Facilitating complexity with Nikki Silvestri

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I’m thrilled to *finally* share my conversation with the amazing and electrifying Nikki Silvestri.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We connected back in early March and recorded our conversation in late May, at the height of the quarantine. It’s been a process to find the time to sit with this deep conversation and pull together some insights for you.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A friend shared Nikki’s work with me and I was hooked - Nikki was setting up a program to teach facilitation to Rural Women, and I was so curious to dive into her facilitation and leadership approach and her critical work.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nikki’s core metaphor is soil - the complex place that gives life to us all - the source of our nourishment.</span></p> <p><strong>Monoculture vs Food Forests</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Soil can be thought of as a series of inputs - minerals, water, carbon, etc. A mathematical equation for creating a space for life. But rich soil is not simple. It’s a complex, living thing that responds unpredictably to attempts to control it.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In agriculture we can have a food forest - a near-wild combination of plants and animals feeding each other and ourselves. Or, we can have a monoculture - sprawling spaces where we use as much science and technology as possible to sustain maximum outputs at all times and at all costs.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nikki suggests, rightly, that monocultures can also exist in our own organizations...and that when we have such a monoculture, when we are not doing what she calls “basic diversity and inclusion work” innovation and creativity will be lost. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Esther Derby, a noted Agile consultant,</span> <a href= "https://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2020/leading-change-esther-derby"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">touched on this forest metaphor in our podcast