Acknowledging and Engaging under Complexity (continued)

This post is part of an online conversation about how Boards and EDs in Not-For-Profits can engage to best steer the organization forward.

This is the second of two installments. This builds on ideas from the Globe and Mail article that gets are complexity by discussing fact checking in newspaper publishing, where Kathy English acknowledges that people no longer agree on “evidence” to support the facts they are checking.

PART 3: Clarifying (and Reducing?) Complexity

What is the evidence of what you know?

It is common to hear people talk about evidence-based practices. In their conversation about journalistic fact checking and the role that evidence plays, Kathy English lamented, "Well, now people can't agree on that evidence, and that makes the role so, so challenging." There is a quote about allowing people to possess individual opinions but not allowing them to claim individual facts. (Maybe we would expect a cursory fact-check of that quote revealed several potential origins.)

Kathy English's question is to be taken as an inquiry rather than a challenge, i.e. I am not disagreeing with your assertion, I am simply asking you to back it up. The cool kids would say, "let's see the receipts."

For this conversation to continue, we must distinguish between skepticism (about beliefs and evidence and truth, etc.), which accompanies healthy curiosity, and views that are completely detached from anything that could qualify as empirical evidence. Dismissal of a tangible piece of evidence as unimportant is very different from completely refusing to acknowledge it.

If beliefs can be conceptual, evidence is specific and tangible. When, in good faith, someone asks for evidence of your belief, the response is often data or a tangible experience. For example, "Why do you think the economy is bad?" can generate a reference to an economic report from a government agency or an anecdote that I have seen a drop-off in my business. These examples show the distinction between self-generated evidence and that relayed to you (from a trustworthy source).

And, by the way, What is evidence, anyway?

Evidence carries a connotation of being indisputable, but there is a good deal of trust attached to the sources of evidence. When Kathy English says that we can't agree on evidence, I am assuming that a big part of that is we can't agree on trustworthy sources. The lack of trust can run the gamut from believing that the "evidence" is completely fabricated, to questioning its completeness, whether by omitting a finding or by avoiding an area of inquiry. For when we are our own source, The John Howard Society of Canada published an article last summer on their website that discusses the limitations of eyewitnesses. Conversations about beliefs do not have to feel like a cross examination, but you can imagine a conversation where your inquisitor keeps referring to what you "think" you saw (or heard) and how it may not have been what actually happened.

Author Paula Coelho shares this piece of wisdom in his book The Alchemist: "Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time." So, is a single occurrence a one-off or the start of a brand-new sequence? Your answer will depend on what you believe, but we can agree that it happened once, right?

The theory of change exercise is one example of a group of people creating a shared understanding of a complex situation. Donald Hebb describes the relationship between theory and truth with the quote, "A good theory holds together long enough to get you a better theory." Opening up a theory for discussion is a means of seeing if a better one exists. If we treat aligning beliefs as an interactive process, the conversations about the evidence we are using to support the belief will underpin any collaboration.

Parting Thoughts

When we are collaborating with a group of people, like a Board of Directors working with an Executive Director, we can engage in conversations to align on "what we believe" and "what evidence we are using to underpin those beliefs." 

Here are ideas to make those exchanges easier:

Questioning a source does not have to mean dismissing it completely.

Rob Briner talks about this with respect to evidence-based research studies about organizational development. Whether a conclusion comes from a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed reports, or from one study of 16 people makes a difference. Just because it is the latter does not mean it is wrong, but one hopes that, if that is your only "receipt," you would be open to discussing the belief in question.

Getting more information on sources can be helpful.

If one is to trust the NY Times, they recently reported that a study vouching for the safety of glyphosate weedkillers was retracted from a scientific journal, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, due to information that revealed the authors worked for Monsanto. Just because you are paid by the organization that benefits directly from your findings does not mean that your views were skewed, but we might expect agreement that we need to contend with this grain of salt. (One also expects differing views on its proportions and relative mass.)

Collecting data requires a theory.

Einstein famously said, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Pairing this with Peter Drucker's, "It you can't measure it, you can't manage it," shines a light on the challenges of creating evidence from data. What we decide the measure (because we want to manage it) reveals a logical connection of what "counts." The City of Calgary is currently dealing with water main breaks. Apparently a "measure" that was in place to "manage" this was looking at "wire breaks," which were an early warning sign of a pipe failure. When there are many moving parts (such as the case of Calgary water mains, but also with most areas in which we deal), it is helpful to share a theory of "how it works." 

Acknowledging a fact does not mean supporting a theory.

We make logical connections, some of which may be more defensible than others. In his book Sensemaking, Christian Madsbjerg references "Objective Knowledge," that is based in natural sciences. It may stretch the definition to call gravity a theory, but I believe that if my coffee mug slips off the desk, it will end up on the floor. He contrasts this with "Subjective Knowledge" that arises from personal feelings and opinions. If I find myself to be a bit irritated in the late morning, maybe that has something to do with my skipping breakfast.

 So…

Unlike social gatherings, differences in politics, worldviews and overriding narratives of how the world works, we can (and have to) discuss, understand, and even accept these differences. We can disagree on whether the future limitations of accepting public-sector funding, while agreeing that we need funds to run the organization.