The first meeting begins with a “post-mortem” on the latest launch crisis. The team members tackle the issue with enthusiasm, jumping in with their own perspectives of what went wrong and why. At first the meeting seems to be going well, since everyone is obviously engaged in solving the problem. But as the meeting progresses, you start to feel like the group is spinning its wheels. The stories begin to resemble a jumble of personal anecdotes that share no common elements: “Well, on project X, we tried doing something new, and this is what happened…” or “This reminds me of the time when we implemented process Y and we were carrying spare parts in brown paper bags…” Lots of interesting stories are being exchanged, but they do not seem to be leading to a common understanding of the root causes.

The Storytelling Trap

Stories can be a powerful tool for engaging a group’s interest in a problem or issue. The specific details about people and events make it easy for most people to relate to stories, and they often provide a firm grounding in the day-to-day reality of the situation. But storytelling’s strength is also its Achilles heel: when we remain at event-level storytelling, it is difficult to generalize the insights to other situations, and so the solutions are often situation-specific. Without a deeper understanding of why something happened, the most we can do is find ways to react faster to similar events in the future.

FROM EVENTS TO VISION: STRUCTURED PROBLEM-SOLVING

By using a modified version of the “Vision Deployment Matrix,” a team can look at a particular problem under study from different perspectives. The “Current Reality” and “Desired Future Reality” columns allow you to differentiate between diagnosis of the current situation and proposed solutions for the future

Storytelling at Multiple Levels

One way that managers can move beyond event-level storytelling to a deeper understanding of an issue is to use a modified version of the Vision Deployment Matrix (see “Vision Deployment Matrix: A Framework for Large-Scale Change,” February 1995). In particular, applying the first two columns of the matrix (“current reality” and “desired future reality”) to a particular problem can provide a framework for both analyzing the current situation and designing an effective, long-term solution (see “From Events to Vision: Structured Problem-Solving”).

The matrix distinguishes between different levels of seeing and understanding a situation. The “Events” level captures stories about specific incidents or events that indicate a problem. The next level,“ Patterns,” expands the time horizon. At this stage, the team might ask, “Are these individual events or stories part of a larger pattern that has been unfolding over time?” Next, the “Systemic Structures” level looks at the structures that might be producing the observed pattern of behavior. Since those systemic structures are usually physical manifestations of deeply held mental models in the organization, the “Mental Models” level prompts the team to surface them. Finally, at the “Vision” level, the group considers how the vision of what the organization is creating might be influencing those mental models.

Analyzing a problem or situation from multiple levels can be useful in several ways. First, it forces us to go beyond event-level storytelling, where our ability to affect the future is low, to a perspective that offers greater leverage for creating systemic change. Second, the matrix provides a way to distinguish between different ideas and experiences (e.g., “Does this story illustrate a problem situation or a prevalent mental model?”). Finally, when the conversation does jump from events to specific systems to assumptions and so on, the matrix can provide a coherent framework for mapping everyone’s contribution in real time.

Using the Matrix

By filling in the matrix around a particular problem or issue, the team members can work together to raise their understanding from the level of events to patterns, systemic structures, mental models, and vision. For example, in the product launch situation, the team started with stories of a particular launch failure. After some discussion, the team discovered that the proper tests for verification were never conducted. But instead of going further into the details of why that process was neglected, the team can ask questions designed to draw the stories up to the patterns level, such as, “Was this indicative of a pattern that happens on all products?” Additional stories can then be used to establish whether that is indeed a pattern.

The next step is to identify the underlying structures that may currently be responsible for such behavior. In this example, the test and verification efforts all relied on a central group of people who were chronically overused by all the products under development, hence verifications were rarely done to the level specified. When the group tried to understand how engineers could justify skipping such an important step, they revealed an implicit mental model: “not knowing there is a problem and moving forward is better than knowing there is a problem and moving forward.” In short, the division had been operating according to an “ignorance is bliss” strategy.

To understand where this assumption came from, the group asked, “What is the implicit vision driving the process?” The most common answer was “to minimize unwanted senior management attention.” In other words, no one in product development wanted to have problems surface on their “watch.”

Although this team focused on the “Current Reality” column, they could also fill out the “Desired Future Reality” column by asking what kinds of new structures might be needed to prevent these problems from happening in the future.

Guiding Questions

The following set of questions can be used to guide conversations as a team moves among the different levels of perspective. In looking at current reality, it may be easier to start at the level of events (since that is where stories usually begin) and work your way up the levels. When mapping out the desired future reality, however, it may be better to begin at the level of vision and go down to the other levels so that your desired future reality is not limited by the current reality. Having said that, it is likely that in actual meetings the conversation will bounce all over the place. The main point is to use the matrix to capture the conversation in a coherent framework.

Current Reality

• What are some specific events that characterize the current reality?
• Are those specific events indicative of a pattern over time? Do other stories corroborate this repeated pattern?
• Are there systemic structures in place that are responsible for the pattern? Which specific structures are producing the most dominant pattern of behavior behind the current results?
• What mental models do we hold that led us to put such structures in place? What are the prevailing assumptions, beliefs, and values that sustain those structures?
• What kind of vision are we operating out of that explains the mental models we hold? What is the current vision-in-use?

Desired Future Reality

• What is the espoused vision of the future?
• What sets of assumptions, beliefs, and values will help realize the vision?
• What kinds of systemic structures are required (either invented or redesigned) to operationalize the new mental models and achieve that vision?
• What would be the behavior over time of key indicators if the desired vision became a reality?
• What specific events would illustrate how the vision is operating on a day-to-day basis?

By elevating the conversation from events to systems structure and beyond, this simple tool can help managers make clearer sense of their own experiences, and use those experiences to formulate more effective solutions to the problems at hand.

Daniel H. Kim is co-founder of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, and of Pegasus Communications, Inc. He is a public speaker and teacher of systems thinking and organizational learning.

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Starting with the Basks

Jorge began his exploration of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by looking for an exercise that could help him better understand how to create a learning organization. He found a “solo exercise” entitled “Defining Your Learning Organization” (p. 50). Following the instructions, he began envisioning the learning organization he would like to build. To do this, the exercise suggested answering three questions about this ideal organization: 1) What are the characteristics of this organization that make it succeed? 2) How do its people interact inside the organization and with the outside world? 3) How does this organization differ from my current organization?

When Jorge completed the exercise, he was enthusiastic about his personal vision of what a learning organization would look like. Since he had heard the phrase “shared vision” tossed around the office, he decided to share his vision with the other members of his organization. He picked up the book once again to look for suggestions.

His search brought him to an article entitled “Building Shared Vision: How to Begin” (p. 312), one of the “Theory and Methods” entries in the book. The article described five stages in the process of building shared vision, and suggested first determining your current stage, and then designing a strategy to get you to the next stage. With help from the Fieldbook, Jorge determined that his company was at stage two (“selling” the vision), and to further the work he should focus on enrolling people in the vision by sharing his personal excitement and commitment. Based on the suggestions in the book, he plotted a course of action.

Creating a Vision

Some weeks later, Jorge picked up his tattered copy of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. He felt his work group was now at the stage where the members were ready to co-create a vision. One intriguing phrase he came across said, When a shared vision effort starts with personal vision, the organization becomes a tool for people’s self realization, rather than a machine they’re subjected to.” When he shared this passage with the other members of his group, he was asked, “I low do we do this?”

After skimming through the book, Jorge stumbled upon a “Guiding Ideas” article entitled “Intrapersonal Mastery” (p. 226), which stated that personal mastery involves a move from reacting to the past to creating your future. As this shift happens, you often realize that you are intimately related to your organization, your nation, and the world. Along with this realization comes the desire to adjust your personal vision so that it encompasses not just what you want for yourself, but what you want for the larger systems in which you work and live.

Jorge immediately wrote up a presentation on intrapersonal mastery and presented it to his group. The meeting, however, was a disaster. He was constantly interrupted, people seemed to react to things that weren’t said, and there was a lot of posturing. Afterward, he met with each of the members individually to get their impressions of what went wrong, and to reemphasize his belief in the importance of intrapersonal mastery. To his surprise, each team member expressed excitement and interest in the topic. He wondered how they could possibly agree with him individually and yet act so unproductively in a group setting. It seemed that his group also needed to work on team learning.

That evening he picked up his Fieldbook and found another “Theory & Methods” article in the Team Learning chapter (p. 357). The article was on dialogue, a process through which people learn how to think together by creating a “container” — an atmosphere of trust and respect in which difficult topics can be addressed. After reading about dialogue, Jorge invited the other members of his group to come to a series of meetings to begin experimenting with the dialogue process. After they met a number of times in “dialogue sessions, Jorge felt like they were beginning to reach a new level of understanding and communication. At this point, he presented the group with a team exercise from the Fieldbook entitled “What Do We Want to Create?” (p. 337), which offers a two-step method for jointly articulating a shared vision and evaluating current reality. After doing this exercise a number of times, they felt comfortable with the shared vision they created.

Looking at the System

The group agreed that the next step was to design a method to achieve that vision. Jorge knew that before you change the structure of a system, you better know what you’re doing or you could make it worse. He decided that it would be a good idea to map out the structure of the system using system dynamics’ causal loop diagramming technique. A “Systems Stories” article in the Fieldbook entitled “Start with Story Telling” told of a company like his that used systems thinking to move from focusing on events to recognizing patterns of behavior over time. They then mapped out the mental models of the company’s managers so they could see the systemic structure underlying their problems. Jorge and the other managers decided that they would attempt to do the same.

Using the archetype family tree in the Fieldbook (p. 149), they identified the “Shifting the Burden” archetype as best capturing one of their most persistent problems. It seemed to Jorge’s group that at International Chocolate, managers spent much of their time “fighting fires” — even though they all recognized the havoc and the short-term perspective crisis management engenders. Using the storyline of the “Shifting the Burden” archetype from the Fieldbook, the group saw that a dependence on crisis management had led to addictive behavior in the company as a whole. As the team began to flesh out the storyline, they soon developed a free-form causal loop diagram that accurately reflected their shared view of their problem. But although they all agreed on the structure of the system as represented in their causal loop diagram, they disagreed about the behavior that system would produce if they tried to change the addictive structure.

As Jorge was puzzling over this latest dilemma, he noticed a cameo article in the Fieldbook by John Sterman entitled “Beyond Training Wheels” (p. 177), which discussed the shortcomings of archetypes and causal loop diagrams. Jorge and his team discovered that they were not alone in being unable to mentally “simulate” the solution to the problem they had mapped, and that in order to do this they needed to convert their causal loop map to a mathematical model.

Although the Fieldbook contained several articles on converting causal loop diagrams to computer models, Jorge felt that it was not nearly as rich in this area as it was in others. It did, however, point to and review many modeling resources that Jorge could pursue for using system dynamics to create mathematical models and test their systems hypothesis (p. 546).

Next Steps

Jorge is currently busy finding a consultant to help build a computer model. Although he is not using the Fieldbook quite as much at this stage, he keeps it on a shelf next to his desk because he knows he’ll pick it up again soon. Jorge has learned that building a learning organization is a continuous process, and despite their progress, his company still has a long way to go.

W. Brian Kreutzer is a consultant, teacher, and writer associated with Gould-Kreutzer Associates, Inc.

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (New York: Doubleday, 1994) is available through Pegasus Communications, Inc.

The post The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: A Guide to the Learning Organization appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

But as you placed each card and the house grew taller, you began to worry more about the possibility of the house falling down than about building it. You worried about the air currents being stirred as people walked by; you were careful not to breathe while placing each card. Try as you might, it became harder and harder to concentrate on that perfect card house. The sweat beaded on your brow as your shaky hand placed one more card on top, and…CRASH!

Keeping Focused on What We Want

Many goals succumb to the same fate as the house of cards. Try as we might to keep focused on the goal, other pressures interfere and take our attention away from what we are really trying to achieve. Productivity standards, cost control measures, fire-fighting–all can undermine a project or effort and, over time, lead to a “Drifting Goals” scenario. We become focused on what we don’t want to have happen, rather than what we want to change.

The “Drifting Goals” archetype is helpful for trying to understand why an organization is not able to achieve its desired goals. “Drifting Goals” occurs when the gap between a goal and the actual performance is reduced by lowering the goal. Because this often happens over a long period of time, the gradual lowering of the goal is usually not apparent until the decreasing performance measure has drifted so low that it produces a crisis. The following seven-step process illustrates how to use the “Drifting Goals” archetype as a diagnostic tool to target drifting performance areas and help organizations attain their visions.

1. Identify a performance measure that has deteriorated or oscillated over time

Sometimes the actual performance measure that has deteriorated is not the same as the one you have identified. For example, when sales of Tater Tots fell from 1985 to 1987, managers at OreIda assumed that the decline reflected a change in consumer eating habits. But further exploration showed that the quality of the Tater Tots had gradually declined over the years: ‘Their once-chunky insides had turned to mashed potato. The outside had lost its light and crispy coating.”

(“Heinz Ain’t Broke, But It’s Doing a Lot of Fixing,” Business Week, December 11, 1989).

At Ore-Ida, the goal was in the form of a quality standard for Tater Tots (see “Drifting Quality Standards”). A gap between actual quality and that goal should have signaled the need for investments in new equipment and/or the quality of the ingredients (B1). But because the drift in the quality standard (B2) occurred over a long period of time, it was not perceived as a problem.

2. Are there implicit or explicit goals that were in conflict with the stated goal?

Sometimes there are implicit or explicit goals in an organization which are at odds with the stated goal. For example, Ore-Ida was committed to producing quality Tater Tots, but the company had also embarked on a series of cost control plans beginning in 1979. “Cost-cutting had led plant managers to step up line speeds and change storage and cooking methods. Over a decade, the moves had changed Tater Tots.” Identifying other related goals that may be affecting the particular performance measure could reveal conflicts which create sub-optimization.

Drifting Quality Standards

A gap between actual Tater Tot quality and the quality standard should have signaled the need to invest in production processes or ingredients (81). But because the drift in quality &alined over along periodof time, it was not perceived as a problem.

3. What are the standard operating procedures for correcting the gap?

Identifying the standard operating procedures (SOP’s) for correcting the gaps will give you a window into the kinds of corrective actions that are currently in place. You want to find SOP’s that may have inadvertently contributed to the slippage of goals. What are the things that have happened that may have caused the corrective actions themselves to erode over time?

4. Nave the goals themselves been lowered over time?

A key question is whether the setting of the goals has been linked to past performance. The idea is to have an asymmetric relationship between past performance and future goals. That is, when performance is continually improving, basing the next goal on the previous one can create cycles of continuous improvement. But this strategy can lead to disaster when performance begins to slip, creating a reinforcing cycle of declining quality.

At Ore-Ida, the actual Tater Tot quality and the quality standard were linked together in such a way that as the quality deteriorated, it affected the quality reference point (see ‘Slippery Slope’ of Quality”). So from year to year, the quality looked about the same even as it was decreasing (R3). One potential side-effect of sliding quality could be that as sales decrease (due to poor quality), the company might decide to cut back on investments in production process and materials. That would lead to lower quality, which would actually accelerate the deterioration of quality (R4). Breaking this cycle involves creating measures that will counterbalance such tendencies.

'Slippery Slope' of Quality

If actual quality and the quality standard are linked together, qualitymay appear toremain the same from year to year even as it decreases (R3). If deteriorating quality results in a decrease in sales, the company may cut back on investments, further accelerating the quality deterioration (R4).

5. Identify external frames of reference to anchor the goal

One way to keep goals from sliding is to anchor them to an external frame of reference. The reference point can’t be chosen arbitrarily, or it will be susceptible to change. Benchmarking provides an outside reference point. It won’t tell you how to achieve a goal, but it offers a frame of reference and shows what is possible in a given area.

The ultimate source, however, is the voice of the customer. At Ore-Ida, customer polls could have given a clear indication that sliding sales were a reflection of declining quality, not a change in consumer preferences.

6. Clarify the vision

Unless you establish a clear vision that is compelling for everyone involved, the improvement will be only temporary. You can motivate people and train them to use the tools that provide the corrective action, but if they really don’t understand what the vision is all about, at best they will only be complying. Over time, the system will slip back into making only the corrective actions that look good relative to what is being measured, regardless of the overall impact on the company.

7. Create a dear transition plan

After you achieve clarity around the vision, the next step is to explore what it will take to achieve that vision, and anticipate the expected time frame. Where are the goals in relation to that transition plan? If you’re currently operating at a level of 1 and you’re trying to get to 10, it is unrealistic to expect the change to occur overnight.

Unrealistic expectations about the time frame for achieving a goal can produce emotional tension and financial pressure which can undermine even the best improvement program. The question to consider at this point is how to make sure that the gap between current reality and the goal does not turn into a negative force. If we don’t carefully manage the effects of emotional tension, we lose the powerful potential of having a vision. In some ways, that’s the biggest challenge and potentially the greatest benefit of applying a “Drifting Goals” archetype.

Creative tension only works when somehow it taps into a level of motivation which is intrinsic. And that becomes a powerful leverage point for an organization whose creative forces have been tapped by the excitement of achieving the vision. The lesson of the “Drifting Goals” archetype is that in any attempt to achieve a goal or vision, you can’t bypass the emotional tension that results. But by channeling that tension into a creative force, you can transcend it and attain the vision.

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“The failure (or refusal) of a leader to foresee may be viewed as an ethical failure; because a serious ethical compromise today (when the usual judgement on ethical inadequacy is made) is sometimes the result of a failure to make the effort at an earlier date to foresee today’s events and take the right actions when there was freedom for initiative to act. The action which society labels ‘unethical’ in the present moment is often really one of no choice. By this standard, a lot of guilty people are walking around with an air of innocence that they would not have if society were able always to pin a label ‘unethical’ on the failure to foresee and the conscious failure to act constructively when there was freedom to act.”

I have never heard anybody talk about leadership responsibilities in that way. Others may admonish us for not having exercised better foresight or for incorrectly anticipating the future. They may call it a failure of planning or an error in judgment. But to call such a lapse an ethical failure is such a strong stance that it compelled me to take a deeper look at the issue so that I could come to better understand why Greenleaf used such provocative terminology.

Foresight in the Face of Complexity

I once subscribed to a financial newsletter that focused on investing in a basket of eight stocks selected from the companies that make up the Dow 30. At first glance, this might seem like a limited investment strategy; after all, how many options do you have for picking eight out of a universe of only 30 stocks? Though people’s guesses vary widely, the correct answer is that there are slightly more than 5.7 million different combinations of eight companies that you can select out of 30 stocks.

“The failure (or refusal) of a leader to foresee may be viewed as an ethical failure.” —Robert Greenleaf

Most of us are surprised to learn that such a mind-boggling number comes from such a relatively small set of choices. The number of possible combinations of human groupings within an organization is even more staggering. Even in a small organization with 30 employees, you can create millions of different combinations — or teams — of various sizes. Add to the mix the dynamic forces of the external environment that are continually affecting the organization, and you find yourself facing a situation in which exercising foresight seems to be nothing but a pipe dream.

Forecasting vs. Predicting. We might think then that the enormous complexity of our modern organizations leaves us incapable of exercising foresight. This conjecture would be true if we equated foresight with making accurate forecasts about the future — which is impossible to do. Fortunately, foresight is really about being able to perceive the significance and nature of events before they have occurred — which is achievable.

In their scenario planning work at Royal Dutch Shell, Arie de Geus and his colleagues were careful to draw the distinction between making forecasts versus making predictions about the future. They realized early on that there was no reliable way to forecast what the oil price might be at a specific date in the future. However, they were able to develop a deep understanding of the geopolitical realities of the various countries in which they operated and combine it with their knowledge of the oil industry to develop scenarios to help their managers predict future consequences of current events. In short, their scenario planning efforts gave them the capability to exercise foresight even during times of turbulent change.

To illustrate the difference between forecasts and predictions, de Geus offers the following example: If it rains in the foothills of the Himalayas, we cannot forecast exactly when the rivers will swell and flood the valleys, but we can predict with certainty that the flooding will occur. The better we know the structure of the terrain, the greater knowledge we have about the flooding to follow. Thus, a leader’s ethical responsibility is to know the underlying structures within her domain and be able to make predictions that can guide her people to a better future.

Helping vs. Meddling. Whenever I ask managers whether they think they are helping or meddling when they take actions in their organizations, they unanimously respond with “helping.” When I follow up with the question, “How do you know you are helping?” most will admit they really do not know whether they are or not. Failure to know whether I am helping or meddling is another ethical lapse,

because it means that I lack the foresight to know the future consequences of my own (and my people’s) actions.

Dr. Edwards Deming, a pioneer in the quality improvement movement, often illustrated the difference between helping and meddling with a marble-dropping experiment. Let’s say we drop a marble 40 times, aiming for an “X” marked on a tabletop. If we mark the spot where the marble comes to rest each time, we will eventually have a random pattern of dots surrounding the X.

Now, instead of aiming for the X, we change our aim to compensate for where the marble ended up in the previous round. For example, if the marble ended up an inch to the right of the X, the next time we will aim it an inch to the left. If we dropped the marble 40 more times following that strategy, would the pattern of dots form a circle that is smaller, the same, or larger than in the first round and why?

When I use this exercise with a group, I generally get all three answers — smaller, the same, and larger. What is interesting about people’s responses isn’t whether they got the right answer or not, but rather the reasons they offer for why they gave their answer.

Those who say that the circle will be smaller explain that we are reducing the error because we are compensating for the directional deviations from the previous round. After all, if you shoot a gun at a target and your first shot goes a little to the left, you will make an adjustment the next time by shooting a little to the right. But this strategy only works if aim is the primary source of the variation, which is not true in this case.

Others guess that the circle will be the same size precisely because they know the cause of the variation does not come from the aim. Because they know that changing the aim is not going to improve the results, they erroneously conclude that it will not degrade the results either. This would be true if the changes we made to our aim were so minor that their effects were negligible. However, in our experiment, the changes were in direct proportion to the underlying variation

we experienced, so their impact is quite significant. The correct answer is that the circle gets larger. Although some people are able to give the right answer, not everyone can provide the correct explanation of why it is true. This fact is important, because getting the right answer or the right results is not good enough; we must also know why. Otherwise, we may be making a lucky guess that we cannot count on the next time or an intuition that we are unable to pass on to someone else. The reason the circle gets larger is that we are introducing more variation by constantly changing the aim. The primary source of variation in the first round

There is an important link between understanding a system’s capability and having the capacity to exercise foresight.

was the interaction between the marble and the surface of the table. Since we did nothing to reduce that variation, any other change we introduce simply adds more variation to the system.

So, if we are really interested in tightening the circle of dots, what can we do? We can make the table surface softer by covering it with felt so that the marble is less likely to bounce and roll. In addition, we can glue Velcro on the marble so it sticks to the cloth where it lands. These actions help because they change the system’s underlying structures.

Understanding System Capability. The ability to discern between whether we are helping or meddling has allowed us to improve the quality of virtually all manufactured products. Through the application of statistical process control (SPC) techniques, we now have a much deeper understanding of the sources of variation in a manufacturing process and can work to reduce those variations. Prior to the advent of SPC, when a machine was producing a piece that was outside of specs, the operator would adjust the machine to compensate for the error. Doing so was analogous to the second part of our marble experiment and would produce the same undesirable results: The very actions we took to correct the problem would actually exacerbate it.

Unlike the marble experiment, however, the impact of making adjustments did not produce clear and immediate negative results. In the short run, the adjustments often seemed to improve the results — although they then deteriorated over time. Operators saw little rhyme or reason as to why tweaking the machine worked sometimes and not others, so they couldn’t produce consistent outcomes.

SPC provided a way to calculate the range of variability that was normal to the system. For example, a drill press that is supposed to drill a 10mm hole will not be able to drill a hole that is exactly 10.000mm every time. Because of various factors (irregularities in the drill bit, the effects of vibration, variability in the piece being drilled), the holes may fall somewhere between 10.000mm and 10.009mm. If we determine that this range represents the system capability of this drill press, then we must accept any variation that falls between these two limits to be common to the system — the correct action to take in this instance is to do nothing.

If a variation exceeds these limits, however, that is considered to be a special cause, and we must take corrective actions because something other than the normal operation of the system must have caused the greater variation. This ability to distinguish between common and special causes revolutionized manufacturing and led to dramatic quality improvement. Unfortunately, it has not been translated very well in domains beyond manufacturing.

There is an important link between understanding a system’s capability and having the capacity to exercise foresight. In the marble experiment, we saw that although we cannot forecast where each individual drop of the marble will end up, we can predict with absolute certainty that the pattern of drops will get bigger over time. Therefore, we know that the act of changing our aim is actually meddling, not helping. Ultimately, taking ill-considered actions (or causing actions to be taken) that actually worsen the state of affairs — especially in the guise of “helping” — constitutes an ethical failure.

Foresight and the Role of Vision

There is a biblical proverb that states, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” I believe this is true because without vision, people suffer death by a thousand paper cuts. They are driven to their “graves” through an endless stream of meaningless activity, reacting to one thing after another. They become the walking dead in the passionless halls of our hyperactive organizations. So, the failure to lead with foresight is an ethical failure because lack of vision destroys people’s spirits and robs organizations of the generative energy of true commitment.

The Four Faces of Vision. Unfortunately, vision has become such an over-used word that it has lost its meaning in many organizations. When people refer to vision, they are often talking about its close cousins

FOUR FACES OFVISION

When people refer to vision, they are often talking about its close cousins—idle dreams, visions statements, and corporate objectives. Each of these concepts guides people’s actions in different ways. Idle dreams are often the fertile soil from which compelling visions spring forth. A vision statement then serves as a snapshot and a formal reminder. Objectives help us track our progress toward making that vision a reality.

idle dreams, vision statements, and corporate objectives. Each of these concepts represents a different approach for guiding people’s actions (see “Four Faces of Vision”).

Some people do not see any practical significance to visions because they don’t think they will ever become reality. They tend to view visionaries as idle dreamers because they focus on the future rather than the present, and the visions themselves often seem fantastically impossible to achieve. These people discount anything that is not rooted in the here and now as being “airy fairy” or impractical.

But visions are not the same thing as idle dreams. Idle dreams are meant to remain idle — that’s what provides them with their magic and generative power. When we relieve ourselves of the need to produce and simply dream, our imagination lights up with all kinds of possibilities. As leaders, we should encourage our people to devote some of their time to daydreams, because this is fertile soil from which visions are likely to sprout.

Other people think their job is done when they have crafted a vision statement; they mistake the vision statement for the vision itself. They see the process of sharing the vision as one of simply “rolling out” whatever it is that senior management has created through cards, posters, videos, speeches, and other forms of one-way communication. These efforts almost always lead to cynicism. The organization does not value the vision because people do not sense that senior executives support it nor do they feel like participants in the process.

Those who mistake vision statements for a vision do not realize that drafting a vision statement marks the beginning, not the end, of a continuous process. In a sense, they are committing an error that is analogous to mistaking a photograph for the real person, because that is what a vision statement is — a static snapshot — relative to a true vision, which is a living source of energy in the organization.

Then there are those who equate vision with corporate objectives. Proclamations like “Our vision is to hit 20% ROI this year” resonate with those interested in driving people to perform to measurable yardsticks. The issue here isn’t whether setting numerical objectives is good or bad, but what happens when we turn a vision into performance objectives. When coming up with objectives that we know we will be measured against, we tend to focus on what is do-able, not what is desirable.

Will the Real Vision Please Stand Up? So, what qualify as real visions? Visions are clear and compelling pictures of the future that people truly care about bringing into reality. They do not need to pass a reality test, because the primary consideration is whether we care enough about them to commit ourselves to bring them into reality.

The thing that distinguishes idle dreams from visions is the fact that we have made a conscious choice to start working toward the vision. For example, when John F. Kennedy articulated a vision to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely within a decade, it could have stayed as a nice idle dream of what we might do. But, because he had tapped into the latent aspirations of the American people at a time when they needed a great dream, his “idle dream” united the nation in a common vision that taxpayers cared enough about to invest billions of dollars to make it a reality. Even though the articulated vision was literally impossible to do at the time, once Americans chose to make it happen, the impossible became the possible.

When we have made the commitment of choosing a vision, then vision statements can be useful. A vision statement provides us with a way to engage others in the visioning process. Of course, we will need to set many objectives along the way, but the objectives themselves are not the vision. Compelling visions provide us with the energy and desire to set and meet numerous objectives, including ones we would have never accepted if they were set before us in isolation. In short, visions are powerful because of the simple fact that we care about them. When our emotions are engaged, we have the energy and desire to set things in motion.

Foresight and the Power of Choice

As mentioned above, choice plays an important role in vision. If we never exercise choice, we will forever want things without ever taking steps toward attaining them. It is the conscious choice to bring something into reality that transforms an idle dream into a vision that has the power to tap people’s energy and commitment. Making choices, then, is a powerful act.

Hierarchy of Choices. In his book, The Path of Least Resistance (Fawcett Books, 1989), Robert Fritz differentiates between making Fundamental, Primary, and Secondary Choices. Fritz points out that it is difficult to make choices at one level if we have not yet made a choice at the level below it. He refers to vision as a primary choice — choosing a clear picture of a result we want to create. Given that there are literally an infinite number of possible choices we can make about what vision to pursue, what will help us narrow the possibilities? The answer lies in making a fundamental choice first (see “Hierarchy of Choices”).

The fundamental choice addresses the big question “Why?” and serves to clarify our purpose in life. Being clear about our purpose then informs all future choices. To do so requires deep self-knowledge and an awareness of the core values that define who we are. In my experience, core values and purpose are so intimately interrelated that they form the basis of our identity. That is to say, the values we deeply believe in and our sense of purpose define who we are as individuals and as organizations.

Many people in organizations struggle to make choices at the level of strategy and tactics. Without the clarity of primary choices such as vision to guide them, they have no basis for making secondary choices. When they get stuck, rather than going down a level and clarifying the fundamental issues, they tend to move up a level and try to make tertiary choices (which may come easier because the stakes are lower). As they make these tactical choices, they then work backwards to see how their tactical choices may help them to decide on choice of strategy. In the end, people in the organization are all busily engaged in executing numerous activities, but very few have any idea how their activities are connected to a broad strategy or a common vision, let alone a sense of purpose.

Order Without Control. What does all this have to do with having foresight? Well, imagine that you are the leader of a large product development team that is several hundred people strong. Everyone is busily

engaged in all kinds of activities, presumably in support of developing the next generation of your product. But how do you know that your people are working as hard as they can to produce the kind of product they are supposed to produce? One approach would be to tightly control as much of the process as possible to ensure that everyone is making the “right” choices. This would require an army of inspectors, a sophisticated monitoring system for checking up on people’s progress, etc. However, this kind of over-control seldom produces the desired results.

Instead, I believe that an organization’s core values, purpose, and vision can create order out of seeming chaos without the need for tight control systems. When every member of a team or organization has internalized the core value and purpose and has a clear picture of the result they are striving for, they will be guided every step of the way. Their individual choices will all naturally fall within certain boundaries, even as the day-to-day activities are unpredictable and seemingly chaotic. The clarity in purpose and core values guides the organization and produces predictable outcomes that we can foresee even before they happen and without knowing much of the details.

Stewards of the Future

In the end, foresight is about understanding our organizational complexity, articulating a compelling vision, and making the foundational choices to guide our people. Exercising foresight requires us to not only know the true capabilities of our organization but also to be deeply connected to the highest aspirations of our people so that we can articulate a vision that inspires people to create their future instead of merely reacting to things. As leaders, by developing a deeper awareness and intuition of the forces that shape our future, we prevent complexity and the turbulence of our environment from casting that future into ever-darker shadows of doubt and uncertainty. Thus, developing foresight capabilities is both an ethical responsibility and a business imperative, because the two are inextricably linked.

The recent scandals surrounding the demise of companies like Enron (questionable accounting practices), Arthur Andersen (shredded documents), and WorldCom ($4 billion of misstated income) graphically illustrate why Greenleaf felt that the lack of foresight was an ethical failure. The magnitude of these collapses cannot be summed up in the billions of dollars lost alone, but includes the tens of thousands of people who have been robbed of their livelihoods and retirement dreams. Their leaders failed them by not being good stewards of their organization’s future and not anticipating the negative ramifications of their actions. The losses are particularly tragic because they were so eminently preventable.

My hope is that each of us will be vigilant in continually developing our foresight so that we stand ready and able to be true stewards of the future. Answering the call requires us to rediscover who we are as individuals and connect with the highest aspirations in ourselves and in our organizations. It requires us to ask the deeper question “Who am I?” and answer it repeatedly until we have stripped away the layers of varnish we have applied over ourselves and revealed the beauty of the natural wood that is our true self. Only then, from a place of authenticity, can we join together to create a better future for all.

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Trust and Community

The year before Marianne took office, the division developed a new strategy to ensure that customers’ orders were filled in an optimal way. This initiative had significant organizational consequences, because business units had to cooperate in a way they had not done before. Up to this point, they had operated independently from different countries and locations. To support this strategy, the company installed an integrated IS-IT system, which required a standardization of work processes and a change in mindset for employees.

The financial function mirrored the complexity of the division. A year after this change was introduced, staff members still resisted aligning their work processes with those of other business units and utilizing the IT system’s full capacity. For them to share their knowledge and competency more effectively with each other, the financial group needed to reduce internal competition, establish greater trust, and feel as if they belonged to a community that served the whole division.

The Power of And

To address these challenges, we decided to promote the power of “and.” In all of our activities, we linked seemingly disparate concepts, such as vision/values and reengineering systems/practices; creativity and complex financial issues; fun and tough business problems; and individual growth and team empowerment.

When people understand and identify with the whole, they recognize the importance of their contribution and can better align their unit’s vision with that of the company as a whole.

Behind this double focus were some core beliefs and assumptions:

• People offer the highest leverage for bettering an organization. When individuals become aware of the potential for improvement and are involved in setting the direction and establishing the values they want to live by, they naturally move in that direction.
• To be engaged, people must have a clear image of what they want to create. In addition, they do best by starting with small steps and achieving results quickly.
• When people understand and identify with the whole, they recognize the importance of their contribution and can better align their unit’s vision with that of the company as a whole.

We decided that the best way to put these beliefs into action was through large-group events. Twice a year, we conducted two-day gatherings where people worked on specific, ongoing organizational goals. The setting was informal, and people were invited, not ordered, to attend. To attract participants, we worked to establish a reputation for providing challenging, fun, and result-oriented activities. Before each gathering, we clarified the results we wanted and looked for ways to incorporate creativity, play, and an element of surprise. Throughout the event, we carefully monitored activities and changed the program’s content if people became tired or disinterested.

At every event, one or two top executives talked about the main strategy and development plans for the division, often using material prepared by the financial group in this larger context. These presentations gave the group a sense of the big picture and signaled the importance of their individual contributions. We kept employees who didn’t attend informed of the results through an intranet newsletter.

Vision/Values AND Reengineering Systems/Practices. Before we began conducting these events, the financial group had only a vague idea of its role within the company, which many perceived as simply providing financial reports and business analysis to management. When people came together as a community, a new vision emerged: to create value for the division by being a proactive team player in business decisions, seeing the big picture, focusing on the future, being flexible and energetic, and continually seeking improvement.

To reach this vision, during one of the gatherings, the group decided it needed to establish a culture characterized by respecting the individual, sharing knowledge, challenging each other, and recognizing and rewarding success. As they began to work together differently, based on these values, new opportunities became visible. The group was able to identify “low-hanging fruit,” that is, easy-to-do actions that yield high-leverage consequences. No one could see these possibilities before because work processes had been fragmented.

Creativity AND Complex Financial Issues. To keep energy high and encourage innovative ideas during the events, we employed creative methodologies, including the World Café. In the World Café, four to six people from different functions, levels, and locations sat at each of dozens of small tables scattered throughout a large room. The tables were covered with sheets of paper, and participants used colored pens to record the ideas that emerged from their conversation. Members from each group then moved to other tables, carrying the “seeds” from their conversation with them to share with others.

The method’s success lies in coming up with a question that “travels well” (see “The World Café: Living Knowledge Through Conversations That Matter,” V12N5). Some questions we used were: What does it mean to create value for the division? How can we make the new business system the heart of the financial community? The café setting created a relaxed atmosphere in which people felt at ease sharing their thoughts and listening to others. Losing much of their defensiveness, participants began to appreciate diverse perspectives and engage in intense business-oriented discussions that often yielded remarkable discoveries and insights.

Fun AND Tough Business Problems. We wanted our team-building efforts to be tied directly to increased productivity and results. As such, the games we used related specifically to strategic initiatives and were grounded in daily tasks. For example, to help participants understand process thinking, we gave each group a set of papers, each marked with an element involved in cake baking. Participants had to arrange them in a flow chart, indicating inputs, outputs, activities, and tools. As a result, many felt they finally understood what process thinking was all about.

Another favorite activity was learning how to line-dance, which we presented as a metaphor for understanding the importance of aligning systems. Decked in special t-shirts with cowboy music booming from the speakers, participants struggled to master dance’s difficult steps. When achieved success, with everyone moving together, the group burst into spontaneous clapping.

Individual Growth AND Team Empowerment.

We made stress management a theme at several events. Participants appreciated being able to share their struggles with pressing deadlines and uncomfortable situations. They were surprised at how common their problems were and learned stress-reduction techniques.

To give participants a sense of continuity, momentum, and accomplishment, we allotted time for presenting project results to the whole group. The group then provided feedback and celebrated milestones. This process made individuals more visible to the entire division and also gave everyone a sense that their input was needed and welcomed.

At every large-group event, Marianne awarded the “Golden Glue” prize to individuals who clearly contributed most across business units. We usually had a closing ritual at the end of each gathering that summed up the accomplishments of the event; for instance, each person might describe in one word their most important learning.

Group Achievements

The financial organization has radically changed in the past three years. By pooling individual competence, using integrated systems, and improving processes with a focus on creating value for the division, it has become a proactive, future-oriented partner with other business units, providing valuable input on strategic division-wide decisions. Taking on new responsibility and succeeding has released creative energy into the organization. This enthusiasm was particularly obvious when the group completed a large process analysis in record time on top of ordinary workloads.

In 2000 the financial organization received a prize from the Norwegian Association of MBAs. Although the award was specifically conferred upon Marianne, she openly shared the honor with her colleagues for their willingness to try a new approach and for following through with dedication and determination.

Currently, the whole aluminum division is being reorganized and downsized to become more effective and efficient. In addition, the parent company has made a large acquisition with substantial integration challenges. We believe that, through their participation in this change process, the individuals in the financial community have become better equipped to deal with the challenges they are now facing.

Marianne M. Aamodt was CFO of Hydro Aluminum Metal Products Division from 1998-2002. She is currently head of the Organizational Structure and Dimensioning team for the integration of the newly acquired international German-based aluminum company. This acquisition is the largest in Norwegian history and makes Hydro Europe’s largest, and the world’s third-largest, aluminum company. Mara Senese (senese@online.no) is a senior partner in Senese & Depuis Associates. An American living and working in Norway, since 1987 she has served as a coach and consultant to executives and their organizations facilitating creative learning environments as well as teaching personal mastery, communication, creativity, and intuition development.

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You are a hiker, drinking in the September air along the trails of the Cockaponset State Forest with a friend. Deciduous yellows, browns, and reds punctuate the still-green woodland. Late summer asters glow along the sides of the path. As you cross a bridge spanning a rivulet, your companion pauses to sip

from her water bottle. You wait, and your gaze drifts downward. You are startled to see, scarlet against the dark peat, a set of concentric hearts. Some of the bright berries have drifted in the slight current, blurring the edges, a gentle dance between the direction of a knowing hand and the swamp’s hidden currents.

In September 2009, a group of global environmental leaders gathered at the Trinity Conference Center in West Cornwall, Connecticut, for a five-day workshop. Arriving from locales as distant as Brazil and Indonesia and as close as nearby New England states, the 14 participants were alumni of the Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program, run by the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute.

Donella (Dana) Meadows was the lead author of the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, which rocked readers with its exploration of the pending collision between a rapidly growing population and a world with finite resources. An important early voice of insight and innovation on the environment, Dana went on to found the Sustainability Institute; teach generations of students at Dartmouth College; receive a MacArthur “Genius” award; and write a weekly newspaper column, “The Global Citizen.” She also founded Cobb Hill, now a thriving cohousing community and organic farm in Hartland, Vermont. The Fellows Program was founded after Meadows’ untimely death in 2001 with the goal of ratcheting up the environmental movement by increasing the effectiveness of its up-and-coming leaders.

The Fellows — by design, mainly women — work in NGOs, government agencies, philanthropic institutions, and businesses around the globe. They represent organizations that range from large multinational corporations to social and environmental justice start-ups in developing countries; their areas of focus run the gamut of the pressing issues of our times — forestry, energy, food production and farming, economic development, ocean conservation, pollution prevention, health and safety.

Three Skill Sets

Over the course of the two-year program, Sustainability Institute staff and outside instructors train and coach Fellows in three skill sets: systems thinking, reflective conversation, and visioning. All of Dana Meadows’work was grounded in systems thinking — the perspective that we can better understand something by looking at it in the context of its relationships rather than in isolation. When people try to solve problems without considering the larger implications of our actions, we can end up creating unintended consequences in other parts of the system — and make the original problem even worse. Valuing synthesis over analysis and holism over reductionism, systems thinking takes literally the well-known Aristotelian edict, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

By balancing attentive listening to others with effective advocacy of one’s own position, the practice of reflective conversation serves to gather knowledge from all parts of a system. The goal is to surface insights from those with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives instead of relying on the limited knowledge of a few.

Visioning involves identifying a desired future and using the gap between that vision and current reality to motivate action. By practicing these tools, Fellows gain the ability to tackle seemingly intractable problems and design radical — from the “root” — solutions rather than short-term quick fixes. Now, almost a decade after its launch, the program has 54 alumni. Every two years, a new cohort of 18 to 20 participants gathers at Sustainability Institute for a series of four week-long workshops, with ongoing homework and personal coaching between sessions. During the onsite meetings, Fellows stay with families in the Cobb House co-housing community. To experience living with lower environmental impact and higher levels of mutual dependence, they do chores such as stacking wood for the common furnace and maintaining the community’s hilly paths. In the process, the participants form close bonds that result in joint projects, crossover learning from different sectors and industries, and a support net for when the road feels impossibly long.

Because, as the less-than promising outcomes of the U. N. Climate Conference Copenhagen showed, the barriers to success for those combating climate change still remain sky high. For the Fellows, these struggles are far from abstract. Each day involves a Sophie’s Choice of tradeoffs, of balancing one group’s vital needs against another’s, of making tough compromises between what is right and what is possible. It can be lonely, wearing work. The alumni workshop in September sought, among other things, to strengthen the ties among people from all of the cohorts, to break through the isolation, to celebrate what has been achieved, and to plant the seeds for future success.

Leadership Earth Art Project

Knowing the renewing quality of the arts and their possibilities for stimulating new ways of thinking and being, the event’s conveners consciously wove visual arts, music, and dance into the program. On the first afternoon, Vermont artist Jay Mead led the group in an activity designed to “help participants experience systems in nature, observe patterns, and work from a creative influence to balance the intellectual.” A painter, sculptor, puppeteer, and performance artist, Mead has created environmental art for more than 30 years. He has worked with Bread and Puppet, Cristo, the Puppet Tree, and Wise Fool Puppet Interventions, and has led workshops for learners of all ages.

Mead called the three-hour experience the “Leadership Earth Art Project,” or LEAP! As a catalyst for the activity, he introduced the work of British artist Andrew Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy uses natural material, including snow, ice, leaves, bark, rock, clay, stones, feathers, petals, and twigs, to create outdoor sculptures. Some of these are ephemeral—like a glittery star formed from icicles secured in the center by the artist’s saliva — while others are more enduring, such as a continuous crack in the courtyard pavers at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco. According to Goldsworthy, “I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn.”

Jay encouraged participants to follow Goldsworthy’s lead and learn from the natural landscape by creating their own in situ pieces. By working with the right brain rather than just the left, hands and not merely the head, they would practice a mode of thinking and sensing that is different from how we generally interact with the environment. Through this “playful meditation,” the goal was for the alumni to discover patterns in nature that reveal larger systems and suggest metaphors for their own life experience, work, and vision.

Mead led the group around their canvas: the Trinity Conference Center’s grounds, with its labyrinth and hiking trail through the Cockaponset State Forest and along the bank of the Housotonic River. He showed the group a sample he had created: a set of vertebrae made from stones, white against the crisp fall leaves. This simple artifact echoed the shape and direction of the nearby train track, emphasized the parallels between natural and human-made design solutions.

The Fellows then dispersed, naturally falling into pairs, with a few preferred the reverie of working alone. Their voices joined the soundtrack of rustling leaves, flowing water, and bird songs, set against the Indian-summer sky.

One team created what they called “a spectrum of energy,” a wheel of stones and a gradation of fall leaves, moving from green to yellow to red and then to brown. Another pair made crowns, woven from ferns and adorned with flowers, transforming the group into a tribe of protective wood nymphs. Rolling up their pant legs, two participants waded into the river to construct a sturdy question mark out of river rocks, a dam around which the water eddied and flowed. Some of the installations were kinetic, using the wind and the water for movement; others captured the coiled energy of the spiral; still others reflected the cyclical autumnal shift from abundance to harvest — and the promise of renewal.

After three hours, Jay reeled in the groups for a “gallery walk” of the installations. As they described their work, the artists recounted the pleasure of slowing down, of being in the process rather than focusing on the product, of working with their hands. By using found materials and accentuating what was already there, they moved from viewing nature as an object to considering it a co-conspirator and guide.

The Ultimate Systems Teacher

As a culture, we spend so much of our effort on combating the forces of nature. We use nails and metals extracted from the earth to erect structures that defy the laws of gravity. We paint and seal to stave off rot and decay. We disregard natural laws like “waste = food” and “there is no away.” We treat Earth’s rhythms as an obstacle to be surmounted or a problem to be solved.

But what if, even for an afternoon, we could create in accordance with, not in defiance of, the natural systems that we are a part of? What if we were to accept the inevitability that our artifacts will ultimately revert to where they came from, to feed the next cycle, with or without our approval? What if we slowed ourselves to the pace of the river and the forest and the fields? Could we learn to learn from nature, which is, according to Jay Mead, “the ultimate systems teacher”? Would we have the courage to do so?

For at least one group of leaders in the trenches of the sustainability resolution, the answer is decidedly “yes.”

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A Seven-Step Process

At first daunted by the challenge, Paul gained a foothold on the problem by beginning to identify how the choices she was making created chaos. She figured out why she was always running late for meetings, constantly losing phone messages, submitting invoices way past deadline—and forever looking for her keys. Understanding that deep personal change requires fundamentally shifting how we think about things, she gradually developed a seven-step process for “changing your mindset so you can do more of what you really want to do” (see “The Seven-Step Change Cycle” on p. 11).

RESTORING ORDER TO YOUR DESK

As you put things away at the end of the day, you feel more energized and ready for what life will offer you the next morning.

In her book, Marilyn provides numerous examples of how to put each step into practice. For instance, in Step One, figuring out your purpose for getting organized, she suggests articulating what you want to do that you currently can’t. If that method doesn’t inspire you, she proposes identifying the costs of disorganization to your life, such as money, time, relationships, family, and spirit. In Step Two, envisioning what you want, the author encourages you to find a metaphor that embodies your idea of being organized, such as a basketball team, a still lake in the wilderness, a beautiful tall ship, or ice dancing. Holding onto this positive image during your journey helps you let go of any negative metaphors that held you back in the past. In Step Three, accurately assessing the source of your mess, Paul outlines four levels of inquiry into your reality—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—to reveal the unintended effects of your actions. “Part of organizing,” she explains, “is to internalize a sense of consequence so that you become aware that saving one piece of paper at one point in time could lead you to an overwhelming mountain of papers later on.”

Organizing Wisdom

This kind of systemic approach taps into what she calls “organizing wisdom”—that is, principles for uncovering strategies for taking action. One core principle is getting to ready, or clearing out space in your office and calendar so you can do what you need to do. Another is creating new habits, such as hanging things up and putting things away that continually return you to “ready” (see “Restoring Order to Your Desk”). A third is building effective systems, for example, developing simple routines for tracking phone calls, handling mail, and scheduling meetings.

“As you become more organized, you will find that it is possible to shift from taking action based on anxiety to acting from deep intention,” Marilyn asserts. By engaging in this process, you can replace the stress and discomfort of disorder with a confidence in your extraordinary capabilities to achieve your goals. Piles can become manageable, deadlines can be met, relationships can grow—and you might even appreciate doing your dishes! Ultimately, taking this journey can open up new opportunities to make the difference you have always wanted to make in your life.

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.

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Organization must pay attention these transitions, because of the radical reduction in the numbers of workers currently available for jobs and the movement into our working ranks of a new generation of employees with totally different values and expectations. If companies want to attract and keep top talent, the old ways of recruiting, rewarding, and leading won’t get us there. A different kind of leadership is required for the future.

Traditional Leadership Models

What are the roots of the leadership models that brought us to this point in organizational development? During the Industrial Revolution, hierarchies were the norm. At that time, businesses depended on the completion of many repetitive tasks in the most efficient way possible. To that end, factories, railroads, mines, and other companies followed a top-down view of leadership, in which those at the top gathered the information, made the decisions, and controlled the power. Those at the bottom—the “hired hands”—were rewarded for conformity and unquestioning obedience. In addition, business moved much more slowly than it does today.

Our approach to preparing new leaders over the last 50 years has sprung from these roots. Leadership training in MBA courses has been based on the case-study method, through which learners study patterns of how others solved their business problems. The assumption has been that if you learn enough about the successful case studies, you will be prepared as a leader—you will be able to go forth, match your new challenges to the case studies of the past, and superimpose a similar solution on the problems of today.

Yet change is accelerating, and we are now in a time when many companies view a traditional education as more of a negative than a positive. They even consider an MBA a detriment, because graduates must unlearn their reliance on the past in order to see new, more complex patterns emerging. Some observers have said that this shift has turned the pyramid of power on its head.

The Beginnings of Servant-Leadership

Servant-leadership is one model that can help turn traditional notions of leadership and organizational structure upside-down. Robert K. Greenleaf came up with the term “servant-leadership” after reading The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse (reissued by The Robert K. Greenleaf Center, 1991). In this story, Leo, a cheerful, nurturing servant, supports a group of travelers on a long and difficult journey. His sustaining spirit helps keep the group’s purpose clear and morale high until, one day, Leo disappears. Soon after, the travelers disperse. Years later, the storyteller comes upon a spiritual order and discovers that Leo is actually the group’s highly respected titular head. Yet by serving the travelers rather than trying to lead them, he had helped ensure their survival and bolstered their sense of shared commitment. This story gave Greenleaf insight into a new way to perceive leadership.

Greenleaf was reading this book because he was helping university leaders deal with the student unrest of the 1970s, a challenge unlike any they had faced before. In the spirit of trying to understand the roots of the conflict, Greenleaf put himself in the students’ shoes and began to study what interested them. It was from this reflection that the term “servant-leadership” first came to him. To Greenleaf, the phrase represented a transformation in the meaning of leadership.

Servant-leadership stands in sharp contrast to the typical American definition of the leader as a stand-alone hero, usually white and male. As a result of this false picture of what defines a leader, we celebrate and reward the wrong things. In movies, for example, we all love to see the “good guys” take on the “bad guys” and win. The blockbuster “Lethal Weapon” movies are a take-off on this myth and represent a metaphor for many of our organizations. Our movie “heroes” (or leaders) act quickly and decisively, blowing up buildings and wrecking cars and planes in highdrama chases.

Although they always win (annihilating or capturing the bad guys), they leave behind a trail of blood and destruction.

This appetite for high-drama can fool us into believing that we can depend on one or two “super people” to solve our organizational crises. Even in impressive corporate turnarounds, we tend to look for the hero who single-handedly “saved the day.” We long for a “savior” to fix the messes that we all have had a part in creating. But this myth causes us to lose sight of all those in the background who provided valuable support to the single hero.

Seeing the leader as servant, however, puts the emphasis on very different qualities (see “A New Kind of Leadership” on p. 3). Servant-leadership is not about a personal quest for power, prestige, or material rewards. Instead, from this perspective, leadership begins with a true motivation to serve others. Rather than controlling or wielding power, the servant-leader works to build a solid foundation of shared goals by (1) listening deeply to understand the needs and concerns of others; (2) working thoughtfully to help build a creative consensus; and (3) honoring the paradox of polarized parties and working to create “third right answers” that rise above the compromise of “we/they” negotiations. The focus of servant-leadership is on sharing information, building a common vision, self-management, high levels of interdependence, learning from mistakes, encouraging creative input from every team member, and questioning present assumptions and mental models.

How Servant-Leadership Serves Organizations

Servant-leadership is a powerful methodology for organizational learning because it offers new ways to capitalize on the knowledge and wisdom of all employees, not just those “at the top.” Through this different form of leadership, big-picture information and business strategies are shared broadly throughout the company. By understanding basic assumptions and background information on issues or decisions, everyone can add something of value to the discussion because everyone possesses the basic tools needed to make meaningful contributions. Such tools and information are traditionally reserved for upper management, but sharing them brings deeper meaning to each job and empowers each person to participate more in effective decision-making and creative problem-solving. Individuals thus grow from being mere hired hands into having fully engaged minds and hearts.

Our movie “heroes” (or leaders) act quickly and decisively, blowing up buildings and wrecking cars and planes in high-drama chases. Although they always win (annihilating or capturing the bad guys), they leave behind a trail of blood and destruction.

This approach constitutes true empowerment, which significantly increases job satisfaction and engages far more brain power from each employee. It also eliminates the “that’s not my job” syndrome, as each person, seeing the impact he or she has on the whole, becomes eager to do whatever it takes to achieve the collective vision. Servant-leadership therefore challenges some basic terms in our management vocabulary; expressions such as “subordinates,” “my people,” “staff (versus “line”), “overhead” (referring to people), “direct reports,” “manpower” all become less accurate or useful. Even phrases such as “driving decision-making down into the ranks” betray a deep misunderstanding of the concept of empowerment. Do we believe that those below are resistant to change or less intelligent than others? Why must we drive or push decisions down? Something vital is missing from this way of thinking—deep respect and mentoring, a desire to lift others to their fullest potential, and the humility to understand that the work of one person can rarely match that of an aligned team.

Phil Jackson, former coach of the world champion Chicago Bulls basketball team, described this notion well in his book Sacred Hoops (Hyperion, 1995). He wrote, “Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the ‘me’ for the ‘we.’As [retired professional basketball player] Bill Cartwright puts it: ‘A great basketball team will have trust. I’ve seen teams in this league where the players won’t pass to a guy because they don’t think he is going to catch the ball. But a great basketball team will throw the ball to everyone. If a guy drops it or bobbles it out of bounds, the next time they’ll throw it to him again. And because of their confidence in him, he will have confidence. That’s how you grow.’” Phil Jackson drew much of the inspiration for his style of coaching—which is clearly servant-leadership—from Zen, Christianity, and the Native American tradition. He created a sacred space for the team to gather, bond, process, and learn from mistakes.

A servant-leader is also keenly aware of a much wider circle of stakeholders than just those internal to the organization. Ray Anderson, chairman and CEO of Interface, one of the largest international commercial carpet wholesalers, has challenged his company to join him in leading what he calls the “second Industrial Revolution.” He defines this new paradigm as one that finds sustainable ways to do business that respect the finiteness of natural resources. His vision, supported by his valued employees, is to never again sell a square yard of carpet. Instead, they seek to lease carpeting and then find ways to achieve 100-percent recycling.

A NEW KIND OF LEADERSHIP

A servant-leader thus does not duck behind the letter of the law but asks, “What is the right thing for us to do to best serve all stakeholders?” He or she defines profit beyond financial gain to include meaningful work, environmental responsibility, and quality of life for all involved. To quote Robert Greenleaf, “The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will each benefit, or at least not be further deprived?”

Supervisors often believe that they don’t have time to make a longterm investment in people (see “Addiction to Fire-fighting”). When an individual’s primary focus is on doing everything faster, she becomes addicted to the constant rush of adrenaline. To feed this craving, the person neglects proactive tasks such as coaching, mentoring, planning ahead, and quiet reflection to learn from mistakes. Instead, the brain sees only more problems—reasons to stay reactive and highly charged. Servant-leaders spend far less time in crisis management or fire fighting than do traditional managers. Instead, they use crises as opportunities to coach others and collectively learn from mistakes.

ADDICTION OF FIRE-FIGHTING

As the number of organizational “fires” increases, leaders spend more and more time “fire-fighting,” which, in the short-term, reduces the number of crises (B1). However, the fundamental solution is to build decision-making skills in others (B2). By focusing on crisis management rather than on staff development, supervisors increase the company’s dependence on their own expertise and actually erode the level of competency throughout the organization (R3).

The Power of Internal Motivation and Paradox

So what does it take to become a servant-leader? The most important quality is a deep, internal drive to contribute to a collective result or vision. Very often a servant-leader purposely refuses to accept the perks of the position and takes a relatively low salary because another shared goal may have more value. For example, Southwest Airlines chairman Herb Kelleher has long been referred to as the most underpaid CEO in the industry. Herb was the first to work without pay when SWA faced a serious financial threat. In asking the pilot’s union to agree to freeze their wages for five years, he showed his commitment by freezing his own wages as well.

Big salaries and attractive perks are clearly not the main motivators for Southwest’s leadership team; the company’s top leaders are paid well below the industry average. Rather, they stay because they are making history together. Their vision is a noble one—to provide meaningful careers to their employees and the freedom to fly to many Americans who otherwise could not afford the convenience of air travel. SWA’s leaders love to take on major competitors and win. Beyond that, each finds fulfillment in developing talent all around him or her. Servant-leadership has become a core way of being within Southwest Airlines.

A second quality of servant-leaders is an awareness of paradox. Paradox involves two aspects: the understanding that there is usually another side to every story, and the fact that most situations contain an opposite and balancing truth (see “The Structure of Paradox: Managing Interdependent Opposites,” by Philip Ramsey, The Systems ThinkerV8N9). Here are some of the paradoxes that servant-leadership illuminates:

• We can lead more effectively by serving others.
• We can arrive at better answers by learning to ask deeper questions and by involving more people in the process.
• We can build strength and unity by valuing differences.
• We can improve quality by making mistakes, as long as we also create a safe environment in which we can learn from experience.
• Fewer words (such as a brief story or metaphor) can provide greater understanding than a long speech. A servant-leader knows to delve into what is not being said or what is being overlooked, especially when solutions come too quickly or with too easy a consensus.

A Time for Transformation

We are moving away from a time when a strong hierarchy worked for our organizations. In the past, we gauged results in a far more limited way than we do today—financial and other material gain, power, and prestige were viewed as true measures of success. Other, more complex measures, such as the impact of our businesses on society, families, and the environment, have not been part of our accounting systems. Yet now, as we move into the Information Age and a new millennium, we’ve come to recognize the limitations of the traditional “bottom line.”

In the past, we gauged results in a far more limited way than we do today . . .Yet now, as we move into the Information Age and a new millennium, we’ve come to recognize the limitations of the traditional “bottom line.”

A servant-leadership approach can help us overcome these limitations and accomplish a true and lasting transformation within our organizations (see “Practicing Servant-Leadership”). To be sure, as we envision the many peaks and valleys before us in undertaking this journey, we sometimes may feel that we are alone. But we are not alone—many others are headed in the same direction. For instance, in Fortune magazine’s recent listing of the 100 best companies to work for in America, three of the top four follow the principles of servant-leadership: Synovus Financial (number 1), TDIndustries (number 2), and Southwest Airlines (number 4). In addition to providing a nurturing and inspiring work environment, each of these businesses is recognized as a leader in its industry.

On a personal level, as many of us begin to come to terms with our own mortality, our desire to leave a legacy grows. “What can I contribute that will continue long after I am gone?” Some yearn to have their names emblazoned on a building or some other form of ego recognition. Servant-leaders find fulfillment in the deeper joy of lifting others to new levels of possibility, an outcome that goes far beyond what one person could accomplish alone. The magical synergy that results when egos are put aside, vision is shared, and a true learning organization takes root is something that brings incredible joy, satisfaction, and results to the participants and their organizations. For, as Margaret Mead put it, “Never doubt the power of a small group of committed individuals to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” The true heroes of the new millennium will be servant-leaders, quietly working out of the spotlight to transform our world.

Ann McGee-Cooper, Ed. D., is founder of Ann McGeeCooper & Associates, a team of futurists who specialize in creative solutions and the politics of change. For the past 25 years, she and her team have worked to develop servant-leaders. Duane Trammell, M. Ed., is managing partner of Ann McGee-Cooper & Associates and co-author of the group’s servant-leadership curriculum.

Editorial support for this article was provided by Kellie Warman O’Reilly and Janice Molloy.

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