HSD 3 {HSD 1 revisited*}

A friend has been nibbling away at me over the last few years to review our HSD Certification course. (As I write the acronym it occurs to me that it sounds like a disease. 😜 )

HSD is far from a disease - it's a means to a cure. It stands for Human Systems Dynamics and provides a perspective on organizations and all the interactions and related ups and downs that occur when groups of two or more humans try to accomplish something.

You know: CHAOS. (The most recent elections in the U.S. and about Brexit might come to mind.)

Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone could provide some insight and practical suggestions to deal with this kind of mess? The mess being a complex system that has unforeseen and unintended consequences? Like... oh, LIFE in general?

Well, Glenda Eoyang and the HSD Institute can, and do!

And since my lovely and talented partner, Vickie Gray, and I have dealt with many messy organizations with complex problems throughout our consulting days, Human Systems Dynamics seemed very worth learning about. So we did, by taking the HSD Certification course from Glenda in 2010.

As well as being a rewarding, insightful, and revealing learning experience we got to work with a cohort of classmates with years of organizational experience and insight on the related problems and challenges they had tackled.

One of the kindred consultant spirits in the group was F., and it was his idea to review the course, share experiences and new learning, and discuss questions since six years has passed.

So F. has been poking at me and trying to set aside time in his busy practice for us to talk. Today was our first solid crack at opening our class binders and walking through the materials. 

I thought it would be useful to capture our thoughts and insights here as we go forward.

To set the stage I'm borrowing the Simple Rules that the Institute established for their course:

• Teach and learn in every action
• Search for the true and the useful
• Give and get value for value
• Attend to the part, the whole and the greater whole
• Engage in joyful practice
• Share the HSD story

Just the concept to even have Simple Rules to follow as part of the initial conditions for group behaviour was one of the first lessons. I'm sure we'll come back to this later.

Stay tuned for more!

{* My first blog post on HSD was in 2010.}

Team Tips - 24 {Protocol Check - What do you think?}

Friday Brag (borrowed from my sweetheart Vickie)(steal from the best):

Highest number ever of page views of my blog of my last post “Team Tips - 23”. Yay!

You can now say: “You did that?”, and I can reply: “I did that!”

I also received some complimentary comments, and an offer of a reply to my Ask for Help. “All good” as they say locally.

I'm also receiving the highest volume of email spam, which probably means the evil bots are mining their way from the blog to my website and my supposedly “un-bot-able” email address. The offers of deposited funds, court action, lewd (I'm assuming) photos, follow-ups to fictitious requests for business proposals, fake billing, etc. are actually quite creative. One even claims that I've been caught speeding on a traffic camera - as if they existed here. If the spelling and grammar weren't so atrocious one could be tempted to pay attention to them. And if they didn't have the huge red warning flag of the attached zip file.

Following the line of the last post, it would be nice to scream “Protocol Check” at them.

But that isn't at all the point of Protocol Check.

While it would occasionally feel really good, and satisfying, and therapeutic to yell at someone who gets a Protocol wrong, or breaks a Commitment, that's not what Protocol Check is for. It's really a learning tool.

If I bury an Ask for Help inside a Perfection Game, or Check In angry about someone's behaviour without asking their intention, or just generally get the Protocol steps wrong, that's a great opportunity to gently, quietly, compassionately have a conversation with me about the Protocols in a spirit of shared learning.

It might go:

• Paul, Protocol Check.
• Oh? 
• I'm wondering what your intention was in that Perfection Game.
• Err .... I think I was looking for some information.
• OK; let's both look at the Core Protocols and see what it says about the Perfection Game. Were you really trying to Ask for Help?
• Hmmmm. Let's have a look. Maybe there is a better way than what I did.

In this kind of interaction both parties, adhering to the Commitments, are interested in discovering how the Protocols in question work, and the best way to use them.

For me, it is important that both parties are open to learning and teaching simultaneously. Alternatively, the risk is that one party becomes the “Protocol God” and rains fire and brimstone down on the transgressor.

Even when, as occurred in one of our BootCamps, a participant had the Protocols virtually memorized, and became Mr. Protocol Check. Happily, it all became fun: we had a Protocol Check dance, and phone ring tone imitating his specially exaggerated Protocol Check voice. But he followed “Rule Number 6” (Art of Possibility, Zander & Zander) and it was hilarious learning for all of us.

So while no one objected to my licence in writing about “screaming Protocol Check” last time, that's not how it is done.

Nevertheless, the ring tone may still be available.