By Roger Duck and Jane Searles.
2. Jane Searles (biography)
Think of a time when you noticed how different ‘they’ are from ‘us’. In that moment, did the relationship become more interesting and alive? Or did it flatten into what looked like a boundary – a barrier to be overcome or a connection to be engineered?
This i2Insights contribution is intended to stimulate your imagination by giving examples from practice of relationships between people and teams being treated as opportunities for learning, rather than boundaries.
Most readers of i2Insights work in research. We believe there is much of relevance here for any context in which people are working together, including research teams.
The context
We expand here on the idea that ‘a system boundary is simultaneously a process of drawing a distinction and identifying an active relationship of mutual learning’ (Duck and Searles 2021).
We are not so much advocating for ‘rewilding’ boundaries, as for avoiding ‘taming’ relationships before they have had a chance to flower.
We have rooted this account in Jane’s experiences of a community initiative in Scotland, and our mutual learning through reflective discussion. In the winter months, volunteers provide a Saturday evening meal in a community hall. This is for anyone living in the area, provided on a ‘pay what you can’ basis, supported by other donations.
The volunteers organise themselves so that no individual is indispensable. This has been done by developing clarity of the roles required, supported by a peer-based culture that enables roles to be passed around between different people. There is no hard and fast divide between those who ‘do’ and those who ‘organise’, nor between those volunteering and those dining.
We highlight four examples of learning situations: 1) working as a team, 2) working across internal team boundaries, 3) working across a formal organisational boundary, and 4) nurturing a culture to support self-organisation.
Working as a team
We have learnt that people are able to experience ongoing relationships of learning between roles, where people value different perspectives as opportunities, and work together as a team, while still appreciating the value of role boundaries in defining the scope of responsibilities.
In our example, people in different roles sometimes suggest and try out new practices together. A young volunteer was concerned the group was throwing away a lot of sugar. Reusing unused sugar from the bowls breaks hygiene regulations. She and another volunteer realised they could dramatically reduce the waste, without breaking the law, by putting out only a small amount, as long as someone kept an eye on the levels. This is now the practice. Similar kinds of small but practical learning have led, after two years, to efficient ways of working suited to the specific context and volunteers’ personal preferences.
Some volunteers, in some roles, prefer predefined ways of working which do not change in response to others, perhaps because this provides a sense of control, efficiency, safety and/or identity. Where this is the case, members of the group have realised that sensitivity is needed to encourage learning. If the need for safety is paramount, or if there is a history of conflict, one way to enable such learning can be to imagine a ‘safe house’: a place where both people can leave their roles behind and talk about their different perspectives.
Working across boundaries between internal teams
We have learnt that the vitality of relationships can be nurtured between internal teams, while still using agreed procedural interactions when useful for efficiency.
In our example, the kitchen and the front of house teams both need to know what diners have ordered. In week 2, front of house panicked when the kitchen team moved the hand-written orders from the serving hatch into the kitchen. In week 3, the teams put in place a formal procedure by creating two copies of each order using carbon paper. Two years on, people now coordinate in practice by talking to one another, as a more relaxed atmosphere has developed. The paper records act only as reminders.
Building in predictable procedures between teams can be a way of dealing with what is commonly called the ‘silo problem’ in many organisations. Our example demonstrates what can be achieved when both teams focus on being more flexible with one another. It is then possible to work in ways that honour the vitality of the relationship, only using formulaic solutions across boundaries to support this where necessary.
Working across a formal organisational boundary
A formal organisational boundary is also a relationship and, therefore, an opportunity for learning.
In our example, the distinction between volunteers and diners could easily look and feel like an organisational boundary. But volunteers dine and diners volunteer and, each Saturday, a volunteer plays the role of host, responsible for welcoming everyone and introducing people to one another. These practices have spread into a general friendliness, creating a sense of overall community which is generally felt more deeply than any role-based distinctions between people.
Nurturing a culture to support self-organisation
We have learnt that embracing boundaries as opportunities for learning can help when nurturing self-organising teams.
In our example, some volunteers are particularly motivated to ensure that people are free to exchange roles and to come and go over time. This peer-based working extends to the aspiration that no role should have the right to arbitrarily exercise ‘power over’ any other.
Even one volunteer being overtly critical or behaving disrespectfully can affect the enjoyment and motivation of others. The group has found it must acknowledge and address discomfort as it arises, being sensitive to changing personal context and individuals’ differing assumptions and motivations.
Challenges are ongoing, particularly in the face of the recurring question: ‘this may be working, but who’s actually in charge?’ There is also an inevitable tension between experimentation and the need to deliver meals safely in 90 minutes. Nevertheless, although it requires continual vigilance, the group is achieving a good balance between efficiency and nurturing the social interactions that support inclusion.
So what?
How might these lessons translate to your experience of teamwork in research, or in any other roles in life?
How relevant is our experience that when you focus on being human together, you are more likely to notice that every boundary is an impoverished view of a rich relationship of mutual learning? And that our ability to learn together, and to change, are destroyed by pre-scripted procedural roles and interactions?
How have you combined teamwork with the social process of learning? How might you find the time, care and persistence to nurture a culture of curiosity and courage to ‘dance’ together? What difference might that make?
Reference:
Duck, R. and Searles, J. (2021). Designing freedom together. Organization Development Review, 53, 5: 32-40. (Available online in open access through: https://www.academia.edu/70156929/Designing_Freedom_Together)
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution or the work on which the contribution is based. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Roger Duck PhD works mostly as a consultant through his own business, Mapsar Limited, drawing on systemic ideas to help people learn together and take effective action. His work focuses on creating conditions for learning and change in organisations, and the wider systems in which they operate. He is active in networks exploring systemic practice and participatory learning for transformative innovation. He is based near Manchester, UK.
Biography: Jane Searles BSc is a systemic architect. Her work addresses whole systems, which have customers or citizens at their heart, and focusses on people and effective teamwork (and enabling technology where useful). She is now retired and is applying her experience as a community activist in her local area, and as such has been deeply involved throughout the local community meals initiative, which is now in its third year. This experience, especially moments of heightened emotion and learning, is drawn on for examples for this i2Insights contribution. She is based in Fife, Scotland, UK.
I was really interested in your piece and wanted to share something from our experience in Better Together.
Better Together was set up as a co-produced service, with professionals and people with lived experience working alongside each other to provide support for people using substances and also managing various mental health experiences. We offered the usual support, psychoeducation, therapy and group support. Lived experience, although central in principle, in the early days was often something that service staff maybe felt that needed to be managed and minded. There was a lot of risk management, discussions and a level of fear from managers about how things might unfold.
As we worked together, we started to recognise the value in each other in a different way, and the hierarchy began to loosen. It became less about who held what role, and more about what each person brought. We began to see that as a kind of gift each person was bringing and we treated it in that way. Different ways of being with, and working together began to unfold, for example in our group work we wouldn’t ask a question we weren’t willing to answer ourselves. The service staff also answered the questions for themselves in our “check-in and reflection groups.” That helped keep things mutual and grounded.
From there, people didn’t just bring their experience of addiction, mental health or recovery. They brought what they loved their talents, humour, music, poetry. We found ourselves writing together, listening to music, laughing.
We all came from different disciplines and different experiences, and we stayed different. But we learned how to relate, and to learn from each other. The boundaries between us became more like invitations, to be shaped by each other and to discover something new or very old and forgotten.
We also didn’t organise ourselves around relapse or diagnosis. If someone came in having used that day, we didn’t exclude them or manage them. We listened to the fact that they had come, that they wanted to connect not disconnect, we learned to hold each others experience instead of manage, risk assess or diagnose it.
We found ourselves listening not only to what was said, but to what hadn’t yet been told, each other’s untold stories. In doing that, we unlearned a lot of what we had experienced in other systems.
What mattered wasn’t just what each person brought, but who we were becoming through the sharing.
It didn’t feel like blurring boundaries, more like opening them, so something living could happen between us.
It felt more like a relational ecology, where multiple truths could exist at the same time. The only real condition was that we agreed to learn from and with each other.
Roger Duck and Jane Searles have shared a short, succinct explanation of systemic thinking in action as fundamentally human practices, Readers would need to “unpack” the examples of carefully thought through work through relating them to their own actual experiences of being human while doing things with others. At best this would be done through shared discussion, exploration and discovery, or creative learning together. This particular process could lead to a virtuous circle of doing and thinking together, potentially encouraging ever widening circles of practitioners in the fields of meaningful human relations. Roger and Jane have generously shared their fruitful experiences.
Caveat: Currently, there is concerted criticism of control and its various manifestations – whether deliberate or unthinking – as highlighted in the examples mentioned. While this is a much needed corrective, there could be a more nuanced comment on this negative practice in order to promote mutually rewarding learning from experience or “error”.
For example, otherwise thoughtful and considerate persons would be aghast to learn that they are controlling in their interactions with others.
This resonated for me, Roger and Jane, thank you, but it also quietly exposes something. When people are trusted to relate, adapt and solve problems together, my experience is that they usually do. The example you shared wasn’t surprising; it’s what happens when the conditions are right! What’s interesting and what I’ve been writing about this week is that we still design most public service systems as if this isn’t true. We build around roles, process and control and then we wonder why relationships flatten and learning slows!! In reality, high-performing teams don’t remove boundaries, they work through them, in real time. Issues surface early, get dealt with quickly and aren’t treated as problems to avoid, but as part of how the system learns and that’s the gap in reform quite honestly. Not whether people can do this, but whether the system actually allows it…….
Thanks for this, both. An interesting discussion of boundaries in a delightful community project but with many additional implications for interorganizational learning and maybe even cross-sector learning. Many useful concepts. I love the safe house!
Leicester Vaughan College’s Human Factor at Work project is only just getting off the ground, focusing essentially on social and emotional learning in the workplace to promote human flourishing. One specific theme we may pursue further down the line is to trawl for any interest in the city in a community of practice around bullying – the causes, the manifestations, the roles, the cultures that permit or encourage it, the systems that have been developed to address it. Is there mileage in designing this as cross-sector i.e. psychotherapists and social workers, education professionals, those in the health service, HR and managers in corporates and SMEs? While there might be more interest in a sector-specific group – and it’s not either/or – something suggests that there might be a different order of learning were we to explore the phenomenon within the individual, the family, the school and the adult workplace and the learning at the boundaries. Any observations or illustrations most welcome!
The word ‘learning’ may lead to some confusion. The word ‘applies to knowledge acquired especially through formal, often advance schooling’ . A web search gives the synonyms erudition, scholarship and knowledge. Obviously this is not how you are using the word here. Perhaps the words ‘experience’, ‘understanding’ or ‘openness’ express your ideas rather better? ‘Boundaries as opportunities for understanding’ feels a bit better to me.
Although not an area I am familiar with, I found this paper thought provoking yet very accessible. There are many areas where this type of thinking could usefully be applied.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Sue. I’m delighted that you found it accessible.
Jane and I have found the whole process of responding to comments to be full of insight.
So I’d love to hear more about where you think this kind of thinking (and indeed practice) might apply, and perhaps what challenges you can imagine in those contexts.
Thank you Roger and Jane for such a thoughtful piece of writing. Many sentences and phrases throughout demand to be savoured and re-read. To ‘work in ways that honour the vitality of the relationship’, ‘to nurture a culture of curiosity’, and valuing ‘different perspectives as opportunities’ are important phrases which resonate heavily with my research, reading and work experience. I’ve tried to work at the interfaces of ‘accepted boundaries’ (which have always puzzled me) and treated them instead as spaces for creative, fruitful differences to emerge.
This excellent guide touches on something very profound on our shared journey to establish better ways of thinking and working together as actively caring human beings, rather than as passive rule-followers who simply ‘give up’ with encountered false boundaries. What you describe echoes across individual learning, team learning, organisational and inter-organisational learning and community-grounded learning.
The tone and ambition of this short piece of writing is truly astonishing. Its rich fabric of ideas and shared thinking begins with subtlety and practicality to touch upon the approaches required to help achieve inclusive, adaptive social learning through individual, team and community-based research. Somehow, I feel that it picks up and moves on from where my own research left off, in ways I can barely describe. No doubt many others will find your piece thought-provoking too, in a good way.
For me, it highlights the importance of patience, and of being constantly both attentive and reflective. Overall, it answers the need to feel a sense of human belonging via consciously adopting an approach of shared responsibility, which isn’t at all easy! Thinking in particular of your second question, this context seems to create a fertile environment in which mutual learning can flourish through a focus on evolving relationships, rather than shrivel through imposed structural isolation.
This form of mutual learning and empowerment doesn’t mean that everyone sits (or should sit) ‘on the same page’, but perhaps is simply willing to be more adaptive in their own thinking and thus affect the flexibility of the group endeavour?
Thank you Cathy!
We recognise that you have a broader understanding of the philosophy behind the community meals than is available from this short article, because you were in the loop while we were developing the text (which started out considerably longer!)
I (Jane) have been personally enthusiastic about nurturing the creation and growth of a self-organising team, and it feels like you are also interested in this process from a research perspective, which is wonderful. (Forgive me if I have read this incorrectly). It is interesting to note the way in which your response encouraged us think about what we have written from the perspective of a research exercise.
Shared responsibility “isn’t at all easy” is such an understatement! There is so much to learn about how to go about this successfully in practice. For example, we are struck by your reflection that it may be possible to “create a fertile environment in which mutual learning can flourish through a focus on evolving relationships, rather than shrivel through imposed structural isolation.” One way that “structural isolation” can turn up in practice is when the drive to complete a predefined activity as efficiently as possible distracts people from being human together. Given that the urge to efficiency is so deeply embedded in our culture, a focus on flourishing relationships is likely to remain a visionary ideal. But visionary ideals can have enormous practical value when they feed the green shoots of change.
Regarding your last paragraph, the direction of travel is to collectively create the conditions in which each person can become more themselves and more individuated, whilst at the same time feeling a greater sense of belonging in relationships of mutual respect. There is often quite a journey to arrive at a place in which, genuinely, “I’m OK and you’re OK”: that is always seesawing away underneath the surface for most of us!
Thanks, Jane for your thoughtful reply. Lots more of interest here. If a sole focus on efficiency effectively de-humanises our interactions, it can become questionable. William Morris thought so! That can stamp on our humanity and deny the creativity and fulfilment which makes life worthwhile. I love the way you are treading a difficult path (or is it straddling a dual path?) between people feeling comfortable becoming more themselves, while also achieving a sense of belonging through mutual respect. That dual approach would truly extend the identity of the individual into the world by adopting more open ways of mutual learning, rather than continuing to condone isolation?
I do tend to see every individual as a potential everyday learner, researcher and philosopher: something to be nurtured and more appreciated within our society. This is especially important, given the multiple challenges that we face at present.
These are meant to be admiring words, which your thoughts have prompted, but you are actually doing it. Keep up the great work!
“Efficiency can stamp on our humanity and deny the creativity and fulfilment which makes life worthwhile”. Lovely. That’s so important.
The community meals volunteers, and the diners, are “actually doing it”. Every meal generates a whole stack of new learning which continually changes the details of what is actually done. That change IS the learning. The volunteers, and the diners, are doing it every week, creating community one new relationship at a time.
Developing a way of making sense of, and communicating about, the embodied learning that is going on, as Roger and I have done in this article, is itself part of the learning process, in my view. It is interesting that the difficult thing is not in the process of learning and improving day by day, nor in the process of making sense of this as we have done in this article, but in bringing those two ways of seeing the world together. This is surely another opportunity for learning across a boundary that we have yet to properly address.
Thanks for prompting our ongoing reflection.
Thank you for this wonderful contribution to the literacy of self-and team-perception! Fine grained observations as the one’s you share encourage to observe/reflect own behaviour in collaborative situations more in detail. Thank you also for highlighting the act of drawing a distinction when creating boundaries. It is the verb ‘drawing’ that I experience helpful as an entry point to learn how to stretch, transcend, transform or dissolve boundaries together.
Reading your blog-post I was reminded of Paulo Freire’s notion of the human being as a „limit-being“ (referring to the existential constitution of humans) that — challenged by „limit-situations“ — may perform „limit-acts“ which, in Freire’s experience (and language), can contribute to become more human (which seem to be very much the case in your community kitchen).
Thank you for your perceptive comments, Ulli, on the importance of fine-grained observations from practice. These happen when you have a fully-functioning action learning process.
Regarding the point about drawing a distinction, I am pretty sure that this phrasing originally came from my (Roger’s) reading of The Wholeness of Nature, Goethe’s Way in Science by Henri Bortoft, when he talks about “distinguishing-which-is-relating”. I can’t now find the original quotation, but the concept has stayed with me.
Neither of us is in a good position to comment on Paulo Freire’s work, but it is always interesting to understand the connections that people make.
“Your skin doesn’t separate you from the world; it’s a bridge through which the external world flows into you, and you flow into it.” Alan Watts
I love this piece – it makes me think of the above, but also provides a ‘stand’ for what Barry Oshry (perhaps confusingly) calls ‘robust systems’ – with the distinction:
In Dominance systems, the Other is evaluated, feared, defended against, controlled.
In Robust systems, the Other is studied, welcomed, valued, utilized.
Your characterisation of a boundary opens up this possibility beautifully!
Thank you for your enthusiastic support and considered comments, as always, Benjamin!
These ways of rethinking the nature of boundaries are so important. I (Roger) remember wondering when I was quite young “when I open my mouth and breathe in, where is the boundary of ‘me’?” We can learn so much from multiple perspectives.
We’ve written something in response to Anil Wali in the comments here about our attempt to speak to the primacy of relational process as a different way of seeing.
well all living things are basically bilaterally-open toruses, aren’t we? 🙂
Yes. And all living things are basically eddies in the river of life!
For those interested, there is a particular systems methodology called (for rather obscure reasons) Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, or CHAT for short. CHAT was developed by Mike Cole and Yrjö Engestrom. Etienne Wenger later of Communities of Practice and Situated Learning fame, was also involved in the early days. CHAT is based on the idea that if systems approaches are intended to be opportunities for learning, then why not develop a systems methodology based on learning theories. In this case, it was based on Vygotsky’s ideas of learning as a social process. CHAT is a fascinating approach that has strongly influenced my practice, but in essence is based on the idea that an individual’s journey to fulfilling a need is mediated by the tools they use (including language), the rules of the community they are part of and the roles that they play in that community. How an individual learns how to fulfill that need is dependent on how they addresses and resolve the contractions within and between tool, rules, roles and needs. Now expand this into a work setting (ie a community of practice) where people are working on the same activity but fullfilling different needs, and you have a whole bunch more contradictions that need to be addressed, as this article so succinctly describes. CHAT is frequently used in high risk environments especially concerning health and safety issues, where contradictions abound. If anyone is interested to find out more, there is a description of CHAT in my book System Diagrams, along with the questions that CHAT addresses. The book is donationware (ie free but you can pay something if you wish) and can be downloaded from https://bobwilliams.gumroad.com
Apologies about the grammar. I pushed the wrong button on my computer and it sent out the raw version. For some reason I couldn’t edit the posted comment. The most significant auto-correct blooper is ‘contractions’. It should of course be contradictions.
Thank you Bob for your comments, and for the introduction to CHAT. Putting learning at the heart of systemic thinking and practice sounds eminently sensible.
As a fundamental part of an ongoing process of change, we are interested in the collective possibilities and creativity that can arise by doing things together and sharing thoughts with each other.
Nora Bateson has invented the word ‘symmathesy’ as a replacement for the word ‘system’ to emphasise the essence of (living) systems as processes of ‘learning together’. Nora talks about boundaries as ‘interfaces of mutual learning’ which means, for her, that people are learning together but not necessarily the same thing.
There are clearly some common threads through all of this and, no doubt, some contradictions!
Great article and impressive analysis to soften rigid boundaries into more malleable opportunities among diverse groups for multi-level intervention, camaraderie and efficiency to break down siloes and have a more efficient outcomes in a multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary dynamic interactions and engagement to yield a profound impactful product.
Excellent article demonstrating the challenges and opportunities faced when diverse local volunteers work together on a community project. The challenge is to engage, empower and encourage all volunteers to value and contribute their own ideas and actions to progress, sustain and improve the project, discussing with peers to put actions in place, rather than waiting for a “leader” to make key decisions. The local context, learning, persistence and personal relationships are key to success.
Thank you Aileen. I agree with all of that!
Your involvement with the highs and lows of the community meals initiative we are talking about here shines forth from your words!
I have learnt such a lot with and from you, especially about how to gently encourage peer relationships between people with very different backgrounds and outlooks.
Thank you! In a world of rigid boundaries and siloes, which most of us find ourselves in most of the time, we can always try to soften them into more malleable opportunities (nice phrasing!)
When we come to use these ideas in reality, we need to recognise this prevailing view.
One of us (Jane) started initially with the idea of writing about the practical actions that can be taken to overcome barriers. The other (Roger) started with the conviction that everyone intuitively understands that boundaries are the result of us noticing differences (and individuals) more than noticing relationships. This resulted in us both adopting a way of seeing (a ‘vision’) where we we deliberately address a constant state of ongoing and changing relationship, rather seeing the world as made up of ‘things’ and ‘boundaries’ between them.