With a total of 300,000 employees, Ford operates in 50 countries around the world. It sells a huge array of products, and offers an equally widespread range of services — from financing to distributing and dealer support.

VENTURING INTO THE BADLANDS

When system and social complexity are high, the organization enters the realm of “the Badlands.”

Like any large organization, it’s also peopled by individuals who come from all walks of life — and who have the different outlooks to prove it. Engineers, accountants, human-resource folks — they all have unique backgrounds and view their work through unique perspectives. Add Ford’s various stakeholders to the mix, and you’ve got even more complexity. There are media stakeholders, shareholders, customers, the families of employees — all of them with different expectations and hopes for the company.

System and Social Complexity: “The Badlands”

Now let’s look even more deeply inside Ford to see what complexity really consists of. If you think about it, the complexity that Ford and other large organizations grapple with comes in two “flavors”: system complexity and social complexity. System complexity derives from the infrastructure of the company — the business model it uses, the way the company organizes its various functions and processes, the selection of products and services it offers. Social complexity comes from the different outlooks of the many people associated with Ford — workers, customers, families, and other stakeholders from every single country and culture that Ford operates in.

Why is it important to distinguish between these two kinds of complexity? The reason is that, if we put them on a basic graph, we get a disturbing picture of the kinds of problems that complexity can cause for an organization (see “Venturing into the Badlands”). We can think of these problems as falling into four categories:

“Tame” Problems. If an organization has low system and social complexity — for example, a mom-and-pop fruit market in a small Midwestern town — it experiences what we can think of as “tame” problems, such as figuring out when to order more inventory.

“Messy” Problems. If a company has low social complexity but high system complexity, it encounters “messy” problems. A good illustration might be the highly competitive network of tool-and-die shops in Michigan. These shops deal with intricate, precisely gauged devices that have to be delivered quickly. However, the workforce consists almost entirely of guys, all of whom root for the Detroit Lions football team — so there’s little social tension.

“Wicked” Problems. If a company has high social complexity but low system complexity, it suffers “wicked” problems. For instance, a newspaper publisher works in a relatively simple system, with clear goals and one product. However, the place is probably staffed with highly creative, culturally diverse employees — with all the accompanying differences in viewpoint and values.

The Winner: “Wicked messes,” or “The Badlands.” When an organization has high system and social complexity — like Ford and other large, globalized companies have — it enters “the Badlands.” Singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen graphically captured that unique region in South Dakota characterized by dangerous temperature swings, ravenous carnivores, and uncertain survival in his song “Badlands.” But the area and the song also represent optimism and possibilities. More vegetation and wildlife inhabit the Badlands than anyplace else in the United States, and Springsteen’s voice and lyrics offer a sense of hope despite the song’s painful and angry chords.

What’s So Bad About the Badlands?

A company that’s operating in the Badlands faces a highly challenging brand of problems. The complexity is so extreme, and the number of interconnections among the various parts of the system so numerous, that the organization can barely control anything. Solutions take time, patience, and profound empathy on the part of everyone involved.

In Ford’s case, a number of especially daunting challenges have arisen recently. For one thing, the Firestone tires tragedy has left the entire Ford community reeling. Ford faces an immense struggle to make sure this kind of fiasco never happens again. The bonds of trust between company and supplier, and between company and customer, will take a long time to rebuild. In addition, Ford and other automotive manufacturers have come under fire not only for safety issues but also for environmental and human-rights concerns.

Clearly, Ford’s business environment keeps getting tougher. The company is held accountable for parts it buys from suppliers and for labor practices in the various parts of the world where it does business. It’s also accountable for resolving baffling patterns — for example, the demand for

All of these challenges come from a single error in thinking: the assumption that human beings can control a complex, living system like a large organization.

SUVs is rising, along with cries for environmentally friendly vehicles. The majority of Ford’s profits come from sales of SUVs; how will the company reconcile these conflicting demands? Ford’s newly launched initiative — to not only offer excellent products and services but to also make the world a better place through environmentally and socially responsible manufacturing — will probably be its toughest effort ever.

But here’s where the big lesson comes in. All of these challenges come from a single error in thinking: the assumption that human beings can control a complex, living system like a large organization. Systems thinker Meg Wheatley compares the complexity of large companies to that of the world. The world, she points out, existed for billions of years before we humans came along, but we have the nerve to think that it needs us to control it! Likewise, what makes us think that we can control a big, complex organization?

Yet attempt to control we do — often with disastrous results.

Our All-Too-Common Controls . . .

We human beings try to control the complexity of our work lives through lots of different means:

System Fixes. When we attempt to manage system complexity, we haul out a jumble of established tools and processes that seem to have worked for companies in the past. For example, we use something we blithely call “strategic planning.” Our assumption is simple: If we just write down the strategy we want to follow, and plan accordingly, everything will turn out the way we want. We even call in consultants to help us clarify our strategy — and pay them big bucks for it. The problem is that this approach to planning has long outlived its usefulness. The world has become a much more complicated place than it was back when organizations like General Motors and the MIT Sloan School of Management first devised this approach to strategy.

We also use financial analysis and reporting models that were probably invented as far back as the 1950s. These models don’t take into account all the real costs associated with doing business — such as social and environmental impacts. Nor do they recognize the value of “soft” assets, such as employee morale and commitment.

In addition, we all keep throwing the phrase “business case” around — “What’s the business case for that new HR program you want to launch?” “What’s the business case for that product modification?” In other words, what returns can we expect from a proposed change of any kind? Again, this focus on returns ignores the bigger picture: the long-term costs and benefits of the change.

Finally, we try to manage system complexity by making things as simple as possible through standardization — no matter how complicated the business is. Standardization is appropriate at times. For example, the Toyota Camry, Ford’s number-one competitor in that class of car, has just seven kinds of fuel pump applications. The Ford Taurus has more than 40! You can imagine how much simpler and cheaper it is to manufacture, sell, and service the Camry pump. But when we carry our fondness for standardization into areas of strategy — unthinkingly accepting methods and models that worked best during a simpler age — we run into trouble.

Social Fixes. Our attempts to manage social complexity get even more prickly. In many large companies, the human-resources department engineers all such efforts. HR of course deals with personnel planning, education and training, labor relations, and so forth. But in numerous companies, it spearheads change programs as well — whether to address work-life balance, professional development, conflict and communications management, or other social workplace issues. Yet as we’ll see, this realm of complexity is probably even more difficult to control than systemic complexity is.

. . . and Their Confounding Consequences

Each of the above “fixes” might gain us some positive results: We have a strategic plan to work with; we have some way of measuring certain aspects of our business; we manage to get a few employees thinking differently about important social issues. However, these improvements often prove only incremental. More important, these fixes also have unintended consequences — many of them profound enough to eclipse any gains they may have earned us.

The Price of System Fixes. As one cost of trying to control system complexity, we end up “micromanaging the metrics,” mainly because it’s the only thing we can do. This micromanaging in turn creates conflicts of interests. For example, when Ford decided to redesign one of its 40 fuel pumps to make it cheaper to build, it unwittingly pitted employees from different functions against each other. Engineering people felt pressured to reduce the design cost of the part, manufacturing staff felt compelled to shave off labor and overhead costs, and the purchasing department felt driven to find cheaper suppliers. Caught up in the crosscurrents of these conflicting objectives, none of these competing parties wanted to approve the change plan unless they got credit for its success. As you can imagine, the plan languished in people’s in-boxes as the various parties jockeyed for position as “the winner.”

Micromanaging the metrics can also create a “Tragedy of the Commons” situation — that archetypal dilemma in which all the parties in a system try to maximize their own gains, only to ruin things for everyone. For instance, at Ford (and probably at many other large companies), there’s only so much money available to support a new product or service idea. People know this, so when they build their annual budgets, they ask for the money they need for the new ideas — plus another 10 percent as a cushion (because they know the budget office would never give them what they originally asked for!). At the end of the year, everyone’s out of funds because they beefed up their budgets too much. And great, innovative ideas end up going unfunded.

The Price of Social Fixes. The biggest consequence of social fixes is probably a “Shifting the Burden” archetypal situation. Upper management, along with HR, tries to address a problem by applying a short-term, “bandage” solution rather than a longer-term, fundamental solution. The side effect of that bandage solution only makes the workforce dependent on management, thus preventing the organization from learning how to identify and implement a fundamental solution.

What does this look like in action? Usually, it takes the form of upper management’s decision to “roll out” a change initiative to address a problem. For instance, employees might be complaining about something — work-life tensions, conflicts over cultural differences, and so forth. Rather than letting people take responsibility for addressing their problems — that is, get involved in coming up with a shared solution — management force-feeds the company a new program (B1 in “Shifting the Burden to Management”). This might reduce complaints for a time, and managers might even capture a few hearts and minds. But these gains won’t stick. Worse, this approach makes employees passive, as they come to depend more and more on management to solve their problems and “take care of them.” The more dependent they become, the less able they are to feel a sense of responsibility and get involved in grappling with their problems (R3 in the diagram).

This “sheep-dip” approach to change — standardized for the masses — completely ignores employees’ true potential for making their own decisions and managing their own issues. For example, consider the difference between a company that legislates rigid work hours and one that trusts its employees to pull an all-nighter when the work demands it—and to head out to spend time with their kids

on a Friday afternoon because the work is in good shape. People can’t learn how to make these kinds of judgments wisely for themselves if their employer treats them like children.

“Sheep dipping” has another consequence as well: Because it makes employees passive, it discourages the fluid transfer of knowledge that occurs when people feel involved in and responsible for their work. Instead of looking to one another, anticipating needs, and collaborating as a team, employees have their eyes on management, waiting to be taken care of. Knowledge remains trapped in individuals’ minds and in separate functions in the organization, and the firm never leverages its true potential.

From Control to Soul

So, if we can’t control complexity, how do we go to work every day with some semblance of our sanity? Should we just give up hoping that our organizations can navigate skillfully enough through the Badlands to survive the competition and maybe even achieve their vision? What are we to do if we can’t control our work, our employees, and our organization? How can we take our organizations to places they’ve never been — scary, dangerous places, but places that also hold out opportunities for unimagined achievement?

The answer lies in one word: soul. “Soul” is a funny word. It means different things to different people, and for some it has a strong spiritual element. But in the context we’re discussing now — organizational health, values, and change — its meaning has to do with entirely new, radical perspectives on work and life.

To cross the Badlands successfully, all of us — from senior executives to middle managers to individual contributors — need to adopt these “soulful” perspectives:

Understand the system; don’t control it. As we saw above, we can’t manage, manipulate, or avoid problems in our organizations without spawning some unintended — and often undesirable — consequences. Understanding the organizational and social systems we live and work in makes us far more able to work within those systems in a healthy, successful way.

Know the relationships in the system. Understanding a system means grasping the nature of the relationships among its parts — whether those parts are business functions, individuals, external forces acting on the organization, etc. By knowing how the parts all influence each other, we can avoid taking actions that ripple through the system in ways that we never intended.

Strengthen human relationships. Success doesn’t come from dead-on metrics or a seemingly bulletproof business model; it comes from one thing only: strong, positive relationships among human beings. When you really think about it, nothing good in the world happens until people get together, talk, understand one another’s perspectives and assumptions, and work together toward a compelling goal or a vision. Even the most brilliant individual working alone can achieve only so much without connecting and collaborating with other people.

Understand others’ perspectives. This can take guts. People’s mental models — their assumptions about how the world works — derive from a complicated process of having experiences, drawing conclusions from those experiences, and then approaching their lives from those premises. Understanding where another person is “coming from” means being able to set aside our own mental models and earn enough of that other person’s trust so that he or she feels comfortable sharing those unique perspectives.

Determine what we stand for. Why do you work, really? Forget the easy answers — “I want to make money” or “I want to buy a nice house.” What lies beneath those easy answers? Around the world, people work for the same handful of profound reasons: They want their lives to have meaning, they want to create something worthwhile and wonderful, they want to see their families thrive in safe surroundings, they want to contribute to their communities, they want to leave this Earth knowing that they made it better. All these reasons define what we stand for. By clarifying what we stand for — that is, knowing in our souls why we go to work every day — we learn that we all are striving for similar and important things. That realization alone can build community and commitment a lot faster than any “rolled-out” management initiative can.

Determine our trust and our trustworthiness. Strong relationships stem from bonds of trust between people. To trust others, we have to assume the best in them — until and unless they prove themselves otherwise. But equally important, we also need to ask ourselves how trustworthy we are. We must realize that others are looking to us to prove our trustworthiness as well. By carefully and slowly building mutual trust, we create a network of robust relationships that will support us as we move forward together.

Be humble, courageous, and vulnerable. Understanding ourselves and others in ways that strengthen our relationships takes enormous courage — and a major dose of humility. It also takes a willingness to say “I don’t know” at times — something that many companies certainly don’t encourage. And finally, it takes a willingness to make ourselves vulnerable — to explain to others why we think and act the way we do, and why we value the things we value.

Find “soul heroes.” We need to keep an eye out for people whom we sense we can learn from — people who live and embody these soulful perspectives. These individuals can be colleagues, family members, friends, customers, or neighbors. If we find someone like this at work — no matter what their position — we must not be afraid to approach them, to talk with them about these questions of values, trust, and soul.

Tools for Your Badlands Backpack

So, to venture into the Badlands, we need soul — whole new ways of looking at our lives and work. But soul alone won’t get us safely through to the other side. We wouldn’t approach the real Badlands without also bringing along a backpack filled with water, food, first-aid materials, and other tools for survival and comfort. Likewise, we shouldn’t tackle the Badlands of organizational complexity without the proper tools.

These five tools are especially crucial:

Systems Thinking Tools.The field of systems thinking provides some powerful devices for understanding the systems in which we live and work, and for communicating our understanding about those systems to the other people who inhabit them. Causal loop diagrams, like the one in “Shifting the Burden to Management,” let us graphically depict our assumptions about how the system works. When we build such a diagram with others, we especially enrich that understanding, because we pull all our isolated perspectives into one shared picture. From there, we can explore possible ways to work with the system to get the results we want. These diagrams also powerfully demonstrate the folly in trying to manhandle a system: When we draw them, we can better see the long-term, undesirable consequences of our attempts to control the system.

Dialogue. The field of dialogue has grown in recent years to include specific approaches to talking with one other. For example, dialogue emphasizes patience in exploring mutual understanding and in arriving at potential solutions to problems. It also encourages us to suspend our judgments about others during verbal exchanges — that is, to temporarily hold our judgments aside in order to grasp others’ reasons for acting or thinking as they do. Dialogue lets a group tap into its collective intelligence — a powerful way of transferring and leveraging knowledge.

Ladder of Inference. This tool offers a potent way to understand why we think and respond to our world as we do. It helps us see how we construct our mental models from our life experiences — and how those mental models can ossify if we don’t keep testing them to see whether they’re still relevant. In the workplace, we all make decisions, say things, and take actions based on our mental models. By using the Ladder of Inference to examine where those models came from, we can revise them as necessary — and reap much more shared understanding with colleagues. (For information about the Ladder of Inference, see The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook published by Currency/ Doubleday).

Scenario Planning. This field has also grown in recent years. Numerous organizations, notably Royal Dutch/Shell, have used scenario planning to remarkable effect. This tool reflects the fact that we can’t control systems. Scenario planning encourages us to instead imagine a broad array of possible futures for our organization or even our entire industry — and to make the best possible arrangements we can to prepare for and benefit from those potential outcomes. This approach thus acknowledges the complexities inherent in any system; after all, there’s no way to easily determine the many different directions a system’s impact may take.

Managing by Means. New methodologies are emerging that can help us assess the true costs of running our businesses — costs to human society, to the environment, and to the business itself. And costs in the short run as well as the long run. We must grapple with these methodologies if we hope to achieve the only long-term business goal that really makes sense: business that doesn’t destroy the very means on which it depends.

Traditional change management methods build things to stick. They do not build things to last and are thus ineffective because well-intentioned people create the strategy, solution, and problem sets based on a narrow set of assumptions. To create a sustainable organization, we must work to understand the complex system dynamics of the environment and experiment with multidimensional strategies. We must also work to understand diverse social dynamics and allow multiple perspectives and behaviors to emerge. Finally, we must trust ourselves, hold true to our core convictions, and have courage, humility, and soul. In these ways, we can navigate through — and even prosper in — the most desolate and challenging of Badlands.

David Berdish is the corporate governance manager at Ford Motor Company. He is leading the development of sustainable business principles that will integrate the “triple bottom line” of economics, environmental, and societal performance and global human-rights processes. He is also supporting the organizational learning efforts at the renovation of the historic Rouge Assembly site.

The post Learning and Leading Through the Badlands appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

At Boeing, a major aerospace company, a team leader and his R&D group recently found themselves in uncharted territory as they faced a new project. They needed to create a leadership infrastructure to bridge the learning that happens in the workplace with more structured classroom learning. The framework would span multiple organizations, missions, locations, and personnel. The temptation to leap into action was hard to resist. But the project team realized that taking the time to develop an implementation strategy would help them to be more effective in the long run. In order to do so in a systematic way, they chose to develop an Operational Strategy Map to guide their efforts.

The Operational Mapping Methodology

Developing a map of strategy isn’t a new idea. Most organizational improvement methodologies (such as total quality management, reengineering, and the balanced scorecard) recommend some form of mapping in order to facilitate understanding of an organization and its processes. All mapping methodologies have benefits as well as limitations. Because maps are necessarily a representation of reality — and not the reality itself — it’s important to choose a framework that captures the essence of the system in a way that helps the organization most effectively navigate through the unfolding strategy.

The Operational Strategy Mapping (OSM) framework synthesizes elements from three disciplines — system dynamics, skilled facilitation, and balanced scorecard—to create a process and product that can enhance the creation and implementation of organizational change efforts (see “Operational Strategy Mapping”). Using OSM, a strategic planning and implementation team clearly articulates what the strategy should accomplish, how it works, and what unintended consequences might result. In the process of developing the map, team members generate understanding of, and commitment to, the overall plan.

System Dynamics. OSM uses system dynamics mapping and its underlying paradigm of the world. System dynamics incorporates two different visual languages: causal loop diagrams and stock and flow maps. In order to quickly get up to speed on the terminology and launch into the mapping process, groups may begin with causal loop diagrams. Causal loops can be extremely useful for eliciting important interdependencies that will impact and be impacted by the strategy.

Because OSM requires exploring questions such as “How does/will it work?” the strategy team will eventually need to build stock and flow maps to generate this “operational” focus. Although doing so may initially require a little more effort than creating causal loops, the value derived from this additional effort of differentiating between conditions and activities that change those conditions will dramatically increase the rigor and quality of any strategy discussions. Using stock and flow maps, groups can look at the factors inherent in the strategy that may contribute to unintended consequences during implementation.

OPERATIONAL STRATEGY MAPPING

The Operational Strategy Mapping (OSM) framework synthesizes elements from three disciplines — system dynamics, skilled facilitation, and balanced scorecard—to create a process and product that can enhance the creation and implementation of organizational change efforts.

The paradigm of system dynamics asks us to move from thinking about our organizations in terms of one-time events and isolated functions to considering them in terms of continuous, dynamic, integrated processes. To implement OSM, a team needs to look at the strategy as something that will unfold over time, with natural ebbs and flows, and will likely require adjusting in terms of the magnitude and timing of different elements. The system dynamics approach also suggests the need to identify forces that might slow or impede implementation. It offers guidance in predicting natural delays in the system; knowing about these delays is vital to generating an effective implementation plan.

Skilled Facilitation. Skilled facilitation, based on the work of Roger Schwarz, provides the framework for the process of building OSMs. It offers tools for assessing if the appropriate stakeholders are involved, how effective the group dynamics are, and how to facilitate conversations around building and testing the usefulness of the map. Because skilled facilitation applies an explicit approach to developing shared mental models (both about the content of the project and the group’s process), it is a natural fit with the system dynamics approach to mapping.

The Balanced Scorecard. The third discipline built into the OSM methodology, Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC), has become popular for helping businesses and public-policy organizations build and revise visual strategic “bubble maps” as part of an ongoing, iterative learning process. The BSC’s four quadrant perspective — Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning — provides a useful guide for ensuring that the strategy map covers the organization’s different facets. (Although not all OSMs cover the four quadrants, groups should be conscious about choosing to eliminate one or more quadrants from the map.) However, the stock and flow language is better able to depict how processes work than “bubble maps” and can serve as the basis for computer simulation at a point in the future if the team finds this additional step helpful.

The steps for building an OSM are the same as those described for the BSC. In their book, The Strategy Focused Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Kaplan and Norton describe strategy management as following four principles:

1. Translate the Strategy to Operational Terms
2. Align the Organization to the Strategy
3. Make Strategy Everyone’s Everyday Job
4. Make Strategy a Continual Process

As you’ll see, the distributed learning team at The Boeing Company followed these steps as they developed and used an OSM.

Building an OSM at Boeing

The Boeing Company is an organization widely distributed across geographies, business segments, and product lines; it also includes several engineering disciplines. The decision to sponsor a leadership initiative in the company reflected an understanding that, although the culture focused primarily on formal learning events, more than 80 percent of learning and leadership development occurred on the job. The “Workplace Leadership Initiative” would integrate formal and informal learning and would support participants in pursuing their individual learning agendas on their own time. In turn, employees would contribute their own content/expertise through a personalized web site and a community space that would be integrated into the leadership program’s learning experience. Putting together the various pieces of the program was a challenging opportunity. The development team decided to create an Operational Strategy Map to help them “mentally simulate” how they might execute the initiative.

Translating the Strategy to Operational Terms. The first phase of developing the OSM was to get background information on the project and develop a “strawman” map of the strategy. Getting background information usually requires phone interviews with a few stakeholders/experts. This interviewing process serves two purposes: (1) Gathering information from throughout the system of interest, and

(2) Generating understanding and commitment from the stakeholders for the process and subsequent map.

For this project, the team leader possessed the knowledge to provide enough input for the initial map.

The team leader was concerned about the following areas of execution: creating the initial workplace leadership system, generating enthusiasm among potential users, and building support among senior managers (who might not be users, but who would likely encourage or discourage the use of the system among their staff). He had several hypotheses about how the system might work, but felt that the OSM process would force him to better articulate those assumptions, integrate the team’s assumptions more effectively, test the accuracy of the combined assumptions, and ultimately communicate them to management.

Based on initial conversations, the group chose to focus the core structure of the map on the system’s end users. In this case, the core structure (often referred to as the spinal cord or main chain of the model) assumes that users can move from being Unaware of the WL (abbreviation for “Workplace Leadership System”) to being Aware of and May Use WL. (See the section labeled “Core Structure” in the diagram “A Virtuous Cycle” on p. 4.) After experiencing the Workplace Leadership System, they might become an Advocate for WL — or they might become Resistant to WL.

The stocks and flows visually represent the movement of people from one state to another. The stocks (boxes) are the accumulation of people (how many in each state at any point in time), and the flows (circles) are the processes that advance people through the various stocks. The initiative would need to carefully manage the movement from Unaware to Aware and then ensure Advocates were generated while simultaneously limiting the flow into Resistant to WL. The team spent hours further defining attributes associated with the stocks: What type of person was in each stock? Is there a better name for the stock? Is there anything missing in the main chain?

After focusing on the stocks, the team was ready to begin thinking through strategic implications by analyzing what might drive each of the flows. They quickly realized that they couldn’t directly affect the stocks — they needed to design policies directed toward the processes that move people from one state to another. The group determined that they could have a direct impact on awareness by having focus groups and other public relations-type events. People would move into the Advocates stock through word-of-mouth; their experience with the WL system would influence the level of Advocates and Resistant folks, because the more positive the experience, the faster the rate of acquiring new Advocates.

As always happens, the team identified weaknesses in the draft map’s assumptions. Foremost among these was the map’s aggregation of the learning initiative’s attributes into a single stock. The team suggested three categories of attributes: Useful Content, Features, and Ease of Use. The discussion around the development of these features was heated. Through it, the team found an appreciation for the level of precision that OSMs bring to what’s often a fuzzy process.

As a result of the conversations to improve the assumptions in the map, the team identified a virtuous cycle they wanted to set in motion. An important element of the Workplace Leadership System is users’ ability to add their own content, wisdom, and expertise—and Advocates would likely contribute the most. The greater the content that the program has to offer, the greater participants’ overall satisfaction will be (the team called this the “Wow!” effect). High levels of satisfaction in turn create more Advocates. A nice loop to get going! The team realized, however, that a limit to growth for this loop would be the ease of use. If it’s not easy to add content, then Advocates probably will not do so, making it difficult to set the cycle into motion.

The team found that the mapping process surfaced a dark side of implementation that they hadn’t consciously discussed before: the buildup of folks resistant to the initiative. At first, the group was dismayed to think about the potential for Resisters to develop in

A VIRTUOUS CYCLE

An important element of the Workplace Leadership System is users’ ability to add their own content, wisdom, and expertise. The greater the content that the program has to offer, the greater participants’ overall satisfaction will be. High levels of satisfaction in turn will create more Advocates.

the organization. But after some discussion, they realized that because they now knew the possibility existed, they could look out for it.

Further, they decided that if budding Resisters were identified early enough and were listened to, two things would happen. First, they would likely have feedback that would improve the overall system. More importantly, they might move over into the stock of Advocates. The team believed that people who cared enough to be Resisters could become strong Advocates — the energy would just be directed differently. The team referred to this as an aikido approach to resistance: Rather than push directly back against critical feedback (the natural tendency of a design team), they would redirect the energy behind the criticism — and apply it to improving the product. The team also strongly believed that the process of listening would generate Advocates.

The group developed a large wall hanging with crisp high-resolution graphics. Over the course of a couple of weeks, they used the map in their meetings and presented it to managers and other stakeholder groups within Boeing. In discussions and presentations, team members were able to walk up to the map, point directly at the area of strategy they were describing, and quickly get everyone’s reactions.

As a result of these meetings, the map was modified slightly — yet the core structure remained the same. The team found they could present the map without the aid of the project consultant. In that sense, they owned the map, its assumptions, and the implications it had for their strategy — it provided a common framework that guided their discussions.

Aligning the Organization to the Strategy. The second step in the process is to align the organization to the strategy. The team did so by using the map to develop a team project plan. They focused on the flows in the map and assigned tasks to different individuals. Although the group could have used sophisticated project planning software, for this effort they imported snapshots of map segments into Excel worksheets and added roles and responsibilities (see “The Project Plan”).

Results from the Initiative

The project is still underway, but the team has already reaped several benefits from developing the OSM. The most significant impact is that the team focused their early effort on a seven-day process to set in motion a virtuous cycle around the project. The goal of this experiment was to learn as quickly as possible about potential Advocates and Resisters. The team tested the initiative’s ease of use, features, and useful content in order to assess the “Wow!” factor, identify the number of individuals in various categories, and analyze the quality of their experience in moving to being an Advocate or a Resister.

As a result of this exploration, the team reconceptualized the project’s web interface. If they hadn’t learned from this experiment with setting a virtuous cycle in motion, they might have wasted a large portion of their 2005 budget in trying to implement a system without thoughtful consideration of Advocates and Resisters.

The team was pleased to find that the map was still valid even after the shift in emphasis. This process confirmed that the level of aggregation was sufficiently useful, that is, it allowed them to examine the implications of their implementation strategy at a high level, without becoming so specific that they needed to modify the map every time they made minor modifications to the actual program.

Making Strategy Everyone’s Everyday Job. Another result of the OSM process was that the team developed a shared language. This terminology improved the quality of conversations, because it made implicit assumptions about the strategy explicit. It created an environment for making

THE PROJECT PLAN

The team developed a project plan by focusing on the flows in the map and assigning tasks to different individuals. They imported snapshots of map segments into Excel worksheets and added roles and responsibilities.

strategy everyone’s everyday job. When people pointed to a piece of the map to describe the impact of a certain proposal, everyone understood what they were referring to. Having a shared language also had the unintended benefit of increasing camaraderie.

In most cases of strategy development, management knows the underlying assumptions, but the implementation team is left in the dark. The OSM process integrates assumptions from the entire team. The group as a whole owns the strategy, the implementation, and of course, the results. Talk about empowerment!

Another benefit of the process was that the team found it easier to be brutally honest during implementation. For example, as word of the Workplace Leadership Initiative spread during the development of the map, the team not only heard from folks with a favorable impression of the project but also from those with an unfavorable view. In other circumstances, the group might have filtered out the negative input. But because the map suggested that they pay attention to potential resisters, and that by doing so they could generate a positive trend, the team accepted the early criticism and incorporated some of the constructive comments in their implementation plan.

Making Strategy a Continual Process. As part of continual learning, the Boeing team may choose to go into more detail in some areas of the map. They are exploring the potential benefits of developing simulation models of certain aspects. Further, the group may build additional maps or revise the current one. Even so, they will continue to use the OSM they’ve developed in building and implementing strategy for months to come.

Using the Methodology in Your Organization

If you’d like to use an Operational Strategy Map to help guide your strategic planning and implementation, here are a few things we’ve learned:

• You won’t get the map perfect the first time. The process of building the map is where the learning is. Create a prototype (what we’ve called the “strawman map”) as quickly as you can. Then let the strategy development team critique, modify, and ultimately own it. The process of their owning it will make it better. Trust us!
• Identify as quickly as possible the “main chain” of the map. Use the main chain to ask questions about how the system in question works and what might be some unintended consequences of any activities.
• Focus on analyzing the major dynamics in the map. In the case described here, the team focused on the major virtuous cycle for a week. They asked questions about it, tested its usefulness and likelihood of occurrence — and in the end, they developed a whole new approach to the overall project.
• Fit the map on one page if you can. The Boeing team struggled on occasion as it tried to add nuances to the map that added complexity. The understanding generated from these incremental add-ons was usually minimal. You can always create separate maps of more detailed processes at a later date.
• Once the strawman map has been developed, modify it only in the presence of the whole team. Otherwise, you will not have the buy in needed to implement any new insights. Plus, you’ll likely miss something important when making the change.
• Develop simulation models only to the point where doing so provides an adequate return for the time and money invested. The process of simulation modeling is often a laborious one; it may take months to develop a reasonably sophisticated computer model of the strategy. The siren call of “We’ll find the answer” often tempts teams to try to develop the Mother of All Models. But this quest can become a journey of diminishing returns, in that simulation modeling may not generate enough additional insight to be worth the investment. The team in this article will develop a few small models to deepen and refine their understanding of implementation dynamics.

The OSM methodology holds potential for all organizations. The process of developing a simple, one page stock and flow map of the organization’s strategy generates strategic insight and commitment to implementation. If your organization has been struggling to execute its strategy — or even to develop a good one — you will find building an OSM useful. It’s a perfect tool to get everyone on the same page so that when you come to a fork in the road, you’ll be more likely to take the better path.

Chris Soderquist (chris.soderquist@pontifexconsulting.com) is the founder of Pontifex Consulting. He consults to organizations and communities in order to build their capacity to create and implement sustainable, high-leverage solutions to their most strategic challenges. Mark Shimada (mark.s.shimada@boeing.com) is a program manager in The Boeing Company’s Leadership Development and Functional Excellence Group. He supports his peers to accelerate business results through extraordinary leadership development programs.

The post Operational Strategy Mapping: Learning and Executing at The Boeing Company appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUCCESS ENGINE PART I

The Engine of Success

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

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

SUCCESS ENGINE PART II

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

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

THE DARKER SIDE OF GROWTH PART I

The Dark Side of Growth

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

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

THE DARKER SIDE OF GROWTH PART II

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

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

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

The Emotional Side of the Structure

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

THE DARKER SIDE OF GROWTH PART III

The Outcomes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Issue of Inclusiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although IT and software development projects may be the most visible areas in which work extends beyond its original parameters, process re-engineering efforts, wide-ranging organizational change initiatives, and large-scale construction projects certainly are not exempt. Take, for example, a small town in North Carolina that is building a reservoir for its municipal water supply. The original estimate for the project five years ago was $5.4 million, with a two-year window for construction. Today, the estimated cost is $8 million. Construction has barely begun and is now projected to take three years.

Given these troubling statistics, it seems fair to say that large projects rarely, if ever, stay within their original specifications and meet their forecast targets of time and dollars. In fact, any program or project that is complex in nature, covers an extended period of time, requires a significant monetary investment, and has multiple components needing to be managed simultaneously is vulnerable, despite heroic traditional project management efforts. This tendency of such projects to expand beyond their initial boundaries and thereby to extend far beyond their forecasts is often called “scope creep.” In this article, we examine this phenomenon by viewing large projects as complex systems. By understanding scope creep in this context, we can begin to identify how and why it occurs. Equipped with this knowledge, empowered people, teams, and organizations can more effectively plan for and mitigate the effects of scope creep by taking a more realistic and dynamic perspective on the project management process.

Scope Creep Dynamics

How does scope creep begin, and what causes it to build on itself over time, leading to costly overruns and delays? Organizations initiate projects to address a perceived need (see “The Dynamics of Scope Creep” on p. 3). For instance, the town mentioned above faced periodic water shortages during times of drought, so it decided to build a reservoir to meet its perceived water needs. In an ideal world, after some delay, the project would be completed within its original budget and on schedule, and the perceived need would be filled (B1).

The amount of money invested in a project limits the amount of work that can be accomplished and therefore generally defines the project’s scope — at least initially. The larger the project, and the more people, departments, and agencies involved, the more complex the governance becomes. For instance, in an IT company, a large-scale product development effort requires input from a number of departments, each with its own management and its own priorities. Several subprojects of the larger effort could end up competing with each other for the skills of testers, database programmers, or technical writers, making the overall governance complex. The competition for limited resources intensifies as the number of subprojects expands, making management of the overall effort more challenging.

When the governance is complex, managers find it difficult to make decisions in a timely manner and to attend to the long-term consequences of each decision. These difficulties threaten the accuracy of schedule estimates. As deadlines draw closer and time pressure rises, people tend to “cut corners” to keep the project on track. In a software development project, for example, cutting corners often means inappropriate parallel development—perhaps developing applications that depend on lower-level modules before the lower-level modules are fully designed. Cutting corners in a construction project could mean accepting the lowest bid without qualifying the vendor, not allowing enough time to coordinate the work of the various subcontractors, or even neglecting to let cement cure properly. In the short term, cutting corners can appear to alleviate schedule pressures (B2), but it is actually an example of the classic “Fix That Fails” archetypal structure. In a “Fixes That Fail” scenario, an action that solves a problem over the short term actually exacerbates the same condition over the long run. Thus, over time, cutting corners generally results in rework, which inevitably creates even more schedule pressure (R3).

Rework also increases cost. As the cost of a project goes up, project managers need to justify the additional expenditures to upper management or to their constituents. To do so, they often find themselves promising new and enhanced features to make the additional expense more palatable. For instance, an elected official might tell an irate group of taxpayers, “Of course a dam costing this much will include a recreation area.” Or the constituents might decide that such a costly undertaking must include a recreation area and pressure officials to add one. The expectations of an IT project might rise when the sales department assures dissatisfied customers, “Oh, we have a new release in the works that will address your concern.” Assurances and assumptions such as these raise customers’ expectations and expand the project’s scope (R4).

As the project’s scope increases, the web of interactions and dependencies among tasks, subprojects, departments, and agencies grows even more intricate. This rising complexity can lead to delays. For example, on a construction project, if one subcontractor has to wait for a second one to finish his tasks, he may need to take on another job in the interim. He then may not have the personnel immediately available to work on the original project when the first subcontractor is finally ready for him. Delay creates even more deadline pressure and reinforces the “scope creep” dynamic.

Such interactions and dependencies also make it difficult to accurately estimate costs. Delays can further compound the problem, making cost estimates even less accurate. If actual costs are much higher than the original estimates, the pressure on officials and managers to justify costs increases, which can further influence the expectations from the project and cause even more scope creep (R5).

The complexity of the governance affects more than the timeliness of decisions. It also affects the ability of decision-makers to see the effects of their decisions — both on other aspects of the project and later in time. With less visibility to downstream effects, decisions that appear to give positive local results can have negative global consequences. Therefore, the quality of decisions can go down — increasing the likelihood of additional rework and creating additional complexity (R6).

Thus, the tendency of large projects to increase in scope finds its roots in two underlying assumptions. The first is that we can manage a project by simply managing its parts. This practice leads us to ignore the systemwide impact of apparently small, local decisions, which in turn can undermine initial time and cost estimates and increase the project’s complexity. The second is that we assume that we can estimate schedules and costs accurately in advance of initiating work. But often, when a project costs more or takes longer than expected, we respond either by assuming that it must include additional features or by deliberately adding more to justify the increased cost or time — compounding scope creep.

Beyond Traditional Project Management

To date, most explanations of scope creep stem from a linear, sequential view of projects and how they are managed. For example, the Project Management Institute defines the five project management phases as initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing. This model assumes that one phase is completed before the next one begins, and that we should return to previous phases only when problems occur.

Using this sequential framework, several authors have written that scope creep occurs when the planning phase is incomplete. For example, some suggest that if objectives and project “deliverables” are not fully defined up front or if work breakdowns are unclear, then the project will exceed its original cost and schedule projections. Others attribute scope creep to ill-defined resource requirements or insufficient funding. Another set of explanations focuses on the problems that occur during the controlling phase; for instance, poorly documented changes to the project specifications.

All of these explanations are probably correct to some degree. However, even if a team rigidly adheres to this project management framework and completes each step with near perfection, scope creep can still occur, especially in large, complex projects. Good, linear project management is necessary. However, as the frequency of scope creep shows, it is insufficient to prevent the problem.

The downside of the traditional project management model is that it does not adequately account for the fact that a major project — like constructing a reservoir, developing a large, complex piece of software, or writing a major training curriculum — is actually a large system with multiple interacting parts. According to M. I. T. professor John Sterman, “Large-scale projects belong to the class of complex dynamic systems. Such systems (1) are highly complex, consisting of multiple interdependent components, (2) are highly dynamic, (3) involve multiple feedback processes, (4) involve non-linear relationships, and (5) involve both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ data” (, “System Dynamics Modeling for Project Management,” section 3, p. 5, http://web.mit.edu/ jsterman/www). In describing problems in these kinds of systems, author Meg Wheatley says, “They cannot be understood sufficiently either before or even while they are occurring; therefore, prediction and control are impossible” (THE SYSTEMS THINKER, V9N10). In other words, the interactions among the tasks, subprojects, and governance structures of a complex project make it all but impossible to fully define the project deliverables or grasp the resource requirements ahead of time.

For example, in software development, managers commonly divide projects into several modules — each of which is to be designed and developed independently and then combined into a completed product. They then break the work on each module into a series of tasks, which can be sequenced and placed on a timeline. It seems logical to think that if these tasks are accomplished in the prescribed way, their completion should constitute the total project. In practice, though, the degree of interdependency among the modules usually doesn’t become fully evident until after the teams have invested much effort in design and development. At that point, the components often require more design, coding, and testing than originally budgeted to make the modules work together.

Equally important, as the interdependencies among the different modules come to light, the scope of the project changes — even if the project plan does not — because the people involved get new ideas about what the product should offer. For example, a software project that began as a rewrite of code to fix a problem evolves when designers realize that addressing the problem makes it easier to implement a customer request that was difficult to implement in the old code. To satisfy the customer, they design the request into the rewrite. A single addition like this one typically does not pose a problem. However, when a rewrite is large and costly, managers may be pressured to add several of these customer requests to justify the project’s expense. The standard approach to project management neglects to take into account such shifts in expectations. So, what began as a simple fix can unexpectedly become a major project to address customer demands.

Sterman identifies two kinds of complexity in projects: combinatorial and dynamic. Combinatorial complexity is created by the parallel and sequential activities that take place in a large, complex project — for example, in a large construction project, all of the permits needed before breaking ground. Traditional project management tools, such as PERT, CPM, and GANTT charts, are intended to help people handle these details.

On the other hand, dynamic complexity is created by the multiple feedback processes, time delays, and nonlinear causal relationships that exist in any large project. Because the interactions among multiple variables over time drive this kind of complexity, it can grow geometrically or even exponentially as additional elements enter the system (see “Increasing Dynamic Complexity”). For instance, the traditional view holds that adding a fourth task to three that are already scheduled would increase the workload proportionally — that is by 33 percent. However, this calculation does not take into account the fact that the new task interacts with each of the existing tasks, actually doubling the interactions between tasks and potentially increasing the amount of work by much more than one-third. For this reason, dynamic complexity contributes significantly to the phenomenon of scope creep and cannot be adequately addressed using standard, linear approaches.

Mitigating Scope Creep

Clearly, we need to broaden our thinking about project management. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this:

Surface Dynamic Complexity. The first key to mitigating scope creep is to find ways to surface the feedback processes, time delays, and non-linear relationships in a large, complex project. Here are a few suggestions:

• John Sterman has demonstrated the value of using system dynamics modeling in large-scale projects in conjunction with traditional tools. This approach can help to surface many of the interactions between tasks, subprojects, and governance structures that ultimately lead to scope creep and can make explicit many assumptions that often remain unspoken. With such information, decision-makers and project managers can then make more informed decisions about changing external conditions, proposed shifts in strategy, resource allocation, impacts of delays, and even the viability of the project over time.
• If using a system dynamics model isn’t practical, drawing causal loop diagrams can help managers identify feedback loops and causal relationships separated by time and space. Discussion of the interactions and dependencies among various work streams can create a richer understanding of the complexities involved.
• With a basic knowledge of systems thinking and causal loop diagrams, decision-makers often recognize many “shortcuts” as “Fixes That Fail.” But because it is difficult to spot patterns of behavior while implementing a project, managers should anticipate and document potential problem areas up front. One way to do so is to identify any systems archetypes operating in earlier projects, document them, and share them with the project team. The team then needs to continually evaluate whether similar patterns are emerging in the present project, and take appropriate actions to keep from falling into the same traps. Anticipating these situations, documenting them in advance, and appointing someone to flag them if they crop up can lead to smarter decisions once the action starts on a major initiative.
• The decision-making process in large projects is often extremely complex, cumbersome, and subject to pressures from the outside. These pressures can include political considerations, the organization’s culture, ingrained management practices, and budgetary constraints. Because of the complexity of the decision-making process, project managers often make decisions without regard for how they might affect the rest of the system. One way to simplify decision-making and to help identify unintended consequences is to use a decision matrix (see Sample Decision Matrix” at www.pegasuscom.com/matrix.html). To do so, make a list of potential outcomes across the top of a page. Then brainstorm the possible solutions under consideration and list them down the side of the page. Discuss the different resulting combinations represented by each “cell” in the matrix before making any decisions. Use a ranking process to determine which cell or cells best meet the desired outcomes.
• Scenario planning offers another way to identify and explore the possible outcomes — both predictable and unlikely — of decisions being considered. For a simple application of scenario planning, see Peter Senge et al., The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (Doubleday, 1999), pp. 187-190. During the scenario-planning process, project managers and teams might also identify some additional “Fixes That Fail” to avoid.

Rethink Approaches to Budgets and Schedules. We also need to rethink the common assumption that we can make accurate cost and schedule predictions up front in a large project. This expectation is unrealistic, because of the inherently changeable nature of such projects. Therefore, we need a “scalable” approach to budgets and schedules, one in which we regularly review and update time and money estimates. Such reviews should include a timetable for decisions regarding moving the project forward, scaling it back, or perhaps even canceling it. Over time, as we learn more about the work involved, the estimates should become more accurate.

No organization can launch a project without having some idea about the amount of money and time involved. Managers should thus provide a range of initial cost and schedule estimates, along with a margin of error and a review plan with “escape points” as described above. Such estimates and built-in reviews help prevent people from feeling trapped and betrayed when large projects go “over budget” and get delayed.

Use the Original Purpose as an Anchor. There is a tendency to use current expectations as a kind of anchor point when considering changes to the scope of a project. This propensity can be dangerous, because current expectations may have shifted significantly since the project’s inception. In fact, the dynamics behind scope creep are similar to those of the “Drifting Goals” archetypal structure. In “Drifting Goals,” two balancing loops interact to cause goals and standards to decline over time. In scope creep, a series of reinforcing processes constantly “raise the bar” and prevent the project from being finished within its original projections. To help avoid this process, go back to the original purpose of the project and use it as a reference point. Why was the project started in the first place? If you do decide to change its scope, what might be the ramifications?

Follow Good Project Management Practices. Finally, continue to use good project management practices. Many traditional tools remain essential to tracking the progress of any project. However, remember that in a complex system like a large project, the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts; the whole includes the sum of its parts as well as the interactions among all of the components.

Beyond the Old Paradigm

Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” Scope creep is such a problem. To date, most attempts to control scope creep have used linear, additive logic to counteract what is a highly complex, dynamic phenomenon. This sequential way of thinking places the blame for scope creep on poor project management practices. But rather than rushing out to try new project management technologies or blaming people for failing to implement older ones, what we really need is a new way to understand large projects as complex systems. In this article, we have offered approaches that are not visible from the traditional linear approach. We believe that these ideas can serve as learning opportunities and as seeds for yet other solutions. Learning to see large projects as complex systems may not be a revolution, but we think it is a worthy first step toward a possible and necessary evolution in the way organizations operate.

Andrea Shapiro, Ph. D., is an internal organizational learning consultant for Nortel Networks. Her work emphasizes learning, communication, and systems thinking (ashapiro@nortelnetworks.com). Carol Lorenz, Ph. D., of Carol Lorenz and Associates, is an independent contractor who worked at Nortel for a number of years. Her work emphasizes learning, organization effectiveness, and systems thinking (lorenzc@mindspring.com).

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That’s the challenge Al Gore has faced each of the more than 1,200 times he has personally delivered his presentation on global warming depicted in the film, An Inconvenient Truth. As an educator, I am fascinated by how elegantly he communicates complex systems thinking concepts — without ever actually mentioning systems thinking. By any measure, he has been successful: He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the film has won an Academy Award, and many believe that Gore’s work has caused a sea change in U. S. attitudes toward climate change. How did he do this?

What follows is an analysis of how Gore met this challenge, as well as ideas for how the rest of us might apply these techniques in our own work. Some of these observations have come from my participation in a training session with Gore in Nashville in support of his non-profit organization, The Climate Project, which is funded by proceeds from the film. While these ideas may not work for all speakers and all audiences, I think there is wisdom here for all of us.

Tips for Presenting Complex Concepts

Use Everyday Analogies to Reduce Complexity.

• Gore makes the case for why we should be concerned about the bleaching of coral reefs from higher ocean temperatures by calling them “the rainforests of the oceans.” “Rainforest” instantly evokes a rich, colorful, and complex habitat that serves as a linchpin of the environment. Coral reefs are equally full of life — and equally threatened.
• In describing moulins, streams that tunnel down through the middle of glaciers, Gore describes them as behaving “like termites.” This analogy elegantly communicates the idea that such melting will eventually cause ice sheets to break apart, just as termite damage can cause a house to collapse.

Avoid Technical Jargon Like the Plague, and if You Do Use It, Make Fun of It.

• After explaining the greenhouse effect in terms of solar radiation, Gore introduces a cartoon version by saying, “That’s the traditional explanation. Here’s what I think is a better explanation.”
• At another part in the film, he says, “Scientists tell us that the earth is a ‘non-linear system. ’That’s just a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come in big jumps.”In this way, Gore connects with the audience. He’s implicitly saying, “I’m just like you. If I can understand this, so can you.”

Explain Reinforcing and Balancing Loops in Plain Language.

• Gore never uses the word “exponential” to describe population growth. Standing next to a graph showing the level of population growth in just the last generation, he simply says, “In one human lifetime, something profoundly different is going on.”
• In describing why melting of the polar ice cap is accelerating, Gore explains, “As the surrounding water gets warmer, it speeds up the melting of the ice.”
• In describing how warmer ocean temperatures make hurricanes stronger, he states, “If you add energy to a system, it becomes more energetic.”
• Gore describes the Earth’s atmosphere as “a big engine for redistributing heat” from the warmer equator to other latitudes—one big balancing loop.

Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously.

• Use self-deprecating humor. When Gore uses a worker’s lift in the film, he says, “. . . if I don’t kill myself here.”
• Risk using a few constructions that would get points off from your English teacher, such as “Communicate this real clearly.”
• And yes, even use a folksy accent if it comes naturally to you: New “Orlens” instead of New “Orleens.” I am certainly not saying that we should all talk with a Southern accent; I just noted that Gore doesn’t hide his.

As the actor Peter Ustinov once said, “It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.”

Tie Your Message to Personal Stories. Throughout the film, Gore traces his personal learning journey about the Earth from growing up on a farm, to college, to traveling around the world in support of continually learning.

• The death of his only sister to lung cancer forced Gore and his family to confront the mental models of tobacco use. His father finally stopped being a life-long tobacco farmer as a result of her death.
• Gore’s son almost died in an automobile accident. Gore learned from this experience that it is possible to lose what is most precious to you. He reports that this realization changed “my way of being in the world,” a shift that enabled him to confront the reality that we could also lose the Earth. This personal experience is the source of the passion that has sustained him in telling the story of global warming for 30 years.

When I first heard how long Gore had been advocating on this issue, I reflected on the fact that I’ve been trying to tell the story of organizational learning for two years and feel as though nobody’s listening. If Al Gore can tell his story for three decades, then maybe I can keep at it a little longer, too.

Don’t Vilify Your Opponents (but Some Good-Natured Poking Fun Might Be O. K.)

• Regarding some in the petroleum industry, Gore quotes Upton Sinclair as saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
• Regarding skeptics, he cites a lyric from the band Dire Straits: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
• Gore implores us to rise above party lines in order to respond to this challenge: “We must remove global warming from the partisan framework.”

Sometimes, through their anger, activists end up recruiting the half of the audience who already agrees with them at the expense of alienating the other half who does not. We cannot afford such an outcome with an issue like global warming. This problem will require all of us.

Confronting Mental Models

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain

In designing his presentation, Gore invested the most time trying to understand the mental models of skeptics: “I guess the thing I’ve spent more time on than anything else in this slide show is trying to identify all those things in people’s minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this. And whenever I feel like I’ve identified an obstacle, I try to take it apart, roll it away, move it, demolish it, blow it up.”

• One technique he uses to try to win converts is to draw parallels with history. Gore relates denial of global warming to the rise of Hitler in the 1930s: “How do we react when we hear warnings from scientists” about something awful but that has never happened before?
• In one section of the film, he explores old habits that are hard to change through technology, such as nuclear technology: “New technology brings a responsibility to think about its consequences.” This is an unassuming way of addressing the systems thinking adage of asking, “And then what?”
• To prompt the audience to examine the inertia of the status quo, he invokes the story of the frog in the pot of boiling water—that is, if you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out, but if you put it in a pot of lukewarm water and slowly raise the temperature, it will stay in and boil to death.
• In an aside during training, he offered this additional thought on why elected officials can be slow to change:, “If an issue is not on the tips of their constituents’ tongues, it’s very easy for them to ignore it.”

Rhetoric As a System

Gore crafts his presentations by managing three stocks or, as he calls them, “budgets”:

A Time Budget: How long will the audience stay interested? Gore operates under the premise that if he periodically throws in an interesting aside or an arresting image, he “buys” more time from the crowd.

A Complexity Budget: Is the information too complex? By simplifying concepts, he buys more capacity to learn from the audience.

A Hope Budget: Is the graphic depiction of what will happen if we don’t act soon balanced by concrete actions people can take? Fear leads to paralysis. If we replace fear with concern, we motivate action, and in action there is hope.

The main thing that surprised me about Mr. Gore in person was how funny he is. I laughed throughout the training with him. As one of his asides, he then shared this fourth budget:

• A Humor Budget: Show a cartoon or share a funny quotation, and you make deposits in pretty much all three “accounts” above simultaneously.

Sharing a Vision via Affect

Gore also connects through emotion. Here are a few examples that relate to the genesis of his personal vision and his efforts to inspire that vision in others.

• Gore conceives of collective will as a stock: “We have everything we need — with the possible exception of political will. But in America, political will is a renewable resource.”
• “I set myself a goal: Communicate this real clearly. The only way I know how to do it is city by city, person by person, family by family.”
• “Are we capable of doing great things even if they are difficult? The historical record says that we can. . . . It is our time to rise again to secure our future.”
• “There’s nothing that unusual about what I’m doing with this. What is unusual is that I had the privilege to be shown it as a young man. It’s almost as if a window was opened through which the future was very clearly visible.‘See that?’ he said.‘See that? That’s the future in which you are going to live your life.’”

Peter Pruyn is an Organizational Development and Training Consultant at Tufts University. A member of the Society for Organizational Learning and graduate of Rick Karash’s Systems Thinking Development Program, he lives contentedly in Cambridge, MA. He can be reached at pwp [at] airmail.net.

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Two Generations of Knowledge Management

While many of us were just grasping what the term knowledge management means, innovators at the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), the organization that McElroy heads and for which I serve as a board member, were already creating a new and improved iteration of the concept. Although some people may be tempted to dismiss this advance as being simply a case of old wine in new bottles, McElroy draws a bold line in the sand between these two distinctly different versions of knowledge management (KM). He explains how first-generation KM approaches are largely based on the notion that organizations are machines; from this perspective, knowledge and information are close cousins in that both are effectively managed through the use of technology. Practitioners of second-generation KM, on the other hand, adopt a more organic view; they regard information as a distant precursor to knowledge and view social processes as more critical than technology for creating new knowledge.

First-generation KM is based on the assumption that knowledge is a well-defined commodity that can be easily used by people throughout a company and that the main task of KM initiatives is to leverage the use of existing knowledge by sharing it freely throughout an organization. Technology becomes valued as an efficient means to accomplish this goal. Therefore, first-generation KM approaches typically focus on the use of technology to collect, analyze, and store data — especially best practices — that organizations can use to improve performance. For instance, a company’s sales force may use wireless systems to capture insights and lessons learned about customer buying patterns and competitor strategies. They then channel this information to someone within the organization who will organize it, conduct meta-data analyses to draw overarching conclusions, and place the results into a computer database. Such databases are then made available to employees through corporate intranets. Employees may access information such as lists of handy selling tips for approaching customers with certain profiles and strategies for increasing sales that have been developed and used successfully by other members of the sales force. Some of these database systems use “Yellow Pages” directories and expertise profiling to help practitioners connect with those colleagues who have demonstrated successes.

Although such tools are technologically impressive, they tend to focus on identifying isolated elements of knowledge, out of their natural context, and fail to address the fundamental process by which knowledge is created in individuals and groups. Second-generation KM seeks to address this shortcoming. The notion that sharing tips about how a colleague successfully achieved a sale presumes that others can effectively use a similar strategy without changing what they believe, how they think, or how they perceive selling situations. Such an approach reduces selling from an art that is developed over years of experience to a form of behavioral mimicry.

The Knowledge Life Cycle

Whether or not you subscribe to the increasingly popular view that first-generation KM has already proven to be ineffective, McElroy gives compelling reasons to consider switching to second-generation KM. He addresses how (1) organizational learning is linked to KM, (2) knowledge drives innovation, (3) complexity and systems thinking are related to KM, and (4) corporate policies can be an important lever for creating knowledge and innovation (see “10 Key Principles of Second-Generation Knowledge Management” on p. 8). For example, in first-generation KM schemes, such as those that focus on creating formal mechanisms for sharing best practices, knowledge is driven by what we might call “supply-side considerations.” That is, the mere availability of new knowledge is assumed to be sufficient reason to distribute it to employees throughout the organization — regardless of whether they are satisfied with the knowledge they are currently using or even have the capability to use this new material. According to McElroy, second-generation KM approaches are primarily demand-driven. A good example is what human resource professionals call “just-in-time” training (JITT). Through JITT, employees can access training when they believe they need it to solve problems that concern them, rather than attend management-mandated workshops that may or may not provide them with timely information.

In addition, according to the KMCI knowledge life-cycle model that McElroy presents, high-quality knowledge evolves over time through dialogue within communities of practitioners who are committed to understanding what works best. Technological fixes, such as the one described above, are not a substitute for nurturing the essential social processes that contribute to developing new knowledge — they are an adjunct. It is this idea that McElroy tries to impress upon advocates of first-generation KM, who portray computer-based fixes as a main feature of KM rather than as a tool for facilitating it. Because of this limited view of KM’s applicability, it is not surprising that many executives have become skeptical of the discipline’s promise for delivering sustainable competitive advantage.

Knowledge-Friendly Policies

In its essence, The New Knowledge Management espouses the perspective that managers cannot directly manage many critical organizational processes, such as knowledge creation, but they can influence them by judiciously altering certain factors. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is one enterprise that has organized knowledge management processes around people’s natural behaviors. For example, because workers tend to congregate around coffee pots, the company has installed white boards and markers in those areas to assist people in capturing the knowledge that emerges through informal conversations. In addition, because studies at Xerox revealed that people also tend to engage in conversations in stairways, the company facilitated this process by widening those areas so coworkers can remain on the stairs and chat while others still have room to pass by.

Likewise, McElroy argues that corporate policies often unintentionally stifle knowledge creation by favoring efficiency, and that managers should scrutinize and modify processes to be “knowledge-friendly.” In the latter portion of the book, in his description of the Policy Synchronization Method (PSM), he alludes to some key policy levers for systematically redesigning organizations to facilitate knowledge processing and innovation. PSM helps managers do a baseline diagnostic assessment of the effectiveness of current knowledge-processing systems and then alter policies and processes to yield greater innovation in how knowledge is created.

The importance of this naturalistic view of husbanding organizational processes, as opposed to managing them, cannot be overstated. The simplistic industrial engineering notions of Fredrick W. Taylor and others once served the prevailing Newtonian/ Cartesian mental models of managers well, but that era is over. Today, managers are killing organizations by sacrificing innovation to the god of efficiency. We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that stagnant, ineffective processes are traceable to an organization’s failure to create new knowledge, or that the solution lies in finding innovative ways to harness people’s talents, or intellectual capital, rather than in installing new hardware and software. Historically, tools and technology have always worked best when used to augment people’s know-how and understanding. While technologies can often replace people in simple, routine situations, they can’t generate innovation in complex, dynamic environments — that’s where the real value of second-generation KM is most apparent.

Does McElroy find the ultimate answer for achieving high organizational performance? Probably not. But in this writer’s opinion, he convincingly points toward a direction where it may be found, when many other so called knowledge management gurus remain bewitched by the lure of first-generation KM solutions. Second-generation KM — and McElroy’s book — provide a viable conceptual framework for effectively linking KM to systems thinking and organizational learning. In doing so, it offers a promising way for us to create and sustain organizational success.

Steven Cavaleri, Ph. D., (cavaleri@ccsu.edu) is professor of management at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut. He also serves as editor of the journal The Learning Organization.

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Reflection is the practice of pondering the meaning to self and/or to others of what has recently transpired in the immediate environment. It thus constitutes the ability to bring to light and make explicit to oneself and one’s colleagues what has been planned, observed, or achieved in practice. In particular, it privileges the process of inquiry, leading to a level of understanding of experiences that may have been overlooked in the heat of the moment. This deep understanding, in turn, provides a basis for future action.

Three Aspects of Reflection

There are three aspects of reflection in work settings that are often overlooked but potentially vital to ethical inquiry: first, reflection should be collective or public; second, reflection should be contemporaneous; and third, reflection should be critical. Let’s begin with reflection’s collective nature.

1. Reflection Should Be Collective or Public. Plato had the idea of relationships in mind when, in Apology, he quoted Socrates’ now famous phrase, “the unexamined life isn’t worth living.” Although people usually interpret this maxim as a call for introspection, it actually means that we need to discuss our life’s experience and meaning with others. As human beings, we learn about ourselves in relation to others through language; communication allows us to validate our behavior.

In reflection, we examine others’ responses to our actions to determine if our participation in our social communities has been helpful. Accordingly, our self is formed as much from how others respond to us as from what we do. The self, then, is linked to the social communities that give it definition.

In this age of Enron and WorldCom, how can we jump-start much-needed ethical inquiry within the corporate world?

The process of reflecting together and sharing our individual insights in the safe presence of trusting peers constitutes a learning dialogue. The data that come out of these exchanges often involve the interpersonal dynamics at play; when these are acknowledged and dealt with, true inquiry and insight emerge. Learning dialogues also serve to create mutually caring relationships.

2. Reflection Should Be Contemporaneous. Reflection should also be contemporaneous, that is, it should occur in the moment. For example, a team is just about to launch an advertising campaign featuring a comic depiction of a bumbling old man. At seemingly the last moment, a member chimes in with the comment: “It appears as if we have made our decision. But even though it feels right to me, I still have a nagging reservation that the scene may come across as offensive. What would you say to our taking one more look at it? I’m afraid we may have overlooked something.” This “reflection-in-action” can help a group reframe standard ways of operating so as to see experience in a different light.

Other forms of reflection relating to time serve different needs. Anticipatory reflection occurs prior to the experience, often in the form of planning, as learners suggest to themselves and to their peers how they might approach a given situation. In retrospective reflection, an individual or group recalls a recent experience, often with the goal of assessing or evaluating it so as to gain insight for future tasks.

3. Reflection Should Be Critical. Finally, reflection must be critical. When reflection engages our critical consciousness, it probes to a deeper level than trial-and-error experience. It leads to “double-loop” and “triple-loop” learning, both of which seek to go beyond habitual approaches to problem-solving. In double-loop learning, we challenge our assumptions about the applicability of learning from one context to another. In triple-loop learning, we learn about the “context of contexts” as we question the entire frame of reference for approaching an issue.

Consider an example: Executives often assume that, in order for their companies to stay lean and productive and to cut costs, they need to reduce headcount. A traditional, single-loop approach to the issue would be to research how to rationally restructure the company; i.e., lay off workers across-the-board, concentrate on weak operating units, rely on natural attrition, or make specific cuts. Double-loop learning would involve questioning the assumption to begin with that layoffs will improve productivity. Finally, triple-loop learning might address why executives automatically turn to reductions-in-force or restructuring as the set of usual alternatives whenever they are concerned about productivity.

Putting Reflection into Action

Acknowledging the importance of collective, contemporaneous, and critical reflection can help us understand its contribution to ethical inquiry. Through civil discourse about the values that drive the choices we make, we can begin to reach agreement about the standards our organizations should uphold. Critical consciousness enhanced through public reflection helps us recognize the connection between individual problems and the social context within which they are embedded. Once learners make this connection, they acquire intellectual humility, empathy, and courage to challenge standard ways of operating. They learn to consider data beyond their personal taken-for-granted assumptions and begin to explore the historical and social processes that foster universal ethical principles.

Let’s consider the hypothetical case of Charlie, a young professional who was considering whether to accept employment in a military laboratory known to sponsor research in biological warfare. Charlie considered this form of research reprehensible, but the offer was lucrative. With the money, he would be able to start to pay off nine years of student loans and contribute to a critical transplant operation that could save his mother’s life.

Charlie contemplated the offer for nearly two months without coming to a decision. The pros and the cons seemed to balance each other out. Fortunately, he was able to call on the wisdom of an informal group of colleagues that had met casually after work for two years. Although the group originated as a social gathering, it soon became a support network in which people felt free to reveal personal and professional problems for deep consideration by the others.

Charlie introduced his dilemma, and the group helped him work through the decision. His colleagues listened intently to his predicament and offered their support as well as a range of possible solutions. Although some had strong views about the laboratory’s mission, they were most concerned about helping Charlie think through the countervailing ethical principles that could ultimately guide his decision. For example, how would he balance the utilitarian value of possibly saving his mother’s life against the destructive use of the weapons he would be contributing to producing, not to mention the drain on his own conscience? His colleagues also probed a number of Charlie’s assumptions; for example, whether the lab’s agenda could be reformed or whether he was the only source of funds for the transplant operation.

We see in this example that Charlie was able to use all three aspects of reflective practice: his thought process was public, contemporaneous (as well as anticipatory), and critical. Likewise, human resource departments can design practice-oriented learning experiences to emulate the conditions reported in this example. For example, facilitators can assemble learning teams to help employees inquire collectively with their peers on matters of personal and professional consciousness. They can build reflection into learning experiences using techniques such as learning histories, after-action reviews, or group dialogue.

To ensure its practice in day-today management experience, coaching may be needed to encourage individuals to develop their insight by becoming mindful of why things occur in a certain way, scrutinizing differences between others’ perceptions and their own perception of self, becoming curious about how forces below the surface shape actions and outcomes, examining discrepancies between what is being said and what is being done, or just becoming open to feedback from others. By adopting a minimalist intervention style, coaches and facilitators can permit learners to manage their own process of self-discovery.

In this way, employees such as Charlie can learn to cope with real ethical dilemmas that can have both personal and professional consequences and, with the support of others, bring those issues into public dialogue. Such dialogue can go a long way toward preventing the erosion of integrity that has plagued the corporate world in recent years.

Joe Raelin holds the Asa. S. Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education at Northeastern University. Portions of this article have appeared in his recent book, Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone (Berrett-Koehler, 2003) and in Northeastern’s Center for Excellence in University Teaching Newsletter, Teaching Matters.

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There are dozens of books on the topic of difficult, crucial, challenging, important (you get the idea) kinds of conversations (at the end of the articles, I list several). Those times when you know you should talk to someone, but you don’t. Maybe you’ve tried before and it went badly. Or maybe you fear that talking will only make the situation worse. Still, there’s a feeling of being stuck, and you’d like to free up that stuck energy for more useful purposes.

What you have here is a brief synopsis of best-practice strategies: a checklist of action items to think about before going into the conversation; some useful concepts to practice during the conversation; and some tips and suggestions to help your energy stay focused and flowing, including possible conversational openings.

You’ll notice one key theme throughout: You have more power than you think.

Preparing for the Conversation

Before going into the conversation, ask yourself some questions:

1. What is your purpose for having the conversation? What do you hope to accomplish? What would be an ideal outcome? Watch for hidden purposes. You may think you have honorable goals, like educating an employee or increasing connection with your teen, only to notice that your language is excessively critical or condescending. You think you want to support, but you end up punishing. Some purposes are more useful than others. Work on yourself so that you enter the conversation with a supportive purpose.
2. What assumptions are you making about this person’s intentions?You may feel intimidated, belittled, ignored, disrespected, or marginalized, but be cautious about assuming that that was the other person’s intention. Impact does not necessarily equal intent.

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3. What “buttons” of yours are being pushed? Are you more emotional than the situation warrants? Take a look at your “backstory,” as they say in the movies. What personal history is being triggered? You may still have the conversation, but you’ll go into it knowing that some of the heightened emotional state has to do with you.
4. How is your attitude toward the conversation influencing your perception of it? If you think it is going to be horribly difficult, it probably will be. If you truly believe that whatever happens, some good will come of it, that will likely be the case. Try to adjust your attitude for maximum effectiveness.
5. Who is the “opponent”? What might he be thinking about this situation? Is he aware of the problem? If so, how do you think he perceives it? What are his needs and fears? What solution do you think he would suggest? Begin to reframe the opponent as a partner.
6. What are your needs and fears? Are there any common concerns? Could there be?
7. How have you contributed to the problem? How has the other person?

Four Steps to a Successful Outcome

The majority of the work in any conflict conversation is work you do on yourself. No matter how well the conversation begins, you’ll need to stay in charge of yourself, your purpose, and your emotional energy. Breathe, center, and continue to notice when you become off-center—and choose to return again. This is where your power lies. By choosing the calm, centered state, you’ll help your opponent/partner to be more centered, too. Centering is not a step; centering is how you are as you take the steps. (For more on centering, see The Magic of Conflict and the “FAQs About Conflict” listed at the end of the article.)

Step #1: Inquiry

Cultivate an attitude of discovery and curiosity. Pretend you don’t know anything (you really don’t), and try to learn as much as possible about your opponent/partner and her point of view. Pretend you’re entertaining a visitor from another planet, and find out how things look on that planet, how certain events affect the other person, and what the values and priorities are there.

If your partner really was from another planet, you’d be watching her body language and listening for the unspoken energy as well. Do that here. What does she really want? What is she not saying?

Let her talk until she is finished. Don’t interrupt except to acknowledge. Whatever you hear, don’t take it personally. It’s not really about you. Try to learn as much as you can in this phase of the conversation. You’ll get your turn, but don’t rush it.

Step #2: Acknowledgment

Acknowledgment means showing that you’ve heard and understood. Try to understand the other person so well you can make his argument for him. Then do it. Explain back to him what you think he’s really going for. Guess at his hopes and honor his position. He won’t change unless he sees that you see where he stands. Then he might. No guarantees.

Acknowledge whatever you can, including your own defensiveness if it comes up. It’s fine; it just is. You can decide later how to address it. For example, in an argument with a friend, I said: “I notice I’m becoming defensive, and I think it’s because your voice just got louder and sounded angry. I just want to talk about this topic. I’m not trying to persuade you in either direction.” The acknowledgment helped him (and me) to recenter.

Acknowledgment can be difficult if we associate it with agreement. Keep them separate. My saying, “This sounds really important to you” doesn’t mean I’m going to go along with your decision.

Step #3: Advocacy

When you sense that your opponent has expressed all her energy on the topic, it’s your turn. What can you see from your perspective that she has missed? Help clarify your position without minimizing hers. For example, “From what you’ve told me, I can see how you came to the conclusion that I’m not a team player. And I think I am. When I introduce problems with a project, I’m thinking about its long-term success. I don’t mean to be a critic, though perhaps I sound like one. Maybe we can talk about how to address these issues so that my intention is clear.”

Step #4: Problem-Solving

Now you’re ready to begin building solutions. Brainstorming and continued inquiry are useful. Ask your opponent/partner what he thinks would work. Whatever he says, find something that you like and build on it. If the conversation becomes adversarial, go back to inquiry. Asking for the other’s point of view usually creates safety, and he’ll be more willing to engage. If you’ve been successful in centering, adjusting your attitude, and engaging with inquiry and useful purpose, building sustainable solutions will be easy.

Practice, Practice, Practice

The art of conversation is like any art—with continued practice, you acquire skill and ease. Here are some additional hints:

• A successful outcome will depend on two things: how you are and what you say. How you are (centered, supportive, curious, problem-solving) will greatly influence what you say.
• Acknowledge emotional energy— yours and your opponent/partner’s— and direct it toward a useful purpose.
• Know and return to your purpose at difficult moments.
• Don’t take verbal attacks personally. Help your opponent/partner come back to center.
• Don’t assume your opponent/partner can see things from your point of view.
• Practice the conversation with a friend before holding the real one.
• Mentally rehearse the conversation.

See various possibilities and visualize yourself handling them with ease. Envision the outcome you’re hoping for.

How Do I Begin?

In my workshops, a common question is “How do I begin the conversation?” Here are a few conversation openers I’ve picked up over the years—and used many times!

• I have something I’d like to discuss with you that I think will help us work together more effectively.
• I’d like to talk about ___________ with you, but first I’d like to get your point of view.
• I need your help with what just happened. Do you have a few minutes to talk?
• I need your help with something. Can we talk about it (soon)? If the person says, “Sure, let me get back to you,” follow up.
• I think we have different perceptions about ___________. I’d like to hear your thinking on this.
• I’d like to talk about ___________. I think we may have different ideas on how to ___________.
• I’d like to see if we might reach a better understanding about ________. I really want to hear your feelings about this and share my perspective as well.

Write a possible opening for your conversation here: ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________

Good luck!

Judy Ringer is a conflict and communication skills trainer, black belt in aikido, and sole owner of Power & Presence Training and Portsmouth Aikido. To sign up for free tips and articles, visit http://www. JudyRinger.com.

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The good news, according to Tony Wagner, former co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is that the key qualities necessary for innovation—curiosity, collaboration, associative or integrative thinking, and a bias toward action and experimentation—are skills that can be learned rather than being strictly innate. Nevertheless, in his latest book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (Scribner, 2012), he makes the case that most of our schools, at all levels, are failing to provide students with the hands-on, collaborative learning that fosters creative, critical thinking. Instead, they continue to prepare students in traditional ways for a career path that no longer exists.

Breaking the Mold

To illustrate that a different way of teaching and learning is possible, Wagner introduces several educational programs that are striving to break the existing mold, including the High Tech High network of K–12 schools in San Diego, California, Olin College in Needhaam, MA, the MIT Media Lab, and Stanford’s d. school. The essential difference between these programs and other, more conventional ones is that these schools promote:

• Collaboration versus individual achievement
• Multidisciplinary learning versus specialization
• Trial and error versus risk avoidance Creating versus consuming
• Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation

Wagner quotes Richard Miller, president of Olin College, on the college’s goal, one that is largely shared by the other leading-edge institutions Wagner studied:

We’ve trying to teach students to take initiative—to transmit attitudes, motivations, and behaviors versus mere knowledge. Today, it’s not what you know, it’s having the right questions. I see three stages in the evolution of learning: The first is the memorization-based, multiple-choice approach, which is still widely prevalent; then there’s project-based learning where the problem is already determined; finally, there’s design-based learning where you have to define the problem. That way of learning is part of every class here. We are trying to teach students how to frame problems versus repeat the answers.

To achieve this objective, schools require a new kind of educator, one who serves more as a coach and co-learner than as an authority in an academic subject. Wagner highlights two graduate schools of education that have developed new teaching models: the High Tech High Graduate School of Education and the Upper Valley Educators Institute in Lebanon, NH. In both of these programs, novice teachers spend most of their time working with a mentor in a school setting rather than sitting in lectures learning about education theory. In this way, these programs resemble the approach to teacher education used in Finland, a country that has produced outstanding results on international assessments. Interestingly—but maybe not surprisingly, give how entrenched traditional educational philosophies have proven to be—neither the High Tech High Graduate School of Education nor the Upper Valley Educators Institute has received accreditation from its respective regional accreditation agency.

Finding a Path

Given the scant attention paid to fostering creativity, it’s no shock that the young innovators whom Wagner features in the book worked hard to create their own opportunities. Kirk Phelps left Phillips Exeter Academy and Stanford University without graduating, yet at 29 has already had successful careers at Apple working on the iPhone and SunRun, a leading home solar power company. Zander Srodes became an advocate for sea turtle conservancy, authoring a book, leading ecological tours, and earning numerous youth achievement awards and grants—all while struggling in the classroom. Syreeta Gates, who founded SWT Life, which provides New York City teens with entrepreneurial coaching and personal development training, dropped out of City Technical College of New York before finding a sense of purpose through volunteer work.

Virtually all of Wagner’s interview subjects benefited from the guidance of a mentor and participation in unconventional learning experiences. In many cases, the mentor’s efforts weren’t recognized or well compensated by mainstream institutions but instead were done as labor of love. Such is the case of Amanda Alonzo, who works as a science teacher and science fair faculty advisor. She spends as many as four hours a day after school mentoring 40 students a year on their science fair projects. For her efforts, she receives only a $1,800 stipend on top of her teacher’s salary.

Encouraging Creative Work

So where do we go from here? Wagner is aware that schools alone can’t shoulder the burden for developing innovators—parents and employers have a role to play as well. Based on his interviews with innovators and their families, he identified ways in which parents can encourage the “spirit of play, passion, and purpose that are the wellsprings for creative work.” Some of these include allowing plenty of time for play and discovery; encouraging reading; providing toys that encourage imagination and invention; limiting screen time; and allowing kids to make and learn from mistakes.

Wagner also interviewed business leaders, including Tom Kelley from IDEO and Annmarie Neal from Cisco Systems, about how management practices need to change for young innovators to thrive in corporations. Many of the characteristics they described as being vital—such as the free flow of information up and down the organization and trust— are reminiscent of the characteristics of a learning organization as described by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline more than two decades ago.

The US Army is also aware of the need for a new organizational model. According to the report, “The Army Learning Concept for 2015,” “[T]he Army cannot risk failure through complacency, lack of imagination, or resistance to change.” The report recommends three steps for establishing a more effective learning model, including converting classroom experiences to collaborative problem-solving events; tailoring learning to the individual learner’s experience and competence level; and using a blended learning approach that incorporate simulations, gaming technology, and other technology-based instruction.

Staying the Course

Recognizing that change can take time, Wagner concludes the book with a letter to today’s young innovators, who may have to persevere in less-than optimal circumstances. To encourage them to stay the course, he quotes dancer and choreographer Martha Graham:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you will block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

The rest of us have an obligation, too, to give members of the next generation the tools they need to flourish. If we don’t, they will pay the price for our failure of imagination and foresight.

Janice Molloy is content director at Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.

The post Creating Tomorrow’s Innovators Today appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Unchecked and unmanaged, conflict can be negative and corrosive. But when the competition of ideas is suppressed, conformity stifles creativity. The challenge is to reduce the corrosion while stimulating the creativity.

Conflict has many sources:

• Disputes about inequities, broken promises, preferential treatment
• Competition for diminishing resources
• Fault lines of age, gender, race, craft, status, authority
• Expectations, especially when they are unclear or unmet

Fear sustains conflict, often the fear of failure. Employees who lack the competence or confidence to take on a challenging assignment will resist in order to avoid potential failure. Newly appointed managers with high potential but limited management experience will often precipitate conflict as a way of diverting attention from their own deficiencies.

Resolving conflict is seldom easy, but the failure to confront it is often more damaging than the conflict itself. The problem will persist, and the reluctant leader will be seen as timid or inept. This also holds true when we send the problem up the ladder of authority. Not only do we clog the ladder, we miss opportunities to learn how to manage effectively.

Every workplace should have a “conflict-management plan,” a prescribed and widely understood method for dealing with conflict. Most don’t; they depend on the experience and intuition of individual leaders. In the absence of a plan, here are some ideas that will help managers resolve conflict:

Stop Blaming. Pinpointing responsibility for past actions can lead to learning, but doing so can easily cross the boundary to blame, where accepting responsibility becomes difficult. Marilyn Paul, writing in The Systems ThinkerV8N1 (February 1997), reminds us, “Blaming leads to fear, which increases cover-ups and reduces the flow of information by stopping productive conversation.”

Manage Your Emotions and Ego. In Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities (John Wiley & Sons, 1999), Paul Stoltz suggests that the emotional “noise” of conflict interferes with its resolution:

“Filter out the internal static caused by anger and worry. These emotions cloud your judgment. Detach, in the Buddhist way. Acknowledge the emotion; it was appropriate for a few moments, so don’t fight it. But you need to put it away ‘on the shelf. You can still see it, but you control it rather than having it control you. Focus on the things that can really help you.”

When you’re steamed, conflict resolution tends to be more conflict than resolution. Turn the “noise” down as you try to hear what’s really going on.

And don’t let your ego get in the way. Bosses hate to admit when they’re not skilled at something; they think they look weak and ineffective. In coping with conflict, however, admitting a difficulty may be the smartest strategy, a sign of perceptive self-evaluation and, ironically, authentic confidence.

Deal with the Impact, not the Intentions.You may think you know why someone did something you didn’t like, but you may be wrong, so don’t attribute motives. Instead, deal with the impact and consequences of the actions.

Focus on Interests, not Staked Out Positions. People in conflict will come to you declaring their positions (, “I was only exercising my authority as team leader”) or (, “She doesn’t know what she’s doing”). Acknowledge those positions, but understand that they are not the path toward resolution.

Instead, get people to talk about underlying interests—their needs, desires, concerns, and fears. The positions people take in a conflict are driven by these interests. If an employee is not confident about his skills in a certain realm, his abiding interest in not making a fool of himself will lead to a public position to avoid taking on assignments in that area.

Repeat, Rephrase, Reflect. When someone would rather continue the conflict than resolve it, you need to be patient. One way to hold on is to repeat what they are saying, rephrase it in your own words to show you have heard and understood, and then invite the other person to join you as you reflect on the facts and circumstances of the case.

Here are five tactics for that conversation:

1. Explain the consequences and benefits of his actions.
2. Explain how his actions conflict with your values.
3. Explain how the long-term disadvantages outweigh short-term convenience.
4. Explain how his actions are hurting others.
5. Explain how he is eroding his professional reputation.

Skilled leaders can follow these guidelines to prevent conflict from damaging the relationships in the workplace.

Edward D. Miller is the managing director of The Newsroom Leadership Group, a coaching and consulting consortium that produces the popular APME Leadership Development Workshops. This article is adapted from “Managing Conflict,” part of Edward’s “Reflections on Leadership” series on newsroom management. Learn more at www.newsroomleadership.com /Reflections/s-redesign.html.

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