Learning a New Dance: Reflections on Governance and Systems Health

Nearly two years ago in his blog, Governance for Systems Change, Rob Ricigliano shared four practices to help governors work with complex adaptive systems:

1. Capitalize on uncertainty to lower risk and increase chances for success.
2. Focus on creating the conditions for change over short-term outcomes.
3. Liberate choice rather than trying to control it.
4. Rely on multiple ways of knowing as you navigate the journey.

As the blog put a finer point on key challenges and practices I’d seen working, I was delighted to have it as an artifact to discuss with colleagues both in my organization and across the sector.

Over the coming year I did just that, and I continued to find Rob’s practices to be helpful guides for organizations seeking to foster systems change more effectively. And, given how many well intentioned people struggled to follow his guidance, I wondered: What does it take to create the conditions for making these four practices possible? It seemed to be a line of inquiry that deserved additional attention.

Focusing on philanthropy, I explored this question by considering the broader sector context and also the micro moves that they require:

• Zooming out, I came to believe that these practices require governors and staff to step into their work in ways that are likely in tension with other experiences they’ve had.
• Zooming in, I realized that governors and staff often become tripped up by old habits and dominant patterns of behavior in their work together.

The following writing shares my reflections as I zoom in and out. My hope is that by making my observations explicit, we can keep the conversation going and encourage governors and staff to play with stepping into the work differently together.

Dancing on the shores of Lake Bosomtwe

A few notes before I dive in…

• Like Rob, I use the term governance broadly — i.e., “governance applies to anyone who makes important decisions that affect the probability of success of a collective system change endeavor, and not just to members of a board of directors.”
• I’ve moved towards language that better aligns with how Rob and I both now talk about our work, which is to talk about systems health and re-patterning systems, rather than systems change.
• Finally, I write, not as a governance expert, but as a white American woman who is passionate about complexity and systems-aware leadership and who has two decades of experience working within nonprofits and philanthropy.

Zooming out: What is the job at hand for governors?

It is no secret that the effects of governance dynamics ripple through the field of philanthropy, and the sector more widely. As leadership and staff, we often find it challenging to focus on our goals while navigating the expectations, questions, and interests of our governors. And as a result, despite our best intentions, we can find ourselves falling into patterns that take us away from who we want to be.

The impacts of governing power and relationship dynamics surface in infuriatingly patterned ways. Take one familiar story: A governor asks a question, perhaps out of curiosity, of their organization’s leadership and before they know it an organization has reshaped itself to find an answer and grantees are being asked about the governor’s question in partner meetings. Thus, shifting attention and focus of the work.

We all have a role in this tragic dance. Our habit of acting as though governors have absolute power, can exert complete control, and whose every whim becomes a command, results in these assumptions and dynamics being passed on to our grantees in our own partner meetings. Grantees then find themselves being asked, often implicitly and subtly, to treat us as though we have absolute control and expect our whims to be treated as commands.

Even the most experienced leaders fall into these patterns, because being swept up by existing system dynamics is normal, and absolutely expected. Rob outlines that Webster’s defines governance as “overseeing the control or direction of something” and underscores that this dominant definition is not well suited to systems change, (i.e. efforts to contribute to re-patterning complex adaptive systems), given that “centralized control and oversight is unworkable if not impossible” in these contexts.

Said simply, business as usual was designed for simpler problem types, where cause and effect can be more predictable. Status quo continues to be working with a planning mode and within hierarchical organizational models. And in lieu of market forces in the social sector, we still look to the top and to experts for guidance and right answers. For many of us, this is the only way we have ever worked.

In other words, if we want governors to reinforce organizational commitments for systems change rather than unintentionally distracting us from them, we will all need to attend to these dynamics head on and deliberately and consistently play with new ways of working.

We must pause and ask: If the defining task of traditional governance is impossible, then what is the job at hand?

Shifting systems means re-patterning who we are and how we work together so that in time a system re-balances to produce different, hopefully preferable, outcomes. As humans, we are inclined to do what we have always done. We rely on heuristics to move through the day. As any parent knows, from birth we find safety in routines, not just individually but also in the ways we are in a relationship together. Every time I switch who picks up or drops off my kindergartner I am reminded of this reality.

In other words, if we are serious about change, we all need to get uncomfortable trying something new.

Trying something new is, but cannot only be, the job of staff. Patterns reinforce themselves across systems — from the work we are doing with communities, to our organizations and boardrooms — and back. The only real agency we have is what we each individually do with our own time and attention. We need to be clearer with staff and governors joining organizations committed to contributing to systems health that their work will require them to listen and be uncomfortable as they learn. And that what they do and how they do it will be reshaped over time as context changes and as guided by the values and commitments made by the organization.

This requires leaders focused on re-patterning systems to bring our whole selves to work, which is not how most of us got to leadership positions. The 80s, 90s, and 00s encouraged us to fake it until we make it and to build up resumes full of certificates and degrees that demonstrate our deep expertise. While all this experience is critical to addressing issues that come up — passing audits, navigating legal disputes, ensuring sound financial management, etc. — they are not the skills most needed from a governor or staff member committed to contributing to transformational change. In fact, as we know, thanks to folks like Brene Brown, our confidence in our own expertise can hinder our ability to navigate uncertainty. Instead, we need confidence in our ability to act with moral courage.

So, how is being an effective governor for complex systems change different from how governance has been defined in Webster’s? We need governance that is more like a definition of leadership offered by Marshall Ganz:

“Leadership is accepting the responsibility to create conditions that enable others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.”

Just for a moment imagine what our work would be like if that version of governance was our lived reality.

As leaders we each have an opportunity to step into the work in this way; we make choices everyday that define what is prioritized and valued. Yes, organizations need practical expertise and technical experience from governors. But if the governance dynamics that ripple through philanthropy are to enable systems health, even more so we need governors and leaders ready to lead with questions, ready to lean in with trust, deep curiosity, humility, and an absolute commitment to listening and learning together. Leaders who are ready to explicitly redefine their own roles and definitions of success for themselves in service of the organization’s commitments.

Zooming in: What might it take?

Even with whole hearted, committed leaders and governors, people who are ready to try to dance in new ways, organizations struggle to step into Rob’s four practices. This is no surprise, as these practices often go against what is familiar. As Heidi Sparkes Guber reminds me, experiencing failure and breakdowns is part of the work when we aim to make significant change. It is where learning and innovation begins.

Thankfully, these breakdowns often happen in patterned ways at the individual and person-to-person level — between governors and staff. Below, I zoom in to share examples of patterns that I’ve seen in the hopes of prompting you to get curious about other mental models, practices, and structure that you’ve seen. One recurring theme I hope to illustrate is that it’s not just about what you say or incentivize explicitly, it’s about what you do, how you show up, over time

Practice 1: Capitalize on uncertainty.

There is no doubt that managing ourselves and learning to work with uncertainty is at the heart of what is needed to support systems health. As Rob explains, “uncertainty unlocks opportunity” and governors and staff can capitalize on the inherent uncertainty of complex adaptive systems as part of their strategy.

And that is easier said than done given that living and working in uncertainty raises cortisol levels. Think back to the start of the coronavirus pandemic and we are quickly reminded that facing the unknown is stressful. In other words, this practice asks leaders and staff to learn to stay curious and playful at the very same time that they are likely experiencing stress and longing for certainty.

It behooves all of us — staff and governors — to build up a bank of tools, habits and rituals that can help us manage ourselves when anxiety and stress arises. And in the cases of an organization wanting to capitalize on uncertainty, these efforts need to be supported deliberately and proactively. Jennifer Garvey Berger and Carolyn Coughlin provide many practical ideas for this in their book, Unleashing Your Complexity Genius. For example, they remind us that rituals as simple as starting meetings by resetting our breath can help groups attend to their anxiety intentionally.

In lieu of this, uncertainty and heightened cortisol levels reinforce old habits. This is especially challenging in the context of a governance meeting where stress from uncertainty can be combined with performance anxiety, especially when historically governance bodies have rewarded well evidenced certainty. We all want to look good for our bosses and most successful leaders have been trained to provide confident, precise answers, which in the context of complexity is both risky and misses the inherent opportunity uncertainty provides. These are the moments that we snap back to old ways of working.

To shift this dynamic, governors and staff also need to work extra hard to build trusting relationships and to proactively re-shape patterns and their culture so new ways of working feel natural over time. I’ve learned that the trick is to anticipate the patterns of behavior that drive ‘missteps’ so they can be seized as co-learning moments, opportunities to practice together in real-time.

For example, strategy approvals are often moments where staff may feel the need to convince governors that they found the “right answer” or to sell a narrow, clear solution (e.g. proposing a specific approach as the strategic solution) as they anticipate the interrogation of their assumptions and ideas. Knowing this, plan to pause and take a deep breath and work together to resist the urge to assess the correctness of a proposal, i.e. reaffirming certainty. Instead, mirror back how what you heard aligns to your commitment to embracing uncertainty. Celebrate the work that went into the proposal, and see if together you can brainstorm where there may be inherent uncertainty, creating the wiggle room that comes with acknowledging the unknown. Get curious: Where are we experiencing uncertainty? Are there other pathways, stories, and perspectives to be considered now or over time? Celebrate the questions that arise and encourage them to continue to look for “good uncertainty” as part of the work (e.g. regular engagement with diverse thinkers), which can lead to creative adaptation based on lessons learned.

So what might it take to capitalize on uncertainty? Prioritize creating organizational cultures that foster wellbeing and trusting relationships and anticipate where you may be tempted to seek certainty so that you can actively encourage curiosity and engagement with difference. Do this consistently together, and governors and leaders can learn to work with the unknown, unlocking possibilities for emergence.

Practice 2: Focus on creating the conditions for change.

Near-term outcomes not only distracts from our longer-term commitment to systems health, they are also bad predictors of longer-term change and may incentivize work that is less important given an organization’s ultimate ambitions. Rob underscores this clearly and helpfully, and shares a powerful lesson learned by Alice Evans that provides an alternative. She shares that, a “key enabler of their work at [Lankelly Chase] was the realization that creating the conditions for system change should be their focus rather than targeting specific outcomes those conditions might produce.”

It might be easy to interpret “focusing on creating conditions for change” as just shifting what evidence to pay attention to and when. That is certainly part of it given that focusing on outcomes has become a standard for measuring success. And, from my experience, focusing on conditions for change is often just more effective at getting to the heart of what is going well and less well for the work.

However, Alice’s insight calls for organizations to make a bigger move. This is not just about developing new measurement frameworks that replace specific measures with new ones. Focusing on fostering conditions for change requires us to return to Rob’s initial insight that a traditional definition of governance, i.e., “overseeing the control or direction of something”, is not well suited to complex systems change. Staff cannot provide governors with meaningful evidence of progress in re-patterning systems at the annual cadence often expected given the nature of complex adaptive systems and practical limits on time, space, and resources. And, trying to do so often distracts staff from the work itself.

If your focus is on fostering conditions, the main work and comparative advantage of a governor and senior leaders is not to evaluate evidence of progress in re-patterning systems directly. The on-going role is to support and accompany people responsible for doing the work as they make meaningful efforts to test assumptions about context, progress, and the future, and to sense-make, and adapt as they learn.

As staff are faced with significant uncertainty and more than one possible way forward, it can be easy to turn to our governors with the expectation and hope that they will be the final arbiter. Or, without meaning to, hold back data that may lag, confuse, or even disconfirm. At the same time, it can be too easy for governors and leaders to conflate precision with importance or confidence with accuracy, especially when you feel responsible for trying to gauge whether the organization is on course.

To support this practice, we need different kinds of discussions about what success looks like and how things are going. When we acknowledge the dynamic and interdependent nature of our work, we find that we are all wayfinding, looking to past and current patterns to discern where we may be now and may be able to flow to in the future. We gauge health and respond to problems as opportunities for innovation and adaptation from where we are, rather than focusing on specific indicators that we hope will allow us to declare success.

Governors and staff need to build new patterns that position governors as partners in wayfinding. By engaging in meaningful conversations about the specific patterns they hope to contribute to and by clarifying what successfully creating the conditions for systems health could look like in practice, they can create common language and reference points upfront. Throughout the work, governors can also be helpful thought partners to staff as they attend to bias and blind spots and navigate context changes. Staff, on the other hand, need to share rich stories and data that tell the full complexity of the work, which requires trust that they can have these conversations without being penalized or micro-managed.

So what might it take to begin to focus on “creating the conditions” for change? Governors and staff need to focus more on wayfinding rather than constantly asking whether they have succeeded. Governors can play an important role in helping staff test their assumptions and can help leaders identify patterns in responses. Over time, I’ve learned, these patterns can point to opportunities for staff to build skills and capabilities, strengthen operating models, and hone strategies.

Practice 3: Liberate choice.

To foster conditions of emergence and to work with uncertainty and complexity together, we need to unlock the agency of staff and partners so they can make sound decisions based on what has been learned, their understanding of context, and their purpose in the organization and its work.

As Rob helpfully unpacks, there are a number of patterns we need to shift if we want to encourage this kind of liberatory power, particularly since most of us have spent our careers in hierarchical and expert-driven cultures, preferencing the guidance and opinions of our governors whether we agree with them or not. With so much unlearning to be done, liberating choice requires governors and staff to remain power aware. There is no wishing away the reality that attending to power is essential work, especially given the need to retrain our habit of sensing, consciously and unconsciously, with our whole bodies what is appreciated, understood, and desired by our senior leaders.

As Rob points out, liberating choice does not mean that governors should provide no structure. One common tendency of leaders who want to liberate power, or at least to diminish their own power, is to leave significant ambiguity and room for staff to decide on what work is to be done and how. But this can backfire, especially in contexts where staff feel pulled in many directions and rely on governance bodies for resourcing and long-term strategy decisions. Not knowing if decisions will actually be able to be followed through long–term results in ambiguity on strategy rippling through the organization and partner meetings as well.

For this reason, as we consider what it may take to create the conditions for liberated choice, it feels important to put a finer point on two areas of focus that Rob touched on. If the agency of staff is to be unlocked, governors and staff need to clarify:

1. What is most important. Be explicit about what successfully contributing to systems health looks and feels like and for whom so that people can feel agency within this shared picture. This is not about defining a finish line or predicting specific outcomes, but it is about adding nuance and texture to a clear, living story of who we want to be and how we want to relate together. This requires meaningful discourse — and often hot debate — to unpack and align on underpinning values, assumptions, metaphors, definitions, and personal differences and biases. This also requires diligently noticing when what is most important is becoming blurry again so that it can be discussed proactively and explicitly.
2. What the organization will not do. Ironically, as described by Kenwyn Smith’s book Abundance-Scarcity Paradox, it is by setting boundaries that we create the conditions for abundance. Without walls, a vessel will never overflow. Helping to clarify what an organization will not do can be the most important thing that a governor can do to cultivate a culture of abundance and liberate and activate choice in powerful ways.

And, how these decisions are made can be just as important as the decisions themselves. As john a. powell of the Othering and Belonging Institute reminds us, co-creation is at the heart of cultivating cultures of belonging. Taking time to engage staff, partners and key stakeholders results in better systems sensing, stronger strategies and environments where people actually feel that they have a stake in what has been decided. An essential condition for encouraging people to step into their agency.

Finally, I’d add that especially in a context where old habits and power dynamics linger, governors need to be very clear that how to get there is at the discretion of the people responsible for doing the work. Why this differentiation? Because these types of suggestions are the ones most likely to be situational and/or to be laden with implicit assumptions that can undermine liberatory choice. This is difficult because good governors are passionate about the work an organization is doing and personally would like to have influence. However, occasional directives about how to do work can quickly undo the patterns you have worked to establish to create a sense of safety.

Instead, make time for collective learning while also respecting and reinforcing the boundaries and commitments you’ve made together. Don’t hold back your enthusiasm! Staff benefit from learning with and from governors who have vastly different experiences and networks. However, make it a two-way conversation so both staff and governors are learning. And, before you wrap up the conversation, pause. Create a ritual of going back to your vision and strategic boundaries to explore if there are implications. And then reinforce your commitment to liberated choice and let go.

So what might it take to step into liberated choice? Recognize and attend to power deliberately, actively to engage people fully as you align the organization around a co-created understanding of what is important and boundaries, respect these commitments as you make time to learn together, and, then, let go to let come.

Practice 4: Rely on multiple ways of knowing.

The idea that there is deep value in multiple ways of knowing has become salient across the social sector. It is widely known that if we approach a topic with the headiness of knowing, we are likely missing out what can be difficult to verbalize, what lies beneath, what has been undiscovered, and the perspectives and experiences of people and natural beings now and in the future.

Leaders are experimenting with cultivating heart spaces at work. It is now common to ask people how they are feeling, make time for mindfulness, include poetry and music in conversation, and encourage storytelling as part of the evidence sharing.

And, at the same time, governance meetings continue to be thought of as judging spaces, places where we form opinions or conclusions. Spaces where we receive assessments on whether things are going well or not. As Brené Brown might say, people naturally armor up in these contexts. Armor is not helpful if we are trying to open ourselves to multiple ways of knowing!

Governance meetings also often have rigid agendas. We send implicit signals of what’s valued when we make our agendas tight or routinely de-prioritize making time for activities needed to welcome multiple ways of knowing. When there are many senior, busy people in a room, we can feel the need to check through as many tasks as possible and use narrow formats for digesting information. It can feel almost impossible to create the spaciousness required to move out of our heads and into our bodies. We often fail to acknowledge and account for what is lost when time is our master.

Addressing time scarcity and refusing to limit governance to the role of judgment is critical if we are to welcome multiple ways of knowing. I’ve learned we need to have faith that we can bend time, creating moments of expansiveness by working differently together. Our minute-by-minute agendas privilege a linear, predictable way of knowing (while making us feel confident we are using senior leaders’ time well), but they do not allow us to get to what matters.

Minute by minute agendas assume that every minute will be as productive as the last. When in reality this is never true, when we make room for sensing, meaning making, connection, play, and generative discussion, we can create powerful moments that have impact well beyond the time allotted. Instead, governors and staff have an opportunity to reassessing what’s most important (e.g. We know that trust, or mistrust and fear, are powerful drivers of unproductive behavior, but how much time do we spend in board meetings deepening and building trust?) and get explicit about practices and rituals to cultivate and experiment with together. To help with this, lean on a skilled facilitator and experiment. Notice how you get tripped up, hold yourself accountable, and course correct — together.

So what might it take to tap into multiple ways of knowing? Just as we are doing within organizations, I hope to see more governors and staff being intentional about their time together and addressing time scarcity head on by creating rituals that serve as reminders to slow down and prioritize what matters most. By doing so, I’ve learned that governors can provide powerful tailwinds that help to reinforce the pace and prioritization of multiple ways of knowing within the organization as well.

A closing reflection

As Myles Horton taught us, there is no neutrality in systems change work. Unless we actively re-pattern how to work together, we will find ourselves reinforcing the status quo rather than contributing to the change we seek. Thankfully, we all choose every day how we want to step into our work as leaders.

You may be thinking, you are asking a lot. Yes. I think committing to contributing to systems health does ask a lot from each of us, but there is also great joy in rolling up our sleeves and figuring out how to dance together differently.

Just imagine, if we step in together as co-learners, we may be able to do more than tell stories of how we have contributed to our commitments. One day, we may also open Webster’s to find that we have redefined governance altogether.