Why do our attempts to deal with the challenges of our time so often fail? Why are we stuck in so many quagmires today? The cause of our collective failure is that we are blind to the deeper dimension of leadership and transformational change. This “blind spot” exists not only in our collective leadership but also in our everyday social interactions. We are blind to the source dimension from which effective leadership and social action come into being.

We know a great deal about what leaders do and how they do it. But we know very little about the inner place, the source from which they operate

Successful leadership depends on the quality of attention and intention that the leader brings to any situation. Two leaders in the same circumstances doing the same thing can bring about completely different outcomes, depending on the inner place from which each operates (see “Three Perspectives on the Leader’s Work”).

Slowing Down to Understand

At its core, leadership is about shaping and shifting how individuals and groups attend to and subsequently respond to a situation. The trouble is that most leaders are unable to recognize, let alone change, the structural habits of attention used in their organizations.

Learning to recognize the habits of attention in any particular business culture requires, among other things, a particular kind of listening. Over more than a decade of observing people’s interactions in organizations, I have noted four different types of listening.

Listening 1: Downloading. “Yeah, I know that already.” I call this type of listening “downloading” — listening by reconfirming habitual judgments. When you are in a situation where everything that happens confirms what you already know, you are listening by downloading.

Listening 2: Factual. “Ooh, look at that!” This type of listening is factual or object-focused: listening by paying attention to facts and to novel or disconfirming data. You switch off your inner voice of judgment and listen to the voices right in front of you. You focus on what differs from what you already know. Factual listening is the basic mode of good science. You let the data talk to you. You ask questions, and you pay careful attention to the responses you get.

Listening 3: Empathic. “Oh, yes, I know exactly how you feel.” This deeper level of listening is empathic listening. When we are engaged in real dialogue and paying careful attention, we can become aware of a profound shift in the place from which our listening originates. We move from staring at the objective world of things, figures, and facts (the “it-world”) to listening to the story of a living and evolving self (the “you-world”). Sometimes, when we say “I know how you feel,” our emphasis is on a kind of mental or abstract knowing. But to really feel how another feels, we have to have an open heart. Only an open heart gives us the empathic capacity to connect directly with another person from within. When that happens, we feel a profound switch as we enter a new territory in the relationship; we forget about our own agenda and begin to see how the world appears through someone else’s eyes.

Listening 4: Generative. “I can’t express what I experience in words. My whole being has slowed down. I feel more quiet and present and more my real self. I am connected to something larger than myself.” This type of listening moves beyond the current field and connects us to an even deeper realm of emergence. I call this level of listening “generative listening,” or listening from the emerging field of future possibility. This level of listening requires us to access not only our open heart, but also our open will — our capacity to connect to the highest future possibility that can emerge. We no longer look for something outside. We no longer empathize with someone in front of us. We are in an altered state. “Communion” or “grace” is maybe the word that comes closest to the texture of this experience.

When you operate from Listening 1 (downloading), the conversation reconfirms what you already knew. You reconfirm your habits of thought: “There he goes again!” When you operate from Listening 2 (factual listening), you disconfirm what you already know and notice what is new out there: “Boy, this looks so different today!” When you choose to operate from Listening 3 (empathic listening), your perspective is redirected to seeing the situation through the eyes of another: “Boy, yes, now I really understand how you feel about it. I can sense it now too.” And finally, when you choose to operate from Listening 4 (generative listening), you realize that by the end of the conversation, you are no longer the same person you were when it began. You have gone through a subtle but profound change that has connected you to a deeper source of knowing, including the knowledge of your best future possibility and self.

Deep Attention and Awareness

Deep states of attention and awareness are well known by top athletes in sports. For example, Bill Russell, the

STRUCTURES OF ATTENTION

In order to respond to the major challenges of our time, we need to extend our ways of operating from Fields 1 or 2 to Fields 3 or 4 across all system levels.

key player on the most successful basketball team ever (the Boston Celtics, who won 11 championships in 13 years), described his experience of moving from regular to peak performance. He talked about experiencing a slowing down of time, a widening of space, a panoramic type of perception, and a collapse of boundaries between people, even between people on opposing teams (see “Structures of Attention,” movement from Fields 1-2 to Fields 3-4). While top athletes and championship teams around the world have begun to work with refined techniques of moving to peak performance, where the experience Russell describes is more likely to happen, business leaders operate largely without these techniques — or indeed, without any awareness that such techniques exist.

To be effective leaders, we must first understand the field, or inner space, from which we are operating. Theory U identifies four such “field structures of attention,” which result in four different ways of operating. These differing structures affect not only the way we listen, but also how group members communicate with one another, and how institutions form their geometries of power.

The four columns of “Structures of Attention” depict four fundamental meta-processes of the social field that people usually take for granted:

• thinking (individual)
• conversing (group)
• structuring (institutions)
• ecosystem coordination (global systems)

Albert Einstein famously noted that problems cannot be resolved by the same level of consciousness that created them. If we address our 21stcentury challenges with reactive mindsets that mostly reflect the realities of the 19th and 20th centuries (Field 1 and Field 2), we will increase frustration, cynicism, and anger. Across all four meta-processes, we see the need to learn to respond from a deeply generative source (Field 4).

The U: One Process, Five Movements

In order to move from a reactive Field 1 or 2 to a generative Field 3 or 4 response, we must embark on a journey. In an interview project on profound innovation and change that included 150 practitioners and thought leaders, I heard many practitioners describe the various core elements of this journey. One person who did so in particularly accessible words is Brian Arthur, the founding head of the economics group at the Santa Fe Institute. When Joseph Jaworski and I visited him, he explained to us that there are two fundamentally different sources of cognition.

One is the application of existing frameworks (downloading) and the other accessing one’s inner knowing. All true innovation in science, business, and society is based on the latter, not on the everyday downloading type of cognition. So we asked him, “How do you do that?” In his response he walked us through a sequence of three core movements.

The first movement he called “observe, observe, observe.” It means to stop downloading and start listening. It means to stop our habitual ways of operating and immerse ourselves in the places of most potential, the places that matter most to the situation we are dealing with.

The second movement Brian Arthur referred to as “retreat and reflect: allow the inner knowing to emerge.” Go to the inner place of stillness where knowing comes to the surface. We listen to everything we learned during the “observe” phase, and we attend to what wants to emerge. We pay particular attention to our own role and journey.

THE U

In order to move from Field 1 or 2 to Field 3 or 4 ways of operating, we need to move first into intimate connection with the world and to a place of inner knowing that emerges from within, followed by bringing forth the new, which entails discovering the future by doing.

The third movement, according to Brian Arthur, is about “acting in an instant.” This means to prototype the new in order to explore the future by doing. To create a little landing strip of the future that allows for hands-on testing and experimentation.

I have come to refer to this sequence as the U process, because it can be depicted and understood as a U-shaped journey. In practical contexts, the U-shaped journey usually requires two additional movements: an initial phase of building common ground (co-initiating) and a concluding phase that focuses on reviewing, sustaining, and advancing the practical results (co-evolving) (see “The U”).

1. Co-initiating: Build common intent. Stop and listen to others and to what life calls you to do. At the beginning of each project, one or a few key individuals gather together with the intention of making a difference in a situation that really matters to them and to their communities. As they coalesce into a core group, they maintain a common intention around their purpose, the people they want to involve, and the process they want to use. The context that allows such a core group to form is a process of deep listening — listening to what life calls you and others to do.

2. Co-sensing: Observe, observe, observe. Go to the places of most potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open. The limiting factor of transformational change is not a lack of vision or ideas, but an inability to sense — that is, to see deeply, sharply, and collectively. When the members of a group see together with depth and clarity, they become aware of their own collective potential — almost as if a new, collective organ of sight was opening up.

When it comes to organizing knowledge management, strategy, innovation, and learning, we outsource the legwork to experts, consultants, and teachers to tell us how the world works. For simple problems, this may be an appropriate approach. But if you are in the business of innovation, then this way of operating is utterly dysfunctional. The last thing that any real innovator would outsource is perception. When innovating, we must go places ourselves, talk with people, and stay in touch with issues as they evolve. Without a direct link to the context of a situation, we cannot learn to see and act effectively. When this kind of deep seeing — “sensing” — happens collectively and across boundaries, the group as a whole can see the emerging opportunities and the key systemic forces at issue.

3. Presencing: Connect to the source of inspiration and common will. Go to the place of silence and allow the inner knowing to emerge. At the bottom of the U, individuals or groups on the U journey come to a threshold that requires a “letting go” of everything that is not essential. At the same time that we drop the non-essential aspects of the self (, “letting go”), we also open ourselves to new aspects of our highest possible future self (, “letting come”). The essence of “presencing” is the experience of the coming in of the new and the transformation of the old. Once a group crosses this threshold, nothing remains the same. Individual members and the group as a whole begin to operate with a heightened level of energy and sense of future possibility. Often they then begin to function as an intentional vehicle for the future that they feel wants to emerge.

4. Co-creating: Prototype the new in living examples to explore the future by doing. I often work with people trained as engineers, scientists, managers, and economists (as I was). But when it comes to innovation, we all received the wrong education. In all our training and schooling, one important skill was missing: the art and practice of prototyping. That’s what you learn when you become a designer. What designers learn is the opposite of what the rest of us are socialized and habituated to do.

When I was a doctoral student in Germany, a design professor at the Berlin Academy of Arts, Nick Roericht, invited me to co-teach a workshop with him. The night before the workshop, I was invited to meet with Roericht and his inner circle at his loft apartment. I was eager to meet the group and to see how a famous designer had furnished his Berlin loft. When I arrived, I was shocked. The loft was spacious, beautiful — but virtually empty. In a very small corner kitchen stood a sink, an espresso machine, a few cups, and a quasi-kitchen table. But no drawers. No dishwasher. No table in the main room. No chairs. No sofa. Nothing except a few cushions to sit on.

I later learned that the empty loft reflected his approach to prototyping. For example, when he developed a prototype interior design for the dean’s office at his school, he took out all of the furniture and then watched what happened there. Roericht and his students then furnished it according to the dean’s actual needs — the meetings he conducted and so forth — supplying needed objects and furnishings in real time. Thus, prototyping demands that first you empty out all the stuff (“let go”). Then you determine what you really need (“let come”) and provide prototype solutions for those real needs in real time. You observe and adapt based on what happens next.

So the prototype is not the stage that comes after the analysis. The prototype is part of the sensing and discovery process in which we explore the future by doing rather than by thinking and reflecting. This is such a simple point —  but I have found that the innovation processes of many organizations are stalled right there, in the old analytical method of “analysis paralysis.”

The co-creation movement of the U journey results in a set of small living examples that explore the future by doing. It also results in a vibrant and rapidly widening network of change-makers who leverage their learning across prototypes and who help each other deal with whatever innovation challenges they face.

Very often, what you think you will create at the beginning of the U process is quite different from what eventually emerges.

5. Co-evolving: Embody the new in ecosystems that facilitate seeing and acting from the whole. Once we have developed a few prototypes and microcosms of the new, the next step is to review what has been learned — what’s working and what isn’t — and then decide which prototypes might have the highest impact on the system or situation at hand. Coming up with a sound assessment at this stage often requires the involvement of stakeholders from other institutions and sectors. Very often, what you think you will create at the beginning of the U process is quite different from what eventually emerges.

The co-evolving movement results in an innovation ecosystem that connects high-leverage prototype initiatives with the institutions and players that can help take it to the next level of piloting and scaling.

The five movements of the U apply both to the macro level of innovation projects and change architectures and to the meso and micro levels of group conversation or one-on-one interactions. In martial arts, you go through the U in a fraction of a second. When applied to larger innovation projects, the U process unfolds over longer periods of time and in different forms.

Seven Leadership Capacities

The U process feels familiar to people who use creativity in their professional work. They say, “Sure. I know this way of operating from my own peak performance experiences.” But then when you ask, “How does work look in your current institutional context,” they roll their eyes and say, “It looks more like this downloading thing.”

Why is that? Why is the U the road less traveled in institutions? Because it requires an inner journey and hard work. The ability to move through the U as a team or an organization or a system requires a new social technology (see “A New Social Technology”). The social technology of presencing is based on seven essential leadership capacities that a core group must cultivate. Without the cultivation of these capacities, the process described above (five movements) won’t deliver the desired results.

1. Holding the Space: Listen to What Life Calls You to Do. “The key principle of all community organizing is this,” L. A. Agenda’s Anthony Thigpenn once told me., “You never hand over the completed cake. Instead, you invite people into your kitchen to collectively bake the cake.” The trouble with this principle is that most meetings in most organizations work the other way around. You only call a meeting once you have completed the cake and you want to cut it and serve it.

To start with the desire for a cake rather than with the completed cake requires a leader to create or “hold a space” that invites others in. The key to holding a space is listening: to yourself (to what life calls you to do), to the others (particularly others who may be related to that call), and to that which emerges from the collective that you convene. It also requires keeping your attention focused on the highest future possibility of the group. Finally, it requires you to be intentionally incomplete, to hand over the recipe, cooking tools, and ingredients rather than the finished cake. Yes, you can talk about why this is a particularly good recipe, you can add some ingredients, and you can help mix the batter, too. You can even go first if you want to. But you must intentionally leave a lot of open space for others to contribute.

A NEW SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY

The ability to move through a U process as a team, an organization, or a system requires a new social technology, presencing, an inner journey and intimate connection that helps to bring forth the world anew.

2. Observing: Attend with Your Mind Wide Open. The second capacity in the U process is to observe with an open mind by suspending your voice of judgment (VOJ). Suspending your VOJ means shutting down (or embracing and changing) the habit of judging based on past experience in order to open up a new space of inquiry and wonder. Without suspending that VOJ, attempts to get inside the places of most potential will be futile.

3. Sensing: Connect with Your Heart. The third capacity in the U process is to connect to the deeper forces of change through opening your heart. This is the essence of what moving down the left side of the U is all about—facilitating an opening process. The process involves the tuning of three instruments: the open mind, the open heart, and the open will. While the open mind is familiar to most of us, the other two capacities draw us into less familiar territory.

To awaken this other capacity in people, teams, and organizations, I have found it productive to have people work on real projects in real contexts that they care about and to support them with methods and tools that cultivate the open heart. The mind works like a parachute, as the old saying goes — it only functions when open. The same applies to the intelligence of the heart. It only becomes available to us when we cultivate our capacity to appreciate and love. In the words of biologist Humberto Maturana, “Love is the only emotion that enhances our intelligence.”

4. Presencing: Connect to the Deepest Source of Your Self and Will. The fourth capacity in the U process is connecting to the deepest source of yourself and will. While an open heart allows us to see a situation from the whole, the open will enables us to begin to act from the emerging whole.

Danish sculptor and management consultant Erik Lemcke described to me his experience of this process:, “After having worked with a particular sculpture for some time, there comes a certain moment when things are changing. When this moment of change comes, it is no longer me, alone, who is creating. I feel connected to something far deeper and my hands are co-creating with this power. . . . I then intuitively know what I must do. My hands know if I must add or remove something. My hands know how the form should manifest. In one way, it is easy to create with this guidance. In those moments I have a strong feeling of gratitude and humility.”

5. Crystallizing: Access the Power of Intention. The back-stories of successful and inspiring projects, regardless of size, often have a similar story line — a very small group of key persons commits itself to the purpose and outcomes of the project. That committed core group and its intention then goes out into the world and creates an energy field that begins to attract people, opportunities, and resources that make things happen. Then momentum builds. The core group functions as a vehicle for the whole to manifest.

In an interview, Nick Hanauer, the founder of half a dozen highly successful companies, told Joseph Jaworski and me: “One of my favorite sayings, attributed to Margaret Mead, has always been ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’ I totally believe it. You could do almost anything with just five people. With only one person, it’s hard — but when you put that one person with four or five more, you have a force to contend with. All of a sudden, you have enough momentum to make almost anything that’s immanent or within reach actually real.”

6. Prototyping: Integrating Head, Heart, and Hand. The sixth capacity in the U process is the prototyping skill of integrating head, heart, and hand. When helping a golfer who has lost his swing, the master coach in the novel and film “The Legend of Bagger Vance” advises, “Seek it with your hands — don’t think about it, feel it. The wisdom in your hands is greater than the wisdom of your head will ever be.”

That piece of advice articulates a key principle about how to operate on the right side of the U. Moving down the left side of the U is about opening up and dealing with the resistance of thought, emotion, and will; moving up the right side is about intentionally reintegrating the intelligence of the head, the heart, and the hand in the context of practical applications.

Just as the inner enemies on the way down the U represent the VOJ (voice of judgment), the VOC (voice of cynicism), and the VOF (voice of fear), the enemies on the way up are the three old methods of operating: executing without improvisation and mindfulness (reactive action); endless reflection without a will to act (analysis paralysis); and talking without a connection to source and action (blah-blah-blah). These three enemies share the same structural feature. Instead of balancing the intelligence of the head, heart, and hand, one of the three dominates — the will in mindless action, the head in endless reflection, the heart in endless networking. In short, connecting to one’s best future possibility and creating powerful breakthrough ideas requires learning to access the intelligence of the heart and the hand — not just the intelligence of the head.

7. Performing: Playing the Macro Violin. The seventh capacity in the U process is learning to play the “macro violin.” When I asked him to describe presencing-type moments from his music experience, the violinist Miha Pogacnik told me about his first concert in Chartres., “I felt that the cathedral almost kicked me out.‘ Get out with you!’ she said. For I was young and I tried to perform as I always did: by just playing my violin. But then I realized that in Chartres you actually cannot play your small violin, but you have to play the ‘macro violin.’ The small violin is the instrument that is in your hands. The macro-violin is the whole cathedral that surrounds you. The cathedral of Chartres is built entirely according to musical principles. Playing the macro violin requires you to listen and to play from another place, from the periphery. You have to move your listening and playing from within to beyond yourself.”

Most systems, organizations, and societies today lack the two essentials that enable us to play the macro violin: (1) leaders who convene the right sets of players (frontline people who are connected with one another through the same value chain), and (2) a social technology that allows a multi-stakeholder gathering to shift from debating

Connecting to one’s best future possibility and creating powerful breakthrough ideas requires learning to access the intelligence of the heart and the hand — not just the intelligence of the head.

to co-creating the new. Still, there are many examples of how this capacity to act and operate from the larger whole can work. One is in disaster response. When a disaster occurs, other mechanisms (like hierarchy) don’t exist or aren’t sufficient to deal with the situation (like markets or networked negotiation). In these situations, we see the emergence of a fourth mechanism of coordinating — seeing and acting from the presence of the whole.

In summary, the seven Theory U leadership capacities are the enabling conditions that must be in place for the U process and its moments to work. In the absence of these seven leadership capacities, the U process cannot be realized.

C. Otto Scharmer is a senior lecturer at MIT and founding chair of ELIAS, an innovation platform linking global institutions from business, government, and civil society to prototype profound system innovations. He is visiting professor at Helsinki School of Economics and founding chair of the Presencing Institute. Otto has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and cross-sector change initiatives around the world. He has co-designed and delivered award-winning leadership programs for clients including Daimler Chrysler, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and Fujitsu. Otto is the author of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (SoL 2007) and co-author of Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society.

This article is adapted from the executive summary of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. To view the entire summary, go to http://www.ottoscharmer.com/PDFs/ Theory_U_Exec_Summary.pdf.

The post Leading from the Future: A New Social Technology for Our Times appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Teams, too, face similar challenges. While team members often understand the need to gather for the purpose of creative dialogue, learning, and engagement, day-to-day demands often lead them to resort to counterproductive behaviors. For instance,

rather than getting together to expand our knowledge and understanding of an issue, we often turn meetings into a war zone, in which each participant tries to push his or her own agenda. In this context, managing knowledge within teams becomes a formidable task, indeed.

Maya provides a beautiful framework for surfacing common barriers to the effective flow of knowledge.

Nevertheless, the effective generation and flow of knowledge is so important that leaders must make a deliberate effort to understand and address the barriers that exist. One approach is based on an aspect of Vedanta philosophy. Called maya, this concept provides a beautiful framework for surfacing common barriers to the effective flow of knowledge within organizations. This article seeks to explore these hurdles, develop a shared understanding of maya, and spell out the implications of this framework for leaders. At the end of the article, a series of practices based on these concepts will contribute dramatically to leaders’ own effectiveness and that of the teams they lead.

Common Barriers in Managing Knowledge

Here’s a recurring scenario common in today’s organizations: A team meets so that members can make a critical decision. The gathering is carefully structured as a series of presentations, after which participants are given the opportunity to debate various plans of action. Others may present differing opinions and concerns, but the role of individual team members is to convince their coworkers that their approach will have the greatest impact. After all, because they are “in the trenches,” the members of this team believe they have the most important knowledge for developing solutions. Team members hope that, through such debate, the prevailing view will lead to the most successful course of action over the long run.

In the end, though, collaborative problem solving and true learning become extremely difficult. According to the current thinking in organizational development, this all-too-common norm for teams may not lead to the most desirable results, because it creates a number of barriers to organizational learning:

• The unchecked assumption that an individual’s level of understanding reflects a singular “true” reality.
• The failure to understand that individuals may interpret the same event or observation differently and that perceptions of reality are dependent on the individual making the observation (“the observer”).
• The assumption that the most accurate understanding of the realities faced by an organization can be attained through debate and “winning over” those with opposing viewpoints.
• The assumption that the individual, the advocate, the orator, and the great debater possess supreme value through their ability to convince others to abandon their perceptions of reality.
• Finally, and perhaps most tragically, the underlying assumption that the most complete understanding of the complex problems facing organizations today can be achieved through an analysis of the problems facing each of its individual parts, independent of the environment and relationships affecting those parts.

Given the prevalence of this scenario, it should come as no surprise that most organizations struggle to address complex problems that require creativity and an unrestricted flow of ideas.

Vedanta philosophy, central to Hindu thought, provides an elegant perspective for those who feel stuck in such dilemmas. An understanding of the concept of maya provides organizations with one way to grow beyond their current limitations in addressing complexity, fostering creativity, and increasing effectiveness. In the following sections, we seek to gain wisdom and insight from the idea of maya and use this understanding to enhance our effectiveness as leaders.

Vedanta Philosophy

First, some background describing the worldview inherent in the Vedanta philosophy is necessary. The core teachings of Vedanta revolve around three areas:

• The true nature of the universe
• The true nature of the individual
• The interrelationships that exist within the universe

According to this philosophy, the true nature of the universe is that all things, living and inanimate, are interconnected in some fashion. As quantum physicists have learned, each action has an effect on other aspects of the universe, and nothing is really separate from anything else. The belief that a particular event or outcome can result from the actions of one person, independent of all of the other factors in the universe, is a distinctly human flaw. Furthermore, energy is the true essence of material existence, not matter, and it is through this energy that all things are interconnected. This all-pervasive field of energy, referred to as Brahma, exists in all things.

The true nature of the individual exists as energy that is part of a greater whole and not as individual minds or bodies. In fact, the Hindu greeting “Namaste” alludes to this worldview, as its meaning can be translated to “I worship the divine within you.”

The interrelationships that exist among all individuals and among elements of the universe are integral to the true nature of the universe. According to the Vedanta worldview, no individual element can be truly understood independent from its surroundings.

A Definition of Maya

Maya is the illusion, based on our false perceptions, that the true nature of the universe is rooted in the material reality we observe through our senses rather than in energy. It refers to the misconception that events and observations are independent from one another and that the problems of the whole can be understood by analyzing the problems of the parts.

Within the world of Vedanta, maya implies that humans are vulnerable to the illusion that events and objects are not only real in a singular context but exist distinctly and independently from one another. In addition, maya leads humans to rely on ego and thus to see themselves as distinct and independent entities. As a result of this mindset, the teachings of Vedanta view human suffering and dysfunction as having their origins in maya.

How, exactly, is maya the cause of human suffering? For one thing, Hindus see it as the root of human attachment to objects and possessions that our senses perceive as real when, in fact, those objects are transitory. Second, individuals who fail to understand the interconnectedness of all end up acting in ways that promote personal gain at the expense of others and of the environment; foster competition and antagonism as opposed to collaboration and symbiotic growth; and steer others astray from a desire to seek true inquiry and dialogue. Finally, maya results in the illusion that there is, indeed, a single perspective or view that is “right.”

This mindset leads to the need to win, convince others, debate, and resort to violence.

Interestingly, a similar concept can be found in Christianity. Although most Christians may not see it in this context, Hindus interpret the story of Adam and Eve’s bite out of the apple in the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for human vulnerability and overreliance on our senses. In this metaphor, the apple represents maya and thus the origins of human suffering. Similarly, many Hindus choose to see this event as one that leads humans to consider God to be a separate being that can be perceived by the human senses rather than as an all pervasive field of energy in the universe, present in all things.

Maya and Quantum Mechanics

Beyond the spiritual and philosophical origins of maya, many Westerners find it helpful to understand more concrete examples of how the teachings of Vedanta may have validity. The fields of quantum mechanics and subatomic theory provide substantial support for the concept of maya. The following scientific principles, in particular, are helpful:

• The true nature of the universe is not matter but rather energy.
• The true nature of the subatomic world involves probabilities rather than certainties.
• Particles arise from energy.
• A particle’s formation and nature occurs when an attempt is made to observe it.
• Particles do not exist independent of other particles and especially of the observer.

This “new” physics has demonstrated clearly that there is no objective reality “out there,” independent of its relationship with and perception by observers. The field reveals that we cannot understand the whole merely by understanding its parts; we must consider the relationships and interactions between the parts, the observer, and the rest of the universe. In this world, there truly are no independent things.

The interconnectedness of the universe can also be demonstrated from experiments involving subatomic particles. As an example, consider two paired particles with opposite spins (, “spin” is one property of subatomic particles). Physicists have demonstrated that, when a pair of particles is separated by a great distance, they maintain their opposite spins. Even more compelling is the finding that when the spin of one of the separated particles is changed, the other particle somehow alters its spin so that it remains the opposite of its pair. In essence, their relationship and interconnectedness is maintained despite their physical separation.

David Bohm, the well-known physicist and philosopher, described how fragmentation — or focusing on the parts to the exclusion of the whole — results in a sort of “pathology of thought.” He understood that humans tend to divide things that, on a more fundamental level, are actually connected. This mindset has led to flawed thinking in the field of quantum physics and in our perception of the world in which we exist. By advocating for a change in how we view the world, Bohm led to breakthroughs in both physics and the field of dialogue.

Maya, too, refers to this fundamental flaw in human understanding and, as we shall see, in organizational thought. It reminds us of our fallibilities as leaders, as well as those of our organizations and communities. So how can we break free from this trap? Below, we’ll examine the power of dialogue and systems thinking for helping us see through the net of illusions cast by maya.

Perspectives from Dialogue

Leaders who want to achieve a true understanding of reality in the context of the challenges they face should turn to dialogue, not debate or discussion. Because individuals possess different interpretations of what they observe and because there is no reality independent of the observer, the ability to elicit the mental models and perceptions of others is crucial. Dialogue offers a set of tools for surfacing the multiplicity of perspectives that add to a more complete picture of reality.

In particular, four specific dialogue skills, as defined by William Isaacs, can assist those who seek to generate a shared understanding of the true essence of any given situation: listening, respecting, suspending, and voicing.

Listening is more than hearing, as it involves not only the perception of words, but also the attachment of meaning to those words.

Listening

In our over-stimulated lives, we seldom notice the ways in which we listen. Listening is more than hearing, as it involves not only the perception of words, but also the attachment of meaning to those words. The meaning that we attach is often biased by our projection of our own biases, assumptions, interpretations, inferences, and history our mental models. In fact, failing to objectively examine our own interpretations while listening can distort our perceptions of reality.

Maya, as an illusion, refers to this distortion of reality and makes true listening ever so critical to enhancing our own understanding of reality. Given this fallibility, we must understand the mental models within which we operate and learn how to circumvent the automatic projection of these models on the things we hear.

The mastery of inner silence through meditation can dramatically enhance the ability to listen. Vedanta philosophy states that the true essence of reality can only be experienced in, “the space that exists between thoughts.” It is in this space that true mental silence exists and in which mental models disappear. The same principle can be applied to the skill of listening. The greater the degree of inner silence that we are able to achieve, the more effective our listening skills become.

Respecting

When we listen with the goal of understanding others, we are able to achieve greater levels of mutual respect than when we try to push our own agendas. Such listening is made more imperative by, but also facilitated through, the understanding that we are interconnected with and do not exist separate from others. Through mutual respect and listening, we learn about the thinking of others and, more importantly, about our own thinking. In the words of William Isaacs, we can see that “I am in the world, and the world is in me.” Likewise, our ability to say “That, too, is in me” is an extremely useful tool for building respect and understanding with one another. By making efforts to control our tendency to fall for the illusions of maya and separateness, we can build a practice of respectful listening.

Suspending

Suspending involves sharing and putting aside our own mental models. In essence, by suspending, we are making visible our own perspectives of reality. In so doing, we put forth the possibility that our own perspective may be flawed, that certainty may be in question. As we both suspend and seek to understand the perspectives of others, we must inquire effectively from a place of genuine curiosity. In addition, true inquiry involves being aware that our own perspective maybe flawed. The key in the act of suspending involves both surfacing and exploring the relationship between separate interpretations of reality.

Voicing

Often, because of the “pathologies of thought” that are so prevalent in our society, we learn to fear expressing our own interpretation of reality. Taking the leap requires the courage to share a view that may differ from that of others. To combat these fears, we must cultivate the skill of self-awareness, along with that of trusting our own thinking as a valid glimpse of reality.

Understanding that every element of the universe arises from the same underlying energy and reality can help us develop trust in our own voices. By becoming aware that only different perspectives of “the truth” exist, we can muster the courage necessary to effectively voice our opinions. The concept of maya provides us with an awareness of our own vulnerability to forgetting that we are in touch with this reality.

Perspectives from Systems Thinking

Just as dialogue provides us with tools to cultivate perspectives that contribute to a more complete understanding of reality, so does systems thinking. By offering tools that lead us to examine the interrelationships and dynamics that exist among elements of our world, systems thinking creates a framework for moving beyond the limitations that maya imposes on our thinking.

Fragmentation

Our tendency to see things as separate parts whether they are processes, departments, positions, or individuals can severely limit our ability to understand the myriad of systems within which we exist and participate. Leaders in organizations that succumb to maya may ultimately find that they deal with unintended consequences, “fixes that fail,” and processes that deplete rather than renew and invigorate.

Taking time for both reflection and dialogue at meetings and in groups permits teams to explore critical questions such as, “How might this impact other departments with which we interact?” and “How will this approach help to renew the environment and the partners with which we operate?” Eliciting, through generative dialogue, the full nature of interconnectedness is a powerful experience for a team and has the potential to create new perspectives and revolutionary approaches. Such regular dialogue is essential for groups as they evolve beyond the limitations of maya and is a critical competency for leaders to develop.

Even more enlightening is dialogue that elicits connections and relationships to enhance an understanding of the whole. Effective dialogue must be based on the premise that there is not one true perspective of reality, independent of the observer, and that many voices must be engaged to expand our understanding of the whole. In the end, greater insight into the connections and relationships between processes and structures leads to a greater level of group intelligence and more effective and fulfilling work.

The symbol for Om, representing all existence

Individuals and organizations tend to view assets human, financial, or intellectual as their own. In reality, however, when we cease to exist, the things we have in our possession will “flow” elsewhere. In essence, assets flow through the universe and pass through us (or our organizations) temporarily, so that we can utilize them to enhance the greater well-being and harmony of that with which we are interconnected: our partners, our environment, our customers, and our owners.

In the context of Vedanta philosophy, the resources in our possession at any particular moment are available to us for the purpose of fulfilling our mission. But when we fall prey to maya, we fail to experience this interconnectedness as it relates to our true mission and purpose. Individuals and organizations that hoard resources in a miserly fashion are at risk for failing to accomplish their true mission and intent.

Resources for Leaders

In order to master the skills necessary to function beyond the limitations and vulnerabilities described by maya, leaders can adopt a number of practices:

1. Meditate. Time for daily reflection is essential for effective leaders to bring about a greater awareness of their own “center,” their interconnectedness with all that surrounds them, and their own limitations in seeing only a glimpse of reality. Such reflection, though humbling, also instills a sense of calm. Indeed, avoiding the illusion of maya is difficult, and daily reflection can help us to develop this practice.

To that end, devote time each day for silence. Inevitably, when beginning, you will notice thoughts entering your mind. Observe the internal dialogue, label it with what you feel, and release it to return to experience the silence. This observation will uncover aspects of your own mental models that influence thought. To overcome the illusion of maya, it is imperative to develop the ability to master silence and to realize that the essence of true reality is in the space between thoughts, not in the actual thoughts.

2. Become Aware of Ego. Ego, defined as a perception that we are solely responsible for our own success, that our perceptions of reality are indeed the most accurate representations of reality, and that our identity is based in the greatness of our own accomplishments, is a tragic human vulnerability. Leaders must become aware of this flaw in themselves and in those they lead. More importantly, they must foster the conditions that make it safe for individuals to relinquish their attachment to an identity based in ego.

3. Engage Others in Dialogue. Leaders must reflect upon and engage others in dialogue around maya and how it may exist in your own views and perceptions. Explore how opportunities may be missed and dysfunctions created through this vulnerability. In asking questions such as, “How do we create fragmentation in our organization?” leaders trigger others to reveal aspects of their mental models and create a more complete view of the situation.

4. Understand the Interconnectedness of All Things. Encourage those whom you lead to reflect each day on your interconnectedness and on, “That, too, is in me” in the context of thinking about the behaviors and perceptions of others in your organizations and communities. Understand how processes and objects do not exist independent of their surrounding, and explore the relationships that exist between processes and objects, in the context of systems thinking. Work with others to surface these unseen connections.

5. Examine the Relationship That You and Your Organization Have with the External Environment.How do your actions affect the world around you? What systems exist that you have not yet explored or surfaced? In order to be sustainable and healthy, organizations must renew and invigorate their surroundings and environment, not deplete them.

6. Realize That Assets Are Not to Be Hoarded, but Rather to Be Used to Fulfill Your Purpose in Life.Organizations and individuals must realize that assets are part of the universal flow of resources and that, when these resources flow through you or your organization, they do so for the purpose of fulfilling a mission. Hoarding such resources is based on maya, the illusion that it is truly possible to, “own” things.

By comprehending maya as a source of limitation and mastering the true nature of existence, we can begin to successfully manage knowledge in our organizations and support individuals in becoming thoughtful and fulfilled contributors. Likewise, by developing a more complete shared understanding of maya among members of their organizations, as well as within themselves, leaders will develop the skills necessary to excel in the turbulent environments that we face now and that we shall surely face in the future.

The post Becoming Unstuck: Leadership Lessons from Hindu Philosophy appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

What we may not realize is that the best way to get our point across is often counterintuitive. To be successful, we have to try less and listen more.

Understanding As a Goal

Have you ever been in a restaurant that has a swinging door in and out of the kitchen? Ever pushed (or watched someone push) on that door when another body is trying to get through from the other direction? What happens? You push, they push, and nobody gets through, right?

The same push-push back phenomenon occurs when two people want to get their differing viewpoints across at the same time. It usually sounds something like: “Yes, but you’re wrong because . . .” or “No, you weren’t listening. What I’m trying to say is . . .” and so on. If you want to get through to the other side and they’re not creating an opening, you either let them talk first or push hard enough to get them to hear you. If we extend the metaphor, they’re probably not listening. The more you force, the more they resist.

When you push for your way, you virtually guarantee failure, because the harder you try to persuade, the harder the opposition will do the same. He wants to be heard, too — just like you.

If you want to get your point across, don’t make getting your point across the goal. Make understanding the goal. When you try to understand your conflict partner’s view, you create an opening for him to do the same. The door swings toward you as you receive his energy, beliefs, and vision, and benefit from a peek at an alternate reality. You’re able to see both views simultaneously while you reflect on how differently this person perceives the world from his side of the door.

Giving Way to Get Your Way

Don’t give in; give way. There’s a difference. Giving someone the freedom to deliver his message is a gift and a model. You’re not saying you agree with the message; you’re saying you’re willing to entertain an alternative view to facilitate solving the problem.

Sensing a receptive audience, the speaker relaxes. His energy and ideas have an outlet. He worries less whether you agree with him, simply because you’re willing to let him talk. His need for you to understand him is less critical than your willingness to try.

Eventually he has nothing left to say, and now he is opening the door for you. In fact, he’s eager to hear your reflections. He’s thinking, “Wow, I just made some great points. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about them!”

Offer Information That May Be of Value

So don’t start with, “You are really out of line, you don’t know what you’re talking about” or “Your reasoning is full of holes!”

If you want to get your point across, start by acknowledging his argument and appreciating his position. Specifically:

• Summarize his thoughts for him.
• Compliment his reasoning.
• Speak first to his positive intentions.
• Look for one thing you can agree with.

For example:, “John, you’ve obviously put a lot of thought into this and care a great deal about the outcome. I liked what you said about . . .” You must be sincere. We’re not talking about manipulation, but rather a willingness to step into another human being’s shoes.

By listening and acknowledging, you’ve let your partner come through the door, and it’s starting to swing in the other direction. Here’s the place where you might get your point across. But one more admonition: change your thinking from getting your point across to offering information that might be of value to him. He may take advantage and he may not. He’s more likely to receive your offer favorably if it helps him achieve his goals, look good, or save face.

For example, “John, from what you’re saying, you believe you’re doing a good job and living up to the requirements of the job description. I have a slightly different take on it. Would you like to hear it? As I see it, you put a lot of thought into preparing our meetings and organizing staff, and I think you want to do a good job. I have some ideas about how you can go further in your career, if you chose to, by making a few simple changes.” The door is swinging back. It’s your turn to walk purposefully through it.

Six Steps for Creating a Willing Listener

In the end, you may find that “getting your point across” is language that presumes a contest of wills and that there are more efficient ways to achieve your objective. You are less likely to create defensiveness in the listener when you disclose your thinking, acknowledge his, maintain respect and safety, and establish consequences.

Keep in mind there’s a problem on the table to be solved. He’s offered his view. And now you will present yours. As you do this, keep the door open. The following steps will help you:

1. Understand Your Story and Their Story. Rashomon is a 1950 Japanese movie involving four people, each of whom tells a story about how a specific event unfolded. Each story is a little movie that looks completely different from the others. Rashomon reminds me that my story may vary widely from my partner’s, even when we’re looking at the same facts. It helps me exercise caution about how much I think I know about someone else’s motives. I try not to presume. How could I? It’s not my movie. My goal is to see his movie through his lens.
2. Educate, Don’t Sell, Blame, or Accuse. When it’s time to tell my story, I have to teach the listener what things look like from my perspective. I don’t assume he can see my movie either; in fact, I know he can’t. When an employee, student, or loved one acts contrary to expectations, I respectfully describe the feelings that ensued or the resulting impact on the environment or on our relationship. I assume the person has positive intent, and I try to help him to live up to that assumption.For example, “I think you were trying to help the customer as best you could, given the complexity of the request. However, from my experience, when I put the customer on hold for more than a minute, he usually becomes frustrated and hangs up. Let’s talk about how to get answers without putting the customer on hold.”
3. Communicate Your Hopes and Goals. If I’m disappointed, it helps to let others in on my hopes (for the relationship, the workplace, or the task at hand). For example, “When you said you would have the spreadsheet ready Tuesday, I took you at your word. My hope is that we all recognize the importance of deadlines on a project that’s as time sensitive as this one. Can you tell me what happened and what we can do to remedy the situation?”
4. Stay Interested. Remain curious and childlike. Look at each situation with new eyes. Don’t forget that everything you experience is filtered through your perception, your lens. As Stephen Covey says, “Seek first to understand.”
5. Center Yourself and Extend Positive Energy. I practice and teach the martial art aikido, often translated from the Japanese as “the way of blending with energy.” In aikido, as the attack comes, we center ourselves and extend our life energy (ki) to meet the attacker, align with him, and redirect his energy. We lead without force. In life and business, you do the same thing when your language and manner are poised and focused, when you exercise both power and compassion, and when you make your adversary a partner by honoring his energy and positive intent.
6. There Are No Guarantees. What if you’ve tried to find a creative solution through joint problem solving and the situation doesn’t improve? For example, after several conversations and promises to improve, a direct report continues to be disrespectful. Or after your numerous requests to be prompt, an important member of the team continues to show up late or not at all.

Did I forget to mention there are no guarantees? You may not get your point across, ever. You can, however, remain respectful, interested, and purposeful. In the final analysis, this is where your power lies. You can also employ your company’s performance management system as early in the process as possible and hold your staff accountable to its guidelines. At this stage, the point you want to get across changes. You are no longer asking for behavior change. Instead you’re making sure the employee understands the consequences of the road he is traveling.

At home, if getting your point across with your teenager means gaining agreement, you will almost never succeed. However, you can set limits and expectations. For example, “I hear you when you say that your friends can stay out until midnight. Nevertheless, you have to be home by 11:00.”

“But, Mom!”

“I realize this seems hard to you. But I expect you to be home by 11:00.”

Establishing limits and consequences is usually a more practical and effective way to be heard than attempting to gain agreement.

In any case, remember that winning a contest and solving a problem are usually two different things. When you find yourself pushing through that metaphorical door, stop and ask yourself whether it’s the winning or the solving you’re most interested in.

© 2006 Judy Ringer, Power & Presence Training

Judy Ringer is the author of Unlikely Teachers: Finding the Hidden Gifts in Daily Conflict, containing stories and practices on the connection between aikido and conflict. As the founder of Power & Presence Training, Judy specializes in unique workshops on conflict, communication, and creating a more positive work environment. She is a black belt in aikido and chief instructor of Portsmouth Aikido, Portsmouth, NH. Subscribe to Judy’s free e-newsletter, Ki Moments, at http://www. JudyRinger.com.

For Further Reading

Unlikely Teachers: Finding the Hidden Gifts in Daily Conflict, by Judy Ringer How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less, by Milo O. Frank The Magic of Conflict, by Thomas F. Crum Difficult Conversations, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen) Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and l Switzler FAQs about Conflict, by Judy Ringer (www.JudyRinger.com)

The post Being Heard: Strategies for Getting Your Point Across appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Robert Greenleaf (1904–1990) is known for initiating the powerful movement called “servant-leadership.” Servant-leaders embody leadership characteristics, capacities, attitudes, and values such as trust, deep listening, foresight, caring, accountability, and balance. By leading in a way that truly serves others, such leaders develop human possibilities — in themselves and in others.

Catalyzing Change in a Large Institution

Greenleaf began his career as an executive. As a young man, he was encouraged by a college professor to “create change from inside a large institution.” Following that advice, Greenleaf chose to work within the largest institution in the world at that time, AT&T. After three years of climbing telephone poles, he moved into a job in hiring and assessment.

Greenleaf was intuitively drawn to lead in a different way. During his time with AT&T, he incorporated certain leadership practices in his work.

• Deep Listening and Powerful Questions. First, Greenleaf helped people discover their own greatness by asking powerful questions., “True listening builds strength in people,” he said. By choosing to listen, you assume “a healing attitude with faith that another will rise to the challenge.”Joseph Distephano, one of Greenleaf’s mentees, recounts, “We would talk about ideas; I would ask him two or three questions; he would turn them around on me with Rogerian skill, and he’d hold me accountable for them at the next meeting.” Greenleaf focused not on giving advice, but on asking deeper questions so that others would access greater wisdom and “become convinced in their own hearts for their own reasons.”
• Co-Creativity. Greenleaf also recognized resistance to change in organizations and observed, “People don’t change a habit just because they know a better way.” To support the change process, he developed “study teams,” an early form of action research, so employees could learn from each other.When Greenleaf conceived of the idea of the world’s first corporate personnel assessment center in l948, instead of pushing the idea, he seeded a slow transformational change. He honed his idea, reading texts, exploring the issues, asking questions, and collaborating in the development of a vision of assessments based on the whole person. Ten years later, AT&T launched the world’s first corporate assessment center. Other corporations quickly followed.

  Greenleaf later discussed this approach to change with his son, Newcomb. “Suppose you had a really good idea? How would you go about trying to get it accepted? Here’s how I learned to do it. First, decide who the key people are in getting it adopted. Then, tell them the idea but only a bit at a time.” He explained that eventually others would “come to an idea on their own.”, “But,” his son asked, “how will they know it was your idea?”, “They’ll never know,” Bob Greenleaf answered — as if that were the core beauty of the stratagem.

  “All great things are created for their own sake,” Greenleaf wrote, quoting Robert Frost. Paradoxically, by giving over his ego, he became a legend at AT&T. His humility was based on knowing who he was, his deepest identity.

• Inner Listening. Finally, Greenleaf taught managers to gather “enough information, thought, and intuition to do something useful.” To access this inner knowledge, Greenleaf found ways to “listen inside.” Listening inside was revitalizing and also a pragmatic practice to gain a “wider span of awareness.” This was true whether he was looking out at the stars, sitting quietly on a train, or taking time alone in his favorite room at Bell Labs — the absolutely silent anechoic chamber. Greenleaf often stayed there, renewed by the silence, until he was kicked out.In his journal, Greenleaf described a time when his creative drive was blocked. He wrote about a “shadow side” in himself that did not take enough time for his family and was overly concerned with prestige. Once aware, Greenleaf put his insights to work, finding ways to achieve more balance and taking a chance on greater life and creativity. At 49, he let go of the prestige of his position at AT&T to retire early, a powerful turning point that accelerated his unique work and contribution.

Servant-Leadership Is Conceived

After retirement, Greenleaf did leadership consulting. This was in the heat of the tumultuous l960s era. He left one consulting job at a college feeling like a complete failure, stating, “It was virtually impossible for me to carry out the task that I had gone there to do.”

Greenleaf didn’t bury or deny the pain of failure. He held the creative tension, clarifying his vision of a university that could serve the high purpose of nurturing the needs and spirit of students. He had read all of the novels by the student’s most popular author at the time, Herman Hesse. He thought about one character in Hesse’s Journey to the East, Leo, “a man of extraordinary presence, a servant who raised the spirit of the group with song while doing chores.” In the book, Leo suddenly disappears. The group members later discover that this servant was actually a wise and influential leader. In reflecting on the book, the phrase “servant-leader” popped into Greenleaf’s consciousness.

Greenleaf found a way to put this idea into action. He wrote a short essay called “The Servant as Leader” and sent copies to 200 friends. The piece became an underground classic in the business world.

Greenleaf later learned that companies such as TDIndustries were continually reordering copies. One day, he called TDIndustries CEO Jack Lowe and asked, “What are you doing with all those copies of my essay?” It turned out that Lowe was giving them to everyone in the organization, from office workers to executives. Furthermore, they were all meeting in small groups to read the essay and apply its insights. More than 30 years later, new employee-partners at TDIndustries still receive copies of “The Servant as Leader” and discuss it in groups. This practice may be one reason that the company is consistently in the top 10 of Fortune magazine’s 100 best companies to work for in America.

The essay was distributed more widely than Greenleaf could ever have imagined and catapulted his leadership influence to another level.

Greenleaf’s Legacy

During his elder years, Greenleaf never became rigid or wavered from his focus on life-long learning. He gathered wisdom in resonant conversations with others — some well-known and others not — including ministers, writers, thinkers, doctors, activists, and business luminaries, such as Ira Progoff, Aldous Huxley, Karl Menninger, and Bill Wilson. He and his wife, Esther, intentionally sought out certain people; others, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, appeared synchronistically.

From the wisdom and maturity of his elder years, Greenleaf began to write books, publishing his first at age 74. A quote conveys the experience of his final “meaning-making” years:, “The rewards of living a full life may be measured in joyous moments rather than days or years. These are the treasures that return to mind in the quiet hours. The moments nobly lived, the challenges met, the truth spoken. Meeting life — taking responsibility and leaving it joyfully once taken.”

Greenleaf’s circle of influence continues to expand today, as Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard, Margaret Wheatley, Parker Palmer, Ann McGee-Cooper, and many other authors cite servant as leader as an inspiration. Warren Bennis called Greenleaf’s work the “most moral, original, useful writing on the topic of leadership.” According to Peter Senge, “No one in the past 30 years has had a more profound impact on thinking about leadership.” In addition, success stories are emerging from companies that have adopted the principles of servant-leadership, such as Southwest Airlines, TDIndustries, Starbucks, USCellular, and Synovus Financial.

The scope of Greenleaf’s influence goes far beyond the workplace. His seminal writings can be found in graduate and undergraduate courses at dozens of universities. Leaders from a spectrum of religious denominations find that servant-leadership mutually reinforces faith literature. Board trustees are using servant-leadership principles to hold institutions “in trust” for all stakeholders. The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership has become a hub for servant-leadership efforts around the world.

Lessons from Greenleaf’s Life

The “Servant Leadership Primer” in the appendix of Robert Greenleaf: A Life of Servant Leadership offers insights and reflections on developing as a servant-leader. Servant-leadership can’t be reduced to a formula or technique. It is about developing capacities, habits, attitudes, and values. All of these contribute to a leader’s growth — like tributaries feeding into a moving stream. And the source of this development starts with one’s identity and spirit.

As you read this biography, you will likely become open to exploring powerful questions about life and leadership. Important questions compel us to reflect deeply and measure success in new ways. Greenleaf measured himself by the “best test” of servant-leadership: Do we, and those we serve, grow as persons? Become healthier, freer, more autonomous, more likely to serve? And what is the effect on the least privileged, are they served or at least not harmed?

Whether you adopt Greenleaf’s best test, develop your own, or find other issues to explore, this book will evoke questions that matter. The story will breathe new life into the way you think about developing the capacity to serve — in yourself, your organization, and your community.

Deborah Vogele Welch (DeborahVW@aol.com), Ph. D., is founding partner of Reflective Leadership Associates, a company that provides consulting, coaching, and e-learning services. She is an adjunct faculty member in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Capella University and cofounder of Arizona’s local SoL group, Cactus SoL.

The post Transforming Leadership: The Story of Robert Greenleaf appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

How did the country’s citizens manage to solve this almost impossibly complex problem? And what lessons can the rest of us learn from this brave process and others like it around the world? According to Adam Kahane in Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (Berrett-Koehler, 2004), the key to forging a better future in our personal lives, organizations, and world is talking and listening openly.

An Alternative to Force

Although this approach may sound simplistic or naïve, Kahane has stories from some of the world’s most charged conflicts to show that it is neither. In Guatemala, home to a brutal civil war that left more than 200,000 people dead, representatives from all facets began to mend the tattered social fabric through devastatingly honest yet respectful conversation. In Argentina, a country that has been buffeted by economic woes and social chaos, leaders from the legal system engaged in a series of frank dialogue sessions that opened the door to judicial reform. And in South Africa, rather than remaining entrenched in fear or resorting to violence, white and black, right-wing and left-wing, jailers and jailed joined together to listen and be heard in the service of national reconciliation.

People typically approach complex problems either by maintaining the status quo or by trying to force a solution on others.

This approach to tough challenges is unusual, because it involves lowering defenses at a time when participants are most inclined to raise them. It requires openness in settings that have thrived on secrecy and silence. And it demands mutual trust from victims as well as from perpetrators.

But the reality is that, in every setting—international, community, organizational, family—people typically approach complex problems either by maintaining the status quo (that is, by doing nothing) or by trying to force a solution on others. In the latter case, those with more power generally prevail, at least in the short run. Kahane says, “Families replay the same argument over and over, or a parent lays down the law. Organizations keep returning to a familiar crisis, or a boss declares a new strategy. Communities split over a controversial issue, or a politician dictates the answer. Countries negotiate to a stalemate, or they go to war.”

Using force is problematic, in that it leaves behind a swath of physical and psychic damage, perpetuates fear, and sows the seeds of rebellion. Rather than drawing people together, it drives them apart. In imposing their will, those in power shut down all other approaches, options, and possibilities, relying solely on their own judgment.

Kahane points out that this approach might work for straightforward issues, but it is woefully inadequate for dealing with today’s intricate problems. He defines these as situations that are:

Dynamically complex—Causes and their effects are separated by space and time, making the links between them difficult for any one person or group to identify.

Generatively complex—They are unpredictable and unfold in unfamiliar ways.

Socially complex—The people involved are extremely diverse and have very different perspectives.

Based on this definition, solving tough problems requires input from a wide range of stakeholders. Without the open and honest involvement of people from throughout the system, any resolution will be at best short-lived and at worst brutal.

Beyond the Comfort Zone

What kind of magic lies in talking and listening? After all, we talk continually, even when we’re disagreeing. Kahane shows that the quality of our interactions can make a major difference in the outcomes we achieve. Most of the time, when we talk, we’re asserting one point of view—our own—as being the truth. And when we listen, it’s generally to ourselves, as we prepare to refute something someone else has said.

TWO APPROACHES TO COMPLEX PROBLEMS

People typically approach complex problems either by doing nothing or by imposing a solution (R1). But without input from others, the quality of the intervention is generally poor, and the problem reappears. With each turn of the cycle, the severity of the problem grows, and the evel of force required to implement a solution rises. A more sustainable approach is for stakeholders to talk and listen openly, which can lead to the emergence of new strategies and high-quality actions (B2).

To avoid becoming mired in conflict, we need to transcend our typical modes of talking and listening (see “Two Approaches to Complex Problems”). Based on his experiences, Kahane observes, “When someone speaks personally, passionately, and from the heart, the conversation deepens. When a team develops a habit of speaking openly, then the problem they are working on begins to shift.” But he adds, “Often this is extremely difficult. People hesitate to say what they are thinking for many reasons, not only extraordinary but also ordinary: fear of being killed or jailed or fired, or fear of being disliked or considered impolite or stupid or not being a team player.” Nevertheless, if we want to create a new reality, we need to find the courage to speak up.

Listening in new ways means stretching beyond our comfort zone and being willing to be influenced and changed by others. It entails noticing and questioning our thinking and letting go of our attachment to our own ideas. Finally, open listening requires empathy and a genuine interest in other people, their experiences, and their perspectives. As Kahane quotes a South African bishop as saying, “We must listen to the sacred within each of us.”

Our Role in the Problem and Solution

But talking and listening aren’t enough—to create something new rather than merely re-create the past, we need to be able to translate novel forms of conversation into innovative modes of action. Central to this process is being able to see ourselves as part of both the problem and the emerging solution.

To illustrate this point, Kahane describes what happened during a series of workshops that he facilitated in South Africa, known as the Mont Fleur scenario project:, “A small group of leaders, representing a cross-section of a society that the whole world considered irretrievably stuck, had sat down together to talk broadly and profoundly about what was going on and what should be done. More than that, they had not talked about what other people—some faceless authorities or decision makers—should do to advance some parochial agenda, but what they and their colleagues and their fellow citizens had to do in order to create a better future for everybody.” They recognized that, just as they and their fellow citizens and their forebears had created the past, their collective actions would shape the nation’s future. That awareness opened up the possibilities for people to address the problems at a fundamental level.

For most of us, the consequences of continuing to rely on old ways of talking and listening are less dire than for the people whose stories are recounted in this book. But over the long run, we all face extraordinary challenges, including global climate change, the disparity between the wealthy and the poor, growing political instability around the world, and falling resource levels, among other growing crises.

These kinds of complex problems require people of courage to join together and forge peaceful, sustainable solutions. As Kahane concludes, “Every one of us gets to choose, in every encounter every day, which world we will contribute to bringing into reality. When we choose the closed way, we participate in creating a world filled with force and fear. When we choose an open way, we participate in creating another, better world.”

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

The post Forging Sustainable Solutions to Complex Problems appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The assumption implicit in this tactic is that change is done to the organization, not by it. People must be convinced of the need for working differently and, if management does not clearly communicate the reasons for it, they will resist it. This model may work in situations where the shift involves introducing systems and processes that do not require a fundamental transformation of people’s attitudes, ways of seeing the world, and modes of working.

FAILING TO CHANGE

Leadership teams often rely on “telling and selling” large-scale change initiatives to the organization (B1). While this approach may initially seem successful, over the longer run, it undermines employees’ commitment to the change process (R2). The more successful tact would be to include employees from the beginning, what we might call the “engage and shape” approach (B3).

But unfortunately, as shown in “Failing to Change,” when instituting large transformational change initiatives, organizations often fall prey to a “Fixes That Fail” archetype. It begins when the leadership team uses the “tell and sell” approach to introduce a wholesale change of the way the organization does business (B1). They often promote these changes using newsletters, handy reference cards, posters, coffee mugs, and perhaps even a video. Workers initially seem enthusiastic, but over the longer term, fail to fully embrace the new routines (R2). In response, management looks for ways to strong-arm employees into adopting the change, an approach that usually dooms the initiative to failure.

So, is the instinct to communicate that underlies the “tell and sell” approach wrong? Of course not— how else can we achieve our goals except by passionately sharing them with others? But gaining employees’ genuine commitment requires a more authentic, interactive way of speaking and listening than we’ve practiced in the past. As shown in “Failing to Change,” the fundamental solution is for leaders to change how they communicate and what they communicate about (B3). They must work with employees to build a shared vision of the organization, its opportunities, and its challenges, as well as to plan a set of purposeful actions for creating the organization’s future. Only when employees have been included in the process and feel their ideas have been heard and respected will they embrace and contribute to the change. We might call this approach the “engage and shape” philosophy.

“Engage and Shape” Philosophy

As Gary Hamel points out in his work on strategy creation and core competencies, the way to unlock new ideas about an organization is to create conversations across boundaries that involve distinct experiential, technical, and philosophical perspectives. Through engaged conversation comes shared meaning. From shared meaning comes alignment of purpose and fundamental buy-in.

How can leaders effectively engage the workforce in sharing, exploring, and aligning their unique perspectives in order to contribute to the enterprise’s larger vision? The “engage and shape” philosophy offers a framework for understanding what is involved in the process. It starts with the following assumptions:

• Developing visioning skills throughout the organization is more effective than imposing a vision on the organization from above.
• Leaders can’t and shouldn’t have all the answers up front. But they must create the overall direction and allow employees to take the initiative forward in their own way.
• No one can predict the outcome of engaging employees and asking them to shape the future. Leaders will have to relinquish some control over the direction the change initiative takes if they wish to move from merely consulting employees (, “telling and selling”) to capturing their hearts and minds (, “engaging and shaping”).
• Change involves a long journey. We can have some idea about and therefore plan for the first leg of the journey, but it’s difficult to know what might be behind the first or second or fiftieth hill! The implication of this fact is that the planning process has to allow for emergence, agility, and course correction.
• Formal project management involves breaking down projects into components that can then be managed. But dynamic organizational and cultural change takes place in the complex interplay of components. Therefore, leaders need to adopt a holistic and systemic approach to managing that takes into account the complex whole.

Having productive conversations around organizational change is a key process in the “engage and shape” approach, but many managers do not have the patience or interest to develop skills in the discipline of dialogue. Nevertheless, the kind of conversation needed to effect transformational change doesn’t happen by magic. Good conversation involves a set of talking practices and people who can facilitate these conversations. It requires enough time to ensure sufficient alignment around why we need to change, what we should change into in order to secure certain outcomes, how we will go about achieving the change, and how we will handle the inevitable surprises and miscues that might come up during the process.

To make the shift to “engage and shape,” groups can follow a series of four conversational practices that guide the change process and serve as an entry point to a more comprehensive use of dialogue (see “Four Conversational Practices”). These practices provide hard-pressed, action-oriented, and outcome-focused managers with a way to manage conversations in the context of open-ended, less tightly planned but ultimately more transforming ways of achieving change.

FOUR CONVERSATIONAL PRACTICES

A series of four conversational practices can guide the change process and serve as an entry point to a more comprehensive use of dialogue. These practices provide hard-pressed, action-oriented, and outcome-focused managers with a way to manage conversations in the context of open-ended, less tightly planned but ultimately more transforming ways of achieving change.

Just recently, the Ministry of Defence in the United Kingdom used these practices to create high-performing integrated project teams for the acquisition and in-service support of military equipment. The team leaders became skilled practitioners in these tools and techniques, despite initial misgivings that this was “yet another change program that will surely go the way of all the others nowhere.” In a short time, they were able to show immediate benefits in terms of creating a new quality of involvement in and buy-in for the new process among staff members. The group ultimately achieved a series of stretch goals that might not have been possible otherwise.

Managing the Four Conversations

The key to achieving employee engagement in actively shaping change is to iteratively manage and follow a sequence of conversational steps. Before beginning, the group should discuss and decide on what kind of listening would be appropriate (see “Automatic vs. Generated Listening” on p. 4). At the same time, participants should agree to other, more familiar ground rules, such as every contribution is valid, let the speaker finish, suspend assumptions, and so forth.

Overall, the group will seek to explore and build on contributions rather than broadcast their own views in an unconnected way. When people compete to secure airtime, the resulting conversation remains superficial and does not build an evolving meaning. It is particularly important for more senior managers to listen to junior managers rather than correct them or talk over them. Likewise, the kind of decision-making that emerges should be consensual and inclusive.

Note that, when managing conversations about change in organizations, it’s important to clearly distinguish among the past, present, and future. If people are unable to see how their actions in the present are driven by their perceptions, and that their perceptions are created by their past experiences, they will be unable to create a distinctive future that is different from the past!

Conversation for Engagement and Alignment

Once the ground rules have been established, the first step in the change process is to identify and build shared commitment among team members by ensuring that everyone is mentally “in the same place.” Most important is to find out what people are currently committed to regarding the issue, purpose, or objective. In this instance, a commitment means a deeply held belief, an expectation about what should happen, or an explicit aim or purpose located in the future. Failing to openly discuss and acknowledge people’s current commitments means that they will emerge at a later stage and possibly undermine the progress made.

To conduct a conversation for engagement:

• Begin by encouraging participants to say what is on their minds, be it related to the issue at hand or something else. This activity is a way of getting people present in the room and encouraging everyone to speak.
• Surface everyone’s individual concerns in relation to the issue being addressed. Capture these on a flipchart to reexamine later in light of any joint commitment developed by the group to see how well it encompasses individual concerns. Take care to ensure that participants do not simply complain. If they do, try to bring to the surface the underlying causal expectation that the symptomatic complaint is based upon. Another caution is to avoid blame. Blame is based in the past, and any engagement or alignment must be founded on a commitment based in the future.
• Explore people’s commitments and capture them on a flipchart. Rarely do concerns or complaints exist without an underlying commitment to something; for example, complaints about a new change initiative may reveal team members’ underlying desire for senior leaders to recognize innovations already happening in the organization. The best way to begin to understand the differences and similarities in people’s perspectives, and to move to alignment, is to ask them to describe what the future outcome would be if the commitment were realized.
• Once all people’s current commitments have been surfaced, come to agreement on an overall commitment with regard to the issue. This process can be challenging. A helpful way of achieving alignment around what the group wants to achieve is to simply focus on the outcome, benefits, or value that they will create, ideally in measurable terms.

Managers often skip this phase because they don’t deem it “action oriented.” They also often believe that everyone already knows what the problem is; they just need to sort it out. But limiting the time spent or the quality of conversation will only restrict the achievement of the end result. Without engagement and alignment around an overall purpose, the group’s effort to explore possibilities for the future, evaluate their feasibility, and enact any plans will be half-hearted.

A conversation for engagement and alignment will often lead to a clear commitment to producing something that the group doesn’t have the faintest idea of how they will go about achieving. This is a healthy sign! The term given to this sort of commitment is “generating a stand.” A stand is a commitment to building a future that is demonstrated through everyday actions:

• It provides stability during turbulence.
• It allows the group to declare “breakdowns,” that is, instances when people’s words and actions are not based on realizing the stand. Team members should be free to point out to colleagues or their managers when they observe a “breakdown” that is not in service of the goal.
• It provides the basis for coaching and being coached.
• It represents a breakthrough from the past.

In our experience at the Ministry of Defence, the most successful teams were those that had strong alignment around a compelling stand. All other elements then tended to fall into place naturally. Typically, the stand would include high-level stretch targets as opposed to hard targets. Participants believed hard targets to be tough but achievable. Stretch targets, on the other hand, were deemed “over the horizon.” Their purpose was to provoke out-of-the-box thinking and unprecedented action.

In the Ministry of Defence, such stretch targets focused on the performance, time, and cost elements of procuring military equipment; for instance, procuring a new frigate and bringing it into service in half the time, for the same cost, but with greater capability than the current version. Even if a stretch target is not achieved, more often than not, committing to it ensures outcomes that are far greater than merely committing to a hard target. But in order to really commit to such a goal, employees need to participate in the planning process and trust that they won’t be penalized for falling short of what is a highly ambitious objective.

Conversation for Shaping the Future

This second conversational practice on the road toward breakthrough change involves imagining what things could be like in the future. When I worked with a client in the financial services industry, the aim was to transform the role of human resources into that of a true business partner. When the HR managers engaged in a conversation for shaping the future, they imagined a tomorrow in which the HR function genuinely influenced business results.

A key tool for this conversation, borrowed from Soft Systems Methodology, is the construction of a “root definition” for the activity that needs to be changed or addressed. A root definition is a structured description of a system that clearly spells out the activities that take place (or might take place) in the system being studied. It has three parts: what, how, and why. The “what” is the immediate aim of the system, the “how” is the means of achieving that aim, and the “why” is the longer-term aim of the purposeful activity.

Root definitions follow this format:

A system to ………………………… by ………………………… in order to ………………………….

For example, a root definition for creating breakthrough procurement performance at the Ministry of Defence might look like this:

In this root definition,

• The what is “to procure military equipment”;
• The how is “by using integrated project team processes and ways of working”; and
• The why is “to deliver the equipment within the budgets and time frames established at the outset of the project, ensuring enhanced capability to the military end users.”

This is one of many root definition that could be constructed for the activity of military procurement. The root definition should be internally consistent; for example, the “how” must describe a process which will (or should) result in the “what,” and so on. A common mistake is to include more than one purposeful activity in a single root definition.

Participants must also talk and think about the various roles that individuals and groups take on in the system. The categories (abbreviated as “CATWOE”) are:

• C (Customer): Who would be the victims/beneficiaries of the purposeful activity?
• A (Actors): Who would do the activities?
• T (Transformation Process): What would happen?
• W (Weltanschauung): A German word loosely meaning “worldview,” what view of the world makes this definition meaningful?
• O (Owner): Who could stop this activity?
• E (Environmental Constraints): What constraints in its environment does this system take as given?

For the root definition given above, the following is a possible “CATWOE”:

• C: Military end users
• A: Integrated project team (IPT)
• T: IPT processes and ways of working
• W: That multi-functional teams will be better at procuring military equipment than the current silo-based structure
• O: The Ministry of Defence
• E: The performance, time, and cost parameters set out at the start of the procurement

The process of trying out different transformation processes (T) and worldviews (W) in the discussion often promotes innovation. Ultimately, the task is to conclude this conversation with an agreement on one or two root definitions that can be taken forward into the next conversation.

Conversation for Feasibility

This step involves testing the possibilities and ideas developed in the conversation for shaping the future against key criteria, including:

• The original stand
• The feasibility of implementing the new ideas (how do the ideas compare with the current real world and what value will be created by implementing them?)
• The things that need to be in place in order to reach the stretch targets
• Initial plans for the early stages of the breakthrough journey and outline plans for the whole journey
• The projected return on investment

A useful technique in this conversation is to draw a conceptual model of the root definition on a big whiteboard. A conceptual model is a simple diagram showing the links between components of the designed future based on the ideas in the root definition (see “Conceptual Models” on p. 6). It is not a causal loop diagram in the conventional sense, because it is a representation of the future arising from the commitments and ideas flowing from the conversation.

The diagram shows the key activities described in the root definition and how they link together as a coherent system. Playing with different options and comparing them with the current reality helps to identify the benefits that might be derived from implementing the ideas captured in the root definition. Once again, this conversation is most effective when the previous conversations have been thoroughly explored and when participants:

• Listen generously and explore each others’ points of view
• Bring to the surface and challenge their assumptions
• Constantly check back to their original commitments and stands
• Are focused on the outcomes sought
• Try not to recreate the past

CONCEPTUAL MODEL

Conversation for Action

The aim of the conversation for action is to bring to life the conceptual model identified in the previous conversation. This step is critical; unfortunately, managers seldom conduct these conversations well. The principles behind a conversation for action fall into two categories:

1. Participants must make requests of other people.

Here it’s important to be explicit about who is having the request made of them, what is being requested, and by when. The individuals who are having requests made of them have three possible responses:

• Accept the request.
• Reject the request.
• Make a counterproposal, that is, undertake the requested action but on a different timetable or propose a different action.

2. Participants can choose to make promises to other people by offering to do something specific by a particular date.

Although this process seems simple and straightforward, think back to management meetings that have failed to result in meaningful actions. Nearly always, people fail to follow up because team members haven’t rigorously handled conversations for action. This oversight often occurs because the group suffers from a lack of commitment, honesty, or trust. For instance, people may attend meetings because they do not want to miss out on anything, but when the group agrees to do something, no one assumes responsibility for taking it forward.

This conversational discipline brings clarity to the “something” as well as a genuine commitment to taking it forward. The final step is to identify accountability for different tasks. Participants will have developed high levels of trust because they have all been involved in the rigor of the previous conversational steps. The will all be on the same page regarding what they want the outcome to be. If any or all of the previous three stages have been handled in an incomplete way, the conceptual model will remain just that, conceptual.

Application of the Disciplines

At the Ministry of Defence, breakthrough change has been achieved in an environment that had previously been hostile to innovations. One hundred and fifty integrated project teams (IPTs), employing some 5,000 staff members, were established over an 18-month period. This process in itself was seen as a major success, particularly in light of team members’ alignment around robust plans. Many IPTs have already achieved their hard targets, and a significant number have made good progress toward their stretch targets. The UK National Audit Office has highlighted this case as an example of successful change.

Leading change is about adding value to the business by engaging people in finding new ways to operate. The only effective way to draw people into the process is to improve the quality of our speaking and listening. It is through improved conversation that aligned action takes place. In this sense, language is indeed the house of being and doing. The techniques described here are a good way to start improving the quality of our conversations for business benefit.

Robert Bolton is a director of Atos Origin Consulting, formerly KPMG Consulting in the United Kingdom. He specializes in transformational change in the UK public sector, particularly in the area of defense. He is also a visiting lecturer in strategic change at the University of Bristol.

The post Talking Change: Developing Conversational Discipline for Breakthrough Performance appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

If you’re not part of the problem, then you can’t be part of the solution.
– Bill Torbert

While this was happening, I was at my home in South Africa working on a book about how we can solve such tough, complex problems through open-minded, open-hearted talking and listening. Then my youngest stepdaughter, who is 27 years old, came home for the holidays and immediately lapsed into her old teenage behavior. She would go out without telling us, stay out partying until late, and sleep away the day. One evening she had spent hours on the phone having a weepy conversation with an old boyfriend. I was furious! I told her that this kind of behavior was absolutely unacceptable and that she needed to change what she was doing if she wanted to use my phone and stay in my house.

That approach didn’t work. The next morning she left and went to stay with her sister. I had managed to do in my own home what the Americans were doing in Iraq. I had tried to solve a tough problem by using authority: by force.

Why is it that we so often end up trying to solve our tough problems by force? Why is it that our talking so often fails? The answer is both simple and at the same time subtle and challenging. Our most common way of talking is telling, and our most common way of listening is not listening. When we talk and listen in this way, we guarantee that we will end up trying to solve our tough problems by force.

Two Distinctions for Solving Problems

I would like to offer two sets of practical distinctions that you can use to solve your tough problems more effectively. The first distinction is that there is more than one way to solve problems. There is an ordinary approach that works for simple problems, and there is an extraordinary approach that works for complex problems. The second distinction is that there is more than one way to talk and listen. If we are to solve our tough problems peacefully, we need to learn an extraordinary way of talking and listening.

I will explain these two distinctions by sharing two dramatic, life and-death stories. I’m not that sensitive to these distinctions, and so the volume has to be turned way up if I’m going to be able to hear them. These two stories involve situations in which the volume was turned way up, but the two sets of distinctions apply to all human settings—home, school, work, meetings, and national and international affairs.

I learned the first set of distinctions in 1991. I was living in London working for Royal Dutch/Shell’s scenario planning department, heading the social-political-economic research group. Our job was to tell stories about what might happen in the world outside the company, as a tool for Shell executives to use in making decisions today that would allow the company to do well no matter what happened tomorrow. One day, my boss, Joseph Jaworski, received a phone call from a professor in South Africa named Pieter le Roux, who wanted to use the Shell scenario methodology to help make plans for the transition in South Africa away from apartheid. Pieter was wondering if Shell could send somebody to provide methodological advice to the team he was putting together and to facilitate the workshops.

When I was chosen for this project, I knew almost nothing about South Africa, except that the country had a complex problem of apartheid, which most people thought could not be solved peacefully. I knew that the white minority government had been trying for years to deal with the situation by force and had failed, and that the opposition, led by the African National Congress, had tried to over throw the government by force and had failed. I was also aware that Nel- son Mandela had been released from prison a year before and that some negotiations were starting. But I didn’t know much about the scenario team Pieter had put together, except that it was very diverse and included blacks and whites, people from the left and right, professors, political activists, businessmen, establishment figures, trade unionists, and community leaders. I also knew that these people were heroes who had all, in different ways, been trying for a long time to make South Africa a better place.

Since I was very busy with my work at Shell, I didn’t do what I normally would have done: read up on South Africa and form my expert opinion about what was going on and what they ought to do about it. Not having had the time to form such an opinion, I arrived with a greater openness to what this amazing team was going to be able to do. I had also never done this kind of work outside of a company, so we simply used Shell’s scenario methodology. The team immediately launched into discussions about the ANC, the NP, the PAC, the SACP, the CP, and the UDF. I had no idea what they were talking about. One of the team members later said to me, “Adam, when we first met you, we couldn’t believe that anybody could be so ignorant. We were certain you were trying to manipulate us. When we realized that you actually didn’t know anything, that’s when we decided to trust you.” I had, by accident or synchronicity, managed to arrive with the perfect orientation: curious, respectful, and open.

What I came to understand in South Africa was that two parallel processes were occurring. There were the formal, official negotiations around a new constitution, which the newspapers reported about daily. But underneath these were hundreds of informal, unofficial meetings, such as the one I participated in, that brought together all the stakeholders—all the people who were part of the problems—to talk together about the problems and what ought to be done about them. It was through these myriad informal conversations that the formal process succeeded.

I also noticed that, even though we were using the exact same methodology as at Shell, the South African group brought a different energy to the work. In one way it was more serious, and in another more playful. What I eventually understood is that although the methodology was exactly the same, the group’s purpose was fundamentally different. At Shell we had been telling scenarios about what might happen as a tool to help the company adapt as best as it could to whatever might occur in the future. In the South African team, we were telling scenarios not so much to adapt but to create a better future. And this is what accounted for the different energy in the team.

Three Types of Complex Problems

So here’s what I learned in South Africa: a problem can be tough and complex in three different ways.

Socially Complex. A problem is socially complex when the people involved, the actors in the system, have highly diverse perspectives and interests. Problems that are socially simple can be solved by experts and authorities, because it’s easy to agree on what the problem is and for an expert or a boss to propose and implement a solution that people will support. But a socially complex problem cannot be solved without the direct participation of all the stakeholders involved.

Dynamically Complex. A problem is dynamically complex when its cause and effect are far apart in space and time. This is the kind of complexity that is addressed by systems thinking. A dynamically simple problem can be solved piece by piece, but when dynamic complexity is involved, we have to look at the behavior of the system as a whole.

Generatively Complex. When a problem is generatively complex, the future of the system is unfamiliar and undetermined. A generatively simple problem can be solved using rules of thumb from what worked in the past. But when the problem is generatively complex, it can only be solved through a group of people working it through together, listening for and trying out emerging solutions.

TWO WAYS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

A problem can be tough and complex in three different ways; it can be socially, dynamically, and/or generatively complex. Ordinary problem-solving approaches work well for simple challenges. But when we want to solve complex problems, we need to use an extraordinary approach, in which stakeholders look together at the system as a whole and work through an emerging solution.

To give you an idea of how this problem-solving model works, let’s look at the simple matter of a police officer directing traffic at a difficult intersection. The problem is socially simple because everybody has the same objective: to get through the intersection safely and efficiently. The problem is also dynamically simple because all the causes and effects are right there, visible and immediate.

And it’s generatively simple because the way the officer directs traffic, based on what he or she learned at traffic-directing school, works fine. So the problem can be solved using the ordinary approach.

The ordinary approach works perfectly well most of the time. It’s when we want to solve complex problems that we need to use an extraordinary approach, in which the people who are part of the problem— the stakeholders—look together at the system as a whole and work through an emerging solution. This is what I realized the Mont Fleur team had done in South Africa. They had gathered leading representatives from all of the stakeholder groups and used sce- nario planning as a tool for thinking about the behavior of the whole system and finding emerging solutions. My point here is that the ordinary approach cannot generate a peaceful solution to a complex problem. If we use the ordinary approach on a complex problem, we will end up trying to solve the problem by force.

I understood the significance of this realization in my work in South Africa, where people were experimenting with an extraordinary approach to solving complex prob- lems that was applicable not just to the South African context, but else where as well. What I didn’t understand, because I was not experienced enough, is how the South African team was able to work with this extraordinary approach. In the years that followed, I got a lot of experience with this methodology through doing this kind of work with multistakeholder teams in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Israel, Argentina, Colombia, the United States, and Canada. I also began to develop, with colleagues, a family of tools for working with important complex problems in companies and governments.

It wasn’t until 1998, however, in the course of doing some work in Guatemala, that I really grasped the essence of how a group could use the extraordinary approach. I don’t know how well you know the story of Guatemala. It has the dubious distinction of having had the longest running and most brutal civil war in all of Latin America. Over a 36-year period, from 1960 to 1996, more than 200,000 people were killed and disappeared out of a population of only 8 million. More than a million people became internal refugees, and the country as a whole experienced a brutality such as humanity has rarely seen. By the time the peace treaty was signed in 1996, the social fabric of the country had been shredded.

Many brave and wonderful efforts, which continue today, have been made to try to put things back together again. One of these efforts, inspired by the project in South Africa, was called Visión Guatemala. The Visión Guatemala group brought together a group of leaders—even more diverse and senior than the South African team—from the mili- tary, the former guerrillas, business, church, academics, and youth leaders, to try to understand what had hap- pened in the country, what was happening, and what ought to happen. Those of you who follow the news know that things are by no means all right in Guatemala, but in the five years they’ve been working together, this team has made a big impact in the country, on the platforms of all the major political parties, on restructuring the education and tax systems, on constitutional amendments, on anti-poverty programs, on dialogue processes at the municipal level and among politicians, and so forth.

Four Ways of Talking and Listening

In 2000 a group of researchers from the Society for Organizational Learning interviewed members of the Visión Guatemala team to try to pinpoint exactly what happened in their group to allow them to do such extraordinary work in such a highly complex system. The answer the researchers arrived at has to do with the way this group, over the course of their involvement together, progressed in the way they were talking and listening.

Downloading. In the chart “Four Ways of Talking and Listening” (see p. 5), based on the work of Otto Scharmer of MIT, there are four quadrants. According to the researchers’ observations, the Visión Guatemala group started their conversations in downloading. This is supported by an interview with Elena Díez Pinto, the leader of the group. She said, “When I arrived at the hotel for lunch before the start of the initial meeting, the first thing I noticed was that the indigenous people were sitting together, the military guys were sitting together, the human rights group was sitting together. I thought, ‘They are never going to speak to each other.’ In Guatemala we have learned to be very polite to each other. We are so polite that we say ‘yes’ but think ‘no.’ I was worried that we would be so polite that the real issues would never emerge.”

This first type of talking and listening is called downloading, because we merely repeat the story that’s already in our heads, like download- ing a file from the Internet without making any change to it. I say what I always say or what I think is appropriate, such as “How are you? I’m fine,” because I’m afraid that if I say what I’m really thinking, something terrible will happen, for instance, I’ll be embarrassed or even killed. Listening in downloading mode is not listening at all. I am only hearing the tape in my own head.

Debating. The second kind of talking and listening is called debating. A wonderful example of this process occurred in Visión Guatemala’s first workshop. One of the interviewees said, “The first round in the first session was extremely negative, because we were all looking back to the events of recent years, which had left a deep imprint on us. Thus a first moment full of pessimism was generated. Suddenly a young man stood up and questioned our pessimism in a very direct manner. This moment marked the beginning of a very important change, and we continually referred to it afterward. That a young man would suddenly call us ‘old pes- simists’ was an important contribution.” This was debating in the sense that the young man was saying what he really thought, which is what happens when people make the transition from downloading to debating. A clash of arguments occurs; ideas are put forward and judged objectively as in a courtroom.

I used to undervalue debating because it seemed so commonplace. But in the last few years, through observing how many countries and companies in which I’ve worked stay in downloading mode, where people are afraid to say what they think, I’ve come to appreciate the move from downloading to debating as a huge step forward. You can see more perspectives, that is, more of the system.

However, in debating as well as downloading, you’re still seeing what is already there. Neither of those modes creates anything new. For example, in a debate or a courtroom, people have prepared what they want to say before they even enter the room. In that sense, both download- ing and debating lead to a reenactment of patterns of the past or of existing realities. To bring forward something new, we need to talk and listen in an extraordinary way.

Dialoguing. The third mode is called dialoguing. My favorite example of this in the Visión Guatemala team occurred one day when the group was talking about an extremely difficult subject: the civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people had been killed. A general in the army was trying to explain honestly what the war had looked like from his experience and perspective, which was both a very difficult and an unpopular thing for him to do. He certainly did not have the sympathy of most of the people in the room. As he spoke, the woman listening beside him, Raquel Zelaya, the cabinet secretary of peace who was officially responsible for implementing the peace accords, leaned over to him and said, “Julio, I know that nobody enrolls in a military academy in order to learn how to massacre women and children.”

FOUR WAYS OF TALKING AND LISTENING

Downloading and debating work fine for solving simple problems, but they don’t work for solving complex ones. For complex problems, groups need to use dialoguing and presencing, and to be able to shift from one mode to another, as appropriate.

This was a remarkable statement. On the one hand, she was signaling that she had been listening to him with empathy, listening from his perspective and realizing that no matter what had happened, he certainly hadn’t started out his life with a brutal intention. At the same time, through self-reflection, she was indicating her understanding that the way she thought about things mattered and affected how this situation would unfold. In other words, if you cannot see how what you’re doing is contributing to creating the current reality, then by definition you have no leverage, no place to stand, no way to intervene to change the problem situation. When Raquel made that comment to the general, she was recognizing the way in which herat titudes were part of the polarization and needed to change to open up a new way forward.

So in dialoguing, I am both listening to you from within you and listening to myself knowing where I’m coming from. I am not just listening objectively to ideas; I am listening subjectively from inside you and me. And because I’m listening from inside a living, growing system, I can glimpse what’s possible but not yet there. This type of talking and listening is the root of the potential forchange and creativity.

Presencing. This fourth type of talking and listening is what Otto Scharmer, along with Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers, and Peter Senge, has written a book about, which is due to be released this winter and is titled Presence. For that reason, I am using the word presencing, because what I am referring to is the particular kind of talking and listening, of being and doing, that they describe in their book. In the Visión Guatemala group, we experienced this kind of generative dialogue one evening at the first workshop. The group had gotten together after dinner, and I had asked the participants to tell stories about their experiences, either recent or long ago. The exercise was a continuation of the scenario work of trying to understand what had happened and what was happening in Guatemala. But rather than use systems thinking as an objective tool to identify driving forces and key uncertainties, we were using amore subjective approach.

It was a dramatic evening. Helen Mack Chang, a prominent business woman, spoke about the assassination of her sister, a researcher, in broad day-light in Guatemala City some years before. She shared her experience of that day, after her sister had been murdered, and how she had run from government office to government office, trying to find out what had happened, and how the first person she had spoken to, who had lied to her and told her that he knew nothing, was the man sitting beside her that evening in the circle. We were long past being polite. Now people were really saying what they thought.

Then a man named Ronalth Ochaeta told a story. Ronalth was at that time the executive director of the Catholic Church’s human rights office, which published the very important first report on the civil war called “Nunca Más” (, “Never Again”). He spoke of how he had gone one day to be the official observer at the exhumation of a mass grave in a Mayan village. There were many such graves. As he stood by the side of the grave and watched the forensics team removing the earth, he noticed many small bones at the bottom. He asked them, “What happened here? Did people have their bones broken during the massacre?” They answered, “No, people did not have their bones broken. This massacre included several pregnant women, and what you’re seeing are the bones of their fetuses.”

You can feel a little bit now the quality of the silence—the quality of the listening, the realization, the understanding—that we have in this room right now. Perhaps you can imagine what it was like to hear that story in a group of 40 people, all of whom had lived through this experience and in one way or another been implicated. It was a silence such as I had never heard. It just went on and on, for five, maybe ten minutes.

At the end of the day, we were talking about what had happened, and several people used the word communion to refer to that moment when the whole group had been part of one flesh. I remarked that I thought there was a spirit in the room, and a Mayan man said to me afterward, “Mr. Kahane, why were you surprised there was a spirit in the room? Didn’t you know that today is the Mayan Day of the Spirits?” When the SoL researchers interviewed the members of the Visión Guatemala team, six of the intervie- wees referred to those five minutes of silence as the moment when everything had turned in the team, the moment when the team understood why they were there and what they had to do.

One of them said, “As to the story that Ronalth recounted, the one that caused such a big impact, that is one story and there must be a thousand like it. What happened in this country was brutal. Thirty years . . . and we were aware of it, I was. I was a politician for a long time, and this was one of the areas that I worked in. I was even threatened by the military commissioners on account of my political work. We all suffered, but as opponents, as enemies, always from our own particular points of view. As far as I am concerned, the workshops helped me to understand this in its true human dimension—a tremendous brutality. I was aware of it but had not experienced it. It is one thing to know about something as statistical data and another to actually feel it. To think that all of us had to go through this process. I think that after understanding this, everyone was committed to preventing it from happening again.”

This is what we mean by presencing. It wasn’t that people felt empathy for Ronalth; anybody could have told that story. It was as if, through Ronalth, we had all been able to see an aspect of the reality of Guatemala that was of central importance. It was as if, in those five minutes, the boundaries between us disappeared, and the team was able to see what really mattered to them and what they had to do together. In this way, the process of moving from downloading and debate to dialoguing and presencing can be described as one of opening, of developing the capacity to hear what is trying to come through.

Listening to the Sacred Within Each of Us

I have explained two sets of practical distinctions. First, there are two ways to solve problems: an ordinary approach that works for simple problems, and an extraordinary approach that works for complex problems. But the ordinary approach does not work for complex problems, and if we use it, we will end up trying to solve the problem by force. Second, there are four ways of talking and listening.

Downloading and debating work fine for solving simple problems, but they don’t work for solving complex problems. For complex problems, we need to use dialoguing and presencing. If you want to be able to solve complex problems, you need both the awareness of these different ways of talking and listening and the capacity to move among them.

In 1998 Desmond Tutu retired as the Anglican Archbishop of Southern Africa. His successor, Njongonkulu Ndungane, wanted to hold a strategic planning workshop with the 32 bishops who would now be reporting to him. He asked me to facilitate the workshop. Although there were some tough issues to be worked out, it was a joyous meeting.

Right at the beginning, I noticed that these bishops were remarkable listeners; they seemed intuitively to understand and be able to navigate among these four ways of talking and listening. For example, when we were making ground rules for the work- shop, they seemed concerned about the danger of downloading and not listening (they might have called it pontificating). One of the bishops proposed the ground rule, “We must listen to each other’s ideas.” A second bishop said, “No, brother, that’s not quite it. We must listen to one another with empathy.” Then a third bishop said, “No, brothers, that’s not quite it. We must listen to the sacred within each of us.”

I think the bishops got it right. If we can learn to listen to each other truly, with empathy, and if we can learn to listen to the sacred whole as expressed through each of us, then we can peacefully solve even our most complex problems.

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