We use the term “Habits of Mind” to mean having a disposition toward behaving intelligently when confronted with problems to which we do not immediately know the answers. When humans experience dichotomies, are confused by dilemmas, or come face to face with uncertainties, our most effective actions require drawing forth certain patterns of intellectual behavior. When we draw upon these intellectual resources, the results that we produce are more powerful, of higher quality, and of greater significance than if we fail to employ those patterns of intellectual behaviors.

Employing Habits of Mind requires a composite of many skills, attitudes, cues, past experiences, and proclivities. It means that we value one pattern of thinking over another, and therefore it implies choice making about which pattern should be employed at which time. It includes sensitivity to the contextual cues in a situation signaling that it is an appropriate time and circumstance to employ this pattern. It requires a level of skillfulness to employ and carry through the behaviors effectively over time. Finally, it leads individuals to reflect on, evaluate, modify, and carry forth to future applications their learnings.

Research in effective thinking and intelligent behavior indicates that there are some identifiable characteristics of effective thinkers. Scientists, artists, and mathematicians are not the only ones who demonstrate these behaviors. These characteristics have been identified in successful mechanics, teachers, entrepreneurs, salespeople, and parents — people in all walks of life.

Habits of Mind

Following are descriptions and an elaboration of 16 attributes of what human beings do when they behave intelligently (see “16 Habits of Mind”). These Habits of Mind are what intelligent people do when they are confronted with complex problems. These behaviors are seldom performed in isolation. Rather, clusters of such behaviors are drawn forth and employed in various situations. When listening intently, for example, one employs flexibility, metacognition, precise language, and perhaps questioning.

Please do not think that there are only 16 ways in which humans display their intelligence. It should be understood that this list is not meant to be complete. You, your colleagues, or your students will want to continue the search for additional Habits of Mind by adding to and elaborating on this list and the descriptions (for an example of an additional list, see “13 Habits of a Systems Thinker,” compiled by the Waters Foundation).

1. Persisting

“Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time.”

— Marabel Morgan

Efficacious people stick to a task until it is completed. They don’t give up easily They are able to analyze a problem to develop a system, structure, or strategy to attack it. They employ a range and have a repertoire of alternative strategies for problem solving. They collect evidence to indicate their problem-solving strategy is working, and if one strategy doesn’t work, they know how to back up and try another. They recognize when a theory or idea must be rejected and another employed. They have systematic methods of analyzing a problem that include knowing how to begin, what steps must be performed, and what data need to be generated or collected. Because they are able to sustain a problem-solving process over time, they are comfortable with ambiguous situations.

• Managing Impulsivity“. . . . [G]oal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley cup.”

  —Daniel Goleman

  Effective problem solvers have a sense of deliberativeness: They think before they act. They intentionally form a vision of a product, plan of action, goal, or destination before they begin. They strive to clarify and understand directions, develop a strategy for approaching a problem, and withhold immediate value judgments about an idea before fully understanding it. Reflective individuals consider alternatives and consequences of several possible directions prior to taking action. They decrease their need for trial and error by gathering information, taking time to reflect on an answer before giving it, making sure they understand directions, and listening to alternative points of view.

• Listening to Others — With Understanding and Empathy“Listening is the beginning of understanding. … Wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening. Let the wise listen and add to their learning and let the discerning get guidance.”

  —Proverbs 1:5

  According to Stephen Covey, highly effective people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy listening. Some psychologists believe that the ability to listen to another person, empathize with them, and understand their point of view is one of the highest forms of intelligent behavior. Being able to paraphrase another person’s ideas, detecting indicators of their feelings or emotional states in their oral and body language, accurately expressing another person’s concepts, emotions, and problems — all are indications of listening behavior (Piaget called it “overcoming egocentrism”).

  Peter Senge and his colleagues suggest that to listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow your mind’s hearing to your ears’ natural speed and hear beneath the words to their meaning. This is a complex skill requiring the ability to monitor one’s own thoughts while, at the same time, attending to the partner’s words. Honing this behavior does not mean that we can’t disagree with someone. A good listener tries to understand what the other person is saying. In the end, he may disagree sharply, but because he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is he is disagreeing with.

• Thinking Flexibly“If you never change your mind, why have one?”

  — Edward deBono

  An amazing discovery about the human brain is its plasticity — its ability to “rewire,” change, and even repair itself to become smarter. Flexible people are the ones with the most control. They have the capacity to change their minds as they receive additional data. They engage in multiple and simultaneous outcomes and activities, draw upon a repertoire of problem-solving strategies, and know when it is appropriate to be broad and global in their thinking and when a situation requires detailed precision. They create and seek novel approaches and have a well-developed sense of humor. They envision a range of consequences.

  13 HABITS OF A SYSTEMS THINKER

  The Water Foundation has identified 13 Habits of a Systems Thinker. For detailed definitions of each, click here.

  • Seeks to understand the “big picture”
  • Observes how elements within systems change over time, generating patterns and trends
  • Recognizes that a system’s structure generates its behavior: focuses on structure, not on blame
  • Identifies the circular nature of complex cause and effect relationships, i.e. interdependencies
  • Changes perspectives
  • Surfaces and tests assumptions
  • Considers an issue fully and resists the urge to come to a quick conclusion
  • Considers how mental models (i.e., attitudes and beliefs derived from experience) affect current reality and the future
  • Uses understanding of system structures to identify possible leverage actions
  • Considers both short- and long-term consequences of actions
  • Finds where unintended consequences emerge
  • Recognizes the impact of time delays when exploring cause and effect relationships
  • Checks results and changes actions if needed:, “successive approximation”

  Flexible people can approach a problem from a new angle using a novel approach (deBono refers to this as lateral thinking). They consider alternative points of view or deal with several sources of information simultaneously. Thus, flexibility of mind is essential for working with social diversity, enabling an individual to recognize the wholeness and distinctness of other people’s ways of experiencing and making meaning.

  Flexible thinkers are able to take a “macro-centric” perspective. This is similar to looking down from a balcony at ourselves and our interactions with others. This bird’s-eye view is useful for discerning themes and patterns from assortments of information. It is intuitive, holistic, and conceptual. Since we often need to solve problems with incomplete information, we need the capacity to perceive general patterns and jump across gaps of incomplete knowledge or when some of the pieces are missing.

  Yet another perceptual orientation is “micro-centric” — examining the individual and sometimes minute parts that make up the whole. Without this “worm’s-eye view,” science, technology, and any complex enterprise could not function. These activities require attention to detail, precision, and orderly progressions.

  Flexible thinkers display confidence in their intuition. They tolerate confusion and ambiguity up to a point, and are willing to let go of a problem, trusting their subconscious to continue creative and productive work on it. Flexibility is the cradle of humor, creativity, and repertoire.

• Thinking About Our Thinking (Metacognition)“When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.”

  — Plato

  Occurring in the neocortex, metacognition is our ability to know what we know and what we don’t know. It is our ability to plan a strategy for producing what information is needed, to be conscious of our own steps and strategies during the act of problem solving, and to reflect on and evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking. Probably the major components of metacognition are developing a plan of action, maintaining that plan in mind over a period of time, then reflecting back on and evaluating the plan upon its completion. Planning a strategy before embarking on a course of action assists us in keeping track of the steps in the sequence for the duration of the activity. It facilitates making temporal and comparative judgments, assessing the readiness for more or different activities, and monitoring our interpretations, perceptions, decisions, and behaviors.

  Metacognition means becoming increasingly aware of one’s actions and the effect of those actions on others and on the environment, forming internal questions as one searches for information and meaning, developing mental maps or plans of action, mentally rehearsing prior to performance, monitoring those plans as they are employed. It involves being conscious of the need for midcourse correction if the plan is not meeting expectations, reflecting on the plan upon completion of the implementation for the purpose of self-evaluation, and editing mental pictures for improved performance.

• Striving for Accuracy and Precision“A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake.”

  — Confucius

  Embodied in the stamina, grace, and elegance of a ballerina or a shoemaker is the desire for craftsmanship, mastery, flawlessness, and economy of energy to produce exceptional results. People who value these qualities take time to check over their products. They review the rules by which they are to abide; they review the models and visions they are to follow; and they review the criteria they are to employ and confirm that their finished product matches the criteria exactly.

  To be craftsman-like means knowing that one can continually perfect one’s craft by working to attain the highest possible standards and pursue ongoing learning in order to bring a laser-like focus of energies to task accomplishment. For some people, craftsmanship requires continuous reworking. Mario Cuomo, a great speechwriter and politician, once said that his speeches were never done — it was only a deadline that made him stop working on them!

• Questioning and Posing Problems“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances.”

  — Albert Einstein

  One of the distinguishing characteristics between humans and other forms of life is our inclination and ability to find problems to solve. Effective problem solvers know how to ask questions to fill in the gaps between what they know and what they don’t know. Effective questioners are inclined to ask a range of questions. For example, they request data to support others’ conclusions and assumptions through questions such as, “What evidence do you have?”

  They pose questions about alternative points of view:, “From whose viewpoint are we seeing, reading, or hearing?”

  They inquire into causal connections and relationships:, “How are these people/events/situations related to each other?”

  They pose hypothetical problems: “What do you think would happen if …?”

  Inquirers recognize discrepancies and phenomena in their environment and probe into their causes:, “Why do cats purr?”, “Why does the hair on my head grow so fast, while the hair on my arms and legs grows so slowly?”, “What are some alternative solutions to international conflicts other than wars?”

• Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations“I’ve never made a mistake. I’ve only learned from experience.”

  — Thomas A. Edison

  Intelligent human beings learn from experience. When confronted with a new and perplexing problem, they will often draw forth experience from their past. They can be heard to say, “This reminds me of . . .” or “This is just like the time when I . . .” They call on their store of knowledge and experience as sources of data to support, theories to explain, or processes to solve each new challenge. Furthermore, they are able to abstract meaning from one experience, carry it forth, and apply it in a new and novel situation.

• Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision“I do not so easily think in words . . . after being hard at work having arrived at results that are perfectly clear . . . I have to translate my thoughts in a language that does not run evenly with them.”

  — Francis Galton

  Language refinement plays a critical role in enhancing a person’s cognitive maps and their ability to think critically, which is the knowledge base for efficacious action. Enriching the complexity and specificity of language simultaneously produces effective thinking. Language and thinking are closely entwined. Like two sides of a coin, they are inseparable. Fuzzy language is a reflection of fuzzy thinking. Intelligent people strive to communicate accurately in both written and oral form, taking care to use precise language, defining terms, correct names, and universal labels and analogies. They strive to avoid overgeneralizations, deletions, and distortions. Instead, they support their statements with explanations, comparisons, quantification, and evidence.

• Gathering Data Through All Senses“Observe perpetually.”

  — Henry James

  The brain is the ultimate reductionist. It reduces the world to its elementary parts: photons of light, molecules of smell, sound waves, vibrations of touch — which send electrochemical signals to individual brain cells that store information about lines, movements, colors, smells, and other sensory inputs. Intelligent people know that all information gets into the brain through the sensory pathways: gustatory, olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, auditory, visual, Most linguistic, cultural, and physical learning is derived from the environment by observing or taking in through the senses. To know a wine it must be drunk; to know a role it must be acted; to know a game it must be played; to know a dance it must be moved; to know a goal it must be envisioned. Those whose sensory pathways are open, alert, and acute absorb more information from the environment than those whose pathways are withered, immune, and oblivious to sensory stimuli.

  Furthermore, we are learning more about the impact of arts and music on improved mental functioning. Forming mental images is important in mathematics and engineering; listening to classical music seems to improve spatial reasoning. Social scientists solve problems through scenarios and roleplaying; scientists build models; engineers use cad-cam; mechanics learn through hands-on experimentation; artists experiment with colors and textures; musicians learn by producing combinations of instrumental and vocal music.

• Creating, Imagining, and Innovating“The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.”

  — John Schaar

  All humans have the capacity to generate novel, original, clever, or ingenious products, solutions, and techniques—if that capacity is developed. Creative individuals try to conceive problem solutions differently, examining alternative possibilities from many angles. They tend to project themselves into different roles using analogies, starting with a vision and working backward, imagining they are the objects being considered. Creative people take risks and frequently push the boundaries of their perceived limits. They are intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated, working on the task because of the aesthetic challenge rather than the material rewards. Creative people are open to criticism. They hold up their products for others to judge and seek feedback in an ever-increasing effort to refine their technique.

• Responding with Wonderment and Awe“The most beautiful experience in the world is the experience of the mysterious.”

  — Albert Einstein.

  Efficacious people have not only an “I can” attitude, but also an “I enjoy” feeling. They enjoy figuring things out by themselves and continue to learn throughout their lifetimes. They find beauty in a sunset, intrigue in the geometry of a spider web, and exhilaration at the iridescence of a hummingbird’s wings. They see the congruity and intricacies in the derivation of a mathematical formula, recognize the orderliness and adroitness of a chemical change, and commune with the serenity of a distant constellation.

• Taking Responsible Risks“There has been a calculated risk in every stage of American development — the pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, dreamers who were not afraid of action.”

  — Brooks Atkinson

  Flexible people seem to have an almost uncontrollable urge to go beyond established limits. They are uneasy about comfort; they “live on the edge of their competence.” They seem compelled to place themselves in situations where they do not know what the outcome will be. They accept confusion, uncertainty, and the higher risks of failure as part of the normal process, and they learn to view setbacks as interesting, challenging, and growth producing.

  However, they are not behaving impulsively. Their risks are educated. They draw on past knowledge, are thoughtful about consequences, and have a well-trained sense of what is appropriate. They know that not all risks are worth taking! It is only through repeated experiences that risk taking becomes educated. It often is a cross between intuition, drawing on past knowledge, and a sense of meeting new challenges.

• Finding Humor“Where do bees wait? At the buzz stop.”

  — Andrew, age six

  Another unique attribute of humans is our sense of humor. Laughter transcends all cultures and eras. Its positive effects on psychological functions include a drop in the pulse rate, the secretion of endorphins, and increased oxygen in the blood. It has been found to liberate creativity and provoke such higher-level thinking skills as anticipation, the identification of novel relationships, visual imagery, and analogy. People who engage in the mystery of humor have the ability to perceive situations from an original and often interesting vantage point. Having a whimsical frame of mind, they thrive on finding incongruity and perceiving absurdities, ironies, and satire; finding discontinuities; and being able to laugh at situations and themselves.

• Thinking Interdependently“Take care of each other. Share your energies with the group. No one must feel alone, cut off, for that is when you do not make it.”

  — Willie Unsoeld

  Humans are social beings. We congregate in groups, find it therapeutic to be listened to, draw energy from one another, and seek reciprocity. In groups, we contribute our time and energy to tasks that we would quickly tire of when working alone. In fact, we have learned that one of the cruelest forms of punishment that can be inflicted on an individual is solitary confinement.

  Cooperative humans realize that all of us together are more powerful, intellectually and/or physically, than any one individual. Probably the foremost disposition in the post-industrial society is the heightened ability to think in concert with others and to find ourselves increasingly more interdependent and sensitive to the needs of others. Problem solving has become so complex that no one person can go it alone. No one has access to all the data needed to make critical decisions; no one person can consider as many alternatives as several people can.

• Learning Continuously“Insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

  — Albert Einstein

  Intelligent people are in a continuous learning mode. Their confidence, in combination with their inquisitiveness, allows them to constantly search for new and better ways. People with this Habit of Mind are always striving for improvement, growing, and learning. They seize problems, situations, tensions, conflicts, and circumstances as valuable opportunities to learn.

  A great mystery about humans is that we confront learning opportunities with fear rather than mystery and wonder. We seem to feel better when we know rather than when we learn. We defend our biases, beliefs, and storehouses of knowledge rather than inviting the unknown, the creative, and the inspirational. Being certain and closed gives us comfort, while being doubtful and open gives us fear. The highest form of thinking we will ever learn is the humility of knowing that we don’t know.

In Summary

Drawn from research on human effectiveness, descriptions of remarkable performers, and analyses of the characteristics of efficacious people, we have presented descriptions of 16 Habits of Mind. This list is not meant to be complete but rather to serve as a starting point for further elaboration and description.

These Habits of Mind may serve as mental disciplines. When confronted with problematic situations, students, parents, and teachers might habitually employ one or more of these Habits of Mind by asking themselves, “What is the most intelligent thing I can do right now?”

• How can I learn from this? What are my resources? How can I draw on my past successes with problems like this? What do I already know about the problem? What resources do I have available or need to generate?
• How can I approach this problem flexibly? How might I look at the situation in another way? How can I draw upon my repertoire of problem-solving strategies? How can I look at this problem from a fresh perspective?
• How can I illuminate this problem to make it clearer, more precise? Do I need to check out my data sources? How might I break this problem down into its component parts and develop a strategy for understanding and accomplishing each step?
• What do I know or not know? What questions do I need to ask? What strategies are in my mind now? What am I aware of in terms of my own beliefs, values, and goals with this problem? What feelings or emotions am I aware of which might be blocking or enhancing my progress?
• The interdependent thinker might turn to others for help. She might ask, How does this problem affect others? How can we solve it together? What can I learn from others that would help me become a better problem solver?

These Habits of Mind transcend all subject matters commonly taught in school. They are characteristic of peak performers, whether in homes, schools, athletic fields, organizations, the military, governments, churches, or corporations. They are what make marriages successful, learning continual, workplaces productive, and democracies enduring.

The goal of education therefore should be to support others and ourselves in liberating, developing, and habituating these Habits of Mind more fully. Taken together, they are a force directing us toward increasingly authentic, congruent, ethical behavior. They are the tools of disciplined choice making. They are the primary vehicles in the lifelong journey toward integration. They are the “right stuff” that makes human beings efficacious.

This article is adapted with permission from Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick, “Describing 16 Habits of Mind.” Click here to access the original article. The authors have a new book coming out, Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind: 16 Essential Characteristics for Success (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2009).

Arthur L. Costa, Ed. D., is an Emeritus Professor of Education at California State University, Sacramento and co-director of the Institute for Intelligent Behavior in El Dorado Hills, California. He has served as a classroom teacher, a curriculum consultant, and an assistant superintendent for instruction and as the director of educational programs for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Bena Kallick, Ph. D., is a private consultant providing services to school districts, state departments of education, professional organizations, and public sector agencies throughout the United States and abroad. Her areas of focus include group dynamics, creative and critical thinking, and alternative assessment strategies in the classroom.

The post Habits of Mind: Strategies for Disciplined Choice Making appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Why is this relationship problematic? First, although learning is clearly essential for sustained individual and organizational performance in a changing environment, at times the costs may be more visible than performance benefits. Learning can be messy, uncertain, interpersonally risky, and without guaranteed results. Moreover, not all learning leads to improved performance; it depends on what is being learned and how important it is

for particular dimensions of performance. Although some learning is straightforward (the knowledge is codified and readily used by newcomers), other forms rely on experimentation and exploration for which outcomes are unknown in advance. Lastly, time delays between learning and performance may obscure or even undermine evidence of a clear causal relationship.

As described in this article, organizations can at least partly address these challenges through leadership that creates a climate of psychological safety and that promotes inquiry. But first, let’s go into more detail about some of the ways in which a focus on learning can actually appear to undermine performance.

Impediments to Learning

Where catastrophic failure is possible, mistakes are inevitable, or innovation is necessary, learning from failure is highly desirable. Yet research suggests that few organizations dig deeply enough to understand and capture the potential learning from failures. Why this resistance to learning?

Psychological and Organizational Barriers. A multitude of barriers can preclude learning in teams and organizations. These include limitations in human skills or cognition that lead people to draw false conclusions, and complex and cross-disciplinary work designs that can make failures difficult to identify. Additional barriers include lack of policies and procedures to encourage experimentation or forums for employees to analyze and discuss the results.

Learning about complex, interconnected problems also suffers from ineffective discussion among parties with conflicting perspectives. Status differences, lack of psychological safety, and lack of inquiry into others’ information and experiences related to substantive issues can combine to ensure that a group as a whole learns little.

Powerful individuals or respected experts can stifle dissent simply by expressing their opinions. Social pressures for conformity exacerbate the impact of leaders’ actions, particularly when large status and power differences exist among leaders and subordinates. In addition, people in disagreement rarely ask the kind of sincere questions that are necessary for them to learn from each other. We tend to try to force our views on others rather than educating them by providing the underlying reasoning behind our perspectives, as Chris Argyris and Donald Schön showed long ago (see Argyris, C. and Schön, D. Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspectives, Addison-Wesley, 1978).

More generally, the human desire to “get it right” rather than to treat both success and failure as useful data greatly impedes learning. Individuals prevent learning when they ignore their own mistakes in order to protect themselves from the unpleasantness and loss of self-esteem associated with acknowledging failure. People may also deny, distort, or cover up their mistakes in order to avoid the public embarrassment or private derision that frequently accompanies such confessions, despite the potential of learning from them. In addition, people derive comfort from evidence that enables them to believe what they want to believe, to deny responsibility for failures, and to attribute a problem to others or the system.

Similarly, groups and organizations tend to suppress awareness of failures. Organizational incentives typically reward success and punish failure, creating an incentive to hide mistakes. Teams and organizations are also predisposed to underreact to the threat of failure when stakes are high, different views and interests are present, and the situation is ambiguous. Such groups can fail to learn and hence make poor decisions.

Multiple mechanisms can combine to inhibit responsiveness and preclude learning in group settings. First, people tend to filter out subtle threats, blocking potentially valuable data from careful consideration. They also remain stubbornly attached to initial views and seek information and experts to confirm initial conclusions. Groups silence dissenting views, especially when power differences are present. They spend more time confirming shared views than envisioning alternative possibilities. Organizational structures often serve to block new information from reaching the top of the organization. Rather, they tend to reinforce existing wisdom.

IMPACT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL BARRIERS TO LEARNING

While proactively seeking to acquire new capabilities often takes a toll on short-term performance, over time, it benefits both the individual and the organization. Avoiding learning behaviors, on the other hand, can undermine long-term performance.

Inability to Learn from Failure. Most organizations’ inability to learn from failure stems from a lack of attention to small, everyday problems and mistakes. Organizations that embrace small failures as part of a learning process are more likely to innovate successfully. Likewise, organizations that pay more attention to small problems are more likely to avert big ones, especially where tasks are interconnected. Despite the increased rate of failure that accompanies deliberate experimentation, organizations that experiment effectively are likely to be more innovative, productive, and successful than those that do not take such risks (see especially Sitkin, S. B., “Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses,” in L. L. Cummings and B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 14: 231–266, JAI Press, 1992, and Cannon and Edmondson (2005), cited above).

Small failures arise not only in the course of purposeful experimentation, but also in daily work that is complex and interdependent. When problems inevitably arise during the course of business in these situations, workers can either simply compensate for or work around problems, or they can seek to resolve the underlying cause by notifying those who can help to correct them. The former would likely go unnoticed, while the latter would expose poor performance. Nevertheless, compensating for problems can be counterproductive if doing so isolates information about problems such that no learning occurs.

In hazardous situations, small failures not identified as problems worth examination often precede catastrophic failures. Small failures are often the key early warning sign that could provide a wake-up call needed to avert disaster down the road. Yet, in recognizing small failures in order to learn from them, individuals and groups must acknowledge the performance gaps.

Collective learning requires valuing failure and being willing to incur small failures in front of colleagues. It requires being willing to enhance rather than reduce variance. Learning groups must proactively identify, discuss, and analyze what may appear to be insignificant mistakes or problems in addition to large failures. When organizations ignore small problems, preventing larger failures becomes more difficult (see “Impact of Psychological and Organizational Barriers to Learning”).

The Learning Mindset

Given the above challenges, this section describes some of the theoretical alternatives for promoting organizational learning that enhances future performance. It ties together different but related ideas from research at several levels of analysis (see “Learning Mindsets at Multiple Levels of Analysis,” p. 4).

Advocacy and Inquiry Orientations. As discussed above, organizational structures and processes can severely inhibit the ability of a group to effectively incorporate the unique knowledge and concerns of different members. Key features of group process failures include antagonism; a lack of listening, learning, and inquiring; and limited psychological safety for challenging authority. These kinds of individual and interpersonal behaviors have been collectively referred to as an advocacy orientation (Garvin and Roberto introduced this term in “What You Don’t Know About Making Decisions,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 79, No. 8, September 2001).

For example, simple but genuine inquiry into the thinking of other team members could have generated critical new insights about the threat posed by the foam strike to the Columbia space shuttle. Instead, NASA managers spent 16 days downplaying the problem and so did not view the events as a trigger for conducting detailed analyses of the situation. A recent analysis by Roberto, Bohmer, and Edmondson concluded that NASA’s response to the foam strike threat was characterized by active discounting of risk, fragmented, discipline-based analyses, and a wait-and-see orientation to action. When engineers became concerned about the foam strike, the impact of their questions and analyses was dampened by poor team design, coordination, and support. In contrast to the flat and flexible organizational structures that enable research and development, NASA exhibited a rigid hierarchy with strict rules and guidelines for behavior, structures conducive to aims of routine production and efficiency. The cultural reliance on data-driven problem solving and quantitative analysis discouraged novel lines of inquiry based on intuitive judgments and interpretations of incomplete, yet troubling information. In short, the shuttle team faced a significant learning opportunity but was not able to take advantage of it due to counterproductive organizational and group dynamics.

In contrast, effectively conducting an analysis of a failure requires a spirit of inquiry and openness, patience, and a tolerance for ambiguity. Such an inquiry orientation is characterized by the perception among group members that multiple alternatives exist, frequent dissent, deepening understanding of issues and development of new possibilities, filling gaps in knowledge through combining information sources, and awareness of each others’ reasoning and its implications. Such an orientation can counteract common group process failures. Learning about the perspectives, ideas, experiences, and concerns of others when facing uncertainty and high-stakes decisions is critical to making appropriate choices.

Confirmatory and Exploratory Responses. Leaders play an important role in determining group orientation to an observed or suspected failure. Analyzing the Columbia Shuttle tragedy, Edmondson and colleagues suggested that when small problems occur, leaders can respond in one of two basic ways. A confirmatory response — appropriate in routine production settings, but harmful in more volatile or uncertain environments — reinforces accepted assumptions, naturally promoting an advocacy orientation on the part of leaders and others. When individuals seek information, they naturally look for data that confirms existing beliefs. Confirmatory leaders act in ways consistent with established frames and beliefs, passive and reactionary rather than active and forward-looking.

In uncertain or risky situations or where innovation is required, an exploratory response may be more appropriate than seeking to confirm existing views. An exploratory response involves challenging and testing existing assumptions and experimenting with new behaviors and possibilities, the goal of which is to learn and to learn quickly. By deliberately exaggerating ambiguous threats, actively directing and coordinating team analysis and problem solving, and encouraging an overall orientation toward action, exploratory leaders encourage inquiry and experimentation. Leaders seeking to encourage exploration also actively foster constructive conflict and dissent and generate psychological safety by creating an environment in which people have an incentive, or at least do not have a disincentive, to identify and reveal failures, questions, and concerns. This form of leader response helps to accelerate learning through deliberate information gathering, creative mental simulations, and simple, rapid experimentation.

Rather than supporting existing assumptions, an exploratory response requires a deliberate shift in the mindset of a leader — and of others — that alters the way they interpret, make sense of, and diagnose situations. When leaders follow an exploratory approach, they embrace ambiguity and openly acknowledge gaps in knowledge. They recognize that their current understanding may require revision, and they actively seek evidence in support of alternative hypotheses. Rather than seeking to prove what they already believe, exploratory leaders seek discovery through creative and iterative experimentation.

Learning-Oriented and Coping-Oriented Approaches. When implementing an innovation such as a new technology or practice, leaders can orient those who will be responsible for implementation by responding in one of two ways. They may view the innovation challenge as something with which they need to cope or as an exciting learning and improvement opportunity. A coping-oriented approach is characterized by protective or defensive aims and technically oriented leadership. In contrast, learning-oriented leaders share with team members a sense of purpose related to accomplishing compelling goals and view project success as dependent on all team members.

In a study of 16 cardiac surgery departments implementing a minimally invasive cardiovascular surgery technique, successful surgical team leaders demonstrated a learning-oriented approach rather than a coping approach. Learning-oriented leaders explicitly communicated their interdependence with others, emphasizing their own fallibility and need for others’ input for the new technology to work. Without conveying any loss of expertise or status, these leaders simply recognized and communicated that in doing the new procedure they were dependent on others. In learning-oriented teams, members felt a profound sense of ownership of the project’s goals and processes, and they believed their roles to be crucial. Elsewhere, the surgeon’s position as expert precluded others from seeing a way to make genuine contributions beyond enacting their own narrow tasks, and it put them in a position of not seeing themselves as affecting whether the project succeeded or not. Learning-oriented teams had a palpable sense of teamwork and collegiality, aided by early practice sessions.

Organizing to learn and organizing to execute are two distinct management practices, one suited to exploration and the other to exploitation respectively.

In addition, team members felt completely comfortable speaking about their observations and concerns in the operating room, and they also were included in meaningful reflection sessions to discuss how the technology implementation was going. In teams that framed the innovation as a learning opportunity, leaders enrolled carefully selected team members, conducted pretrial team preparation, and engaged in multiple iterations of trial and reflection. Dramatic differences in the success of learning-oriented versus coping oriented leaders suggest that project leaders have substantial power to influence how team members see a project, especially its purpose and their own role in achieving that purpose.

Organizational Exploitation and Exploration. Inquiry and advocacy orientations describe individuals and groups; exploration and exploitation are terms that have been used to describe parallel characteristics of organizations. In mature markets, where solutions for getting a job done exist and are well understood, organizations tend to be designed and oriented toward a focus on execution of tasks and exploitation of current products or services. In more uncertain environments, knowledge about how to achieve performance is limited, requiring collective learning — or exploration in which open-ended experimentation is an integral part. In sum, exploration in search of new or better processes or products is conceptually and managerially distinct from execution, which is characterized by planning and structured implementation and amenable to formal tools such as statistical control.

Organizing to Learn and Organizing to Execute. In the same way that leader response drives group member orientation, the mindset of organizational leaders as well as the structures and systems they initiate play a large role in determining firm behavior and capabilities. Organizing to learn and organizing to execute are two distinct management practices, one suited to exploration and the other to exploitation respectively.

Where problems and processes are well understood and where solutions are known, leaders are advised to organize to execute. Organizing to execute relies on traditional management tools that motivate people and resources to carry out well-defined tasks. When reflecting on the work, leaders who organize to execute are well advised to ask, “Did we do it right?” In general, this approach is systematic, involves first-order learning in which feedback is used to modify or redirect activities, and eschews diversion from prescribed processes without good cause.

In contrast, facing a situation in which process solutions are not yet well developed, leaders must organize to learn: generating variance, learning from failure, sharing results, and experimenting continuously until workable processes are discovered, developed, and refined. Motivating organizational exploration requires a different mindset than motivating accurate and efficient execution. Leaders must ask not “did we succeed?” but rather “did we learn?”

In this way, organizing to learn considers the lessons of failure to be at least as valuable as the lessons of success. Such a managerial approach organizes people and resources for second-order learning that challenges, reframes, and expands possible alternatives. Practices involved in organizing to learn include promoting rather than reducing variance, conducting experiments rather than executing prescribed tasks, and rewarding learning rather than accuracy.

Creating systems to expose failures can help organizations create and sustain competitive advantage. For example, General Electric, UPS, and Intuit proactively seek data to help them identify failures. GE places an 800 number directly on each of its products. UPS allocates protected time for each of its drivers to express concerns or make suggestions. Intuit staffs its customer service line with technical designers, who directly translate feedback from customers into product improvements. At IDEO, brainstorming about problems on a particular project often enables engineers to discover ideas that benefit other design initiatives. At Toyota, the Andon cord, which permits any employee to halt production, enables continuous improvement through frequent investigation of potential concerns.

Leading Organizational Learning

Edmondson’s research has identified several success factors for leaders seeking to incorporate learning into their efforts to manage their organizations effectively. These include recognizing and responding to the need for learning versus execution, embracing the small failures from which organizations can learn, and maintaining the ability to shift nimbly between learning and execution as needed.

Diagnose the Situation and Respond Accordingly. Rather than vary their style as appropriate for the situation, in practice leaders tend to employ a consistent approach. They frequently gravitate toward organizing to execute, particularly when associated practices are consistent with the organization’s culture. However, being good at organizing to execute can hamper efforts that require learning. When leaders facing a novel challenge organize to execute rather than employing a learning approach, their organizations miss opportunities to innovate successfully.

Several years ago, the new chief operating officer at Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minnesota, Julie Morath, exemplified a mindset of organizing to learn. Emphasizing that she did not have the answers, she invited people throughout the organization to join in a learning journey, aimed at discovering how to ensure 100 percent patient safety.

Organizing a team to experiment and learn about an unknown process requires a management approach that embraces failure rather than seeking perfect execution.

Embrace Failure. Organizing a team to experiment and learn about an unknown process requires a management approach that embraces failure rather than seeking perfect execution. Discovery and expeditious trial and error are the keys to successful learning. In the Electric Maze®, an interactive learning exercise created by Interel, participants recognize how unnatural collective learning is for most managers. Teams of students must get each member from one end of the maze to the other without speaking. Individuals step on the maze until a square beeps, at which point the individual must retrace his or her steps back to the start.

To optimize the learning process, the team should “embrace failure” (symbolized in the Electric Maze exercise as “beeps going forward”) and systematically collect as many “failures” as quickly as possible. More typically, however, the need to learn is hampered by the perceived interpersonal risk of “failing” in front of colleagues by stepping on a beeping square. In reality, only by stepping on beeping squares can the team learn quickly and discover the true path forward. The exercise offers a palpable experience to show managers that the desire to look as if one never makes mistakes hinders team and organizational learning.

Maintain Flexibility and Shift as Needed. Some business situations require innovation and execution simultaneously, or in rapid sequence. However, shifting from organizing to learn to organizing to execute can be difficult. Participants in the Electric Maze exercise come to appreciate this challenge as well. To find the correct path through the maze requires organizing to learn.

Once the path is discovered, teams are required to have participants walk through the path as quickly as possible with minimal error. In practical terms, this means the teams must shift their behavior from learning to execution, something that most teams find difficult. The Maze exercise illustrates that managing a team for superb execution of a known process calls for a different approach than managing a team to experiment and discover a new process. The ability to recognize situations that require learning and the flexibility to shift from execution to learning requires awareness as well as skillful management, posing significant challenge to many leaders and competitive advantage to leaders with such ability.

Implications for Performance Measurement

The implication of the complex relationship between learning and performance for performance measurement is worth a brief discussion. Performance is easier to measure in execution contexts than in exploratory learning contexts. In the latter, performance can be challenging to measure in the short term, even if it contributes to clear performance criteria in the long term.

Consider the Electric Maze exercise again. In the second phase, excellent performance is error-free, rapid completion of the task—every member traversing the discovered path. In the first phase, success requires encountering and learning from failures, but how many is the right number? How fast should experiments be run? As in this example, the success of experimentation is far more difficult to assess than the success of execution.

Clearly, there are situations in which it is appropriate to measure performance against quality and efficiency standards. This is true when tasks are routine. However, employee rewards based primarily on indices measuring routine performance, such as accuracy and speed, can thwart efforts to innovate. Stated goals of increasing innovation are more effective when rewards promote experimentation rather than penalize failure. At Bank of America, for example, innovation was an espoused value. Leaders targeted a projected failure rate of 30 percent as suggestive of sufficient experimentation. However, few employees experimented with new ideas until management changed its reward system from traditional performance measures to those that rewarded innovation. Truly supporting innovation requires recognition that trying out innovative ideas will produce failures on the path to improvement.

Leaders need to align incentives and to offer resources to promote and facilitate effective learning. Supporting improvement requires understanding that mistakes are inevitable in uncertain and risky situations. Organizations must reward improvement rather than success, reward experimentation even when it results in failure, and publicize and reward speaking up about concerns and mistakes, so others can learn. Policies that reward compliance with specific targets or procedures encourage effort toward those measures but may thwart efforts toward innovation and experimentation.

Given the problematic nature of the relationship between learning and performance, to provide incentives for learning, performance measurement must examine learning, not just performance. Useful tools include surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to examine attitudes toward and depth of understanding regarding new ideas, knowledge, and ways of thinking. Process measures are also helpful. Direct observation is useful for assessing behavioral change due to new insights. Finally, performance measurement must consider improvement by measuring results over time. Groups that improve more over a fixed time frame or that take less time to improve must be learning faster than their peers.

Supporting improvement requires understanding that mistakes are inevitable in uncertain and risky situations.

Conclusions

This brief article calls attention to some of the challenges and tensions that exist when trying to improve team or organizational performance through proactive learning. We note several ways in which learning and performance in organizations can be at odds. Notably, when organizations engage in a new learning challenge, performance often suffers, or appears to suffer, in the short term. Struggling to acquire new skills or capabilities often takes a real, not just apparent, toll on short-term performance. Moreover, by revealing and analyzing their failures and mistakes — a critical aspect of learning — work groups may appear to be performing less well than they would otherwise.

The work reviewed here has elucidated the challenges of learning from failure in organizations, including the challenges of admitting errors and failures and production pressure that make it difficult to invest time in learning. These challenges are at least partially addressed by managerial efforts to create a climate of psychological safety and to promote inquiry. Leadership is thus essential to foster the mindset, group behaviors, and organizational investments needed to promote today’s learning and invest in tomorrow’s performance.

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management and chair of the doctoral programs at Harvard Business School. Her research examines leadership influences on psychological safety, learning, collaboration, and innovation in teams and organizations.

Sara J. Singer, M. B. A., Ph. D., is assistant professor of Health Care Management and Policy at Harvard School of Public Health and an assistant in Health Policy in the Institute for Health Policy, Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research uses organizational safety, organizational learning, and leadership theories to understand and address the causes and consequences of errors and adverse events.

The post Confronting the Tension Between Learning and Performance appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

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.

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Since I started my career in another arena, when I moved to teaching, I was not compelled to use one particular technique. Instead, I was free to teach in a way that paralleled my own process of following my energy. I tried to tap into people’s creative ability to learn collaboratively, break free from the fear of failure, and go with their ideas, wherever they might lead. Theories can change, practice might be revised, but the impulse to learn is as primal as life itself. I have found that what I call the “Learning Construction Site” — a supremely energizing and effective way to teach adults — releases that impulse and the potential of adults for learning collaboratively in the workplace.

Hard Hat Area #1

We are expecting 14 people this morning, and I’ve set up three tables with coffee. Music is playing softly in the background. As people walk in, I welcome them, asking about their jobs and what they want to learn today. Conversation continues as more people enter. “Is this the right class?” someone asks, bewildered by the uncommon room setting. “Help yourself to some coffee, and let’s find out,” I reply. The door is open, and more people stroll in. Others start talking while stirring their coffee.

I make a point of introducing myself individually to each participant. I greet them and say, “Welcome! I’m glad you could make it. What’s your name?” I recognize their voices from phone conversations I had with each of them before the class about what they wanted to learn. Their names are also familiar from the email I sent with the details of the course. Before class, I noticed that 70 percent of them had logged in to the introductory E-learning module I posted of the main course content.

It is now 9:16 a.m., and class is in full swing. On the table are a few guidelines that suggest conversation topics for this informal start. I ask the participants to make sure they know everyone by name, saying, “If you do not know each other, please introduce yourselves briefly.” The class is about a new way to teach. A few minutes into the conversation, I say, “I’d like to know about your experience training adults in the workplace. Please turn to the person next to you and discuss it. At the end, I’d like to hear from you so we all will know how many years of experience we have in the room.” In groups, participants start linking their previous experience to the subject of today’s class. Ten minutes later, I turn the music off to give instruction for the first learning activity.

In this article, we will break ground on the new idea of a Learning Construction Site (LCS) and discuss the four practices of designing, hosting, facilitating, and evaluating to alter the dynamic and simplify the complex work of releasing the potential of team learning in the workplace. The LCS borrows from several approaches and existing practices. However, it merges these approaches to create an original and integrated learning strategy applicable to new domains, like IT training or leadership classes.

Hard Hats, Supple Minds

Some ways of teaching are more effective than others; training is not simply a matter of taste, style, or personal gift. Moreover, the value of workplace learning in particular resides ultimately in how it is applied and what changes it produces. As a result, I have found that team learning and change are two faces of same process: the construction and transfer of knowledge in the workplace.

I believe that current practices of workplace learning coupled with the traditional mindsets of classroom training are inadequate for the “knowledge workers” of contemporary companies. LCS acknowledges that 21st-century employees step into the role of “knowledge builder” on a continuous basis and that their knowledge needs to change and be “rebuilt” regularly.

With these considerations in mind, the LCS was born. Unlike standard classroom training, it began to take shape when I first started preparing training materials interactively within a training meeting rather than dictating the curriculum; when I insisted on having trainees perform collaborative, hands-on tasks in the class; and when I engaged trainees in dialogue with joint inquiries rather than forcing them to listen to me. LCS came to life when I started using music, drawings, and improvisation to engage the trainees in the content being taught — and watched them, incredulously, wake up and learn better. I immediately noticed how effective these practices were. LCS has yielded measurable adult learning results in the workplace over the past 15 years, from the Marine Corps Association to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to the YMCA.

The governing rule of LCS is “Don’t listen to the instructor. Do talk to your neighbor!”

• Learners perform rather than listen, while engaged in work-like experiences.
• The instructor listens, improvises, and goes along with what the learning process becomes in the class.
• Learners interact with each other in a work-like environment during the learning process.
• Learners are given time, resources, and space to deal with unlearning.

The Four Cornerstones

As I mentioned, in a LCS, learners perform rather than listen, while engaged in work-like experiences. For example, in the first lesson of a beginning Spanish class, I might ask students to think about all words they already know and write them down. Fajita, muchacho, hola, hasta la vista. They discover that they know a lot more than they think they do! In this way, part of the work has already been done, and we have broken the ice. Spoon-feeding words would not have the same result. The activity allows students to search for new words first-hand with all the doubts, difficulty, and adventure of this experience. This is the principle of experientialism in action: realistic experiences in the domain of learning that result in instructional design based on creative, hands-on tasks. As such, this approach recognizes the importance of designing materials before entering the classroom and the need to engage the practices of the learning community that already exists. As Jacques Barzun pointed out in his 1992 book, Begin Here, “It is not the subject but the imagination of the teacher that has to be alive before the interest can be felt.”

In a LCS, the instructor listens, improvises, and goes along with what the learning process becomes in the classroom. In doing so, the focus shifts from the planned questions/content to the emerging questions/content. If we accept that the final value of the experience is not based on planned content, but on how realistic and relevant the learning activities are to the work of the community of learners, then trainers should negotiate the curriculum and get ready to throw away the agenda at a moment’s notice. This is the principle of emergence: flexibility in the classroom to follow what is relevant to trainees, which in turn results in meaningfulness. Robert Chambers calls this the ability to be “optimally unprepared.”

In a LCS, socializing is not a waste of time; instead, the view is that a lack of proper time for conviviality disables collaboration in teams. A LCS creates a friendly atmosphere through a physically welcoming environment (party-like with posters, inviting background music, open stations for group work, favors for participants) and a welcoming attitude of the trainer. This is the principle of conviviality: the pursuit of spirited social skills for reflection with the goal of producing high-performing teamwork and individual learning. This principle requires the trainer to become a skilled host, what Vicky Robin, in The Courage to Convene (1999), calls the new leadership of convening:, “a form of improvisational social artistry aimed at a higher order coherence and intelligence.”

A LCS is messy because the real challenge of learning is unlearning. Removing the debris of previous construction to rebuild the foundation of new understanding creates disorder and disorientation. The instructor deals head-on with conflict, disagreement, resistance to new ideas, difference of opinions, common fears, anxieties, or feelings of incompetence. This is the principle of chaos: the idea of learning as attending compassionately to the dissonance and discomfort of unlearning and, in turn, giving birth to real change and new knowledge.

How do you create a training program inspired by these principles? A LCS focuses on four critical practices:

• Designing Learning Tasks (based on the work of Jane Vella and Bob Mager): Turning the content to be taught into learning activities designed during training preparation
• Hosting Learning Spaces (inspired by the work of Juanita Brown and Vicky Robins): Creating an informal climate to foster collaboration and lower defensiveness
• Facilitating Learning Conversations (guided by insights from David Johnson, Roger Johnson, and Edythe Johnson Holubec, and Sam Kaner): Facilitating conversations through dialogue, reflection, and conviviality and using them as a critical tool to reflect on action
• Evaluating Learning Results: Focusing on evaluation of the results of learning experiences to make them accountable and effective in bringing about organizational change

The Blueprint: Designing Learning Tasks

Adult learners are generally not interested in formal knowledge — meaning the entire background behind what they are learning. It is not about knowing facts or “knowing about” but rather about “knowing how,”, “knowing when,” and improving the learner’s ability to solve problems. So-called “domain knowledge” (concepts, facts, and procedures), while necessary, is largely insufficient to empower people to solve problems at work.

Expertise is built through experience, and experience means the ability to solve problems using the content in the context of work. As a result, the work of the trainer becomes to design content turned into problem-solving experiences set in the work context of the trainees.

1. Selecting the Content. For a LCS session, the design phase is key. To design a session, we meet the people, ask around, get them involved, and make decisions about training with the learners and the stakeholders, not for them (see “The Design Phase” on p. 4 for some suggestions). After this phase, the content is listed in a document and outlined in specific behaviors that will be affected by the LCS experience.
2. Bringing Learning to Task. According to Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, “The practice of the community creates the potential curriculum.” To contextualize the content of the class and create hands-on tasks, the trainer dives into the learners’ community of practice to get an idea of what tasks will capture the content and engage them. Jane Vella defines a learning task as “an open question to the trainees with all the resources to find the answer.” A learning task in a LCS is made of three elements: presentation, activity, and dialogue.
   • Presentation (10 percent of the total time of the task) is where the instructor presents the activity and demonstrates its basic components.
   • The learning activity (45 percent of the total time), the real task, follows; it is a problem that offers the opportunity to practice the content to be learned and includes the resources to solve it.
   • We finish with a review/debriefing phase of dialogue (45 percent of the total time), where the instructor facilitates a conversation about the activity. I will describe this step in more detail later.
3. Executing. Making It All Happen. The discipline of project management can be useful in managing the process. In fact, collaborative learning is about instructional design and facilitating a class as much as it is about making things happen in a specific time-frame with a specific amount of resources.

In the case of my train-the-trainer workshop, the final result of the work in these three steps is a set of training materials that will be used in a class, with a tentative lesson plan, a document or webpage with the key concepts that will be taught, and an email sent to the trainees to encourage them to get familiar with the information before the class.

The Foundation: Hosting Learning Spaces

In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer defines a learning space as “a complex of factors: the physical arrangement and feeling of the room, the conceptual framework that I build around a topic … the emotional ethos I hope to facilitate, and the ground rules that will guide our inquiry.” The challenge of managing these tensions is the heart of the inner practice of training adults. The LCS provides an ideal context for recognizing and embracing the intellectual as well as the emotional world of a group. A learning space with this emotional quality encourages learners as individuals to reach out to others during the learning process.

1. Being. The ultimate inner challenge is working toward the creation of a space where people can bring their whole persons — their brains as well as their hearts. To reach this welcoming presence, we need to realize that the good-natured intentions of following our agenda, lesson plan, and idea of how the session should go can be formidable barriers that might prevent us from interacting with learners.While preparation is good, its function is exactly the opposite of the traditional approach: You over prepare so you can deal better with the total loss of control and accept just being in the moment. When I am in a class and take the first step of being authentic, my behavior causes people to respond in kind. Here are a few tips for just “being” with your learners:
   • Think about what you do to prepare for a dinner with friends. Do you get worked up about an agenda? Do you worry about the slideshow?
   • Make a conscious effort to listen. Avoid talking as much as you can. Bounce back questions and avoid the temptation to become the star. Refrain from reciting your credentials.
2. Setting the Physical Space. The physical space needs to be carefully organized. Try to choose a venue with natural light. Get rid of any clutter and extra chairs. Turn on some low background music. Create flip charts in advance that say things like “agenda,” “feedback,” and “parking lot,” but do not unveil them until needed. Add some plants, vases of flowers, and your own personal touches.
3. Welcoming People. Try to practice hospitality at the beginning of a class, in the critical first three minutes. Think about what a good host does when his guests arrive: He goes around and asks everybody if they are comfortable. She flits from corner to corner with a glass in hand and sees to it that everyone else does the same. By doing so, the host makes a cohesive group out of people who just met by inviting them to have a good time and interact.

Hard Hat Area #2

I turn off the music, and we start hearing group reports from this train-the-trainer class., “So how was it? I noticed some turmoil at table two. What happened?” I say with a smile and a teasing tone of voice. “We had a malfunction!” says one trainee, and the whole class laughs.

The first table shares information, then the second, then the third. The participants listen attentively. The sharing generates a conversation about who the stakeholders are for the training sessions these learners conduct and how to engage them. “We don’t know who our students are,” says someone. We decide it is an important topic, and some trainees ask more questions. I share my experience and solicit other people’s opinions and experience.

I find in my folder some learning activities I brought along. I glance at my watch and decide to manufacture Task #2 on the spot: “Imagine you are asked by your stakeholder, ‘What are the first three things you will do as you organize this class?’ Here is a list.” I distribute the lists. “Find a person you have not worked with before and for the next 10 minutes, select the three most critical activities you need to do in preparation for your training. At the end, you will share your responses with the rest of the class.” A few minutes later, we review their findings and post on the wall giant sticky notes with what this group considers critical to prepare for teaching. Wow, they are all different! I didn’t expect so much interest in instructional design.

I decide to change the sequence of tasks. I introduce now what I thought would be Task #6, saying, “We are doing the next task because, while preparation is critical to training success, we all do different things. In this task, you are given a case study. Read it and answer questions 1, 2, and 3. Then, as a group at your table, come up with common answers. After 40 minutes, you will report a sample of what was said at your table.” I switch the music back on and go back to sit on my stool.

The Hard Work: Facilitating Learning Conversations

In the LCS, people interact heavily with peers and — as in normal work — use conversations to solve business problems. Learners develop a common way of thinking and talking about their work. With learning conversations, they speak their familiar language, incorporating new knowledge, pooling knowledge together in a common search, and exploring knowledge in an intensively collaborative setting. The idea is that you want people to “talk the learning out,” to express it, give it words, reflect on it, dispute it, discuss it. I use three different formats for learning conversations:

1. Dialogue with a Learning Partner. Ask each person to interview, share, and talk with another person about the topic at hand. You might want to have this as a sequel to another activity such as reading a page of text, performing a procedure, or writing an assignment.</li.
2. Learning Group Dialogue (Among Sub-Group Members). Ask each table to discuss something, solve a problem, or complete a task. This is the key work of the trainees during a class. Again, I ask them to come up with an agreed-upon strategy after a discussion, simply share their thoughts about something, or come up with a list of ideas. At the end of a learning group dialogue, you might ask one person to bring the conversation to the rest of the class, write on a flip chart, or fill out a form with questions.
3. Learning Dialogue (Among All Groups). Invite all members of all groups to report, review, discuss, or analyze their work. This is the hardest conversation to facilitate, and it takes some practice to do it well. This step is inherently unpredictable. It represents, however, the highest level of learning. Creating a learning dialogue after a hands-on activity is both the objective of the activity itself and the specific strategy used to develop and confront the understanding matured by doing the activity.

Of course, not every conversation is a learning task. To turn a conversation into a search for meaning, I follow the three criteria identified by Nicholas Burbules, the author of Dialogue in Teaching: participation — an active involvement in dialogue; commitment — a persistent willingness to stay with dialogue no matter what happens; and reciprocity — a mutual respect and concern regardless of privilege or expertise.

The New Building: Evaluating Results

The whole point of this approach is its ability to make a difference in organizations in four areas:

• Prompting Individual Unlearning. Has the experience shifted people’s thinking? Has painful unlearning and conflict-ridden reassessment of perspectives taken place? How do we measure unlearning? As Sivasailam Thiagarajan once wrote, “This session will not answer all your questions, but rather question all your answers.” How can outcomes be accurately measured if we cannot even design unlearning?
• Building Team Learning. Have people experimented with and started owning new practices and new knowledge? Has learning been built collaboratively? While stakeholders strive to define, plan, anticipate, and develop outcomes before a workshop, no matter how much planning we do to reach learning outcomes, ultimately we are dealing with adults who come to class with rich experience. If each individual is responsible for her own knowledge, how can anyone set a target outcome in advance and ensure its achievement? But if we admit to having little — if any — control over the outcomes, how do we ensure results for a LCS?
• Improving Productive Teamwork. Has productive teamwork manifested itself? Have people improved their ability to work together?
• Developing a Learning Community. Is the learning community displaying a vitality that promises new beginnings after the class is over? Does this learning community have the ability to follow up on the work initiated?

What follows is a set of recommendations and best practices that can help us in the hard work of measuring those four critical results areas.

1. Measuring Unlearning. Jane Vella offers a good rule of thumb: “If they are not disputing it they are not learning it.” I welcome controversies as necessary signs that the unlearning process is taking place. If the process of unlearning is impossible to anticipate and therefore completely out of the trainer’s control, it is at least possible to design your class to make things less uncomfortable. For example, allow plenty of time for complaining and disputing the new content (all signs that the trainees are really taking it seriously), and make it safe to disagree with you and with the subject matter of the class. I try to let confrontation unfold and never take disagreement personally. Instead, I collect these as signs of unlearning.
2. Measuring Learning. From the beginning of the program design, I clarify that in class we will test the trainees’ skill level. By communicating the mandate from the stakeholders early and often, and by designing the course through interactive design meetings with all parties, the work of collecting evidence of learning is understood in advance (see “How to Collect Learning Evidence” for details).
3. Measuring Productive Teamwork. By creating a learning space that favors interaction and exchange, encouraging authentic group activities — not goofy games — as a source of team-skills learning, and supporting group discussions and dialogue on context- and content dependent knowledge, the LCS produces a whirlwind of exhilarating teamwork. I assess its quality by observation. I actively ask for feedback on how the group work is going throughout the day and openly but discreetly confront groups whose work during the learning tasks is not productive.
4. Measuring Learning Community Vitality. This way to teach awakens a capacity for experiencing positive interactions on the job, a capacity day-to-day work often does not nurture. Whether this has been described as “having fun” or simply “enjoying the class,” the constant in this approach is that people do not want the experience to stop. As the LCS builds energy and a drive in the group to perform at its best, the alchemy continues outside the class. I measure this outcome by scoring a follow-up online test on the critical issues the trainees have encountered after the learning experience.

Productive Adult Learning Experiences

This article has offered practical suggestions on how to go about designing and facilitating productive learning experiences for adults based on four principles (experientialism, emergence, conviviality, and chaos) and four practices (designing learning tasks, hosting learning spaces, facilitating learning conversations, and evaluating learning results). With the LCS, team learning can model the knowledge power shift embodied by peer-to-peer technologies. We can create learning experiences for adults that pool and create knowledge rather than simply dispensing information or drilling skills. Classroom workplace learning can give in to new language of contemporary learning theory (context, collaboration, community, apprenticeship) while taking full advantage of the brave new world of technology-based training.

“The process of returning learning to its natural location: the workplace,” which Joseph Raelin emphasizes, is at the heart of the LCS. When the critical resource of workplace knowledge is the pooled knowledge of learners — not of the “experts” — and when we recognize that the environment where knowledge lives and breathes is the workplace community — not textbooks — then reliance on outside experts is minimized in favor of an environment where people are truly free to learn from experience in the exhilarating sense of accomplishment of the Learning Construction Site.

Adriano Pianesi is the principal of ParticipAction Consulting, Inc. and has 15 years of experience in the nonprofit, government, and public sector to his work in training adults, course development, facilitation, and e-learning. A certified Action Learning coach and Harvard Discussion Method expert, he teaches workshops in the areas of facilitation, train-the-trainer (training design, development, and delivery), teamwork, customer service, and supervisory skills. His clients include the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the USDA Graduate School, the Department of Justice, Keane Federal Systems, Silo smashers, Serco North America, MRIS, and E-Cornell.

For Further Reading

Baker, Ann C., Patricia J. Jensen, and David A. Kolb. Conversational Learning (Quorum Books, 2002)

Brown, Juanita, and David Isaacs. The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter (Berrett-Koehler, 2005)

Johnson, DavidW., RogerT. Johnson, and Edythe Johnson Holubec. Circles of Learning (ASCD, 1994)

Kaner, Sam, Lenny Lind, Catherine Toldi, and Sarah Fisk. Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (New Society Publishers, 1996)

Mager, Bob. Goal Analysis (The Center for Effective Performance, 1983)

Robin, Vicky., “The Courage to Convene,” from www.collectivewisdominitiative.org/ papers/robin_courage.htm Rogers, Carl. Freedom to Learn (Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1969)

Vella, Jane. Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach (Jossey-Bass, 1994)

Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

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Doris Kearns Goodwin’s epic biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 2005), is no better place to explore the answers. By interweaving the biographies of members of Lincoln’s cabinet, Goodwin creates a systemic portrait of the administration that saved the Union. Through this meticulous examination of the interrelationships among this group, we learn about its leader with a richness that would be unlikely any other way. Remarkably, many of these men were political rivals. Yet in spite of the conflict among them as well as surrounding them, Lincoln forged a team that would prevail.

What struck me most while reading Team of Rivals was how the lynchpin of Lincoln’s prodigious emotional intellect was his empathy. Time and again, Lincoln’s insights into others deescalated conflict and cemented relationships, both personal as well as political. Building on Goodwin’s painstaking research into the people and events of Lincoln’s life, this article examines the relationship between Lincoln’s empathy and the following facets of his emotional intelligence: deescalation, storytelling, self-awareness, self-regulation, humor, and reflection.

Popular culture sometimes offers the two-dimensional image of Abraham Lincoln as a moral but depressed emancipator. Goodwin introduces us to his depth as a man who was “plain and complex, shrewd and transparent, tender and iron-willed” (p. xv). He displayed, “a fierce ambition, an exceptional political acumen, and a wide range of emotional strengths, forged in the crucible of personal hardship, that took his unsuspecting rivals by surprise” (p. xvi). Goodwin observes that “Lincoln’s political genius” allowed him “to repair injured feelings that, left untended, might have escalated into permanent hostility; to assume responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease; and to learn from mistakes… His success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality — kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy — can also be impressive political resources” (p. xvii).

Empathy and De-escalation

When I first wrote the outline for this article, I listed empathy and de-escalation as separate sections. It became readily apparent, however, that virtually every example of Lincoln’s empathy was an example of de-escalation; their relationship was causal (see “Conflict/Empathy Cycle”)

CONFLICT/EMPATHY CYCLE

One way to think about how Lincoln’s empathy affected his ability to manage conflict is with a balancing loop. As conflict increased, it caused his empathy for the other party to increase. As his empathy increased, it reduced the conflict. As the conflict then decreased, Lincoln could focus his attention elsewhere. As his empathy for the other party went down, sometimes the conflict would return. This cycle would then repeat.

Goodwin begins her exploration of Lincoln’s empathy with its relationship to his melancholy. Lincoln “possessed extraordinary empathy — the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires… His sensibilities were not only acute, they were raw.” As a young man, Lincoln once “stopped and tracked back half a mile to rescue a pig caught in a mire – not because he loved the pig, recollected a friend,‘just to take a pain out of his own mind.’” Helen Nicolay, the daughter of Lincoln’s private secretary, concluded, “With his wealth of sympathy, his conscience, and his unflinching sense of justice, he was predestined to sorrow.”

Yet in the political arena, this same sensitivity would be Lincoln’s greatest asset. Nicolay astutely observed that, “His crowning gift of political diagnosis was due to his sympathy… which gave him the power to forecast with uncanny accuracy what his opponents were likely to do.” After listening to colleagues at Whig Party caucuses, Lincoln would extrapolate:, “From your talk, I gather the Democrats will do so and so… I should do so and so to checkmate them.” He would intuit “the moves for days ahead; making them all so plain that his listeners wondered why they had not seen it that way themselves” (pp. 103–104). In this way, Lincoln’s empathy did not prevent him from competing politically; to the contrary, it enabled him to do so successfully.

The duality of his empathy as both a blessing and a curse is a recurrent theme in his life. Lincoln’s trips to visit troops in the field exemplify this dynamic. His bodyguard, William Crook, observed how Lincoln “seemed to absorb the horrors of the war into himself.” Lincoln experienced “agony when the thunder of the cannon told him that men were being cut down like grass” and anguish at the “sight of the poor, torn bodies of the dead and dying on the field of Petersburg.” His “painful sympathy” was extended impartially not only to “the forlorn rebel prisoners” but also to “the devastation of a noble people in ruined Richmond” (pp. 723–724).

The Civil War would present innumerable opportunities for Lincoln’s empathy to de-escalate a potential conflict and transform it into a valued relationship. In one instance, three Confederate slaves being used to build a rebel battery escaped from their master. The Union general Benjamin Butler refused to return the slaves to their owner on the grounds that the slaves were being used to further the rebel cause. As Butler was a conservative Democrat, his action was unusual. Despite their political differences, Lincoln rewarded Butler by promoting him to brigadier general. In a letter to Lincoln, Butler wrote that he accepted the commission but wished to be frank that in the prior election he had done everything he could to oppose Lincoln. He reassured Lincoln that, “I shall do no political act, and loyally support your administration as long as I hold your commission; and when I find any act that I cannot support I shall bring the commission back at once, and return it to you.”

Lincoln replied with typical magnanimity: “That is frank, that is fair. But I want to add one thing: When you see me doing anything that for the good of the country ought not to be done, come and tell me so, and why you think so, and then perhaps you won’t have any chance to resign your commission” (pp 368–369). How many senior leaders are secure enough to order their subordinates to disagree with them? Lincoln recognized that surrounding yourself with those who are willing to disagree with you builds error-checking into your decision-making.

Lincoln’s empathy not only gave him insight into the suffering of others, it aided him in communicating these insights.

Nor was Lincoln beneath apologizing. Goodwin describes that when Lincoln found out “a hastily written note to General Franz Sigel had upset the general, he swiftly followed up with another.‘I was a little cross,’ he told Sigel,‘I ask pardon. If I do get up a little temper I have no sufficient time to keep it up.’ Such gestures on Lincoln’s part repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into lasting animosity” (pp. 511–512).
Lincoln’s friends were more likely to hold political grudges on his behalf than he was. When a congressional colleague celebrated the defeat of a political rival, Winter Davis, Lincoln remarked, “You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I. A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him” (p. 665).

Lincoln’s empathy not only gave him insight into the suffering of others, it aided him in communicating these insights. When Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, refused to grant a political appointment desired by two congressmen, Lincoln eloquently supported the decision. Lincoln described Stanton to the congressman as “the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar, dash and roar without ceasing. He fights back the angry waters and prevents them from undermining and overwhelming the land.” Lincoln marveled at Stanton’s very survival in a position that was “one of the most difficult in the world,” and therefore saw that it was his “duty to submit” to his secretary’s decision. By so doing, he led the congressmen to do the same (p. 670).

Lincoln’s famous second inaugural address in 1865 (“With malice towards none; with charity for all”) was once again guided by his empathy – even for a war-time enemy. Goodwin observes, “If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the nation’s alienated citizens in the South.” Lincoln represented the North and South as being more the same than different:, “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes” (p. 698).

One cannot help sense that for Lincoln “the other” equaled “the self.” Nowhere was this clearer than in Lincoln’s orders regarding the re-assimilation of enemy soldiers after they surrendered. When General Sherman asked for guidance on how to handle the defeated rebels, Lincoln answered that “all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops.” Lincoln wanted the citizens of the South to “have their horses to plow with, and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with. I want no one punished; treat them liberally all round. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws” (p. 713).

One the greatest sources of conflict within Lincoln’s cabinet was his secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase. A former rival during the 1860 bid for the presidency, Chase never stopped campaigning, in some form, even while a member of Lincoln’s cabinet. When this conflict finally came to a head and Chase resigned, Lincoln still did not write him off. To the contrary, he nominated him to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. When Lincoln first announced this nomination to one of Chase’s friends, the colleague was dumbfounded:, “Mr. President, this is an exhibition of magnanimity and patriotism that could hardly be expected of any one. After what he has said against your administration, which has undoubtedly been reported to you, it was hardly to be expected that you would bestow the most important office within your gift on such a man.”

Lincoln’s reply was matter-of-fact: “To have done otherwise I should have been recreant to my convictions of duty to the Republican party and to the country. As to his talk about me, I do not mind that. Chase is, on the whole, a pretty good fellow and a very able man. The only trouble is that he has ‘the White House fever’ a little too bad, but I hope this may cure him and that he will be satisfied.”

Lincoln would later confess that he “would rather have swallowed his buckhorn chair than to have nominated Chase” (p. 680). He was still human; he clearly felt the sting of his former secretary’s insubordination. He simply did his best to rise above his own ego in service of a greater good.

Storytelling

Crafting a story that connects with an audience is ultimately an act of empathy. Lincoln was a seemingly bottomless treasure trove of anecdotes for all occasions. He learned this craft from his father, Thomas. But before he could learn how to tell stories, Lincoln first learned how to listen.

As a young boy, Lincoln would sit “transfixed in the corner” listening to his father’s colorful anecdotes. He would then spend “no small part of the night walking up and down,” putting his father’s stories “in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.” Goodwin recounts that “The following day… he would climb onto the tree stump or log that served as an impromptu stage and mesmerize his own circle of young listeners” (p. 50).

As an adult, Lincoln’s stories became more than mere entertainment: “They frequently provided maxims or proverbs that usefully connected to the lives of his listeners. Lincoln possessed an extraordinary ability to convey practical wisdom in the form of humorous tales his listeners could remember and repeat” (p. 151). His mastery lay in the ability to distill complexity into terms that anyone could understand, thereby enabling others to propagate his considered insights.

Navigating the intense factions of slavery would provide perhaps the greatest test of these talents. Approaching the 1860 convention, one hotly contested national issue was whether slavery should be allowed to spread to the new western territories. Over several speeches, Lincoln refined the following metaphor to describe the decision facing the nation:, “If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them… But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a hatch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide… The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not.”

Goodwin insightfully contrasts this rhetorical approach of Lincoln’s with that of his future secretary of state, William H. Seward. Seward likened slavery to allowing “the Trojan Horse” to enter the territories. While such a classical allusion might have reached Seward’s peers, it lacked the “instant accessibility” to the average citizen of Lincoln’s “homely” story (pp. 233–234).

Lincoln’s rhetorical approach to slavery had grown out of his prior experience with another divisive issue: temperance. In each case, empathy with both sides enabled his insightful understanding of the issue. He advocated that temperance activists avoid “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for such tactics would only be met with more of the same. Independent of the truth of one’s cause, whether it be temperance or slavery, condemning one’s opponent would only cause him to “retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.” The heart, alone, was “the great high road to his reason” and therefore must be reached first to win another over (pp. 167–168). Creating an effective path to do so could only be accomplished by first standing in the other’s shoes.

Goodwin observes that “as a child, Lincoln had honed his oratory skills by addressing his companions from a tree stump” (p. 140). As an adult, these skills would become Lincoln’s connection with people. Lincoln understood that the most important responsibility of his office was to educate:, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts or pronounces decisions” (p. 206). His molding of public sentiment was achieved through storytelling, and his storytelling was made effective through his empathy.

Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation

Lincoln was not merely aware of the emotions of others; he also possessed an acute awareness of his own emotional needs. In spite of a tendency towards melancholy, this awareness enabled him to self-regulate his moods more effectively than any other member of his team, providing a critical foundation of emotional stability in the midst of national instability (p. xvii).

The essence of self-regulation is first having the awareness of one’s emotional needs and then acting to meet them. Lincoln knew intuitively when he had to make “a deposit” in his personal “hope account,” as well as those of others. One activity that sustained not only him but also others was his strategically timed visits to the troops in the field. The sight of Lincoln in his stovepipe hat would elicit cheers from the troops. The act of the president visiting their camps in person – at no slight personal risk – gave the troops inspiration, and inspired troops inspired Lincoln. Seeing each other escalated hope. Attending plays at Grover’s or Ford’s theaters would become another favorite means for Lincoln to achieve emotional “respite and renewal” (p. 609).

Humor

The theater was also an arena in which Lincoln exercised another self-regulation mechanism: his prodigious sense of humor:, “His ‘laugh . . . stood by itself. The neigh of a wild horse on his native prairie is not more undisguised and hearty’” (p. 613).

Meanwhile, as with his empathy, his melancholy was the shadow side of his humor. Goodwin emphasizes a distinction between depression and melancholy, the latter containing “a generous amplitude of possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a sense of humor” (pp. 103, 723). His humor was a willful way out of this “cave of gloom.” Lincoln laughed, he explained, “so he did not weep… His stories were intended ‘to whistle off sadness’” – not only for others but for himself as well.

Lincoln’s humor wasn’t just for humor’s sake; he had an uncanny ability to meld humor into the gravest of circumstances, often providing resolution without offense. During peace talks with a Confederate envoy, the envoy offered King Charles I as an example of a figure who made numerous agreements “with his adversaries despite ongoing hostilities.” Lincoln responded, “I do not profess to be posted in history… All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head in the end” (p. 693).

When the career of his recalcitrant secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, was on the line, Chase wrote Lincoln asking for an audience. It is hard to read Lincoln’s classic reply without yearning for an opportunity to use it:, “The difficulty does not, in the main part, lie within the range of a conversation between you and me” (p. 632).

Much to the consternation of many in the army – but not surprisingly – Lincoln was liberal with issuing military pardons. Such weighty decisions were yet another opportunity for Lincoln to deftly interweave empathy and humor. Lincoln wrote the following passage as part of a pardon to an army officer who was facing a court-martial for giving in to his temper during an altercation with a superior officer. Just as noteworthy is to whom this paternal wisdom is being imparted: the brother-in-law of none other than Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s one-time political nemesis:

No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite (p. 570).

Lincoln could find humor in every nook and cranny of daily experience. During one of his visits to the front, he traveled on a naval flagship. Turning down the admiral’s own room, Lincoln insisted on taking a cramped room only “six feet long by four and a half feet wide” (p. 715). Lincoln joked the next morning that while he had slept well, “you can’t put a long blade into a short scabbard.” During the day, the Admiral arranged for carpenters to knock down the wall and enlarge both the room and the bed. The next morning, Lincoln “announced with delight that ‘a greater miracle than ever happened last night; I shrank six inches in length and about a foot sideways.’”

Pausing to Reflect

Lincoln rarely acted in anger. This was not because he was immune to anger but because his self-awareness guided him to pause to reflect before acting.

Writing was one act that was conducive to such a thoughtful dynamic, observed Lincoln’s secretary, John Nicolay. Lincoln frequently wrote using a process of cumulative refinement, coming back to a passage over days or weeks to hone it to his satisfaction. As a result of the well-crafted substance of his writings, Lincoln’s oratory has withstood the test of time.

Salmon P. Chase’s ambition for the presidency tested Lincoln’s composure more than once. The release of a pamphlet critical of Lincoln’s administration was the last straw. But by holding back from admonishing Chase when the circular became public, Lincoln gave his friends the opportunity to rally in support of him. In this way, Lincoln thwarted Chase without having to take direct action, thereby moderating the potential personal conflict between them.

The self-discipline of pausing to reflect allowed Lincoln’s empathy to return to the forefront of his decision-making and be the guiding force behind his actions, rather than his anger. When General George Meade failed to capture Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, Lincoln was initially inconsolable and penned “a frank letter” to the general. While being grateful for his success at Gettysburg, Lincoln admonished him for “the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape.” As a result, “the war will be prolonged indefinitely.” Before sending the missive, however, Lincoln must have thought through the emotional consequences upon the reader. Years later, the letter would be discovered in an envelope labeled, “To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed” (p. 536).

Lincoln’s Leadership Legacy

Lincoln created a systemic understanding of his time by reading hearts and minds through empathy. In popular culture, empathy is sometimes derided as a form of weakness. Lincoln’s life challenges this stereotype. We create the world around us through our own actions. Lincoln consistently forged function out of chaos with magnanimous gesture after magnanimous gesture. These gestures, in fact, helped Lincoln secure the 1860 Republican nomination, not because he had the greatest experience, but because he had the fewest enemies. Such circumstances were manifest by his empathy throughout his career.

Surely, the positive effect of his approach was magnified because of his office. Executive empathy wields more influence than subordinate empathy. Even so, during the turbulent days of the Civil War, the impact of Lincoln’s legacy had its limitations. While he was able to save the life of a nation, he was ultimately unable to save his own.

How would Lincoln’s behaviors clash with our modern technologies? If one’s response to an angry letter is crafted with a fountain pen and delivered by horseback, pausing to reflect is built into the process. Modern wireless communications technologies discourage such reflection. What are the consequences? What are our choices?

Through his empathy, Lincoln saw everyone in terms of a potential relationship, a connection worth nurturing. With such an enlightened consciousness, is anyone a rival?

It is difficult to reflect on Lincoln and his time without reflecting on our own fragile, fractured world. Perhaps hope for informed action comes in the form of a simple question:, “What would Lincoln do?”

All excerpts copyright © 2005 Blithedale Productions, Inc.

Peter Pruyn lives and writes in Cambridge, MA and can be reached at pwp [at] airmail [dot] net. Special thanks to Rick Karash whose recommendation inspired him to read Team of Rivals. For more of the author’s work see http://peterpruyn.blogspot.com.

The post Executive Empathy: Lincoln’s Antidote to Escalation appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Indeed, I watched this logic entrap the managers and professionals at one firm in a debilitating conflict that lasted for years. Despite everyone’s grasp of systems thinking — they even taught it to their clients — they were all equally convinced that the other guy was causing the impasse. In their minds, cause and effect was linear: When management (or the professionals) did this, they caused that. With the cause of their difficulties now firmly placed in the other guy’s hands, they each waited for the other to change before changing themselves. Stalemate.

When it comes to relationships, it’s small wonder most of us still think this way. As Peter Senge points out in The Fifth Discipline, the roots of this straight-line thinking go back millennia, and changing it won’t be easy. Nor will it be helped by most advice today on how to handle people and relationships well. Almost all of this advice offers the same formula: “When you did X, it made me feel Y.” This formula, which looks innocuous enough on the surface, reinforces thinking that makes relationships grow weaker, not stronger over time.

In today’s fast-paced, interdependent world, relationships among people (not just things or units) matter — a lot.

For 25 years, I’ve been searching for another way of thinking about relationships and the difficulties they encounter — one that makes it easier for people to use those troubles to strengthen their relationships and to learn, change, and grow. That search lies at the heart of my work, and what I’ve found holds startling implications for how to create and sustain strong relationships and stellar teams. Join me as I retrace what I’ve learned; you may be surprised by what you discover on this seemingly well-trodden ground.

Relationship Matters

Perhaps it goes without saying, but in today’s fast-paced, interdependent world, relationships among people (not just things or units) matter — a lot. More and more, people in one part of an organization must work seamlessly with people in other parts if they’re going to get anything done, at least in a timely fashion. As a result, the world (not just our boss) has placed a premium on our ability to navigate tricky, mixed-motive relationships well and without wasting time.

Even the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of touchy-feely thought, has heralded the importance of what they call people skills: “For years, the study of management behavior played second fiddle to quantitative analysis,” a 2006 WSJ article begins. “Now, executives hire coaches to hone their people skills. And business-literature trackers say books on topics like the psychology of leaders outsell tracts on hardnosed subjects like supply-chain management.”

Small surprise, then, that books geared toward developing people’s social competence are selling like hotcakes. People are hungry for guidance. But just what kind of guidance are they getting?

To see, let’s look at a brief passage in Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books, 1995), not because the book’s so bad, but because it’s so good. In fact, it’s hard to find better. Among the many examples Goleman uses to illustrate emotional intelligence, he offers the statement, “When you forgot to pick up my clothes at the cleaners, it made me feel like you don’t care for me.” To underscore the emotional intelligence behind such a statement, he compares it to another way of communicating similar meanings: “You’re always so selfish and uncaring. It just proves I can’t trust you to do anything right.” Without a doubt, the first statement, when compared with the second, comes out looking mighty good.

As Goleman points out, instead of attacking the person’s character, the first statement refers to specific behaviors and feelings and produces less defensiveness as a result. So far, so good.

But let’s take a closer look at the logic underlying the statement, “When you forgot to pick up my clothes at the cleaners, it made me feel like you don’t care for me.” At work in that statement are two assumptions about cause-effect relationships within human relationships.

• The first assumption is that one person’s actions — close in time and space — can singlehandedly cause another person’s reactions. Causes more distant in time and space are not relevant or important causal factors.,/li.

Though highly shared, these assumptions raise a few questions and pose a few problems when it comes to relationships.

One Person’s Actions Cause Another’s Reactions

Let’s take the first assumption and call the people in the relationship Bob and Anne. If we mapped the cause-effect logic underlying this assumption, it would look like “Simple Cause-Effect Logic,” depicted in the first diagram.

According to this diagram, it’s all pretty simple: Anne’s forgetting made Bob feel uncared for. This makes sense if we believe two things are true:

• Bob could react no other way to Anne’s actions. She made him react one way, not another.
• Bob’s reactions were caused by Anne’s actions alone. No other factors came into play.

Let’s explore the first notion. While it’s not unreasonable for Bob to feel uncared for when Anne forgot his clothes, it’s not the only reaction possible. Someone else might wonder if Anne was too overwhelmed to remember and grow concerned. As we all know, different people react differently to the same behavior, depending on what it means to them. So it’s hard to imagine how the first statement could be true — that is, how Bob’s feeling uncared for was an inevitable consequence of Anne’s forgetfulness. Any number of reactions may be reasonable in a given culture, and none of them is a necessary consequence of another person’s behavior. That means another, less obvious causal factor must also be at work: Bob’s interpretation of what Anne’s behavior means.

SIMPLE CAUSE-EFFECT LOGIC

No systems thinker worthy of the name would argue that a single cause, close in time and space, produces a single result in any complex system. Nevertheless, that thinking governs how most of us think about relationships and the troubles they sometimes encounter.

This brings us to the second notion: that Anne’s actions alone caused Bob’s reactions. But if Bob’s interpretation of Anne’s actions also played a role, it’s hard to see how this could be true. Doesn’t it suggest that another factor — Bob’s interpretation of Anne’s behavior —  is also at work? Maybe. You could argue that Bob’s interpretation was caused by Anne’s actions alone and hence his feelings were, too. But would it make sense to take that perspective?.

Let’s see. All of us know that when things are going well, time is on our side, and people are treating us kindly, we don’t see things the same way or get as upset as we might under stressful circumstances. We give people slack; we overlook slights; we extend the benefit of the doubt. Like all of us, Bob’s reactions are in part shaped by his circumstances — whether his time is scarce, whether others let him down that day, whether he’s feeling well or ill, and whether this is the fourth time Anne has forgotten something. So it’s possible that, under some circumstances, Bob might not have even noticed Anne’s forgetfulness, or at least, not gotten upset about it. This means we have to add yet another causal factor to the equation: Bob’s circumstances — what I call his context. That too plays a role.

But wait, there’s more! Another factor is also at play. No matter what kind of day Bob is having, he’s apt to notice Anne’s forgetfulness more and react more viscerally to it if he associates what happened with past hurts — say, the neglect of an uncaring or forgetful parent. The more we associate current events or people with past ones, the more we’re apt to interpret them in a particular way — say, in Bob’s case, as a lack of care. As an article in BusinessWeek once put it: “If it’s hysterical, it’s probably historical.” Like all of us, Bob has built out of experience a large stock of experiential knowledge. Without this knowledge, Bob wouldn’t have a clue how to interpret or react to what Anne did — or to what anyone did for that matter. And so we also have to factor into the equation his past experience and what he’s made out of it.

All told, we now have three factors to add to what was a simple, linear cause-effect equation: Bob’s experiential knowledge, the larger context in which Anne’s forgetfulness occurred, and the way Bob interpreted Anne’s behavior as a result. Once we add these factors, the cause of Bob’s upset grows slightly more complex (see “Slightly More Complex Cause-Effect Logic” on page 3).

This diagram suggests that the first assumption doesn’t hold. It wasn’t Anne’s actions alone that caused Bob to feel uncared for, but a combination of interrelated factors. The implication? Anne didn’t make Bob feel anything; his feelings were the result of a joint venture. Just how much of a joint venture and what kind are the questions we’ll take up next.

The Causal Flow Is One Way

The second assumption is that Bob’s upset has nothing to do with what he’s done; the causal flow is entirely one way. Anne’s actions caused Bob to get upset. End of story. In this story, Bob is not a relevant causal factor, and no attention is given to what caused Anne to “make” Bob upset. In fact, that whole causal chain slips unnoticed off the radar screen. And so it wouldn’t occur to Bob (or to most Bobs) to look for it — though it would certainly occur to most Annes.

But let’s say we ask the question: What led Anne to forget Bob’s clothes at the cleaners in the first place? Well, then we’d have to modify our original diagram by adding a great big question mark right smack in the middle of a big black box (see “Question Raised by Simple Cause-Effect Logic”).

Absent this question mark, we’re more likely to focus on what Anne did to cause Bob’s reaction and less likely to ask what led Anne to forget — especially since Bob’s statement presumes an answer before even asking: Anne doesn’t care enough about Bob to remember his cleaning. That one factor (Anne’s not caring) caused Anne to forget.

But let’s say that Anne’s actions, like Bob’s reactions, flow from more than one factor. In fact, let’s imagine that over time statements like, “When you forgot my cleaning, it made me feel like you don’t care for me,” contributed to feelings of guilt in Anne. And let’s imagine that Anne spent much of her childhood feeling guilty about not doing what her parents asked her to do, and that she learned to manage her folks by promising to do what they asked, only to let them down and to hear again how disappointed they were, leading her to make more promises and to create more disappointment and guilt, and so on. Not an unfamiliar scenario and certainly possible.

Finally, let’s suppose that as an adult, Anne hates disappointing those she loves and feels intense guilt when she does. Like all of us, Anne manages uncomfortable feelings like these by doing what she knows how to do best — in her case, promising to do things she either doesn’t want to do or can’t do. In fact, when she promised to pick up Bob’s clothes, she might have been overwhelmed by all the commitments she’d made: picking kids up at school, meeting deadlines at work, grabbing food for dinner. Overwhelmed by these self-imposed demands, she forgot Bob’s cleaning. To Anne, it didn’t mean she didn’t care for Bob; it meant she cared too much.

The Plot Thickens

In this imaginary scenario, Anne didn’t simply forget, but nor did she forget simply because she didn’t care for Bob. Though we don’t know what led Anne to forget, we can surmise with a good deal of confidence that it was a combination of factors: Bob’s prior actions (perhaps saying things such as “You make me feel uncared for”), the way she interpreted and felt about Bob and about herself in relation to him (Bob as judge, herself as guilty), her context (multiple demands), and what she’d made of past experience (learning to overpromise to manage others’ disappointment and her own guilt and anxiety). Whatever the particulars, the underlying logic remains the same: Just as the causality surrounding Bob’s reactions is complex, so is that surrounding Anne’s actions.

If we now pull all these factors together — those affecting Anne’s actions as well as Bob’s reactions — a more systemic dynamic comes into view (see “A More Systemic Dynamic Comes into View”).

According to this diagram, Anne’s forgetting didn’t by itself cause Bob to feel uncared for, even though that action may be closest in time and space. Indeed, it suggests that Bob’s reactions play a dual role — as both cause and effect — in a complex dynamic between Bob and Anne.

That dynamic consists of a whole host of factors, all of them interacting together in a circular fashion to produce the feeling in Bob that Anne doesn’t care about him. With this more systemic understanding of the event, Bob and Anne can now work together to alter it, making it less likely that events like this one will repeat.

The Anatomy of a Relationship

My research on relationships in top teams suggests that upsetting events within a relationship almost always shed an important light on how a relationship works — or fails to work. Anne’s forgetting Bob’s cleaning and Bob’s feeling uncared for is not an anomaly, especially since it upset Bob enough to raise it. Events like this are what give Bob and Anne’s relationship its distinctive character, one they can intuitively recognize but can’t easily describe. As a result, upsetting events like this one are apt to recur.

Yet given current advice, the best they can do when it recurs is to say once again, “When you did that, it made me feel this.” While that’s a whole lot better than saying, “You’re always so selfish and uncaring. It just proves I can’t trust you to do anything right,” it won’t take Bob and Anne where they need to go to alter the dynamic.

If anything, it could make matters worse. Anne might easily respond, “Yes, I can see that, and when you tell me you feel uncared for when I make a mistake, that makes me feel judged and guilty.” Granted, they would now understand how they each “make” the other feel, but they wouldn’t have a clue how their relationship works such that one of them feels uncared for and the other guilty.

The “Anatomy Framework,” used above to capture Bob and Anne’s dynamic, helps people understand the patterns of interaction that lead upsetting events to recur (also see “The Anatomy Framework” on page 6). These patterns, once they take shape and take hold, define how a relationship works — what I call the underlying anatomy or structure of a relationship. Within that structure, people’s interlocking actions and reactions create a particular pattern, while their respective social contexts and experiential knowledge lock that pattern into place. As all good systems thinkers already know, events follow.

You might notice that the Anatomy Framework on the next page uses some new terms. Instead of the word “interpret,” I use the word “frame”; and instead of the words “experiential knowledge,” I use the words “behavioral repertoire.” I use “frame” to refer only to those repetitious ways we have of interpreting others and ourselves in relation to them. Oh, that’s just Frank. You know how he is. He always thinks he’s right and he never cares what others say. All I can do is play the good wife and humor him. I use the term “behavioral repertoire” to refer not only to the experiential knowledge we bring to events but to the interpretive strategies we use to apply and revise that knowledge. The two together — our largely unconscious experiential knowledge and our largely tacit interpretive strategies — combine to define our behavioral repertoires: our characteristic ways of responding to others.

Had Bob and Anne used the Anatomy Framework to explore Bob’s reactions, they would have seen that his feelings said something about him as well about Anne, and something about the informal structure the two of them had created together. This more relational way of thinking opens up eight times the number of options for changing dynamics that cause upsetting events to occur and recur. With this way of thinking, Anne and Bob can each revisit and revise either their actions, or their reactions, or their social contexts, or their experiential knowledge. Depending on how many and which factors they address, they will alter the dynamics of their relationship to a greater or lesser extent.

Thinking about relationships in simple, cause-effect terms implies only one solution: One or the other person has to change — usually the other person. All this does is give rise to what I call the “Waiting Game,” in which each person waits for the other to change before changing themselves. When you win this game, everyone loses.

My Relationship Made Me Do It

My research on team relationships suggests that people who take a relational perspective build relationships that grow stronger over time, while those who think in more simplistic, either/or terms build relationships that grow more fragile. Even so, many people question whether it’s wise to think in relational terms. What will happen to notions of personal responsibility? they ask. How can you hold anyone accountable for anything if you focus on relationships? After all, you can fire or sue a person, but not a relationship. You’re better off keeping your eye on individuals, they argue, where responsibility can be clearly assigned and appropriately taken.

1. Actions and Reactions. Actions refer to what someone actually says and does, while reactions refer to what someone actually thinks and feels in response to what the other person says and does. Each person’s actions make the other person’s reactions more explicable (see the light boxes in the diagram and the way they reinforce each other).
2. Frames. The interpretations embedded in our reactions, making some actions seem obvious and others impractical (see the darker boxes behind “A Reacts” and “B Reacts”).
3. Social Contexts. The contextual backdrop — formal roles, time constraints, historical events — against which some triggering event occurs, prompting the need to respond (see the darkest boxes with the two-way arrows running into “A Frames” and “B Frames”).
4. Behavioral Repertoires. The largely unconscious experiential knowledge and interpretive strategies that define the range of responses people have at their disposal for framing and acting in different social contexts, once triggered by some event (again, see the darkest boxes with the two-ways arrows running into “A Frames” and “B Frames”). As the arrows suggest, people’s behavioral repertoires both shape and are shaped by their social contexts. Together the two govern the way people frame situations, leading them to react and act toward each other in some ways and not others.

These four elements combine to give a relationship its distinctive character, one we intuitively recognize but have difficulty describing or changing without the proper tools.

It’s a good point. There’s already enough blame-shifting in organizations without adding another excuse: “It wasn’t me. My relationship made me do it.”

But taking a relational perspective doesn’t preempt people from taking responsibility or from looking at what each individual does to create a relationship neither likes. Far from diluting responsibility, when you put the relational back in relationships, you take excuses off the table. No more, “He made me do it.” Instead, people assume personal responsibility not just for themselves but for the relationships they together create and for the impact those relationships have on themselves, those around them, and their organization.

Note: You can learn more about taking a relational approach in Divide Or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength (Portfolio/Penguin Group, June 2008).

Diana McLain Smith is the author of Divide Or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength (Portfolio/Penguin Group, June 2008). She is a partner at the Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm, where she teaches, consults, and conducts research, as well as a founding partner of Action Design, which specializes in organizational learning and professional development. Diana has taught courses and delivered lectures at the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Boston College’s Carroll School of Management.

The post Putting the “Relational” Back in Human Relationships appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

To our knowledge, no other Massachusetts municipality has hosted a World Café or similar process. We believe, however, that this kind of community-wide conversation offers valuable benefits to cities and towns that wish to increase civic engagement and qualitative community input in planning for the future, particularly during a time of stagnant budgets, escalating costs, competing special interests, contentious public discourse, and dwindling public participation. We offer the story of our process — how the Reading World Café came together and the outcomes that resulted — to illuminate the practical role of inclusive conversation as a means of identifying priorities and building systemic support in community governance.

Why a World Café

It started in June 2007 in a kitchen, where a handful of people met to talk about the possibility of hosting a community-wide conversation about the future of Reading. The group was drawn to this idea for a number of reasons.

Reading has a strong history of community involvement. In addition to local governance boards, committees, and representative town meeting, Reading boasts dozens of volunteer organizations dedicated to schools, environmental activism, social services, charity, arts and culture, religious pursuits, and neighborly networking. However, these groups generally operate independent of one another, focusing only on their perceived sphere of influence. The folks around the kitchen table were attracted to the potential in all that divergent volunteer energy, asking “How can we as a community align ourselves to define the collective future of Reading?”

The idea greatly interested Pat Schettini, superintendent of Reading Public Schools, who had come to this initial meeting excited to consider that question. “Given the strong community involvement we’ve seen in the past, hosting an open, expansive community dialogue about the future sounded doable,” commented Schettini. “Yet I have seen many public discussions deteriorate and polarize in the face of controversy and strong opinions — to the point where folks were no longer listening to or learning from each other. I am interested in encouraging more inclusive and courteous discussions to determine what is important to this town.”

Over the past several years, the Reading community had experienced its share of conflict over a number of local issues, including commercial development proposals, interstate highway projects, redistricting for elementary and middle schools, budget allocations, tax overrides, and the town’s water supply. Passions over these issues tended to run high, and the discussions often led to debates and even shouting matches; dialogue was scarce. A recent rezoning controversy concerning a retail development had become heated. “I think the debate became so volatile because as a community we hadn’t really explored what our future could be,” observed Priscilla Hollenbeck, one of the original conversation organizers. “We had to take a step back and consider, if not this, then what do we want as a community? We needed to heal the divisiveness and focus on a common vision.” The people gathered around the kitchen table thought the World Café might be a way to do so.

Previous efforts to engage community members in broader thinking had met with limited success. For example, Reading had recently finalized its 10-year master plan, a document that identified more than 150 projects and actions for the town to undertake. Despite the best efforts of the master plan committee to draw citizens to any number of public meetings, this process drew little community input. As a result, the town manager and board of selectmen had only limited data on community interests to consider when developing priorities. In addition, the school district had completed its District Improvement Plan, which also contained many recommendations and objectives that reflected the best efforts of a relatively small number of dedicated residents.

It became clear to those who met that morning in June that hosting a World Café conversation could have tremendous benefit to the community, not only because of the potential for collecting qualitative data about what people cared about, but also because of the positive, collaborative experience the community could have by talking about their future together. “The hope was that we would get a sense of what the community valued most as part of the World Café conversation process,” reflected school committee member Elaine Webb., “The data generated will be valuable in helping those of us charged with implementing these plans prioritize our next steps.”

As with all things new, the approach was not without risk. Whether real or perceived, the possibility that the event could fail and make matters even worse was an underlying concern. Luckily, one of the initial organizers was an experienced facilitator who utilized similar processes in her consulting work, and she was able to bring her experience to the group of eager enthusiasts.

How It All Came Together

While the idea to host this event began with just a few people, over the course of the eight months it took to implement the World Café, the concept captured the interest and curiosity of many others. The first step for the organizers was to attract “Supporters” to draw participants to the Café. Once engaged, these individuals and organizations would help promote the event and ensure a diverse representation of perspectives.

Armed with a date, a venue, and a list of resources needed, the planning team organized an informational meeting in October 2007. They invited representatives from every group and organization they could think of. The team chose to use the introductory meeting to run a mini-version of the World Café so those in attendance could experience the conversation process for themselves. During this recruitment workshop, the participants were asked to share their perspectives on the questions: “What do I value about this community? What would make this community stronger and more connected?”

“I was pleasantly surprised,” remarked Selectman James Bonazoli of the conversation experience. “I had anticipated there being some kind of hidden agenda or ulterior motive involved, but the conversations were authentic and energizing. I really enjoyed hearing what people had to say.”

Curiosity among a broader group for what might come of a Reading World Café had been sparked. Over the course of the next several months, the planning team worked to build the list of Supporters, meeting with many different organizations to gain formal and informal sponsorship for the event.

Early on, the team discovered it was important to list the essential questions and trajectory for the Café conversation on all marketing materials in order to clarify intentions and keep the process transparent. Accordingly, they developed a logo, an FAQ, press releases, and promotional flyers. With the help of early Supporters, the Reading World Café developed a website (www.readingworldcafe.org) and an online RSVP process. They enlisted volunteers to manage communications, set up and break down the venue, and supply refreshments and entertainment during the reception hour. They recruited a visual recorder willing to capture the event graphically, and contacted the local newspapers and community television network (see “Questions to Consider”).

“Many people are asking, what will happen at the World Café? What will come of it?” noted school committee member David Michaud, during an interview on Reading Community Television., “The fact is no one really knows—it is all part of the mystique and excitement of expansive, collaborative conversation. In the end, however, I believe it will be the experience we have together that matters most.”

The Reading World Café Event

The evening of February 27, 2008 began with a half hour reception in the entrance hall to the high school field house. It didn’t snow until 11:00 that evening — a blessing in New England! Inside the field house itself, 45 round tables, each with five chairs, were covered with large sheets of plain paper and cups of colored markers. A projection screen was positioned so that people seated at the tables could see the questions on slides (see “The World Café in Action”). Participants arrived curious about what exactly they had signed up for.

Over the course of two and a half hours, the crowd participated in four rounds of conversation. Participants were invited to be “courteous and curious” during their conversations, and a “recorder” for each table was asked to keep records of what was discussed on the sheets of paper. The questions used that night allowed participants to explore what they valued most about Reading and what possibilities they hoped would be a part of the town’s future. Between rounds, all participants except the recorders were asked to move independently to other tables. The movement encouraged divergence and infused each table with new perspectives at each round.

At the end of the evening, the participants were asked to capture on large sticky notes (one idea per note) their ideas about Dreams, Opportunities, Dilemmas, and Next Steps. Notes were collected and posted on large templates located in the front of the room for all to see. The notes were later transcribed and published on the Reading World Café website. The templates and graphic recording remained on display at the Reading Public Library for the following month (see “The Future and What We Want”).

Closing comments shared in the plenary revealed that people felt energized, connected, and inspired., “I loved being included in this process,” offered a teenaged girl., “It felt really good to have the adults in this town listen to what we kids have to say.”, “I felt so respected by the people here,” added a young parent., “I am proud to be a member of this community.”

TheWorld Café process gave town officials data that was of a higher quality than what might have come from focus groups or surveys.

The energy level of individuals that night was positive and uplifting. The town administrators collected an armload of forms with names, contact information, and stated interest in following up on outcomes. When people reluctantly left the venue at the end of the evening, they were eager to know when the results would be available and when another World Café could be scheduled.

Outcomes

Members of the planning team organized and summarized the results of the World Café conversation. Overall, the sticky notes indicated that residents and business people wanted a richer community experience. There was a strong interest in:

• Increased community diversity
• Multigenerational spaces
• Ways and places to come together to learn and celebrate
• A downtown area as a focal point for community connection through social gathering spots, a community or cultural arts center, and more restaurants
• Accessible outdoor space ranging from sidewalks and walking paths to more usable open spaces and parks
• Public efforts to go “green” and become more environmentally friendly
• Increased communication and better use of the town website, including a community calendar

These thoughts and suggestions were sprinkled throughout the four templates, taking the form of broad hopes, concrete suggestions to capitalize on community strengths, practical challenges such as funding and low public participation, and actual steps that could be taken to increase communication and idea implementation.

“It is clear to me that people want more information about what is happening in the community,” acknowledged school committee member Lisa Gibbs., “And they definitely want the results of this conversation acknowledged and used by the governing bodies. Those of us who are local officials also need to make it clear how valuable this kind of feedback is.”

The World Café process gave town officials data that was of a higher quality than what might have come from focus groups or surveys, because it was the result of an explorative conversation between people interested in the community. People had time to listen to each other as well as express their ideas before converging on concrete suggestions. As a result, the suggestions spoke to a deeper need for strong community and a quality of life that might not be as evident in results from anonymous surveys or small focus groups.

Much of the data collected that evening was not a surprise to local decision makers; they had heard these perspectives before. Nonetheless, the Café event helped to reinforce and validate those issues, and provided great assistance in prioritizing them. Town officials responsible for setting community goals and program initiatives can establish priorities confident of the support from a broad cross-section of the community. The ability to proceed with the “wind at one’s back” versus anticipating public inertia or resistance can be highly motivating for the volunteers who hold these important positions.

Town officials are not the only ones who benefit from the data; other community organizations are also privy to the collective perspectives, desires, and concerns of the participants. This information can inform direction, mission, and collaborative efforts. For example, the event spurred discussions between a local bank with excess property in the downtown area and an umbrella cultural group that has been seeking space for a performing arts center.

THE WORLD CAFÉ IN ACTION

The Reading high school field house was the setting for the World Café

In addition, participants connected with others in their community who share an interest in Reading’s future, and they were able to influence the shape of that future. Perspectives were altered; new insights gleaned., “I have always felt I needed to advocate passionately for the environment,” commented one participant after the conversation event., “I was really struck at how easily the idea of ‘going green’ took hold without my expending all that energy; and I was able to listen to others in a new way.”

Finally, participants and the community organizations learned a new way of communicating, or perhaps, discovered the lost art of communication. In Reading, the World Café has become a lexicon for inclusive, respectful dialogue that has spread throughout the town, cropping up in church gatherings, official committee meetings, and the Substance Abuse Prevention program; it has become the methodology of choice for community conversation.

A Valuable Step

The World Café process can be a valuable step between community involvement and formal decision making. When held in a productive manner that expands creative thinking, increases interaction, and affords a safe, inquisitive environment, conversations about important questions in which everyone has a stake can provide qualitative data for decision makers as well as invite a more collaborative and inclusive form of civic engagement. Taking time to discover collective perspectives and desires — without the pressure of an imminent decision — permits the emergence of new possibilities, reduces resistance, and creates a shared experience that can fuel the courage needed to face an uncertain future.

In the words of 10-year-old Madeline Hollenbeck, who observed the event, “I liked Reading World Café because it was important. It was a chance for all of Reading to get together and speak out about what was on their mind. It was helpful to the community because it made people think about things that they may have never thought about before. If more people work together on something they agree needs work, it will get done quicker. And afterward everybody can admire what they’ve accomplished together.”

THE FUTURE AND WHAT WE WANT

A visual recorder captured the event graphically.

Peter Hechenbleikner has been town manager in Reading, Massachusetts, for more than 21 years. Previously he worked in South Brunswick, New Jersey, as community development director and in Plainsboro as their first township administrator. He can be reached at townmanager@ci.reading.ma.us.

Deborah Gilburg has been a resident of Reading for more than 10 years. A member of the Reading World Café planning team and facilitator of the event, Deborah is also a principal of Gilburg Leadership Institute, a Massachusetts-based consulting firm. She can be reached at deborah@gilburgleadership.com.

Kerry Dunnell has been a resident of Reading for almost seven years. Professionally, she serves 27 health departments as local government liaison at the Cambridge Advanced Practice Center, focusing on local leadership capacity and regional collaboration practices. She can be reached at kdunnell@hotmail.com.

The post The World Café Goes Local: A Town Plans for the Future appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Because of the department’s rapid expansion, employees had to develop specialized skills, which meant that a team approach was essential to managing even one system. Even though the group was using structured project management methodologies and tools, the CIO recognized that silos were being formed, communication was breaking down, and people weren’t functioning well as a team. So he turned to his executive coach for help in conducting a team-building retreat for his leadership group with the goals of “learning to work better together” and “communicating better.”

The coach suggested that the team adopt a systems thinking approach to see what was going on in the organization from a bigger-picture perspective. Her hypothesis was that it would provide the group with an opportunity to work on a meaningful challenge and, in the process, would help them develop their collaboration skills. Senior leaders agreed with this assessment, deciding that for the department to make progress in the areas of teamwork and communication, they needed to change the system in which they worked.

A Culture of “Yes”

The initiative began with a two-day leadership retreat, with 30-, 60-, and 120-day follow-ups. The leadership group consisted of 25 managers and supervisors, primarily information technology and clinical informatics specialists — nurses and doctors whose clinical expertise provided the link between the department and the customers they served.

The approach was not to teach the entire systems thinking methodology. Instead, after a brief introduction to key concepts to set the stage, the coach introduced systems archetypes. Systems archetypes are universal patterns of behavior. In this case, the 10 “classic” archetypes, as popularized in The Fifth Discipline, were introduced, along with 10 “positive” archetypes — the flip side of the same coin, as developed by Marilyn Herasymowych and Henry Senko of MHA Institute (click here for a description of some of the classic and positive archetypes). Because the archetypes are universal, people quickly understand them and can immediately begin to name where in their system they see that dynamic in action. Because the MHA method is based on stories rather than on causal loop diagrams, which often require a learning curve to understand, it makes seeing the big picture of the system easy for novices.

As each archetype was introduced, participants identified examples of how it manifested in their own group. By noon of the second day, they had identified 10 classic archetypes. By the end of the second day, they had identified 10 positive archetypes. The team was then divided into four groups of five to six people per group. Each group developed its own version of a map of the system in which the department operated. The participants asked questions such as, “Are there any obvious flows here? Which archetypes feed into which others?” The premise of this approach is that there is no one “right” map — they’re all stories seen, lived, and told.

The groups then told their stories of the system to the rest of the team. While the maps were different, each narrative nonetheless resonated with the other participants. In particular, a pattern became clear that the team dubbed “the Vortex of Doom,” with the flip side called “the Swirl of Hope.”

From the maps, the team identified “noisy” archetypes. Noisy archetypes are characterized by conversational inconsistencies (e.g., conflict, disagreement, disparities) or structural limitations (e.g., policies, organizational charts, change interventions). Next, they looked for leverage points — “a small change that has the capacity to have a big impact.” The group viewed leverage points as hypotheses to be tested. As individuals selected their top three potential leverage points, the one that generated the most consensus as a place to start was “making choices about what to say ‘yes’ to and what to say ‘no’ to.”

The team talked about having a culture of “yes,” in that customers and senior managers refused to accept “no” as a response to a request. They came to realize that, as they took on more and more assignments, the available resources in the department declined. The group talked about how this “Growth and Underinvestment” dynamic led people to take heroic efforts to accomplish their workload, which eventually led to burnout. They explored the implications of the “Attractiveness Principle,” which involves managing interdependent limits in a complex system.

The team also did a future map showing what they thought the system would look like as a result of addressing this leverage point. They had lively discussion around the fact that their customers and managers were not used to hearing “no,” and how team members might convey this message without alienating others. Participants recognized potential negative side effects of different interventions and focused on ways to mitigate them. These included:

• Engage in clear communication.
• Manage customer expectations.
• Give customers choices where they can, so it isn’t an absolute “no.”
• Let customers prioritize their own projects.
• Enlist management support.

Management support was a topic for discussion, and the group debated whether you could tell your manager “no.” The general consensus was that there were non-negotiable priorities, but that managers were open to looking at different options; for example, “Okay, we’ll push back this time, but here’s what it will cost us in terms of support and impact on other projects and systems.”

Finally, to make informed choices and priorities, the team decided they must first have a handle on what they had already agreed to. Thus, they planned to compile a project list that identified all the work being conducted within the department. The team came up with a 30-day action plan:

30-Day Action Plan

• The CIO will distribute a list of known and projected projects and initiatives.
• Each member of the leadership team will validate their projects, identify missing items, identify items no longer valid, and submit the annotated list to the CIO.
• The CIO will consolidate and distribute the consolidated list.
• The CIO and his team will meet for an initial review of the list.
• The CIO and his team will meet with the executive coach for a two-hour follow-up session to review the last 30 days and plan for the next 30.

The team noted the contrast in their mood from Day 1 to Day 2. After focusing initially on the classic archetypes, which draw out the negative trends in the system, they reported that they found themselves feeling overwhelmed and demoralized. After identifying and mapping the positive archetypes the next day, they were reminded of their capacity to make positive change and started to feel excited about their ability to improve what the day before had felt hopeless. Upon reflection, the team also commented that it was helpful to hear that others were experiencing the same emotions.

30 Days Later

Initially, the most important benefit the senior staff experienced was understanding their coworkers and their responsibilities in a new, more respectful light. In addition, during the retreat, the group identified a few processes that were not working as efficiently as possible. As people left the retreat, they had already planned meetings to discuss how to improve those practices. From the actual retreat content, the leadership team started to use the language of systems archetypes to evaluate, define, and communicate about the current system. Finally, the group had accomplished their goal of updating the list of existing commitments.

However, this last accomplishment had an unintended negative side effect: People felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the projects which with they were dealing. The project list was longer than expected, with 200 items. In addition to creating the list, the team also needed to design processes to filter new projects, maintain the list, and work together to review the list. At times, the list and the workload threatened to take over the department. But the group continued to apply their knowledge of the archetypes and monitor the system to improve communication and collaboration.

Despite the fact that their 30-day action plan only specified that they update the list, people felt demoralized that they hadn’t made progress on the leverage point of “making choices about what to say ‘yes’ to and what to say ‘no’ to.” One participant commented, “Basically, nothing’s changed. All the negative archetypes that were there when we started are still there.” Upon questioning, they conceded that there was positive movement within the negative archetypes, and evidence that more positive archetypes were happening. But since their workload hadn’t changed, they felt they had failed, even though communication had dramatically changed. To dispel this negative perception, the group discussed the time delay factor in seeing the impact of the changes they’d made in their communication and in their system.

60 Days Later

At the 60-day follow-up, the team started recognizing the significant impact that had occurred in communication. One woman remarked that she was listening to a program on the radio about stovepipes in organizations, and suddenly it occurred to her that their organization no longer had them. The CIO spoke of having more patience about projects not getting done, because he had a better sense of the big picture and the interrelationships. Because of that insight, he felt he was less of a micromanager.

Various team members remarked that they see things from a systems thinking perspective. Now it is more common for them to think ahead and involve other teams in their efforts, whereas in the past they may not have done so until halfway through the project. The group also felt as though there were fewer surprises now that they had a broader picture of what was going on.

The project list went from being an overwhelming prospect to a useful tool. The team recognized that they still needed to prioritize, and their plan for the next 30 days was around that goal. Interestingly enough, the CIO speculated that the project list was the cause of all the positive changes. After discussing this opinion, the team concluded that the list itself was not responsible for the improved communication; the changes wouldn’t have happened in the absence of the leadership retreat with the systems thinking focus. In fact, one person mentioned that the department had created consolidated lists of projects in the past, without the same kind of positive results they were experiencing this time.

120 Days Later

A major project did not go as successfully as expected, and the team required about three months to resolve outstanding issues. The department worked hard to make sure the staff that worked on the project did not feel that fingers were pointing toward them. The team evaluated what worked and what did not, and then developed a process to handle unsuccessful projects.

Despite this setback, communication, teamwork, and morale stayed at an acceptable level. The leadership team thought that the leadership retreat and systems thinking perspective prevented the problem from being worse than it was. Here’s how one team member described it:

Systems thinking brought levity to the situation. We were able to deal with it in more of a non-blaming way, looking at things from a systems perspective. We made a collective decision to drift a few goals, so that we could move forward relieving the pressure of this crisis. We kept the customer informed and had a unified presence. Despite the stress people were feeling, we worked through the issues while maintaining our cool, stayed out of each other’s way, and sent people home for rest and recovery. We understood the need to give ourselves a breath!

In describing in general what they learned at the retreat, one participant gave the following anecdotal story:

We came in, and the office was flooded. We successfully communicated the need for temporary space, relocated everyone in three days, and maintained the level of support to our customers. Systems thinking helped us focus on helping each other out.

Other participants described the success of the systems thinking effort in the following way:

When problems come up, we work more effectively as a team. Communication has improved across different groups. We’re aware of creating a win/win among our users and our teams so that we all can win. The atmosphere we’ve created has made accomplishing our work much easier. “Planning for Limits” has been a big success. Regarding our recent fiasco, we looked at short-term fixes to relieve the pressure; now we’re focusing on the longer-term strategy.

We have a lot less “Shifting the Burden.” We are also more aware of, and thus prevent, people and departments from becoming “Accidental Adversaries.” We get problems to the right people more quickly, thereby minimizing the negative “Escalation” archetype.

We are putting more focus on “Fixes that Work,” not just quick fixes to relieve pressure. We are doing cross-training so we all are successful, minimizing the negative impact of “Success to the Successful.”

The leadership team identified existing challenges:

• The “Attractiveness Principle” continues to be a strong negative archetype: We keep saying “yes” and are working on prioritizing and filtering what we take on. We are still suffering from “Growth and Underinvestment,” which in turn causes “Tragedy of Commons” and “Limits to Success” (not enough resources to keep up with demands). Now that it’s the end of the fiscal year, we are seeing a lot of new projects, and everyone wants them to start now. How we manage it will be key.
• Communicating to our customers is a challenge. They don’t read our e-mails. We recognize that part of the problem might be because we’ve been sending them more, because they complain we don’t keep them informed. It’s a vicious circle.

The team discussed how to sustain the momentum going forward and came up with the following two items:

• After Action Reviews: The team emphasized integrating lessons learned into adjustments going forward. They would incorporate the After Action and Before Action Reviews into the current Lessons Learned approach.
• Systems Thinking at All Levels: To maximize the systems thinking process and sustain it going forward, people thought it needed to go down to all levels in the organization. Most people expressed a desire to have an abbreviated systems thinking training similar to the four-hour make-up session (for those who were absent from the two-day retreat), whereby people from each original group would have a chance to explain their maps, and participants would learn the language of the archetypes. The folks who did this at the four-hour make-up session commented that it was helpful to them in integrating their learning of the methodology.

Three months later, people still thought the leadership retreat was a success and were still reaping the rewards. Internal communication was the most visible improvement, and certain negative archetypes were affected in a positive way. The CIO and his leadership team recognized external communication with their customers as an area on which to focus next. They also saw the need to continue the efforts to prioritize and filter projects to mitigate the continued presence of the “Attractiveness Principle” archetype.

Cynthia Way is principal of Way To Go! Inc., a Washington DC – based company that is in the business of creating breakthroughs in thinking, action, and results — individually and organizationally. Cynthia serves on the board of trustees for the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL).

JonWalter McKeeby, D. Sc., is the chief information officer of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center as well as the department head of the Department of Clinical Research Informatics. DCRI currently has a staff of approximately 100. Over the past year, DCRI has completed approximately 30 mid-range initiatives and projects with the implementation of the Inpatient Pharmacy System as the cornerstone project.

The post Systems Thinking as a Team-Building Approach appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Just before she reaches the doors, the woman’s cell phone rings. She shifts the boxes awkwardly to one arm and digs for the phone in her purse with the other. Precariously balancing the boxes, she answers the call while continuing to approach the doors. She opens the doors by backing into them — while carrying the boxes and while talking on her cell phone. She manages to make it through without dropping anything.

Let’s think about this snippet of reality for a moment. What made the act of opening the doors more difficult than usual was that the woman did so while doing two other things at once. By either momentarily standing still and resting the boxes on the long counter than runs the length of the hallway, or letting the call go to voicemail, she could have made that moment much easier for herself.

So why didn’t she?

Perhaps she didn’t stop because she was in a hurry. Perhaps she was expecting an important call. Or perhaps — Dr. Watson might posit — the important call was from the person to whom she was late in delivering the boxes.

What does it take for any of us to have the awareness that our behavior is not only a function of habit, but that we might benefit from revising that habit?

I see this situation as a marvelous confluence of unremarkable habits. The habits in question might be characterized as:

Habit #1: When you reach a door, walk through it.

Habit #2: When carrying something, put it down only when you reach its destination.

Habit #3: When the phone rings, answer it.

To be sure, nothing untoward came of this moment. The woman successfully negotiated the doors without dropping anything. Nevertheless, the ingredients of this moment — habit, technology, and workload — can have far more severe consequences when our responsibilities involve more than cardboard.

In the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore offers one explanation as to why society has been so slow to address the issue of climate change. He uses two equations to show what happens when creatures of habit use rapidly advancing technology:

old technology + old habits = predictable consequences new technology + old habits = dramatically altered consequences

For example, as petroleum-based products proliferate while our habits of consuming them go unchecked, we can harm something as large as a planet. Could there be similar unintended consequences from the proliferation of personal communications technologies? Is our attention becoming polluted, too?

A prerequisite for choice is awareness. What does it take for any of us to have the awareness that our behavior is not only a function of habit, but that we might benefit from revising that habit? At least in part, it takes attention.

The Limits of Multi-Tasking

Walking down the street recently, I was struck by the fact that the majority of people I passed were talking on their cell phones. What’s it like to talk with someone as he is navigating a crowd? How often have you called a friend and partway through the conversation realized that she was paying attention to something other than you? You might notice longer pauses in her responses, or hear “Uh-huh” when you expect a “Yes” or “No.”

I recently wondered out loud to a neighbor how the younger generation can get their homework done while watching television. She immediately corrected me:, “You mean while watching television, listening to their iPods, surfing the internet, and text messaging on their cell phones.” She was not exaggerating. Perhaps this simply means that her children are in training to be the Olympic multitaskers that our modern world demands. But while multi-tasking has its place, science shows that it is not always prudent.

Researchers have found that driving while using a cell phone measurably impairs driver reaction time — even using a hands-free device. Despite the popular perception that younger people are better at multi-tasking, University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer asserts that, “If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, his reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver.”

Further research by neuroscientists, psychologists, and management professors reveals the limits of our ability to multi-task. Despite the amazing capacity of the human brain, “a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” observed one neuroscientist quoted in the New York Times. Using magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain, researchers can actually measure how much efficiency is lost when a person tries to handle two tasks at once., “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” says David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. He continues, “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

The insidious part is that we don’t notice our own impairment. We are under the impression that our brain can do more than it is capable of. The penalty is not merely our quality of attention while executing tasks but a hampered ability to refocus for the next task. After conducting such studies, some researchers have modified their own behavior to commit to not using their cell phones while driving and only checking their email once an hour.

What? Checking email only once an hour? Doesn’t that sabotage the whole point of having high-speed internet in the first place?

Continuous Partial Attention

In 1998, Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, coined a phrase that gives a name to the crux of our technology-enabled addiction to information: “continuous partial attention.” Through the miniaturization and proliferation of wireless technologies, we now have the ability to become “a node on the network” in order “not to miss anything.” With the world continually at our fingertips, the internet provides an opportunity for the perpetual instant gratification of information and, conversely, a perpetual lack of delaying gratification.

Stone described one consequence of becoming habituated to drinking from this fire hose of information “an artificial sense of constant crisis.”

In a keynote address at the ETech Conference several years back, Stone described one consequence of becoming habituated to drinking from this fire hose of information as “an artificial sense of constant crisis.” And since most of these crises are someplace else, “We [are] everywhere except where we actually [are] physically.” A friend of mine has labeled this lifestyle “adrenaline soup.”

Let’s contrast the act of using a Blackberry (or “Crackberry,” as some call them) on the subway for a moment with its mental opposite. What is going on in the mind of, say, an athlete tracking a ball, a surgeon incising with a scalpel, or an artist staring at a blank canvas, brush poised? What can we learn from these moments of unadulterated focus? My sense is that such mental states are the source of our greatest creativity. As the author Bill Isaacs once wrote, “Truth is like a deer that comes to stand at the edge of the woods to drink. If you make too much noise, it runs away. How quiet are you?”

What quality of attention is required to effectively balance not cardboard boxes, but, say, family relationships? How does being habituated to multi-tasking affect one’s response to a spouse coming home from work upset? What if the solution to the greatest dilemma of your marriage is only one brain synapse away — but that synapse is busy watching TV?

On a community level, could the overload of perpetual crisis management hinder civic engagement or even the quality of decision-making at the national level? Omar Bradley surely could not have foreseen our technological dilemmas, but his counsel from 1948 seems no less appropriate: “It is time that we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship.” Sixty years later, Linda Stone elaborates seamlessly: “It’s crucial for CEOs to be intentional about breaking free from continuous partial attention in order to get their bearings. Some of today’s business books suggest that speed is the answer to today’s business challenges. Pausing to reflect, focus, think a problem through; and then taking steady steps forward in an intentional direction is really the key.”

Discretionary Time

We are all familiar with the phrase “discretionary income,” income that is left over after one’s basic needs have been met, money that you have choice in deciding how to spend. One might propose the analogue of “discretionary time,” the adult’s version of a “free period” during our day. I fear our discretionary time is eroding.

Indications of this trend are subtle. How often do we have dinner parties anymore? How many of your friends still send Christmas cards? When you telephone, how often do you get voicemail as opposed to an answer? When you ask someone, “How are you?” how often is the traditional “Fine” replaced with “Busy”?

We can also observe reactions to these trends. One CEO asks managers to leave cell phones and PDAs at the conference room door as a preemptive measure against the so-called “Blackberry prayer” during meetings. Some businesses are experimenting with one “No eMail Day” per week to encourage more personal interaction. If my experience during a recent unscheduled network outage is any indication, forced to leave their computers, employees actually do start talking to one another.

As discretionary time decreases, socializing becomes more a function of deliberate planning rather than spontaneity. Book clubs are one attempt to fill that void. Meanwhile, other rising trends include massage, yoga, meditation, and Buddhism. Sociologist Alain deVulpian characterizes these trends as “the immense movement toward social therapy that seeks to relieve society’s aches and pains.”

Wouldn’t our lives be more fulfilling if we built incremental relaxation and reflection into our lives rather than relegating such practices to a self-contained activity a few times a week — if at all? Such “healing arts” are at risk of being band aids, enabling unsustainable lifestyles — “cognitive carpal tunnel syndrome” — for ourselves and our children.

A local environmental activist helps homeowners conserve energy by utilizing a variety of household efficiencies. When asked what behaviors people are most reluctant to change for the sake of conservation, at the top of the list is taking shorter showers; she reports, “A number of people feel like their shower time is a rare spot of quiet and relaxation in a busy life and just don’t want to give their lingering showers up.”

Likewise, I know a middle manager who commutes an hour to work each way. When asked why she bucks the trend of her peers by choosing not to own a Blackberry, she says, “I want that time at the red light to be mine!”

Is that what our discretionary time has shrunk to, the duration of showers and red lights?

Awareness at the Counter

As I wait at the counter of my local photocopy shop, a well-dressed young woman walks into the store while talking on her cell phone. She holds out two documents to the owner of the store and asks her to make copies of them.

A minute later, the owner returns with the copies and says, “Seventy-four cents, please.” The young woman, still on her cell phone, hands the owner a credit card. The owner looks at the card and says to the young woman, “I’m not going to run a credit card for 74 cents.” The young woman looks perplexed. She says into her cell phone, “Just a second . . . and says to the owner, “What?” The owner slowly repeats herself: “I’m not going to run a credit card for 74 cents.”

Now understanding, the young woman rummages through her purse for some change. She comes up empty-handed., “I don’t have any cash,” she reports matter-of-factly.

“Well, why don’t you come back when you have some,” the owner declares definitively and hands the woman’s original documents back to her. The young woman, unfazed, returns to her cell phone conversation, zips up her purse, and leaves the store.

As the door closes behind her, the owner stares after her a moment and then exclaims to no one in particular, “Have we lost something? Have we lost something?”

Seeding the Conversation

“That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.”

— Carl Jung

I am no less human than anyone else, no less susceptible to the allure of “continuous partial attention.” My mouse-wrist hurts, and I had to turn off my “You’ve Got Mail” beep multiple times in the course of writing this article.

No, I don’t want to go back to horses and buggies. We can’t “go back.” I acknowledge the wonders of our technology: unparalleled access and ability to make connections that would otherwise be highly unlikely. For example, the internet allowed me to find references for writing this piece in the blink of an eye and to share drafts with others who contributed even more. I’m just concerned that the price we are paying for more personal connections in our lives is that each connection is of less depth.

I want us to unplug, stop, and think: What are the long-term consequences of the trio of habit, technology, and workload? Where will our future athletes, surgeons, and artists come from if our children have no practice with the pure attention upon which such disciplines rely? My intention is to seed this conversation, not provide “the” answer. But I think a piece of the puzzle will be managing these technologies out of awareness rather than habit.

To be sure, socio-economic status, lifestyle, and locale all influence these dynamics. When I introduced the phrase “continuous partial attention” to the father of a two-year-old, he said, “That’s being a parent.” Parenting duties not withstanding, these are not merely the concerns of alarmists: Experts in child development are mobilizing against the demise of reading just as the toy industry is gearing up for computers for toddlers.

I consider this the single most important issue of our time. Many consider it to be global warming, but I see the habit of continuous partial attention as more significant because it is the “meta problem”: It affects how well we go about solving all problems — if we even recognize them at all.

The amount of discretionary time in our lives limits the quality of our attention; the quality of our attention limits the quality of our awareness; the quality of our awareness limits the possibility of evolving our habits. Without the possibility of attention, we risk becoming prisoners of our own making.

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

— Gandhi

Peter Pruyn is a member of the Organizational Development and Training Department at Tufts University. He lives in Cambridge, MA and can be reached at pwp [at] airmail [dot] net. This article is abridged.

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The question that stands before us now is not who can take part in the cultural transformation needed to address these complex problems, but how shall we stand together to do so? Will we simply try to fix the problems we now face with the same mindsets that created them or will we learn to be together in new ways?

Fortunately, every person can participate in and contribute to the creation of a new global ethos of partnership and peace. In fact, we do so each time we choose:

• discernment instead of judgment
• appreciation over criticism
• generosity in place of self-interest
• reconciliation over retaliation

A culture of partnership is one that supports our full humanity and helps us reach our highest human potential. Whether we build this culture depends on the choices we make, from the seemingly insignificant to the most exalted. By understanding our options, we can make wise decisions.

Reframing the Conversation

Through two decades of research, Riane Eisler (one of the authors of this article) found a fundamental difference in how human societies evolved (for a detailed discussion, see The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Harper Collins Publishing, 1987). She documented that, from the beginning, some cultures oriented more to what she termed a dominator system and others to a partnership system — and that gender roles and relations are structured very differently in each (see “Dominator-Partnership Continuum” on p. 10). In dominator systems, social ranking begins with our most fundamental human difference—the difference between female and male. The male and what is stereotypically considered masculine is valued over the female and the stereotypically feminine. This foundational ranking of one gender over the other sets in place a pattern of social rankings based on other differences, such as ethnicity, race, religion, and so on.

In partnership systems, societies value both halves of humanity equally and recognize that humans are social animals with a unique wisdom and capacity to work and live together. Here, stereotypically feminine traits and activities such as caring, nonviolence, and caregiving are highly valued — whether they reside in women or men. This orientation profoundly affects the society’s guiding system of values in all institutions, including business, government, and economics. For example, using the lenses of these social categories makes it possible to see that caring for people, starting in childhood, and for the Earth are important in human and environmental terms.

Toward the dominator end of the spectrum, social systems organize relationships at all levels according to a hierarchy of control, status, and privilege. They routinely extend rights and freedoms to those on top and deny them to those on the bottom. Such rankings lead to thinking limited to two dimensions: superior or inferior; dominating or dominated. Since there is no awareness of the partnership alternative, both parties live in fear. Those on top fear loss of power and control while those on the bottom perpetually seek to gain it. This ranking structure then leads to conflicts — sometimes over trivial issues — that escalate, often leading to cycles of violence, resentment, and retaliation. Such conditions do not generally contribute to growth, learning, or peace.

Social systems toward the partnership end of the spectrum are characterized by more egalitarian organizational structures in which both genders are seen as equal yet different, each capable of unique manifestations of value. A hierarchy of roles may exist, but delegation tends to be based on competency, rather than rankings by gender or other arbitrary groupings. Each group is capable of appreciating the unique value of the other. Differences are seen as opportunities for learning, and both individuals and groups organize through mutual accountability and individual responsibility. Empowerment stems from one’s unique contributions, and connections are made at the level of values, rather than by gender, ethnicity, and other social categories.

In her most recent book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (Berrett-Koehler, 2007), Riane provides extensive evidence of how caring business policies that result from partnership values are actually more profitable than those that stem from dominator values. Economists tell us that building “high-quality human capital” is essential for the postindustrial, knowledge economy. Nations that invest in caring for children are doing just that—while those that do not will dearly pay for this failure.

Learning Conversations

In a global society, we see all shades in the spectrum between dominator and partnership systems. But the necessity to make headway on our intractable challenges requires that we accelerate the movement toward the partnership side of the continuum. A simple way to contribute to designing the future we desire is conversation. Conversation costs nothing but time and can include everyone. Conversations are one of the cornerstones of civic engagement. For millennia, they have served as a means to explore, defend, persuade, connect, and heal. Conversations become the threads of the social fabric of our lives, contributing to communal beliefs, expectations, and judgments about the structures and relationships underlying our families, tribes, communities, institutions, and nations. Conversations are so powerful that in an effort to control their subjects, despots and dictators often limit what topics can be discussed and how or if conversations are allowed.

DOMINATOR-PARTNERSHIP CONTINUUM

The necessity to make headway on our intractable challenges requires that we accelerate the movement toward the partnership side of the continuum.

Modern social science and psychological research has found that the what and how of conversations often lead to defining moments. The what of conversations are the topics we choose to discuss, and the how includes ideas for holding conversations from which we can learn and grow, rather than persuade, coerce, or intimidate. The purpose of holding conversations about our fundamental differences is, therefore, not to blame or judge each other or ourselves. Conversations are held in order to learn what still binds us to the dominator dynamic and to allow us to see each other and our world more clearly.

To understand what divides us, we must look honestly and earnestly at our differences. We must make an effort to understand the other’s point of view and to share our own. The best way to have a powerful conversation about what separates us is to simply listen, become aware of the meaning we may be making for ourselves from what we hear, and recognize that what the other person is saying is true for her or him.

At first, it may be difficult to hold neutral conversations due to the learned meanings we draw from words, phrases, and even tone of voice. Even if you hold your heart for humanity deeply, you are likely to carry some biases based on the tacit meanings that come from your experiences in life related to your own gender. To truly understand the other, you will want to consider what it is like to be in the other’s shoes, to have their beliefs, points of view, and experiences. The “Learning Practice of Leadership” may serve as a helpful reminder for how we can lead ourselves through the controversial waters of gender conversations (see “Learning Practice of Leadership” on p. 11).

Tips for Partnership Conversations

Below are tips for holding partnership conversations and some sample questions to get you started. These tools will be particularly useful in dealing with emotionally charged issues.

1. Convene the conversation in circle so that everyone holds an equal position.
2. Take time to allow people to get settled and leave their work and other concerns behind. Prepare a question that allows people to get introduced and learn a little about why they have joined this conversation.
3. Allow each person to speak when they are ready. There is no need to pressure anyone to talk. People will learn both from listening and speaking.
4. Allow each person who wishes to speak adequate time to do so without interruption.
5. Select a question to start the gender conversation. Several are included in the bulleted list below.
6. As you explore the conversation more deeply, use open questions. Open questions are questions to which there is no “yes” or “no” answer. They are not intended to lead to a specific outcome. Open questions come from a genuine place of curiosity. They often begin with words like “how,”, “what,” “when,” and “why.”
7. Be mindful of your intention when asking any question. If you have a judgment behind your question, it will likely show through., “Why” questions are particularly tricky as they sometimes sound accusatory, such as “Why do you believe that?”
8. Be transparent by stating your personal experiences in relating a position or asking a question.
9. Listen and try to put your judgments aside.
10. Resist the temptation to voice either your own affirmation or your disagreement with another person’s point of view. Allow each speaker to be accountable for their own words.
11. If you find you are having a strong reaction to someone’s comment, good or bad, make a note for later reflection. Ask yourself, what is creating this reaction?
12. In these conversations, it is not important to convince or draw conclusions, but to listen and learn. Have something to write on. Jot down what you notice. And when time allows, journal about what you notice about what you notice. See where a deeper inquiry leads without trying to find the “right answer.”
13. When the conversation has concluded, take time to record notes about what you’ve learned.
14. Reflect on new questions you may have as result of the conversation and new options for relating with others.

Examples: Gender Topic Questions

• What is the first memory you recall in which gender played an important role?
• What happened?
• Do you recall any conclusions you may have drawn as a result of this experience?
• Did the experience make you feel more satisfied to be your gender or less? More empowered or less?
• How do people in your church, work, or community express gender equality and gender rankings?
• What evidence do you find that men are more valued than women?
• What evidence do you find that women are more valued than men?
• What do males and females have in common when it comes to personal values?
• What do you believe about the expression of gender in living species that influences your attitudes about gender differences in humans?
• Think of a major historical event in your lifetime. If you were a different gender, how would your interpretation of that event be changed?
• How do the perceptions we hold about gender influence our attitudes toward power and money?
• What would be different if you had been born a different sex?
• How would the sexes have to change to live more closely aligned with the partnership model?
• What would be the impact to government, business, and other social systems?

Not Just a “Women’s Issue”

Exploring the issues that divide us by examining how we are influenced by our experience of gender can be powerful. It may lead to further inquiry to uncover how gender differences impact your family, community, work, and institutional relationships. In turn, these explorations may give rise to questions about how culture and nations impact each other through our policies, markets, and impact on the planet.

Beginning with our most fundamental human difference, the difference between male and female, it is now time to understand deeply how our gender privileges, limitations, and experiences have shaped and continue to influence us, not only as individual women and men but as members of a world that has inherited a system of values that is heavily influenced by dominator valuations.

One of the most interesting, and important, outcomes of open-ended conversations about gender is a new understanding of what it means to be human for both women and men — and that gender is not “just a women’s issue” but is a key issue for whether we move to a more peaceful and equitable world. As more of us talk openly about these matters, we become participants in the cultural transformation from domination to partnership — not only in gender relations but in all relations. We also help create more effective, humane, and sustainable business practices and government policies when we bring these unconscious impediments out into the open.

Note: References to behavior resulting from the ranking and hierarchy of roles in dominator and partnership systems were adapted from the work of Virginia Satir and the Satir Institute of the Pacific.

Riane Eisler is a social scientist, attorney, consultant, and author best known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now published in 23 languages. Her newest book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking” and by Peter Senge as “desperately needed,” proposes a new paradigm for economic systems. Riane keynotes at conferences worldwide, teaches transformative leadership at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org).

Lucy E. Garrick is an organizational leadership consultant, speaker, artist, and founder of Million Ideas for Peace, a public project designed to help individuals connect their personal and social passions to peacemaking (www.millionideas4peace.com). Lucy consults with corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, and public groups to improve individual and group leadership and performance. She holds a masters degree in Whole Systems Design, is chair of the OSR Alumni Association board of directors, and is principle consultant at NorthShore Consulting Group in Seattle, WA (www.northshoregroup.net).

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