Helen Keller’s story is much more than an inspirational human interest story; it illustrates a pervasive dynamic that is rooted in an archetypal structure. The well-intentioned actions of her parents shifted the burden of responsibility for Helen’s welfare to them. Every problem or failure on Helen’s part brought the parents rushing to her aid. Helen learned that no matter what she did, her parents would accommodate her. And each incident reinforced her parents’ belief that she was indeed helpless. All three were caught in a system that was eroding Helen’s ability (and desire) to cope with the world and shifting the responsibility for her well-being to her parents.

The Structure

The basic structure of this archetype is shown in the diagram labeled “Shifting the Burden Template.” The archetype usually begins with a problem symptom that prompts someone to intervene and “solve” it. The solution (or solutions) that are obvious and immediately implementable usually relieve the problem symptom very quickly. But these symptomatic solutions have two specific negative effects. First, they divert attention away from the real or fundamental source of the problem. More subtly, symptomatic solutions cause the viability of the fundamental solution to deteriorate over time, reinforcing the perceived need for more of the symptomatic solution.

In the Helen Keller story, her parents’ intervention is the symptomatic solution, Helen’s failure to cope with real world is the problem symptom, the development of Helen’s own abilities to care for herself is the fundamental solution, and the side effect is that her parents assume increasing responsibility for her well-being. This particular type of shifting the burden structure, in which responsibility is shifted to a third party, is known as “Shifting the Burden to the Intervener.” Over time, the role of the intervener increases, until it becomes an essential part of the system. In Helen’s case, her parents’ actions reinforced the underdevelopment of her abilities and therefore strengthened their role as “protectors.”

Another very common side effect that occurs in “Shifting the Burden” situations is that the person may become “addicted” to the symptomatic solution. For example, a person who turns to alcohol or drugs to boost his self-esteem or help deal with stress may end up developing an alcohol or drug dependency.

Central vs. Local

The “Shifting the Burden” archetype and its variants — “Addiction” and “Shifting the Burden to the Intervener” — comprise perhaps the single most pervasive systems structure. The diagram labeled “Central Support vs. Branch Capability” illustrates a classic example of this dynamic.

A claims office in a local branch of a large insurance company is faced with a large, complex claim that requires more expertise than it possesses. The central office responds by sending out its corps of experts who take care of the complex claim while the branch office goes about its other, more routine business. Although the occurrence of large claims may be infrequent — making it hard to justify keeping such experts in every branch — over time the interventions can result in deteriorating branch capability.

The reason is that after a while, an implicit operating norm develops that says if a person wants to handle complex, technically challenging claims she has to either join the central office or move to a different firm. Gradually, the most talented people take either of the two options. Unless these people can be replaced by equally capable adjusters, the talent of the branch office gradually erodes, making it rely even more on central support. The cycle is reinforcing — as the central staff becomes better at intervening, the branch seeks their help more often.

Using the Archetype

Templates — causal loop diagrams that trace out generic dynamic structures — serve as a useful guide for mapping out archetypes. The basic “Shifting the Burden” Template serves as a starting point, but templates are not meant to be rigid structures in which we must “fit” a specific case. Tracing out the fundamental solution in the Central vs. Local situation, for example, requires more than a single variable — “Branch attempts to settle claims,” “Learning,” and “Branch ability” are all part of the fundamental solution.

In theory, any one of the four elements of the template — problem symptom, symptomatic solution, side effect, and fundamental solution — can help us identify a “Shifting the Burden” structure at work. Side effects, however, are usually very subtle and difficult to detect from inside the system. Solutions such as alcohol use, increased marketing, oil imports, or federal insurance are more readily identified, but there may not be complete agreement on whether they are “symptomatic” or “fundamental.” Identifying problem symptoms such as high stress, falling revenues, energy shortage, or bank failures (see “Table of Shifting the Burden Examples”) is probably the easiest way to begin filling out a “Shifting the Burden” template.

Keeping in mind that the “rightness” of a solution depends on one’s perspective, it can be helpful to ask whether we are seeing the situation from the parents’, Helen Keller’s, or Ann Sullivan’s point of view. Examining a problem or issue from these different viewpoints can help us understand why a “Shifting the Burden” archetype is operating and discover a solution that is fundamental, not symptomatic.

The post Shifting the Burden: The “Helen Keller” Loops appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Executives today are constantly seeking to predict how their organizations and the marketplace will behave. But because many leaders continue to use traditional reductionist methods to understand organizational behavior ones that focus more on symptoms than on causes of a company’s success they fail to gain real insight into how to build and sustain that success. The result is often reactive, crisis driven management with unanticipated side effects and unforeseen outcomes.

Contrary to this rigid perception of organizations as predictable machines, some management thinkers have come to view them as complex and evolving organisms. Accordingly, the tendency in the business world to define companies in terms of simple formulas and numerical results is slowly being replaced by the recognition that, to be effective in leading organizations, we must think of them in terms of the underlying structures and dynamic patterns of behavior that produce those results. In other words, we must begin to complement or replace linear thinking about how our businesses work with nonlinear approaches by applying the principles and tools of system dynamics.

System Dynamics Theory

Why do so many brilliant management strategies lead firms directly into decline or not produce the anticipated results?

In his classic 1961 book Industrial Dynamics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jay Forrester originated the ideas and methodology of system dynamics. He pointed out that the traditional approaches of the management sciences could not satisfactorily explain the causes of corporate growth or decline because they focused on simply explaining behavior. He believed that a system’s behavior is actually a product of its structure and that leaders should seek to identify where changes in structure might lead to significant, enduring improvements. They could then design organizational policies and processes that would lead to even greater success.

In order for managers to undertake this design process, Forrester advocated that they must analyze their organizations using dynamic models. For this purpose, he developed tools such as causal loop and stock and flow diagrams. These tools serve to illustrate the interconnected feedback loops that form a complex system. By identifying these feedback loops, management can figure out a system’s basic patterns of behavior, which include growth(caused by positive feedback), balance(caused by negative feedback), oscillations(caused by negative feedback combined with a time delay), and further complex interconnections.

Applied to organizations, this way of thinking challenges the notion of measuring success only through financial results. Because people can see financial results, they think they have control over them. But these results are actually produced by the organization’s underlying structures. These structures consist of:

• Organizational Architecture: the basic organizational design (such as the functions or divisions that the company includes) and the governance system (such as the planning and control system)
• Organizational Routines: standard operating procedures, decision making processes, behavioral archetypes
• Tangible and Intangible Resources: financial capital, human resources, buildings, machinery, land, brands
• Organizational Knowledge and Value Base: patents, core competencies, cultural beliefs, attitudes

When we focus on systemic structures and behavioral patterns, we gain the knowledge to design our organizations to produce desirable day-to-day results in areas such as profits, employee motivation, customer satisfaction, and so on (see, “Structure, Behavior, and Results”). The basic idea of the dynamic approach is that, although people shape their organizations, their behavior is ultimately influenced, and therefore limited, by the organizational framework in which they operate. Consequently, leadership means much more than optimizing businesses for short-term outcomes; it involves creating and cultivating structures and enabling organizational behaviors that guarantee the viability of the whole firm. Therefore, in order to manage their organizations successfully, leaders must realize that the best way to achieve sustainable results is not by relying only on what they see or measure but by:

• Describing and assessing the observable behavior of the system;
• Understanding the interdependencies between a system’s behavior and its underlying structure;
• Making assumptions about and modeling these interdependencies using system dynamics tools; and
• Finding and implementing policies to redesign the structure of the system in order to improve its performance.

Building on this system dynamics foundation, we propose to take leadership one step further, to what we call evolutionary leadership. The natural process of evolution offers a compelling model of how leaders might intentionally design and guide growth and balancing processes to create a viable organization. Evolutionary leadership involves the deliberate interplay of two management functions: strategic management (designing structures and processes that stimulate growth) and management control (guiding the external and internal factors that regulate growth). But before we explore the synergy between these two functions, we need to talk about how evolution works in nature and in organizations.

Evolutionary Theory in Organizations

Evolutionary theory has been the predominant paradigm in natural sciences for more than a century. Recently, theorists and practitioners in the social and management sciences have begun to adopt the ideas of evolutionary theory as a framework for describing and analyzing organizational development. The basic concept these pioneers have set forth is that processes of variation, selection, and retention as well as the struggle for scarce resources trigger the evolution of an organization.

Sociocultural evolution differs from biological evolution in that it allows for the intentional variation and selection of ideas. In this context, an organization’s fitness its “viability,” or ability to survive and thrive depends on how its decisions and strategies affect its position in product and resource markets and on its legitimacy from the point of view of important stakeholders. Chilean neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have deeply influenced thinking about viability with their theory that living systems are complex systems that can self-generate. A system dies when it loses its ability to renew itself. In the business world, a company that fails to renew itself by changing its strategic orientation and/or internal structure in response to shifting conditions will die. In contrast, a viable organization is one that can continually create its own future and there by assure its fitness in an evolutionary sense.

But how does a viable organism develop this capacity to self generate? According to Maturana and Varela, it happens when the organism

• Preserves its identify by repeatedly drawing system boundaries (i.e., defining what is “internal” and, “external”); and
• Maintains its ability to adapt to a changing environment.

Within ever-changing environments, external forces constantly threaten the existence of a species by altering its living space. To survive, a species must adapt to the changing conditions successfully without losing its identity. For example, in nature, many kinds of birds have adapted from natural to urban environments, but not all have managed to do so. In the banking industry, banks have profoundly shifted their strategies in the past decade in response to technology changes and new competitors. Many brick and mortar institutions have gone “virtual.” In doing so, they are able to maintain their existence by simultaneously preserving their identity while adapting their strategy and structure to a changing environment.

The key to an organization’s survival lies in mastering the trade-off between preserving its identity and adapting to a changing environment. Leaders do so through strategic thinking and acting, and by asking how they can maintain the fit of the organizational structure and its environment. There are two ways to achieve this goal:

• Maintain your identity and structure and avoid fundamental adaptations by changing the environment or searching for an appropriate new environment.
• Fundamentally change your structure and redefine your identity to reestablish a fit between the organization and its ever changing environment.

In reality, most organizations choose adaptation strategies that lie somewhere between these two extremes.

Organizations can only make alterations to the extent that their structures and resources make modifications possible. A firm has a good chance to successfully adapt to a changing environment when it has a strong learning capacity, that is, the ability to anticipate, influence, and quickly react to environmental changes, along with the ability to recognize, vary, and advance the underlying mechanisms of the learning process itself. For example, Shell Oil enhances its learning capacity by combining strategic planning and organizational learning through scenario planning. Scenario planning provides a mechanism for thinking in alternatives and making underlying assumptions explicit. This process reduces the company’s risk of encountering negative surprises and increases the speed with which it can implement changes. In short, organizational learning is a dynamic feedback process that can help organizations remain viable and therefore survive the external pressures of natural selection (see “The Evolutionary Cycle in Organizations”).

Growth and Balance

In addition to having the ability to adapt and learn, systems must be able to grow. Generally speaking, growing means incorporating more and more available resources like nutrients for a plant or natural or human resources for a company in order to become larger and larger. For a company, growth can mean an increase in market share or market value. But is growth in itself sufficient for survival? Clearly, the answer is no, because nothing grows forever. But where and what are the limits to growth?

In nature, reinforcing processes, such as population growth, are slowed by balancing processes, such as limited food supplies and the spread of diseases. If normal balancing processes aren’t blocked and assert themselves before a population reaches the limits of its habitat, that species can maintain a harmonious relationship with its environment. Such balancing processes ensure that the evolving system remains within a viable range of activities, in this case, healthy population density. Indeed, these balancing processes are more crucial than reinforcing processes, in that they keep the overall system alive. If, on the other hand, important balancing processes are missing, the species might become extinct by overtaxing the resources in its environment.

Are there similar natural boundaries to the development of social systems? The answer is yes. For example, a firm’s development can be limited by its production capacity, the size of its market, or the number of its competitors. The faster the company grows, the more rapidly it reaches these boundaries. From time to time, such limits to growth can change. For example, shifts in market conditions, such as those created by the Internet boom or the world oil crisis of the 1970s, can increase or decrease the time it takes an organization to reach a certain limit, unless people find ways to use their limited resources more efficiently.

We can say that an organization is evolving when its configuration, routines, tangible and intangible resources, knowledge, and value base develop in accordance with the changing external environment. Scientists now know that most healthy living systems follow a developmental path described as punctuated equilibrium periods of balanced growth that are interrupted by periods of exponential growth (see “The Stages of Organizational Evolution” on p. 4).

We regularly underestimate the tremendous power of exponential, or reinforcing, growth. We tend to assume that growth is linear and increases consistently over time. However, exponential growth happens much more precipitously. If we observe the two over a short period of time, exponential growth approximates linear growth. Over a longer period, however, the gap between the two becomes enormous.

Because human beings tend to perceive short term rather than long-term changes, we often reach the boundaries of exponential growth faster than we anticipated, often completely unexpectedly. We see this happen to companies when booming success is followed by equally dramatic failure. For example, cellular telephone companies experienced this phenomenon when they projected that their sales would continue to increase at a high level. But they eventually saturated the market and experienced declining sales. For this reason, unless we understand and anticipate the impact and boundaries of exponential growth, we will have a distorted perception of the evolutionary process, leading to unpleasant surprises and even to an existential crisis for the whole enterprise.

Organizations sustain themselves when they attain a balanced evolution off setting reinforcing growth action with timely balancing impulses. Sustaining this balance is the only way to ensure that companies remain in the realm of “sound growth” as they develop and that they don’t exceed the limits of their environment or resources. Balanced evolution plays an especially critical role during periods of exponential growth, when the organization is at a much higher risk of losing its viability than in periods of balanced growth, when the stakes aren’t as high.

For example, when a leap in growth occurs for a limited time(through external factors such as deregulation or new developments in technology, or through internal factors such as changes in top management or a merger and acquisition), leaders need to off set that growth by intentionally introducing balancing feedback loops. They can do so through control and coordination systems as well as productivity enhancement programs. These loops keep the organization’s growth from consuming the company.

Leadership in Organizational Evolution

But how can leaders help firms achieve the balanced growth they need to evolve? Through strategic management, leaders expand the business; through management control, they regulate the growth process, making sure that it remains within a sustainable range. Together, the two functions form a balanced leadership cycle for guiding and controlling the company’s evolution.

Strategic Management. Through strategic management, leaders cultivate the conditions for a company’s sustainable growth. Specifically, they perform the following three functions:

1. Set Direction. As mentioned earlier, leaders need to preserve or redefine the organization’s core identity and develop its structures in ways that lead to lasting success. They do so by communicating the company’s values and beliefs to employees and external stakeholders through shared vision and mission statements, and by strengthening internal rein forcing processes such as employee morale. They also formulate and implement strategy, not by detailing a map of action but rather by defining a corridor of learning opportunities.
2. Build Resources. Leaders need resources to support entrepreneurial activity. They can acquire them externally (such as machinery or capital) or develop them internally (such as people or policies). From a resource based perspective, only internally built resources can provide the basis for competitive advantages and above average returns, because they are specific to the company and therefore more difficult to imitate. On the other hand, resources that are available on the open market are available to all competitors.
3. Create Infrastructure. Leaders must not attempt to drive growth but rather to influence the factors that can block or support it. As such, they need to design an organizational context that eliminates barriers to company development (such as fear, distrust, centralized decision making, too tight control, and insufficient resources) and develop processes to promote learning (such as organizing flexible teams, supporting communities of practice, creating incentive systems for transferring knowledge, and creating learning spaces).

From a system dynamics perspective, these three functions combine to form a reinforcing process called the “Strategic Management Loop,” which strengthens the company’s growth(see “The Balanced Leadership Cycle”). But for the organization to remain viable, this reinforcing loop must be reined in by balancing processes, such as those that make up the “Management Control Loop.”

Management Control. Management control acts to bring equilibrium to the expanding system. To do so, leaders must perform three central functions:

1. Assure Internal Consistency of Infrastructure, Resources, and Direction. Leaders need to maintain the coherence of a system, particularly in large companies where management functions often get split among different organizational units or departments. To handle this specialization of functions, they must synchronize the development of strategy, resources, structure, and systems. They do so by working with others to develop a shared view of the system, which acts as a basis of companywide activity. However, this model is necessarily a subjective simplification of complex reality, so it can easily become selective and distorted.
2. Compensate for Selective Perception. Therefore, leaders and their teams must compensate for their selective perception by continually enriching their assumptions with relevant new information and challenging their mental models. For example, they might use management information and decision support systems, which provide comprehensive data and make blind spots of organizational perception visible. Management control thus leads to more informed decision making and better anticipation of the consequences of those decisions.
3. Appropriately Limit Developmental Dynamics. Designing appropriate limits on developmental dynamics involves two realms: content and time. Leaders must analyze whether the firm’s expansion exceeds the limits set by its internal conditions (for instance, the number of staff with expertise in certain areas) and the external forces of its environment (for example, the size of the market), thus endangering its boundaries. They also must regulate how fast the firm grows. They do so by pacing the speed of growth so it doesn’t over tax the current management capacity (resources and infrastructure) or environmental limits (size and growth of the market).

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Leaders put these functions into action using different diagnostic tools, such as the balanced score card and budgeting. The balanced scorecard helps them see the inter connections among the key measures of the business, for instance, between employee capacity and customer satisfaction, or between customer satisfaction and market share. Executives can then ensure that key measures stay in balance. Through the budgeting process, they translate strategic direction into financial objectives, setting the frame work for the allocation of resources and the utilization of infrastructures to assure internal consistency. By limiting and balancing developmental dynamics as well as by assuring internal consistency, these tools contribute to the fulfillment of the management control function in the balanced leadership cycle.

In order to avoid survival threatening oscillations between growth and decline, leaders need to take into account the time delays that occur before balancing impulses take effect. Working properly, the interplay of strategic management (growth actions) and management control (balancing impulses) assures a synergistic rhythm of a company’s evolution, a characteristic of particularly successful firms in dynamic environments.

The post Evolutionary Leadership: A Dynamic Approach to Managing Complexity appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

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

A World of Contradictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Collaborator to Contrarian

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

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

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

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

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

GROWING WORKER DISSATISFACTION

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

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

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

Creating Trust and Open Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem-Specific Approaches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Systemic Approaches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Opportunities in Limited Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Culture

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

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

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

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

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

The Complexity Factor

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

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

Culture: Ties That Bind

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Practice of Systems Discovery

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

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

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

The Role of Leaders

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

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

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

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

The post Changing Organizational Culture from a Liability to an Asset appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

As with many neighboring countries, rural poverty and chronic hunger are extensive in Ethiopia. Over 60 million people (more than 80 percent of the population) live below a poverty line of $2.00 a day. Of those, 24 million live on less than half a dollar a day. Each year around 10 million people are at risk of starvation.

I had the opportunity recently to travel in Ethiopia with colleagues from partner organizations involved in a project within the Sustainable Food Lab called New Business Models for Sustainable Trading Relationships. Through the New Business Models project, we are focusing on improving five food supply chains in different parts of Africa. In Ethiopia, we are working to improve and expand trading opportunities for farmers growing white pea beans (navy beans) in areas that are vulnerable to chronic hunger.

Why Pea Beans?

White pea beans are grown in Ethiopia during two seasons — the short rainy season in the spring and the longer rainy season in the summer. It is not a locally consumed crop; 90 percent of the harvest is sold for export. Over 40,000 farmers were engaged in this export crop during 2007, and participation is expanding rapidly due the recent increase in prices.

Ethiopia’s climate, while very dry and vulnerable to extended droughts, is relatively good for pea beans. This and other pulse crops (beans, lentils, and peas) are considered “pro poor.” They dry well, can be stored easily, and require less fertilizer than grains such as teff. These qualities make them attractive to farmers with poor access to reliable transportation and little cash for fertilizers.

A Good Market for the Farmers

Prices Ethiopian farmers receive for white pea beans have been sharply increasing — more than 300 percent over the last four years. Before 2005, prices were at or below the cost of production. Currently, farmers expect prices to continue rising and, as a result, are rapidly expanding production areas. Land in Ethiopia is not privately owned; individuals have “use rights” to land as long as they live there. Farmers in Ethiopia typically have use rights to about two hectares, with half planted for food crops and half for market crops. As prices have increased, farmers have moved more of the market area to pea bean production.

Farmers sell their pea beans to traders, and the ability to set prices (market power) is currently in the hands of the farmers. The profit margins for traders and distributors are staying constant, suggesting a rare situation where they don’t have as much market power. New exporters, including farmer-owned cooperatives, are rapidly entering the market. With pea bean prices high and rising, the current market is working well for farmers including those in some of the traditionally most food-insecure areas.

Dilemmas of a Boom Market

With market power in their hands, farmers in Ethiopia are not engaging with the exporters in any long-term contracts for white pea beans. Instead, many are banking on the prices increasing even more. Farmers see no reason for building long-term relationships with buyers while the market is booming. Some are even breaking contracts with exporters, in hopes of receiving the latest high price.

But markets tend to correct quickly when demand is short and prices are high, and only slowly when prices are low and supply is too high. There is a real possibility that the white pea bean price will overshoot and collapse. A dramatic “market correction” could mean a rapid drop in prices and incomes in these areas of high poverty and food insecurity. We talked with farmers who were doubling their planting area in beans for 2008, and because they are expecting prices to keep increasing, they are holding all sales to the end of the harvest season in hopes of capturing the highest price. If the harvest overshoots the demand, or the local price shoots past the international market causing the exporters to leave, the farmers may find a very rapid drop in price at the end of the season. For many families, the cash from sales at harvest time is critical to their ability to get through the year. When we see this boom market, some of the questions my colleagues and I ask include:

1. What are the limits of price increases? How would farmers know if they were in danger of overshooting the market?
2. If there is danger of overshooting the market, should (and can) we encourage the farmers to be in longer term contracts?
3. With farmers who are so new to business planning, what does it take for them to think about a five-year plan or to think about contracting as a form of risk management and market stability?

Potential Ingredients of New Business Models

Our conversations with actors all along the supply chain — from farmers to exporters — revealed a number of places where market problems could potentially be addressed through better business models developed in partnership with all the businesses involved.

Seeds. The current variety of pea beans grown in Ethiopia has been in use for over 40 years, but yields are relatively low and variability quite high. Several exporters want to introduce new white pea bean varieties to increase both the average size and consistency of size of the beans. NGOs have been looking at introducing new varieties as a way to increase yields and boost production.

When times are good, Ethiopian farmers traditionally keep a portion of the harvest as seed for the next season’s planting. But when farmers need cash, they will sell the pea beans they have saved for seed. Then at the next planting season they will have to take seeds as a loan from traders. This is a problem for introducing new varieties because as soon as the farmer sells all the beans back to the trader, they are mixed in with the existing varieties and the purity of the new strain is lost. Catholic Relief Services, one of the partners in the New Business Models project, has been supporting farm groups to adopt a new pea bean variety and develop seed businesses. But growing white pea beans for seed is a different kind of business from growing for sale into the food supply chain. Farmers need to hold the seed after harvest and sell to other farmers at the next planting time. Without shifts in business understanding and a level of economic security, many farmers growing seed may fall back on selling the harvest as food when they need money rather than holding it and working the longer-term seed business.

Quality. New pea bean varieties that increase the quality of the crop can also pose challenges when selling into a system of small-scale traders. One new variety promoted for its increased size, higher yield, and drought resistance has brought lower prices to farmers than the old variety. The difficulty lies in finding the right buyer in the very complex system of local traders.

A trader who buys the new, larger-sized pea beans will need to have access to (or create) a separate supply channel that pays a higher price. But traders have not been profiting from the rising prices of pea beans, and have little margin for creating new systems. So, the new variety simply gets mixed with the rest of the pea bean harvest.

The current system — where individual farmers sell to small traders who sell to brokers who sell to exporters — has little incentive for better quality. There is no way for a price signal or even information on better management practices to get through the chain. Neither farmers nor traders are rewarded with higher prices for producing or buying pea beans of uniform size or high nutritional quality.

Contracts. Large buyers like to establish contracts in the beginning of the growing season for supplying seed and buying the grain grown from that seed. But in this time of rising prices, the farmer cooperatives and unions sometimes break contracts and ask for the new higher market price, refusing to deliver at the contract price. These farmer groups do not value the risk-sharing aspect of contracts — that they won’t capture all the price increase if prices go up, but they are protected from large losses if prices go down.

Market Information. Though everyone on the production side is very excited and expects prices to continue to increase, the farmers, traders, and cooperative managers say little about the international market in which they all compete. They don’t talk about the possibility of shooting past a competitive price point and crashing the market. Better systems of market price information through the chain need to be developed.

There are real opportunities to help set up good systems of price signals and clear communication of quality needs and supporting practices in the Ethiopian communities that grow, buy, process, and export white pea beans. Our goal is to move from short-term thinking where either the farmers maximize price (leading to overshoot and collapse of the market) or the exporters minimize price (leaving the farmer with no profit to invest in farm, family, and community) to developing business models that link the longer-term goals and knowledge of the exporters and farmers. We hope to create a more stable and profitable market for all involved and build the base for sustainable livelihoods in rural Ethiopia.

Don Seville is co-director of the Sustainable Food Laboratory, a multi-stakeholder project with the mission of innovating ways to increase the sustainability of the mainstream food system. In addition, he is a facilitator and systems modeler with the Sustainability Institute. For the past 10 years, Don has worked in a number of public policy and corporate strategy arenas, including sustainable agriculture, diabetes and obesity, energy utility strategy, and forestry. This article originally appeared in the Sustainability Institute’s Spring 2008 Letter from SI, Volume 2 Issue 1. 

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Traditional Forms of Consulting

Over time, a number of different kinds of consulting assistance have developed, including expert advise on specific topics or methodologies, research (both internal and external), training, and coaching and facilitation. In most cases, these methods have a specific content and outcome as their objective, for example, a strategic or sales plan, identification of a target market, rating of customer or employee satisfaction, or a set of new skills to meet market demands. In these instances, the client assumes that the consultant has a better or correct answer, and the value of the engagement depends on the consultant’s successful delivery of this solution to the client.

In contrast, facilitation — and, in some cases, coaching — is quite different. A superb facilitator doesn’t lead a group to the decision he or she recommends; instead he or she helps a group function better together. The value of this kind of work comes from the facilitator’s ability to help generate effective group processes — not in his or her content expertise. In fact, the facilitator’s effectiveness diminishes dramatically if he or she tries to lead the group to a specific answer.

We are now seeing the need for enabling infrastructures —  infrastructures that enable groups with changing members to meet changing goals in the context of changing environments.

But this kind of facilitation usually doesn’t affect groups outside the one that is involved in the intervention. And in rapidly shifting situations, the processes that both the expert and the facilitator bring — while completely appropriate in specific instances where they are used knowledgeably — may actually undermine the group’s productivity by creating dependency on a third party. Thus, in addition to the traditional consulting activities described above, we are now seeing the need for services that provide enabling infrastructures — infrastructures that enable groups with changing members to meet changing goals in the context of changing environments.

Enabling Infrastructures

What are enabling infrastructures?

They are the support mechanisms that make it possible for — or enable — a group to be highly effective, even if the members of the group change. Enabling infrastructures are a combination of processes and tools organized in specific ways so that they support people individually and collectively in sustaining superior performance. Just as hollow bones, wings, and receptors that can sense updrafts (among other characteristics) enable a bird to fly, a combination of invisible processes, visible tools, and intentional organization enable a group to function at consistently high levels.

For example, within a company, enabling infrastructures might include mechanisms for mentoring, coaching, and peer support; a corporate culture that sustains transparency, open communication, and development of interpersonal skills; disciplined gathering, sharing, and responding to feedback from throughout the organization; and attention not only to financial health but also to emotional energy.

These processes, tools, and organizational types sustain groups as they gather information, remember, focus, create sense and meaning, project into the future, take action, get feedback, and learn — all functions that enable people to choose goals effectively and sustain high levels of performance in pursuit of their goals, both as individuals and in collaboration. Most organizations already have support for some or all of these activities, but take them for granted. Building enabling infrastructures requires conscious intent; active integration of processes and tools; careful organizational design; and a set of criteria against which to evaluate success and make changes where necessary.

In addition to the specific processes and practices that support the change process, ongoing coaching and support are vital parts of an enabling infrastructure. But most organizations don’t have the resources to provide rich support services to every person. This is a problem of scale. A longstanding human response to problems of scale is to build automated tools. In many organizations, an intranet connects everyone and provides a beginning platform for services that might support every person. A growing number of developers are creating social software — programs to facilitate interaction and collaboration.

Technology, with its ability to offer time- and effort-saving support to many people, can be a powerful part of an enabling infrastructure, but it isn’t enough; more than 50 percent of all installed software languishes from lack of use. Thus, the enhanced communication and information capabilities offered by social software must be complemented — and often, in fact, preceded — by other forms of training, coaching, and facilitation.

Some Examples in Practice

For instance, an R&D group in a global technology company faced frequent changes in the team’s membership, management structure, competitive landscape, and nature of the products they were developing. To create an infrastructure that would enable high levels of performance despite constant shifts, this group added to their staff meetings the disciplined process of reviewing summaries of feedback gathered from each person through the company’s intranet concerning a wide-ranging and constantly changing set of balanced scorecard areas — supported by ongoing coaching and facilitation. While in the beginning, both meeting facilitation and individual coaching was provided by an outside facilitator, the long-term goal was for other staff members to develop expertise in this arena. As carefully selected new members arrived, the group paid close attention to getting to know them and helping them understand “how we do things around here” — going slow by investing time and energy to insure that, when needed to, they could go fast.

The TEC organization is a pioneering example of the power of an enabling infrastructure to connect individuals and groups beyond traditional organizational boundaries. TEC (www.techonline.com) is an organization that brings together small groups (usually around 15 people) of entrepreneurs once a month to give each participant the benefit of advice from peers using a carefully designed facilitated process. Monthly meetings are supplemented with coaching for each group member and a host of online services.

In their meetings, TEC members are not focused on a single opportunity or problem but on the changing opportunities and problems that arise over time in each participant’s business. Group facilitators are carefully selected, receive ongoing training, and get feedback on their effectiveness. Participants are screened for quality and group fit.

Although enabling infrastructures often differ from organization to organization in the ways in which they are implemented, they share many goals and characteristics. For example, they are designed to facilitate group processes rather than support teams in reaching a specific goal. And they include careful selection of participants as well as an emphasis on the interaction among people and their tools. A successful enabling infrastructure builds in processes (prototyping, training, coaching, buddy-systems, feedback mechanisms, etc.) to support participant needs and sustain high levels of collaboration. Further, as processes tend to degrade over time, continuous feedback specifically on the quality of the group’s interactions helps to maintain quality and secure resources when required.

A New Focus

As shown above, when thinking about enabling infrastructures, we must include a combination of disciplined processes, individual coaching and training, and automated support with an intentional organizational design and focus. In the design process, I believe it will be helpful to use a series of criteria against which to judge our efforts; that is, the initiative must be continuous (not event-based), be based on multiple processes (not “just” learning or feedback), support every person (not only leaders or poor performers), and generate autonomy (not dependency on consultants).

In writing this article, I want to draw attention to enabling infrastructures as a new area in which consultants can have an impact by describing how it is different from traditional consulting services. By creating this distinction and point of focus, I invite systems thinkers to contribute to creating the systems, practices, experience, and body of literature that will help support the development of these needed services in a rich and humane way.

Mary Ann Allison (maa@allisongroup.com) is coauthor of The Complexity Advantage (McGrawHill Professional, 1999), which the Wall Street Journal described as having “the power to change a business in startling ways.” She is the chairman and chief cybernetics officer of the Allison Group, LLC, a New York–based international consulting firm.

The post Helping Groups to Function on Their Own: A New Form of Consulting appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The statistics are sobering: As documented by the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2000, an estimated 64 percent of U. S. adults were overweight or obese. Today, almost three times as many adolescents are overweight as in 1980. With these developments has come a rise in diabetes, heart diseases, and other chronic health problems; approximately 300,000 Americans die each year from factors related to being overweight, at a cost of around $100 billion.

Some groups argue that the solution to the problem lies in the realm of personal responsibility—Americans need to curb their appetites, keep themselves from giving into temptation, and exercise. But several news sources, including ABC anchorman Peter Jennings and Consumer Reports magazine, have gone beyond pointing the finger at individuals for their immoderation to delve into the social, economic, and political trends that make it easy for us to pack on the pounds. The findings may help explain why so many people find it difficult to maintain a healthy weight and hint at systemic solutions that would help all of us make wiser lifestyle choices.

Battle with the Bulge

Americans’ struggle to stay slim isn’t new, but health statistics show that, during the mid-1970s to early 1980s, something changed in our battle with the bulge. What occurred was likely the confluence of a number of different factors, among them:

• The Growth of Low-Cost Fast Food. The number of fast-food restaurants per capita doubled from 1972 to 1997
• Supersizing. According to a study by nutrition experts Marion Nestle and Lisa R. Young, “Portion sizes began to grow in the 1970s, rose sharply in the 1980s, and have continued in parallel with increasing body weights.” Vendors found that they could increase profits by charging slightly more for larger helpings.
• The Expansion of Food Choices. New candy, snack, cereal, soda, and other high-calorie food products have flooded the market in recent years. At the same time, the food industry has spent around $33 billion a year on advertising, especially to children.
• The Reduction in Smoking. According to “Finding Fault for the Fat” by Daniel Akst (The Boston Globe Magazine, December 7, 2003), “Giving up smoking was responsible for about a quarter of the increase in the number of overweight men over a decade and for a sixth of the increase in overweight women.”
• The Reliance on Cars. Especially in the suburbs, people now spend more of their time driving than walking.

According to some experts, these factors have been exacerbated by certain public-policy decisions. Federal farm subsidies have led to an over-abundance of corn, rice, soybeans, sugar, and wheat in this country.

These staples are then used to create processed foods and fatten hogs and cattle—the foods we should eat less of to maintain a healthy weight. Because of subsidies, the prices of products high in calories and saturated fat have risen much less quickly that those of fresh fruits and vegetables.

If the majority of Americans are struggling with weight issues, then clearly larger forces are at play than lack of individual resolve.

The USDA food pyramid is also under attack for leading Americans to bulk up on refined carbohydrates while rejecting all fats. Government officials thought the distinction between a good and bad fat and a good and bad carbohydrate was too complicated. They simplified the message and gave license to unbridled consumption of white bread, white rice, pasta, and potatoes—foods that the body metabolizes much more quickly than their whole-grain cousins—while preaching wholesale rejection of fats, even unsaturated fats, which are important for good health.

Even school officials have contributed to the problem through efforts to balance their budgets. To save money, some school districts have reduced or eliminated physical education classes. And with so-called “pouring contracts,” soft-drink makers pay fees to put vending machines in schools. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently called for a ban on soda in schools as part of an effort to battle childhood obesity.

Food for Thought

Whenever we see a pattern of behavior that escalates over time, we can be pretty sure that some strong reinforcing processes are at work. We all need to take responsibility for our own actions and choices. But if the majority of Americans are struggling with weight issues, then clearly larger forces are at play than lack of individual resolve. And unless American society finds ways to intervene in the escalating obesity problem, according to pediatric nutritionist Keith Thomas Ayoob, “This may be the first generation of kids [in the United States] that has a life span shorter than that of their parents.” That’s some sobering food for thought.

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In the West, we typically attribute success to individual factors: a person’s innate intelligence and drive to achieve. But why do some so-called geniuses rise to the top of their professions while others fail to have an impact? To answer this question, Gladwell delves beneath the conventional wisdom and finds that factors such as a person’s birth month or year, family background, or even random opportunities play more of a role in people’s achievement than we previously thought.

Birthday Bonanza

To illustrate his point, Gladwell cites a study of Canadian youth hockey players that reveals a surprising fact: In any elite group in this league, “40 percent will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December.” A similar trend, with a weighting toward different months, shows up in U. S. baseball leagues and European soccer teams. What explains this strange phenomenon?

It turns out that, in Canadian hockey, the cut-off date for eligibility for a certain age bracket is January 1. At age 10, kids born right after the cut-off date have an advantage over those born later in the year in terms of size, speed, and coordination. As a result, the older 10-year-olds are more frequently chosen to participate in elite leagues, receive better coaching, play with more skilled teammates, and participate in more games and practices. Over the long run, these “more talented” players are more likely to make it to the professional ranks.

This pattern of behavior describes what in systems parlance is known as a “Success to the Successful” dynamic (see “Success to the Older Child”). As Gladwell says, “The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still—and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn’t start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.”

SUCCESS TO THE OLDER CHILD

This same dynamic also plays out in education. Children who are on the older end of the spectrum tend to have an advantage over their younger peers that amplifies over time. In a study by economists Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey, older fourth graders scored significantly higher on a test of math and science skills than younger fourth graders. Gladwell comments, “That’s the difference between qualifying for a gifted program or not.” And once students land in gifted programs, they are likely to benefit from the best teaching, the highest-quality materials, the most up-to-date technology, and so on.

Inadvertent Privileging

So, what’s the solution to this inadvertent privileging of some over others? Gladwell suggests setting up two or three youth hockey leagues per age bracket, divided by months of birth. For the lower grades, school systems could create separate classes for kids born January through April, May through August, and September through December. Another solution would be to follow the Danish system of not assigning kids to different academic tracks until they are out of elementary school, when their maturity levels out.

The takeaway is that simple policy decisions often have powerful unintended consequences. By looking at patterns of behavior, we can identify those effects and find ways to improve the system. Breaking free from the “Success to the Successful” dynamic would create truly equal opportunities for all, to the benefit of all.

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

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Maybe part of the challenge lies in the concept of “resolution.” Flipping through MerriamWebster’s Collegiate Dictionary, I was surprised to see that the first current definition of “resolve” is “a: break up, separate” and “b: to reduce by analysis (~the problem into simple elements).” Not until the fifth definition did I find “to reach a firm decision about (~to get more sleep).” Followers of the late Russ Ackoff know that phrases such as “reduce by analysis” are red flags, signaling a potentially nonsystemic approach to problem solving.

In a recent post on his Idea Architects blog, Jeffrey Cufaude questioned our usual methods for trying to address enduring challenges. He wrote, “If you find yourself, either individually or organizationally, looking to re-solve the same issue repeatedly, you may need to direct your attention deeper. You likely need to think more systemically about why this same issue recurs. What beliefs, mindsets, policies, procedures, or practices help perpetuate the same behaviors or outcomes, the ones you want to change?”

With these perspectives in mind, I looked at one of my own longstanding resolutions: clearing out my email Inbox. By directing my attention deeper, can I “re-solve” the challenge once and for all? I turned to the systems thinking tool known as the “iceberg” for guidance.

Events, Patterns, Structure

Most change efforts focus on the event level. To address my overcrowded Inbox, I created a folder called “Old Inbox,” moved my backlog of emails there, and mentally committed to emptying my current Inbox each day. Problem solved, right?

Not exactly. I have done the same thing several years in a row. Clearly, a pattern has emerged, in that my determination to behave differently hasn’t stuck. As I recall from past years, for several days, I duly deleted emails as I dealt with them and filed those I needed for future reference. But, over time, the number of unsorted emails accumulated, until my clean Inbox was a distant memory.

Whenever we think we’ve addressed a problem only to have it recur again, we can be sure that it’s a structural issue. As Jeffrey Cufaude suggested, I needed to look at the beliefs, mindsets, policies, procedures, and practices that have undercut my efforts time and again.

When I reflected on my email practices in greater detail—including the thoughts and feelings that influence my actions—I realized that I experience what productivity expert David Allen calls the “out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome.” As shown in this loop, because of my fear of losing track of important items, I allow emails to accumulate in my Inbox. The growing number of emails reduces my ability to easily sort through them, which increases my stress and, in turn, my fear of misplacing something important.

Breaking the Vicious Cycle

The key, I decided, is to put systems in place to alleviate the fear and thus break the vicious cycle. The first thing I did was to experiment with a free, online to-do list (I use TeuxDeux; I’m sure there are others available). If an email includes a task I need to complete, I enter it on the list and move the email to a folder. Somehow, I feel more confident having the list online than in my planner.

Next, I followed a tip by David Allen. I created two folders that reside at the top of my email folder list: @Action and @Waiting For. Of course, I need to actively manage the content of these folders; otherwise, they’ll become just as clogged as my Inbox used to be.

Will these actions be enough to change the underlying structure that influences my email habits? Time will tell, but so far, so good. Now about that exercise regimen …

Janice Molloy is managing editor of The Systems Thinker.

The post Resolving to Stop Re-Solving appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The answer is … “it depends.” It depends on the underlying theory on which the current tools and methods are based. If our management practices are based on transient or situation-specific phenomena, they are likely to require revision whenever the circumstances change. If, on the other hand, they are based on a structural understanding, the situation may change, but the tools will still apply.

Where Are the Cows?

Barry Richmond of High Performance Systems [now I see systems] tells this story: “While perusing a well-known economic journal, I came across an article which described a model that had been constructed to forecast U. S. milk production. The model was of the Y=f(Xi) form [Y =Y0 + a1X1 + a2X2 +…+ anXn], where the Xi’s included such things as: last year’s milk production, interest rates, spending on cattle feed, GNP growth, and other macroeconomic factors. As the article detailed, the model performed quite well as a predictive device—at least in terms of its ability to ‘track history.’ The obvious thing about this model, that would bother both dairy farmers and people who were partial to operational specifications, is: ‘where’s the cows?!’ Simply stated, if you’ve got no cows, you’ve got no milk! Crude, but true.”

How does all this talk about cows relate to our vice president’s question? Well, imagine that an epidemic swept over the country and killed all the cows. What would the above model predict for next year’s milk production? The answer would most likely look a lot like the number for last year’s milk production, which is clearly incorrect. The model must be abandoned.

“Unfair,” you might say. “It’s not that the model is wrong. It’s just that the world has changed dramatically since the model was originally built and the changes must now be added.” But what has really changed? Yes, the cows are now dead, but the basic fact that milk comes from cows, and that without cows there can be no milk, is as true now as it was before the mass decimation. From a structural perspective, the nature of the world has not changed at all. The model was inadequate because it was based on situation-specific data that has now changed.

Structural Thinking

When we look at the world through a structural lens, we are interested in understanding how things actually work. We are less interested in correlational relationships and more interested in the causal structures that produce the observed behavior. This is not to say that nonstructural models aren’t valuable. Regression models, for example, have many applications and are useful for identifying correlation, explaining sources of variance, and extrapolating from historical data. Those models are inadequate, however, for gaining insight into how a system actually operates.

MILK PRODUCTION MODEL

If we wanted to create a structural representation of milk production, we would begin with the central accumulator “Milk Cows.” Milk production is determined by the number of cows and the amount of milk per cow. To create our hypothetical scenario of an epidemic, we would simply enter zero for the number of milk cows. The resulting annual milk production would also be zero.

If we were to look at the milk production model from a structural viewpoint, we would start with the basic fact that milk comes from cows. Therefore, cows are the central accumulator in the model—the number of cows accumulates over time, as cows are born, mature, and become milk cows (see “Milk Production Model”).

Depending on the scope of our study, we may be interested in representing the lifecycle of all cows, or just milk cows. In this case, we will focus our attention on the flow of cows from birth through maturity into the milk cow accumulator. The annual milk production is then determined by the number of milk cows at any one time and the amount of milk per cow. Of course, there are many other factors that affect milk production, such as food supplies, milk demand, and dairy farmers. These factors could also be added to our diagram in the form of additional accumulators and flows.

The resulting model can then be simulated on a computer to see how annual milk production behaves over time. To create our hypothetical epidemic scenario, for example, we would simply put zero for the stock of cows. In that event, the annual milk production would also equal zero. Because this model is tied to the structure of the system, not just historical data, it would not have to be thrown out even if all of the cows suddenly died.

Levels of Explanation

We live in the world of events. As a result, we encounter and navigate through the rapids of life on an event by-event basis. But this does not mean that we must act on each event as if it were an isolated occurrence. We can look at patterns of behavior over time and try to glean lessons from the past that will improve our ability to handle present situations. That is the purpose of forecasting models.

Forecasting models, like the economist’s milk production model described above, attempt to provide information about the future by looking at the past. But in many ways, managing on the basis of forecasts is a lot like trying to drive a car by looking through the rearview mirror. When does it work best? When the road is straight and there are no obstacles in the way. When does it fail? The rest of the time! When using a forecasting model, you only realize you have missed a turn once you see the cliff’s edge behind you and feel the sensation of free fall hit your stomach.

Forecasting provides very little insight into what actually produces the observed behavior. Consequently, it allows us to anticipate and react to changes only if they do not deviate too much from past behavior. Models, on the other hand, capture the structural forces at work and are therefore less situation-dependent. To come back to the vice president’s question, structural thinking provides a more stable basis of understanding that will last even through times of turbulent change.

Generic Thinking Skills

SALES GROWTH MODEL

If we replace the names of the variables in the “Milk Production Model” with those listed above, we can create a model that explores sales growth. The same generic resource development structure can be used to describe both processes.

If we begin to view the world through a structural perspective, another benefit emerges—the ability to transfer insight. This ability to see similar structures occurring in diverse settings is referred to as “generic thinking,” and the structures themselves are referred to as “generic structures.”

For example, if we take the “Milk Production Model” and substitute “hires” for “births,”, “trainees” for “calves,” and “sales managers” for “milk cows,” we can transform the milk cow model into a model that can be used to explore the structural forces that influence annual sales (see “Sales Growth Model”). The same generic resource development structure underlies both models. Although we may debate whether it takes longer to produce a milk cow or a sales manager, we can agree that the structure of both processes is fundamentally the same.

Daniel H. Kim is co-founder of Pegasus Communications, founding publisher of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and a consultant, facilitator, teacher, and public speaker committed to helping problem-solving organizations transform into learning organizations.

For further reading about structural thinking and the other critical thinking skills included under the systems thinking umbrella, see Barry Richmond’s The Thinking in Systems Thinking: Seven Essential Skills (Pegasus Communications, 2000).

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