We clearly need ways of improving our thought processes, especially in groups where finding a solution depends on people first reaching a common formulation of the problem. Dialogue, a discipline for collective learning and inquiry, can provide a means for developing such shared understanding. Proponents of dialogue claim it can help groups reach higher levels of consciousness, and thus to become more creative and effective. The uninitiated, however, may view dialogue as just one more oversold communication technology.

I believe that in addition to enhancing communication, dialogue holds considerable promise as a problem-formulation and problem-solving philosophy and technology. It is a necessary vehicle for understanding the cultures and subcultures in which we live and work, and organizational learning will ultimately depend upon such cultural understanding. Dialogue thus becomes a central element of any model of organizational transformation.

If dialogue is to become helpful to organizational processes, it must be seen as accessible to everyone. In order to demystify dialogue, therefore, I’d like to focus on the process — how to get started, and how and why dialogue often breaks down — while exploring some of the issues that groups must address if they are to create an effective dialogue process.

We clearly need ways of improving our thought processes, especially in groups where the solution depends on people reaching a common formulation of the problem.

Dialogue vs. Discussion

To understand the different phases of the dialogue process, I have found it helpful to draw a road map based on Bill Isaacs’ basic model (see “Ways of Talking Together,” p. 2). The diagram maps different forms of conversation in terms of two basic paths — dialogue and discussion.

One basic question that all groups must face before entering into dialogue is, “How do we know whether discussion and/or debate is more or less desirable then dialogue? Should we always go down the dialogue path?” I would argue that discussion/debate is a valid problem solving and decision-making process only if one can assume that the group members understand each other well enough to “talk the same language.” Such a state of shared understanding, however, probably cannot be achieved unless some form of dialogue has previously taken place. The danger in premature discussion is that the group may reach “false consensus”: members assume they mean the same thing in using certain terms, but only later discover subtle differences in meaning that have major consequences for action.

Dialogue, on the other hand, is a basic process for building common understanding. By letting go of disagreement, a group gradually builds a shared set of meanings that make much higher levels of mutual understanding and creative thinking possible. As we listen to ourselves and others, we begin to see the subtleties of how each member thinks and expresses meanings. In this process, we do not strive to convince each other, but instead try to build a common experience base that allows us to learn collectively. The more the group achieves such collective understanding, the easier it becomes to reach a decision, and the more likely it is that the decision will be implemented in the way the group meant it to be.

Getting Started

In the groups that I have observed, the facilitator started by arranging the setting and then describing the concept of dialogue. The goal is to give the group enough information to understand dialogue sufficiently to begin the conversation. Next, small group discussion and reflection is used to link dialogue to past experiences of “real communication” (see “Role of the Facilitator: Setting the Context,” p. 3). This introductory session has several objectives which frame the session and allow a more effective dialogue to occur:

• Make the members feel as equal as possible. Having the group sit in a circle neutralizes rank or status differences in the group, and conveys the sense that each person’s unique contribution is of equal value.
• Give everyone a sense of guaranteed “air time” to establish their identity in the group. Asking everyone to comment ensures that all participants will have a turn. In larger groups, not everyone may choose to speak, but each person has the opportunity to do so, and the expectation is that the group will take whatever time is necessary for that to happen.
• Set the task for the group. The group should understand that they have come together to explore the dialogue process and gain some understanding of it, not to make a decision or solve an external problem.
• Legitimize personal experiences. Early in the group’s life, members will primarily be concerned about themselves and their own feelings; hence, legitimizing personal experiences and drawing on these experiences is a good way to begin.

The length and frequency with which the group meets will depend upon the size of the group, the reason for getting together, and the constraints on members. The meetings that I participated in at MIT were generally one-and-a-half to two hours long and occurred at roughly two-to-three-week intervals.

After watching various groups go through a first meeting, I often wondered how the second meeting of each group would get going. I found that the best method was to start by asking everyone to comment on “where they were at” and to go around the circle with the expectation that everyone would speak. Again, what seems to be important is to legitimize “air time” for everyone and to imply tacitly that everyone should make a contribution to starting the meeting, even though the content of that contribution can be virtually anything (see “Check-In, Check-Out: A Tool for ‘Real’ Conversations,” May 1994).

WAYS OF TALKING TOGETHER

The facilitator has a choice about how much theoretical input to provide during a dialogue session. To determine what concepts to introduce when, I have drawn a road map of the dialogue process based on Bill Isaacs’ model, which describes conversation in terms of two basic paths — dialogue and discussion.

Deeper Listening

As a conversation develops in the group, there inevitably comes a point where we sense some form of disconfirmation. Our point is not understood, or we face disagreement, challenge, or attack. At that moment, we usually respond with anxiety and/or anger, though we may be barely aware of it. Our first choice, then, is whether to allow that feeling to surface and trust that it is legitimate.

As we become more aware of these choices, we also become aware of the possibility that the feeling might have been triggered by our perception of what the others in the group did, and that these perceptions could be incorrect. Before we give in to anxiety and/or anger, therefore, we must determine whether we accurately interpreted the data. Were we, in fact, being challenged or attacked?

This moment is critical. As we become more reflective, we begin to realize how much our initial perceptions can be colored by expectations based on our cultural learning and past experiences. We do not always accurately perceive what is “out there.” What we perceive is often based on our needs, expectations, projections, and, most of all, our culturally learned assumptions and categories of thought. Thus the first challenge of really listening to others is to identify the distortions and bias that filter our own cognitive processes. We have to learn to listen to ourselves before we can really understand others. Such internal listening is, of course, especially difficult if one is in the midst of an active, task-oriented discussion. Dialogue, however, opens up the space for such reflection to occur.

Once we realize that our perception itself may not be accurate, we face a second, more fundamental choice — whether actively to explore our perception by asking what the person really meant, explaining ourselves further, or in some other way focusing specifically on the person who produced the disconfirming event. As we have all experienced, choosing to confront the situation immediately can quickly polarize the conversation around a few people and a few issues.

An alternative choice is to “suspend” our feelings to see what more will come up from ourselves and from others. What this means in the group is that when I am upset by what someone else says, I have a genuine choice between (1) voicing my reaction and (2) letting the matter go by suspending my own reaction. Suspending assumptions is particularly difficult if we perceive that our point has been misunderstood or misinterpreted. Nevertheless, I have found repeatedly that if I suspend my assumption, I find that further conversation clarifies the issue and that my own interpretation of what was going on is validated or changed without my having actively to intervene.

When a number of members of the group begin to suspend their own reactions, the group begins to go down the left-hand path toward dialogue. In contrast, when a number of members choose to react by immediately disagreeing, elaborating, questioning, or otherwise focusing on a particular trigger that set them off, the group goes down the path of discussion and eventually gets mired in unproductive debate.

Suspending assumptions allows for reflection, which is very similar to the emphasis in group dynamics training on observing the “here and now.” Bill Isaacs suggests that what we need is proprioception — attention to and living in the moment. Ultimately, dialogue helps us achieve a state in which we know our thoughts at the moment we have them. Whether proprioception is psychologically possible is debatable, but the basic idea is to shorten the internal feedback loop as much as possible. As a result, we can become conscious of how much our thoughts and perceptions are a function of both our past learning and the immediate events that trigger it. This learning is difficult at best, yet it lies at the heart of the ability to enter dialogue.

Group Dynamics

The dynamics of “building the group” occur parallel to the process of conducting the dialogue. Issues of identity, role, influence, group goals, norms of openness and intimacy, and questions of authority all have to be addressed, though much of this occurs implicitly rather than explicitly. The group usually displays all of the classical issues that occur around authority vis-à-vis the facilitator: Will the facilitator tell us what to do? Will we do what we are told? Does the facilitator have the answers and is withholding them, or is he or she exploring along with the rest of us? At what point can we function without the facilitator?

Issues of group growth and development have to be dealt with if they interfere with or confuse the dialogue process. The facilitator should therefore be skilled in group facilitation, so that the issues can be properly sorted into two categories: those that have to do with the development of the dialogue, and those that have to do with the development of the group. In my own experience, the dialogue process speeds up the development of the group and should therefore be the primary driving process in each meeting. A major reason for this acceleration is that dialogue creates psychological safety and thus allows individual and group change to occur, assuming that some motivation to change is already present (see “Containment”).

The group may initially experience dialogue as a detour from or a slowing down of problem solving. But real change does not happen until people feel psychologically safe, and the implicit or explicit norms that are articulated in a dialogue session provide that safety by giving people both a sense of direction and a sense that the dangerous aspects of interaction will be contained. If the group can work on the task or problem using the dialogue format, it should be able to reach a valid level of communication much faster.

Task vs. Process

Once a group experiences dialogue, the process tends to feed on itself. In several cases, I have been in groups that chose to stay in a circle and continue in a dialogue mode even as they tackled concrete tasks with time limits. I would hypothesize, however, that unless a dialogue group is formed specifically for the purpose of learning about itself, it eventually needs some other larger purpose to sustain itself. Continuing to meet in a dialogue format probably does not work once members have mastered the basic skills.The core task or ultimate problem, then, is likely to be the reason the group met in the first place.

Dialogue is, by definition, a process that has meaning only in a group.

The best way to think about dialogue is as a group process that arises initially out of the individual participants’ personal skills or attitudes. Dialogue is, by definition, a process that has meaning only in a group. Several people have to collaborate with each other for dialogue to occur. But this collaboration rests on individual choice, based on a certain attitude toward how to get the most out of a conversation and on certain skills of reflection and suspension. Once the group has gained those attitudes and skills collectively, it is possible to have even highly time-sensitive problem solving meetings in a dialogue format.

Most people have a general sense of what dialogue is about and have experienced versions of it in their past relationships. Therefore, even in a problem-solving meeting, a facilitator may suggest that the group experiment with dialogue. In my own experience, I have found it best to introduce early on in a meeting the idea that there are always assumptions behind our comments and perceptions, and that our problem-solving process will be improved if we get in touch with these assumptions. Consequently, if the conversation turns into too much of a discussion or debate, I can legitimately raise the question of whether or not the disagreement is based on different assumptions, and then explore those assumptions explicitly. Continually focusing the group on the cognitive categories and underlying assumptions of conversation is, from this point of view, the central role of the facilitator.

One of the ultimate tests of the importance of dialogue will be whether or not difficult, conflict-ridden problems can be handled better in groups that have learned to function in a dialogue mode. Because severe conflicts are almost always the result of cultural or subcultural differences, I would assume that initial dialogue in some form will always be necessary. Dialogue cannot force the conflicting groups into the room together, but once they are there, it holds promise for finding the common ground needed to resolve the conflicts.

Edgar H. Schein is Sloan Fellows professor of management emeritus and a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management. He chairs the board of the MIT Organizational Learning Center and is the author of numerous books on organization development, such as Process Consultation, Vol. 1 and 2 (Addison-Wesley, 1987, 1988).

This article is edited from “On Dialogue, Culture, and Organizational Learning” by Edgar H. Schein, which appeared in the Autumn 1993 issue of Organizational Dynamics. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, American Management Association, New York, NY. © 1993.All rights reserved.

The post The Process of Dialogue: Creating Effective Communication appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Network thinking has brought about vast improvements in efficiency in all these sectors. But while such ideas have had an enormous impact on technology, we have yet to see comparable gains in understanding social systems. Social networking software and websites such as MySpace claim to provide a meaningful way to bring people together from around the world in virtual communities. However, these Internet-based solutions have gained a negative reputation for harboring child predators and others who take advantage of the web’s anonymity to deceive their victims. The purpose of this article is to introduce the history, scientific theory, and research behind how true value is created in social networks — and to provide ideas for starting to leverage this knowledge for the good of organizations and beyond.

Not in My Space!

Over the past few years, social networking websites have exploded seemingly out of nowhere. MySpace, which was founded less than four years ago, now has more than 100 million users. PC Magazine defines social networking as “a web site that provides a virtual community for people interested in a subject. It provides a way for members to communicate by voice, chat, instant message, videoconference and blogs.” The use of social networking software to form relationships online is a logical extension of the Internet’s communication capabilities. All indicators suggest that social networking providers will continue to flourish, even as new technologies emerge that improve virtual connections, such as Web 2.0 (web-based communities and hosted services that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users) and telepresence services.

But the popularity of existing services is being shadowed by concerns of child predation and social deception. Four families are suing MySpace after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met through the site. Congress introduced the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006, and although it did not pass the Senate, it is likely to be considered again by the 110th Congress.

Beyond concern over legal liability for the actions of people who use their services for criminal purposes, technology companies need to take into account their brand image. Over the long run, those that allow antisocial behavior to flourish — even if it’s through benign neglect — will likely be less successful than those who promote social well-being. In an ever-more crowded marketplace, the adoption of socially responsible technologies will become an important new competitive differentiator.

While technologies such as MySpace claim to be novel social networking solutions, the science of studying and understanding social networks has been developing for at least 100 years. By applying this rich body of work to the business world, I have found that value is created in collaborative social systems that run across a company’s traditional organizational chart. Enterprises that learn how to create an environment that accelerates the functioning of such networks through mutual acceptance, respect, and co-inspiration will realize large gains in performance and the well-being of their workforce. While current social networking technologies are likely to become passé as new technologies emerge, our understanding of social networks will become a core competency for organizations that find themselves in an integrated global economy.

Social Network Mapping vs. Social Network Analysis

The father of social network measurement was J. L. Moreno, M. D., an Austrian gestalt psychiatrist who, in 1915, began charting social relations by drawing “sociograms” that showed group relations as line drawings connecting people. In developing “sociometry,” now referred to as social network mapping, Moreno sought to study social groups in order to recognize and acknowledge the value of each person. Moreno was influenced by George Herbert Mead, who developed qualitative research methods, and by the American educator John Dewey. Dewey saw individuals as inseparable from their social context, just as society is meaningless apart from its realization in the lives of its individual members. Additionally, just as Dewey influenced W. E. Deming and Walter Shewhart in the creation of continuous quality improvement processes, he also influenced Moreno to use social measurement as an action science to continuously improve social well-being.

Sociologists and anthropologists use social network measurement to uncover the overall structure of a social system. In this context, a system can be small, like a family or a manufacturing line, or large, like trade balances among nations. With this knowledge of the interrelationships and social rules in a given culture, social scientists can better understand, for instance, the spread of HIV, with the goal of stopping the epidemic.

Analysis is defined as the decomposition of the whole, so social network analysis, as practiced today, generally focuses on individuals and their roles. For example, someone with many more social connections than others might be described as a “hub.” In contrast, I have followed the path of what I call social action research in order to understand the science of social systems and how human communities generate social, biological, and financial well-being. Instead of observing a network from the outside, following Moreno’s methodology, social action researchers invite everyone in a group to join them in reflecting on their daily actions by employing qualitative research practices, such as participant observation and unstructured interviews, to generate survey questions.

This process is useful in at least two ways. First, managers can refer to the maps when creating strategies and planning work processes to ensure that they enhance rather than detract from the working of the social networks involved. Second, when employees are asked for their views on how they are creating value for their organization, they feel respected, important, and inspired to perform at an even higher level.

Construction of Social Network Graphs

In business, the survey questions employed in social action research typically refer to the creation of value. For example, the following questions were used in studies at Hewlett Packard:

“With whom have you collaborated on the_______________?”

• reduction of quality escalations in inkjet supplies
• ink-elastomer chemical interaction studies
• development of HP’s first digital projector
• creation of product detection software
• sale of computers and servers

The quality of social network data depends on the relevance, timeliness, and validity of the questions used. The survey is designed for individuals to complete. It includes the name of the person completing the survey, the date, the question, and a table for them to identify those with whom they collaborate, how often they collaborate, and the role or location of those they have identified. As surveys are returned, the individuals named are also sent the same survey to complete. This process continues until no new people have been identified (snowball sampling) or until the group decides to suspend the surveying.

The collected data is then compiled. Usually, a social network with a given kind of interaction among a group of people is graphically depicted by a number of points connected by lines. In traditional graphs, each point is called a “node,” representing a person, and each line is called a “connection,” representing relationships between people. In social action research, dots are replaced with the names of people. The lines also have arrows indicating who identified whom as a network member. Finally, each connection can be associated with a value, which usually is the frequency of contact or interaction.

In this example, the social network data shows a relationship between Dennis, Maria, and Yan. Dennis and Maria, and Maria and Yan, have the strongest connections because they meet most frequently and share reciprocal interactions. At the same time, the relationship between Dennis and Yan is the weakest, because it is unidirectional and less frequent.

But we must be careful in making sweeping generalizations using social network graphs. For example, there can be value in weak ties. In our example, it could be that Dennis had valuable information that Yan needed to complete a work assignment. Our explanations of social network graphs must be validated by those involved in the study, which is again why the qualitative research is so important in preceding the social network survey.

Study of Social Network Graphs

Once the social network graph is constructed, it is shared with those participating in the study. This is a reflective process, as those involved in the network validate the quality of the data and in turn respond to its findings. Perhaps the study reveals that an important position is missing from the network, and participants take action to “fill the hole.” In response to another study, employees may choose to expand the number of connections within a social network; for example, a company that becomes more customer centered by shifting the structure of their social networks to include customers.

Following are some of the traditional features of social network graphics that can offer valuable information about their functioning and sources of leverage for change:

Density

Density is a measure of overall connectedness. It is arrived at by dividing the number of ties by the number of possible ties between people.

In this example, there are 5 ties between Maria, Peter, Dennis, and Katy out of 12 possible ties, so the density of this social network is .42. Density measures fall between 0 and 1.0, with 1.0 representing the greatest density or connectedness. The higher the density, the stronger the connections between team members. A low density score could potentially show conflict in the group or structural barriers that prevent members from communicating effectively.

Centrality

Centrality is considered a measure of power, importance, or influence in social networks. It is derived simply by counting the number of connections a person has. In this example, Maria is the most “central” person in the network, followed by Chris and Darla, with Dennis, Katy, and Peter being the least central. Here again, we would rely on the qualitative interviews to learn more about Maria’s role. In some studies, we have found that the person in Maria’s position is a program manager that everyone depends on to keep them on track. Perhaps Maria is the supervisor of Dennis, Katy, and Darla and peer of Chris and Peter. In yet another context, Maria might be the creator of a rumor that is circulating about the office.

Structural Holes

When I use social network mapping as a learning process, those in the network construct and examine the maps themselves. Participants commonly observe structural holes — individuals missing from the diagram who have the potential to contribute to the network’s performance. In one case, a manager was called in to mitigate conflicts between Hewlett-Packard and a plastics supplier. He witnessed long, grueling meetings between the two organizations where little if anything was accomplished. The manager opened his journal and drew this picture representing the engineers in his organization and in the vendor’s organization:

His sociogram showed connections within the organizations but more importantly showed structural holes between the two organizations. With engineers from both organizations present, the manager drew connections for all to see, suggesting that team members from both organizations should work as one team. As the age-old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, quite literally the picture was worth thousands of dollars. Engineers from the two companies immediately began to fill the “holes” by collaborating, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next year.

Social Systems and Living Systems

I have presented a number of traditional social network concepts. When looking at social network graphics, it is important to realize that, like photographs, they are snapshots of how social networks have formed. Social networks are constantly changing, and our greatest leverage lies in understanding them from a perspective of living systems. As currently practiced by many consultants using tools such as those described above, social network analysis is the separation of a social network into its component parts. It attempts to describe or make comments about an individual’s role within a network. So, going back to the social network in which Maria played a central role, an analysis might conclude that Dennis is an isolated “node” in the network and should be more of a team player. Or from a knowledge management perspective, Maria may be seen as a “hub” in the network and therefore should be promoted.

This approach can have value, but to me, it doesn’t go far enough in generating a systemic understanding of social networks. I have found that insights from the study of living systems and cognition provide the philosophical explanations for a deep understanding of social systems.

In 1951, social scientist Gregory Bateson reconceived psychiatric practices by describing a way of viewing the world that shifted from focusing on:

1. parts to the whole,
2. categorization to integration,
3. the individual to interactions,
4. systems outside the observer to systems that include the observer.

This shift was an initial step in leading us away from analysis and separation to systems thinking. But from my perspective, the most profound contributors to understanding social systems are the co-founders of the Matriztic Institute, Dr. Humberto Maturana and Professor Ximena Davila. They explain in great detail how human beings are born to collaborate and how we can move from a culture of pain and suffering to a culture of well-being through what they describe as “liberating conversations.” To me, this perspective offers new questions and insights into the value and practice of studying social networks. Based on their work, we begin our research with a simple statement: “Everything that is said is said by an observer.” We follow up with a fundamental question: “How do I do what I do as an observer of systems?”

This last question in particular is vital, because it brings forth the role of the observer in the social system they are reflecting upon. When someone interested in a particular network realizes that, whatever they do to the network, they do to themselves, too, they are likely to take socially responsible actions. In studying the work of Maturana and Davila, we also learn that social systems are dynamic and that anything that occurs in the social system is determined by its underlying structure.

Studying social systems is an important departure for organizations. Since the late 1800s, we have been accustomed to see organizations as machines. In the Industrial Age, the physical sciences became the frame of reference for guiding economic growth. Using scientific tools of separation, specialization, analysis, and reductionism, a new image of organizations emerged: the organizational, or org, chart. The org chart depicts hierarchy and areas of specialization. Although some still believe that organizations function based on the structures shown in these charts, many people are finding that the life sciences lead to a more valid understanding of social systems in organizations today. This shift in perspective raises new possibilities by leveraging the concepts of self-organization, collaboration, inter- and intra-organizational social networks, and multidimensionality.

Self-Organization

Are social networks static or dynamic? This is not a trivial question. Managing an organization’s effectiveness will depend on the answer to this question. If you believe that social networks are static, you will presume that relationships are always the same. If, however, you believe that social networks are dynamic, you will want to continually refresh your assumptions about how value is being created. Social action research or practices such as management by walking around become critical learning processes for understanding collective knowledge.

By mapping social networks over time, I have found that they are dynamic and constantly changing, even if the members stay the same. People self-organize as employees create new connections, weaken old connections, and so on in response to new opportunities. Self-organization is an important systemic principle, because performance and productivity are maximized as those within the social network have the freedom to organize their own relationships. You might think of self-organization as the antithesis of bureaucracy. Research has shown that the greatest reward for employees is making a timely contribution to their company, and self-organization is the group process for doing so. (See illustration above.)

Collaboration

Humans are social beings. We can pick out a familiar face among hundreds of pedestrians. At a very early age, infants recognize facial patterns. Biologically, facial recognition stimulates a neural network in the amygdala region of the mid-brain, which is also the center of our emotions. Neuroscientists claim that more than 90 percent of the information we receive from others we obtain through facial expression and body language. Unlike any other species, humans are neurologically wired to be social.

As Maturana and Davila have described, we humans are loving beings and are biologically structured to collaborate. This relationship of mutual acceptance expanded as humans formed groups to survive. Through this innate social behavior, we can accomplish tasks without having to spend time deciding on what group structure is most fitting. While companies spend a fortune on organizing their workforce, social systems require no funding or intervening because of their biological nature.

Social network structure varies. Some networks are based on command and control or dominant and obedient relationships. Other networks are distributive in nature, such as the rumor mill that exists in most organizations. Collaborative social networks are social systems in which everyone is accepted as a legitimate member by everyone else. They are cohesive and natural, and are the source of social capital or optimal group productivity. These systems are also the source of value creation, innovation, and performance breakthrough. This illustration shows optimal cohesion, as every member of the social network is connected to every other member in a seamless support system they created for a man with disabilities.

Whenever I have studied how value is created in the workplace, I have mapped collaborative social systems. In our expanding global economy, the performance challenge for executives is to create the conditions for collaboration to occur. Research has shown this can be done by (1) giving employees the freedom to organize themselves and (2) generating reflective conversations on how value is created.

Inter- and Intra-Organizational Social Networks

The theory that underlies most org charts is that work flows from the top of the organization down through the ranks. However, studies of how work actually gets done have consistently shown that it happens in social systems that span the organizational chart horizontally, not vertically. For a department in a large enterprise, I have plotted the collaborative social networks across the organization chart, shown above in blue shading.

The boundaries of value-creating social systems do not end within the organization. I have also studied collaboration in social systems that include two or more organizations. The rejection of plastics created by outside vendors for Hewlett-Packard’s inkjet cartridges was completely eliminated during the most aggressive inkjet cartridge launch in HP’s history, in part due to a collaborative network that included four Hewlett-Packard sites, two formerly competitive plastic suppliers, and subject matter experts. These parties worked closely in developing the use of transducers in plastic injection molding processes.

In another instance, in Puerto Rico, a network of HP engineers and engineers from their supplier Nypro joined forces on a project that refurbished worn manufacturing line parts instead of throwing them into local landfills. This network of collaboration had multiple effects. First, the initiative created social well-being by giving participants the freedom to innovate and the joy of accomplishment. Second, it generated biological well-being, as the factory no longer dumped heavy metals into Puerto Rico’s already taxed landfill waste dumps. Finally, it led to financial wellbeing by saving HP hundreds of thousands of dollars. You might recognize this example as the one cited earlier in the article in which the manager identified structural holes and asked engineers from both organizations to collaborate. In doing so, they saved HP more than $700,000.

Multidimensionality

As social beings, we coordinate our actions in conversations within closed systems that include other business units, vendors, universities, family, and friends in a continuously changing present. This statement challenges our traditional thoughts of the org chart network, isolated internally and externally, as the source of value creation. In his 1982 book, Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming drew an alternative value-production system as a network of suppliers->producers->consumers. In my work, I have found that our networks are multidimensional; for example, in the HP example cited above, those in the social system generated business results but also social and biological well-being.

The illustration at the bottom of page 5 shows the social system of people supporting a man with disabilities who grew up in a state institution. By providing this man with the support he needed to have a job, the network brought his productivity to 100 percent with perfect quality. In doing so, they improved his wages from $0 at the state institution to more than $1,500/month plus benefits, enabling him to leave welfare and public assistance. This shift allowed the man to move from the institution, which cost tax-payers $80,000/year, to his own community, where he became a taxpayer and owned his own condominium. His case is a prime example of how to leverage living, multidimensional, collaborative systems and, in the process, create value and well-being.

Systems Laws

The work of the Matriztic Institute goes a step further to describe systemic laws that can expand our understanding and application of social systems thinking.

Structural Determination

Imagine going to the stadium to watch your favorite sports team, or perhaps you are at a concert hall getting ready to listen to a symphony. You anticipate an extraordinary performance and then learn that an exemplary player has been replaced. Your immediate response may be incredulity. You may think, “How could they perform without this person?” If you do not find an adequate explanation for your question or if you aren’t satisfied with the substitute, you may become disappointed and critical.

Your disappointment in this instance stems from an innate understanding of the law of structural determination. As explained by Maturana and Davila, structural determination states that everything that occurs in a system is determined by the system’s structure. Engineers will immediately understand this concept. They are experts at developing new products as a system and making sure that the interconnected parts are structurally compatible. The same law can be applied to social systems, such as a team, an orchestra, or a workplace. In these settings, performance is determined by the structure of the social network. If critical people are missing, performance will suffer. If there is a lack of collaboration among members of the network, group productivity will diminish, and cost will increase. Emotions will turn from excitement to disappointment as participants and other stakeholders realize that the output may not be of the caliber they had anticipated.

These things often occur in the workplace through restructuring, reorganization, and voluntary workforce reductions. In one case, I mapped a social network that was generating new IT products. First one person and then two others were assigned new roles in the company. The executive in charge of the new IT products noticed a slowing of performance, and it took those remaining in the network months to reorganize their efforts. By understanding social network mapping and the systemic law of structural determination, executives can anticipate how changes to a network will affect its efficiency and overall performance.

Conservation

To exist in the rapidly growing global economy, companies are told they need to keep up with the competitive environment they find themselves in. New management concepts and abstractions are continually emerging to guide organizations through these complex, dynamic challenges. To capitalize on these innovative methodologies and perspectives, managers are told they must promote an internal culture of change. But the management literature tends to focus on new concepts instead of understanding how work is done.

I propose that managers must learn how value is created in our networked world. Although change is inevitable, it is equally important to conserve those practices that improve efficiency, value creation, and well-being in collaborative social systems. When initiatives inadvertently disrupt the network of relationships through which work is accomplished, they can backfire and leave the company even more vulnerable to outside pressures than before.

Research has shown that value is created in dynamic, collaborative social systems that connect people across business units, companies, continents, and cultures. To be successful in the global economy, organizations will need to develop new practices based on understanding social systems.

Although change is inevitable, it is equally important to conserve those practices that improve efficiency, value creation, and well-being in collaborative social systems.

Unfortunately, technological developments labeled as social networking can actually obscure our understanding.

The work of Humberto Maturana and Ximena Davila expands our knowledge of social systems. This knowledge will have positive effects on organizations of all kinds. First, by developing practices that support self-organizing social systems, managers will improve organizational efficiencies through productivity gains. Second, because the quality of our social systems translates to the quality of our knowledge, reflective studies of social systems will lead to financial, social, and biological well-being. Finally, as we reflect on our social nature, we discover that we too live our lives in social networks. Through this insight, we become socially responsible and generate greater social well-being.

Dennis Sandow is president of Reflexus Company, a research company studying performance and knowledge creation in collaborative social systems. Prior to starting Reflexus, Dennis conducted research on social networks and social capital at the University of Oregon. Dennis is a research member of the Society for Organizational Learning and lives in Oregon with his wife and two adult children.

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Descending climbers were scattered along the upper reaches of the mountain when a powerful storm hit. Some people became incapacitated near the summit; others managed to get to within a few hundred yards of their tents at Camp Four (26,100 feet) before becoming lost in the whiteout conditions. Eight climbers would die over the next day and a half. Others would suffer severe frostbite and disability from their Everest summit attempts.

The 1996 Everest climbing season was the deadliest ever in the mountain’s history. The key events of the May 1996 tragedies have been analyzed thoroughly, both from a sensationalist perspective for the general public, and from a more analytical perspective by the climbing community. Now that some time for reflection has passed, we can view the The 1996 Everest climbing season was the deadliest ever in the mountain’s history. The key events of the May 1996 tragedies have been analyzed thoroughly, both from a sensationalist perspective for the general public, and from a more analytical perspective by the climbing community. Now that some time for reflection has passed, we can view the events as a rich metaphor for how organizations cope and survive, or not, under extreme conditions.

Although most of us don’t face life or death situations in the office, we do operate in a volatile environment that demands strong leadership and quick decision-making based on the best information we can gather in a short time. In this sense, we might say that our work teams scale our own Everests every day.

Because any significant undertaking requires leadership of a productive team effort, we begin by sketching out some of the factors essential to “collaborative leadership.” We then examine the case of the 1996 IMAX expedition led by David Breashears as an example of effective collaborative leadership in action. We conclude by drawing lessons from Everest for business leaders.

Collaborative Leadership

Many managers recognize the need for collaborative leadership to help them achieve their objectives in a changing business environment. They have heard that leading in new ways can enable groups to perform at higher levels. The problem is that very few managers really know what collaborative leadership entails or how to implement it. Many think they are leading collaboratively when they are really either just trying to keep everyone happy or continuing to rule with an iron fist couched in friendlier language.

Collaborative leadership is a set of skills for leading people as they work together to accomplish both individual and collective goals (see “Skillful Collaborative Leadership”). First and foremost, collaborative leaders must be excellent communicators of a passionate vision. They must maintain a keen awareness of the many variables that affect their organizations, such as the availability of resources, time constraints, and shifting markets. These leaders must balance the agendas of a group of talented but very different people and work with the team as a whole to help members achieve their highest level of capability. In short, they must be able to weave many complex factors together into a plan to accomplish an overarching goal.

Collaborative leaders do not rely on pure consensus when making decisions. Their role on the team is to stay aware of the big picture and to keep in mind all the factors that are necessary to make the goal happen. Thus, although they collect input and information from others, they must ultimately make a decision that they feel best serves the organization’s needs. This decision may go against the expressed desire of one or more team members. To keep dissenters engaged, collaborative leaders must articulate a vision so compelling that team members are willing to make their personal aspirations secondary to achieving the overall objective.

In a crisis, teams tend to fall apart as their members approach basic survival level. On Everest, survival means having enough air to breathe to keep blood circulating to the brain and staying warm enough to avoid frostbite and hypothermia. Similarly, managers of a business in a critical state must understand the organization’s core functions and find ways to sustain those activities until they can muster additional resources.

In crisis situations, people’s “fight or flight” instincts will cloud their judgment unless the leader has instilled in them a strong sense of the vision; has modeled the ability to work through the dilemma and keep moving toward the goal; can foresee possible scenarios for resolving the crisis; and can communicate the different actions needed to reach safety. A collaborative leader must master the skill of creating a complex web of relationships among team members that binds the group together and that resists the pressures that seek to separate them under stress. For when collaborative leadership is missing, personal survival and individual goals negate group goals, planning falls apart, and communication is shattered.

Collaborative Leadership on Everest

During the challenging May 1996 climbing season, the IMAX expedition led by David Breashears succeeded where others failed, in that the group achieved its goals of creating footage for the IMAX Everest movie, conducting scientific research, and putting team members on the summit safely. A measure of this success is attributable to Breashears’s collaborative leadership style.

Breashears and his group were united in their personal goals to summit Everest, and in the group goal of bringing the Everest experience back to the masses through large-format cinematography. Unlike some of the other teams on the mountain, Breashears’s IMAX expedition was fully funded by the film’s producers and by the U. S. National Science Foundation. Because of this financial backing, Breashears had the luxury of handpicking his crew, and he showed an outstanding ability to judge both physical and psychological readiness.

At base camp, Breashears’s approach to team-building centered on creating opportunities for the team to get acquainted, bond socially, and develop a sense of mutual respect and interdependence. For example, at dinner, team members contributed delicacies from their home cultures. This rich social context and intimacy was sustained beyond base camp. As the IMAX team moved up the mountain, the process of filming the movie helped to unite the team further.

On May 8, just before several other expeditions headed out for the summit, Breashears made the difficult call to postpone his team’s attempt and descend to a lower camp. His chief priority was the team’s safety. Although Breashears gathered the input of his team members, no one questioned that the final decision to make or abandon the summit attempt would be his alone.

When the other teams ran into trouble on summit day, Breashears stopped filming. His group devoted all their energies to rescuing the survivors, bringing them down the mountain, and assisting in providing medical treatment. These actions saved the lives of two climbers. Breashears and his team chose to risk their chance to summit and their film project in order to respond to the immediate needs of people who were in jeopardy. The group’s heroism further cemented their bonds. Breashears’s display of character under duress, for example, his refusal to film the injured climbers for profit, additionally bolstered the team’s spirit.

After the tragedies and rescues of the remaining members of the other teams, Breashears’s group returned to base camp to consider their options. In the end, after the memorial services and a short time to reflect, they decided to return to the mountain to make a summit attempt. Once they reached high camp, Breashears made the hard decision to cut one team member from the summit team. The climber had cracked two ribs through coughing on the way up to high camp, and Breashears judged that she would not be strong enough to safely make the summit. Again, this decision was his to make, and the team was strong enough that they accommodated the loss of one member with little loss of morale.

In preparing for the summit attempt, Breashears ran through a number of scenarios for the climb. He mused: “In my mind, I ran through all the possibilities of our summit day. When I got to the end of one scenario, I would work through another. I know that the effects of hypoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) and sleep deprivation and the tug of Everest would cloud my decision making. I wanted to have rationalized a decision for the most likely scenarios of the day down here in the relative warmth of my sleeping bag and the security of my tent” (High Exposure, Simon & Schuster, 1999).

Despite the stress of the preceding events, the IMAX team successfully summitted Everest and captured the glory of the highest point on earth on film. Part of the success of the expedition came from the incredibly talented team. But Breashears’s ability to masterfully create both environmental and psychological support for his climbers and articulate an unwavering vision and sense of integrity bring him close to the collaborative leadership ideal.

Unconscious Collusion

Collaborative leadership alone cannot create success. When crisis strikes, team members must rely on their own inner resources — courage, conviction, and, a more elusive resource, character — to get them through the challenges at hand. Although the leader can model and instill a vision of uniting personal and team objectives, the successful resolution of crisis ultimately rests on the strength of earlier team-building efforts.

In Into Thin Air (Anchor Books, 1997), the best-selling book about the May 1996 Everest climbing season, Jon Krakauer noted that in one of the other expeditions “each client (a climber who has paid to be part of a professionally guided expedition) was in it for himself.” Such thinking precludes effective collaboration. In addition, he states that many of the clients adopted a “tourist” attitude. They expected the staff to prepare the mountain for them, so that they would only need to put one foot in front of the other to succeed.

At the same time, according to Krakauer, on the morning of the summit attempt, several clients on his team expressed concerns about the summit plan they were following, but none of them discussed their doubts with their leaders. If there had been closer collaboration within the teams, such concerns may have been discussed more openly. In reflecting on these actions and attitudes, we must consider the role of unconscious collusion. In groups, unconscious collusion occurs when no one feels either empowered or responsible for calling out red flags that could spell trouble.

In the rapidly changing conditions and troubled communications that Krakauer documents in his book, unconscious collusion played a central role in the tragic outcomes.

This kind of unconscious collusion can lead to poor decisions and potential disasters in companies as well. The ongoing pressures on businesses for results and nonstop success — comparable to “summit fever” (the desire to get the summit despite escalating risks) among a group of climbers — create overwhelming pressure for employees to go along with the crowd, to bury their doubts, and to ignore risks. In successful groups, someone always raises questions when they sense problems with a certain course of action. But unfortunately, unless the team has developed high levels of trust, personal ownership, responsibility, and open communication, no one will feel it is their duty or right to question a prior decision. To counter unconscious collusion, the collaborative leader must constantly nurture team intelligence, model and reinforce the need for open communication, encourage dissenting viewpoints, and maintain an open-door policy.

What Does This Mean for Business Collaboration?

Looking at the case of the 1996 Everest expeditions through the lens of collaborative leadership can naturally lead to the following conclusions about business collaboration under crisis:

Consistency in collaborative leadership is vitally important. One of the lessons we can glean from the success of the Breashears team is the critical role of consistent leadership, particularly in a crisis. The confusion that results when leaders vacillate between different leadership styles can undermine a group’s sense of teamwork and the ability of different members to step into leadership roles. In this context of blurred boundaries and roles, a sudden leadership vacuum can lead to paralysis and “every man for himself behavior.

In contrast, over time, predictable, consistent collaborative leadership inspires commitment, confidence, and loyalty from a team. In this atmosphere, people know what to expect from their leaders, and what their leaders expect from them. If the leader must withdraw for any reason, the team’s strength and strong vision seamlessly carry it though the temporary vacuum at the top.

The ongoing pressures on businesses for results and nonstop success — comparable to “summit fever” (the desire to get to the summit despite escalating risks) among a group of climbers — create overwhelming pressure for employees to go along with the crowd, bury their doubts, and ignore risks.

The ideal collaborative leader shares much in common with a good movie director. David Breashears’s training as a movie director likely supported his ability to motivate others and lead collaboratively. The director is the leader on a movie production, but all the members of the team are mutually dependent. On a movie production, each person’s role is clear, and each task must be executed in sequence.

The movie director’s challenge, similar that of a team leader, is to:

• find and organize the best talent,
• prepare the environment for the production,
• draw on and incorporate the team’s ideas,
• create a clear goal,
• articulate a story and vision for the production, and
• weave together the complex web of aspirations and talents in the group to create a coherent and compelling end product.

The movie production process also offers a strong element of real-time learning, in that it incorporates processes for discovering errors and correcting potential failures before the project reaches a critical stage. The director reviews “dailies” for each day of production. In collaboration with cast and crew, he or she decides which scenes work and which need to be reshot, keeping in mind time and budget constraints. This regular review process serves as an excellent way to prevent teams from falling into unconscious collusion and ignoring warning signs.

The “director” in a business setting — the leader — must ensure that team roles are clear; that members clearly understand the project’s objectives and milestones; and that the group as a whole frequently and openly assesses the progress to date against the original plan. He or she must do so in a nonthreatening setting and demonstrate flexibility in adapting the plan to changing conditions. Many businesses have adopted formal after-action review processes that occur both in the course of a project and after its completion.

Collaborative leaders develop flexibility in the team for dealing with rapidly changing conditions. Successful groups must recognize the need for flexibility in approaching rapidly changing conditions. For instance, in order to sustain collaboration in crisis and mitigate survival anxiety, Breashears and his team collectively reviewed potential scenarios, developed contingency plans, and stayed in touch with each other on summit day. When survival anxiety becomes too high in business, because of ill-defined or shifting management priorities, downsizings, competition, or loss of market value, managers must prepare for a strong wave of fight-or-flight reactions among team members and for a fall-off in collaborative efforts. The development of alternate strategic scenarios is an emerging business practice that can support the flexibility of project teams and help them respond quickly to changing conditions.

Collaborative leaders are supported by interdependent team members who take ownership for achieving common goals. As Krakauer and others have noted, many of the clients on the commercial expeditions in 1996 felt they had been led to expect that they were entitled to reach the peak of Everest; that their every need would be catered to; and that the dangers were minimal if they followed the formula laid out by the expedition leaders. This overreliance on the leaders put a tremendous burden on those individuals and led to a vicious cycle: As the clients became more and more dependent, the leaders’ ability to prepare “the mountain for the clients” decreased.

In the business arena, no organization can afford to cultivate dependence in its employees — and thereby put unnecessary stress on managers. Successful groups combine strong interdependence among members with individual responsibility and ownership for the outcomes of the project. This combination is vitally important in the harsh environment of the new economy.

When Preparedness Isn’t Enough

Leaders will be most successful in turbulent environments if they inspire team members to go beyond their limitations; coach them to make the teams’ goals their own; practice a consistent, predictable collaborative leadership style; and present an unwavering vision. In the new business climate, managers would do well to cultivate the skills that make for a great director, rather than those that make for a great supervisor. More and more, leaders must form teams made up of contractors, partners, suppliers, and subsidiary employees — none of whom directly report to one another. They will need to organize more frequent project reviews, so that team members are continually checking their assumptions, learning in real time, and correcting mistakes before they become serious. In this way, collaborative teams can avert potential disaster.

When expedition leaders initially prepare to climb Everest, they focus tremendous energy on preparedness: physical training, supplies, equipment, portage, logistics, and staffing. Teams that undertake these operations with skill and foresight greatly enhance their chances of success on the mountain. However, the 1996 season on Everest revealed that excellent preparation isn’t enough. When a team’s very survival is threatened, the quality of their interactions, relationships, and decisions become key to a successful outcome.

In business, the process of facing a new challenge is similar: Organizations devote much effort to preparedness, logistics, and resources, but they often fail to invest in promoting leadership and collaboration skills. What we learn from Everest is that it is exactly this investment in human capability that can mean the difference between success and failure. With a strong grounding in collaborative skills and effective collaborative leadership, teams can learn to pull together in times of crisis rather than fall apart.

Dori Digenti is president of Learning Mastery (www.learnmaster.com), an education and consulting firm devoted to building collaborative and learning capability in client organizations. She is facilitator of the Collaborative Learning Network, a group of leading companies working together to understand and enhance collaboration skills.

References

Bennis, Warren and Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration (Perseus Books, 1997)

Breashears, David. High Exposure (Simon & Schuster, 1999)

Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air (Anchor Books, 1997)

The post Lessons from Everest: The Role of Collaborative Leadership in Crisis appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

knowledge and shape its future. But the process of co-creating the future through conversation is so natural we usually overlook it.

Since our early ancestors gathered in circles around the warmth of a fire, conversation has been a primary process for making sense of our world, discovering what we value, sharing knowledge, and imagining our future. Small groups exploring important questions — and connecting with other groups that are doing the same — have always played a major role in social and institutional renewal. Consider the sewing circles and “committees of correspondence” that helped birth the American Republic; the conversations in cafés and salons that spawned the French Revolution; and the Scandinavian “study circles” that stimulated an economic and social renaissance in Northern Europe. Reaching out in ever-widening circles, members of small groups spread their insights to larger constituencies, carrying the seed ideas for new conversations, creative possibilities, and collective action (see “Conversation as a Path to Large-Scale Change”).

Today, especially with the advent of the Internet, we are becoming increasingly aware of the power and potential of these dynamic networks of conversation and their systemic importance for large-scale collaboration, learning, and change. The crosspollination of ideas from group to group can lead to the emergence of surprising creativity and focus as we discover innovative ways to support a “system thinking together.”

What if we could create an intentional, simple, and effective approach for fostering greater collaborative learning and coherent thought than is often available in large group settings? Our research reveals that what we have come to call “The World Café” has a unique contribution to make when the goal is the focused use of dialogic inquiry to foster collective insight around real-life challenges and key strategic questions at increasing levels of scale.

What is The World Café? It is an innovative methodology that enhances the capacity for collaborative thinking about critical issues by linking small group and large-group conversations. In the process, knowledge grows, a sense of the whole becomes real, and new possibilities become visible. The World Café utilizes the principles of dynamic networks and living systems to access a source of deeper creativity and shared knowledge that might not be available through more traditional approaches to collaborative work.

The World Café is also an evocative metaphor that enables us to pay attention to aspects of organizational life that are often invisible, hidden by formal structures and policies. It highlights the naturally occurring networks of conversation and social learning through which we access collective intelligence, create new knowledge, and bring forth desired futures. Using The World Café as an organizing image allows leaders to intentionally design processes that take advantage of the natural dynamics that are already at play in order to create sustainable business and social value.

How The World Café Was Born

Several years ago, we serendipitously discovered the unique power of Café style conversations. One rainy morning, we wanted to provide a comfortable setting for participants in a global dialogue on intellectual capital to enjoy their coffee while waiting for the session to begin. We set up small tables in our living room and covered them with paper tablecloths. We added flowers and set out colored crayons, like in many neighborhood cafés.

People were delighted and amused. They got their coffee and gathered in small, informal groups around the tables. Soon, everyone was deeply engaged in conversation. As they talked, people scribbled ideas on the tablecloths. After a while, someone expressed curiosity about what was happening in other conversations. One person agreed to stay at each table as a host while others traveled to other tables to discover what interesting ideas were pollinating there.

People buzzed with excitement. At a certain point, they decided to leave a new host at each table. The other members traveled to new tables, connecting ideas, testing assumptions, and adding to each other’s diagrams and pictures on the tablecloths.

As lunchtime drew near, we took a “tour” of all the tablecloths, seeing what new connections and questions had emerged. Our interactive graphics specialist captured collective insights from the morning on a large piece of newsprint in the middle of the room. We suddenly realized that we had tapped into something very simple but potentially very powerful. Through the Café conversations, a shared knowledge base, larger than any individual or group in the room, had become accessible to us. Our unique contributions had combined and recombined into rich new patterns of living knowledge and innovative thought that had not been visible when we started.

The World Café As Methodology

What makes such a seemingly simple practice — that of talking together about things we care about and intentionally linking the essence of our conversations with others in ever widening circles — so useful? We think it’s because Café conversations offer us the opportunity to notice the possibilities for mutual insight, innovation, and action that are already present in any group, if we only knew how to access them. We are discovering that this process offers a unique mixture of freedom and focus, of coherence without control. Depending on an organization’s needs, Café events can be designed around particular themes or topics. The Café format is flexible and adapts to different circumstances, based on a few simple practices and principles (see “Café Hosting Tips”).

Groups as small as 12 and as large as 1,200 from around the world have engaged in Café learning conversations in a wide range of settings. In a global consumer products company, executives from over 30 nations used Café principles to integrate a new worldwide marketing strategy. In New Zealand, Maori leaders combined The World Café with indigenous meeting formats during regional treaty negotiations. Mexican government and corporate leaders applied The World Café to scenario planning. A Fortune 100 company is using “Creative Cafés” to explore corporate responsibility with stakeholders. And faculty members in the U. S. and Europe are creating virtual online “Knowledge Cafés” to conduct distance-learning programs.

After participating in Café conversations, members share comments such as, “I developed productive relationships and learned more from others than I ever expected. You can actually see the knowledge growing.” Participants often develop an increased sense of responsibility for making use of the practical insights they gain and for staying connected as they expand the conversation to larger constituencies.

The practice of The World Café is based on a set of working assumptions that we continue to explore:

• The future is born in webs of human conversation.
• Compelling questions encourage collective learning.
• Networks are the underlying pattern of living systems.
• Human systems — organizations, families, communities — are living systems.
• Intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways.
• We collectively have all the wisdom and resources we need.

Five Key Operating Principles

We are discovering that the unique contribution of Café learning seems to come from translating these working assumptions into the following five operating principles that, when used in combination, increase the likelihood of generating breakthrough thinking.

Create Hospitable Space. Café hosts around the world emphasize the power and importance of creating a welcoming environment to enliven collaborative conversation. We thrive and are better able to confront difficult questions, explore underlying assumptions, and create what we care about in surroundings that evoke warmth, friendliness, and authenticity than in those that are less hospitable to the human spirit. Most meeting places are sterile, cold, and impersonal. Consider choosing environments with natural light. Create comfortable seating. Honor our traditions of human hospitality by offering refreshments. Play soft music as people enter. Decorate the walls with art. Hospitable space means “safe” space — where everyone feels free to offer their best thinking.

Hosts can create hospitable space even in large, impersonal venues. For instance, at a conference for 1,000 people, we asked the hotel staff to set up small, round cocktail tables instead of rows of chairs in the cavernous ballroom. We then decked out each table with a red-checked tablecloth and a vase of red and white carnations. Volunteers placed sheets of white paper over the tablecloths and left small containers of colored markers for doodling. We also brought in palm trees and other greenery. When people entered the room, they were greeted by soft jazz music. The buzz of conversation almost instantly filled the space.

Knowledge emerges in response to compelling questions that “travel well” as they attract collective engagement and exploration throughout a system.

Explore Questions That Matter. One of our most important learnings in working with The World Café is that discovering and exploring “questions that matter” opens the door to catalytic conversation, insight, and innovation. Knowledge emerges in response to compelling questions that “travel well” as they attract collective engagement and exploration throughout a system. Powerful questions provide focus and coherence to networks of conversation that might otherwise spin off in random directions. Well-crafted strategic questions define intention, focus energy, and direct attention toward what really counts.

Hone the skill of shaping open-ended questions that are relevant to the group’s real-life concerns. These questions need not imply immediate action steps or problem solving. Allow the questions to invite inquiry and exploration. At one Café in Denmark focused on improving a school system, the hosts framed the central question as “What could a good school also be?” rather than as “How can we fix the problems in this school?” In doing so, they opened up the conversation to appreciating what might be possible in the future, rather than limiting the focus to what is wrong in the present.

Connect Diverse People and Perspectives. “Intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways,” according to Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science (Berrett-Koehler, 1992). By cross-pollinating ideas among tables in several rounds of conversation, we intentionally invite a more accelerated and richer network of dialogic interactions on a larger scale than is common in most dialogue circles.

One technique for enriching the ways in which the system connects to itself is to vary the different rounds of conversation. Hosts stay at each table to welcome guests while the other members travel to new tables to share as well as gather insights. Travelers might then return to their home Cafés or continue to move from table to table for several iterations. Sometimes the hosts change, with the first host becoming a traveler during the second cycle. Or several members might stay at the table while the others go out for brief visits as “ambassadors” to other tables, collecting new seed ideas that bring diverse perspectives to the home table.

Additionally, all living systems — including human systems — benefit from diversity. In her book The Quantum Society: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (William Morrow and Company, 1994), Danah Zohar states: “Social evolution requires that different points of view, different ideas, different ways of life, and different traditions recombine into larger, more complex emergent wholes.” Breakthrough thinking is more likely to emerge when diverse viewpoints and perspectives contribute to the exploration. For example, “Strategy Cafés” that engage multiple stakeholders, including employees from all levels as well as customers and suppliers, can offer richer opportunities for innovation than traditional strategic planning activities among senior executives alone.

Listen Together for Patterns, Insights, and Deeper Questions.

Through Café conversations, participants often discover coherent patterns of meaning in what may appear, at first glance, to be a chaotic and messy self-organizing exchange of ideas and perspectives. The emphasis is on shared listening — listening for the wisdom or insight that no individual member of the group might have access to by themselves. To that end, invite members to offer their unique perspectives and listen for new connections in the “space in-between.” Allow for silence and reflection. Ask members to notice what’s evolving in the middle of the table. By focusing on these special qualities of collective attention, we have a greater opportunity to experience what our Danish colleague Finn Voldtofte calls “the magic in the middle.”

For example, in Sweden, hosts of a multi-stakeholder forum used Café conversations to clarify areas of inquiry that could influence the future of both the information/communications industry and the environment. They began the first round of conversation by giving each table of participants a “talking stone.” Each member took the talking stone in turn and presented his or her key insights, thoughts, or deeper questions about the query “How can information technology contribute to a sustainable future?”

The three other participants at each table were to listen carefully and draw any connections they noticed between ideas in the middle of the tablecloth. In the second and third rounds, the Café hosts asked everyone to begin listening as a group for the deeper assumptions underlying their perspectives and to write them on the tablecloth as well. When the final round was over, the group pooled the collective insights and “ahas” that had emerged from linking the small-group dialogues from Café tables and creating a “conversation of the whole.” Through this intentional process of discovering and connecting underlying assumptions and insights, participants who might have opposed each other in a different setting came to a mutual appreciation of the deeper questions they faced together in contributing to a sustainable future.

Make Collective Knowledge Visible to the Group. We’ve come to realize that the simple act of scribbling ideas and pictures on a paper napkin or tablecloth so that the others at the Café table can literally “see what you mean” is integral to knowledge creation and innovation. As Michael Schrage says in Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration (Random House, 1990), “The images, maps, and perceptions bouncing around in people’s brains must be given a form that other people’s images, maps, or perceptions can shape, alter, or otherwise add value to. . . . It takes shared space to create shared understanding.” By providing paper and markers, we encourage the use of “shared space” where people can build on each other’s ideas, weave together their thoughts, and engage in deeper collective listening.

Many Café events include an interactive graphics specialist, who creates large visual maps that synthesize key insights and ideas. Commented Nancy Margulies, who has hosted many Cafés, “It’s like having a big ‘tablecloth’ in the middle of the whole group. Participants can quite literally see that they are creating something new together.” Other possibilities for making collective knowledge visible include having a “gallery walk,” with participants taking a tour of the tablecloths created by the different groups; publishing a Café newspaper on the spot; and creating theater presentations that reflect group discoveries. Each of these techniques allows participants to capture and build on the momentum and ideas that emerge. In addition, creating “storybooks” from the session allows participants to take the results of their work to larger audiences after the event.

The five operating principles seem quite simple, but embodying them as an integrated practice demands creativity, thoughtfulness, artistry, and care. The creativity of the host can make the difference between an interesting conversation and the magic of experiencing what our colleague Tom Atlee calls co-intelligence in action.

Conversation As Action

But is all of this talk just that, talk? What about the urgent need for action in our organizations today? We have found that, by its nature, The World Café challenges the ways most of us think about creating desired results in organizational and community life. Many leaders still preach that we should “stop talking and get to work” — as if talk and work were two separate things. Humberto Maturana, a pioneering evolutionary biologist, has helped us see that human beings think together and coordinate action in and through language. Conversation is “real work.” Through conversation people discover who cares about what and who will be accountable for next steps. We are finding that when people come to a new level of shared understanding around real-life issues, they want to make a difference. When participants return from Café conversations, they often see additional action choices that they didn’t know existed before.

Café As Metaphor

As reported by members of Café events, The World Café is a powerful methodology for collaborative learning and knowledge evolution. We are also finding that it is a provocative metaphor that can help us see organizational and societal change in a new light. How might the metaphor of “The World as Café” invite us to think differently about ways to catalyze system-wide innovation and action?

We are learning that Café conversations are based on a larger natural process of mutual inquiry and discovery that does not depend on small, round tables and red-checked tablecloths. By experiencing the power of focused networks of conversation on a small scale, members see how they might utilize this strategic insight in the larger systems they are part of. What if conversation were as much a core business process as marketing, distribution, or product development? What if it were already the core process — the source of organizational intelligence that allows all of the others to generate positive results?

For example, imagine your organization as a series of Café tables, with employees moving between functions inside the organization as well as connecting with multiple “tables” of customers, suppliers, distributors, and other conversation partners. What difference would it make to your own action choices if you viewed your workplace as a dynamic, living network of conversations and knowledge creation rather than as a traditional hierarchy (see “What We View Determines What We Do”)?

Based on an understanding of The World Café, leaders can take greater responsibility for designing infrastructures that bring coherence and focus to organizational conversations. For example, they come to recognize the key role they play in discovering “the big questions” and hosting strategic conversations with multiple stakeholders. This shift of lens also has practical implications for how leaders work with strategy formation, organizational learning, information technology, the design of physical space, and leadership development.

In one Café session, senior leaders from major corporations were mapping the implications of taking this view. The director of global operations for a company with more than 50,000 employees suddenly jumped up from his seat and exclaimed, “Do you know what I’ve gone and done? I’ve just reorganized my entire global operation. I’ve broken up the informal knowledge networks and relationships that have developed over the years. If I had looked at my reorganization through these glasses, I would have done it a lot differently. It’s going to take us a long

time to recover!” His heartfelt comments stimulated a lively conversation about the role of leaders in developing organizational strategies that honor these less visible but critical conversational and learning processes.

We’re seeing many practical examples of how people are intentionally using the metaphor of The World Café to guide strategic work in larger systems. Executives in a high-tech corporation helped to decrease the injury rate dramatically by using Café principles to engage existing networks of conversation and introduce questions about safety risks. The World Café has led intellectual capital expert Leif Edvinsson of Sweden to observe that the office design of the past is inadequate to support effective knowledge work. In response, he has engaged leading-edge architects in alternative space design.

World Café principles are also being used to redesign a Museum of Science and Industry in Florida to highlight not only formal exhibits but also learning conversations as doorways to discovery. And the initiative From the Four Directions: People Everywhere Leading the Way is intentionally weaving a global network of conversations among leaders of all ages on several continents. Using the Internet and other information technologies, local conversation circles feed insights back into the network, catalyzing these worldwide leadership dialogues into a growing force for societal innovation.

Creating Sustainable Value

The World Café is one path for stimulating courageous conversation about questions that matter to our lives and work—especially in large group settings. We are now seeing the systemic ways in which focused networks of conversation, especially with the support of collaborative technologies, can help organizations and communities evolve. Using The World Café as a methodology and as a metaphor offers a practical yet innovative way to cultivate both the knowledge required to thrive today and the wisdom needed to create the futures we want, rather than being forced to live with the futures we get.

Juanita Brown and David Isaacs serve as strategists and thinking partners with senior leaders, applying living systems principles to the evolution of knowledge-based organizations and large-scale change initiatives. They have hosted Café conversations and strategic dialogues internationally in a wide variety of business and community settings. (Contact info@theworldcafe.com or call 415-381-3368). The World Café Community is comprised of a growing global group of leaders and others committed to courageous conversations and positive futures. We thank Anne Dosher, Ken Homer, Susan Kelly, Janice Molloy, Nancy Margulies, Karen Speerstra, and Sue Wetzler for their special contributions to this article.

The post The World Cafe: Living Knowledge Through Conversations That Matter appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

In this new context, managers must develop a different mindset. They need to deal with a high level of unpredictability and accept the incompleteness of our knowledge base. Moreover, they need to act on the fact that the key differentiating factor between success and failure will be the ability to learn collaboratively with others — both within and outside of their organizations.

Why collaborative learning? In the current business climate, no one person or organization can bridge the chasm between present levels of skills and knowledge and the level of understanding necessary to take advantage of breaking technologies. The challenges of the global economy require that we join with customers, vendors, competitors, and partners from other industries to share insights. Organizational survival into the next century may well depend on our ability to configure collaborative arrangements within and across organizations — quickly, flexibly, and with a clear learning strategy. Companies that cannot network with others to share key knowledge — using the latest technology — will fall hopelessly behind their rivals.

The Practice of Collaborative Learning

What is collaborative learning, and what does it entail in practice? Collaborative learning is the process of generating new knowledge and capability that occurs when two or more people explore key business issues together, with the goal of fulfilling organizational needs and continually building their ability to work and learn in tandem. The practice of collaborative learning moves relationships beyond the mere exchange of information that characterizes most project teams or corporate partnerships. Collaborative learning begins at the individual level. For it to take root in an organization, employees must first develop a collaborative mindset and a collaborative skillset.

A Collaborative Mindset: Seeing New Opportunities

Individuals who adopt a collaborative mindset maintain an active awareness of the collaborative learning potential in every business transaction. They possess an openness and keen interest in others’ perspectives, and develop the ability to gather resources to experiment with and implement new ideas. These employees realize that their own tacit knowledge — when combined with a colleague’s tacit knowledge — may hold the key to a new innovation. Therefore, individuals working from this orientation constantly seek opportunities to explore collaborative potential with partners, coworkers, and even those who seemingly have no direct connection to the business. They leave themselves open to serendipitous opportunities for new partnering that may arise on airplanes, in shopping malls, or in other environments that we typically do not think of as supporting learning.

But a collaborative mindset at the individual level is not enough. To foster this same mindset on an organizational level requires that a firm understand the learning and data acquisition styles of partner organizations. Then the firm must deliver information and knowledge in forms that partners can use. This activity can be as simple as providing a list of the organization’s commonly used acronyms, or as complex as opening the company’s intranet to partners so that they may understand the firm’s inner workings.

When companies become aware of the potential in collaboration, knowledge-generating opportunities arise both by conscious design and by chance. For example, a manager at one firm gave a presentation to a partner company, knowing that a dissatisfied customer sat in the audience. By working from a collaborative mindset, this manager openly engaged the customer in recounting the problems he had experienced with the product and made a commitment to remedy the situation in front of the audience. Over time, this collaborative stance led to a new partnership with the now satisfied customer and resulted in several joint projects, including one at a major airport. Working from a collaborative mindset means continually seeking opportunities to build on existing relationships, and turning neutral or negative circumstances into advantageous ones.

A Collaborative Skillset: Spanning Boundaries

In addition to developing a collaborative mindset, individuals need to build a set of competencies that let them cross boundaries between groups and companies, learn from others, and disseminate that learning throughout their organizations. The six “boundary-spanning skills” described below provide managers with the tools they need to work more productively with others — within and outside of the organization — and to create and manage the knowledge gained through those interactions (for a boundary spanning competency model, go to www.pegasuscom.com/model.html).

Double-Loop Learning. The usual approach to a new experience or piece of data is termed single-loop, or adaptive, learning. (These concepts derive from the work of Chris Argyris.) Single-loop learning occurs when we alter our actions based on new information but we do not question the assumptions and beliefs concerning that data. We see an example of this in how organizations typically handle failure. Analyzing the “lessons learned” from a particular problem may be valuable, but it often results in a list of do’s and don’t’s — single-loop learning. This technique doesn’t delve into the assumptions that brought about the shortfall, nor does it seek to change the system created by those assumptions. In double-loop, or generative, learning, when we encounter failure, we explore our assumptions and commit to behaving differently in the future. Developing skill in double-loop learning involves increasing our awareness of the filters and suppositions that we use to interpret reality, and acting on this insight.

Communication (Dialogue, Feedback, Listening). Effective boundary-spanning relies on hearing, understanding, and empathizing with others. This ability involves listening not only to others but also to ourselves to uncover hidden biases. The practice of dialogue, as first defined by physicist David Bohm, can help. Dialogue supports divergent communication, in which a group allows a stream of viewpoints to flow through the conversation without feeling a need to reach a set conclusion. It also teaches us how to listen to others without judging them. Another component of boundary spanning communication is the capacity to give and receive feedback. This challenging skill helps us to see beyond our own view of reality and improves our ability to communicate with others. Tactfully done, feedback conveys potentially ego-damaging information in a neutral and helpful way. Mediation. As organizations continue to move toward flattened hierarchies, they have less need for traditional management techniques. Instead, they must help their workers learn to influence their peers in productive ways. In particular, mediation capabilities let parties go beyond political maneuvering and a winner-take-all attitude to achieve alignment through a focus on shared interests.

Systems Thinking. Systems thinking provides the essential backdrop for understanding the cause-and-effect relationships between organizations and their larger environments. This perspective highlights the functioning of the system as a whole, rather than the discrete parts that make up that system. The systems thinking toolbox — which includes causal loop diagramming, systems archetypes, stock and flow diagrams, and other tools — provides a powerful methodology for surfacing barriers to change, identifying leverage points for effective action, and building new connections.

Peer Learning. Peer learning is a vital and, in many cases, the most effective form of learning. Traditional corporate learning models involve either in-house classroom training or university courses. These methods emphasize the transfer of theory and case studies from the expert to the student. In current business practice, however, learning must take place “just-in-time,” with theory and practice developed in parallel and all players taking part in problem-solving activities. The concepts of self-directed work teams, 360-degree feedback, and communities of practice all support the increasing relevance of peer learning.

Cultural Literacy. Research shows that success in managing relationships with individuals from other cultures hinges on flexibility, openness, sensitivity, tolerance, curiosity, the ability to handle stress, and a sense of humor. Even armed with these skills, people can still fall victim to their own cultural values and assume that their perspective is the right one. This attitude can spawn unexpected conflict. To work successfully on a global level, organizations must continuously build awareness of cultural differences among employees and help them develop a level of comfort working across cultural boundaries. Such awareness emerges primarily from actual interactions with members of other cultures; it cannot be acquired from books and lectures, no matter how engaging or insightful.

A Collaborative Environment

By combining a collaborative mindset and skill set, managers acquire the skills and flexibility they need to move their organizations forward. As a result, they can inspire individuals to cross boundaries, learn from others, and disseminate that learning through-out the organization (see “The Collaborative Learning Cycle”). Such boundary spanning activities give workers access to business expertise in the moment — and can lead to rich, new insights.

However, there is another prime ingredient necessary for collaborative learning: the organization must support and sustain a collaborative environment. Organizational consultant Edward Marshall defines a collaborative environment as consisting of:

• A Collaborative Culture: a set of core values that shape a business’s behavior, including respect for people, honor and integrity, ownership and alignment, consensus, trust-based relationships, full responsibility and accountability, and recognition and growth
• Collaborative Team Processes: including team formation, management, self-sufficiency and renewal, and closing processes
• A Collaborative Structure: support for collaboration from human resources and information systems
• Collaborative Leadership: the ability to recognize many leaders, not just one; these leaders fulfill a number of functions, such as facilitator, coach, healer, member, manager, change agent

How can an organization bridge the gap between individuals’ development of a collaborative mindset and skillset and the company’s development of a collaborative environment? One way is to form an internal learning group. Drawn from various divisions and levels within the company, such a group focuses on building collaborative capability — and deriving business results from that enhanced capability — within the organization.

These groups begin by assessing the organization’s level of support for collaborative efforts. For example, one company found that workers failed to share technical information across departments because they didn’t understand the firm’s policies regarding intellectual property. In this case, the organization provided additional training to help employees work through these concerns.

Internal learning groups cultivate boundary-spanning skills and practice collaborative learning themselves in addressing the company’s business challenges. For example, a small West-Coast chemical company experienced communication barriers after merging with a lab on the East Coast. Management assembled a group consisting of members from each of the merged entities to address issues of collaboration. This team put together a personnel directory and a compendium of technical success stories from both firms. In addition, it designed a plan for an organization-wide session to inform employees about the merged organization’s new accounting processes, lab procedures, technical competencies, and customer care approaches. In the process, the group discovered pockets of people who were interested in exploring collaboration. Encouraged by this finding, it began to support ongoing experiments in collaborative learning, such as periodic meetings of project managers to exchange knowledge and practices.

These internal learning groups also play a central role in disseminating new knowledge throughout the organization, using tools such as after-action reviews, internal publications, and intranets. The sharing of cutting-edge tools and ideas with other teams creates value because it improves processes and hones collaborative skills. For example, the learning group of a Fortune 500 company experimented with the use of e-meeting software and disseminated that knowledge throughout the company through the technical staff. Finally, the learning group members experience an enhanced degree of interdependence, which steps up collaboration — and performance — even further. The group’s process both begins and ends with a reassessment of the organization’s collaborative learning capability, at an increasingly fine-grained level of inquiry.

Forming a Learning Network

Once the internal learning group has completed some successful projects, it will likely encounter barriers to moving the organization to a fully collaborative environment. These barriers often take the form of inherent conflicts between espoused beliefs, such as “We are a collaborative company,” and core values, such as “The individual is who counts here; watch out for number one.” One way to surmount these barriers is for the group to participate in a learning network (see “The Learning Network” on p. 1), drawn from the work of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Edgar Schein on the learning consortium.

A learning network is a cross-organizational forum in which internal learning groups from diverse organizations can explore challenges together. Group members come together on a regular basis to give and get feedback and create new knowledge. The interaction among the parties sparks behavioral changes that create value for each organization. This is because outsiders may have a more objective view of an organization’s operations and strategies than do those who are involved in the firm’s day-to-day operations. For example, when an information technology company’s learning group presented a new project for a Web-based internal instructional system to the other members of its learning network, someone from another company asked how it would implement the program in countries where Internet access is limited. This query served as powerful feedback for the presenting group.

For a learning network to succeed, the organizations involved must decide how to deal with differential power among the stakeholders; define the network’s mission, goals, and norms; involve dedicated and trained participants; develop a level of trust among individuals and organizations; and assume a win-win orientation. Each member group engages in a process of experimentation, application, and dissemination of knowledge within its own organization. The network member groups then meet regularly to share knowledge and to engage in collaborative projects across organizations. These projects can take the form of joint research, standards setting activities, experimentation, problem-solving, or peer-teaching seminars. Interdependence and trust strengthen when network members follow through on commitments, provide feedback, and come to new insights together.

The ongoing support and vitality of internal learning groups is central at this stage. To create value within their home organizations, member groups in the learning network must capture and transfer learnings from the network’s cross-organizational programs. They can do so through ongoing activities that link internal groups’ projects to the network. This might include visits between companies, the design of collaborative spaces — both physical and Web-based — for network activities that are broadly accessible to members, and frequent face-to-face and virtual meetings, both internal and cross-organizational.

For instance, the Collaborative Learning Network is a consortium of seven companies from a variety of industries dedicated to understanding how collaborative learning can enhance organizational performance. Its members have engaged in a series of monthly virtual seminars over the past year that link semi-annual face-to-face meetings. Network members have found that experimenting with virtual processes for cross-firm communication has directly helped their business units build expertise in collaborative tools. Below are some findings from these joint experiments:

• For virtual meetings, simple tools like phone conferencing, e-mail, and Powerpoint presentations shared on the Web work best. These tools are standardized across organizations and platforms.
• Synchronous meetings, whether face to face or virtual, garner more consistent participation than more open-ended, asynchronous methods, such as Web-based discussion boards.
• Information overload is at best irritating and at worst debilitating. Networks must find a balance between “push” (e-mail, phone, print) and “pull” (Web sites, scheduled events, conferencing) methods of information exchange.

Of course, companies must receive a return on their investment in collaborative processes. Questions to pose in assessing learning network results include: What has been the bottom-line impact of new sources of learning? Have new applications of technology emerged from the network activities? If so, are they now producing profit or cutting costs? Has senior management acted on any feedback received through the learning network’s activities? If so, what has been the outcome?

Each learning network will have a natural life cycle. Once the initial period of activity has concluded — as agreed at the outset — the network members need to enter a closing or renewal phase. If the network chooses to disband, then the participants should schedule a formal closing meeting to celebrate the network’s achievements. Members might also document the network’s experiences in some final form, such as a learning history. As a final outcome, members could assemble a core group of mentors willing to guide other individuals in each organization who may wish to initiate their own learning network (see “Forming a Learning Network”).

Bringing It All Together

If used skillfully, collaborative learning can improve work performance; heighten strategic awareness; enhance responsiveness to changes in the marketplace; and foster more productive relationships with customers, vendors, and other stakeholders. It can also encourage teams to experiment with fresh approaches for addressing problems and for working and thinking together. By combining collaborative awareness and skills at the individual, group, firm, and inter-firm levels, organizations can effect significant and lasting change. In this challenging climate, we all need to develop powerful new models of partnership and learning. Collaborative learning offers a structured way for organizations to quickly adapt to the needs of a changing business environment — to the benefit of individual employees and the organization as a whole.

Dori Digenti is president and founder of Learning Mastery, an education and consulting firm focusing on collaboration and learning. Over the past 20 years, Dori has worked with business, academia, and government to develop cultural literacy, learning capacity, and collaborative competence. She has written the Collaborative Learning Guidebook (1999), as well as articles for Reflections: The SoL Journal, the Organization Development Journal, and other publications. Dori is webmaster for www.learnmaster.com, www.collaborative-learning.org, and a forthcoming Web site on the work of Edgar Schein.

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Undertaking a Multi-Level Effort

SoL consultants and internal consultants are designing ways to weave new thinking tools and techniques into the fabric of the NSA culture. They have been helping NSA’s senior leadership team redefine roles and responsibilities as a result of significant organizational restructuring, describe new leadership standards, develop an efficient decision-making process, and begin to run NSA like a business.

In addition, early in the change process, General Hayden identified a cadre of leaders who would champion the effort throughout the agency. Consultants are working with these leaders as well to help align their thinking and actions with NSA’s strategic and business imperatives — and to model new attitudes and behaviors for others at all levels within the agency. These change leaders recognize that in order to model new behaviors for others, they must first transform themselves. In moving away from a traditional hierarchy, many have found that they need different skills, such as the ability to lead change, foster collaboration, and empower employees.

To develop these skills, these leaders are working with what we call reflective partners, usually internal consultants or change agents who volunteer to support an executive in learning new ways of leading. Reflective partners in turn receive training from experienced coaches. This process allows both the leaders and their partners to improve their interpersonal skills.

The role of reflective partner takes different forms, depending on the leader’s needs. The goal of the relationship is to create time for leaders to reflect on how they interact with their peers and subordinates. Partners act as mirrors, helping executives gain insights into their actions and encounters with others. For instance, a reflective partner might accompany a leader to a meeting to observe and take notes on the interactions. The partner later provides feedback about the dynamics he or she observed and helps the leader learn from the experience.

Over time, leaders learn behaviors that can help them lead more effectively — and unlearn those that interfere with performance. The first people to notice changes in the leader are his or her direct reports. Once executives come to trust their reflective partners, they often invite them to work first with their direct reports and then with their larger organization to bring innovative ideas to more and more people.

We call this process spiral integration (see “Spiral Integration”). So far, we have noticed two types of spirals: a downward spiral (from executive to direct reports, as people further down the ranks become involved in learning different ways of working together) and an upward spiral (from executive to upper echelons, as interest in the change initiative surfaces from above). Spiral integration occurs naturally; it is not a program or a project to be managed. Instead, leaders model productive new ways of thinking and acting and then help others adopt those same behaviors. In this way, spiral integration is facilitating change throughout NSA.

Building In-House Capability

By increasing our capabilities within NSA to maintain momentum around continuous learning and change, we lessen our need for outside help. Two organizations — one formal, Corporate Development Services, and the other informal, the Learning Leaders — assist individuals, teams, and organizations in their efforts to change. Linked to the work being done by SoL consultants, these two internal groups provide continuity by sponsoring training courses, hosting learning events, and offering consulting services to people who are trying to transform how they and their organizations work.

Corporate Development Services is composed of NSA employees who have advanced training and education in applied behavioral sciences, specializing in organization development. This organization’s work is supported by the Learning Leaders, an informal network of NSA employees from a wide variety of disciplines who have a passion for innovative thinking. The Learning Leaders began more than four years ago as a grassroots effort to help bring about fundamental change at NSA. Many people in this network support spiral integration by serving as reflective partners, facilitators, and champions for change wherever they work.

Preserving the Best

The first year of the transformation initiative was marked by unprecedented changes as we implemented federally mandated reforms, restructured the organization, and named new leaders throughout the agency. The work with SoL focused on educating the top leadership team, building internal capability to support the change process, and beginning to work with mission teams. The second year was characterized by the launch of a reflective partnering practice for senior leaders, spiral integration in many parts of the organization as managers introduced new tools and techniques, and a “settling in” to the new organizational structure. In this coming year, we will expand our capability at all levels, work more with mission teams, and communicate stories and lessons learned to the workforce.

We have found that this gradual approach to change ensures that the best of NSA’s ethos — a dedication and passion for serving America — is being preserved. At the same time, the organization is developing the collaborative skills, agility, and speed we need to tackle the emerging challenges of the 21st century.

Rebecca Owens Pille leads Corporate Development Services and is the focal point for the Learning Leaders network. She has worked in the change arena within the federal government for over a decade and formalized her experience with a master of science degree in applied behavioral science from Johns Hopkins University.

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These questions formed the challenge that The Boston Consortium for Higher Education (TBC) faced in the fall of 2001. Founded in 1996, TBC’s mission is to develop new and creative ideas that can improve quality and produce cost savings among Boston’s world-renowned institutions of higher learning. Its primary modus operandi is to promote results-oriented collaboration by developing trusting relationships across its member schools so that each might engage the creativity and energy that reside within the network system. In this way, TBC attempts to broker solutions to what may seem to be intractable problems. For example, the Consortium’s Environmental Health and Safety Group found an environmentally conscious way to save member schools from spending significant revenues on training for handling hazardous materials. By working together, the group members customized a shared online training program that was delivered through a joint web site.

TBC’s distinguishing feature as a network is to promote collaboration not through hierarchical control but through genuine exploration and mutual learning using facilitated work groups. However, while it had become successful working with middle managers from the member institutions, it had not sufficiently influenced senior management to adopt a comparable level of collaborative engagement. So, in the fall of 2001, the executive director of the Consortium, Phil DiChiara, commissioned a unique executive breakfast series for senior administrators in such capacities as chief financial officer, chief information officer, facilities director, and vice president of human resources. The series began with the popular theme of leadership development, but DiChiara dreamed that it could become much more. He envisioned the program as setting in motion a commitment to personal and professional development that would evolve into an enduring collective approach to leadership.

What prompted TBC’s interest in collective leadership was DiChiara’s abiding belief in leaders as intermediaries of mutual learning and mutual action. Such leaders don’t see their role as providing the direction that releases others to act. They instead encourage their staffs to act in their domain of expertise and to learn collectively what they need to know. This process encourages a cascading approach that starts with the individual, expands to the department and organization, and ultimately extends between organizations across the network.

Leaderful Practice

TBC referred to this new brand of leadership as “leaderful practice,” a term used by management professor Joe Raelin in his book, Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone (Berrett-Koehler, 2003). What attracted the executive staff of The Boston Consortium to Raelin’s work was that, while many writers have suggested that leaders consult with their followers or that leaders learn to step aside to let others take the reins, Joe goes a step further by advocating a mutual model that involves everyone in leadership – transforming it from being an individual property into a truly collaborative practice that individuals and teams co-create.

Of course, many organizations, academic or otherwise, are hesitant to embrace this form of leadership. In leaderful practice, rather than await instructions from the official team supervisor, any member of a team can act under the simple principle that anyone who is connected to an organizational practice should have a say in its planning and implementation. A leaderful approach may take some courage, especially in organizations in which leaders have historically exerted hierarchical control, because it frames the position leader as the person without all the answers. It also requires a certain level of vulnerability and trust to rely on others to lead when it is their time. Yet this approach can release the multiple perspectives and out-of-the-box thinking that foster creative solutions to systemic problems.

In order to introduce participants to the concept of leaderful practice, TBC invited Joe Raelin to participate in developing what came to be known as the Executive Development Series, initially a set of workshops that would expose participants to a wide-ranging “perspectives approach” to leadership. The logic of the perspectives approach is that there is no fixed model for effective leadership; instead, there are many lenses from which to view leadership, and each lens can produce a set of unique practices. Once we’ve considered these different lenses, we can develop a model of leadership that fits with both our personal and professional aspirations and settings. Raelin didn’t see the perspectives approach as constituting the essence of the Executive Development Series; rather, he hoped that it would serve as a take-off point from which participants would gradually become engaged in work-based applications of emerging practices in their own environment.

The Series gradually evolved as a three-stage process, taking participants through increasing levels of personal and professional commitment and risk:

• Stage One: Perspectives Discussion
• Stage Two: Learning Team
• Stage Three: Project Team

In Stage One, as mentioned above, participants explored alternative perspectives of leadership theory and practice. They decided to meet initially for six sessions and, from a menu of 12 perspectives presented by Raelin, chose to consider the leader as steward, as team facilitator, as change agent, as meaning-maker, as conflict manager, and as manager of professionals. Each perspective was supported by readings that were carefully selected not only to characterize the perspective in question but also to provide a wide variety of views in order to stimulate thoughtful dialogue.

A leaderful approach may take some courage, because it frames the position leader as the person without all the answers.

In Stage Two, most of the participants indicated a desire to move on to a different form of experience. While they enjoyed the readings associated with the perspectives approach, they wanted to do more than just think about them; they wanted to experiment with the ideas in their own professional work settings. Doing so would allow them to test whether the theories they were reading about were actually applicable in practice. In the shift from Stage One to Stage Two, the discussion group evolved into a learning team. Participants chose to serve as a sounding board and a support to each other as they began to convert their theories of leadership into practice and, in turn, their practices back into theory. Testing the theory of collective leadership, for example, one member reported, “I used less structure within my work team to create more opportunities for others to feel comfortable to step up.”

After five months had elapsed in Stage Two, another substantial subset from the learning team asked to move on to yet another level of experience, now known as Stage Three. The participants reasoned that their reflections on their leadership experiments, though helpful, were nonetheless based on what the individual reported was happening rather than on direct observation. A more reliable form of feedback would arise from actually observing one another’s leadership behaviors. Why not, then, engage in a project together? The participants believed that there would be no greater opportunity for real-time experience and collective reflection on that experience than from doing work together.

But what project should they choose? The team assembled to consider a number of options. After thorough deliberation, they settled on a project to deliver the same program that they had experienced to what they began to refer to as a “second-generation” of TBC administrators. This second group would go through the same stages as the original, or “first-generation,” participants had, except that the facilitation would come from the initial group, not from Joe Raelin. These first-generation facilitators would continue to meet with Raelin to reflect upon and learn from their experiences in guiding others.

Learning Journal

While going through this program, the participants in both generations of TBC’s Executive Development Series created a supportive community that allowed them to talk freely about their fears and failures as well as their hopes and successes. They were committed to bringing their own lessons on leadership to others in their home organizations and throughout the Consortium. But why stop there? Both teams also became committed to a “third-person” form of learning that could benefit other networks that might want to create their own collaborative communities.

As a result, the teams decided to study themselves through a “learning journal,” a written history of their experience in all its critical detail. They hired a consultant to survey both generations of participants in the Series to learn how these groups transformed themselves into leaderful learning teams. The learning journal revealed what members agreed were the critical ingredients to the development of a leaderful management network: personal readiness on the part of participants, sensitive facilitation, and the presence of peer exemplars. All three conditions need to work in tandem, or the team is unlikely to be successful.

The learning journal reported that, at the beginning, people were at different levels of personal readiness to change. Those who were more ready than others were able to serve as peer exemplars and help to enhance the feeling of safety and encourage others to grow. The facilitator, meanwhile, maintained a balance between freedom and control, letting members take over the facilitation of the team over time. At that point, the original facilitator effectively worked himself out of a job.

Creating leaderful management networks is not merely a question of sharing data or services; it involves learning how to truly collaborate so as to invent new ways to lead together and unlock any knowledge that might benefit the network as a whole. Member organizations need to learn from and create synergies between one another. The capital to be generated is not only economic; it is also social. As one of the team members stated in the learning journal, “I have forged connections with colleagues that I would not have ordinarily had time for. It has increased my confidence in my own preparation, learning, and judgment. I am eager to go forward and extend this experience into my work environment.” At The Boston Consortium, as more administrators experience the value of leaderful practice, this form of collective leadership will permeate the entire network and, perhaps in part based on this article, from there to other social networks.

Jon Raelin is a research consultant with The Boston Consortium. He conducted the “Learning Journal” that reported the history of the leadership development experiences from which this article was based. Full collaborators in this project were the members of the Executive Breakfast Series Teams who presented at the Society for Organizational Learning’s Fourth Research Greenhouse: Mark Braun, Bill Gasper, Phil DiChiara, Jim Kreinbring, Pattie Orr, Joe Raelin, Vicky Sirianni, Susan Vogt (deceased), and Colleen Wheeler.

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Southwest Airlines—which has practiced servant-leadership for 33 years — is one company that has managed to thrive in the face of adversity. In 2001, the company was the only major airline to make a profit. It regularly ranks in the top 10 of the “100 Best Companies to Work for in America.” In a company that is 85 percent unionized, Southwest has been able to develop high loyalty among its people because it instilled the “soft stuff into its organizational processes from its inception.

Preparing for Bad Times

Chairman Herb Kelleher’s motto for both Southwest employees and the airline as a whole is “Manage in good times to prepare for bad times.” To succeed in today’s marketplace, the company cross-trains employees and increases their skill base so that individuals at all levels can take personal responsibility for keeping the company marketable, maintaining high-trust relationships, and identifying effective options for dealing with transitions. In addition, Kelleher and other leaders inspire loyalty by communicating openly and truthfully with their staff, respecting the lifework balance, and fostering continuous learning. Southwest employees know that their voices matter and that they can implement new programs, make decisions, and help customers in times of need. A guiding principle is: If you use your best judgment to do what is right, your leaders will stand behind you.

Southwest Airlines — which has practiced servant-leadership for 33 years — is one company that has managed to thrive in the face of adversity.

Over the years, Southwest management has gone to extreme lengths to avoid layoffs. During the Gulf War, when fuel prices rose so much that the company lost money every time an airplane took off, Kelleher promised to do everything in his power not to address the challenge by laying people off. He, top leaders, and many employees took voluntary pay cuts to keep the company profitable. More recently, following September 11, Southwest was the only airline that did not lay off any workers or reduce its flight schedule.

One reason why the airline doesn’t lay people off has to do with its hiring practice: It looks for attitude before experience, technical expertise, talent, or intelligence. “We can train people to load a plane, take reservations, or serve passengers,” says Kelli Miller, Southwest Airlines marketing manager for Utah. “What we can’t train is good attitude or ‘heart-based’ decision-making.” The company also consistently provides coaching and growth opportunities for people and weeds out non-performers within the first six-month probationary period.

Company managers profoundly understand the negative impact that layoffs can have on employee morale, trust, productivity, corporate memory, and, eventually, bottom-line results. Because they understand that long-term profitability comes from capitalizing on employees’ wisdom and capability, Southwest sees massive layoffs as merely “quick fixes” that often fail in the long run (see “Layoffs That Fail”).

The “Warrior Spirit”

Because of the company’s commitment to its workforce, Southwest employees perform at heroic levels on a daily basis and volunteer to make huge personal sacrifices on behalf of the company in hard times. Says Miller, “This last year has been Southwest’s biggest trial. But preparation for 9-11 didn’t start the day the terrorists struck. It began 30 years ago when the Southwest ‘Warrior Spirit’ was born — the will among leaders and employees alike to fight, to do whatever it takes to make the airline successful.”

Examples of heroic service abound. For instance, in the airline’s early days, when Southwest’s bank repossessed one of its four planes, forcing it to cancel a fourth of its flights, employees got creative. “We figured that if we could turn our planes in 10 to 15 minutes rather than 45, we could still keep the same number of flights even with one less plane,” explains Miller. “This significantly more efficient turn-time set a record in the airline industry. Since then, employees acting as partners to solve difficult business challenges and achieve unheard of levels of productivity has become our tradition and trademark.”

Following September 11, the company’s top three leaders volunteered to work without pay through the end of the year. Immediately, employees sought to help Southwest recoup lost revenue and pledged $1.3 million in payroll deductions. As an article in The Wall Street Journal describes, “Southwest has managed to remain profitable while all others have suffered huge losses. Why? Because of low cost and a productive work force. At no time have those advantages been more striking than right now. And the really interesting thing is that Southwest employees appear to have understood that.”

Donna Conover, executive vice president of customer service, points out that the company has high expectations for each employee. “Just doing your job well does not make you a good employee. The attitude and spirit toward others complete the needs the company has of that employee. As leaders, if we allow lack of teamwork or low productivity, we are being unfair to the rest of the team.” Time and again, Southwest employees have more than held up their end of this new employee-employer contract.

A Shining Example

Through the deep mutual trust and sense of ownership that characterize their cultures, Southwest and other companies that embrace servant-leadership have achieved remarkable results that put them at the head of their industries. These achievements don’t happen by accident or through guesswork — they are the result of leaders who commit to serving their employees and, in turn, providing their customers with the best products and service in the marketplace. This is a formula for success in even the most challenging economic climate.

To return to our opening question, “Does the soft stuff really work when challenges are tough and complex and the future of a company is on the line?” What we have repeatedly learned from clients who have practiced servant-leadership over several decades is that the strength of organizations comes from their people. You can’t micromanage people one day and expect them to think and act like owners the next. It takes a long time to grow business savvy at every level of a company. If you don’t begin early to invest in developing people, building mutual trust and respect, and engaging meaningful collaboration at all levels, you will not be able to leverage your employees’ potential when a major crisis hits. Servant-leadership offers a way for leaders to bring out the best in others by offering the best of themselves.

Ann McGee-Cooper, Ed. D., is coauthor of The Essentials of Servant-Leadership: Principles in Practice (Pegasus Communications, 2001) and founder of a team of futurists focusing on servant-leadership, creative solutions, and the politics of change. She has served on the Culture Committee of Southwest Airlines for the past dozen years.

Gary Looper is a Partner at Ann McGee-Cooper & Associates; Team Leader of the 10-organization Servant-Leadership Learning Community; and coauthor of The Essentials of Servant-Leadership.

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Partially as a result of the different settings in which these activities take place, the VCR has remained an underused piece of electronics, while the automobile continues to play a central role in our culture. This example is just one of many that the authors cite in weaving a cautionary tale about relying exclusively on technology — especially information technology — to drive the future of our organizations, institutions, and societies. Instead, we must recognize how social needs — especially around learning — influence our acceptance and successful application of new technologies. If we fail to do so, we’ll continue to build products that people can’t use, design strategies that people won’t implement, and recommend changes that people fail to embrace — regardless of how elegant or sophisticated those solutions may be.

Broken Promises of the Information Age

To bolster their argument, Seely Brown, director of the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and Duguid, research specialist in social and cultural studies in education at the University of California at Berkeley, explore some of the broken promises of the Information Age. What ever happened to visions of the “paperless office”? Or predictions that the organizations of the 21st century would be flatter and less centralized than their 20th-century counterparts? Or the idea that most of us will soon be working for “virtual corporations,” dialing into the office every day from our homes? Despite now having the technical means to make such divinations realities, we have yet to do so. Are we merely creatures of habit, stubbornly standing in the way of progress? Or are there deeper reasons why the digital revolution hasn’t changed our world as quickly and as completely as some soothsayers had prophesized?

Seely Brown and Duguid believe that many of the predictions about the transforming impact of bits and bytes fail to take human needs and desires into account. They state, “The tight focus on information, with the implicit assumption that if we look after information everything else will fall into place, is ultimately a sort of social and moral blindness.” The authors argue that “rather than condemning humanity as foolish, primitive, or stubborn for sticking with the old and rejecting the new, it seems better to stop and ask why.”

Their probing questions produce interesting — and sometimes counterintuitive — results. For instance, why has the rise of digital communication corresponded with an unfortunate jump in paper consumption, when many predicted that computers would replace the need for printed documents? In exploring this query, Seely Brown and Duguid found that paper is more than just a carrier of information; it offers certain qualities that are challenging to duplicate in electronic form. Documents bear smells, textures, and smudges that convey meaning. For instance, think of the reactions that a letter on high-quality bond, a perfumed notecard, or a tearstained letter can provoke in the recipient — characteristics that are difficult to emulate by computer.

The authors sense that we have found cutting-edge technologies and old-fashioned pen and paper to be complementary rather than competitive. They cite the case of the fax machine, which has grown in popularity even as seemingly more efficient modes of communication have evolved. People still find it useful to be able to scrawl comments on a document and drop it in the fax for instant — and accurate — transmission.

Likewise, for years, pundits have predicted that the rise of e-mail, the Internet, and the World Wide Web would lead to flatter organizations, with information systems replacing middle managers. What these futurists failed to recognize is that managers add value to the flow of information; they aren’t simply conduits that can easily be replaced by machines. And technology can actually lead to greater centralization. With the compression of space and time made possible by digital communication, the main office can now maintain tighter control over branch offices than it could when information flowed more slowly. Thus, technology won’t automatically cause more egalitarian organizational structures; managers still must choose to share power and authority with others.

Knowledge and the Knower

Seely Brown and Duguid also address the topic of knowledge management. In an effort to leverage employees’ learnings and insights, numerous companies have invested fistfuls of money in knowledge databases. But many have found that, despite their best intentions, they have created only static repositories of information. True knowledge is notoriously difficult to “detach” from the knower. As a case in point, the authors cite several companies that have successfully identified best practices in one plant but have been unable to implement those practices in another factory just across town.

Why is transferring knowledge from one plant to another, or from one person to another, so difficult? This question brings us back to the example of the video-cassette recorder — and the social nature of learning. Seely Brown and Duguid refer to anthropologist Julian Orr’s study of the spread of knowledge among Xerox technical representatives — which occurred in spite of the company’s information systems. Orr found that the company-supplied documentation was inadequate for all but the most routine tasks that the reps faced. So the reps found ways to engage in collaborative problem-solving, knowledge sharing, and knowledge creation outside the organization’s formal processes — through telling stories over breakfast or while troubleshooting breakdowns together.

“Become a member of a community, engage in its practices, and you can acquire and make use of its knowledge and information. Remain an outsider, and these will remain indigestible.”

The reps formed a community that was linked by their common practice of servicing copiers. “The members of this community spent a lot of time both working and talking over work together. . . .The talk made the work intelligible, and the work made the talk intelligible. . . . Become a member of a community, engage in its practices, and you can acquire and make use of its knowledge and information. Remain an outsider, and these will remain indigestible.” The reps ultimately adopted a knowledge database that succeeded in becoming a valuable resource because they themselves determined what tips and insights to include. In this case, the technology supported — rather than sought to replace — the workers’ social network and processes.

Learning as a Social Process

Based on their findings, the authors have several recommendations for moving from an information-based to a knowledge-based model of learning. They highlight the power of collaboration, storytelling, and improvisation. They cite the example of a problem-solving session at Xerox that resembled “a series of alternating, improvisational jazz solos, as each [rep] took over the lead, ran with it for a little while, then handed it off to his partner, all against the bass-line continuo of the rumbling machine until finally all came together.” This kind of learning would be difficult to glean from a user’s manual or information database.

Seely Brown and Duguid also advocate balancing formal and informal processes, as well as structure and spontaneity. Too many constraints can limit creativity; too few can hinder productivity. They comment that “The use of deliberate structure to preserve the spontaneity of self-organization may be one of humanity’s most productive assets.”

The authors are careful to point out that knowledge creation and sharing mustn’t remain the purview of the folks in product development. “Businesses have to create new business models, new financial strategies, new organizational structures, and even new institutional frameworks to deal in these new markets.” Companies must look beyond their own walls to view their formal and informal connections with other businesses — especially those located close by. Seely Brown and Duguid point out the synergies present in “clusters” of companies in similar industries, such as the high-tech cluster in Silicon Valley, the Formula 1 cluster of race-car designers outside of London, and the golf-club cluster outside of Los Angeles. Such hotbeds of knowledge on a particular subject can offer economies of scale and broad-reaching networks of practice for all players.

Far from being a pessimistic diatribe about the limits of technology, The Social Life of Information highlights the potential that exists in the human mind and spirit. Time and again, though, the authors remind us that machines, software, and datalines must serve human needs — and that humans don’t exist merely to fulfill a destiny predetermined by our tools. In order to make the most of the incredible technical resources that we’ve created, we need to tailor them to help bring us together rather than allow them to push us farther apart. By remembering that learning and knowledge creation are social processes, we can ultimately leverage the promise of technology to build a better future for all.

Janice Molloy is content director at Pegasus Communications and serves as managing editor of THE SYSTEMS THINKER.

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City staff members realized that extending municipal boundaries would require dealing with new citizens—many of whom might not be happy being “annexed” into the city. The staff needed to develop an effective process to educate people on how the benefits of living in Fayetteville outweighed the costs and to show them that the government was going to approach change differently than it had in the past. “We needed citizens’ support as we developed new infrastructures that affected their property and their pocketbook,” explains Terrie Hutaff, assistant to the city manager for organizational development and training. “For instance, we had to figure out how to convince thousands of urban residents of the importance of moving from wells and septic tanks to a public water and sewer system when their own well or tank worked perfectly fine. We wanted them to understand that their neighbors’ current or future problems were connected to their own lives.”

Citizens Engage in Decision-Making

To expand the city while addressing potential opposition from citizens, officials decided to use a more collaborative approach to governance, in which they would share information with and gather feedback from a wide range of stakeholders. One of the first steps Fayetteville’s city manager, Roger Stancil, took to make this shift was to create a management team that shared leadership responsibility—including exchanging knowledge, solving problems, and making decisions on implementation—with both citizens and other employees. This new approach required the collaboration of diverse departments, such as police and fire services, garbage collection, public works, and so on, most of which operated autonomously in the past.

Influenced by ideas in The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (Currency/ Doubleday, 1990), Stancil invested time and money in transforming his staff ’s thinking about systems structure and individual behavior. One of the city’s key initiatives has been involving the community in every aspect of the ongoing annexation process. Staff members have met regularly with citizens’ groups. Kept informed and included in the process, most residents accept annexation.

The success of the annexation process demonstrated to Stancil that he needed to create a system to deal with other issues in a similar way. Stancil and his management team are currently applying the principles of organizational learning to develop a strategic plan that simultaneously encourages individual involvement and learning while building systems that support organizational change.

The city management team is also working on a more effective process for communicating with elected officials. Traditionally, the city council set goals and made policy decisions, which the city manager interpreted for his staff. The staff then tried the best they could to implement these goals. In the new process, in order to ensure a shared understanding of what is required, staff members articulate their interpretation of the goals to the council before spending resources. “For instance, we recently did an assessment of the council’s one-year targets and then fed this information back to them, basically inquiring, ‘Did we get it right?’” Hutaff explains. When council members expressed satisfaction with the assessment, the staff then further developed action plans, which the council also approved.

“This kind of deliberate communication rarely happened before,” says Hutaff. “By regularly checking with the council, we can use our time more efficiently and respond quickly as new information emerges.” The next proposed step is to have workshops focused on complex issues, such as a capital improvement plan, that require more intensive involvement of elected officials and the management team. “One of our biggest challenges,” Hutaff acknowledges, “is clarifying which people need to be part of making decisions to accomplish council’s goals and then empowering them to do so.”

Managers Set Shared Values

Today, the biggest difference people can observe in Fayetteville’s governance is the improved relationships and collaboration among management team members, who are producing higher-quality decisions. Early on, the management team created a set of values for which they wanted to be recognized: ethics, teamwork, stewardship, respect, and professionalism. Acting consistently with these values means managing with accountability; placing public interest above personal interest; understanding and appreciating people’s diverse perspectives; and learning from each situation and adjusting behavior to enhance the ability to serve. For example, after several phases of annexing areas with large numbers of residents, the management team realized they were not capturing “lessons learned” effectively. They have since developed a process to capture these lessons and make needed changes before the next phase.

While recognizing the gradual nature of systemic change and current budget constraints, the city manager has boldly expressed a long-term commitment to organizational development and training. “I will continue to dedicate resources to training, because developing people is the only way we’ll create lasting change in our organization,” Stancil says. “Group decision-making can be an arduous process, and it’s easy to give up in the middle. But when participants take the long view, the results are truly worth it.”

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