The explosive growth in the homecare industry helped this particular company go from $0 to $10 million in revenue between 1989 and 1991. From ’91 to ’92, however, revenue plateaued and the company lost a major hospital account. When I came on, I needed to learn what was happening in the company and reestablish the growth pattern set in the previous years.

Challenging Mental Models

As a starting point, I began to explore the different viewpoints held by the company’s key players. Corporate management and the board of directors had opposing visions and ideas that required reconciliation in order to make progress. The board of directors saw only one problem — an inability to sell new hospital contracts. Consequently, they believed that if the company could solve the problem of selling, everything else would “work itself out.”

Management, however, saw the problem in terms of fundamental weaknesses in the company’s underlying operation and infrastructure. They believed that these weaknesses, such as internal capacity constraints, were being masked by flat volume and would become much more evident once the company began to grow again. Ironically, the growth that the board prayed for every day was management’s biggest nightmare.

To prepare the board and management for the systems work, I needed to convey several ideas. First, that the nature of progress isn’t necessarily linear but discontinuous, and, as with learning, you can hit plateaus or take giant steps. Many organizations do not grasp this concept of learning and instead follow a behavior pattern that assumes a linear, constant developmental path. I also needed to convey that there can be multiple “right” paths for strategy, and different combinations of strategies and tactics can conceivably get you to your goal. Finally, to set the framework, I had to illustrate that individual strategies can reinforce each other, cancel each other, or balance each other. Therefore, the strategies need to be viewed as interdependent, and the analysis must take into account how any two or more strategies interact.

Service Volume

By increasing service volume, service demand will also rise. If demand grows and capacity doesn’t, service quality will drop, resulting in a smaller client base (B2). In order to keep customer satisfaction and sales high, service capacity must grow at the same pace as service volume. Higher service quality will ten lead to higher customer satisfaction, which will maintain or expand service volume, revenue, and profits.

Designing the Process

We wanted to incorporate a strategic planning process with certain primary specifications. First, the process needed to help us gain a basic systems-level understanding of how our clients are generated and how they interact with us. It also needed to enable us to explicitly play through alternative scenarios, while letting us treat strategies as dynamic and interdependent, thus allowing us to model the strategies in various ways over time.

Keeping with this criteria, we felt that an approach using systems principles and computer simulation using ithink software would work best. We chose this strategy because it would require a strong understanding of basic business dynamics and would allow little room for ambiguity. It also allowed for explicit definition and debate of underlying assumptions. We wanted to go through a process that included early dialogue to lay out every assumption we were making about both the way the industry was moving and the way our company functioned. Finally, this approach allowed us to generate “real-time” learning and hypothesis-testing, which we achieved by manipulating our assumptions in real time in an interactive computer-based ithink model.

Modeling the Macro View

We started by modeling a macro view of the company and its strategy using causal-loop diagramming. This macro view included assumptions regarding how clients are generated and how the financial and operating systems of the company function. Our primary goal was to frame and illustrate the major issues in a simple one-page strategy for the company. We also wanted to high-light interdependence among the different strategics that had been proposed within the company. The team that worked on the causal loops was a subset of seven senior managers in the company who had the best embedded knowledge of the company.

The causal looping took place in a two-step process. The team knew that the board’s fundamental issue was marketing, so it started by modeling the marketing function and then looking for all of the second-stage implications that might emerge. Suppose, for example, that we are successful in marketing. Would marketing alone be sufficient to successfully move the company forward? The board’s logic was that the marketing program would generate more clients, more clients would generate more service volume, and more service volume would generate more revenue. With reasonable expense control, the result would be higher profits. The board liked that plan and wanted to keep it that way.

As we drew the causal loop diagrams, however, I posed a question — “What would happen to our service volume if we boosted marketing efforts?” (see “Service Volume”). Marketing efforts will drive more service volume. If demand grows and capacity doesn’t, service quality will drop, which will ultimately reduce our client base (B2). The key is to turn this balancing loop into a reinforcing process. If service demand grows and service capacity keeps pace, service quality will be maintained or actually increase over time. If that happens, higher service quality will lead to higher customer satisfaction, which will maintain or expand service volume, revenue, and ultimately profits (R1).

Measuring Performance Standards

A gap between performance standards and perceived performance drives investment in service capacity, which will improve quality and lead to higher customer satisfaction (R3).

This way of thinking produced new insight for the board: a marketing program is important, but building service capacity is equally critical. We needed to invest in capacity immediately to anticipate and meet service needs. The next step, therefore, was to determine what drives service capacity. Our theory was that we operate based on something we call “perceived performance,” in which we are driven by our measures of service quality against some realistic standard. The company doesn’t have well-developed standards beyond the usual measurements of cost per case, cost per visit, and other basic economic standards. Therefore, without well-defined operating standards, we had no realistic understanding of our perceived performance.

Consequently, we were brought to the question of how to drive realistic performance standards. We concluded that we needed a formal learning program under the rubric of Total Quality Management. The belief was that our perceived performance should drive a steady investment chain in process improvement, while also inciting a greater need to study business processes (see “Measuring Performance Standards”). A gap between performance standards and perceived performance would then spur further investments in service capacity, which would raise the overall service quality (R3), leading to higher customer satisfaction and an increase in service volume. With this systemic understanding, we felt comfortable endorsing the creation of a structured program in order to create knowledge that would reinforce and refine the performance standards.

We went to the board with a plan to operationalize their vision by investing in four areas: marketing, service capacity, a rigid set of performance standards, and an organizational learning approach that would drive the kind of knowledge that sets the standards. The result was that the board and our management group began to understand that there was far more than one barrier to success in the company.

The board then challenged management with an acid test: based on the systems logic, they decided to allocate some money up front to start work on building capacity. They would not approve the full program, however, unless we demonstrated that we could deliver on selling new accounts.

We found that the easy part was adding accounts. The much harder part was the other three objectives: building capacity, creating credible performance standards with that reorganization, and instituting a TQM program throughout the company. These other aspects absorbed the vast majority of our time.

For the first three to four months, my time was spent mostly on marketing and partially on systems thinking. We were able to get over the initial threshold, proving that marketing was the apparent and not the real problem. When the board saw two signed contracts within four months, they were more willing to invest in the next stage of development. The next stage of work involved building an operational model of the company, which we used to develop and test our mix and timing of strategies. The model reinforced our understanding of the need for multiple, integrated initiatives to reach our goals.

Company Learning

Through the planning process, we realized that as a company we were not nearly as good as we thought we were. This was partly because there was little history of planning in the company. Previous strategy had been developed by the board, was very top-down, and had no involvement of the operating staff. Because strategy started and ended at the level of the board and executive management, it never found its way to the operating managers who represented 95 percent of our staff and 100 percent of our revenue. It also involved little understanding of the hospital client.

Another major reason for our performance shortfall was that the board had little exposure to the operational reality of the company. The radically different perceptions held by the board and management about future prospects and risks came about because the managers were much more grounded in the reality of the company, but they had no way to communicate that reality to the board. Although the managers could easily point out the systems that weren’t working, the measurements we weren’t doing, and the level of understanding about our core business we didn’t have, that knowledge was not being transferred to the policymakers. Our systems thinking work provided a forum and a language to stimulate that communication.

Until we started asking these questions and modeling our assumptions, many people in the company did not understand certain aspects of the business — such as how a new client was acquired (see “From Causal Loops to Simulation”). For all practical purposes, our clients “materialized out of a cloud.” So what we tried to do was work back from that cloud and really educate everyone in the company about the operational realities. Through that process, we learned a great deal about our company and our client institutions. As a result of the planning process and our work with systems thinking, we have reached a better understanding of our business and a new way of communicating and testing the complex strategies necessary for future success.

Steven DeMello was president and chief operating officer of Alliance Home Care Management, Inc. I le is presently the director of healthcare practice for High Performance Systems, Inc.

Editorial support for this oracle was provided by Anne Cycle.

The post Systems Thinking and Strategic Planning in Healthcare appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

It was a long day of heated discussions with little agreement or progress against an ambitious agenda. Sam asked how I thought it had gone. I recall saying, “It depends on your desired outcome. If success meant getting through the agenda and getting resolution on the issues, you did not meet that objective. If, however, you wanted to get a view of the team dynamics, I believe you had a very successful meeting.” He laughed and said, “What should I do about this situation? I need a team of VPs who can work together to create uniform standards of manufacturing that are necessary for us to achieve our revenue and profitability targets. Can you help me?”

The Team’s Current State

In the meeting I attended, I observed a team that was ill equipped to work in a collaborative and productive manner. Some of the behaviors I saw included:

• An inability to focus on an agenda and make decisions
• A lack of willingness to engage in dialogue
• Poor capacity to listen to one another
• An apparent lack of respect for one another’s ideas
• A tendency to personalize the conversation and get defensive

These observations led to some preliminary hypotheses — that the group lacked trust and the willingness to operate as a team; that they were focused on furthering their individual agendas; and that they would be unsuccessful in creating a standardized manufacturing platform for the company unless they were able to come together and operate with mutual respect, trust, and a willingness to listen to and learn from each other.

In the meeting I attended, I observed a team that was ill equipped to work in a collaborative and productive manner.

During conversations concerning Sam’s 360-review, I had developed a rapport with each member of the team. I leveraged this to have open and honest discussions on what I’d observed during their business meeting. One of them commented, “It was embarrassing to have you witness that meeting. That is so typical of the way we operate. It’s a challenge to get through an agenda with this group.” These one-on-one conversations helped validate my hypotheses around specific concerns and enlisted the executives in Sam’s overall objective — of creating a cohesive team who could work well together in executing an aggressive and critical element of the organization’s strategy.

I also used a team effectiveness questionnaire from Edgar Schein (from Process Consultation: Its Role in Organization Development, Addison-Wesley, 1988, p. 57–58) to get the team to self-assess and have a structured view of their current effectiveness. When I shared the results of this assessment, one of the executives commented, “I had no idea we were so disruptive in the way we operated.”

Based on the assessments, and with Sam’s agreement, my mandate for a 12-month engagement was to create a team that:

• Made sound business decisions in a considered and timely manner
• Had the ability to work together to solve critical production and quality issues
• Engaged in meetings that were productive, energetic, and constructive
• Showed evidence of listening, collaboration, and mutual respect
• Set aside personal agendas and depersonalized the conversation
• Collaborated to develop and implement a world-class manufacturing strategy

The Design of Interventions

I saw this as an amazing opportunity to delve into territory that is typically not explored. I based the design of my interventions on a model of human structural dynamics derived from the work of David Kantor (see “Human Structural Dynamics Model”). This model suggests that human interactions are a function of the social context in which they take place and of what goes on in people’s hearts and minds (Ober, Kantor, Yanowitz, “Creating Business Results Through Team Learning, The Systems Thinker, V6N5, June/July, 1995, pp.1–5). I chose to focus on two aspects of this model—the team or what is described as the face-to-face structure, and the deeper individual structures and how they might influence the team’s interactions, either one-on-one or in the team.

I chose to include individual-level interventions because they cover ground that is typically less acknowledged and yet significantly impacts behavior — what we see at the face-to-face level. It also meshed well with my belief as an OD practitioner that all change starts with individual change, and that our behavior as adults is strongly influenced by our mental models, core beliefs, and stories — many of these arising from experiences in our formative years. I had a sense that if I was able to allow for the surfacing and at some point sharing of deep imagery from each individual, it would help this team coalesce and begin the process of trusting each other.

The Team Interventions

At the team level, the interventions were designed to help develop trust and connection, and start to develop the capacity for listening. The following models, beliefs, and assumptions influenced the choice of interventions:

• A high-performing team is characterized in part by strong personal commitments to the growth and success of each team member (Katzenbach and Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High Performance Organization, Harper Business, 1993).
• Appreciation of individual experiences and gifts is a powerful foundation for transformation and allows for creation of powerful outcomes (Cooperrider and Whitney, Appreciative Inquiry, Berrett Koehler, 1999; Elliott, Locating the Energy for Change: An Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry, International Institute for Sustainable Development, 1999).
• The ability to listen deeply allows for connection and a foundation for collaboration and “thinking together” — the essence of dialogue (Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, Currency/Doubleday, 1999).
• Dialogue fosters and maintains the high levels of openness and trust that are present in healthy teams.

“Progress Toward Trust and Cohesiveness” demonstrates how the different elements were integrated to guide the team’s progress toward trust and cohesion. In addition to determining the current state, five other building blocks contributed toward creating a team that was able to sustain behavioral changes that enabled an environment of trust, collaboration, and cohesiveness:

Establishing Structural Elements. Sam wanted the team to own and follow basic housekeeping guidelines. This set of interventions was aimed at establishing a process by which the team could focus its discussions and deliberations and make decisions in an effective manner. It involved clarifying roles and responsibilities, delineating decision rights, and setting up operating guidelines between Sam and his team, as well as within the team.

PROGRESS TOWARD TRUST AND COHESIVENESS

The interventions were integrated to guide the team’s progress toward trust and cohesion.

Developing the Capacity for Deep Listening and Dialogue. The more challenging aspects of this engagement were around creating a safe container for the team to have strong dialogue. To achieve this, I introduced the principles and intentions of council to structure the meetings (Zimmerman and Coyle, The Way of Council, Bramble Books, 1996; Baldwin, Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture, Bantam, 1998). These principles included always being seated in a circle and using a talking piece that the team co-created. The intentions of council are speaking from the heart or being honest and authentic; listening from the heart or being deeply present and attentive when another speaks; being “lean of expression” and learning to be succinct; and allowing for silence as well as spontaneous expression.

To facilitate their interactions within this structure and to help them make the distinctions that would allow them to realize the intentions of council, I introduced the four behaviors of dialogue as described by Bill Isaacs — voicing, listening, respecting, and suspending (see “Developing the Capacity for New Behaviors”). At one level, the intention was to help the team develop a capacity for listening without judgment and reaction, and at another it was aimed at helping them experience how deep listening could result in more powerful outcomes and decisions. Above all, it was aimed at building trust within the team.

DEVELOPING THE CAPACITY FOR NEW BEHAVIORS

The four behaviors of dialogue as described by Bill Isaacs are voicing, listening, respecting, and suspending.

Over the course of my engagement (and subsequently), the team adopted sitting in a circle as part of their meeting protocol. Initially they struggled with the some of the practices of council — in particular with holding a silence. They tended to reach for the talking stick before the person who was speaking had finished. Over time, as they became more comfortable with the practices, the use of the talking stick as a mechanism to allow “one voice at a time” and to help “hold the silence” evolved from a forced behavior to a more natural and comfortable one. Their discussions went from individuals fighting to say their piece to comments that were more indicative of listening and building on what has been said. The reaction to silence went from a rush to fill it to actually asking for a moment of reflection during the course of a conversation. Although there was evidence of progress, it was more of an iterative process than a linear progression. The awareness and reinforcement of dialogic behaviors was one that continued throughout my 12-month engagement with this team and continues to be a core part of the team’s operating model.

Appreciating the Diversity of Skills and Capabilities. While most of Sam’s team had been at this company for many years and had deep roots in the industry, some of the more recent additions were brought in with different industry experience, including experience in creating world-class manufacturing organizations. The input of these individuals was often not considered and valued by their colleagues. As Sam put it, “I hired Joel and Charisse for their expertise in Lean Manufacturing. I am concerned the rest of the team is shutting them out. I suppose I could be more directive by simply telling people we have to rely on their experience, but I don’t want to add to the resistance.”

The team needed to operate in an environment of respect and appreciation for the diversity of style, skills, experiences, and contributions. They also needed to understand how to work effectively with this diversity and leverage the strengths of each other. To create this culture and capacity, I used interventions derived from Appreciative Inquiry, team role preference (Margerison and McCann, “Team Management Profiles: Their Use in Managerial Development,” Journal of Management Development, Vol 4, No 2, pp 34–37, 1985), and individual assessments such as DiSC as building blocks on the foundation of dialogue.

These interventions had the desired impact. For instance, the Appreciative Inquiry exercise used in the first session allowed for a breaking of the ice in the team. The team found many points of connection — shared experiences, interests, hopes, and desires. After that session, some of the sources of tension dissipated, such as the resentment of the role an individual played or the lack of industry experience. In addition, the resistance to being seen as and operating as a team started to fall away as they worked through their stories of positive team experiences.

In using the Team Management Profiles, the team was able to appreciate the different work preferences and styles that were present in the room. It allowed them to identify strategies that would be most effective in interacting with this group of individuals and to value the different roles each member of the team tended to prefer in a team setting. It also gave them a snapshot of what might be missing and how they could develop those roles as a collective.

Becoming an Observer of the Self. As I worked with the team, I felt it was important to facilitate the development of their capacity for diagnosis and action in order to make them self-correcting and self-sustaining after I had transitioned out of the process. I also wanted them to have a greater awareness of how to facilitate a dialogue by understanding the roles they tended to gravitate to in a conversation. I introduced another element of structural dynamics — that of boundary profiles and, more specifically, David Kantor’s “four-player system” (Kantor and Lonstein, “Reframing Team Relationships: How the Principles of ‘Structural Dynamics’ Can Help Teams Come to Terms with Their Dark Side,” The Fifth Discipline Field book, Currency/ Doubleday, 1994).

My intention was to get this team of individuals to see their patterns of interaction. I believed if they were conscious of their operating tendencies, how these impacted their effectiveness, and what roles were being played out in their team interactions, they might be able to shift the roles they played and engage in more productive and effective dialogue. It would help them notice whether their conversations were dialogic in nature or at the level of discussion and debate. At a minimum, it would increase their self-awareness of how they showed up and help them develop a capacity to become observers of their own behavior. To facilitate their learning, I videotaped some of their meetings and had them analyze their interactions afterward.

One of the insights that emerged was the difference in expectations of how the team should operate. For instance, Sam expected his team to be his equal partners in the decisions they made. There were some members who would defer to Sam’s decisions. Another insight came from seeing two members of the team frequently engaging in a move-oppose dynamic and how it stymied the progression of the conversation.

Creating Sustainability of Change. The emphasis of each intervention was to help them not only become familiar with the skills but also to practice and develop a level of mastery with that skill. Each session built on the previous ones. The final intervention was a visual image storytelling process (Reeve, Creating a Catalyst for Change via Collage Inspired Conversations, unpublished Master’s thesis, Fielding Graduate University, 2005) where the team incorporated the various building blocks (i.e., practices of dialogue, appreciation and knowledge of self and other, and observation) to co-create their vision for their team. It required them to collaboratively create the guiding principles and core values of the team, and the behaviors that would govern their interactions going forward, by building on the values and vision of each individual. I chose a visual process to shift the context from the verbal, left-brain activities that this team was facile with to a process that would invite them to activate in a positive way some of the drivers of their behavior — their beliefs, values, and mental models. As the team moved from sharing individual values and beliefs to co-creating a shared set of guiding principles and vision, they exhibited respect for individual ideas and the diversity of opinions. There was a remarkable absence of the heated arguments that had characterized the first meeting I’d attended. In its place was an energy of collaboration and partnership, resulting in the creation of a shared vision that each individual had contributed to, owned, and had personalized through the storytelling process.

The Individual Interventions

While working with the team as an entity, I was also coaching individual members. A core outcome for the coaching sessions was to help the individual become an observer of the self and understand what drove behavior so they were able to choose how to act, rather than acting from a place of habitual tendency. The ultimate goal for the “Human Structural Dynamics Model” is authenticity; insight, mastery, and alignment are intermediate stages that lead to authenticity. In an effort to be pragmatic (and recognizing the journey toward authenticity is a lifelong one), I focused on a realistic goal of building the capacity for insight through self-awareness and inquiry into the underlying causes of behaviors, along with varying degrees of mastery.

Using a subset of the human structural dynamics model as a base, I worked to help each individual become aware of their feelings, mental models, belief systems, and deeper stories that governed their behavior in the team context. Specifically, the intent was to make visible those factors that were invisible or less visible and enable the individual to act in an authentic manner.

As I used this model to guide the individual coaching sessions with each executive, my role evolved in the following manner:

• Help the individual become aware of feelings, mental models, belief systems, and deeper stories
• Create and strengthen their capacity for embracing these deeper structures
• Facilitate their understanding of how these structures impact their behavior and how to recognize the shadow aspects
• Help them develop the ability to reframe and choose the internal structures that influence behavior

Interplay Between Individual and Team Interventions

Having simultaneous interventions at the individual and team levels and playing a dual role as facilitator for the team and as personal coach allowed me to observe shifts that occurred as individuals gained insight into their behavior and changed how they interacted with the team. The team meetings also provided me with direction on how to intervene at the individual level with different executives.

The Results

Over the 12-month period, there were many visible changes at both the team level and with individuals. For instance, the team’s interactions were much less fractious and chaotic. Their discussions resulted in key decisions being made in a timely manner with each individual feeling heard even if their idea was not included. They had greater appreciation and respect for what their colleagues brought to the team, “I had no idea Charisse had such wide-ranging experience. It is quite refreshing to have someone who hasn’t grown up in this industry.”

They were able to appreciate silence and the quality of reflection and insight that came from it, “I realized how much of my time is filled with doing things — meetings, conference calls. I never get time to think. I was actually able to think about and find a solution to this problem.” There was a greater sense of camaraderie and trust among them. In self-assessing their progress on the team effectiveness instrument used at the beginning of the process, on all measures, the team had moved from a “below average” score to an “above average” rating.

When I started my work with the team, I would have described members as exhibiting behaviors characteristic of “breakdown.” Probably one of the more profound changes I saw was their ability to maintain a quality of inquiry. At rare moments, particularly in our last session together, there were moments when their interactions had elements of flow.

At the individual level, the changes varied depending on the person. Certainly some of them moved more than others. As their capacity to observe their own behavior grew, it created greater awareness and ownership of their own issues, and led to more courage and honesty in their communications. As they stepped in to appreciate and value their own contributions and role on the team, their insecurities went down; they developed more confidence and demonstrated a greater sense of presence as leaders. The awareness and legitimizing of their individual stories allowed them to have respect for and appreciation of the same in others. By practicing compassion for themselves, they developed the capacity for compassion toward others. This in turn allowed for a level of trust and a commitment to each other’s success, which provided a strong basis for collaboration.

Critical Success Factors

I was operating at two levels of the system simultaneously and addressed not only the behaviors that emerged in team interactions but also the underlying triggers of these behaviors. One reason I was able to successfully take this path was Sam’s uncompromising sponsorship and support, as well as the trust we had built as a result of our long-standing relationship and my candor in the early stages of the engagement. Over the course of the 12 months, he allowed me tremendous creative freedom to introduce the ideas behind council practices and dialogue. He’d been exposed to the practices and was a great believer in the notion of “going slow to go fast.”

Although some members of the team were initially resistant to the team process, because of my work with them individually, they grew to trust me with their inner stories and thus trust the process I was taking the team through. Their cynicism and resistance started to wear down as they experienced having a voice in the conversation and being heard as a result of using council and dialogue practices.

One of the other unexpected contributors to the success of the engagement was my knowledge of the organization, its business, and the dynamics within the industry. It allowed me to connect the interventions aimed at strengthening team effectiveness to core business issues the team was dealing with, rather than have “stand-alone” team-building sessions. By integrating business issues into the design of the interventions, the team had an immediate context for applying and practicing their new skills, which enhanced the capacity for retention and recall of new behaviors.

Challenges Encountered

There were some challenges during the course of this engagement. Even as they saw the value of the practices of council and dialogue, the team didn’t readily embrace some aspects. It took a while for them to honor silence and not jump into the fray. “I find it so difficult to sit still and not say something when no one is speaking. It makes me wonder if I did something wrong,” said one of the executives early in our sessions. While this reflected the challenge of holding silence, it was also a powerful example of how our inner story shows up in our behavior. Over time, and with the help of reflective practices in their individual coaching as well as in their team sessions, they started to see the value of having silence and silent time in their process.

Another difficulty that was more present in earlier sessions than in later ones was a desire to be “in action.” This is reflected in the comment from a team member that “we talk a lot and I enjoy our sessions, but when do we make decisions for the business?” Fortunately, given Sam’s experience with dialogue, he was able to support me and provide a context of “We are making decisions. By talking about and resolving the issues, our decisions are becoming clearer.” It took them a while to realize that by being in dialogue, they were “in action” around decisions.

In creating the experience of being an observer of the self and using the four-player model, there were some unintended consequences. During the debrief, one of the team commented,

The human structural dynamics model provided a valuable set of lenses to examine this team’s issues.

“We sure were on our best behavior today. I suppose we knew we were being watched.” Had I anticipated this better, I might have introduced a disturbance to the system to raise the stakes, because when the stakes are high, people tend to revert to “default” or typical behaviors, especially in early stages of behavioral change.

Summary

The human structural dynamics model provided a valuable set of lenses to examine this team’s issues. At the same time, it allowed for improvisation in the choice of interventions used to address different team issues. The occasion to work with an intact team over an extended period of time helped create a robust foundation wherein the skills introduced had a chance of taking hold. It helped build trust with each individual and created a space for personal growth. This systemic approach presented a powerful learning opportunity for all of us engaged in the process.

A longer version of this article appears in Reflections: The SoL Journal on Knowledge, Learning, and Change, Volume 9 Number 1. For more information, go to www.solonline.org/reflections.

Deepika Nath (dnath@indicaconsulting.com) is the founder and principal of Indica Consulting, where her focus is on bridging strategy and organizational development to bring about growth and lasting transformation. She is a trusted advisor and coach to senior executives seeking to define an authentic and effective leadership style. Her experience spans 15 years of strategy and organizational consulting with leading firms such as the Boston Consulting Group and Ernst &Young. A member of SoL, she holds a PhD in Management and an MA in Organizational Development.

The post Building Trust and Cohesiveness in a Leadership Team appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

A shared commitment to act toward a compelling goal.

Why do I like it?

• First, it emphasizes that strategy is about action – not about analyzing, forecasting, writing papers, filling out forms, compiling spreadsheets, but about action.
• Second, it speaks of a shared commitment – the kind of commitment that management needs so that they continue to act as a team, even when things get tough.
• Third, it recognizes the importance of a compelling goal – the objective, that, when realized, brings vision into reality.

I recognize that the statement makes no declaration about what the goal should be or about what actions should be taken, but I ask that you ride with that gap for the moment — all will be revealed in due course. I also recognize that are many ways of building a shared commitment to act and of defining a good strategy. Scenario planning, which I will focus on, is just one of them.

Gods, Gamblers, Grinders, and Guides

All organizations have their own dominant beliefs, and top managers have their own styles. Some people believe, for example, that it is possible to predict the future (if not in general, then at least as far as their own organizations are concerned); others prefer to believe that the future is uncertain and that the journey into the future is one of exploration. As regards style, some leaders exercise very strong control, while others seek to empower those in their organizations (see “Four Leadership Styles”).

Strong, controlling leaders who believe they can predict the future are much like gods: Not only do they know what they want, they know best, too. You don’t have to read Homer to learn that any mortal who incites the wrath of an angry god soon has an uncomfortable time. Such leaders need no tools and techniques to formulate a strategy: They know. From time to time, they might actually be right.

Strong, controlling leaders who are less certain of their powers of prediction often behave like gamblers: They place a bet that the future will evolve in a certain way and, if it does, fine; if it doesn’t, well, let’s throw the dice again and see what happens a second time. Gamblers, too, need few tools and techniques, but they might like some financial analyses to give them a feel for the odds.

Empowerers who believe they can predict the future are convinced that, somewhere out there, the “right” strategic answer exists, if only they can find it. These are the grinders, managers who are forever grinding away on more analyses, more research, more numbers. These people love tools and techniques, with their five forces, their value chains, their PERTS, and their SWOTS.

In many cases, the most successful leaders may be those empowerers who choose to serve as guides: They seek to carefully steer their organizations through the uncertainties that the future will inevitably bring. How can they steer the safest course? Well, to do so, they need a map. The problem is that no such map can be found, for maps exist in space, not in time.

It is in this last arena that scenarios can help, for scenarios are stories describing how the future might evolve. Scenarios therefore do a similar job in time to that done by maps in space. But because the future might evolve in many ways, there are many possible scenarios, each of which represents one possible view of what might happen over the next five, 10, or 20 years. Importantly, the emphasis within each scenario is not on the internal aspects of the business, but rather on the external context in which the business might operate; robust scenarios depict the future in terms of politics, economics, sociology, demography, technology, and industrial structures.

By imagining what such a future might be, you can test whether or not a particular strategy for your own business will be beneficial, should that future indeed come to pass. And by explicitly recognizing that there might be several different futures, any one of which might happen, you can test your strategy against each and see if some strategies are more robust than others. In essence, scenario planning is a form of simulation: It is the business manager’s equivalent of the jet pilot’s flight simulator. The scenarios project you and your organization into the future, and provide a realistic, rich context in which you can examine whether or not particular strategies – the development of new products, the entry into new markets, or whatever – are likely to be successful.

Scenarios also serve to heighten your understanding of risk, so that when you put your strategy into action, you will be much more aware of how changes in the external environment are likely to impact your business. Then if you notice that the world is in fact evolving in a direction for which your strategy is less appropriate, you will be able to change course easily and quickly, far more so than your competitors, who may not have noticed what is going on, or, if they have, may continue for some time in a state of denial.

But how does scenario-based strategic planning – to give it its full name – actually work?

Scenario-Based Strategic Planning

Scenario-based strategic planning comprises two principal activities:

• First, the development of a small number of scenarios – say, up to five – each of which describes a different view of how a future world might look.
• Second, the agreement on a strategy – a set of actions that the organization is committed to take.

As indicated by “Scenario Development and Strategy Formation,” the process of scenario development is divergent and strives to embrace as broad as possible a view of how the future might evolve, in order to encompass the future’s inevitable uncertainties. This is done through a series of group workshops, supported by research, and the gathering of expert opinions. The purpose of the scenarios is to provide a series of backdrops against which different strategies can be assessed. Questions such as “Should we enter the [whatever] market?”, “What are the risks of making [whatever] investment?” and the like are tested against each of the scenarios. Participants assume that, yes, they do enter that market, and that, yes, they do make that investment, and then imagine that they and their organization are projected into each scenario 10 years into the future. They can then assess, using “projected hindsight,” whether or not those decisions were “good” or “bad.” By exploring various decisions against each scenario in this way, team members can then determine that set of decisions that they collectively feel most comfortable taking now and therefore converge upon an agreed strategy.

The following pages describe the process in more detail. First, we need to introduce and define three terms that have a special role in scenario planning: worlds, levers, and outcomes.

Worlds. A world is a comprehensive description of the context in which a business operates. Worlds are therefore described in terms of (often long!) lists of adjectives and adjectival phrases, describing all aspects of the world of interest, including the political, social, economic and regulatory structures, nature of market competition, technology, and all the rest.

SCENARIO DEVELOPMENT AND STRATEGY FORMATION

The process of scenario development is divergent and strives to embrace as broad as possible a view of how the future might evolve, in order to encompass the future’s inevitable uncertainties. The purpose of the scenarios is to provide a series of backdrops against which different strategies can be assessed. By exploring various decisions against each scenario in this way, team members can then determine that set of decisions that they collectively feel most comfortable taking now and therefore converge upon an agreed strategy.

The most familiar world is today’s world, and an important part of the scenario planning process is to come to a shared view of just what it is. Different people see different things, and some lively workshops can be run focused on describing today’s world. Ultimately, any description of today’s world must pass the Martian Test: If the description were e-mailed to a group of Martians approaching Earth, on stepping out of their saucer, they must be able to recognize where they have landed.

If today’s world is defined in terms of a long list of descriptive phrases, then, by definition, a different world must have a different list. A major milestone in scenario planning is to generate a small number of different worlds – three to five is usually sufficient – that have self-consistent descriptions. These worlds should be significantly different from one another, and from today’s world.

Some of the different worlds might appear favorable, others harsh; some may appear to be relatively likely, other less so; some might be desirable, others positively repulsive. At the moment, though, such issues aren’t important; all that matters is that any different world must be believed to be, in principle, possible.

Levers and Outcomes. Levers represent the actions and decisions that managers can take. For example, managers can determine product range, target markets, staffing levels, skills, investments in infrastructure, level of R&D, location of manufacturing sites, amount spent on advertising, and so on. At any time, each lever has a setting – the numeric amount associated with that lever.

Outcomes represent the commercial results of the organization: levels of sales and profit, reputation, share price, market share, staff morale, and so on. At any time, each outcome has a numeric value.

Fundamentally, the job of strategic management is to determine the levers and assign their settings, so as to generate desirable outcomes. As every manager soon learns, however, levers are not directly connected to outcomes; there simply is no lever to allow managers to directly control profit, market share, or share price. Rather, the levers that managers can actually pull are only indirectly, and sometimes rather loosely, coupled to the outcomes, and managers act in the belief – or hope – that by cutting costs here and increasing staff there, shareholder value will be increased. To make matters worse, time delays occur before any change in a lever setting begins to take effect.

This process is, as we all know too well, very complex. A powerful tool in taming this complexity is system dynamics modeling. This kind of simulation goes far beyond the typical spreadsheet and can handle loosely coupled variables, time lags, and feedback loops. (For a more complete definition of system dynamics, go to http://www.systemdynamics.org.)

The Rules of Innovation

Many people feel that inventing new worlds is difficult, fearing not only that they lack the expert knowledge, but also – and far worse – that they just don’t have the imagination. In fact, inventing new worlds is easy and a lot of fun, provided, of course, that you do it in the easy, fun way – and that is to borrow from the techniques of innovation.

Briefly, two of the key rules that make innovation deliberate, systematic, and safe are:

• Rule No. 1: Don’t try to leap directly into the unknown – start from something or somewhere you know well.
• Rule No. 2: New ideas are best generated not by waiting for lightning to strike, but by challenging assumptions and asking, “How might this be different?”

A simple but nonetheless startling example of these rules in action is the familiar nine dots puzzle (see “Nine Dots Puzzle”). There are two questions:

• How can you join all nine dots with four straight lines, without taking your pencil off the page?
• And if that is too easy, how many different ways can you find of joining all the dots with just one line?

Most people tackle the first question by picking up a pen and drawing various alternatives; they usually don’t even know where to start with the second question. But then most people don’t know the two rules of innovation. Picking up a pen, drawing, and trying to solve the puzzle by trial and error breaks the first rule – you’re leaping into the dark. The first rule says “Let’s understand all we can about the nine dots.” There are nine, they are in a square array, they are an inch or so apart, and they are about a quarter-inch square. The second rule says, “Challenge the assumptions.” Is the shape the dots form a square? What would happen if the dots weren’t an inch apart? They might be a mile apart or close together. But if they were close, I could wipe a felt-tip pen across all nine at once. So, if they’re an inch apart, I need a thick pen – maybe a paint roller. Ah yes, that’s it, a paint roller. And the puzzle is instantly solved.

Inventing New Worlds

The easiest way of inventing new worlds is therefore to apply the two key rules of innovation defined above. In the context of scenario planning, if we follow Rule No. 1, our starting point is something we all know well indeed, namely, today’s world. In fact, we take the time to define today’s world not only to build a genuine, deeply shared view of where we are, but also as a springboard to innovation.

One observation about today’s world might be that “the current industrial structure is consolidating.” Rule No. 2 requires us to challenge assumptions and ask, “How might this be different?” How might the industrial structure be different? Well, perhaps it will concentrate even further into a global monopoly; perhaps it will fragment as a result of government intervention; perhaps new entrants will come in on the back of a new technology.

Applying Rule No. 2 thus results in many alternative possibilities. As a group begins to list these potential futures, people start associating characteristics together, so that a small number of self-consistent worlds emerge, each with its appropriate set of descriptions. Created by a process of deliberate challenge and deliberate and systematic innovation, these descriptions will be very different from today’s world. When you are in the middle of the process, it can appear to be something of a muddle, with hundreds of post-its all over the walls. But rest assured that it works: The human mind is quite adept at seeing patterns. Just as the solution to the nine dots puzzle emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, so the process of challenge, coupled with the interactions of a group and the human ability to see patterns, will create a compelling series of new worlds.

“Scenario Planning Summary” forms the heart of a scenario planning exercise. Each column represents a different world, the first being today’s world. The often extensive descriptions of each world are incorporated in the first row. The levers are named in the title box of the second row, and the corresponding lever settings are identified in the appropriate column. Similarly, the outcomes are named in the title box of the third row, and the outcome values, for the defined lever settings in each world, are assessed and entered into each column.

The question then becomes, What are the lever settings and what new levers might be required to give favorable outcomes in as many of the worlds as possible? Once the most favorable set of levers and lever settings have been determined, then your strategy is that set of managerial actions required to move the levers from their current settings to the desired ones.

Testing the Levers

By now, you will have:

• Defined today’s world.
• Defined up to five alternative worlds.
• Defined the levers and the outcomes.
• Seen how the lever settings in today’s world generate today’s outcome values.

It is at this point that the scenarios themselves are written, each scenario being a vivid story describing how each of the alternative new worlds evolved, in its own particular way, from today’s world. Well-written scenarios capture your imagination and are powerful vehicles for communication and training. Immersing yourself in the scenarios builds “a memory of the future,” so that as time passes and the future becomes reality, you recognize what you see. But the scenarios themselves are not the end of the exercise: The purpose of the scenarios, and the alternative worlds they describe, is to form a context in which your business might operate in the future.

To test out this method:

• Imagine that the levers and their settings are the same as in today’s world. What will the outcome values be in the different worlds? Are they favorable or unfavorable?
• If the outcome values in any alternative world are unfavorable, what would the lever settings have be to give rise to favorable outcomes? Do you need to invoke any new levers?

This process is best carried out through group discussion; it can also be supported by modeling and specific, well-focused analysis. The objective is to examine how robust different lever settings are to future uncertainty. Suppose, for example, you decide that the current lever settings give favorable outcome values in just one of the alternative future worlds. That analysis implies that, if you leave the lever settings as they are and that particular future does indeed come to pass, your business is likely to be successful. But if the future were to evolve toward any of the other worlds, things might not be so rosy.

Turning Scenarios into Strategy

As a result of the exploration of the lever settings in the various worlds, you will discover one of a number of things, for example, that:

• The current levers, and their settings, are indeed robust under future worlds, or
• The current levers, and their settings, are not robust under future worlds, or
• Some different lever settings are robust under many of the future worlds, including today’s world; or there are no lever settings that work well under many worlds, but several clusters of settings that work well in some worlds but not others; or there are no generally safe lever settings – each world has its own.

These insights are guides to strategy. How so? Let’s go back to our definition of strategy: a shared commitment to act toward a compelling goal.

A shared commitment to take what specific actions, toward which particular goal? Well:

• The goal must be defined in relation to one or more of the worlds, and
• The actions must be to move existing levers to new settings or to deploy new levers.

The process of strategy development is therefore that of deciding which levers need to be placed at what settings. And the strategy itself is the set of actions you decide to take to move the levers from their current settings to their new ones.

Scenario-based strategic planning has the objective of providing a framework to enable managers to make strategic decisions (see “The Scenario-Based Strategic Planning Process”). These decisions can relate only to levers and their settings; managers, quite literally, can do little else. As we all know, the problem with resetting the levers is that some of them are difficult to reset; some, once reset, cannot be reversed to their original settings; many require a long time to reset; and, once settings have been reset, it may be a long time before the results are actually achieved—time during which the world is fast evolving, often in such a way as to make the new settings no longer fit for their originally conceived purpose.

THE SCENARIO-BASED STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS

Scenario-based strategic planning has the objective of providing a framework to enable managers to make strategic decisions. As such, it comprises a number of activities, beginning with defining today’s world and the range of actions that managers can take to creating scenarios of different possible worlds to testing levers in different settings and, finally, identifying effective actions.

But the levers must be reset from time to time. Doing nothing, and so betting that the world will stay still, is often a worse bet than taking a gamble on one particular future. The process is exciting, challenging, stimulating, exhausting, amazing – and, most importantly, it works.

Dennis Sherwood is the author of nine books, including Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager’s Guide to Applying Systems Thinking, Smart Things to Know About Innovation, and Unlock Your Mind. For 12 years, he was a consulting partner with Coopers & Lybrand and was subsequently an executive director at Goldman Sachs in London, a partner in Bossard Consultants, and vice president of SRI Consulting. He is currently with the Silver Bullet Machine Manufacturing Company. Dennis was educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Yale, and California, and is a Sloan Fellow, with distinction, of the London Business School. He is a well-known speaker at conferences, has written many journal articles, and has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s programs In Business, Shoptalk, and Nice Work.

The post Turning Innovative Scenarios into Robust Strategies appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

A Self-Organizing Event

The virtual conference was the brainchild of Holger Nauheimer, creator of the Change Management Tool book. It was the simplest of acts; Holger put out an invitation to his contact list, and RTVC was born. The conference was the collaborative design of a self-organizing group of independent consultants, facilitators, and technologists who met online; most still have not yet met face-to-face. In addition to Holger, who is from Germany, the RTVC steering team consisted of Stephan Dohrn, (Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Lucy Garrick (Seattle, US), Hans Gaertner (Bremen, Germany), Suresh Fernando (Vancouver, Canada), and Sofia Bustamante, (London, UK).

The hosts created an online portal where participants organized before, during, and after the event (see “Online Portal”). Links led people to conference registration, pre-session preparations, places to post session topics, and technical help. Because this gathering was an experiment, conference registration was free.

We used principles from Open Space Technology because of its simplicity and flexibility. Ironically, Open Space Technology, as originally conceived, has nothing to do with computer technology, but is a convening methodology consisting of a space to meet, a group with a shared theme or topic around which conversations can be focused, and time to achieve a desired result. Before our conference began, participants posted sessions related to our conference theme on an online discussion board. Time was scheduled for two tracks of self-organizing breakout sessions, where interested parties would participate using a variety of social media.

Imagine, if you will, a sort of virtual conference hotel where Skype Chat is the lobby and general convening space. Participants from around the globe arrive and sign into the opening session on Skype Chat. Other virtual rooms are designated as self-service places to get information on how the conference is organized, how to convene an Open Space session, technical support, and so on. Two tracks of breakout sessions are posted and convened in other virtual spaces using free social media such as virtual white boards, writing spaces, and mind maps as well as online video, audio, and text chat. In a closing session back in the general convening space, participants post outcomes from each breakout session.

ONLINE PORTAL

The hosts created an online portal where participants organized before, during, and after the event. Links led people to conference registration, pre-session preparations, places to post session topics, and technical help.

On the day of the event, we had no idea what would happen. About 30 minutes before the posted start time, 53 participants representing 19 different countries began to “arrive” and greet each other with no assistance from the facilitators (see “Participants from 19 Countries”). After the opening session, conveners held nine breakout sessions using a variety of social media platforms.

To be candid, I expected chaos. After all, in chat rooms, everyone can post simultaneously. Each social media tool has its own idiosyncrasies. To my surprise, the event was at least as orderly as any physical gathering I have attended, maybe more so. During the closing session, I asked participants for one-word reactions to the conference. Their reactions ranged from “thrilling, encouraging, and engaging” to “like riding a roller coaster, technically challenging, and disruptive.”

Our team was delighted by the responses and the success of the collective experience of conference attendees. We believe that virtual collaboration holds tremendous promise for code signing solutions to some of society’s most challenging issues, and because social media is a co-dependent environment, its strategic potential will continue to unfold as more and more people learn how to convene and co-create in it.

Lessons Learned

We realized somewhere along the way that we had been virtually collaborating in order to design our virtual collaboration conference. Since the conclusion of the RTVC conference, our team continues to work together on new projects. We still have not met in person. We get together daily in a private Skype Chat that we call our “office” to plan projects and discuss business matters. We recently facilitated an online brainstorm with people from around the world on the topic of participative government. We are openly sharing our expertise, learning from new experiences, and developing strategies to help individuals and groups who might otherwise have no way of working together.

Here are some of the things we’ve learned from convening the conference and other experiences with social media:

Ten Tips for Virtual Collaboration

1. Make It Cost Effective: You can do a lot with free and low-cost online tools. You can run global real-time meetings and automatically record the contents effectively and efficiently. Our first public conference was designed and implemented in four weeks with six volunteers and two part-time contractors at various levels of technical skill. You could not put on a physical conference in that timeframe for that budget. Our second event was a much more elaborate design and took approximately the same amount of time to plan.
2. Wade Before You Dive In: There is a dizzying array of social media. Pick a couple of platforms and experiment, ask questions, and get comfortable. This can be a time-consuming effort, so be patient.
3. Google It: Take advantage of free advice published on blogs and websites about how to use social media.
4. Prepare by Writing: If you’re a convener, consider pre-writing some text ahead of time in a simple text editor. Having prepared material that you can easily cut and paste into a chat or discussion can allow you to focus on the conversation instead of on the tool.
5. Hold a Technology Orientation: Allow time in advance of a meeting or conference as well as at the beginning of breakout sessions to familiarize participants with the tools being used. Test them ahead of time. This is particularly important when running multiple sessions utilizing different social media platforms.
6. Learn to Run Multiple Channels: Collaborating in small groups in virtual space involves running parallel channels simultaneously. Some, such as text chat, are synchronous (real-time), and others, such as wikis, are asynchronous. Some, such as most blogs, are one-way, and others, such as VOIP, are two-way. Experiment and have fun with these different media.
7. Hone Your Facilitation and Virtual Skills: The culture that has evolved from virtual collaboration features openly sharing expertise with a generosity of spirit. People share and help each other. As in the physical world, skillful facilitation supports communication, makes meaning, and creates the conditions for people to take conversations beyond talk to achieve goals. Your prowess in virtual-land will be aided by unlearning old beliefs about protection and control, and learning new ways to contribute and share the work. It is a practice—something you will never completely master but will improve with experience and curiosity.
8. Share Your Systems Thinking Skills: The virtual world is nothing if not self-organizing and emergent. Those lessons we’ve learned about being aware and present and testing assumptions are essential for successful leadership and engagement in the culture of virtual collaboration.
9. Designate Communication Conventions: Designating a few simple communication conventions can be enormously helpful when communicating via text. We use “ALL CAPS” to get the attention of the group; we use “@name” to address a comment to a specific person; and we use “#” at the end of a sentence as a virtual talking stick to indicate we’re through speaking. Abbreviations and incomplete sentences are common and part of the online chat culture.
10. Document and Keep the Conversation Alive: One advantage of all social media is that most of it automatically records the content of a meeting, whether text, voice, or image. To keep a synchronous conversation alive, we synthesize key themes and next steps, then cut and paste them into a community discussion board, blog, microblog, or community website.

Different and the Same

Virtual convening is part of virtual collaboration, but holding a meeting with geographically distant participants is just the tip of the iceberg. Conveners and participants have varying perceptions about what it means to collaborate. Our model of virtual collaboration continues to evolve in the virtual world, and so will yours. We change the virtual tools as they change us. Collaboration implies that real value is created for both conveners and participants.

In the virtual space, value is rarely limited to finances. It includes things like openness, generosity, respect, and reputation. Creating real value with virtual collaboration, as with in-person collaboration, is greatly enhanced through a thoughtful design and skilled facilitation process linked to the purpose of your gathering.

What is surprising is that an amazing amount of real material value is not only possible but has already been generated from virtual collaboration without the benefit of the traditional organizational systems and structures. By this I mean things like no org chart, no department heads, and no decision trees. These are emergent qualities in the virtual world.

In the virtual space, value is rarely limited to finances. It includes things like openness, generosity, respect, and reputation.

Consider what has already happened with Wikipedia and the Mozilla browser, Firefox. Wikipedia is a high-quality global encyclopedia published in 10 languages and three alphabets that was created by volunteers with a passion for its subject matter. For more than 10 years, Mozilla has been an open source, non-profit community creating and innovating on key Internet technologies where large commercial vendors could not. Mozilla has become the software provider of choice for more than 170 million people, creating products such as the Firefox browser and the Apache web server. Something revolutionary is going on in terms of what open social media can accomplish, and I have no doubt that in ways both subtle and obvious, it is likely to transform our institutions and organizations around the world.

In the closing epilogue of his book, Here Comes Everybody (Penguin Press, 2008), Clay Shirky tells the story of Aldus Manutius, a Venetian printer who in 1501 published the first translation of Virgil’s works in a format small enough to fit into a gentleman’s saddle bags, thus making the written word portable. Shirky, who studies the impact of media on society, goes on to say, “The lesson from Manutius’s life is that the future belongs to those who take the present for granted . . . The mistakes that novices make comes from lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But in times of revolution, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.”

Virtual collaboration is here to stay. It provides a bridge that goes well beyond geography. It is a way to connect what we have in common across space, time, generations, and organizations of every type and style. Virtual collaboration calls upon those of us who are learners to unlearn things because they have stopped being true and to tap into collective sources of wisdom facilitated by breaking through arbitrary institutional boundaries.

Lucy Garrick is a founder of NorthShore Group, a Seattle-based consulting and coaching practice in leadership and organizational change, and a cofounder of Radical Inclusion, which provides international education, social media strategy, and consulting services in the use of social media for positive organizational and social change.

For Further Reference:

Slide Show of Lessons and Outcomes from Real-time Virtual Collaboration Radical Inclusion Blog 50 Social Sites That Every Business Needs from Focus.com Skype: How To Make Free Calls Anywhere How To Participate in a Twitter Chat from TwitTip.com

The post Opening Space for Virtual Global Collaboration appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

When asked how he managed to accomplish this feat, Spielberg credited the use of a large, aerial-perspective map that effectively captured the entire story as well as the camera locations. This rich image, which was much more detailed than a normal film storyboard, showed everyone on the production what was supposed to happen to whom and when. The detailed picture helped the crew come to a shared mindset and allowed them to work quickly and effectively.

Everyone knew the desired result as well as the detailed steps along the way. People on the production could place their efforts in the context of the big picture. They were all on the same page, so to speak; it just happened to be a very big one posted around all four walls of Spielberg’s hotel room.

Old Wine in New Bottles

Of course, the use of pictures to convey messages, encourage dialogue, and shape people’s perspectives is nothing new. A lot of art has this quality, including religious art. Take, for instance, Botticelli’s La Primavera. In the painting, Venus looks out at viewers and, by the gesture of her right hand, asks them to choose which of the Three Graces they should emulate. It is an image designed to challenge the Medici princes of Florence to think about what sort of leadership they should provide: Should they lead with a deeper spiritual quality or should they go for short-term pleasure and gain?

Pictures are effective because they can convey complexity as well as make manifest people’s mental models. For these reasons, they can be useful in a corporate setting in helping leaders articulate their thinking, encouraging organization-wide dialogue to promote greater engagement in strategy and building a shared vision about what the future should look like and how to achieve it. A visual depiction is far more useful than words alone in helping a community of people create common ground.

“Learning Pictures” are a tool used to help people align their thinking about conceptual matters, such as strategy, the nature of change, organizational performance, the competitive landscape, and organizational dynamics. They are large, colorful representations of the business situation, created by a consultant or facilitator with the support of a graphic designer or artist based on input from a leadership team (see “Sample Learning Picture”). The images are then used as a catalyst for group dialogue, usually with a facilitator and one of the leaders involved in creating the picture. Once the picture has been used in these dialogue sessions with people from throughout the organization, they inevitably end up being put on a wall and used for other communication tasks, such as during orientation for new employees.

Done well, a Learning Picture helps to create what Richard Pascale, Mark Milleman, and Linda Gioja, in Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business (Crown, 2000), call “line of sight” understanding. This kind of understanding, they say, “provides an overview of the strategic context. It enables employees on the shop floor to see the direct connection between what they do and the overall corporate results.”

The Process

Leaders responsible for achieving new levels of performance and capability sometimes jump into action without first having thought clearly about the outcomes they seek to achieve. If the wider community of employees has only a tenuous grasp on the strategic outcomes and how they are to be achieved, then their chances of realizing them are severely compromised. Likewise, if the members of the leadership team do not have a similar view about “the what” and “the how,” then they have little hope of arriving at the destination. Thus, the process of creating a Learning Picture is often as useful to the organization as the result.

The process follows six steps:

1. Elicit the Big Picture. In this step, the team accountable for delivering the strategic change participates in a facilitated workshop. The workshop lasts about two to three hours and focuses on the following:
   1. The end state that is desired, the vision (the what)
   2. The challenges and a map through them (the how)
   3. The case for change (the why)

   Most of the focus is on the end state. The facilitator’s task is to probe what this will look and feel like and to drill down to specific details, such as: What sort of relationships will there be between the company and its stakeholders/customers? What will the working environment be like? How will leadership be exercised? What will be different? What are the dominant chains of cause and effect? What will be leading indicators of success? How will key functions interact and how will they create value across departments? What cultural artifacts will be employed to substantiate the desired culture? What would a visitor from another planet see?

   If a picture says a thousand words, then it can certainly help to create the dialogue that leads to shared mindset.

   The key is to elicit participants’ mental models about the future and align them around one version.

   Throughout the session, the facilitator listens for visual metaphors and imagery. At the end of the workshop, participants agree on a visual metaphor for the Learning Picture that might act as the core theme.

   Some possible metaphors include:

   • Islands in the sea
   • Landscape with hills and rivers
   • Built environment with roads, shops, and factories
   • Formula 1 racing
   • Aviation, airports, and airliners
   • The globe showing connected communities and other networking themes
   • Mountains
   • A maze
   • The inside of a computer

   A strategic or conceptual artist – a graphic designer/illustrator who can use standard illustration software – listens to the discussion and starts to conceptualize the Learning Picture with the help of the consultant/facilitator, who acts as a bridge between the group and the artist.

2. Design the Learning Picture. The next stage is to think about the main themes that emerged from the facilitated discussion. With one client, the challenge was to integrate a new function with two existing business units. The management team hit upon the idea of representing the groups in a Learning Picture that showed them all collaborating in a working environment of the future. The image shows people interacting in new ways and leveraging new tools and information to achieve unprecedented outcomes.The management team felt that people in the organization needed to be more interdependent and share information without the intervention of the head office. To depict that concept, the Learning Picture showed one business function in the center with another supporting it around the outside and then further layers of support above and beneath these two core organizational constructs. Collaboration, best practices, visibility of information, a common language, and other ideas were represented in the picture’s details.

   Before they produced this picture, the organization had created plenty of PowerPoint slide packs about the new teams and the processes they would use, but the framework as a whole was not clear. In fact, some people who were supposed to benefit from this new way of working saw the change as a threat. The picture helped staff see in some detail what the future held for them. Through the facilitated dialogue, they explored the impact of the new tools and methodologies they would be given to use and the new information they would have access to. The picture sparked a conversation about how people would relate to each other in different ways. Because the discussion elicited imagined details about the future, it had a grounded quality that led participants to begin to own and desire the changes.

3. Make It Rich. Once the architecture of the picture has been decided, the facilitator and the graphic designer work together to fill in the details in the new structure. For example, to show that the balance of power needed to shift in favor of one department when dealing with suppliers, the graphic designer included two people on a see-saw. The see-saw tipped in one direction as both people looked at a computer screen showing the details of the supplier’s performance over the previous quarter. The key is to fill the picture with lots of vignettes and mini-stories that people can refer to when using the picture as a catalyst for group discussion.The picture may go through one or two iterations, as the leadership team gives its input on the details and the image takes shape.
4. Design the “Cascade” Process and Facilitators’ Guidelines. When the image is completed, it is important to plan the process for using it throughout the organization – the “cascade process” – and to develop facilitators’ guidelines. One way to use the illustration with groups is to lead a conversation by structuring a story around the picture. Another approach is to simply give an overview of the image and then look at specific areas of detail to bring out the most important messages. Classic facilitation questions include:
   • What do you imagine these people are saying to each other?
   • Which theme in this picture is most interesting/threatening/enticing/challenging/appealing to you?
   • Who would you most like to be in the picture?
   • If you could do one thing in this picture, what would it be?

   With an engaging image and a facilitator armed with some well-chosen questions, it is not too difficult to encourage some searching dialogue around core organizational issues.

5. Train Facilitators and Plan a Pilot. We have found it remarkably easy for experienced in-house facilitators and seasoned managers to use the Learning Picture to enable highly valuable conversations. The process is often given a boost if the leadership team facilitates some or all of the sessions; doing so demonstrates their own commitment to the conversation about the future.
6. Roll Out the Learning Picture and Feedback. It is important to build a process into the facilitated sessions through which employees can provide feedback to the leadership team on important aspects of the change. Leaders should approach the roll-out with the spirit of “engage and shape” rather than “tell and sell.” This tactic is particularly important when the desired future represents something of a transformation from the current state.

A Shared Mindset

The Learning Picture is one tool that leaders can use to engage employees in bringing about a desired future for their organizations. If employees have what Dave Ulrich calls a “shared mindset” about the future, then they will be more likely to realize that future. If a picture says a thousand words, then it can certainly help to create the dialogue that leads to a shared mindset. In our experience, a good picture is worth a thousand PowerPoint slides. Just ask Steven Spielberg.

Robert Bolton is associate partner at Atos Consulting, UK. He specializes in creating high performance organizations by finding, designing, and leveraging powerful connections in people processes. He can be contacted at Robert. Bolton@atosorigin.com.

The post Picture This: Using Learning Pictures to Create Shared Mindset appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

We’ll use paper and pencil (the only items you’ll have to pay for, assuming you own a fairly up-to-date computer) to sketch out the initial model, a simulator called SimPack to code the model, a compiler called gcc to compile the model into an executable program, gnuplot for the graphics, and Dia for producing stock and flow diagrams and other documentation (see “Shoestring Resources”).

The Process, Briefly

Let’s start with model building. I still find paper and pencil the best way to get started — it’s easy to use, there is no syntax checking to constrain creativity, and editing is quick and satisfying — erase small mistakes or, for bigger changes, ball up the paper and throw it in the recycling bin.

Once you have sketched a model, it’s time to convert it into something the computer can understand. While it’s not too hard to write a basic system dynamics simulator from scratch, SimPack, a collection of simulation programs produced by Paul Fishwick at the University of Florida, makes life easier.

SimPack provides two system dynamics simulator programs that you’ll find in the constraint/differential/integrate subdirectory of SimPack: conte.c for Euler integration and contrk.c for Runge-Kutta integration. You’ll need to enter your model equations as statements in the C programming language.

Once you’ve coded the model in C, you’ll need to compile it to turn the C program into an executable program for your computer. If you’re running on Linux or Mac OS X, you probably have ready access to the compiler gcc. If you’re running Windows, Cygwin offers a free environment that includes gcc and other tools you might use.

After you compile and run the program, you’ll get a file full of numbers, representing the value of each variable of interest at each point of simulated time. Gnuplot can graph that data.

What’s left? Perhaps you want to communicate your thinking about the relationship between stocks and flows in the system to others. Use Dia to create traditional or creative stock and flow diagrams. Both Dia and gnuplot can produce results suitable for casual viewing on the screen, incorporation into a Web site, or publication in a report or journal.

Taking the Next Step

If you haven’t programmed much, you may be a bit overwhelmed. Move forward in small steps. Start by installing and exploring gnuplot and Dia; you’ll likely find many uses for them, including plotting data and drawing diagrams.

Then install Cygwin, if you’re on Windows. While it can be a massive download, all you really need is the basic installation plus gcc. You’ll probably want the man (manual) pages, too.

Even if you decide you prefer to use a commercial simulator, you might find that some of these tools can augment your normal processes. For example, I’ve used gnuplot to produce publication-quality graphics from data generated using a commercial simulator.

Who knows? You might enjoy systems thinking on a shoestring!

Bill Harris (bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com) is principal and founder of Facilitated Systems, a company dedicated to helping organizations address complex problems, work more productively in meetings and groups, and learn more effectively from experience.

this is a continuation…

Making It Concrete

The Model. To illustrate, I’ll carry a simple model about the spread of infection through a population through the entire process. If you need more information, refer to “Shoestring Resources” in the main article.

The SI model is a simple model of disease. It divides a population into two groups: Susceptible (S) and Infected (I) people (thus the SI moniker). There’s only one flow, from S to I. The number of susceptibles becoming infected per day, ipd, is the product of the number of susceptible people S, the number of contacts a susceptible person has per day c, the probability of any one contact being with an infectious person, and the probability of getting infected from contact with an infected person p:

ipd = S * c * (I / (S + I)) * p

For more information, see chapter 9 of John Sterman’s Business Dynamics (McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2000).

To create the simulation program, open the SimPack file conte.c in a text editor (e.g., Notepad; I use GNU Emacs) and save it as si.c in a convenient directory. Then set the number of initial susceptibles S to 9999, the number of initial infecteds I to 1, the probability of getting infected from one contact p to 10% (0.1), and the number of contacts per day c to 4 by editing the initialization function init_conditions in si.c:

init_conditions() { out[1] = 9999.0; /* Susceptibles */ out[2] = 1.0; /* Infecteds */ p = 0.1; c = 4.0 time = 0.0; delta_time = 0.125; } Note that we don’t refer to S and I by those names; rather, we use elements of the array in and out to represent values of stocks. out[1] holds S, the number of susceptible people just calculated by the model, while in[1] holds the value of S to be used at the start of the next iteration. The function init_conditions also sets the initial time to 0 and the simulation time increment (often referred to as DT in system dynamics models) to 0.125.

We need one more SimPack function to calculate the results:

state() { /* Calculate flows */ ipd = out[1] * c * (out[2] / (out[1] + out[2])) * p; /* Update stocks */ /* Susceptibles */ in[1] = 0.0 – ipd; /* Infecteds */ in[2] = ipd – 0.0; }

We have a bit of housekeeping to attend to, as well; we’ll need this declaration at the start of the program:

double d, c, ipd;

In the function main, we’ll set the program to run when time (in days) is less than 50.0, and we’ll add a statement to print out all the results. To speed experimentation, I print all the stocks and flows and let gnuplot select the values to plot:

printf( “%f %f %f %f n”,time, out[1], out[2], ipd);

If you’re not a C programmer, some of this may look like gobbledygook; you can just try it, or you can read some of the “Shoestring Resources.”

Compile this program by typing two simple commands in a Cygwin command shell window:

gcc –o si.exe si.c ./si.exe > si.dat

The first line compiles the program si.c, creating si.exe, and the second runs si.exe, putting its results in the file si.dat. Si.dat has four columns: the time, S, I, and ipd. You can look at si.dat with your favorite text editor to see the results. If you’ve made it this far, pat yourself on the back; you’ve created a system dynamics model!

Plotting the Output

Few of us are satisfied looking at such a long list of numbers. Start gnuplot, and enter the command

cd “/Documents and Settings/My Documents/My Name/”

if that’s where you put your program. Then the command

plot “si.dat” using 1:2

will plot the number of susceptible people over time.

plot “si.dat” using 1:3

will plot the number of infectious people over time.

plot “si.dat” using 2:4

will create a phase plot showing the number of people getting sick per day for different values of the susceptible population. In each case, the numbers in the plot statement refer to columns in the data file you wrote when you ran si.exe.

Gnuplot can plot multiple graphs on the same sheet and can format the output for the screen or publication.

Making Life Simpler and More Powerful

As you advance, you’ll likely need a table function to represent nonlinearities. With basic C programming skills, it isn’t hard to create. You might also want to be able to give your model new parameter values without recompiling the program; the getopt C library function can help. If you want to reduce the typing required for this work, check out gnuplot mode for the Emacs text editor in the “Shoestring Resources” section of the main article.

Stock and Flow Diagrams. Those of us accustomed to using commercial simulators expect to see computer-generated stock and flow diagrams. We’ll use Dia. While you can draw straightforward stock and flow diagrams easily with Dia, you can also exercise a bit of creativity, using a symbol for stocks that suggests the type of object being accumulated and a symbol for flows that matches the symbol for stocks.

Now that you’ve seen that you can do system dynamics on a shoestring, remember all the good practices you’ve learned elsewhere. Happy modeling!

Bill Harris (bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com) is principal and founder of Facilitated Systems, a company dedicated to helping organizations address complex problems, work more productively in meetings and groups, and learn more effectively from experience.

The post System Dynamics on a Shoestring appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

In the face of day-to-day pressures, groups often leap to solutions after only a modest amount of brainstorming. A systemic approach, however, provides a structured problem-solving process for digging deeper into our most vexing problems.

To get a sense for how systems thinking can be used for problem identification, problem solving, and solution testing, we have outlined a six-step process. To use this process on a problem in your workplace, try the worksheet on page 9.

1. Tell the Story

The starting point for a systems thinking analysis is to get your head above water enough to start thinking about the problem instead of just acting on it. An effective way to do this is to gather together all of the important players in the situation and have each one describe the problem from his or her point of view.

At Bijou Bottling Company, the problem was usually a customer complaint: “Where were the 40 cases of 2-litre Baseball tie-in product that were ordered last week?!” Somehow Bijou would get the goods there on time, whatever it took—including air shipping heavy soda in glass bottles at enormous costs. But this crisis management led to a culture where people built their careers on coming in at the 11th hour and turning around a customer complaint.

2. Draw “Behavior Over Time” Graphs

In the storytelling stage, most of the energy is focused on the pressures of the current moment. When we move to “Behavior Over Time” (BOT) graphs, however, we begin to connect the present to the past and move from seeing events to recognizing patterns over time.

Draw only one variable per graph on a Post-it note so it can be easily moved around in the steps that follow. The time frame should span from past up to the present—but it can also include future projections (see “Bijou Over Time”).

3. Create a Focusing Statement

At this point, you want to create a statement that will help channel energy during the rest of the process. This statement may involve a picture of what people want, or a question about why certain problems are occurring. At Bijou, for example, the focusing statement was: “We’re pretty good at solving each problem as it arises. But why are these problems recurring with greater frequency and intensity? What is causing them?”

BIJOU OVER TIME

At Bijou, crisis management efforts had increased over time, while the effectiveness of the production/distribution system had decreased.

4. Identify the Structure

You now want to describe the systemic structures that are creating the behavior patterns you identified. The systems archetypes are an easy way to begin building a theory of why and how things are happening (see “Systems Archetypes at a Glance,” V22N6, August 2011).

Begin by reviewing the story, graphs, and focusing statement to see if they follow the storyline of an archetype. If so, draw the loop diagram for that archetype, place the Post-its of the variables in the diagram, and move them around on a flip chart until you have a diagram that seems to capture what is going on.

The group at Bijou decided that their problem matched the “Shifting the Burden” storyline, in which a problem is “solved” by applying a short-term solution that takes attention away from more fundamental improvements. They identified a balancing loop that described how customer problems were solved with heroic “11th-Hour” efforts (the symptomatic solution) at the expense of improvement and redesign of the production/distribution system (the fundamental solution). As people “learned” over time that heroism is rewarded, their willingness and ability to address system-wide problems decreased (see “Shifting the Burden to Heroism”).

SHIFTING THE BURDEN TO HEROISM

At Bijou, customer problems were solved with heroic “11th-Hour” efforts (B1) rather than with improvements in the production/distribution system (B2). Over time, people at Bijou “learned” that heroism is rewarded, which reduced their willingness and ability to address system-wide problems and increased the company’s dependence on heroic efforts (R3). One negative side-effect of Bijou’s “heroism” attitude was that customers were taking problem situations and escalating them to crises in order to get the company’s attention (B4).

5. Going Deeper into the Issues

Once you have a reasonably good theory of what is happening, it is time to take a deeper look at the underlying issues in order to move from understanding to action. There are four areas you should clarify:

• Purpose of the System. Ask yourself, “In the larger context, what do we really want here?”
• Mental Models. Begin the exploration of mental models by adding “thought bubbles” to those links in the diagram that represent choices being made (see “Mental Models and Systems Thinking: Going Deeper into Systemic Issues,” V23N5, June/July 2012).
• The Larger System. Add links and loops to enrich the story and connect the relationships to the larger system.
• Personal Role. Acknowledge and clarify your own role in the situation.

For example, when the people at Bijou looked at the larger system, they wondered what role their customers played in the system. They theorized that customers were taking problem situations and escalating them into crises in order to get the company’s attention (B4).

6. Plan an Intervention

When planning an intervention, use your knowledge of the system to design a solution that will structurally change it to produce the results you want. This might take the form of adding a new link or loop that will produce desirable behavior, breaking a link or loop that produces undesirable behavior, or a combination of the two. The most powerful interventions often involve changing the thinking of the people involved in the system.

At Bijou, the key to change was realizing that the problems were largely self-inflicted. They realized that they had to make progress on production/distribution system improvements while still doing enough fire-fighting to keep things afloat. In the longer term, they would need to change the reward systems that promoted heroic behavior. They also recognized the need to sustain the improvement efforts even when the pressure came off—otherwise the problems would be back again soon.

Part of a Cycle

Even as systems thinkers, it is easy to fall back into a linear process. But learning is a cycle—not a once-through process with a beginning and an end. Once you have designed and tested an intervention, it is time to shift into the active side of the learning cycle. This process includes taking action, seeing the results, and then coming back to examine the outcomes from a systemic perspective.

Michael Goodman is an internationally recognized speaker, author, and practitioner in the fields of systems thinking, organizational learning and change, and leadership.

Richard Karash is a founding trustee of the Society for Organizational Learning, a founding member of the SoL Coaching Community of Practice, and a co-creator of “Coaching from a Systems Perspective.”

Editorial support for this article was provided by Colleen Lannon.

The post Six Steps to Thinking Systemically appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The plan won state funding, and a new executive director supported by a multi-sector board began steering implementation. Service providers who had previously worked independently and competed for foundation and public monies came together in new ways. One dramatic example was that they all voted unanimously to reallocate HUD funding from one service provider’s transitional housing program to a permanent supportive housing program run by another provider. Jennifer Schrand, who chaired the planning process and is currently Manager of Outreach and Development for Legal Services of South Central Michigan, observed, “I learned the difference between changing a particular system and leading systemic change.”

Calhoun County has done a remarkable job of securing permanent housing for the homeless, especially in the face of the economic downturn. For example, in the plan’s first three years of operation from 2007-2009, homelessness decreased by 13% (from 1,658 to 1,437), and eviction rates declined by 3%, despite a 70% increase in unemployment and 15% increase in bankruptcy filings. Readers can follow the ongoing progress of the initiative at the Coordinating Council of Calhoun County website.

Why was this intervention so successful when many other attempts to improve the quality of people’s lives fall short? For example, urban renewal programs of the 1960s were backed by good intentions and significant funding, yet they failed to produce the changes envisioned for them. Moreover, the programs often made living conditions worse – leading to outcomes such as abandoned public housing projects and increased unemployment that resulted from what appeared to be successful job training programs (see Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics, 1969).

Stories of well-intentioned yet counterproductive solutions abound, as we learn that food aid can lead to increased starvation by undermining local agriculture, and drug busts can cause a rise in drug-related crime by reducing the availability and increasing the price of the diminished street supply. In other cases, short-term successes frequently fail to be sustained, and the problem mysteriously reappears. We see this dynamic when civic leaders invest in programs to reduce urban youth crime only to have the crime rate subsequently rise, or when international donors fund the drilling of wells in African villages to improve access to potable water, with the result that the wells eventually break down and villagers are unable to fix them.

By applying a systems thinking-based approach, the project to end homelessness managed to overcome the pitfalls of these other initiatives. The partners combined two significant interventions:

1. a proactive community development effort that engaged leaders in various sectors along with homeless people themselves, and
2. a systems diagnosis that enabled all stakeholders to agree on a shared picture of why homelessness persists and where the leverage exists in ending it.

In other words, the approach combined more conventional processes that facilitate acting systemically with tools to help the stakeholders transcend their immediate self-interests by thinking systemically as well.

Likewise, a comprehensive initiative to improve food and fitness – and in the process address childhood obesity – illustrates how the application of systems thinking can help organizations make better decisions about how to use their limited resources for highest sustainable impact (much of the first part of this article was adapted from David Peter Stroh, “Leveraging Grant-Making: Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Social Systems,” Foundation Review, Vol. 1, No. 3).

The Non-Obvious Nature of Complex Systems

Lewis Thomas, the award-winning medical essayist, observed, “When you are confronted by any complex social system… with things about it that you’re dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This is one of the sore discouragements of our time” (The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1979). The stories above about failed interventions epitomize this poignant insight. They share other specific characteristics:

• The solutions that were implemented seemed obvious at the time and in fact often helped achieve the desired results in the short term. For example, it is natural to provide shelter, even temporary, for people who are homeless.
• In the long term, the intervention neutralized short-term gains or even made things worse. For example, the temporary shelters provided by Calhoun County led to the ironic consequence of reducing the visibility of its homeless population, which diminished community pressure to solve the problem permanently.
• The negative consequences of these solutions were unintentional; everyone did the best they could with what they knew at the time.
• When the problem recurs, people fail to see their responsibility for the recurrence and blame others for the failure.

How can the interactions over time among elements in a complex system transform the best of intentions into such disappointing results? The reason lies in part in our tendency to apply linear thinking to complex, nonlinear problems. Systems and linear thinking differ in several important respects, as shown in “Distinguishing Linear Thinking from Systems Thinking.”

For instance, a linear approach to starvation might lead donors to assume that sending food aid solves the problem. However, thinking about it in a systemic way would raise concerns about such unintended consequences as depressed local food prices that deter local agricultural development and leave a country even more vulnerable to food shortages in the future. From a systemic view, temporary food aid only exacerbates the problem in the long run unless it is coupled with supports for local agriculture.

Systems vs. Linear Thinking

Because the problems addressed by many organizations are exceedingly complex, one step they can take to increase the social return on their investments is to think systemically (vs. linearly). Implementing a systems approach involves the following process:

1. Building a strong foundation for change by engaging multiple stakeholders to identify an initial vision and picture of current reality
2. Engaging stakeholders to explain their often competing views of why a chronic, complex problem persists despite people’s best efforts to solve it
3. Integrating the diverse perspectives into a map that provides a more complete picture of the system and root causes of the problem
4. Supporting people to see how their well-intended efforts to solve the problem often make the problem worse
5. Committing to a compelling vision of the future and supportive strategies that can lead to sustainable, system-wide change

Based on the insight that non-obvious system dynamics often seduce us into doing what is expedient but ultimately ineffective, the Food and Fitness (F&F) initiative of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) followed these steps in taking a comprehensive systems approach to planning, implementing, and evaluating the program. Initial planning began in 2004, and the first work with systems thinking in the field started in 2007. Implementation continues today in nine communities throughout the U. S.

F&F began as a response to staff and board member concerns about the rising rate of childhood obesity and early onset of related diseases such as type 2 diabetes. The WKKF program officers who initially led F&F, Linda Jo Doctor and Gail Imig, knew that many well-intentioned programs had attempted to address childhood obesity by focusing on nutrition, education, or exercise. Some targeted policy change, whereas others focused on individual behavior, but data clearly showed undesirable outcomes continuing, especially among children from poor families.

WKKF had long supported developing a healthy, safe food supply and increasing consumption of good food. Because the issue was highly complex and prior efforts to address it had been unsuccessful, the program officers determined that a systemic approach would be essential to achieving long-term goals. They believed that applying this kind of process to F&F would increase the likelihood of engaging a diverse group of people and organizations, fostering collaboration and finding innovative strategies to change the underlying systems, and thereby creating and sustaining the healthy results everyone seeks for children and families.

Applying Systems Thinking to Program Planning

Of the three major programming functions – planning, implementation, and evaluation – systems thinking can play an especially important role in improving planning. Here are suggestions for how to integrate these steps into the program planning process.

Step 1: Build a Foundation for Change

Building a strong foundation for systemic change involves engaging diverse stakeholders in the planning stage. This is a cornerstone of the F&F initiative. WKKF developed its knowledge base by bringing together researchers and theorists from around the country in fields such as public health, nutrition, exercise physiology, education, behavior change, child development, social change, and social marketing. The foundation also assembled a group of community thought leaders for a conversation about the current realities in their communities, as well as their visions for communities that would support the health of vulnerable children and families. In addition, WKKF engaged with other foundations throughout the U. S. in conversations about their collective thinking on childhood obesity and the roles foundations might play. From all of this outreach, a collective vision for the initiative began to emerge—not as a reaction to the immediate circumstances, but from an enriched understanding of current realities, as well as deeply shared aspirations for the future:

We envision vibrant communities where everyone – especially the most vulnerable children – has equitable access to affordable, healthy, locally grown food, and safe and inviting places for physical activity and play.

Step 2: Engage Stakeholders to Explain Often Competing Views

Building on the results of Step 1 above, systems mapping is one tool to help stakeholders see how their efforts are connected and where their views differ. This tool extends the more familiar approaches of sociograms or network maps to show not only who is related to whom, but also how their different assessments of what is important interact.

F&F’s conversation among community thought leaders was structured using the systems thinking iceberg model. Examples of questions included, “What is happening now regarding the health and fitness of children in your communities that has been capturing your attention?” “What are some patterns related to health and fitness of children that you’re noticing?” “What policies, community or societal structures, and systems in your communities do you believe are creating the patterns and events you’ve been noticing?” “What beliefs and assumptions that people hold are getting in the way of children’s health and fitness?” This conversation ended with the question, “What is the future for supporting the health of children and their parents that you truly care about creating in your community?”

Initially, each participant’s comments reflected his or her own work and the competition for resources that typically accompanies community engagement. Some believed the lack of mandated daily physical education caused childhood obesity. Others faulted school lunches. Some hoped parents would prepare more meals at home rather than eating out. Several blamed the rise of fast-food establishments. In the ensuing conversation, participants began to consider one another’s thinking. They came to realize that no single explanation, including their own, could fully explain the health outcomes they saw. The conversation revealed different perspectives and experiences but also began aligning participants around common beliefs and a deeper, broader understanding of the issue.

Step 3: Integrate Diverse Perspectives

Systems maps integrate diverse perspectives into a picture of the system and provide an understanding of a problem’s root causes. Participants in F&F came to see that the obesity epidemic in children was the result of national, state, and local systems failing to support healthy living, rather than a consequence of accumulated individual behaviors. They began to recognize the interrelationships among systems such as the food system, the quality of food in schools and neighborhoods, the natural and built environment and its role in supporting active living, safety, and public policy such as zoning. They also started to understand how individual organizations’ good intentions and actions could actually undermine one another’s efforts. These conversations paved the way for collaboratively creating strategies and tactics in later phases of the work.

Step 4: Support Responsibility for Unintended Consequences

One characteristic of social systems is that people often unintentionally contribute to the very problems they want to solve. Systems thinking enabled communities working in the F&F initiative to uncover potential unintended consequences of their efforts.

For example, marketing the concept of eating locally grown food without developing a food system that can provide it can lead to increased prices for that food, putting it out of reach for schools, children, and families in low-income communities and thus decreasing the consumption of good food among that population. Pushing for policies to allow open space to be used for community gardens could have the unintended consequence of reducing access to outdoor areas for children to play and be active.

If people understand how they contribute to a problem, they have more control over solving it. Raising awareness of responsibility without invoking blame and defensiveness takes skill – yet it is well worth the effort.

Step 5: Commit to a Compelling Vision and Develop Strategies
Once a foundation for change has been developed and the collective understanding of current reality has deepened, the last planning step is to affirm a compelling vision of the future and design strategies that can lead to sustainable, system-wide change. This step entails

1. committing to a compelling vision,
2. developing and articulating a theory of change,
3. linking investments to an integrated theory of change, and
4. planning for a funding stream over time that mirrors and facilitates a natural pattern of exponential growth (for details about each of these processes, see David Peter Stroh and Kathleen Zurcher, “Leveraging Grant-Making—Part 2: Aligning Programmatic Approaches with Complex System Dynamics,” Foundation Review, Vol. 1, No.4).

The systems approach to this work resulted in unanticipated positive consequences. Developing relationships, engaging in high-quality conversations, and committing to a common vision during the planning phase produced immediate results in many of the communities. In Northeast Iowa, Luther College, the public school district in Decorah, and the city council created a proposed community recreation plan under which Luther College would grant a no-cost lease on 50 acres of land for a citywide sports center and would raise the money to build an indoor aquatic center; the city would build soccer and tennis courts; and the school district would raise money for maintenance. Documenting these results during each phase of work is critical to maintaining momentum and funding for long-term system change.

A Pause on the Quick Fix

Our continued work in applying systems thinking to social change in such areas as homelessness, early childhood development, K-12 education, and public health affirms the importance of integrating approaches for acting and thinking systemically. Many people have become familiar with tools such as stakeholder mapping and community building, and methodologies for getting the whole system in the room to bring together the range of interests and resources vital to social change. These are positive steps toward overcoming the pitfalls of the failed interventions referenced at the beginning of the article.

However, unless we drastically shift the way we think, bringing diverse stakeholders together all too often fails to surface or reconcile the differences between people’s espoused (and sincere) commitment to serving the most vulnerable members of society and the equally if not more powerful competing commitment to optimizing their individual contributions and maintaining their current practices. For example, shelter directors want to end homelessness, but they actually get paid according to the number of beds they fill each night. Donors want to end homelessness, but their benefactors get more immediate satisfaction from housing people temporarily. Service providers who specialize in helping the homeless may find themselves competing for funds that might otherwise be allocated toward prevention.

As one nonprofit noted, the greatest challenge in creating social change can be mustering the courage to ask different kinds of questions, such as, “What is our organization willing to give up in order for the system as a whole to succeed?” Thinking systemically helps people answer that question in a way that serves their higher intentions. It does so by enabling them to see the differences between the short and long-term impacts of their actions, and the unintended consequences of their actions, on not only other stakeholders but also themselves. The result might be that one shelter director decides to close his facility, while another reinvents her organization to focus on helping the homeless build bridges toward the safe, permanent, affordable, and supportive housing they ultimately need to heal. The net outcome is that people act in service of the whole because it naturally follows their thinking about how the whole behaves.

Ann Mansfield, co-director of the F&F program in Northeast Iowa, summarized the benefit of using systems thinking: “The tools helped us put a pause on the quick fix.” Systems thinking provides frameworks and tools that can enhance organizations’ efforts to achieve lasting systems change results by making a few key coordinated changes over time. By following the five-step change process for achieving sustainable, system-wide improvement as spelled out in this article, we can increase the chances that our interventions will have the results we fervently desire.

David Peter Stroh, Master’s Degree, City Planning, was a founding partner of Innovation Associates. He is currently a principal with Bridgeway Partners, an organizational consulting firm dedicated to supporting social change through the application of organizational learning disciplines. dstroh@bridgewaypartners.com

Kathleen A. Zurcher, PhD, Educational Psychology, partners with communities and organizations to achieve their desired future by applying and building capabilities in organizational learning and systems thinking. In 2008 she retired from WKKF. She was previously a senior administrator for Family Medicine, and a faculty member in the University of Minnesota’s extension service and at Lehigh University. kzurcher33@gmail.com

The post Acting and Thinking Systemically appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The World Café is an innovative approach to large-group dialogue that has been widely adopted around the world. In this process, groups—often numbering in the hundreds of people—participate together in evolving rounds of dialogue at small café- style tables while at the same time remaining part of a single, larger, connected conversation. Participants record key insights in words and pictures on paper tablecloths. Intimate conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into questions or issues that are important in their life, work, or community. As the network of connections increases, knowledge sharing grows. The collective wisdom of the group becomes more accessible, and innovative possibilities for action emerge.

Sounds simple? It is, and yet there is a depth of living systems theory and experience that underpins the successful operation of Café processes and influences what emerges from their use. This philosophical framework is woven throughout the book and is what distinguishes the World Café from many other conversational approaches.

Beginnings

In an early chapter, co-author David Isaacs relates the story of the origins of the World Café. On a rainy day in January 1995, a group gathered at a home in San Francisco as part of an ongoing session to explore a particular question. To create a welcoming environment, the organizers hurriedly brought out T. V. tables, festooning each with a large sheet of paper, crayons, and a small vase of flowers.

When people arrived, they sat in informal groups around the tables and immediately started talking about the question they had been addressing the day before. As people traveled from table to table to share ideas—something that one of the participants had suggested—Juanita and David noticed a palpable energy in the room that they had never experienced before. Later, they joined with others to reflect on the conditions that led people to engage with each other so spontaneously, naturally, and in such depth in that setting.

In their subsequent research with Café hosts and participants around the world, Juanita and her colleagues have discovered a set of principles that underpin the practice of a successful World Café:

1. Set the Context
2. Create Hospitable Space
3. Explore Questions That Matter
4. Encourage Everyone’s Participation
5. Cross-pollinate and Connect Diverse Perspectives
6. Listen Together for Insights, Patterns, and Deeper Questions
7. Harvest and Share Collective Discoveries.

Much of the book is devoted to exploring the precise meaning and implication of these principles. Each chapter begins with a quotation, an illustration, and a question. These are followed by personal stories of Cafés in action, guidelines, Juanita’s perspectives, and questions for reflection.

For example, “Connecting the Parts and the Whole: The Financial Planning Association” illustrates the spirit reflected in the case studies and describes just one of the creative ways in which groups have started to apply the principles. In this section, Kim Porto and Sean Walters describe an innovation they have invented for harvesting and sharing individual and collective discoveries from the Café process: what they call the Gallery Walk. During a Café, facilitators collect and post emerging questions; participants then walk from question to question, adding their comments and insights on sticky notes. According to Kim and Sean, “One of the aspects we think makes this particular approach to whole-group synthesis so engaging and useful is that people have control over what they contribute . . . each person gets the opportunity (and has the responsibility) to contribute exactly what is most meaningful to him or her, and put it exactly where he or she feels it best fits in the overall synthesis.”

At the Core

This case study extends some of the ideas put forth in the book’s Foreword, written by Margaret Wheatley. Meg says, “The World Café process reawakens our deep species memory of two fundamental beliefs about human life. First, we humans want to talk together about things that matter to us. In fact this is what gives satisfaction and meaning to life. Second, as we talk together, we are able to access a greater wisdom that is found only in the collective.”

Thus, the essence of this book is the observation that whenever people converse and treat each other well in the course of addressing questions that matter, they are likely to achieve constructive outcomes. If you are familiar with the work of Humberto Maturana, you will not be surprised to learn that the authors reference it in several places. Juanita speaks eloquently about coming to recognize, through Maturana’s work, that Conversation is our human way of creating and sustaining—or transforming —the realities in which we live.” Looking through this lens, she became aware of what key thinkers were saying about what happens when people feel secure and respected for expressing what they think is important. Juanita also came to understand that conversation is at the center of a wide range of fields that are integral to our everyday lives, such as strategy, information technology, conflict resolution, and global affairs.

One of the main components of conversation is listening. The book includes numerous references to how Café processes promote attentive listening—and how this process affects both speaker and hearers. A poignant comment by Lloyd Fell illustrates. When he was present at his first Café, he felt “a tremendous wave of energy …right across the room. It was as if something had suddenly been unleashed by the invitation to speak freely in the more intimate setting of the café tables.” Lloyd also noted his feeling of being heard. “I am never the first to enter into a group conversation, but I found myself listening with interest and beginning to feel that I wanted to join in. After a time I did and the respect with which my words were treated had a warmth and friendliness about it that I have never experienced at a meeting.”

The Café process also highlights the importance of questioning. Questions are the trigger for inclusive, respectful, purposeful, and animated conversing. The book is rife with examples of powerful questions, such as “What could a good school also be?” or Hewlett-Packard’s famous “How can we be the best industrial research lab for (instead of in) the world?” One of the key lessons from the Café is that genuine questions, questions to which we don’t know the answers, release energy in a way that focusing on “problems” or “answers” never could.

Creating Life-Affirming Futures

In addition to providing guidelines for action in our organizations and groups, this book’s most important contribution may lie in the insights it offers on how we may begin to address some of the global issues that have come into our consciousness in recent years. With regard to this big picture, the authors state, “Our deeper intention in a Café conversation is for people to experience themselves being an integral part of a living web/network of relational thinking and of experiencing conversation itself as a co-evolutionary force for accessing co-intelligence on behalf of life-affirming futures and the conscious evolution of social systems.” Could the Café process contribute by helping people everywhere see themselves as being interconnected cells in a complex organism, with all the duties and rights of an individual as well as the concomitant responsibilities for the health of the greater whole?

In his Afterword, Peter Senge shares that the power and potential of the “collective creativity” that arises in World Café conversations is seldom realized in most of our daily conversations—yet! He characterizes the ways in which we currently express our needs as “being too small, too self centered, too disconnected from the desires of others.” But using Café and other dialogue processes to expand our global vision and collectively address bigger questions could create a world engaged in conversations on questions that have real heart and meaning for us all—one conversation at a time. The prospects of such a dream coming to life—through the creation of intentional contexts such as Café conversations and other forms of dialogue—are much enhanced by the availability of this book.

Alan Stewart, Ph. D., refers to himself as a “professional conversationalist”—a facilitator of collaborative conversational processes. His report on a public consultation that he hosted for a local council in Australia has drawn wide interest (www.theworldcafe.com/storyconversing.html). Alan has been a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University. He is now promoting what he calls “Qin Tan Conversation,” or “Pure Talk,” in Hong Kong, where he now resides. For more information, go to www.creativestate.biz.

The post On Conversation and Collective Questioning: Theory and Practice of the World Café appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

I remember once trying to choose between two jobs—they both offered growth opportunities, an increased salary, and a chance to step into new territory. After hemming and hawing for a few days, I finally created a pro and con list, so I would know clearly what the two options had to offer.

Did this help? Not really.

In the end, the list did not point out a clear winner—the pros and cons lists were equally long. So I had to just go with my gut, which is often where you end up in these kinds of situations.

So Carson and his colleagues tried to separate them. The twins ended up dying on the operating table. But those surgeries led to more surgeries, which led to more learning, which led to eventual success.

Carson struggled at one point in his career with how to make these decisions. But once he simply asked himself, “What’s the best thing that can happen if I take this action, and then what’s the worst thing that can happen?” And second, he asked himself, “What’s the best thing that can happen if I don’t do anything, and what’s the worst thing that can happen if I don’t do anything?”

We all have had to face grueling decisions. The biggest decisions you might have to make are where to go to college, what jobs to accept, whether to have children, and whether to stay in your marriage or get divorced. Sometimes we have to make major health decisions—do I have them remove this lump, even though it is likely benign? Do I take this medication, when it has so many painful side effects? How involved do I get in my kids’ lives? Do I follow them to that party to see if what they said is true? Do I have my parent move in with me and my family?

These decisions put us out of our comfort zone; they are hard to make. We sometimes drag our feet in making these decisions. We wish we weren’t in this position. Rather than putting a stake in the ground, we’d rather just stay in the safe zone.

I once asked my mother if I should take a new job in the next state. I fully expected her to tell me to stay where I was (safer, less commute, a known quantity). Her advice: “I’d take the job where you’d travel the world.” “Why?” I asked. She responded, “Because it will challenge you. It will put you on your growing edge. It’s more of a risk, and you will therefore learn more and get more out of it.”

That’s the upside of any tough decision—there’s usually some learning you will get out of it. Conflict, or choice, can naturally lead to expansion.

There’s always the easier decisions you have to make too; the ones that have fewer real consequences. My 11year-old son recently had to decide what language to study in 7th grade. After a few days of thinking about it, he said, “I’m going to take Spanish.”

“Okay,” I said, glad he had at least made a decision and it wasn’t going down to the wire. “Why Spanish?” I asked.

“I am going to choose Spanish, because there are more baseball players who speak Spanish.” Spoken like a true 11-year-old who was in the middle of little league and striving to hit them out of the park.

So, to add to the list of how to make a decision: Ask yourself what your long-term vision is, and let that guide you. Even if you don’t end up on the Yankees’ bench someday, it will probably be the right decision all along.

KellieWardman is vice president of the Greater Manchester Family YMCA. She also serves as adjunct faculty in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University. Kellie was publications director of Pegasus Communications. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. Go to her blog at http://kelliewardman.com.

The post A or B? appeared first on The Systems Thinker.