Seeking answers to this conundrum, we have studied successful interventions by asking participants what made the difference. On one level, their answers reveal little. They say they just did it, or they tried hard. They cite relatively minor suggestions and offhand comments that they took for wisdom. The people we interviewed describe being influenced by experiences outside the work situation: the influence of a book they had read, a lesson learned at home, something a friend said. While leaders and consultants had been working steadily and systematically to help facilitate change, credit is given to what seems like peripheral, almost random events.

The logic beneath these explanations seems unavoidable: People and organizations change — rapidly, strongly, thoroughly — when ready to change. When ready, they will pick up almost anything from the environment and make use of it. Even the slightest nudge from a manager can act as a powerful catalyst. Conversely, when people are not ready to change, they will ignore or resist the best efforts of others to change them. As anyone who has repeatedly tried to act less defensively or more assertively knows, we resist even our own plans to change.

It appears there are deep, underground currents of readiness that, once tapped, serve as powerful catalysts for change (see “A New Theory of Readiness and Change” on p. 3). While this statement may appear mysterious, in fact it reflects two of the most basic premises of science and systems theory. First, physicists have shown that systems outside their normal constraints, systems far from equilibrium, are vulnerable to change triggered by random experience, just as an avalanche can be set off by a loud noise. Second, during periods of disequilibrium, there are many potential paths of growth and development — what biologists call bundles of opportunity. Like new sprouts in spring, these bundles are quietly waiting to be watered and fertilized. By supporting these preexisting bundles, we can fuel and guide change.

People and organizations change — rapidly, strongly, thoroughly — when ready to change.

Readiness takes many forms. Sometimes, people and organizations are in so much pain that they believe they must change. At other times, systems are so out of kilter, so uncertain or disorganized, that they can’t help but change in their efforts to regain their balance. At still other times, people are so open, curious, and receptive to the influence of a new leader that they see every new idea or program as pointing the path to successful action. There is much variety but the core principle seems clear: Organizations change when they are ready.

Readiness is derived from the Greek word, arariskein, which means “fitting” or “joining” or “being arranged for use.” So it is that certain kinds of interventions fit best in particular organizational climates at particular times — and not in others. A system can be entered at any point, because all of its elements are interconnected. This is the nub of it —  when interactions are aligned according to both timing and fit, there is readiness.

Three States of Readiness

Our research identifies readiness as existing in three different states. Each requires its own specific kinds of interventions. The first of the three states we call forays, which are changes that either have not come to fruition or do not yet exert a strong influence on the whole organization. They are best served in the style of martial arts, by pushing them from behind. In effect, we support and augment forces for alignment that are already in motion. The second type we name responsive states of readiness, such as curiosity, receptiveness, urgency, and determination. They are best served by leaders who provide information, advice, and guidance — a mentoring kind of support. The third type we call unstable states of readiness, like confusion, anxiety, and crisis. They need to be reframed so that people view them as integral aspects of change and cultivated as seedbeds of creative thought.

The idea is to have options, to identify whether and how groups are ready for change, and then to design interventions with those states of readiness in mind. If the intervention targeted to one form of readiness shows signs of failure, we can look elsewhere to intervene. This approach transforms the development of change strategies from guesswork into an empirical process.

Forays

No matter how rigidly or bureaucratically organized systems are or may appear, there are always changes afoot — people are constantly trying to improve things. Leaders and other change agents must learn to see these forays for what they are: tentative, incomplete moves that people and organizations make to improve their organization. Their efforts are forays from one way of doing or thinking about things into another.

Individually, forays look like this: You resolve to work with your staff in a collaborative fashion and succeed for a few days but then fall back into a more autocratic approach. Organizationally, forays look like this: Within a school in which many teachers and departments plod through their days in a bored, lethargic manner, several instructors come together informally, excited by their challenge, and push each other to innovative work with children. Creative strategies and new work processes that build strength but then get ignored or voted down are forays. Successful projects and teams whose learnings do not spread to the general culture of the corporation — these, too, are forays.

Forays are present in all organizations, all of the time. It is essential for leaders to learn to spot them. If we can identify and support forays to help them grow and use the momentum of people’s own energies, then we have access to the most powerful change agent possible (see “Capturing Forays”). Nevertheless, we may not always succeed in identifying and supporting forays, or our support during stable times may prove inadequate. We may have to wait for unstable times, when patterns of thought and behavior loosen, to push forays into lasting change.

Responsive States of Readiness

Responsive states include curiosity, receptiveness, urgency, and determination. As they approach the task of implementing a change effort, leaders frequently assume responsive states are in play, particularly because they are the easiest stage of readiness to manage. While these states are familiar enough, it’s useful to review the variations to discover when to provide information, planning, advice, or guidance.

Curiosity. Early on in planning and change efforts, staff, board members, volunteer workers, and others are often curious. They are willing to look at and keep an open mind about what leaders have in store for them.

Preferred Intervention Style. Leaders should offer information and suggest alternatives, but avoid pushing. Moving too fast can alienate potentially open-minded people. Scenario planning can be ideal for this state of readiness.

Receptivity. When receptive, people are actively open-minded. They are exploring and not locked into a solution. They have identified a problem but don’t yet have a solution, and they are asking to be told what can be done. New leaders who follow on the heels of organizational difficulties are often met with this kind of receptivity; the early days of their tenure are marked by a honeymoon period.

Preferred Intervention Style. When the organization is receptive, leaders have room to present their own approach to organizational success, or, better still, two or three approaches for the staff to choose from.

Urgency. With urgency, people feel a strong need to do something and, often enough, a strong need for help. Time is of the essence. “Are we too late?”, “Can we fix what is clearly broken?”, “Will our organization survive?”, “Will we let down our clients?”, “Will our jobs be preserved?” Urgency can occur during a sudden downturn in organizational life — funding is declining or unclear; clients are diminishing; the community does not feel well served and says so; a clear opportunity is missed and a competitor takes it.

Preferred Intervention Style. During states of urgency, leaders can and should make clear, decisive suggestions. They can emphasize the type of structure, processes, and working methods that will lead to success.

Determination. When determined, people have identified a problem and believe they must solve it. A private school has been losing enrollment to another local school and knows that it must fund the construction of a new building in order to compete; a state agency says it will only fund larger community-based organizations, leading a smaller organization to acquire or merge with a partner; a board feels its executive director is taking the organization down the wrong road and must step in. When events are dramatic and their consequences are well understood, the determination to get on with things closes down the psychological space available for alternative solutions.

Preferred Intervention Style. The will and energy for change are in place; leaders have only to provide a credible way to move forward and demonstrate self-confidence and belief in their staffs.

There is a limit to responsive states of readiness. In general, people and organizations in responsive states do not feel threatened. They do not anticipate radical change, either in the form of a dramatic restructuring or of a paradigm shift in the way the organization’s mission, strategies, or operations are conceived. Transformational experiences grow from instability or from small powerful new forces in an organization’s life that, with support, have the capacity to pull the organization into entirely different ways to perform their work. Therefore, when the utilization of responsive states proves either ineffectual or not helpful enough, leaders may turn to unstable states of readiness.

Using Instability

Physical scientists have demonstrated that systems in disequilibrium are vulnerable to change. This observation is equally true for people and organizations. Individuals, groups, and organizations, when disrupted, can find themselves confused, anxious, sometimes feeling helpless, and ready for relief. When confusion exceeds our ability to cope with even ordinary matters, we reach out for almost any way to get oriented — even if what we find is new and unfamiliar. We become alert for people who can help us. We pay attention to thoughts, strategies, and feelings that had been buried and forgotten during stable times. Or we take risks and behave in uncharacteristic ways, as when crisis brings out the best in some individuals and organizations. Unstable states provide the soil in which forays grow.

Physical scientists have demonstrated that systems in disequilibrium are vulnerable to change.

Where, you may ask, do unstable states come from, and do they come frequently enough for impatient planners to make use of in designing interventions? They do. Leadership changes, reorganizations, and challenges from the marketplace, for example, periodically throw people into states of confusion, anxiety, panic, and crisis — and get them wondering if their way of doing business is viable, or even if they are in the right business. During the course of a given three-year period, every organization is likely to question itself at a basic level.

Like responsive states, unstable states range from mild to very intense:

Confusion and Disorientation. Leaders and staff become confused and disoriented at work more often than they let on. Rapid growth, for example, may render informal management incompetent. Funding agencies may insist on better financial controls and more sophisticated information systems. As details fall between the cracks, as they often do when grassroots and entrepreneurial organizations grow, staff may lose confidence in themselves and their leaders. They are no longer new and able to get by on enthusiasm, effort, and innovation, but they don’t yet know how to reorganize in a more professional way. At such junctures, leaders are often unclear how to lead, and staff do not know how or who to follow. Confusion reigns.

Preferred Intervention. It is often helpful to name and affirm the confusion, framing it as a natural consequence of organizational change and growth and noting that it can be a source of energy and creativity. People will feel a strong desire to reestablish order. If the new order can incorporate adaptive ideas and if the urge for order helps the organization push towards a more coherent way to work, then the confusion will have served a great purpose.

Anxiety. Anxiety combines confusion with worry. Organizational problems are personalized, and we take them home. Problems remain somewhat vague, unfocused. The nature of anxiety is that it lacks a clear object. Anxiety draws people inward, away from colleagues, realistic evaluation, and collaboration.

Preferred Intervention. First, acknowledge the anxiety and name it. Second, encourage creative management that breaks the rules of business-as-usual. Third, work toward clearly defining the problem and potential solutions. Coming up with a rough version of a new strategic plan, one that people believe will lead them out of their troubles, is among the best ways to alleviate anxiety and realign the organization.

Panic and Crisis. There are times in organizational life when people panic, become fearful and frenetic, grow irrational, and lose their capacity for practical problem solving. Panic can be contagious. It can begin with one or two people, with one team or unit, and spread to others like grassfire while leaders — if they haven’t initiated the panic or been contaminated themselves — look on helplessly. Similarly, organizations can go through an identity crisis. They are changing so rapidly — through growth, change of services, change of location, change of leadership — that they no longer know who they are, and they cannot utilize their accustomed responses to situations. They feel awkward, inept — and, as a result, they act that way.

Preferred Intervention. Leadership needs to step forward and normalize the process. The challenge for leaders is to remain calm, to share both practical and impractical thoughts that can become the seeds of creative solutions. Besides normalizing and stating the potential in such moments, they must contain the panic. Strong leadership is required from someone who is not overwhelmed, who has perspective, who has watched groups and organizations enter — and leave — such crises several times before and come out better for it. The benefit is that organizations can become transformed, because the extreme disorganization created by panic loosens all patterns and opens the door to radical new patterns of experience.

Readiness in the System

Readiness is not a character trait or a quality that resides in others. A person can be ready to change in one situation or with one particular person and not with others. Context determines readiness as much as any particular quality of determination, urgency, openness, or vulnerability. If two people are joined in their urgency, for instance, they are more likely to move than if one is urgent for change while the other is bored, or if the other feels compelled to defend the status quo.

We have to be prepared to meet the readiness of others when and where it emerges. There’s no point in asking advice from someone who is prepared only for resistance. There isn’t much value in taking chances to leave familiar shores if others are made nervous by risk, instability, heated discussion, or intimacy. We have to engage and encourage the potential inherent in the readiness of others to change.

Creating Readiness

While we generally can find at least one of the three states of readiness in an organization, this is not always the case. Yet even in these situations, an opportunity remains. The patterns that hold a system in place and make it resistant to change can be disrupted. By disrupting ingrained patterns, we can generate states of readiness.

LEVERAGING READINESS

This chart is designed to help leaders decide how to move from utilizing one type of readiness to others. The order is based on (1) moving from the least to most intrusive and (2) emphasizing change that is invited or native to a system we intend to change.

For example, leaders can disrupt patterns of thinking. They can demand new levels of performance and can challenge assumptions. Similarly, dialogue groups and T-groups frustrate easy, rational modes of thought and push participants, first toward confusion (unstable states) and then toward more creative modes of thinking (forays). A similar experience occasionally takes place with particularly compelling speakers or inspiring leaders, who first connect with their audiences through shared ideas and experiences and, once the audience is rapt, lead them to entirely unexpected conclusions.

Further, leaders can disrupt the behavioral field. By asking a group of employees to rotate through each other’s roles, for example, a leader can create confusion (unstable states) as well as help workers broaden their appreciation of each other’s activities. The confusion then sets the stage for creative thinking about roles and collaboration. In some firms, the process is called “walking a mile” (in someone else’s shoes). When we restructure teams, committees, departments, and work processes, old patterns of behavior and cognition are similarly disrupted.

A Decision Sequence

We have developed a thought sequence to help leaders decide how to move from utilizing one type of readiness to others. The order is based on two principles: (1) moving from the least to the most intrusive; (2) emphasizing change that is invited or native to a system we intend to change (see “Leveraging Readiness”).

1. Identify and Support Forays. Forays are the most natural to people, so they offer the best chance of long-term success (see “Forays: A Case Study”). If, for some reason, you can’t find forays to support or your support doesn’t bring about substantial change, turn to responsive states.
2. Address Responsive States. The interventions here are straight-forward and simple: generally, provide information and guidance. Because people are curious or receptive, you have been invited to intervene; there is little to lose. If worst comes to worst, you will be ineffective. Don’t push. Pushing will create resentment and control struggles.
3. Sustain Unstable States. Remember, you don’t have to create crises. The natural ups and downs of organizational life often create small and large experiences of instability and confusion.
4. Disrupt Patterns of Thought, Behavior, and Feelings That Inhibit Change. The purpose of such disruption is not to force change — you can’t impose beliefs or behaviors — but to open gaps in patterns that permit people to learn and grow.

Changing Ourselves

Changing organizations always requires changing the people who work in them. Leaders, like others, have become integral parts of an organization’s stable patterns of thought, behavior, and feelings. Being part of the patterns presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is in the difficulty in personal change — gaining the perspective to see oneself in behavior and having the will to utilize that perspective to change oneself.

Changing oneself represents one of the most powerful tools available to the leader as an agent of organizational change. Leaders are obviously important in organizations, particularly because everyone observes their activities. When the leader’s action is out of character or a little unusual, people try to interpret it. The interpretation goes on internally — “What does this mean for me?” — and externally, as people talk in corridors, at lunch, in meetings.

When leaders change, there is often a ripple effect. One person changes, and that influences another and yet another. Observing these changes, the leader may adjust again. In other words, the leader’s initial change represents a foray. When others change in response and new patterns are built, then the foray has pulled the organizational system into a significant transformation.

Whenever leaders find themselves at an impasse with their staffs, changing their own behavior can set in motion such chains of events. A leader’s changes tend to destabilize the culture and processes of work, unfreezing stuck patterns and making reorganization possible. At the point where the organization grows unstable, each of the interventions we have discussed above becomes workable. Forays can be supported. Curiosity, receptivity, and even determination to change will emerge, presenting opportunities for leaders to introduce or reinforce the strategic directions around which alignment is built.

Many leaders plan and implement change efforts with hardly a thought to the readiness of their employees. They may assume that persuasion and reason will win the day. Or rather than picking their moments, leaders may try to create a permanent state of readiness for change in a negative way, by declaring that “only the paranoid survive,” or in a positive way, by striving to create a “learning organization.” But these approaches are likely to encounter resistance, either open or more subversive forms. By becoming aware of the different states of readiness and leveraging them, leaders widen their options and enhance their chances. Holding to the simplistic notion that “organizations are either ready or not ready for change” is to miss the truth — leaders can leverage readiness that exists everywhere.

Barry Dym is an organization development consultant and executive coach, with an emphasis on change management, strategy development and implementation, and leadership and management development. He is the author of four books: Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations (coauthored with Harry Hutson), Leadership Transitions, Couples, and Readiness and Change in Couple Therapy. Barry was the founder and executive director of two organizations.

Harry Hutson is a leadership and organization consultant whose practice focuses on the human side of strategic change. He designs and leads systemwide planning events, results-focused workshops, and team-building exercises; in addition, he provides individual coaching for executives. Harry has served for many years on the board of directors of the New England Center for Children.

An expanded version of this article appears in Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations (Sage Publications, Inc., forthcoming).

The post Leveraging Organizational Readiness for Change appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Fortunately, the problem isn’t insurmountable; in fact, it is resolved quite easily – if senior managers commit to working together to have a better understanding of where the organization is today and where it is going. This article introduces four different tools – the Vehicle Analogy, the Fire-Fighting Matrix, the Vision Deployment Matrix, and the Conceptual Framework – that can be used in tandem. The first two are diagnostic tools, designed to surface people’s perceptions of the organization’s current reality and future potential as well as to expose barriers to success. The second two provide frameworks for identifying a shared vision of a desired future and outlining steps for achieving that goal. By utilizing these four tools together, a management team can create an environment that can help their organization realize its potential.

From X to Z Through Y

All organizations are on a journey from a current reality (“X”) to a desired future (“Z”). That desired future might be to attain a specific set of goals, such as a certain market share or earnings. It might also be a series of milestones that would signal to stockholders that the company’s management is the right team to continue to run the company. The road from X to Z contains a series of initiatives and targets along the way, symbolized by the letter “Y.”

Here’s the problem. On the surface, the best route to get from X to Z is a straight line. And in business, a straight line means a clear, concise, understandable path of activities. However, in many organizations, the path from X to Z begins to wander a bit. Instead of going directly from X to Z through the Ys, managers find that the Ys have suddenly shifted and are no longer on the direct route to Z. And too often, the overwhelming number of Ys causes workers to lose sight of how to get to Z, or even where Z is.

This dynamic – losing sight of Z – is even more complicated when some managers see different and conflicting Ys. An even worse scenario is when people begin to believe that getting to a particular Y carries the same importance and focus as getting to Z.

So how can an organization maintain a common understanding of what Z is, where it is, how to get there, and why it is so important? The solution is to make sure that everyone in the organization – from the senior management team right on down to the evening shift workers – knows the answers to these questions at any given time. Equally important is to make sure that they have a clear picture of how they fit and how their work activities contribute to reaching Z. The first step to creating this focus is to ensure that everyone has a common understanding of the company’s current situation, or “X.”

Surfacing Current Perceptions

The good news about understanding the current situation in an organization is that there is a plethora of data available: competitive analyses, revenue projections and forecasts, globalization trends, workforce shifts, inventory turns, asset valuations and utilization, productivity effectiveness, and so on. The bad news is that hardly any of the data available looks at people’s mental models of the organization. Most of us agree that employees are the most important asset of any organization; therefore, knowing how they view the business, its potential, and their role in reaching organizational goals is critical.

Getting people to articulate their view of the organization can be difficult. Workers’ reluctance to be open with their perceptions often stems from the fear of possible retribution from management, the fear that they are alone in their view, or just an inability to articulate their observations and feelings. One way to get past these obstacles is to have employees compare the organization to a type of vehicle. Using the vehicle analogy creates a non-threatening environment in which people can discuss their views of the organization creatively and descriptively.

This process usually works best with groups that represent a cross-section of the company to provide representative thinking across the organization as a whole. Once you have your group together, ask these four questions:

1. If our organization were some kind of vehicle, what kind would it be?
2. What is the condition of that vehicle?
3. What part of the vehicle are you? (You cannot be a driver or passenger, but must be an integral part of the vehicle itself.)
4. What kind of vehicle will the organization be in three years (or whatever time range you are interested in)?

In question number 1, you are looking for the year, brand, model, and color of whatever type of vehicle the participant chooses. Participants usually select automobiles, but they could also pick bicycles, boats, airplanes, trucks, rockets, or whatever. The only criterion is that the vehicle must be something that was manufactured, which precludes using animals such as camels or horses.

In question number 2, you are seeking a detailed description of how the participants evaluate the current condition of the vehicle, such as rusted, dented, cleaned on a regular basis, or receives regular maintenance. This question surfaces perceptions about the organization’s health and its ability to realize its potential.

Question 3 is meant to get participants to think about how they contribute to the organization’s functioning. The role people play is too often confused with their job title or description. After they respond with something like “the fuel,”, “the carburetor,” or “the windshield,” the facilitator can surface additional mental models by asking, “And what function does that component perform in the vehicle? What would make it operate more effectively?”

Question 4 is used to identify what participants believe the organization will be able to achieve in the timeframe selected. Sometimes people report quite a change from the current vehicle (question 1) to the future vehicle (question 4) – the Wright Brother’s plane to a space shuttle; a skateboard to a new BMW. Equally, we have seen almost imperceptible shifts between the current and the future – a 1985 Ford Taurus to a 1985 Ford Taurus with new paint, a 2001 Mercedes Benz to a 2002 Mercedes Benz. On occasion, we have even seen the analogy seem to go backward – a 1999 Volvo wagon to a 1996 Volvo sedan.

This exercise helps to surface people’s assumptions about the organization and highlights any gaps in alignment among the perceptions of different participants. To show these discrepancies, the facilitator plots the results from questions 1 and 4 from all participants on a graph (see “Vehicle Graphs”).

For each individual, the results will be a straight line between two points, one for “current reality” and one for “future potential.” If the person’s assessment is that the company is currently an old bare-bones Volkswagen Beetle but has the potential to become a next-generation space shuttle, then the line will start at the bottom left corner and travel up to the top right. If the individual thinks the company is a middle-of-the-road performer now and will remain so in the future, a short, horizontal line would appear halfway up the graph.

The plotting is relative. So if one person characterizes current reality as a VW Beetle, but everyone else says its a pogo stick, then the VW plot line would start at a higher point than the pogo-stick plot line. An old car today that in three years will be the same car but clean would result in a horizontal line that doesn’t go very far to the right; again, the actual positioning would be based on the other answers.

The responses in example A represent an organization with a good level of alignment in the perceptions of current reality and future potential. The responses shown in Example B appear to be quite scattered, that is, participants had little common understanding of where the organization is and where it is going.

Conversation about the graphs centers on the following questions:

1. What does this graph tell us about our alignment around our current reality and future potential?
2. What is the impact of these assumptions on our ability to deliver consistently high performance?
3. What level of alignment do we need?
4. What do we want to do about it?

So, if most of the people view the future organization as a sturdy Toyota Camry but a few others see it as a jalopy, the group has a common language for exploring why their opinions diverge so dramatically. From this foundation, they can begin to create a common understanding of what their expectations are, where they want their organization to go, and what they will need to do to get their organization there.

The Curse of Fire-Fighting

Unfortunately, many organizations spend too much time on their journey to Z fighting fires. This may seem counterintuitive. Most certainly, if there is a crisis, it must be resolved. The problem comes when people put out the same fires year after year. The key to high performance over time is to extinguish fires and then make sure that they stay out. Doing so requires a different set of mental models about handling critical organizational problems than most managers have today.

In order to break the cycle of fire-fighting, we first must have a clear picture of how much of it is really happening. The best way to accomplish this is to have each member of a group plot on a four-block matrix how much and what kind of fire-fighting he or she thinks is taking place in the organization (department, team, etc.) (see “Fire-Fighting Matrix”). Participants use circles to represent current activities and squares to represent activities at some point in the past. A facilitator then combines all the data on one matrix.

FIRE-FIGHTING MATRIX

In this example, people believe little learning has happened in the organization. This is demonstrated by the fact that, for the most part, the circles (today’s fire-fighting) are in the same area as the squares (fire-fighting two years ago). If learning were taking place, the circles would mainly appear in the upper-right quadrant of “new and high-value” problems.

The composite matrix often shows that people believe little learning has happened in the organization. This is demonstrated by the fact that, for the most part, the circles (today’s fire-fighting) are in the same area as the squares (fire-fighting two years ago). If learning were taking place, the circles would mainly appear in the upper-right quadrant of “new and high-value” problems. The fact that learning is not taking place means that the organization will continue to relive the same problems year after year, lessening its ability to realize its potential over time.

The vehicle analogy and the fire-fighting matrix are complementary diagnostic tools. In a company in which there is a distinctly low set of expectations (as shown by the vehicle analogy exercise), you generally find high levels of fire-fighting – fighting the same fires over and over again. By using the vehicle analogy and the fire-fighting matrix together, managers and employees can begin to see the impact of their collective actions. This is the first step to shifting behaviors and removing the roadblocks to organizational success.

ChemCo (a pseudonym), a global organization from the chemical sector, recently used these two tools. The management team and their direct reports were closely aligned in their perceptions of where the organization was and where they thought it would be in the future. However, their expectations about what the company would accomplish were rather bleak. Likewise, the output from the fire-fighting matrix showed that the company was not learning from experience. In organizations, perceptions are as important as reality. At ChemCo, the belief by managers and workers alike that the company had little possibility to realize its potential threatened to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Through this analysis, participants should have a good idea as to why the organization might struggle on its journey to Z. To overcome these barriers, they need to create a common vision of a desired future, with a detailed list of the actions that will support it. The next two tools – the Vision Deployment Matrix and the conceptual framework – can help an organization do just that.

Understanding Z

We usually describe Z – the organization’s overall goal – in terms of what we might call “events.” Events are the organizational outputs that are most easy to see and, consequently, most often measured. They are typically variables such as revenues, market share, headcount, and stock price. For energy companies, the list probably includes barrels per day; for healthcare facilities, the number of patients discharged; for manufacturing, production levels; and for service organizations, customer service ratings. These are fine measures, but they represent a rather myopic view of Z.

To get a true picture of Z, it is important to be able to describe not only the events, but also the patterns of behavior that lead to certain actions; the systemic structures (both the explicit and implicit policies and procedures) that will support the process; and the mental models of the managers and employees necessary for achieving the goal. The Vision Deployment Matrix is useful for compiling this detailed view of Z.

The Vision Deployment Matrix (VDM) is a tool designed by Daniel H. Kim to enable managers and employees to describe the organization’s current reality as well as what they want the organization to look like in the future (see “Vision Deployment Matrix”). By describing these two points in the journey in detail, the path from current reality to desired future becomes clearer – and more achievable. The difference between the vehicle analogy and the VDM is that the vehicle analogy paints a picture of people’s general impressions of the organization today and what they think it will become; the VDM offers a detailed look at the organization now, as well as specifying what employees want it to be in the future

Each participant fills out a matrix, and the results are then compiled. For ChemCo, there was a startling difference between what the ChemCo managers expected to happen, as shown in the vehicle analogy, and what they wanted to happen, as shown in the VDM. This gap is a serious problem, because it means that the organization as a whole lacks the confidence to reach Z.

To help bridge the gap, the group must come to agreement on a common vision, the steps for achieving it, and progress indicators to make sure they are on the right track. At the same time, individuals list action items for how they can contribute to the overall process. Because the VDM includes not just actions at the event level but also at the pattern, structures, and mental models levels, the actions people take are likely to be more effective than when they were operating only at the event level. By using the VDM, employees gain confidence that the organization is working toward a common goal and that it is achievable, regardless of past experiences.

Evaluating Individual Progress

Especially for managers, the process of closing the gap between the organization’s current reality and desired future means changing how they think, how they influence others, how they achieve goals and targets, and how they lead. To help draw attention to each of these areas and evaluate progress, the conceptual framework can be useful.

The conceptual framework has four columns labeled “thinking,” “influencing,”, “achieving,” and “leading.” These leadership competencies are critical for an organization to be able to reach its potential. The rows are labeled with company values, specific initiatives, organization-wide goals, key competencies, or other variables that are important to the particular organization (see “Conceptual Framework”).

To complete the framework, managers fill the cells of the matrix with the demonstrable behaviors they will need to exhibit in order to make progress in those areas. This exercise can be particularly challenging for leaders who are used to focusing on “achieving” at the expense of the other competencies. After the managers fill in their frameworks, they present what they have written down to the others in their group. After the presentations, participants then commit to what they will do differently in support of each item in the framework; that is, how they will change their behavior in ways that will be visible to others.

A management team at ChemCo did this exercise together. One month later, the team met to evaluate their progress. The facilitator had prepared an assessment for the group. Each manager read the list of commitments for the other members and evaluated whether they saw no evidence of change, some evidence of change, or a clear difference in the manager’s behavior. The assessment documents were then collected and compiled, with the compiled data presented in aggregate form for each manager.

At this first assessment meeting, both individual and team scores were largely unchanged. The team was disappointed by their lack of progress, but realized that, without this data, they wouldn’t have known how well they were doing in achieving their goals. The assessment gave them the motivation to continue to focus on improving their performance.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Managers fill out the cells of the matrix with the demonstrable behaviors they will need to exhibit in order to make progress in those areas. They then identify what they will do differently in support of each item in the framework; that is, how they will change their behavior in ways that will be visible to others.

One team member asked, “How often do you think we should do this assessment?” Another wanted to know, “Can we use this assessment with our own teams as well as with this team?” Both questions showed that managers were beginning to think in a different way than they had in the past. They saw the value of the exercise and wanted to be assessed not only by their peers but also by their subordinates. This is a sign of a senior leadership team that was serious about both getting better at being leaders and staying on a positive course on their journey to Z.

Bridging the Gap

Most managers lack clarity about their organizations’ visions and aspirations. Just because an organization has a printed vision statement doesn’t mean that people know what it means. Too often, the vision statement is just a set of cleverly worded phrases that tell of a glorious organizational future without giving workers a sense of how they fit into creating that future. If managers and employees don’t see the connection between what they do on a daily basis and where the organization is going, they will not be able to ensure that the company gets there.

These four tools, in combination, help people make the connection between current reality and desired future, and provide concrete ways to bridge the gap. They are not meant as simply opportunities for participants to vent or whine about why their companies are having problems. Rather they provide an opportunity to elevate the conversations about why the organization is where it is and where it is going. The tools also help to create an environment in which an organization can realize its potential. And that is what the journey to Z is all about.

James B. Rieley (jbrieley@boardrush.com) is a leadership development advisor for senior management and their teams. He has a doctorate in organizational effectiveness and has written extensively on the subject of improving organizational performance. He is the author of Gaming the System (FT/Prentice Hall, 2001) and Plain Talk about Business Performance (PenPress, 2004).

The post The Journey to Z: Realizing the Potential of an Organization appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

How can they do so? Using facilitation skills. Effective facilitation involves using processes and tools to maximize the collective intelligence of individuals in a group to determine the right course of action and to then build a template for acting on the choices they make. Facilitation, while long associated with individuals leading workshops, planning meetings, or other group processes, actually encompasses a broad mix of consulting and coaching skills that are too critical to be relegated to the domain of a select few.

In today’s organizations, individuals at all levels need to possess facilitation skills. By necessity, people are making decisions collaboratively in consultation with others. More work is being completed in cross-functional teams and through internal or external partnerships than ever before. But this need for greater collaboration comes at a time when the diversity of perspectives, talents, and cultures present in the workplace is increasing. Achieving better results by tapping into this mix is a goal that can be accomplished through effective application of facilitative leadership fundamentals (see “Facilitative Leadership Fundamentals”).

The good news? Facilitation is a skill that almost all individuals can master and add to their overall portfolio of leadership skills.

The Essence of Facilitative Leadership

The essence of facilitative leadership can be summarized in six major themes:

• • Facilitative leaders make connections and help others make meaning. In a fast-paced environment overloaded with information, people need to be able to connect on a variety of levels: with their colleagues, with the issues at hand, and with the lessons from the past and the potential of the future. Facilitative leaders listen for and seek to make (or help others make) the connection between what is occurring in a conversation and what has occurred in other places or at other times. For example, they might ask how a current decision under deliberation might affect operations in another area. Effective facilitation involves periodically asking the question, “How does this discussion connect with others we have been having or to what someone else is doing?”Facilitative leaders also seek to connect comments made by various individuals in a meeting. Because facilitation involves deep and active listening, leaders who have developed these skills likely have an overall sense of the links among disparate threads of conversation. They help group members make these correlations, as well as identify the meaning behind what is occurring, by posing expansive, open-ended questions that invite others into the discussion.

    Such leaders create a reflective space for individuals and groups where they can make sense of what is transpiring and capture real-time learning about both what they are doing and how they are doing it. They slow the conversation down periodically, and invite the group to assess the nature of the deliberations and how they can be enhanced:, “How are we doing what we are doing?” Facilitative leaders help others understand that the diversity present in the group is likely to yield different meanings that can coexist peacefully alongside each other without any one perspective needing to win. In sum, leaders who exercise these skills work with others to achieve synergy, producing a group result that surpasses what any individual might have achieved on his or her own.

  • Facilitative leaders provide direction without totally taking the reins. When group members do not share ownership of decisions and their outcomes, they are less likely to follow through on commitments. Too often, individuals abdicate their responsibility to the leader; that is, they fail to acknowledge that ensuring a group’s effectiveness is the responsibility of all members. In order for groups to realize their full potential, every individual must be concerned with the good of the whole. For this reason, facilitative leaders more often ask rather than tell groups what they need to be doing and help them move forward rather than control their movement.In his classic work, Facilitation (McGraw-Hill, 1995), Trevor Bentley noted that facilitative leaders position themselves differently vis-à-vis the group, depending on the situation. They lead from the front during a group’s early stages of development, when participants need to clarify their shared purpose and benefit from having a structure that connects them to the group’s work and to each other. As a group develops and members take more responsibility for directing its activities, the leader becomes just another voice, serving alongside the other members. Finally, when a group reaches higher stages of performance, the facilitative leader contributes from behind, offering insights and observations that add to the team’s evolving momentum.

Individuals using a facilitative approach are concerned with both what the group is discussing or deciding and how they are actually doing it.

• Facilitative leaders balance managing content and process. Individuals using a facilitative approach are concerned with both what the group is discussing or deciding and how they are actually doing it. They appreciate and understand that the team may need to use different processes to achieve different desired outcomes. An important part of these efforts involves thoughtfully considering how the group might reach a certain result.Facilitative leaders often work with group members to establish shared agreements for how participants will interact with each other and do their work, that is, the group process aspect of their efforts. The group then uses these agreements as guidelines for discussions and as evaluation criteria for how well they are accomplishing their charge:, “We’ve made some significant decisions today. When you reflect on the conversations that led to them, how well did we do on the agreements we established earlier?”

  Sometimes group process is dismissed as “soft stuff” that keeps teams from the real work of making decisions. But individuals want others to consider their perspectives and to solicit and appreciate their contributions and ideas. As a result, individuals leading groups and teams must appropriately balance attention to content and process.

• Facilitative leaders invite disclosure and feedback to help surface unacknowledged or invisible beliefs, thoughts, and patterns. Call it what you want – the dead cow on the table, the elephant in the middle of the room, or the skunk smelling up the place – most groups have certain topics they need to discuss in order to move forward on key decisions and efforts. Facilitative leaders work with individuals and groups to identify and discuss the important issues they may be unaware of or unwilling to address. These may be issues that are perceived as being too “hot” or fraught with potential conflict to be brought into the open.Facilitative leaders understand that the greatest risk is when a group avoids dealing with the truth, when individuals speak in glossy abstractions of reality so as not to rock the boat. To overcome this tendency, they frequently invite participants to step back and examine what’s not being said that needs to be brought into the discussions:, “When you think of what we want to accomplish today, what are the questions or issues we need to discuss that have yet to surface?” The more that work groups learn to address issues openly and honestly, the more productive their relationships and work activity will become.

  By attending to the relationships among individuals in a group and the natural dynamics that unfold as they work with each other, facilitative leaders increase people’s comfort in engaging in open and honest dialogue. Individuals feel supported in making statements that previously would have been considered too difficult to share, such as opinions that run counter to conventional wisdom or the perspective of those holding the greatest power. They learn to communicate in a respectful manner how others’ behaviors are affecting them and their work. They become comfortable revealing their own observations or perceptions and inviting their colleagues to do the same.

  In this manner, feedback becomes a routine part of the group’s conversations as opposed to something that gets saved up and shared only selectively. The facilitative leader adeptly manages both feedback and disclosure (as defined in the Johari Window model developed by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, 1969) so that group members make more information public and discuss it respectfully and thoughtfully.

• Facilitative leaders focus on building the capacity of individuals and groups to accomplish more on their own, now and in the future. Facilitative leadership is not just about the immediate task. It is also about helping a group or team learn together so they might become more productive in the future. Similarly, when coaching an individual employee, a facilitative leader focuses not only on dealing with the employee’s immediate need but also with laying a foundation for future strong performance.This long-term definition of success helps keep facilitative leaders from assuming too much responsibility for a group. Doing so could leave group members unable to manage future efforts without the leader’s involvement. To prevent such dependence from developing, facilitative leaders regularly engage groups in debriefing their meetings and projects to determine what lessons can be learned and what adjustments need to be made in the distribution of responsibilities.

  Leaders who operate in this way also understand that group agreements and structure may need to change as the work itself or the environment in which it is being done changes. They see structure as a means to an end not as the end itself or a turf to be protected at all costs. Such leaders frequently ask group members, “Are we best organized to accomplish our desired results given the current environment in which we operate?” Engaging in this process allows individuals to see boundaries between departments, positions, and functional areas as permeable, something that must be regularly evaluated for their impact and effectiveness.

• Facilitative leaders operate from a position of restraint. Because facilitative leaders want to maximize others’ contributions, they tend to operate first from a position of restraint, carefully measuring what, if any, action they need to take. Exercising this kind of discretion helps them avoid the “heroic leader” syndrome describe by Roger L. Martin in his book The Responsibility Virus (Basic Books, 2002): “When leaders assume ‘heroic’ responsibility for making the critical choices facing their organizations, when their reaction to problems is to go it alone, work harder, do more, to be more heroic still, with no collaboration and sharing of the leadership burden, their ‘heroism’ is often their undoing.”
  

  Authenticity is one of the hallmarks of the effective facilitator.

  Trevor Bentley offers a continuum with three categories of interventions available for the facilitative leader: gentle, persuasive, and forceful or directive. Gentle interventions include doing nothing, offering silence or support, or asking questions to clarify. Persuasive interventions involve asking questions to move the group or offering suggested choices, paths, or actions. Forceful interventions reflect a higher degree of involvement and include offering guidance, choosing for the group, or directing the group.

  Some misinterpret the continuum, believing that a facilitative leader should never offer persuasive or directive interventions. But should an emergency siren go off during a group meeting, I doubt anyone is looking to clarify the range of options available to them through some nominal group process, thoughtfully flesh out the pros and cons of each option, elicit a choice from the group, and then run that choice through deBono’s Six Hat Thinking Method. No, participants would be very comfortable with following a directive from the leader!

  What the continuum does illustrate is the range of options available to a facilitative leader at all times. The wise leader understands the consequences of the intervention she might choose and does not unnecessarily move deeper into the continuum unless doing so advances the group’s capacity. She carefully and deliberately selects how to intervene and at what level. Simply moving one step back on the continuum can often allow a group to retain more control over its own efforts. Notice the difference between “I think we should move on” and “Are we ready to move on?” The latter allows for much more choice from the group itself. Facilitative leaders do not make choices for others that either (1) they do not need to make or (2) that rightfully do not belong to them.

Making the Commitment

Every person can adopt the role and lens of a facilitator in their interactions with others. Making a commitment to act in this way, however, needs to be done thoughtfully. Authenticity is one of the hallmarks of the effective facilitator. As the Sufi philosopher Rumi says, “If you are unfaithfully with us, you are causing terrible damage.” Appropriating a few techniques learned in a workshop or from a book without truly incorporating them into your overall leadership identify will cause them to be seen and experienced as insincere or manipulative.

In a world in which technology allows almost everything to be copied and widely distributed, our authentic self is the one thing that really can’t be copied. Failing to bring who we are to what we do commoditizes our individuality and denies the unique style and contributions we bring to our individual relationships, the communities of which we are part, and the organizations and stakeholders we serve. Facilitative leaders model their genuine selves for others and help create the space that honors the diversity and genuineness present in any group (see “The Facilitative Leader’s Gifts”).

Because authenticity is rarely ostentatious and seldom calls attention to itself, it is experienced by others as natural and genuine. When others comment favorably on some aspect of our authenticity, we are often bemused, because the quality they noted is so much a part of who we are that we would not know how to be any other way. As G. Ross Lawford notes in The Quest for Authentic Power: Getting Past Manipulation, Control, and Self-Limiting Beliefs (Berrett-Koehler, 2002), “The power of authenticity is quietly efficient and confidently effective.” Facilitative leaders not only help others tell the truth because of their leadership style and interventions, they help others be the truth.

Any time we choose to alter the normal style most individuals would associate with our work, we need to be sensitive to how that change might be perceived and received. If your colleagues see you as a real “take charge” type of person, they might question your intentions if you suddenly shift to a strongly facilitative stance. Rather than changing overnight, gradually introduce new leadership skills and facilitation behaviors in your regular interactions with others. For instance, when you find yourself about to tell someone or a group what to do, pull back a bit and ask a thoughtful question that might help them discover for themselves what most needs to be done. When you need to coach an employee on a job-specific issue, make sure to probe if other relevant issues are what actually need to be discussed.

Professional literature often draws rigid lines between leadership and management, seeming to suggest that one is right and one is wrong. In reality, organizations need individuals who both do the right thing and are capable of doing things right. They need people who can help individuals and groups do the right things right – the very nature of facilitative leadership.

Jeffrey Cufaude (jeffrey@ideaarchitects.org), a former higher education administrator and nonprofit association executive, is currently an architect of ideas, writing, speaking, and facilitating on various individual and organizational development issues. His core purpose is to build communities of ideas and idealists.

The post The Art of Facilitative Leadership: Maximizing Others’ Contributions appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Having worked with a number of new enterprises and groups within large organizations that have achieved success and rapid organizational growth, we have come to believe there is a dark side of success. In years of exposure to these kinds of situations, we have seen patterns that appear independent of the individuals involved, in which accomplishment leads to dysfunction, and accolades give way to frustration and dissatisfaction. If ignored by senior executives and management teams, these patterns can lead to the spiraling decline of the organization. If, on the other hand, leaders anticipate and deal with these dynamics in a timely and disciplined way, they can lead their organizations to sustained success on both a business and a human level.

In his recently published book DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation (Berrett-Koehler, 2003), MIT management professor emeritus Ed Schein identifies a number of “invisible” consequences of the rapid growth of DEC in the 1960s–1980s. These insights emerged from his 26 years of consulting with the CEO and senior management team. In cases we have studied, we also recognized some of these same consequences in their early stages.

As organizations grow and disperse geographically, four things tend to happen.

What happens in organizations as part of the growth process that almost inevitably leads to dissatisfaction?

• First, employees lose familiarity with one another, and work relationships become less predictable and more difficult to manage.
• Second, open communication both upward and laterally in the organization becomes more challenging and time-consuming.
• Third, the organization as a whole finds it difficult to achieve strategic focus.
• Finally, anxiety grows among executives and employees alike.

These problems can escalate over time and, left unaddressed, bring even the most vibrant organization to its knees.

So how do you identify and constructively deal with these issues before it’s too late? A recent case study illustrates some of what we believe are generic systemic patterns in rapidly growing organizations that are variations of the “Limits to Growth” systems archetype, as well as potential interventions for managing the challenges of success.

Growing Challenges

A highly successful nonprofit organization had just opened a second office and hired new employees to serve the dramatically increasing customer base. Shortly after, a new president/COO came on board to help the CEO deal with the growing organizational size and complexity.

As the new COO worked toward creating a strategic plan, she became increasingly uneasy. She saw problems regarding:

• The capacity of managers to deal with the challenges of a larger and more complex organization;
• Negative and sometimes hostile attitudes of some senior staff members;
• Executives who used the excuse of not understanding the organization’s goals as a license to do their own thing; and
• The unwillingness of some of the veterans to deal with the process and human implications of growth.

In interviews we conducted with the COO, she told us of her frustration and anger at several members of her management team. She had spent many unproductive hours trying to work with them, to no avail. She had reluctantly reached the conclusion that they were having a negative impact on the rest of the staff as well and would have to go.

At the invitation of the CEO and COO, we began to investigate the situation. We conducted a series of interviews with the senior management team and identified five key issues:

• Lack of clarity and agreement about the meaning of their shared vision;
• Employees’ feelings of being excluded from the team and lack of understanding regarding the needs of the larger organization;
• Competition and turf battles resulting in part from the opening of the second office;
• Lack of clarity and enforcement regarding recent delegation, empowerment, and accountability decisions; and
• Inadequate management training in the skills required to lead a more complex and stratified organization.

What was it that caused all of these issues to surface at about the same time in an apparently well-run and successful organization? A systemic view of the situation, developed by participants in three two-day “Learning Labs” over a six-month timeframe, provided some provocative insights. Participants in the Learning Labs included the CEO, COO, and all senior managers. By working with causal loop diagrams of the dynamics they described, the group was able to identify some leverage points for change and ultimately reverse the negative dynamics that had begun to dominate the organization.

SUCCESS ENGINE PART I

The Engine of Success

Our initial task was to try to understand what had enabled the organizazation’s growth and success in the recent past. Once we clarified the core process the management group viewed as responsible for their earlier accomplishments, we could explore ways for them to redirect their efforts and sustain that success into the future.
In this case, the group identified clarity of goals as having played an essential role in the past. Because of its relatively small size in earlier years, all employees participated in clarifying the organization’s objectives. With clear goals, the organization was able to effectively target its resources toward high-leverage activities. Identifying such focused activities also allowed employees to align all their efforts — from mission through strategy to final results — for consistent outcomes. This alignment ultimately led to high levels of performance. And once people saw the tangible benefits that resulted from having clear goals, they were even more willing to invest time and energy in the process (see “Success Engine Part I”).

With the organization’s rapid growth, communication among business functions became more difficult, and senior managers and employees had come to hold widely varying interpretations of what the goals of the organization actually meant. The management team realized that clarifying goals and getting organizational alignment once again would have a positive impact on employee morale and teamwork.

SUCCESS ENGINE PART II

In addition, with clear goals and a compelling mission, stakeholders, including board members, healthcare providers, and members of third-world governmental agencies, would feel more committed to the effort. Increased support from stakeholders would help to boost employee morale. The team believed that when people feel optimistic about their organization’s prospects, they can more productively engage in teamwork and feel more comfortable engaging in open, honest communication. Candid communication and improved teamwork then permit the deeper dialogue that leads to even greater clarity about shared vision and goals (see “Success Engine Part II”).

The management team came to the conclusion that, by making the mission and goals absolutely clear, consistent, and compelling, they could ensure that each employee knows how their everyday actions contribute to overall organizational success. Workers could also plan their activities with total focus, avoid any projects or activities that do not contribute value, and prioritize the rest based on their level of contribution to organizationwide objectives. Through the causal loop diagrams, the team was able to see how they had created an engine for growth and success in the past, and gained confidence that they could do so again in the future.

THE DARKER SIDE OF GROWTH PART I

The Dark Side of Growth

Having come to an understanding of how their organization could operate effectively, the management team then focused their energies on how the system was currently operating and what was impeding or could impede their progress. They recognized that there is in fact a dark side to growth that comes with success.

As the team discovered, as growth continues, functions and departments become larger in size and more specialized in their activities. Consequently, they tend to become differentiated from each other, and communication between and among them becomes more difficult than when the organization was smaller (see “The Darker Side of Growth Part I”).

THE DARKER SIDE OF GROWTH PART II

As communication and understanding decreases, workers find it more challenging to understand how, why, and by whom decisions are made. Morale begins to decrease; many employees become less engaged than previously; and the organization’s success is imperiled.

In addition, as the decision-making process becomes murkier, the lack of clear shared goals and priorities reduces the level of alignment in the organization and erodes trust. For when we can no longer be sure that we want the same things as our managers or coworkers, how can we have confidence in our ability to work together? Reduced trust further reduces morale, engagement, productivity, and, in the long run, organizational success. As defensiveness and suspicion grow:

• Negativism and provincialism rise, which undermines interdepartmental communication even further and makes organizationwide support for decisions less likely.
• Actions taken to mitigate the negativism and provincialism cause people to focus on why decisions don’t work — the problem — instead of on what we can do together to meet our goals — the solution. Leaders’ efforts to respond to the defensiveness lead to inconsistencies in priorities, and drain time and energy.
• The perceived inconsistencies in priorities reduce alignment among employees, thereby increasing competition for resources and further boosting defensiveness and suspicion (see “The Darker Side of Growth Part II”).

The Emotional Side of the Structure

From our interviews with the management team and conversations during the Learning Labs, we could see some significant emotional reactions that were resulting from the organization’s rapid growth. Levels of anger and defensiveness had begun to rise over time, while some workers’ self-esteem and feelings of belonging had plummeted. This pattern was consistent with our experiences in other organizations.
These problems again seem to stem from the fact that, as growth increases, groups can no longer include everyone in every decision. When people feel excluded, they become defensive and suspect others’ motives. They also begin to doubt their own abilities to contribute, which leads to anger in some and reduced self-esteem in others.

THE DARKER SIDE OF GROWTH PART III

The Outcomes

The development and analysis of the causal loop diagrams through interviews and the Learning Labs resulted in two important conclusions:

• The problems the organization was facing were not unique, but were the result of their very success and rapid growth.
• There were no villains in the story, only people trying to do their best in a systemic structure that generated some unfortunate and at times dysfunctional behavior.

The systems map indicated two key leverage points for immediate action: creating more clarity around the vision and goals, and improving the transparency and understanding of the decision-making process. The management team also identified a longer-term action: to hold “dialogues” on a regular basis to provide a safe mechanism for dealing with the emotional issues that surfaced.

In a rapidly growing organization where there is significant momentum and stress around accomplishing all the tasks associated with that growth, the decision itself to take time for reflection requires courage on the part of leaders.

With some initial reluctance, senior managers agreed to revisit the shared vision and goals to clarify any ambiguities and ensure that they were consistent with each other. They evaluated the outcomes expected from each goal, the metrics by which they could define success, and the method to be used to resolve conflicting priorities that might arise. During this process, inconsistencies and lack of clarity in the meaning of some of the objectives were revealed. The team also came to understand why some staff members responsible for specific goals were not aligned on priorities or action plans. In fact, in one dramatic example, at one point, the CEO confessed, “I guess I fudged that one to make it acceptable to all the board members.”

Once the group agreed on the goals, they worked to create a transparent decision-making process and establish a means for quickly disseminating decisions and their rationale to all employees. The team agreed to delegate decision-making authority to the level as close as possible to the actual work. In fact, instead of specifying what authority they would delegate, members created a “reservation of authorities” document, with a rationale for each decision-making authority that was reserved for senior management only.

The group communicated the results of this effort to all employees. As a whole, the organization launched an initiative to tie department and individual work assignments and performance reviews directly to the organization’s goals. Six months after completion of the project, the CEO and COO reported:

• They had a more cohesive management team.
• The decision-making process is working, and people are no longer complaining about not understanding what decisions were made or why.
• The organization is using performance reviews for each employee and an overall scorecard for senior management that tie directly to the organization’s goals.
• Employees are more aware of and skilled in surfacing mental models and understanding and dealing with different perspectives.</li.
• Teams occasionally slip back into a silo mentality and have not yet fully internalized the systems view, but they are continuing to work on doing so together.

The Issue of Inclusiveness

As we have shared this work with colleagues, we have been struck by the degree to which they report having encountered similar business and emotional dynamics in other organizations. It appears that many of these issues are, in fact, quite generic in situations where there is rapid organizational growth. Usually, senior managers fail to recognize and constructively deal with these patterns. Instead, the “blame game” often seems to prevail, thus precluding people from seeing and addressing situations from a systemic perspective to the detriment, and sometimes the demise, of the organization.

The issue of inclusiveness seems to be at the core of the emotional dynamics that arise in rapid organizational growth situations. People want to be a part of and contribute to their organization. When they feel thwarted, intense feelings and sometimes dysfunctional behaviors arise.

Executives and managers who subscribe to the myth that you can simply grow out of your problems do so at their own peril. As illustrated in the diagram, if organizations do not address these issues, a cycle of dysfunctional thinking, feeling, and acting can escalate and, over time, undermine success.

To avoid this drastic outcome, as happened in this case, senior managers first need to take the time to reflect on and understand the systemic structure in which they are operating. In a rapidly growing organization where there is significant momentum and stress around accomplishing all the tasks associated with that growth, the decision itself to take time for reflection requires courage on the part of leaders. Managing success then involves proactively clarifying and creating alignment around strategic goals, understanding the complexities of their systemic structure, and implementing a clear and transparent decision-making process along with an ongoing infrastructure to allow employees to voice and discuss their concerns. As shown in this case study, such steps can constructively transform an organization and enable continued growth and success.

Jeff Clanon is a founding consultant member and the director of partnership development for the Society for Organizational Learning. The Society (SoL) is a nonprofit, member-governed organization dedicated to building knowledge about fundamental institutional change through integrating research, capacity building, and the practical application of organizational learning theory and methods. SoL evolved from the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT, where Jeff was the executive director for five years. Fred Simon is an independent consultant, a founding member and member of the governing council of SoL, and an adjunct faculty member of the University of Michigan. He worked for Ford Motor Company for 30 years, where he pioneered new approaches to creating leadership at all levels. For more information about SoL, visit www.solonline.org.

The post The Dark Side of Success: Dealing with the Organizational and Emotional Complexities of Growth appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

When we lead an organization that relies on profitability to exist, the answer isn’t always obvious. As we become mindful of the myriad of outside factors that influence our business success, we confront troubling dilemmas and are called on to make choices that we know will have larger implications for the future of our companies, cultures, and lives. We must tirelessly invent new products, services, and often entire markets, while we secretly reminisce about how much easier things used to be.

We must focus on the business of doing business, but in today’s climate, we can only do so by navigating difficult social issues. We aim for growth, but we want to stay true to the purpose and values that make our organization a great place to work.

Likewise, we want to reinvigorate our personal health, yet we struggle with the weight of work on our shoulders.

Every moment seems like a compromise, a juggling act, a constant “give and take” with no end in sight.

We can either stick our head in the sand or discover fundamentally new ways to see our problems, make decisions, and relate to others.

The stark truth is that the world is continually shifting right before our eyes, in ways we cannot control. The more we see the consequences of our values and actions, the more we realize that we can’t succeed any longer using the exhausting and uninspired approaches of the past.

Today’s world is challenging us in ways we could not have imagined (see “Twenty-First Century Challenges and Opportunities” on p. 3). We can either stick our head in the sand or discover fundamentally new ways to see our problems, make decisions, and relate to others. Ultimately, the current circumstances invite us to cultivate a radically new approach to directing our businesses and our lives. To do so, we must become twenty-first century leaders.

Who Is the 21st Century Leader?

Twenty-first century leaders, and the organizations they head up, come in all shapes and sizes. They are:

• Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw, owners of the wildly popular Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a mid-sized enterprise that achieves sustained growth year after year through passion, purpose, and principled, well-managed strategies to benefit the company and local community.
• Linda Distlerath, head of Global Health Policy at pharmaceutical giant Merck & Company, who collaborates with the Gates Foundation to guide a multi-year, $50 million strategy for mitigating AIDS in Botswana.</li.
• Iqbal Quadir, founder of GrameenPhone, Bangledesh’s largest phone company, who uses the savvy of business not only to provide communication services to more than 50 million people, but also to encourage democracy in the region.
• Dianne Culhane, director at the Coca-Cola Company, who takes care of her health so that she has the physical stamina, emotional grit, and mental ingenuity to meet the world spanning demands of her frenetic job.

Twenty-first century leaders are the professionals, managers, and human beings who choose mindfulness and inner wisdom as resources for success. They are motivated to transform human, financial, and natural resources into outcomes that serve both business and society. Instead of treating new markets, breakthrough technologies, and business profits as an end in themselves, twenty-first century leaders see these as instruments of a more authentic aim: constructive, long-lasting change.

Instead of growing organizations and brands for the sake of reputation or size, they use the power of their organizations and brands for the sake of well-being and effectiveness no matter where they operate.

True twenty-first century leaders don’t pursue do-gooder public relations ploys. They see a clear reality in today’s world: modern issues, like environmental challenges, and business results are inextricably coupled. As a result, it makes sense to redefine wealth altogether as “wellth,” an ideal that embraces sound economics and good health — personal, organizational, societal, and global. Through their wisdom, visions, and deeds, twenty-first century leaders are creating reference points of wellness and balanced growth from which to measure themselves and their organizations.

These leaders stand apart from the success-at-any-cost management style that reigned in the last few decades. They rise above conventional corporate logic to generate what we might call “enlightened” results. Essentially, twenty-first century leaders are carving out a new consciousness for living, working, and leading that stands the traditional model of business on its head. If you long to use your self and your skills as tools to help business and humankind function on a higher ground, you too may be a member of this ever-growing group.

Wellth-Driven Results

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Twenty-first century leaders don’t choose goals randomly. They consider themselves stewards of changes that improve the health, prosperity, and effectiveness of people, businesses, and the larger natural and social worlds. These leaders are apt to regard wholes rather than parts, to influence and partner rather than intervene or force, to balance short- and long-term objectives rather than succumb to immediate pressures, and to create results using a naturally present momentum for change rather than foist new programs on the organization (see “Diagnosing a Problem Using a Systems View”). In turn, their businesses, large and small, actively seek ways to:

• Transform collective difficulties, such as the digital divide or malnutrition, into social and business profit
• Engage in industries that benefit humanity instead of only individuals
• Shape consumers’ lives with marketing messages that are conscientious, truthful, and educational
• Sponsor transparent audits of their financial, social, and environment performance
• Use their aspirations, deeper purpose, core values, and company strengths to regulate and conduct strategies for business growth
• Provide safe and healthy working conditions as well as cultivate a wellth-driven business culture
• Use corporate power in ways that promote healthy and sustainable leadership practices in the larger geopolitical and economic arenas
• Leave a legacy of leaders and initiatives that fosters the values of health and sustainability within the organization and around the globe.

As systems architects, twenty-first century leaders see their jobs as generating environments and structures to promote self-determination, collaboration, and the healthy evolution of systems everywhere.

Becoming a Twenty-First Century Leader

To pursue a twenty-first century leadership agenda, start with these actions:

• Choose wellth-driven outcomes. Help the system you work with, such as a team, business, or organizational culture, to connect with deeply held aspirations, a motivating purpose, and outcomes worth changing for. Select goals that are positive, meaningful, and relevant. When people believe in what they’re working toward, they are more likely to use their creative energy to achieve it.
• Forecast the consequences. Consider the short- and longer-term impacts of your actions on multiple stakeholders—your company, the workforce, business partners, the environment, the communities you operate in, vendors, other alliances, and yourself. Factor these potential benefits and losses into your plans for change, and keep your plans aligned with the intent to produce good rather than harm.
• Assess the readiness for change. Change is often like a roller-coaster ride, so prepare for the ups and downs. Assess your organization’s readiness for change by asking: Are we free of problems that would distract us from reaching our goals? Are we open to radical ideas and solutions, plus willing to let go of approaches that may prevent progress? Are we prepared to build on and go beyond the values of our past so that we can bring about greater health and effectiveness in our future? Can we commit the time, energy, and resources required to sustain our change for the long haul, especially when we hit bumps along the way? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” consider what you and others need to rethink before embarking on your wellth-driven goals.
• Determine your role in the change effort. Figure out how you, as a leader, can be a constructive and enabling influence. Uncover the deeper purpose, values, and strengths of your leadership, and allow them to guide your thoughts and actions. Doing so will help you bring the best of yourself to your leadership role and perform your responsibilities with a minimum of effort and maximum of enthusiasm and integrity.
• Cultivate the capabilities of others. Assist the people you work with to contribute to the desired goals on their own. Your job isn’t to fix anything or anyone as an all-knowing, all-seeing expert; your role is to enable people to solve their own problems and create sustainable results, ultimately without your guidance or resources.
• Ask strategic questions. For example, when stuck at an impasse, asking “How else could we interpret this?” could be just the right question to prod people toward views they’d never considered. Strategic questions open up new possibilities and deepen people’s ability to access their own wisdom. Additionally, these questions ensure that people are concentrated around the right challenges and aspirations, rather than responding from stress, denial, ignorance, or fear.
• Influence and let go. As you influence change toward the desired results, let go of control. By design, a living system — individuals, teams, and whole cultures alike — cannot be externally controlled and thrive to their fullest. Shifting toward a new quality of results (i.e., a more integrated focus on the social and commercial impact by your company) will put different demands on the system; the system may respond by stopping short of its potential, resisting the change, or learning how to flourish. Stay in a facilitative role, show humility and respect, and pay attention to how the system changes best.
• Apply standardized tools as appropriate. Utilize tools and methods only to the extent that they are useful. Human and natural systems are too unique for any one-size-fits-all approach. Technologies, such as change management techniques and strategic planning methods, are valuable guides to get new results, but they cannot be imposed in the same way every time for every living system.
• Balance sustainability with growth toward wellth-driven results. To foster sustainable results, help people consciously manage the pursuit of change goals by identifying the internal and external barriers to change, rectifying these barriers, and exercising different values, structures, and practices for a healthier, more mindful, and more stable way of functioning.

While you are carrying out all of these activities, don’t miss the most powerful tool you have at your disposal: you!

The Most Powerful Tool

Achieving wellth isn’t just for the benefit of business or society; it’s also personal. Twenty-first century leaders strive to live a life that reflects the same values of health and sustainability that they advance in their companies and the world. Among other things, a wellth-driven life actively integrates a sound mind, fit body, sense of belonging and purpose, spiritual core, and healthy emotional expression. It is a life of wholeness, meaning, competence, and effectiveness. In fact, a Stanford study of 53 successful leaders, including physicians, authors, philanthropists, managers, and others, found that these individuals not only take care of their health, they also draw on their health as a resource to meet challenges, solve complex problems, innovate, and productively lead. Wellth, then, isn’t merely the outcome or experience of how you live and lead; it is a prime resource for living and leading itself.

On the other hand, the lack of wellth can erode your leadership. Consider the predicament of many CEOs who spend their entire careers focused on improving organizational performance while ignoring their own health. According to a 2002 World Economic Forum report, “CEOs are increasingly suffering from stress, sleep deprivation, heart disease, loneliness, failed marriages, and depression, among other problems. And those woes are taking toll on the bottomline” (www.wef.org).

Thus, the personal well-being of CEOs directly affects the health of their businesses. Unhealthy CEOs and leaders at all levels lack the physical and emotional resilience, clear-headedness, and world-centric awareness to make the best decisions for their organizations and society as a whole. Without robust personal health, they can’t access the depth of wisdom they need to make their lives, projects, and businesses better, or to navigate complexity. The leaders don’t have the physical, psychological, or spiritual capacity from which to exercise the kind of leadership required in today’s world.

Your personal wellth is the most powerful change tool you possess. Prestige, titles, and money may come and go outside your control, but you always have the power to optimize your well-being. Personal wellth enables you to lead with inner authority rather than vacillation, discernment rather than thoughtlessness, resilience rather than burnout. As an individual, your wellth provides an inexhaustible energy supply, as long as you safeguard and manage it. When leading from personal wellth, your deeper inner truths naturally produce value in your outer life and work.

Are you taking care of your personal wellth? If you experience any of the warning signs, you are already compromising your life and organizational well-being (see “Personal Wellth Checklist” on p. 5).

This short list of warning signs sends a clear message: Focus on what it takes for you to feel personally whole, and learn to use your health as a resource for leading successfully. Your success — and the meaningful impact you can generate beyond you — relies on it.

Surprisingly, many leaders think these symptoms are the price they must pay for accepting a leadership role. On the contrary, they are a knock on the door, instructing you to realign your life based on balanced success. For the sake of your business, your life, and the health of society, explore the aspects of your well-being — such as your spiritual core, exercise, or friendships — that you can develop to bolster your psychological and physical well-being and, in turn, your overall effectiveness. What few changes could you make in your health today so that you are a better instrument of change for the welfare of others?

A Call to a New Kind of Success

Twenty-first century leadership is an evolutionary leap from the leadership styles we’ve known before. In the circles, today’s true leaders are using their selves and their businesses to elevate a wellth-driven consciousness, where health and sustainability is endeavored for its own sake rather than purely because of moral, legal, political, or commercial obligations.

What few changes could you make in your health today so that you are a better instrument of change for the welfare of others?

Instead of fixing crises using worn-out approaches, twenty-first century leaders use problems as the impetus to evolve healthier values and practices for the future. By attempting to use all forms of power more conscientiously and wisely—whether financial wealth, corporate reach, brand presence, charisma, or personal health—these leaders set the stage for innovative collaboration and decisions that embrace the whole. Essentially, twenty-first century leaders endeavor to align their lives, relationships, and companies with unfolding a deeper wellth for business and human evolution.

Renee Moorefield, Ph. D., is CEO of Wisdom Works, a firm that specializes in cultivating the mindfulness, health, and effectiveness of twenty-first century leaders as a strategy for conscious business and society. To learn more about the pioneering leadership programs, in-depth wellth assessments, services, and publications of Wisdom Works, contact: 303.772.9000.

Article adapted from Driven by Wellth: The 7 Essentials for Healthy, Sustainable Results in 21st Century Business & Leadership (by Julie Maloney and Renee Moorefield, Wellth Productions, 2004).

For Further Reading

Beck, Don, and Chris Cowan. Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change (Blackwell Publishing, 1996)

Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Life, Community and Everyday Life (Basic Books, 2002)

Paulson, Daryl, and Ken Wilber. Competitive Business, Caring Business: An Integral Business Perspective for the 21st Century (Paraview Press, 2002)

Pelletier, Kenneth. Sound Mind, Sound Body: A New Model for Lifelong Health (Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, 1994)

The post Wellth-Driven Success:A New Framework for 21st-Century Leaders appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

These and other metaphors are often used to help explain systems theory, and they do so effectively — to a point. Many people can intellectually grasp the idea of interconnections in our world and the importance of taking a holistic perspective. But for some, the concept seems so easy to understand that they miss its value. For them, having a metaphorical understanding of systems thinking does not necessarily lead to action or to an integration of the concepts into everyday practice.

Nevertheless, it’s not necessary to have a deep understanding of systems theory in order to use it to influence institutional behavior. What is crucial is to connect some of the elements of systems thinking directly to proposed actions. In this article, I suggest how organizations might apply four models to make the transition from thinking to action. The iceberg metaphor helps to probe the underlying causes of events and patterns. The force field analysis provides a visual means of understanding the factors that keep organizations in “quasi-equilibrium” and the issues involved in any change process. The spidergram emphasizes linkages within a given system. Finally, behavior over time graphs draw attention to the long-range effects of organizational efforts.

The Iceberg (It’s bigger than you think!)

The iceberg is one of the most frequently used models to explain systems thinking (see “The Iceberg”). Thanks to movies like “Titanic,” many people recognize that most of an iceberg sits hidden beneath the water; that is, out of sight.

Different authors present the iceberg model as having from three to six levels; we’ll use a four-level model here.

In the iceberg model, the piece of the structure that appears above the surface represents a single “event.” A young woman arrives an hour late for work after dropping off her young child at a nursery. Her supervisor is understanding — this time. Just below the surface, a deeper level of examination reveals patterns of events, or “trends.” The young mother is late on the same day a week later. We might ask, in this case or any similar situation, whether these two events are unique or if a pattern of behavior is beginning to emerge.

It’s not necessary to have a deep understanding of systems theory in order to use it to influence institutional behavior.

Submerged below the level of the trend is the “structure,” the foundation that supports and creates the behaviors higher up in the pyramid. In the case of the working mother, is she late every week because the organization has strict policies about when staffers need to be in the office — policies that don’t take into account when daycare facilities open their doors in the morning? Would a more effective policy be one that allows employees to work flexible hours or dial in from home on some days? In organizations, the structure is often determined by its policies and procedures.

THE ICEBERG

Each level down the iceberg offers a deeper understanding of the system being examined as well as increased leverage for changing it.

At the next level down, our “mental models” — and those of the people who came before us — affect the structures we put in place and the way we understand the top parts of the iceberg. Is the company founded on a sense of trust for its employees, or does management view itself as needing to monitor workers’ hours to make sure they put in what they’re being paid for? Is “face time” more important than productivity? These attitudes affect the company’s policies and ultimately how it treats all employees, including those with small children.

Each level down the iceberg offers a deeper understanding of the system being examined as well as increased leverage for changing it. Consider, for example, the response of many communities across the U. S. to the events of September 11. Immediately following the tragedy, various groups sponsored events embracing immigrants, with participants singing “We Are the World” and taking part in other heart-warming efforts to reach out to others in a time of national pain and anguish. These events were nice, but of little long-term significance. If the planners had applied the iceberg model to the process, they might have begun by asking simply, “Will we do this again? Should it become an annual event?”

Other questions lead deeper into the model. How do we keep this issue in people’s vision throughout the year? Are there other ways that we might integrate new immigrants into our community? How might we link “native” families to those who are new? And, ultimately, what can we do to open the minds of Americans to see the benefits of the diversity provided by the influx of immigrants? Such exploration might lead to a revival of workshops in cross-cultural understanding such as those brought forth by local ecumenical councils during desegregation.

As shown here, groups can use the iceberg model to improve program planning and to integrate systems thinking into the process. Next time you are involved in event planning, ask yourself whether you are planning an event or a whole movement!

Force Field Analysis (I’m losing my balance!)

Another useful approach to getting deeper into a systems mode of thinking is the force field analysis attributed to Kurt Lewin (, “Resolving Social Conflicts,” Selected Papers on Group Dynamics, 1948). Force field analysis (FFA) is a well-known tool for examining change (see “Force Field Analysis”). It asks, “What forces are at play to increase the odds of a given change taking hold, and what are the elements hindering that change?” This framework provides a rich systems perspective on an issue.

The concept is simple. At any given moment, an organization is in equilibrium; that is, there’s a balance between opposing forces. Without this balance, operations couldn’t move along at their normal pace. When a new idea to change the way the organization operates comes along, it threatens to disrupt the balance. But the forces that maintain the status quo usually make it difficult for change initiatives to take root. The FFA offers a useful way to illustrate this dynamic.

As an example, consider the issue of organizational paperwork. When the academic vice president in an institution of higher education proclaims, “We must simplify operations and eliminate as much unnecessary paperwork as possible,” you can hear the roar of approval from the faculty. But then the change does not happen.

Why? The FFA analysis can provide an understanding of the system as it exists and why there is resistance to change.

Imagine the forces that oppose such a change. For instance, in an attempt to ensure that departments spend certain funds properly, the institutional effectiveness office creates a form requiring that someone from its staff sign off on expenditures of more than $100 from those funds. The graduate college believes that another college in the university is not following standards, so they insist on receiving duplicates of all paperwork that involves graduate students. Department chairs, who have not received any training regarding institutional procedures, fail to follow some of the mandatory processes and lose the trust of the vice president, who then insists on signing off on all travel forms. And on it goes.

In these situations, the top manager often tries to force the change with further declarations and threats. Predictably, the use of strong-arm tactics frequently results in greater resistance.

A more productive way to approach the problem is by listing and examining the balancing forces that prevent the change from taking root (see the table below). Is an individual’s status within the university determined by how many decisions he or she must sign off on? If so, how can we change this reality? Are new faculty members adequately trained on proper completion of paperwork? If not, why? In what ways do various policies reinforce the status quo? How did those forces come about? What can be done to eliminate the forces of resistance or to redirect them in such a manner that they support the proposed change? Each question expands our understanding of the system and opens up possible methods of supporting the initiative.

Spidergram (Not Spider Man!)

Another metaphor for explaining systems thinking is that of a spider web. In The Web of Life (Anchor Books, 1996), Fritjof Capra uses the spider web as the central metaphor to describe the interconnections of all life on Earth. A disruption at one point in the web has an impact that reaches to all points, as it also does in human institutions.

Applying this systems metaphor to organizational issues is easy through the spidergram (see “Spidergram”). First, place the initiative, change, or process to be modified in the center of the web. Then draw threads outward, with blocks at the ends that represent anchoring points for the web. Identify, at each anchor, a unit or process within the organization that might be affected by the change. Stretch your mind to identify all possible anchors. Then, along each line connecting the center to an anchor, indicate the potential impact that the action might have on the anchor.

Consider, for example, an admissions unit in a hospital. The CEO believes that no one should have to stand in line for anything. The admissions staff is aware of and agrees with this perspective. They would also like to reduce their workload, so when budget time comes around, they ask for two additional positions to be created. From their perspective, this is the right thing to do.

Applying the spidergram to this issue involves placing the admissions unit’s request in the center of the web. What then are the anchor points? They might include the hospital budget; the other departments that would be affected by adding expense and capacity to the admissions unit, such as the records office and human resources; and customer satisfaction.

The next step is to note anticipated side effects of funding two more positions in admission on the anchor points. Will other departments requesting positions go without? Will the workload in the records office increase to the point where it begins to cause delays in patient services? Are there other means of resolving the issue, such as sending patients paperwork in advance to complete before coming to the hospital?

The spidergram will not provide an answer as to whether or not the hospital should support the admissions office’s request. It will, however, help identify the interconnections that exist and the potential impact of the proposal beyond the single unit or process involved. It is an extremely useful systems thinking strategy to help an organization see the “big picture” and to avoid sub-optimizing the whole in order to fulfill requests by units with strong and persistent advocates.

Behavior over Time Graphs (The long view)

Short-term thinking leads to event-level actions (as shown in the iceberg model). The number of surgeries in a given month, students enrolled in the fall semester, and quarterly profits are all examples of short-term thinking. If people do view those bits of data historically, they often do so only in relationship to the previous year’s numbers, and begin and end the examination with the question “Are we up?” And often, closely examining the numbers is a guise for searching for someone to blame for a decline!

A systems perspective encourages looking at more data points over a longer period and within a larger context than we’re used to doing. It involves analyzing relevant trends and other patterns that may be acting on the numbers we’re examining at the moment. The graphs may include both historical data and anticipated or desired future trends after a particular intervention. These graphs do not have to be precise, though they should be representative of actual or projected trends in order to be of value. If taken seriously, so-called behavior over time graphs can provide a means for understanding the flow of events and enhance discussion both of the past and the future (see “Behavior over Time Graph” on p. 9).

Take the example of a decline in enrollment numbers in a given department within a large university. The president sees the drop and, with great frustration, calls the provost: “What’s going on over there? Why aren’t the faculty doing their jobs?” The provost calls the dean, who phones the department chair. The chair reminds the dean that they agreed to raise standards for admission to the program in order to meet increasing state employment standards for graduates. Looking at long-term student enrollment patterns in similar situations might have led the administrators to understand that numbers frequently decline at first before enrollment begins to rise again. And doing so might have kept everyone’s blood pressure in check.

“Behavior over Time Graph” represents a small local business that had a tremendous launch, but then experienced lagging sales. When top managers considered the demographics of the individuals they catered to, they recognized that many of the older retirees who had created their initial success had left the state or died. To boost sales, they would need to consider marketing to a slightly younger crowd or even altering their product. Graphing trends in the rise or fall of multiple variables (enrollment and the local economy in higher education, sales and new product introductions in manufacturing, and so on) helps generate discussion, leading to hypotheses and deeper understanding of the trends as part of creating an overall strategy.

Back to Start

Busy executives who think that systems thinking is interesting but of limited value are missing an important tool for change. The best-laid plans can go astray if the whole system has not been considered. Administrators in every kind of organization can benefit from the use of these and other metaphors and models that build a deep understanding of the systems within which they work and live, and strengthen their actions toward continuous improvement.

Ed Cunliff is assistant vice president for academic affairs at the University of Central Oklahoma, with major responsibilities in institutional research, assessment, continuous improvement, and the Academic Support Center. He is active in the pursuit of quality concepts on and off campus, and serves on the board of the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education. Ed’s interest in systems theory has led him to become involved with environmental issues, and he serves on several related boards.

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In our organizations too, although we sometimes disagree with our coworkers based on our different roles, perspectives, or styles, we generally reach mutually agreeable and often creative resolutions without coming to literal or figurative blows. We don’t always do so fully or based on a deep understanding of the complexities involved. Neither do we always arrive at agreements that are entirely satisfying to both parties. Nevertheless, daily life would be intolerable and our organizations would grind to a halt if we were unable to compromise well enough to coexist with each other in a state of relative tolerance and truce.

A World of Contradictions

It is usually a mark of social maturity (and not inconsiderable relief) when we can find ways to live and work with each other despite our differences. Sometimes, though, one of the parties may choose to steer clear of those they are in conflict with (avoid the person), circumvent the difficult circumstances (avoid the conflict), or just take themselves out of the situation by moving on (change their environment through flight). This can happen because of imbalances of power between the parties, insufficient communication or conflict-resolution skills, or a lack of incentive for or investment in continuing the relationship.

“Why can’t we all just get along?” asked Rodney King famously, echoing the sentiments of many of us who have at some point or another wondered about the seeming intractability of human conflict.

When employees find a work situation unbearable, they can almost always change their environment and leave for greener pastures. In the days when the economy was booming and opportunities seemed unlimited, unhappy employees merely called a headhunter, sent out a dozen resumes, and were soon swamped with job offers. Employers, on the other hand, found themselves in the position of needing to offer stock options, casual Fridays, flextime, daycare facilities, foosball, and other company perks to attract and retain the best-skilled workers in the market.

Today, while the economy is looking far better than it has in the past couple of years, the employment market is, particularly in some industries, still very tight. In an uncertain economy or an exceptionally tight job market, when good, well-paying jobs are at a premium, even if an individual wishes to flee a challenging work situation, he or she may find it difficult to do so. Beyond a weak economy there may be many other reasons why employees may be forced to stay in jobs that they are unhappy in. They may do so because of health issues, the diminishing market for their specific skills, or a desire not to disrupt their family stability. Disgruntled workers may also stay where they are to protect their pensions or simply because they are unmotivated or lack the confidence to start afresh in a new environment.

Whatever their particular circumstances, in my work as a conflict resolution professional, I sometimes come across individuals who are unhappy in their present jobs as well as people who see themselves as “a bad fit,” philosophically and operationally, with their organizations or their coworkers. As a result, they can’t maintain their customary level of performance and feel demoralized. Disaffected workers in this situation end up living in a world of contradictions, at once fearful of losing their jobs because of sub-par performance, yet dreading going into the office each day. Managers on the other hand, while sensing dissatisfaction and affected by a loss of morale in their teams, are not always able to fire employees who, while evidently unhappy, are still productive.

The costs involved in replacing employees, the possibility of wrongful termination and discrimination suits, and the fear of stoking further dissent in the teams discourages them from ending the relationship.

The impact of this dynamic on the organization is considerable. When disgruntled employees stay for want of other viable options, they are often unable or unwilling to pull their weight. This behavior in turn diminishes organizational morale, because others become resentful at having to pick up the slack. Communication is affected across the board as unhappy employees become sullen and uncooperative. Teamwork suffers because of the forming of cliques and the creating of “in” and “out” groups. If management doesn’t address the problem, dissatisfaction can spread to other employees, productivity and performance may soon be compromised, and, in extreme cases, the company’s survival could be at stake (see “Growing Worker Dissatisfaction”). Again, even as these employees hang in during the tough economic times, as soon as the economy and the job market improve, they are generally out the door like a shot.

From Collaborator to Contrarian

Take the case of Nancy Miller*. When she took the position of vice president of marketing at New England Computers Inc. (NECI) in March 2001, she was confident that her career was on the upswing. For the first year or so, the challenges of the new job and the prospects of making her mark in the company brought out the best in her. By the middle of 2002, however, things had changed. NECI merged with a larger company operating out of Texas, becoming Nexus Telecom Inc. A new president replaced the one who had hired her, bringing a completely different style to the organization. Then the economic downturn and the bankruptcies of two of the company’s best customers put immense pressure on the marketing team.

While Nancy and Billy Wayne, the new president, shared a common interest in the profitability and growth of the company, their approaches to marketing seemed remarkably different. Also, whereas Nancy once had the president’s ear, she now had to go through Wayne’s executive assistant, Sandra, a brilliant young Ivy-league MBA who was evidently being groomed for bigger things. In the beginning, Nancy had tried to be friendly and welcoming to Sandra, but over time it became clear that they didn’t have much in common. The loss of access to the president, the frustration at not being able to guide the marketing direction of the company, and the increasing sense that she was being marginalized contributed to Nancy’s assessment that perhaps the time had come for her to change jobs.

Nevertheless, after a couple of months of casual networking and many discreet inquiries, Nancy found that there were few jobs on the market. At networking events, she kept running into former colleagues, now unemployed, who had been unable to find comparable positions for more than six months. Nancy’s husband and friends advised her to wait until the economy improved before making a change. Unable to move to a job that would better suit her needs, skills, and style, she remained frustrated.

Thus Nancy, who prided herself on being collaborative and a “people” person and who prized a positive attitude above all else, found herself increasingly unhappy and dreading the thought of going into work each day. Being a consummate professional, she tried to hide her feelings and function in a reasonably civil manner with her colleagues. However, her heart was not in the job anymore, and her frustrations came out in small ways. Her relations with the president’s assistant became cold and veered toward hostility. With the president, whom she had difficulty trusting, she became even more detached.

Even with her own colleagues in marketing, Nancy was unable to summon the kind of passion and humor that she brought to all her previous positions. She became less forgiving of minor administrative infractions, easily upset when things didn’t go according to plan, nervous about closing deals, and paranoid about losing her remaining accounts. She took to speaking disparagingly to her friends outside the company about the “boys from Texas.” Soon her negativity and frustration found expression with some of her staff and especially her friends in human resources, some of whom, like her, were less than enamored about the changes that came with the merger.

GROWING WORKER DISSATISFACTION

When disgruntled employees stay for want of other viable options, they often set off a vicious cycle of growing discontent in the organization. If management doesn’t address the problem, dissatisfaction can spread to other employees, productivity and performance may soon be compromised, and, in extreme cases, the company’s survival could be at stake.

In a matter of a couple of short months, the atmosphere in the organization, especially on the fifth floor where the marketing department shared space with the president’s staff and human resources, had become unbearably toxic. Cliques formed where there once had been a general sense of camaraderie; morale plummeted in the face of gossip; and productivity slipped as working groups and individuals became less forthcoming with information and pursued different and often competing agendas.

What can the company do at this point? Firing Nancy would be difficult, because she continues to be productive and meet her targets. Also, this kind of staff change would likely increase workers’ feelings of insecurity and contribute to distrust of the new leadership. In any case, although Nancy is near the eye of the conflict, she probably is not the problem herself. The issue of employee dissatisfaction and breakdown of communication is widespread and systemic within the merged organization.

Creating Trust and Open Communication

To begin to address this kind of growing crisis, top managers must first try to understand where some of the conflicts are coming from and to reestablish healthy and useful communication horizontally and vertically within the organization. By doing so, the organization can work toward a common vision with a sense of purpose, building trust and team spirit between the staff and management and across divisions and departments.

This can seem like a chicken-and-egg situation, since honest and open communication requires an environment of trust, while some will have difficulty trusting until the other party has demonstrated their ability to communicate honestly and openly. The manager, under these circumstances, needs to put in place confidence-building measures to improve communication, review existing mechanisms for dealing with grievances, and make whatever changes are necessary to create a better climate within the organization.

Regardless of whether this process is done internally or through the services of an external consultant, the inquiry needs to focus on the reasons for the disaffection and the possible differences in goals that may have evolved between employer and employee. Once both parties recognize where the disagreements are, if any, they need to be able to navigate and negotiate through them, bearing in mind the larger goals and mission of the organization. During this process, the facilitator can help participants find ways to hear and meet the legitimate needs of the other party, while ensuring that their own needs and those of the organizations are honored.

After the initial anxieties that are brought to the fore by the shock of honest expression are resolved, this process can create a powerful and open climate where people are listened to and feel understood, and can strive to achieve common goals. Another important benefit of this approach is the creation of a more relaxed and trusting work atmosphere and the building of stronger organizational loyalties. In some situations in which the divide between individual and organizational goals proves insurmountable, management will have to move that person to a more appropriate job within the organization or assist him or her in transitioning out.

When an organization invests in this process, it demonstrates its responsible, caring, and humane side. Employees reciprocate by feeling happier, more secure, and more cooperative than before.

It is useful to think of conflict as an early warning sign that tells of an impending disconnect between the systems that we have in place and the changing circumstances.

Listed below are some specific steps that managers can take to address the issue either through marshaling its own internal resources or by calling in an outside consultant. These can be divided into “Problem Specific” actions, which address immediate needs and concerns, and “Systemic” actions, which focus on developing long-term solutions.

Problem-Specific Approaches

1. Communicating: The first thing a manager can do is to initiate a private conversation with the employee with a view to listening carefully, without judgment, to his or her complaints.

2. Understanding the Other’s Interests: The manager needs to understand the employee’s basic interests (needs, desires, and concerns), differentiating these from positions he or she may be taking from a place of fear or frustration.

3. Articulating One’s Own Interests: After having clearly understood where the employee is coming from, the manager can try to make clear his or her own basic interests and those of the organization.

4. Appreciating Similarities and Differences: Once both parties understand each other’s interests, they have a better handle on where the differences exist and on the true nature of the conflict.

5. Negotiating: The manager can now try to meet some of the employee’s genuine needs. This might require some creative problem solving (increasing the size of the pie!) as well as negotiation.

6. Agreeing: This conversation might result in agreements that include accommodations and compromises that both parties can live with.

7. Maintaining the Relationship: Once the negotiation is complete and agreements have been made, periodic check-ins are necessary to ensure that the agreements are working and the lines of communication remain open.

Systemic Approaches

1. Assessing the Conflict: Management (either internally or by bringing in a consultant) needs to assess the organizational climate and study the nature and source of the conflicts within the organization.

2. Designing an Intervention: Based on the findings in the assessment phase, a team makes recommendations for strategies or interventions to be implemented.

3. Training and Education: It is possible that the first intervention may be to offer a communication and conflict-resolution training program for all employees to help develop some organization-wide capacity in this arena.

4. Mediating: Managers who have significant interpersonal issues to deal with could be offered an opportunity to meet with a mediator.

5. Revisiting the Mission and Vision: In some cases, it might be necessary to reexamine the corporate vision and mission in light of the changed internal and external circumstances, the needs and goals of the larger organization, and those of the individual employees.

6. Designing Procedures and Protocols: Organizations need to design and put in place a conflict-response and management system, such as sophisticated grievance procedures and reporting protocols, that gives the organization the tools and mechanisms to deal with disputes and conflicts when they arise.

7. Institutionalizing an Ombudsman: The organization may find it useful to appoint from within or hire an ombudsman who can objectively weigh in on contentious issues.

8. Coaching: The organization can also ensure that all senior managers, especially those in leadership positions, have access to individualized executive coaching services to enable them to function at optimum levels.

Organizations may, depending on the context and their specific needs, build into their system some or all of these mechanisms and procedures. Beyond the challenges of dealing with unhappy employees who won’t leave and whom you cannot or choose not to terminate, this approach also has broad applicability in most any interpersonal conflict that occurs in the workplace.

Creative Opportunities in Limited Choice

Immigrants whose right to live in this country is tied to their job have long experienced the challenges of not being able to leave a difficult work situation. Because of the many restrictions inherent in the employment visa, newcomers who come to the United States on an employer-sponsored work permit (such as the H1B visa) often have less flexibility than their colleagues who are citizens or permanent residents. Changing jobs for them entails not just getting a job offer, but the legal hassles and the expense of switching sponsorship from one employee to another.

Some of the frustrations that these workers experience are similar to Nancy’s; however, they are exacerbated by the additional insecurity of being at risk of having to leave the country should they lose their job. Sometimes, though, such situations can present creative opportunities that, strangely enough, come from having limited choice.

In one case, a new immigrant, Rathin, had major conflicts with his supervisor, John. He was so miserable that he considered quitting his job. However he knew that were he to leave the job, he would most likely have to leave the country too, having been sponsored for employment by his company. Not willing to completely disrupt his life, Rathin was forced to adopt innovative ways in which to rebuild his relationship with John, something he might not have tried were he able to easily move on to another job. He decided to ask for an opportunity to go in for mediation with John.

The company agreed to the expense, and both John and Rathin met with a mediator for a couple of sessions. As a result, both employee and manager gained a better understanding of where each of them was coming from, each other’s needs, and the possible causes for frustration.

They were able to communicate better with each other, and they became more sophisticated in dealing with difficult and potentially contentious matters. They were also able to resolve many of the tensions that had prevented them from working well together. Rathin and John now have worked their way to a good professional relationship, and Rathin enjoys his job tremendously.

In this context, conflict is not something to be avoided; it is simply a sign of problems within the organization. In our increasingly complex and ever-shifting world, it is useful to think of conflict as an early warning sign that tells of an impending disconnect between the systems that we have in place and the changing circumstances. It can also tell us of the possible need to reexamine our own philosophies, assumptions, and biases, however well they may have served us in the past.

While conflicts often cause discomfort, are unpleasant, and illuminate the cracks in the system, they also present opportunities for deeper learning, growth, and meaningful change, if we address them creatively and with skill. Today these skills are available to organizations in the shape of a wealth of research, knowledge, and literature on the subject and through access to professionals who have been trained to help individuals and organizations deal with conflict.

Ashok Panikkar (apanikkar@vantagepartners.com) is a communication and conflict-resolution professional. He is presently employed at Vantage Partners, a management consulting firm specializing in building both organizational and individual expertise in negotiations and managing critical relationships.

The post Working in an Unhappy Place: Reengaging Disaffected Employees Through Conflict Resolution appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

In 2002, as Cabletelco’s product offerings and customer base grew, the Call Center for the Northeast Region faced the ever-increasing challenge of serving diverse customers with multiple products and high levels of technical complexity. To address these obstacles and opportunities, a team from within the Call Center organization was formed. This cross-functional group collaborated on solutions for matching the flow of work, the design of jobs, and various processes to the way the business needed to operate in order to be successful. The group included the vice president of Customer Care. It was empowered to make decisions related to the customer service organization as well as to make recommendations to the Northeast Region senior leadership team on matters that involved additional budget expenditures or staffing.

One aspect of the challenge involved the Call Center supervisors, who continually struggled to eek out time to complete performance management and employee development functions. Supervisors found themselves “playing out of position” for several key reasons:

• They were increasingly called on to train workers on matters such as changes in call-handling policies, new marketing campaigns, and the effects of computer technology changes on customer interactions.
• They were responsible for more and more administrative tasks, including updating databases, adjusting payroll, monitoring adherence to schedules, and filing various reports. The most fundamental reason that supervisors failed to accomplish some important tasks was that they spent much of their time fielding complex calls that CSRs were not equipped to handle. It was common for a supervisor to report for her shift, step into her office, and face a stack of “escalated” calls that were waiting for her. All too frequently, managers spent their entire shifts resolving such issues.

Why were so many calls passed along to supervisors?

• First, the large volume of changes in the business, including the institution of multiple billing systems, had made the customer service representative’s job increasingly difficult and complex.
• Second, consistently high CSR turnover rates reduced service levels, service quality, customer satisfaction, and job satisfaction. Thirty-five percent of CSRs and 120 percent of service representatives at a key outsourcer (used to handle the ever-increasing call volume) left each year.
• In turn, the level of experience among the CSRs had fallen. Since 1999, the average tenure had declined from 4.5 years to just one year.

Although there were certainly instances when it was appropriate for a supervisor to handle a call, such as when a customer asked to speak directly to a supervisor or wanted to complain about poor service, the team studying the problem felt that many of the escalated calls could be avoided by increasing the CSRs’ ability to handle them themselves. To do so, they would need to develop competencies in:

• Clearly explaining company policies to customers
• Using information technology to locate answers to customer questions, such as which marketing campaign was currently in effect
• Diffusing irate customers

But with the volume of work, the rising complexity of the CSRs’ job, and the low experience base of the workforce, it was evident that change wasn’t going to happen overnight.

Clearly something had to be done.

A Systems Approach

Fortunately, a good proportion of the team had experience with systems thinking from a previous workshop I had given on the essentials. The others were given a tutorial and were brought up-to-speed quickly. The group as a whole then began to tackle the problem of escalated calls from a systemic perspective.

They determined that the quick-fix solution to dealing with escalated calls while freeing supervisors to perform their more traditional duties would be to create a new “development specialist” role to handle complex calls. (Another would have been to add more supervisors, but the company had a firm supervisor-to-CSR ratio that could not be changed for cost-containment reasons). The more fundamental solution would be to further develop the CSRs’ competencies to handle calls themselves.

The team recognized that if the company only took the step of instituting the development specialist role to handle escalated calls, the calls would get handled, but the CSRs wouldn’t gain additional skills nor would their job satisfaction increase (a key factor in reducing the high turnover rate). This quick fix would effectively undermine the development of the CSRs by creating an over-reliance on, or “addiction” to, the specialists. In effect, it would simply shift the problem from the supervisor’s desk to the development specialist’s desk without ever addressing the underlying causes (see “Shifting the Burden to Development Specialists”).

In systems thinking terms, this is a classic example of the “Shifting the Burden” archetype, in which a short-term fix actually undermines the organization’s ability to take action at a more fundamental level. Piece by piece and variable by variable, the team built the systems loops and connected them. The visual model became an easy way to understand the dynamics and to present the analysis to top management and others.

From talking through the causal loop diagram, it became clear that the key was to make sure that any solution for meeting the Call Center’s immediate needs would also support its long-term viability. To fulfill both of these goals, the group recommended the hiring of development specialists to help handle the influx of complex calls. At the same time, to mitigate over-reliance on the development specialists while ensuring the success of the role, the team proposed that:

• The development specialists help CSRs build the capacity to handle complex calls themselves.
• Supervisors take advantage of the time freed up from handling escalated calls to focus on performance management and CSR development.
• Supervisors continue to take some escalated calls in order to have direct insight into customer issues and CSR work challenges.

One way that the development specialists would help CSRs develop their skills was through a technique known as “side-jacking.” Rather than hand off a call to a development specialist and be done with it, a CSR would stay on line as the specialist handled the call to witness, learn, and develop the means to resolve the problem. The development specialist would also debrief the call with the CSR to build understanding and competency.

The expected impact of this approach was:

• CSRs would develop their ability to handle complex calls.
• The workforce as a whole would be more capable, experienced, and able to handle calls efficiently.
• Customer service/customer satisfaction would increase.
• Employee satisfaction would increase, and turnover might decrease.
• Fundamentally, CSRs would be better equipped to solve customer problems — effectively creating a “smarter” workforce.

Sharing the Burden

By taking a systems viewpoint on the situation and thoroughly describing the dynamics at play, the team was able to get management to agree to add the development specialist role to the workforce at a time when headcount was being strictly managed. The logic of the approach and the completeness of thinking represented in the portrayal of the “Shifting the Burden” archetype gave the team confidence in their recommended strategies, allowed them to get support from leadership to proceed, and provided a basis to clearly communicate their plans to the workforce.

One year later, the development specialist role has proven to be a valuable addition to the organization. The CSRs have improved their skills. With side-jacking, they walk through difficult calls with a development specialist and observe how the problem is handled. The next time a similar call comes in, they are inclined to first attempt to handle it themselves before passing it along. Most important, the number of escalated calls has been reduced, and more customers get taken care of the first time they call.

With the addition of advanced technology, development specialists will be able to monitor the work of each CSR four times a month and see how they are solving problems and creating work orders. This data will serve as the basis for further development conversations. Fittingly, perhaps, development specialists have started to move into supervisory roles as the organization has continued to grow, while CSRs have been promoted to fill the development specialist role. One indicator of success is that turnover among CSRs has declined by 6 percent annually.

Many of the improvements the team came up with to improve the way the business operated have taken root. Systems thinking allowed them to pull their disparate thought processes together, create a coherent solution, and sell and implement their proposal.

Jack Regan is principal of Metis Consulting Group, Inc., a management consulting and training firm whose mission is to initiate and build workplace communities where individuals and organizations realize the results that most matter to them. Over the past 16 years, Jack has focused on the design, facilitation, and management of organizational change. He has worked with leaders and teams in a variety of industries and communities on strategic thinking, planning, and implementation, and has used his consultation expertise to enable clients to produce both demonstrable business results and relevant cultural renewal.

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Dr. Donella H. Meadows was one of the most influential environmental thinkers of the 20th century. As principal author of Limits to Growth (Universe Books, 1972), which sold more than nine million copies in 26 languages, she and her colleagues applied the then relatively new tools of system dynamics to global problems. She went on to write eight other books and a weekly syndicated column.

Donella founded Sustainability Institute in 1996 to apply systems thinking, system dynamics, and organizational learning to environmental and social challenges. Three qualities that she combined brilliantly were dedication to scientific rigor, deeply grounded optimism, and the ability to communicate well. Donella’s use of systems tools enabled her to see clearly the root causes of seemingly intractable problems — poverty, war, environmental degradation — and her deep affection for people and the earth gave her a unique power to reach others.

The Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program honors and builds on Donella’s legacy by empowering a new generation of sustainability leaders to use whole-systems thinking in their work and life. The Fellowship integrates rigorous systems analysis with skills in articulating feelings, values, and vision. To support more women in becoming leaders of sustainability, the selection process ensures that at least two-thirds of the participants are female.

The recently graduated 2003–2004 Fellows work in the nonprofit, government, business, tribal, university, and philanthropic sectors. They hailed from major cities, university towns, and rural communities in 14 states. One Fellow came from Brazil, and several others have significant experience working in international settings with a range of colleagues and stakeholders. Through their ongoing work with their organizations, the Fellows interact with conservation activists, farmers, industry executives, legislators, citizen boards, and government officials. Their work represents diverse sectors, bioregions, and ecosystems.

The Curriculum

The Fellows Program is organized in two-year cycles, encompassing four 4day workshops at Sustainability Institute’s affiliated Cobb Hill cohousing community in Vermont, homework, and personalized coaching to apply the workshop teachings to Fellows’ current work. Staff at the Sustainability Institute, and guest speakers Peter Senge (author of The Fifth Discipline), Nancy Jack Todd (Ocean Arks International and editor of Annals of Earth), John Sterman (Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management and director of the MIT System Dynamics Group), and Sara Schley (SEED Systems and the SoL Sustainability Consortium), taught the recent Fellows to:

• Build skills in systems thinking, organizational learning, reflective conversation, mental models, and personal mastery
• Apply systems principles to complex environmental and social problems in their work
• Develop their professional and personal capabilities to serve as leaders for sustainability

Specifically, Fellows:

• Learn to draw causal loop maps that reveal system drivers and leverage points for creating change
• Practice stock and flow diagrams and “Action to Outcome” mapping
• Uncover mental models that drive policy and populations of people to accept or reject new initiatives
• Develop and lead strategies for environmental and social sustainability
• Create new collaborations among other Fellows and with Sustainability Institute staff
• Communicate more effectively, facilitate new understanding, and inspire hope
• Increase their personal mastery and articulate a vision for long-term sustainability in several issue areas

A fundamental thrust of both the Fellows program and Sustainability Institute’s work is to address the systemic roots of social and environmental problems rather than focus on their many symptoms. When Fellows learn to recognize and, most importantly, direct their strategies toward the drivers of complex systems, they greatly enhance their effectiveness. The tools of systems thinking foster connection and understanding as well as win/win dynamics.

By committing to apply the teachings of the Fellowship to their current work challenges, Fellows both use the tools of systems thinking and expose others to them. They also form a learning network representing many regions, issue areas, and professional contacts that amplifies the impact of the training for each participant.

Applying the Learnings

The 2003–2004 Fellows stated that their ability to broaden their perspective in addressing larger-scale environmental and social problems, analyze the root causes of these problems, look for leverage points to make change, and implement solutions have all increased through the program. Angela Park, from the Environmental Leadership Program, says, “The Fellowship has given me very specific tools for thinking strategically about some truly vexing, complicated projects.” Fellows apply these tools to engage multiple stakeholders in complex environmental and social issues in the U. S. and international settings. For example:

• Julia Novy-Hildesley, director of the Lemelson Foundation, has applied a range of tools she learned and practiced through the Fellows Program. She has used an adapted visioning exercise to help her executive board envision the desired results from a program they are initiating. In addition, Julia developed a stock and flow and casual loop map to articulate her foundation’s plan for increasing the rate of invention and innovation toward social ends in the developing world. The stock and flow map outlines the development of ideas to inventions to products actually in use, while the feedback loops show the ways that the foundation’s three strategies — mentoring, recognition, and dissemination — trigger reinforcing cycles that could lead to improved results over time.
• Christina Page of the Rocky Mountain Institute has applied systems thinking tools toward overcoming the barriers that prevent corporations from working together to purchase and use environmentally benign material on a massive scale. The effort pulls together Fortune 500 corporations to radically increase the demand for alternatives to hexavalent chrome, conventional leather, and other products. Christina, a facilitator and catalyst to the effort, has been using causal mapping tools to diagram the various hurdles that the project faces, for example, the building of a critical mass of participants, the potential for too many participants, and competitive pressures. She reports, “It was a luxury to talk about the project in terms of systems and mindsets rather than just budgets and immediate deadlines.”
• Tim Brown, director of the Delta Institute, works to prevent biological pollution in the Great Lakes. Such a seemingly intractable problem involves several major groups — ports, vessel owners, shippers, and the public. By incorporating systems thinking into his work of developing an Environmental Management System (EMS), Tim made it clear to his team (five people from five different organizations) that they would have to engage all stakeholders in crafting a solution that served all of their needs. Tim used a systems map he created with the help of his Sustainability Institute coach and other Fellows to provide strategic orientation to his team. His use of systems thinking on this issue was particularly significant because he is a team member, not a project leader.
• Amália Souza, Global Green grants, Brazil, is using both systems and inquiry tools in the development of a new Brazilian foundation to support grassroots environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). She says about the Fellows Program, “Learning to ‘think’ in systems terms is a challenge unlike most so far. And it is an amazing exercise to force my mind to see the whole picture. These tools are proving quite efficient in my work, since I can see things now that would have escaped my perception completely before. I have still a long ways to go in mastering these tools, but I can see why I should persevere. This Fellowship, in many ways, is revealing a new and much more interesting world to me.”
• Ellen Wolfe of Tabors Caramanis & Associates, focuses on electric utility restructuring activities. She works with electrical system operators, policy makers, regulators, and market participants to effect change in market structures. Ellen’s work over the past few years has been in the context of the California energy crises; she seeks further thinking on how to put in place effective and efficient market structures in an environment of short-run political and business cycles. She comments, “The Fellowship has shown me the value of good communication; how great it felt to hear and be heard, to give and receive good coaching, and how little relative impact it has to ‘convince’ someone of something rather than let them arrive at insights themselves. It has encouraged new ways of being for me in my work. Also, in doing so, it has given me a higher level of confidence in stepping up and taking on a leadership role in areas for which I do not necessarily have a demonstrated area of competency.”

Donella Meadows once said, “We humans are smart enough to have created complex systems and amazing productivity; surely we are also smart enough to make sure that everyone shares our bounty, and surely we are smart enough to sustainably steward the natural world upon which we all depend.” The 2003–2004 Fellows are working with multiple stakeholders in a cross-section of issue areas to do just this, giving us inspiration and hope as we build on Donella’s legacy to shift the tide to global sustainability.

Edie Farwell is program director for the Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program of the Sustainability Institute. Previously, she was director of the Association for Progressive Communications.

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As in the NASA case, most executives either overlook or dismiss the underlying systemic structures and embedded processes that make up an organization’s culture. Because culture is untidy, muddled, and abstract, people tend to ignore it when making complex decisions or seeking concrete solutions. Consequently, many leaders act as if their decisions are objective and logical. They pretend that clusters of interests, organizational attitudes, or ingrained patterns of behavior do not influence their choices or affect business results. Only when crises occur do they scramble to look for reasons below the surface. It is our task as systems practitioners to draw attention to these misperceptions before disaster strikes.

The Power of Culture

Every organization has a unique culture. With minimal effort, groups with as few as 10 employees will develop chains of command, acceptable codes of behavior, and unique language that support and sustain their beliefs and attitudes. For example, in the “startup” frenzy of Silicon Valley in the 1980s, the engineers and young programmers who populated the computer industry, many fresh out of high school, balked at wearing traditional business attire: dark suit, white shirt, and staid tie. The casual dress they preferred stood for and propagated a cultural belief that hardware and software developers are independent, creative individuals who work best when not bound by the constraints of hierarchical authority.

Ignoring the hidden impact of organizational culture can have serious consequences.

Over time, this attitude led to a series of practices, procedures, and policies that came to characterize the Silicon Valley culture. For example, Apple Computers was one of the original and most well-known startups in California. Employees and managers alike wore sandals or hightop sneakers, ragged blue jeans or shorts, and collarless tee shirts; played basketball on outdoor courts set up by the company; and binged on junk food while working grueling hours. Cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs declared his programmers “artists” and “pirates,” and he rewarded their commitment with perks of stock options and working retreats at cushy resorts. His claims that Apple products were “magical” and would “change the world” became embedded in the organizational culture and convinced many – media, shareholders, directors, and employees – of the superiority of the company’s hardware.

Unfortunately, this cultural climate had numerous unintended consequences. Demanding product schedules fueled a pattern of divorce, health problems, and even suicide. And despite the hyperbole, for practical reasons, such as pricing, the products failed to gain dominance in the marketplace.

The Apple example shows how an organization’s culture develops over time, how it affects the way the enterprise operates on a daily basis, and how it is perceived within and outside of its walls. It also illustrates how executives frequently make crippling judgments when they do not factor the effects of their organization’s culture into their strategic and tactical decisions.

The Complexity Factor

Because of the complexity of an organization like NASA, the likelihood that multiple and conflicting views will develop is high. Within the space agency, three subcultures each saw the space shuttle through their unique lenses. Petroski says that “to scientists the vehicle (shuttle) was a tool.” For the NASA managers who lobbied Congress for the Agency’s budget, the shuttle was a technology, and even a flawed mission was proof of success. But the managers’ view was light years away from that of the engineers, a group who, according to Petroski, “achieve success in their designs by imagining how they might fail.” In 1986, when the two groups clashed over the safety of Challenger, managers, fearing a loss of public support and political funding if the shuttle did not fly, pulled rank and ignored the engineers’ advice.

With both of the doomed flights, these groups faced off with little or no understanding of each other’s views or agendas. From the evidence, we might hazard a guess that NASA’s overarching culture didn’t support healthy collaboration or respect for differing opinions, and that dissent and conflict were suppressed. Fortunately, most organizations do not regularly make life and death decisions. Nevertheless, the NASA case reiterates that ignoring the hidden impact of organizational culture can have serious consequences.

Culture: Ties That Bind

The image of the “iceberg,” commonly used in the systems thinking literature, is useful to conceptualize the role of culture (see “Looking Beneath the Surface”). We can consider culture to be a systemic structure that shapes and is shaped by individuals’ feelings, attitudes, and beliefs as well as by official and informal policies and procedures. These structures give rise to patterns of behavior and, ultimately, to specific events. Because events are easily visible and patterns and structures are usually hidden from sight, we often focus our problem solving on the surface level.

Using published reports about NASA, we can use the iceberg model to explore how its culture might have contributed to the shuttle tragedies.

Events: The space exploration program is a symbol of vibrant scientific endeavors and military strength. To the public and politicians, space flights serve as a gauge of success. Thus flights are the focus of NASA’s multiple goals and are the observable events or outcomes of its programs.

Patterns: In both failures, the managers’ subculture exercised its authority in the face of engineering and scientific concerns. Following each shuttle accident, NASA management focused on the technical issues that led to the failures and didn’t delve beneath the surface to explore the human factors that might have contributed, that is, how people in the organization communicated with each other and made decisions.

Structures and Cultural Beliefs: NASA’s executives, the manager subgroup, understood the need for ongoing government funding. Because they perceived that delays in flights could affect political support, public enthusiasm, and financial backing for the program, they overrode the engineers’ recommendations. The NASA culture supported this unilateral decision making and squelching of conflicting opinions.

Rarely, if ever, can we pinpoint a single reason for a success or failure, and too often, we miss the complexity. By delving beneath the surface to examine the elements of an organization’s culture, we can uncover potential risks or opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed and remedy or leverage them.

The Practice of Systems Discovery

Different tools are useful for casting light on an organization’s culture, including climate surveys and organizational gap-analyses. Whatever the nomenclature, input gathered from face-to-face interviews is critical to uncovering the deep belief systems that drive what organizations do. The commonality among these activities, regardless of name, is that (1) information is gathered from across the organization, (2) the input is grouped into thematic categories, and (3) the data/themes are analyzed. This process works best when people from throughout the organization participate in a face-to-face process. Online employee surveys cannot uncover systemic gaps as they lack the level of detail needed to make complex situations clear.

Uncovering the beliefs and behavior from throughout the organization raises our awareness of underlying assumptions, stereotypical attitudes, disrespectful behavior – even fear of conflict. Awareness coupled with motivation can build better collaborations and, in turn, more effective thinking and acting.

Initiating this process in an organization can be difficult! Rarely will executives expend for information about the environment or agree to a massive reengineering project. But as we have seen from the NASA example, surfacing underlying dynamics can be vital to an organization’s success. The key is to keep the process simple., “Steps for Surfacing Belief Systems” provides a skeletal checklist for practitioners.

The Role of Leaders

The CEO and the organization’s managers set the tone for any and all interventions through their actions and dedication. If today’s leaders are skeptical that organizational culture is key to operational and financial success, unlocking the mysteries of an organization will be beyond his or her reach. And many executives are “naysayers,” labeling the management of interpersonal issues as soft skills and relegating it to the “nice-to-have” column. This is a fallacy. These are the challenging issues of the workplace, and they require sophisticated skills. Pretending that interests and attitudes do not impact the bottom line is a mistake.

But, buyer beware! There is no panacea or “flavor of the month” solution, only the hard collaborative work of delving into the forces that cause our organizations to work the way they do. Executives must comprehend the rigorous demands of what they are “buying.” Not all problems can be solved with a single effort. We, the practitioners, must set clear and realistic expectations for an intervention. Sell simply; see complexity; seek clarity.

The news today is littered with stories of organizational failure. Executives can and must learn from these, but it is the meaty challenge of systems practitioners to look at the dynamics that led to these sensationalized failures and translate them into terms that managers value and understand. The bottom line is that cultural knowledge is an important asset for success.

Pat Salgado is a principal with Hatteras Consulting Group located in Pleasanton, California. She worked inside Silicon Valley computer companies for 15 years and more recently was the CEO of a large performing arts theater. Pat holds a Ph. D. in Human and Organization Systems from the Fielding Graduate Institute.

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