Feedback helps a complex relationship to learn, change, adapt and grow, in its parts and as a whole. These relationships have marvellous abilities to understand and to communicate, to contrive and invent ways to overcome their own difficulties. Rather than impose "engineered solutions", encourage people to pool possible approaches and provide a feedback mechanism that will allow the more successful to emerge.

Invitations for feedback must be crafted with care. But the good news is that you created a structure for feedback when you mapped Yala trees, assigned roles and granted permissions.

Here is one of the screens that would invite members of the Biennial's Education Roundtable to share their views:

 

Of course, there are some conversations that must be taken “off line”, but there are many others that will flow more easily with the help of a secure network. The Yala offers neutral ground for the vital and sometimes awkward interactions in complex relationships.

Think of it this way: in a restaurant, the waiter does not tell the chef what to do. The chef might own the restaurant! Instead the waiter puts a diner’s order on a hook, and the chef takes that order off that hook to fulfill it. The dining room is the waiter’s domain. The kitchen is the chef’s. The hook is neutral territory. And chef and waiter still talk to each other at other times and in other ways. Nowadays that "hook" is more likely to be a computer system.

As Seymour Papert wrote in his visionary book Mindstorms:

“The obstacle... is cultural. And if the problem is cultural the remedy must be cultural. We need to advance the art of meshing computers with cultures so that they can serve to unite, hopefully without homogenizing, the fragmented subcultures that coexist counter-productively in contemporary society. The computer acts as a transitional object to mediate relationships that are ultimately between person and person.”

Consequently the Yala seeks to ensure neutrality both in what it does and what it doesn't do:

• Focus on the message... not the messenger
• Invite dissimilar ideas... not consensus
• Seek mutual understanding... not solutions
• Stay in the moment... store no history, project no trends.

After inviting feedback and making interaction safer, display what you have heard.

Yala reports aid clear and precise thinking.

Tables are preferable for small data sets, show exact numbers, and work well where there are many local comparisons to draw. The Yala’s “SuperTable” is designed to intrigue. It organizes and sorts the information, lets you drill down to the underlying detail, and provides options to change the display and cut the data in different ways.

This is a portion of a SuperTable:

 

Graphical displays are best for large amounts of data. The Yala’s Pattern display is similar to the SuperTable but more compact. Charts are shrunken and tightly packed to present as much information as possible within a single eye-span. Scales and titles are minimized and “data ink” maximized. Harmonious color schemes increase information density (and there is a grayscale option to support black and white printing or faxing).

Here's part of a Pattern report:

Yala trees give us a coherent architecture for organizing and learning from feedback. Logical structure, shrunken graphics and color further assist pattern recognition.

Thus the Yala maps aims, issues and views at the interfaces of complex relationships, invites feedback and displays emerging patterns of thought – and stops there. When good ideas emerge, implementation is likely to happen. Acting intelligently is "acting our minds". We can’t forget what we now know, or unlearn what we’ve just learnt. It is tough to keep doing things the hard way once a better way is discovered.

Consequently the Yala does not generate implementation tasks, assign responsibilities, plan completion dates, monitor actual performance and take remedial action. These are activities of line management. The Yala does not create a competing power structure.

But it does require a new style of leadership, dubbed coordinate and cultivate.