yeah,

Viv Read:
It

MARK:
yeah,

Viv Read:
works.

MARK:
entropy doesn't care, it applies to us all. Ha ha.

Viv Read:
Absolutely.

MARK:
So, well, Viv, we've been delighted to host you. We're glad to know you, and we look forward to doing this again relatively soon and keep these discussions going. And we'll make sure that we send people your way to Complexibility, maybe also can follow you on LinkedIn, I suppose.

Viv Read:
Yes, look, absolutely. And

MARK:
Yeah.

Viv Read:
as I say, I would hope that maybe later in the year, we'll be able to share something a little more specific around some of the other projects that we're doing.

MARK:
Wonderful. All right, for the sake of the recording, we'll close. Thanks for listening to No Way Out. And again, Vivreid, thanks for joining us all the way from Down Under.

Viv Read:
My pleasure.

MARK:
Thanks again.