Why has accountability, which is merely a principle of sound managerial practice, gotten such a bad rap? Senior managers have too often invoked it as a way of getting things done that they themselves don’t know how do in our less-than-perfect organizational systems and structures. Sometimes this dubious ploy actually works. After all, when their boss says, “Just get it done!” many people can — through sheer willpower, brute force, and long hours — overcome managerial abdication, systemic dysfunctionality, and structural flaws. But the wear and tear burns people out and suboptimizes the whole.

As a managerial technique, holding people accountable after casually tossing a goal or task to them — without setting the context, securing the necessary resources, and providing the proper structure — is destructive. It generates negative emotions and behaviors and a widespread negative response to the proper and requisite notion of accountability. Nevertheless, accountability leadership is crucial for managers to move forward to more productive ways of doing business.

Rehabilitating Accountability

As a first step in rehabilitating accountability, I give you the following accurate, useful definition of the concept: “Accountability is the obligation of an employee to deliver all elements of the value that he or she is being compensated for delivering, as well as the obligation to deliver on specific output commitments with no surprises.”

The essence of employee accountability becomes clear by comparing the role of an employee with that of an independent contractor. A contractor is accountable for delivering a measurable, usually quantifiable, product, service, or result. Repair the roof. Install a phone system. Collect past due accounts. In the process, the contractor has the absolute right to be paid as long as you receive the value you requested. He is left on his own to create his own processes to secure resources, generate efficiencies, and produce results.

Employees, on the other hand, are accountable for delivering value consistent with the total requirements of their role while coordinating with other company processes and functions. In turn, they have the right to be compensated at a level consistent with the value they contribute. Employees are (by law!) paid every day, come what may. They also typically receive training, development, and benefits. But in order to follow through with their commitments, they need the appropriate resources, support, and guidance about expectations about their performance.

Fixed vs. Relative Accountabilities

Thus, in an organization, the term “accountability” refers to an employee’s obligations, some of which are fixed and some of which are relative. Fixed accountabilities comprise the employee’s obligations to deliver outputs and to use resources and processes precisely as specified by the employer. They are necessary to keep processes in control and can be summarized in two distinct categories:

• Commitment. Employees must fulfill the output commitments exactly, in terms of quantity, quality, and timeparameters, as defined in their assignments, projects, services, and other deliverables — unless the manager agrees to adjust them. Under no circumstances can the employee surprise her manager at the due date with changes.
• Adherence. Employees must simultaneously observe and work within defined resource constraints — that is, the rules and limits established by policies, procedures, contracts, and other managerial guidelines, as well as by law.

Relative accountabilities have to do with the employee’s exercise of judgment to maximize value; they include the following four categories:

• Reach. Employees are expected to add as much value as they can by signing on for ambitious yet achievable targets, rather than hanging back or committing to “low-ball” goals.
• Fit for purpose. Employees must continually strive to ensure the optimal means of producing appropriate outputs that support the purpose for which the outputs were designed in the first place.
• Stewardship. Employees must manage company funds and other resources efficiently and seek ways to continually improve and conserve those resources, wherever possible
• Teamwork. Employees must recognize that it is the concerted effort from and between everyone that generates profit in any organization, rather than isolated efforts to maximize personal output. Therefore, an employee must accommodate other people’s work across the organization to maximize the total organizational value — even if her job becomes more difficult in the process.

Many managers do a poor job of defining, explaining, and gaining commitment to fixed accountabilities with their subordinates and holding them to those commitments (see “Management Terminology”). Even more fail to properly explain relative accountabilities and to accurately assess their subordinates’ effectiveness in delivering on them. For that reason, some managers over-budget expenses so they’ll look good next year; some salespeople sell customers more than they need, just so they’ll reach their sales quota this year; some operating personnel pay too much for materials because it’s easier than shopping around — all are failing to fulfill their relative accountabilities. Clearly articulated relative accountabilities are the antidote to the pursuit of narrow goals, waste of resources, and lack of team play that renders so many employees, and their companies, ineffective.

QQT/R

Managers’ accountabilities include some that are unique to the managerial role. Chief among them is being clear with their subordinates about what (the quantity and quality of output) they are expected to deliver and how much time they have to deliver it. Managers are also accountable for providing the resources employees need to complete their assignments.

In virtually any environment, when I ask employees how clear their managers are about what they are accountable for getting done, most will say, “Not very.” In manufacturing, for instance, a supervisor may specify an increase in quantity but not the acceptable reduction, if any, in quality. Yet statistical process control and just-in-time working require unambiguous clarity about accountabilities and the interaction between quantity, quality, time, and resources.

Many managers assume their subordinates know what they are accountable for, not realizing the tension and anxiety they inadvertently cause by failing to be clear. Typically, a highly responsible subordinate will make her best guess at reading her boss’s mind, hoping to be in the right ballpark. Then, a few months later when she gives him a progress report and he says, “That’s not at all what I wanted,” she ends up feeling frustrated and distrustful.

Management scientist Elliott Jaques has developed a small but powerful tool that can be useful for clarifying fixed accountabilities: QQT/R. The slash in QQT/R does not indicate arithmetic division; it merely separates employees’ output accountabilities (quantity, quality, and time frame) from their resource constraints (see “QQT/R”). This expression is the simplest way for managers to accurately define assignments that they are delegating to their subordinates.

QQT/R creates unequivocal clarity regarding obligations. The formula puts all four variables on the table so managers and subordinates can examine, discuss, adjust, and commit to each one explicitly. The variables are both independent and interdependent, summing up real-world constraints and possibilities and exposing potential tradeoffs among them.

With the tradeoffs out in the open, managers and their subordinates are positioned for a hard-hitting, objective conversation about the manager’s goals and resources and the employee’s ability to meet those goals given current conditions. When this process is ignored or done haphazardly, employees are saddled with their managers’ unrealistic or unfair expectations, and managers delude themselves with their employees’ acquiescent or deceptive commitments to fulfill those expectations. When managers extract so-called stretch commitments from employees that are obviously unobtainable, or when they fail to provide adequate resources for an effort, employees know what’s happening and feel they’ve been taken. Similarly, when employees won’t commit to challenging goals, they are sabotaging their managers and their company.

Some managers fear that tools such as QQT/R inhibit initiative and creativity. But QQT/R does just the opposite, because it inspires employees to figure out how best to deliver on their commitments — not to decide what they are to deliver. The best employees delight in improving processes and conserving resources while hitting their QQT objectives. QQT/R should not be construed as top-down either. It should be the outcome of active, vigorous, two-way discussion between managers and their subordinates.

Other managers initially believe that QQT/R cannot be applied to people in analytical or research positions or other areas of knowledge work. Our clients involved in research, product, technology, and market development, as well as similar functions, don’t use QQT/R just to define results per se. They also use it to mutually define the processes, steps, and resources that must be developed in order to yield the intended results (see “A Technology QQT/R” on page 4).

QQT/R is not meant to be a straightjacket or a rigid set of rules. Rather, it is a useful tool for managers and employees to use in developing clearly articulated, mutually agreed upon commitments. It is the most efficient means of ensuring that the output delivered to managers is really the output they wanted. Significantly, QQT/R captures some of the managers’ accountabilities as well as those of employees by defining the resources the manager commits to deliver.

Yet being clear about the QQT/R does not capture all managerial accountabilities. In addition, managers must provide their subordinates the support and working conditions they need to deliver on their accountabilities. This support may include coaching subordinates to enhance their effectiveness and providing constructive feedback. The bottom line is that a manager is accountable for her subordinates’ outputs. She cannot blame her inability to deliver her commitments on her subordinates’ failure to meet their targets. You might say the manager’s credo for the 21st century must be: No excuses about your subordinates’ QQT/Rs! No surprises about your own!

Accountability and Authority

Managers must also be accountable for giving subordinates the authority they need in order to deliver on their obligations. Holding employees accountable for achieving a goal that they haven’t been given the authority to achieve is what I call “managing for fantasy.” Invariably, doing so generates stress, frustration, and resentment in employees. Even when the result is obtained, it is usually at the cost of suboptimizing overall organizational results (see “Managing for Fantasy”).

The reverse of this problem authority without accountability — is also prevalent. For example, an employee may be given authority over processes, people, or other resources but not held accountable for how well he or she manages or what results are achieved. When that happens, the employee eventually becomes self-absorbed and develops a sense of entitlement. In this fantasy culture of undisciplined performance and variable teamwork, one’s attitude is always “me first, productivity second.”

Accountability vs. Responsibility

Another common mistake is confusing accountability with responsibility. In the purest sense, responsibility is what an individual demands of himself or herself. It has to do with one’s conscience, aspirations, and internal standards. Accountability has to do with specific obligations one has to another individual based on mutual commitments each has made to the other. Unfortunately, most organizations use these words interchangeably as a way to make people feel accountable when they don’t actually have the necessary authority.

When employees are unclear about or lack the authority they need to deliver on their accountabilities, they fall back on their own sense of personal responsibility. Because most companies have highly responsible employees, those employees take it upon themselves to get the job done, usually at considerable cost to themselves and their coworkers. As a consequence, they always end up suboptimizing overall organizational effectiveness.

For example, a client of ours in the metal fabricating business asked me to talk with their newly promoted assistant superintendent Sam Travers, a 12-year veteran. Since the promotion, Sam had grown irritable and disruptive. His leadership style included yelling, threatening, cursing, and even kicking cans around. After talking with Sam, I found him to be courteous, reasonable, intelligent, and mature. If anything, he was fully aware of his so-called accountabilities — and chief among them was keeping his area’s machines operating at 80 percent of capacity, or more. However, the machine operators were subordinate to their shift supervisors, not to Sam, and they feared their supervisors would dock their pay, write them up, suspend them, or fire them if a machine broke from being cranked too high. The supervisors, busy fighting fires elsewhere, told Sam to handle the problem himself. Only by screaming at the operators could Sam get them to work faster. He had no managerial authority over the operators yet he felt responsible for getting those machines running at 80 percent or better.

An employee who is working hard but not getting the intended results, or who is achieving results only at considerable cost to coworkers, subordinates, or the larger organization, is probably acting responsibly. With such individuals, you must first review their accountabilities and set them in the context of overall company goals. The next crucial step is to ascertain whether the person has both the commensurate authority and the resources to get the job done. Gaps in the accountability-authority equation may be resolved simply or may require rethinking the alignments in your structures and processes.

LEAD People to Accountability

So what is the solution to this accountability crisis? How can we build accountability leadership in our organizations? The four cornerstones of accountability leadership are “LEAD” — leverage, engagement, alignment, and development. LEAD represents a systemic way of thinking and acting that greatly increases a manager’s effectiveness. It starts with the concept that managers exist to leverage people’s potential so that they can achieve more than they could alone. To get this leverage, managers must engage their employees’ enthusiastic commitment and ensure that they are in alignment with the organization and one another. To maintain leverage over the long term, managers must develop their people’s capabilities so they can apply their full potential to the work of the organization.

Let’s look more closely at each element of the system:

Leverage. In an accountability framework, managers are hired to leverage the creative capabilities of their people to make the total result of their contributions greater than the sum of the parts. A lever is a simple tool that enables someone to lift a heavy object higher than he could on his own. Similarly, leadership, when properly practiced using the levers of engagement, alignment, and development, enables people in a company, department, or team to accomplish something that would not otherwise be possible.

To help employees exercise judgment, the most important leadership practice a manager can deploy is setting context.

The key for managers to become effective leaders is to understand what they are leveraging. They’re not leveraging employees’ fixed accountabilities — the defined assignments and the rules of engagement surrounding the assignment — but rather their relative accountabilities — the value added by their application of judgment and discretion. In other words, managers must fully leverage the collective mental force of their people in order to elevate the whole organization’s ability to deliver value to the customer and, ultimately, to the shareholder.

To help their employees exercise their judgment, the most important leadership practice a manager can deploy is setting context. Doing so consists of including your subordinate in your own thinking and in your manager’s thinking, and then incorporating your subordinate’s thinking into your own. This approach improves upon the quality of a manager’s plan and it helps a subordinate to think, plan, and make adjustments intelligently — that is, in a way that best supports the bigger picture.

Engagement. Effective managers engage commitment by understanding what goes into a healthy “psychological contract,” a term coined by Harry Levinson in the 1950s to describe how managers understand and create the conditions necessary for people to feel supported and successful. This contract represents an implicit — often unspoken — understanding and agreement on what the company will provide, and what the employee will provide, to make the relationship work. It is not to be confused with an employment contract, a legal device detailing what employers and employees owe each other. Rather, the psychological contract rests upon a foundation of mutual commitment to each other’s success.

Negotiating strong, mutual, and reciprocal contracts requires that managers attend to what their employees value, how they define success, and what demonstrates to them that the organization supports their pursuit of success. As a general rule, employees perceive their companies as being committed to their success when they provide:

• A safe, healthy work environment
• Respectful, trustworthy relationships
• Regular opportunities for providing input to the organization, its goals, and one’s own assignments
• Valuable, personally meaningful, and challenging work
• The resources and authorities necessary to meet accountabilities
• Assistance in reaching one’s full potential within the organization
• Recognition and appreciation of one’s contribution
• Fair compensation
• A commitment to organizational success and perpetuation

If an employee — or your entire workforce — fails to demonstrate the level of engagement sought, use the preceding list as a diagnostic checklist. Invariably, at least one and usually more of these elements will be missing. This shortcoming is your clue to remedial actions that you might take.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that context setting and QQT/Rs are part of the psychological contract. Employees prefer clarity, not vagueness. The very process of jointly defining intentions and ambitious and attainable QQT/Rs creates engagement.

Alignment. Employees are aligned when they understand the relationship between their activities and goals and those of their organization, managers, and coworkers — and then act on that understanding. Alignment enables employees to best use their judgment to craft, with others, the day-to-day, often minute-to-minute adjustments that will best support management’s thinking in light of changing conditions.

Alignment ensures that employees are not only accountable for accomplishing their own individual missions — the QQT/Rs — but that they deliver their accountabilities in such a way that ensures they fit into, and support, the whole. With that framework, employees can be expected to chart and continually adjust a course to reach optimal solutions — together. So by setting context, a manager brightens the light on the areas where employees should focus and dims it on areas where they do not need to do so.

To be most useful, context must be translated into a fully articulated decision-making framework within which subordinates can make optimal trade-offs. This framework guides subordinates when they must make decisions involving key dimensions such as revenue, costs, profits, quality, quantity, timeliness, customer satisfaction, or an objective such as winning a new market. Within such a framework, employees not only understand the context in terms of their manager’s thinking and intentions, but they also understand the umbrella of alternative logic within which they must operate.

Development. Employee development, as a continual, career long process, represents the surest path to a workforce that functions with enthusiastic commitment at its full potential. If there truly is a talent gap and companies cannot find and retain enough high performers, then senior executives need to start taking employee development seriously. This means understanding what development entails, creating a talent-pool development system, and holding each manager accountable for effectively developing her own employees — both in role and in careers.

To fully develop an employee’s potential, you need to have a good idea of what that potential is. The purest handle you can get on an employee’s potential involves assessing his ability to handle complexity. This point is quite important, because position levels in organizations are closely related to the complexity of the tasks and the kind of judgment involved in the work of those positions.

Broadly, the tasks of employee development fall into two areas: developing subordinates in their current positions (through coaching) and developing subordinates to improve their fit for higher-level positions in the future (through mentoring). In other words, managers must be accountable for coaching their immediate subordinates and for mentoring their subordinates’ subordinates.

What It Takes to LEAD

The system that I have labeled LEAD lacks the iron-fist approach of the old command-and-control style of management, as well as its paternalism and its limited view of employee potential. LEAD also eschews the passive approach associated with employee empowerment, self-directed work groups, and similar laissez-faire reactions to command and control.

Instead, LEAD begins with a clear mandate for managers to leverage their people to their highest levels of achievement, as individuals and as a group. LEAD recognizes that managers will draw forth employees’ best efforts not by the unilateral issuing of orders, but by enthusiastically engaging their employees’ commitment in their work. Furthermore, LEAD aligns those efforts when managers construct with their subordinates a powerful context — conveying management’s thinking and intentions — as well as practical decision-making frameworks. And finally, LEAD looks to the long-term value of the individual and the organization by holding managers accountable for effectively developing their employees to their fullest potential.

To implement LEAD, you need a clear view of your managerial role, the flexibility to adopt new viewpoints, and the patience and intelligence to learn new skills. You also need the energy and commitment to work with yourself and your people, to try and fail and try again until the system becomes part of your everyday managerial-leadership practice. In addition, you need the courage to establish LEAD as an accountability for every manager and to assess each manager’s value — and right to remain a manager — against this standard. Implementing accountability leadership does require hard work, but I fervently believe that business leaders and managers who undertake it can use LEAD to their competitive advantage.

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Many of the changes that large organizations seek to implement initially appear to employees to be complex, difficult, disruptive, strange, and counterintuitive. The new cultures that accompany major changes often involve concepts, attitudes, and skills that workers do not understand or accept. Some analysts are increasingly skeptical that genuine acceptance of major change is even possible in organizations. They recommend that organizations either go through painful periods of coercive persuasion or start with new populations of workers who hold different assumptions than do the old ones. The unattractiveness and inefficiency of both these practices — essentially telling employees to “comply or say goodbye” — is an additional stimulus for seeking more effective ways to introduce large-scale change.

A Leap in Comprehension

Fortunately, we are learning that storytelling can help large numbers of employees to understand complex and difficult transitions. Stories enable a leap in comprehension so that the audience intuitively grasps what the change involves, why it might be desirable, and how the organization or community might implement it. They invite the audience to see analogies to the tale from their own backgrounds, their own contexts, and their own fields of expertise. Through narrative, listeners can extrapolate from a scenario in one context to what might be involved in implementing a similar practice in their own environment.

We are learning that storytelling can help large numbers of employees to understand complex and difficult transitions.

Compare stories to abstract definitions as a way of introducing a complex concept like knowledge management. Here is the definition of knowledge management from www.brint.com, one of the world’s best web sites on the topic: Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous change. . . . Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information-processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.

Impeccably comprehensive and profound in its implications, the definition has only one problem, and it is a serious one: It is unintelligible except to someone who already understands the subject. Even an experienced practitioner needs to study the definition for some time to comprehend it. This dense verbiage could confirm the skeptic’s worst fears that the concept of knowledge management is hopelessly complex, confusing, and in the end irrelevant.

But efforts to simplify definitions often strip them of content. For instance, one might define knowledge management more simply as the strategy and processes to enable the creation and flow of relevant knowledge throughout the business to create organizational, customer, and consumer value (definition by David Smith, Unilever, cited at www.knowledge-nurture.com). The definition looks straight-forward, but it doesn’t help those who don’t already know the strategy and processes needed to create knowledge and make it flow throughout a business. Nor is the terminology persuasive to anyone who is not already convinced of the worth of knowledge management.

By contrast, the story of a World Bank task team leader in Madagascar is readily comprehensible: In late 1998, a task team leader assigned to Tananarive was able to get advice within a couple of days to solve a client’s problem. By sending an e-mail to colleagues around the world regarding how other countries deal with the question of taxing sales of medicine, he was able to draw on the knowledge and experiences of a community of experts. Before the advent of the Internet, collecting this kind of information would have taken months to accomplish (see “The Madagascar Case” for the complete story).

This story is relatively simple and accessible. In a simple, quick, and non-threatening way, listeners can grasp the idea of a community of practitioners and the function of a knowledge base. In addition, World Bank employees have a way to get the gist of knowledge-sharing — and improve the way they themselves work — by extrapolating from the story’s example. When a story does its job, the listeners’ minds race ahead to imagine the further implications of implementing the same idea in other settings: Imagine if we were able to get answers to these kinds of questions in such an agile fashion! Imagine if we could share expertise on the web with our clients! Imagine what kind of organization we could become! The concept changes from being vague, abstract, and inert to breathing, exciting, and alive.

The changes that we need to implement in large organizations often have many dimensions and facets. Just the attempt to explain the idea can kill enthusiasm before implementation even begins. Stories, on the other hand, invite the listener to visualize a different world, and in the imagining, to add value to the tale.

How Stories Catalyze Change

Of course, storytelling cannot substitute for changes in strategy, programs, budgets, incentives, personnel, measurement, and all the many, coordinated actions needed to transform a large organization. However, it is a tool that managers can use to elicit decisions to implement such changes in the first place. Narrative can help leaders communicate the ideas behind an initiative throughout the organization. It can assist in mobilizing large numbers of employees, including entrenched managers, to support shifts that initially may seem strange and threatening.

Stories can be effective in supporting change in organizations for a number of reasons:

1. Storytelling is natural and easy. We develop the ability to tell and follow narrative at such an early age —  around two or three — that it is tempting to call the capability innate. By contrast, we don’t naturally practice abstract analysis, which involves mental exercises with non-living things; it is something that we must be trained to do, through many years of schooling.

2. Stories show the connections between things. A good story holds disparate elements together long enough to energize and guide action, plausibly enough to let people make sense of what has happened, and engagingly enough to entice others to contribute their own inputs in the interest of applying the learnings to their own situation.

3. Stories help us cope with complexity. The world is a complex place. One of the ways in which humans have coped with such complexity for thousands of years is through stories. People in modern corporations do the same when they recount examples of notable successes or dismal failures, of individuals who went above and beyond the call of duty and those who fell miserably short of expectations, of leaders who walked the talk and those who betrayed the trust of their direct reports.

4. Stories bypass defense mechanisms. One element that attracts us to stories is that we can’t always anticipate where they are heading. For this reason, as we listen to a new tale, we usually suspend our standard defenses. In contrast, when we hear a formal presentation on an important topic, we generally have our critical apparatus ready to dissect, analyze, and appraise the proposal. In the case of a story, we don’t analyze it — we live it. The mindset is fundamentally different.

5. Stories are energizing. Analytic, step-by-step explanations are often tiring. By contrast, when we discover the story’s implicit idea and make new connections, we feel energized, interested, excited, and enthusiastic.

6. Stories can enhance or change perceptions. While every creative idea must be logical in hindsight (otherwise we could not appreciate its value), it isn’t necessarily logical in foresight. In fact, if the idea is big, bold, and different, we will initially view it as illogical because of our preconceptions and existing frame of reference. Stories can make strange new ideas familiar, comprehensible, and acceptable to a potentially resistant audience.

7. Stories are easy to remember. Stories are mnemonics that enable people to reconstruct earlier events. In a well-told tale, the narrator provides a logical chain of events. Once the listeners grasp this sequence, they can recall it when it becomes relevant to their current reality.

8. Stories are inherently nonadversarial. When we hear a story, we don’t usually question the facts or the logic of the plot. We tend to give the storyteller some leeway and wait to see where the tale leads. The shared imagining of the teller and listener creates a common space. As the storyteller watches the reactions of the listeners, he instinctively builds on and emphasizes the elements that are resonating with the audience. The audience senses that the storyteller is interacting with them and responds in turn. In this way, the teller and the listener create meaning together.

9. Stories are inherently nonhierarchical. With analytical arguments and abstract propositions, some people are deemed qualified to judge their validity — such as those with advanced degrees or greater levels of power — and others are expected to follow their lead. In contrast, narrative is inherently democratic. Although there are key storytellers and story-makers, all people have the capacity to determine whether a story coheres and rings true for them.

10. Stories engage our feelings. Stories engage our emotions and offer deep meaning because, by their nature, they are about the irregularities in our lives, the things that catch our attention as being different from what is expected. For this reason, they arouse our curiosity or even fear. These deviations from the status quo potentially threaten our ability to stay in control of our lives; thus, we feel that we need to understand them so we can have a say in our future.

Two Stories in One

Stories aimed at eliciting change in organizations do not achieve their full impact merely by communicating the information contained in the plot. For instance, I do not tell the story of Madagascar tax administration because I want to inform people about the facts of the tax administration in Madagascar. These facts are irrelevant to my purpose, except as a pretext for getting

The power of using a story to elicit change comes not from the story itself, but from the reaction that it elicits in the minds of the audience.

the audience to see that knowledge sharing across organizational boundaries is not only a real possibility, but also that it could be tremendously valuable for the organization.

Thus, there are, in effect, two stories that the storyteller is trying to convey to the listener. One is the explicit story that the storyteller narrates to the listener — what happened in tax administration in Madagascar. The other — and by far the more important — is the implicit story that the listeners themselves invent — a unique tale of how something similar to what occurred in Madagascar could occur in their own work environments. This second story gets created as the listeners’ project their context, problems, hopes, and aspirations on the plot — and cannot even be imagined by the storyteller, who has no access to the necessary inputs that are in the listeners’ heads.

If the narrative does its work properly, the stories that the listeners invent will be similar to those that the storyteller attempted to elicit and significantly overlap with each other. Furthermore, the listeners will believe in the stories that they create, because they themselves have invented them. Even better, they are likely to tell the stories to others. In this way, the narrative acts as a springboard for change. In effect, the power of using a story to elicit change comes not from the story itself, but from the reaction that it elicits in the minds of the audience. The inputs that the listeners contribute make the difference between a story that merely transmits information and one that successfully catalyzes change (see “The Power of Narrative”).

How to Craft a Story That Sparks Change

Stories that are likely to elicit change include the following design elements:

1. The story must be understandable to the audience. The protagonist should be in a predicament familiar to the particular audience, preferably the very plight that the change proposal is meant to solve. For instance, in the Madagascar story, the predicament was familiar to people who work for the World Bank, and it illustrated the use of knowledge management. The intended audience could understand and emotionally engage with the tale of a task team leader who didn’t have — and urgently needed — the know-how to satisfy a particular client.

2. The story should be told from the perspective of a single protagonist. Audiences tend to have more difficulty sympathizing with stories with multiple protagonists than with those with a single protagonist. Narratives with a single main protagonist are generally more successful, because they engage the listeners’ emotions with one specific predicament.

3. The protagonist should be prototypical of the organization’s business. In particular, she should reflect the organization’s core activities; for instance, if it is a sales organization, the protagonist will likely be a sales representative.

4. The story should have a degree of strangeness or incongruity for the listeners. If the story is a cliché, the audience won’t listen or learn; it must violate the listeners’ perceptual frameworks in some way. The violation occurs either because something unexpected happens — such as new characters, relationships, or data — or because an expected event does not take place. For instance, in the Madagascar story, the audience is surprised that the task team leader could contact many people around the world and quickly get the answer to a complex technical question.

The element of strangeness is always specific to the particular audience. What is new to one is commonplace to another. An in-depth understanding of the organization or community can thus help the storyteller detect what might be fresh and unconventional in that setting and judge what reception the tale will receive.

5. The story must not only be strange, but also eerily familiar. If the story is too exotic, it will fail to spring the listeners to a new level of understanding of their own situations. The story must epitomize the change idea, almost like a premonition of what the future might be like.

6. The story should embody the change proposal as much as possible. The story should reflect the change idea as a whole as much as possible, rather than just a small part of the process. If no such story exists, then the narrator might extrapolate from something that did happen. If the narrator builds on a true story, she should be explicit about doing so, to avoid any later accusation of massaging the facts.

7. If possible, the story should be true. People find true stories more persuasive than made-up ones. The use of names and photos of the participants, and the specific dates when things occurred, can enhance authenticity.

8. The story should be reasonably recent. The fact that the Madagascar story was fresh when it was told helped contribute to its relevance and believability.

9. The narrator should tell the story as simply and as briefly as possible. The complete Madagascar story takes only a few minutes to tell. The narrator does not spend time on getting the listener to know the quirks and personality of the protagonist, how he looked and felt, the sights and sounds of Tananarive, or the smell of the tax administration building where he was working — tools that professional storytellers often use to immerse their audience in a story. In this case, the narrator leaves a lot to the listeners’ imagination, including only those details that illustrate knowledge-sharing. Speed and conciseness of style are appropriate here, because the storyteller is less interested in conveying the details of exactly what happened in Madagascar than he is in sparking new ideas in the minds of the listeners about how they might implement knowledge-sharing in their own environments.

10. The storyteller doesn’t let herself become the story. Someone who aims to elicit organizational change through stories doesn’t need to recount his tale with the panache of a Charles Dickens or a Mark Twain. These authors’ voices are so present and visible in their stories that we are immediately impressed by their personality and narrative style. Their intensive technique grabs us by the lapels and compels us to look at things in a certain way that can be almost adversarial. They come on so powerfully that they don’t always leave much space for the readers’ thoughts. In our context, it is more relevant to think about the minimalist stories of Raymond Carver. Remember that we are aiming to leave lots of space for the listeners to invent their own stories, use their imagination, and fill in the blanks.

The goal is to foster collaboration, get people to learn about themselves, and support them as they co-create a new future.

Do Stories Always Work?

Storytelling is not a panacea for eliciting change in organizations. It can only be as good as the underlying ideas being conveyed. If those ideas are bad, people will see through even the most engaging story. But even when the underlying ideas are good, there are times when storytelling is ineffective. Sometimes the listeners simply don’t “get it” at all.

For instance, there are people who have listened to my stories of knowledge-sharing and instead of gleaning the underlying idea, have instead pressed me with questions such as: Where is Madagascar? Why didn’t the task team leader already know the answer to this question? What is the level of taxation in that country? When this happens, we are getting into a discussion of the explicit story: tax administration in Madagascar and economic policy and so on. These are all interesting issues, but such a discussion indicates that the narrative has failed to elicit the implicit story and spring the listener to a new level of understanding of the possibilities of knowledge-sharing and organizational change. Knowledge-sharing has little to do with Madagascar or its tax system and everything to do with what is happening in the work environment of the individual listeners.

When listeners raise such questions, it means that the story has transported them to Madagascar and then left them there, stranded. They have failed to make the return journey to their own organization and their own environment. This happens when they don’t find the context of the story intelligible or clearly relevant to their own circumstances.

These occasions when storytelling falls short of its goal illustrate how dependent a story is on the shared background of the audience. With those who don’t know what it would be like trying to get the answer to a complex question of tax administration on the other side of the planet, or how amazing it would be to be able to get a broad spectrum of advice from knowledgeable colleagues from around the world, or how to make an analogy to the challenges they themselves face in their own work situation, the story could be a total failure in terms of sparking organizational change. But where an audience understands the background and the context, the Madagascar story — and many others like it—has been extraordinarily effective.

The Impact of Storytelling

When a story works well with its audience, it embeds a new way of looking at the world in the listeners’ minds and induces new opportunities. In the process, an understanding of the potential of the change idea — in this case, it is knowledge-sharing, but it might be any number of complex change initiatives — can erupt into the collective consciousness, producing a sudden coalescence of vision in the minds of the listeners. The provenance of these thoughts — in this instance, the story — is not important. What matters is the fact that the narrative inspires insight and, in turn, action. The spark that starts the fire is less significant than the conflagration that then takes place as the organization adopts innovative approaches to doing business.

Stephen Denning is former program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, Washington, D. C. He is also the author of The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations (ButterworthHeinemann, 2000). The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank. Additional background on knowledge management by the same author may be found at http://www.stevedenning.com.

For Further Reading

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies (Ballantine Books, 1994)

Brunner, Jerome. “Culture and Human Development: A New Look” in Human Development, Vol. 33 (1990): 344-355

Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life (Fontana, 1996)

Denning, Stephen, et al. “What Is Knowledge Management?” working paper, World Bank, 1998 (available at http://www.stevedenning.com/knowledge_management.htm)

Polkinghorne, Donald E. Narrative, Knowing and the Human Sciences (State University of New York at Albany Press, 1988)

Schein, Edgar H. “Organizational Learning as Cognitive Re-definition: Coercive Persuasion Revisited,” working paper, MIT Sloan School of Management, 1996 (available at http://mitsloan.mit.edu/)

Weick, Karl, and Larry Browning. “Argument and Narration in Organizational Communication” in Yearly Review of Management of the Journal of Management, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1986): 234

Weick, Karl. Sensemaking in Organizations (Sage, 1995)

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Strategic learning can occur, not only through formal planning activities, but also through webs of informal conversations and networks of relationships, both within an organization and among key stakeholders. Choosing to ask and explore “big questions” — questions that matter to the future of the organization — is a powerful force.

When people frame their strategic exploration as questions rather than as concerns or problems, a conversation begins where everyone can learn something new together, rather than having the normal stale debates. In effect, people begin looking at “the map of the territory” together. The questions encourage them to wonder “What is the map telling us?” rather than to push preconceived ideas of what they think it shows.

Why Don’t We Ask Better Questions?

If asking good questions is so critical, why don’t we spend more of our time and energy focused upon discovering and framing them? One reason may be that much of our Western culture is focused on knowing the “right answer” rather than discovering the “right question.” Our educational system focuses more on memorization and static answers rather than on the art of seeking new possibilities through dynamic questioning. We are rarely taught how to ask powerful questions. Nor are we often taught why we should ask compelling questions in the first place. Quizzes, examinations, and aptitude tests all reinforce the value of correct answers, usually with only one correct answer for each question asked. Is it any wonder that most of us are uncomfortable with not knowing?

Perhaps our aversion to asking creative questions stems from our emphasis on finding quick fixes and our attachment to black/white, either/or thinking. Often the rapid pace of our lives and work doesn’t provide us the opportunity to be in reflective conversations where creative questions and innovative solutions can be explored before reaching key decisions. This dilemma is further reinforced by organizational reward systems in which leaders feel they are paid for fixing problems rather than fostering breakthrough thinking. Between our deep attachment to the answer — any answer — and our anxiety about not knowing, we have inadvertently thwarted our collective capacity for deep creativity and fresh perspectives in the face of the unprecedented challenges we face, both in our own organizations and as a global human community.

The World’s Best Industrial Research Lab

One of the best corporate examples of how a “big question” — a truly strategic question — can galvanize collective conversation, engagement, and action occurred at Hewlett-Packard. The director of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories wondered why HP Labs was not considered the best industrial research lab in the world. As he thought about it, he realized that he did not know what being the “World’s Best Industrial Research Lab” (WBIRL) really meant.

One key staff member was charged with coordinating the effort. Instead of looking for “answers” outside the company, she encouraged the director to share his “big question” with all lab employees around the world. Instead of organizing a senior executive retreat to create a vision and then roll it out, she encouraged organization-wide webs of inquiry and conversation, asking people what WBIRL meant to them, what it would mean personally for their own jobs, and what it might take to get there. She invited the entire organization to join in exploring the question through informal, ongoing conversations; and she took advantage of more formal internal survey and communication infrastructures. When the lab director acknowledged his “not knowing” — an uncommon stance for a senior executive — an open field was created for multiple constituencies and perspectives to be heard.

The conversation continued for several months. The WBIRL leader developed a creative “reader’s theater” piece which reflected 800 survey responses, detailing employee frustrations, dreams, insights, and hopes. Players spoke the key themes as “voices of the organization,” with senior management listening. That made a difference to everyone’s thinking by literally putting a variety of points of view on stage together. But it wasn’t the only venue in which the “big question” was explored. Senior management met in strategic sessions, using approaches such as interactive graphics and “storytelling about the future” to see new opportunities that crossed functional boundaries. In these strategic conversations, they considered core technologies that might be needed for multiple future scenarios at HP Labs to unfold.

People throughout the labs, meanwhile, were initiating projects at all levels, resulting in significant improvement in key areas of the lab’s work. Weekly Chalk Talks for engineers, “coffee talks,” an Administrative Assistant Forum, and a Community Forum created opportunities for ongoing dialogue, listening, and learning. A WBIRL Grants Program provided small stipends for innovative ideas, enabling people to act at the corporate grassroots level, taking personal responsibility for work they believed in. In all of these efforts, the leader of the WBIRL project spent most of her time “helping the parts see the whole” and linking people with complementary ideas.
And yet, while productivity was improving rapidly, something was missing. During an informal conversation while planning for a “Celebration of Creativity” to acknowledge what had already been accomplished, one of the lab engineers spoke up. She wondered what was really different about HP that distinguished it from any other company that wanted to be the best in the world. She said, “What would get me out of bed in the morning would be to become the best for the world.”
Suddenly a really “big question” had emerged. What would it mean for HP Labs to be the best both in and for the world? (See “What Makes a Powerful Question?”)

Stakeholders in any system already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges.

A senior engineer created an image of what “for the world” meant to him. It was a well-known picture of the founders of HP looking into the backyard garage where the company began. He added a beautiful photo of Earth placed inside. This picture became the symbol of “HP for the World.” A “town meeting” of 800 Palo Alto employees with live satellite hook-ups enabling a global conversation focused on the question, “What does ‘HP for the World’ mean to you?” The “HP For the World” image spread throughout the company — appearing in lobbies, featured in recruiting brochures, and offered as executive gifts. More than 50,000 posters were purchased by HP employees around the world, stimulating a growing network of conversations about the meaning of the big question for the future of the company.

In the course of this exploration, people rediscovered that the company founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, had always maintained a commitment, as Packard put it, that “the Hewlett-Packard company should be managed first and foremost to make a commitment to society.” Growing numbers of people throughout HP reconnected to that founding governing idea — stimulating investigations into breakthrough technologies for education, remote medical care for third-world nations, and global environmental issues.

As part of this effort, the same senior engineer who had created the “for the world” poster image was persuaded to pursue a 25-year old dream: To create a mile-long educational diorama, placing human life in the context of evolutionary history. In 1997, this work — “A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us” — was featured at the annual State of the World Forum. There, the question of what it means to be for the world was posed to global leaders gathered from every continent. Public and private partnerships evolved from these conversations. Clearly, this is a powerful question that “travels well.”

Big Questions and Strategic Thinking

This approach to discovering and asking the “big questions” — strategic questions for which we truly do not have answers — is grounded in the assumption that stakeholders in any system already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges. Given the appropriate context and support, members of an organizational community can often sense where powerful strategic possibilities and opportunities for action may lie. Is it simply “luck” that enables us to stumble onto questions that really matter for strategic thinking? Or can we actually design processes that make it more likely for those questions to emerge? (See “How to Use Questions Effectively” on page 4.)

“Discovering strategic questions,” says one colleague, a senior executive at a major multinational corporation,

“is like panning for gold. You have to care about finding it, you have to be curious, and you have to create an anticipation of discovering gold, even though none of us may know ahead of time where we’ll find it. You head toward the general territory where you think the gold may be located, with your best tools, your experience, and your instincts.”

To evoke strategic thinking based on discovering powerful questions, several activities may be useful. They

may not apply to all situations and they may not always follow the same sequence, but they suggest ways that formal and informal processes can evolve together to support individuals as well as teams in discovering “gold” for themselves.

Assessing the Landscape. Get a feel for the larger context in which you are operating. Scan the horizon, as well as the contours of the current business and organizational landscape, related to the system or project you are working with. Like trackers in the mountains, look for obvious and subtle indicators that point to storms as well as to sunny skies. Allow your curiosity and imagination to take the lead as you begin to identify the many questions that the business landscape reveals. It will be tough, but important, to frame your findings as questions, rather than as concerns or problems. To help in framing those questions, ask yourself: “How does A relate to C and what questions does that suggest? If X were at play here, what would we be asking? What is the real question underneath all this data?”

Discovering Core Questions. Once you think you’ve posed most of the relevant questions (and there may be many of them), look for patterns. This is not a mechanical process, even though it can be disciplined and systematic.

You are on a treasure hunt, seeking the core questions — usually three to five — which, if answered, would make the most difference to the future of your work. Cluster the questions and consider the relationships that appear among them. Notice what “pops up” in order to discover the “big questions” that the initial clusters reveal.

Creating Images of Possibility. Imagine what your situation would look like or be like if these “big questions” were answered. Creating vivid images of possibility is different from pie-in-the-sky visioning, especially if people with a variety of perspectives have participated in the earlier stages of the conversation. This part of the conversation can also provide clues for evolving creative strategies in response to the “big questions.” It often reveals new territory and opportunities for action while remaining grounded in real life.

Evolving Workable Strategies. Workable strategies begin to emerge in response to compelling questions and to the images of possibility that these questions evoke. Of course, the cycle is never complete. Relevant business data, ongoing conversations with internal and external stakeholders, informal conversations among employees, and feedback from the environment enable you to continually assess the business landscape revealing new questions.

Many organizations are stuck in a “problem-solving orientation” when it comes to strategy. They can’t seem to shake the focus on fixing short-term problems or seeking immediate (but ineffective) solutions. Simply by moving their attention to a deliberate focus on essential questions, they can develop an inquiry-oriented approach to evolving organizational strategy (see “How Can I Frame Better Questions?”). In a knowledge economy, this approach provides an opportunity for developing the capability of strategic thinking in everyone, and for fostering sustainable business and social value.

How Can Leaders Use Powerful Questions?

In today’s turbulent times, engaging people’s best thinking about complex issues without easy answers represents one key to creating the futures we want. Leaders need to develop greater capacities for fostering “inquiring systems” in order to learn, adapt, and create new knowledge to meet emerging needs (see “Is Your Organization an Inquiring System?”).

The leadership challenges of the next 20 years are likely to revolve around the art of catalyzing networks of people rather than solely managing hierarchies as in the past. The ability to bring diverse perspectives to bear on key issues both inside and outside the organization and to work with multiple partners and alliances will be a critical skill for effective leaders. We believe the following core capabilities, rarely taught in today’s MBA or corporate leadership programs, will help define leadership excellence:

Engaging Strategic Questions. In a volatile and uncertain environment, one of the most credible stances leaders can take is to assist their organizations in discovering the right questions at the right time. A key leadership responsibility is creating infrastructures for dialogue and engagement that encourage others at all levels to develop insightful questions and to search for innovative paths forward. Leaders also need to consider reward systems that provide incentives for members to work across organizational boundaries to discover those challenging questions that create common focus and shared forward movement.

Convening and Hosting Learning Conversations. A core aspect of the leader’s new work is creating opportunities for learning conversations around catalyzing questions. However, authentic conversation is less likely to occur in a climate of fear, mistrust, and hierarchical control. The human mind and heart must be fully engaged in authentic conversation for the deeper questions to be surfaced that support the emergence of new knowledge. Thus, the ability to facilitate working conversations that enhance trust and reduce fear is an important leadership capability.

Supporting Appreciative Inquiry. Opening spaces of possibility through discovering powerful questions may require a shift in leadership orientation from what is not working and how to fix it, to what is working and how to leverage it. Shifting the focus in this direction enables leaders to foster networks of conversation based on leveraging emerging possibilities rather than just on fixing past mistakes. Leaders who ask, “What’s possible here and who cares?” will have a much easier time gaining the collaboration and best thinking of their constituents than those who ask, “What’s wrong here, and who is to blame?” By asking appreciative questions, organizations have the opportunity to grow in new directions.

Fostering Shared Meaning. Leaders of organizations in the 21st century will discover that one of their unique contributions is to provide conceptual leadership — creating a context of meaning through stories, images, and metaphors within which groups can discover relevant questions as well as deepen or shift their thinking together. To tap into this pool of shared meaning, which is the ground from which both powerful questions and innovative solutions emerge, network leaders need to put time and attention into framing common language and developing shared images and metaphors.

Nurturing Communities of Practice. Many of the most provocative questions for an organization’s future are first discovered on the front lines, in the middle of the action of everyday life. Key strategic questions that are critical for creating sustainable value are often lost because few of today’s leaders have been trained to notice, honor, and utilize the social fabric of learning that occurs through the informal “Communities of Practice” that exist throughout an organization. A Community of Practice is made of up people who share a common interest and who work together to expand their individual and collective capacity to solve problems over time. Nurturing these informal learning networks and honoring the questions they care about, is another core aspect of the leaders new work.

Using Collaborative Technologies. Intranet and groupware technologies are now making it possible for widely dispersed work groups to participate in learning conversations and team projects across time and space. As these tools become even more widely available, leaders will need to support widespread online conversations where members throughout the organization can contribute their own questions and best thinking to critical strategic issues. The Hewlett Packard case shows how important enabling technology infrastructures are for strategic innovation. Collaborative tools will be a critical factor in how well strategic questions travel both within the organization and among customers and other stakeholders who are key to success.

Co-Evolving the Future

It is quite easy to learn the basics of crafting powerful questions. However, once you have begun down this path, it’s hard to turn back. As your questions broaden and deepen, so does your experience of life. There is no telling where a powerful question might lead you. Transformative conversations can result from posing a simple question such as: “What questions are we not asking ourselves about the situation in the Middle East?” Tantalizing possibilities emerge from the simple act of changing a preposition from “in” to “for” as in the HP example. Profound systemic change can emerge from creating a process for discovering and acting on the “big questions” within a business setting.

Where collaborative learning and breakthrough thinking are requirements for a sustainable business future, asking “questions that matter” and engaging diverse constituencies in learning conversations are a core process for survival. Because questions are inherently related to action, they are at the heart of an organization’s capacity to mobilize the resources required to create a positive future. Seeing the organization as a dynamic network of conversations through which the organization evolves its future encourages members at every level to search for questions related to their real work that can catalyze collective energy and momentum. It enables each one of us to realize that our thoughtful participation in discovering and exploring questions that matter — to our team, to our organization, and to the larger communities of which we are a part — we can make a difference to the whole. For it is only in this way that organizations will be able to cultivate both the knowledge required to thrive today and the wisdom needed to ensure a sustainable future.

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But how do we go about finding a consultant who can give us the help we need? Managers—particularly those seeking to build “learning organizations” — can find themselves frustrated by the quality of advice and services they receive from outside experts. Recent research into the experience of consultants who specialize in organizational learning disciplines suggests that this frustration can stem from the conflicting, unspoken assumptions managers and consultants hold as they embark on an initiative together.

This finding raises important questions for managers: What mental models do you hold about the change process? What role should consultants play? How do your preconceptions shape the relationships you form with consultants? And, finally, what outcomes do you expect — quick fixes or lasting shifts in corporate culture?

To begin to explore these questions, let’s first consider why tackling today’s complex challenges requires a shift in understanding about learning and work. We then examine the role of the consultant in building capacity for ongoing organizational learning.

Building Social Bonds

Thought leaders such as Peter Senge and William Isaacs suggest that many managers fail to bring about needed organizational change because of their assumptions about learning and work. For example, many executives assume that work is best done by finding a technically competent person in the area of concern, having this person determine the most appropriate course of action, and then implementing that action. From this perspective, learning is a process through which individuals gain technical knowledge.

These executives also assume that the best way to determine technical ability is through competition — that is, generating a debate between technical experts to determine who best understands how to help. Feeling the need to be proactive, these specialists may hastily label something as a “problem” and look for the most direct solution: the “quickest fix.” This approach often improves the situation in the short run but actually worsens it over the long term.

Learning experts suggest that this emphasis on technical competence and competition may be useful for relatively simple issues, but not for more complex challenges. The difficulties facing most managers today are generally too intricate for one or two people to determine the right course of action based on previous experience. Each situation is likely to be different from previous ones, requiring solutions tailored to the particular circumstances.

Therefore, rather than focusing on individual expertise, Senge and others recommend a view of work that emphasizes building social bonds — through practicing collaborative tools, such as dialogue, partnership coaching, and visioning — while getting things done. As people develop new skills for conversing and new ways of behaving, they build strong relationships and increase their capacity for anticipating and handling novel situations together. From this perspective, learning means building the capacity to learn together how to meet future challenges.

From Problem Solving to Capacity Building

Thus, to be successful in this rapidly changing marketplace, we need to cultivate groups of people with diverse perspectives who can learn how to come to a shared understanding of the often hidden forces that shape their organizations both internally and externally. In addition, these teams should include those charged with implementing decisions. As a result, they can take more effective action at a fundamental rather than symptomatic level.

In this context, according to Senge and Daniel H. Kim, consultants are ideally capacity builders who develop links between research and practice rather than problem solvers. They provide methods and tools to help others expand their capabilities and skills on an ongoing basis, thereby transforming concepts into practical know-how and results. These consultants may have knowledge in a variety of areas, but the contribution they make is framed as building capacity for learning and interpersonal connections rather than providing expertise.

What are the main differences between a problem-solving versus a capacity-building approach to consulting? (See “Alternative Models of Consulting.”)

Linear vs. Cyclical Processes. Consultants who take a problem-solving orientation typically use a linear process in their work. They first identify problems, then diagnose them, and finally find and implement solutions. At this point, the project or consulting assignment often ends. In contrast, consultants who view their purpose as enabling organizations to continually adjust to change typically implement a cyclical process. With each project or assignment, they generate new information about the organization’s culture and what is required for it to move toward its vision.

Single vs. Double-Loop Learning. Chris Argyris and Donald Schön were the first to describe single-loop and double-loop learning. When we engage in single-loop learning, as is typical of a problem-solving approach, we take action to solve a problem, assess the consequences of our intervention, and use what we learn in taking new actions; we continue this process until we think we have solved the problem. Single-loop learning might involve asking, “Did the action solve the problem? Did we meet the standards we had set?”

In double-loop learning, which is a key element of building capacity to handle change, we assess not only the effect of our actions on the problem, but also the variables that shape thinking within the organization more broadly. We do this by asking questions such as, “What made us think this was a problem? Why did we set the standards in such a way?”

Finite Commitment vs. “Communities of Practice.” Consultants who employ a linear process that has definite starting and finishing points usually view the client relationship as temporary, ending when the contract is fulfilled. Those focused on building capacity using a cyclical approach may utilize contracts to define work they do, but they view their purpose, process, and commitment as long term.

Etienne Wenger has referred to the long-term relationship that can form between a consultant and client organization as a “community of practice” (see “Communities of Practice: Learning As a Social System,” V9N5). While not formally part of the organization, consultants learn together with organization members through their regular interactions. As a result, they create social bonds and a shared repertoire of resources (common language, sensibilities, and so forth) that enable them to collaborate effectively.

These communities of practice do not expire when a contract ends or a project is completed. Rather, the nature of the community shifts from active engagement to “dispersed,” where members keep in touch though they no longer engage with the same intensity. In this situation, consultants feel committed to organizations beyond the life of particular contracts, because they feel they belong to a community. They might, without charging a fee, provide advice outside of a given project.

Experts vs. Capacity Builders. Finally, the role the consultant plays differs according to his or her orientation and the client’s expectations. In a problem-solving approach, a client would expect a consultant to act as an expert in the managers’ area of need. This role might include helping managers determine what they need to do or helping managers who already know what they want to do to implement their plans. On the other hand, clients who understand the power of building capacity for learning may require a consultant to facilitate the process by which members of the organization solve their own problems.

The problem-solving and capacity-building approaches appear to be quite separate models of how consultants can act. We might expect that consultants would consistently adopt one or the other of the approaches. Our research suggests, however, that consultants’ choices are more complex and have a lot to do with their clients’ assumptions about how to tackle the organizational challenges they face.

Handling the Tension

Although many consultants may agree with the philosophy of organizational learning, because they practice predominantly among clients oriented toward solving problems, they feel pulled between the two models. To begin to explore the impact of this tension on client-consultant relationships, we interviewed seven New Zealand consultants who had worked, cumulatively, with organizations in four of the five disciplines that Senge says are essential to organizational learning: team learning, shared vision, systems thinking, and personal mastery. All worked independently or in firms with 10 or fewer associates. Four were founders and managers of their own consulting companies. Only one consultant from any given company was represented in the study. All were either known to the researchers or recommended by one of the other consultants being interviewed.

We chose these consultants because we knew they preferred taking a capacity-building approach in their work and wanted to analyze how they dealt with the tension between the short-term results that some clients wanted them to produce and their personal desire to help the client support the creation of infrastructures for learning. We kept the sample small so we could conduct semi-structured interviews to generate rich descriptions of consulting practices. Such descriptions allowed us to explore the particular issues relevant to consultants as they dealt with the tension between problem solving and capacity building.

We asked the consultants to discuss how they had carried out critical phases of the consulting process with what they considered a particularly important client. They described how they had gained access to the organization, established a contract, collected data, diagnosed needs, implemented solutions, reviewed work, and terminated the consultancy. We also asked them how the relationship with the chosen client differed from relationships with other clients.

Consulting for Capacity Building. After we analyzed transcripts of the interviews, we saw clear evidence that the consultants viewed their work in terms of building capacity. The consultants’ descriptions of actions they took revealed their deliberate efforts to conduct themselves in ways that aligned with organizational learning philosophies (see “Themes from Interviews”). For instance, they sought to understand their clients’ work at a deep level and confront clients with double-loop challenges that went beyond contractual obligations.

In addition, the consultants described the kinds of benefits their clients received in behavioral terms, that is, they didn’t discuss how they solved particular problems, but rather described their clients’ attitudinal changes with phrases such as “greater self-awareness,” “commitment to people issues,” “improved communications,” and “a shift from a managing or controlling orientation to a learning orientation.” One consultant described the benefits in this way:

“I am helping them to work as a team rather than as individuals. So they are benefiting . . . partly from my intellectual input and partly from my facilitation skills, and also from my ability to challenge them. They end up better organized, more focused, thinking slightly differently — sometimes a lot differently — which in the beginning they couldn’t. Generally speaking, they believe they have done it themselves, which is about right because they have developed themselves. The thinking is theirs. The decision is theirs.”

Three participants also mentioned “knowledge transfer to the client” as an important outcome; they didn’t just teach their clients technical “know-how.” One participant described his goal as passing his “cast of mind” or way of thinking about the work to his client. Another said, “One of the requirements of the design is that [clients] are able to perform some of the skills we perform for them and then [the skills] become embedded. So we demonstrate over and over again. . . . Otherwise there is no change in behavior. They have to unlearn 30 years of belief and practice, and I know how difficult that is. But as the project draws down, we will appear less frequently.”

Along with framing benefits to clients in capacity-building terms, participants spoke about adopting organizational learning principles directly into their own practice. For example, three consultants described how they incorporated reflection into their process of review, both with the client and with themselves. One respondent felt that personal reflection was often a more intense form of review than client feedback because “My experience is we tend to be harder on ourselves than clients [are].”

Four participants considered ongoing conversations with their clients — what Juanita Brown and David Isaacs describe as a core business process that contributes to learning — an essential part of their consulting work. Talk in organizations is often focused on making decisions, which in turn creates adversarial relationships that do not encourage reflection or shared understanding. Conversation needs to allow for a full range of contributions — offering new ideas, yielding to the direction of others, and reflecting in silence — to create the conditions for learning.

Some described using conversation not only to establish issues to address but to build commitment to the change processes being considered. One participant said that conversation often replaced the traditional attempts by managers to “sell” change programs to the rest of the organization. Engaging people throughout the organization in conversation about issues of significant concern allowed shared understanding of needed action to emerge.

Limits to Capacity Building. As this study indicates, consultants endeavored to incorporate capacity building into their work with key clients with whom they had longstanding relationships. However, two outcomes from the interviews showed that this approach was not possible in all their projects.

Six participants mentioned clients’ apprehension about taking an overly theoretical orientation, a fear intensified by the fact that some areas of organizational learning — such as systems thinking and reflective conversation — may feel “unnatural” and involve concepts that do not appear to have immediate practical value to the client. One participant described clients struggling to “find the connection between what we are talking about and the bottom line.” To respond to such concerns, these consultants deliberately developed strategies that both delivered practical outcomes and challenged clients to “widen their mindsets.” Often this involved starting the relationship with intermittent contacts and small projects, which built into long-term relationships over time.

Six participants also mentioned the importance of developing trust with the clients before the capacity building work could take hold. Because practicing organizational learning concepts requires the involvement of both minds and hearts, along with deeper levels of communication, consultants reported feeling bolder in confronting clients about issues that needed to be addressed only as trust grew. As one participant put it: “With a stronger relationship with the client . . . I became bolder . . . not letting them ‘wimp out,’ and I would say, ‘Give it a go.’” Another expressed the tendency for consultants to demonstrate personal commitment as they tried to build trust and capacity: “We can’t retreat in the end and say, ‘You paid us to do this thing.’ So we tend to enter into quite deep relationships with clients because of this. The communication modes and the levels of trust are high and we are working with minds and hearts. When we are doing learning, there is no other way.”

Implications for Consultants and Managers

Although this research was exploratory, involving interviews with a small sample of consultants, the results were enlightening to both the interviewers and participants. We had suspected that consultants would have an “either/or” approach to resolving the tension inherent in their position. Either they would operate according to traditional models of consulting, with an emphasis on technical rationality, or they would adapt their practice to reflect organizational learning principles.

We were surprised and encouraged to find that the consultants interviewed had more sophisticated ways of dealing with the paradox. They were able to hold building capacity for learning as an ideal, yet work with clients who did not allow them to put this philosophy into practice. They typically started their relationships with projects aimed at deliverable outcomes that allowed them to establish credibility. Consultants were willing to establish expertise by finding practical solutions to the client’s immediate business problems. At the same time, the participants in this study consciously built relationships with clients that would make capacity-building consulting possible in the future.

Consultants reported being able to do their best work within trusting relationships with clients. Such relationships enabled them:

• To more effectively understand clients’ real needs through deeper insights into the organization.
• To be bolder in confronting clients with fundamental changes that needed to be made.
• To review and improve their own practice openly and collaboratively with clients.

Participants also generally talked about their own responsibility in building trusting relationships. They described strategies such as using small, intermittent projects with clear, practical outcomes and deliberately avoiding language and work that appeared too theoretical or conceptual.

Although the focus of the research was on consultants, this finding has important implications for managers seeking to use consulting services. Because the responsibility for the development and maintenance of any relationship lies with both parties, managers need to understand how to enable consultants to be most effective. In situations where managers do not accept this responsibility, a Catch-22 situation seems likely to occur. For example, managers may hire consultants to build the organization’s capacity for learning, but reward only those who provide short-term, expert solutions to organizational problems. In doing so, they force consultants to compete with each other and offer them little freedom to experiment, act openly, or confront real issues.

While all the consultants in the study reported being able to form successful long-term relationships with some managers, they also cited many examples where executives’ assumptions made it difficult to do so (see “Mike’s Story”). For these consultants, the majority of their clients were primarily interested in having their problems solved.

What challenge does this research hold for you? If you want to lead change in your organization with the help of consultants, you must build trusting partnerships that will allow the consultants to act in a truly capacity-building role. While doing so is based on a set of assumptions that may feel unfamiliar and unnatural to many managers, those who can make this shift in perspective will have an advantage in their efforts to build organizations equipped to adapt to the challenges of the future.

Phil Ramsey (P. L. Ramsey@massey.ac.nz) is a lecturer in human resource development at Massey University in New Zealand.

Paresha Sinha has consulted and taught in India. Her master’s degree included research on consulting for learning organizations. Paresha currently works for the Centre for the Study of Leadership at Victoria University, New Zealand.

For Further Reading

Brown, Juanita, and David Isaacs. “Conversation As a Core Business Process,” The Systems Thinker, V7N10, December 1996/January 1997

Organizational Learning at Work: Embracing the Challenges of the New Workplace (Pegasus Communications, 1999)

Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue (Random House, 1998)

The post Consultants as Problem Solvers or Capacity Builders? appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

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

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

Foresight in the Face of Complexity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foresight and the Role of Vision

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

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

FOUR FACES OFVISION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foresight and the Power of Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewards of the Future

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

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

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

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About six years ago, Colonial Pipeline had a defining moment: One million gallons of diesel fuel spilled from a ruptured pipeline into Reedy River in South Carolina. This accident damaged the company’s reputation with both the public and regulators. Forced to scrutinize how we conducted business and maintained the pipeline, we discovered that human factors are as important to the operation of the pipeline as mechanical, electrical, and computer systems. In response, our leaders worked with employees to begin making changes in the ways we did things. Relying on our frontline workers to provide answers and to become change agents has proven invaluable in the journey to operational excellence.

Conduct of Operations Guide

Over the past several years, all employees from the executive offices to the pipeline facilities have become involved in continuous improvement and learning. One of our first realizations in the aftermath of the Reedy River accident was that we didn’t have a set of administrative policies that guided the performance of daily operations tasks. In 1998, by working with people in field operations such as maintenance, quality assurance, and engineering, we developed a “Conduct of Operations” document that specifies the proper use of procedures, communication techniques, written information in logs, control of equipment, professional behaviors in operations areas, verification techniques, and so on. Operations employees recently updated the document, which had been based on a model from the nuclear industry.

Compiling the Conduct of Operations reflected a shift toward involving the people who do the work in setting policies and solving problems. At the same time, we adopted a guideline that any person has the authority to shut down the pipeline if he or she thinks there’s a problem. Although ceasing operation is undesirable from a business perspective, we would rather shut down and lose revenue while we investigate the cause of the unusual indicator than take the chance that there’s a leak or spill. Protecting the public, the environment, and our employees needs to be the top priority.

STAR. One of the elements of the Conduct of Operations is STAR, which is an acronym for Stop, Think, Act, and Review. This tool has proven to be a simple but powerful way to avoid errors. When a person does a task, he or she stops before doing the first step, thinks about the correct action, acts by doing the step, and reviews to ensure the actual result matches the expected result. For example, if I’m going to open a valve to start gasoline flowing through the pipeline, I’ll stop, think about what I’m going to do, push the correct button, and then look to see that the valve for gasoline is open. If there’s a problem, I can immediately recognize and correct it. Through our voluntary near-miss reporting system, we receive regular accounts of how STAR has prevented errors or other problems.

We introduce and reinforce the use of STAR in a number of ways. The most effective is a yellow foam star similar to that shown in “The STAR Process.” These stars or small signs with the acronym are visible at all facilities as a constant reminder that this simple tool can prevent errors. Some people have even adopted the STAR process at home.

The Power of Teams

Each of Colonial Pipeline’s four districts, which span the entire pipeline, and its operating control center in Atlanta now has an OPEX team. The teams have between 7 and 12 members and include operators, technicians, project team personnel, and an operations manager. Individuals are chosen based on their experience and expressed interest in representing their local units as operational excellence “champions.” Team members regularly communicate with each other through quarterly meetings, conference calls, and e-mails. All teams have similar charters and goals that are linked to corporate, district, and individual goals.

The members of the OPEX teams have been invaluable in leading change initiatives at their locations. With the support of local and corporate management, they have conversations with their coworkers about ways to achieve “spill-free, error-free performance.” In many cases, the OPEX team members have received training as on-the-job coaches or procedure writers. One individual has led an effort to develop operating procedures that are task-specific, designed with the user in mind, and focused on mitigating risks. After five years, these procedures are used at all facilities. They have played a large part in ensuring safer operations and are used as training tools for new employees.

To increase team effectiveness, we’ve used The Team Memory Jogger, a publication of Goal/QPC. OPEX team members regularly evaluate their meetings and use the ideas in the book to solve problems. They also use the “personal skills checklists” in the book to improve their own performance.

At the end of the year, all 50 team members are invited to a two-day Operational Excellence Summit. One manager calls this event “a family reunion, celebration, info-mercial, tent revival, cheerleading clinic, and time of learning.” Participants take advantage of the time together to share learnings. So team members can share their experiences with their coworkers back home, we have a graphic recorder document the event in evocative words and images. Reproductions of the illustrations are still being passed from location to location nine months after the last Summit, providing a rich source of discussion topics.

New Approaches

Based on our success with these kinds of tools, we have tried other things that we would not have attempted several years ago. Last year, all technicians who had been with the company less than five years participated in technical training. The training involved studies of electrical and mechanical principles, basic math, print reading, and assembling and disassembling valves and pumps. It also included storytelling. If someone had told me 10 years ago that our technicians would be involved in telling stories to one another as a part of their training, I would have laughed.

In any case, we know that people learn best when they are sharing meaningful experiences. At the different sessions of the technician course, participants were required to think of a story about their work. At each class meeting, one individual shared his or her story. This approach proved very successful in helping attendees understand what being a technician at Colonial means. It also aided people from different locations and backgrounds in creating a network of support.

I recently used another technique with the Operations Leadership team, which includes those leaders in all areas of the organization who are involved in strategic initiatives and decisions. They were dealing with a complex issue about organization redesign that required a common understanding of all the challenges and mutual agreement about the path forward. I adapted a tool called “Visual Explorer” for the group. As I travel around the pipeline system, I habitually buy postcards that convey metaphors or show local scenes. For example, last year I purchased postcards with images of Amish agriculture and people working together building barns in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the setting for a technicians’ meeting.

At the meeting, I spread lots of the postcards on a table. After listening to a presentation, participants wrote down their thoughts about what was important to them regarding the redesign. They then went to the table and looked at the postcards until they found one or several that “connected” with both them personally and their thoughts about organization redesign. Finally, they went back to their seats and wrote about the meaning the cards had for them in this context.

I didn’t know what to expect when the time came to discuss the images. What occurred was a thoughtful conversation about many aspects of the issues involved in organization redesign. Although participants didn’t come to a final conclusion about how to approach the task, they agreed on the need to work together to build new capabilities in the organization’s workforce.

Writing this article has made me realize that our mission statement about delivering energy solutions and linking folks who need one another doesn’t just apply to transporting petroleum products from suppliers to consumers. We can supply energy for learning to one another, and we can continue to link employees with learning tools that develop individuals, teams, and the organization. Linking, conversing, developing, working together—these practices energize our workforce and lead to more systemic learning.

The post Systems Learning for “Error-Free” Performance at Colonial Pipeline appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

A FAULTY FIX

In our efforts to improve the quality of meetings, we often work to clarify agendas, start and end on time, and agree to follow-up actions (B1). But making meetings more programmed may alienate a large group of participants and actually increase dissatisfaction (R2).

Satisfying Some, Not All

Many people in organizations in the West would describe a successful meeting as one in which the agenda was clearly presented and followed, the meeting started and ended on time, and the group agreed to clear follow up actions. Unfortunately, while a clearly planned, efficiently led meeting is often preferable to a meandering brain dump, organization and efficiency alone may not eliminate complaints about meetings. In fact, making meetings more programmed may alienate a large group of participants (see “A Faulty Fix”) — and make meeting even less useful than before.

Our awareness of differences in expectations and perceptions of meetings grew as we began to utilize the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI). Ned Herrmann, an electrical engineer by training, led the leadership development process for General Electric for many years. When the early research on left and right-brain differences emerged, Ned created an assessment tool that measured not just left and right-brain function but also neo-cortex (upper brain) and limbic (mid-brain) preferences. The resulting instrument is one of the most carefully validated measurements of individual preferences in how we process and make sense of what’s going on around us. As such, it gives us a sense of how people with different HBDI profiles participate in and gain value from meetings—or, alternatively, feel alienated by a process that conflicts with their needs and interests (see “Herrmann Brain Dominance Model” on p. 9).

Meetings that reflect each of the four quadrants of the brain would have very different characteristics.

“A” quadrant (left-brained) meetings would:

• Be goal-focused.
• Be brief and to the point.
• Include objectives and an agenda prepared in advance with times, topics, and who is responsible for each item.
• Respect the timetable.
• Focus on the bottom line: Time is money.
• Succinctly articulate outcomes.
• Include appropriate data and financials.
• Allow time for relevant analysis and debate.

“B” quadrant (left-brained) meetings would:

• Respect protocol and include attendees based on rank and responsibility.
• Include a detailed agenda sent well ahead of time.
• Have clearly assigned roles (facilitator, timekeeper, scribe).
• Stick to the agenda. Start and end on time.
• Include a minimum of chitchat.
• Not allow side conversations.
• End with clear action items stating who, when, how, where.
• Include minutes sent to all participants after the event.
• Take place regularly with agreed upon formats. For example, weekly staff meeting, monthly division meeting, quarterly client review.

“C” quadrant (right-brained) meetings would:

• Include time for sharing and building trust.
• Allow for informal, spontaneous, off-line interaction.
• Include activities and/or food to build community.
• Have a check-in process at the beginning to help the group connect.
• Build ownership and strong team interaction by respecting all ideas.
• Include a debrief.
• Invite a cross-section of participants from throughout the organization.
• Take place in a comfortable environment.
• Include facilitation, facilitation, and more facilitation!

“D” quadrant (right-brained) meetings would:

• Be spontaneous about when, how, and whether to meet.
• Constantly stretch the organization’s vision.
• Focus on future possibilities rather than tactics.
• Challenge participants’ assumptions and encourage them to think “out of the box.”
• Take place in unusual places, at different times.
• Include a loose agenda and timetable.
• Encourage doodling and fun.
• Allow for brainstorming and free flow of ideas.
• Include “toys” to stimulate participants’ thinking and help them let go of stress.
• Provide big-picture context.

You may quickly notice that the “A” and “B” quadrants reflect traditional business measures of what constitutes a high-value meeting. Yet these are the antithesis of what the “C” and “D” quadrants promote. Sensitivity to people and relationship issues as well as intuition stem from the “C” quadrant. Visionary, entrepreneurial, creative leaps come from the “D” quadrant. If we ignore the preferences of people who operate from these two quadrants, we will manage and implement projects efficiently but never notice when our products and services have become obsolete or when our customers and employees feel ignored, taken for granted, unheard, or unappreciated.

HERRMANN BRAIN DOMINANCE MODEL

The Herrmann Brain Dominance Model contains four distinct thinking styles, incorporating the left and right hemispheres as well as the upper and lower parts of the brain. We each develop a particular way in which we see the world, process information, and make decisions that reflects the characteristics of one or more quadrants of the brain.

People in more than half the cultures of the world view typical American business “efficiencies” as an insult to their intelligence and a major barrier to building successful relationships. According to Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, co-authors of Riding the Waves of Culture(McGraw-Hill, 1998), the highly structured meetings of most Western countries would impede success in Latin America and much of Africa and Asia. This echoes the foundational research of Dr. Edward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall, who state in Hidden Differences, Doing Business with the Japanese(Anchor, 1990), “Adherence to a rigid agenda and the achievement of meaningful consensus represent opposite goals and do not mix.”

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner explain that cultures are either specific (relationships prescribed by a contract) or diffuse (whole person involved in business relationships). In diffuse cultures, such as those found in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, people constantly share a great deal of background information. High-trust relationships stem from personal familiarity, so everyone keeps up with the lives of those around them. By contrast, in specific cultures such as North America and Europe, people compart mentalize their personal relationships, work, and many aspects of day-to-day life. They often believe that, to be efficient, they must limit conversations to the immediate topic and not “waste time” on chit-chat.

Nevertheless, some Americans are diffuse, quadrant “C” and “D” people. They understand the big picture and go to meetings with an open mind, expecting to learn from others. For such people, too much structure blocks the flow of communication and trust. They believe in their ability to listen intuitively and achieve consensus by involving each member of the group. These participants do not measure a good meeting by how quickly it adjourns, but rather by how much is shared, resolved, and agreed upon, even though the meeting may have gone well past the time allotted to it. The solution is to dig deeper to find out the underlying cause of discontent. We believe meetings can be substantially improved when:

• all four quadrants are considered in meeting design
• specific and diffuse expectations are addressed,
• a brief evaluation is held at the close of each meeting, and
• the tension between differing perspectives is “held” rather than, “resolved.”

If we have only one system for structuring our time, we may please half the population but organize our business teams in such a way that we fail miserably when we attempt to build deep trust and genuine ownership, deal effectively with other cultures, and even communicate with others in our own organizations. The challenge is to recognize and respect differences in expectations for meetings and hold the “opposites” in tension, without abandoning either preference.

From Uniformity to Variety

Moving from a “one-meeting-fits-all” mindset to multiple settings, styles, and procedures can help answer the cries for “No more meetings!” We can gain great dividends with careful thought about the purpose for calling a meeting. Who needs to be present? For how long? Where would be the best place to meet? What procedure should we use?

We gleaned the following ideas from high-performance teams and companies around the globe:

1. The power of silence. To start the meeting at a deeper level, pose questions, then sit in silence for five minutes before responding. Throughout a meeting, anyone can suggest a silence to encourage self-reflection.

2. Virtual, on-line meetings. Have participants “check in” at the beginning by sharing their state-of-mind and “check out” at the end to help bring closure. Set the agenda in advance, yet leave room for new topics.

3. Conference calls. Ask that people identify themselves before speaking. The group creates the agenda in advance and determines when to move to a new topic and when to end the session. Evaluate the experience at the end to celebrate successes, share lessons learned, and continue to improve process/performance.

4. Walking meetings (usually two people). These informal strolls can be especially good for focusing on a challenging problem. They provide privacy and time to reflect and go deeper.

5. Representative meetings. Instead of having many people participate, invite a smaller group of cross-functional representatives to meet.

6. Missing voice. Pull in an empty chair and make a nametag to remind the group to consider the concerns, questions, and needs of a missing team member, client, or other stakeholder.

Moving from a “one-meeting-fits-all” mindset to multiple settings, styles, and procedures can help answer the cries for “No more meetings!”

7. Outside the office. For a change of perspective, meet at a retreat center, hotel, park, coffee shop, or client’s/ vendor’s plant.

8. Meetings on tape. Record a meeting for an attendee who is traveling or ill.

9. Capacity building. Use meetings to grow younger team members by engaging potential leaders in challenging roles to facilitate, present, critique, celebrate, and evaluate.

10. Huddles. Spontaneous meetings that anyone can convene.

11. Deep Dives. More lengthy meetings to question assumptions around a specific project. The title signifies a need to go deep into details, root causes, and work process improvement.

12. Fireside Chats. Gather teams to provide context, congratulate, encourage, challenge, and work to deeply engage commitment through dialogue.

No matter what the setting, agenda, or content, create and be accountable for a set of ground rules, such as:

• This is a safe zone
• No rank in the room
• Everyone participates, no one dominates
• Help us stay on track
• One speaker at a time
• Give freely of your experience
• Agree only if it makes sense to do so
• Listen as an ally
• Be an active listener
• Maintain each other’s self-esteem
• Keep an open mind
• Maintain confidentiality
• No outside work
• Have fun

One of the best skills we have learned to improve meetings for all involved is to challenge ourselves with at least five good questions in advance, such as:

• How can I add value?
• What is the purpose of this meeting?
• Who will attend?
• What else might I accomplish before, during, or after with any of the attendees?
• Can I double my value by representing a partner, client, or peer?

By finding ways to make meetings meaningful for all participants and capitalizing on the strengths of our diverse workforce, we may finally be able to transform our shared “meeting fatigue” and move to new levels of productivity and enjoyment. Think of meetings as time to build collective intelligence, grow community, and engage highest levels of collaboration. You will know you are on the right track when problems are identified much earlier, solutions are more creative, and work becomes more rewarding and even fun. So get out there and experiment!

Ann McGee-Cooper, Ed. D., has been called a visionary and catalyst for the transformation of American business.

Duane Trammell is a Founding Partner at AMCA, Inc. and coauthor of Time Management for Unmanageable People.

Gary Looper is a Partner at AMCA, Inc. and Project Leader of the Servant-Leadership Learning Community.

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Trust and Community

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

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

The Power of And

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

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

Behind this double focus were some core beliefs and assumptions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Individual Growth AND Team Empowerment.

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

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

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

Group Achievements

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

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

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

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

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The Morning Star incident, as it became widely known, sparked a series of meetings among black clergy throughout Greater Boston to discuss the alarming increase in youth homicide in their communities. Since the late 1980s, many of them had been deeply concerned about the escalating violence among young people (in 1990 Boston had 62 homicide victims aged 24 or younger), but few had taken concrete steps to address it. After the incident, a small group of pastors — Jeffrey Brown, a Baptist minister in Cambridge; Ray Hammond, a Methodist minister in Jamaica Plain; Eugene Rivers, a Pentecostal minister in Four Corners, Dorchester; and Sam Wood, a nondenominational minister in Grove Hall, Roxbury — decided to work together to figure out a solution.

The four ministers based their collaboration on the following questions: How can we make the transition from violence to inquiry? What principles and processes are required to effect the profound change we so obviously need? They decided to walk the streets together and talk to gang members on late Friday evenings, focusing on Four Corners. They figured if they could make a difference in the most dangerous neighborhood in Boston, they could impact the entire city. The responses they received from young people evolved into themes that formed the basis of the alliance they created called the “TenPoint Coalition.” TenPoint then became a catalyst for mobilizing the entire city to support at-risk youth.

Taking a Stand

For Reverend Jeffrey Brown, deciding to take on inner-city violence was an evolutionary process. Although he had preached at an inner-city church since 1987, most of the members of his congregation commuted to his service from the suburbs, where he himself lived. As the homicide rate skyrocketed, Jeff would dutifully speak about the violence to his congregation — but still drive past the problem back to his home. Finally, in January 1990, when a teenager was murdered by gang members a hundred yards from his church, he decided to act.

Jeff was determined to discover the source of the violence plaguing the entire community. He volunteered at the high school but soon realized that the youth he wanted to talk to weren’t going to school—they were hanging out at parks and on street corners. So he decided to walk the streets, even though his congregation objected. At some point, Jeff realized that, in order to achieve the community he wanted to be a part of, he had to be willing to risk the community he thought he had.

Jeff felt particularly challenged to suspend his assumptions, the many cultural myths he had acquired about inner-city kids. He believed, for example, that they were completely materialistic; spending time with them convinced him that their materialism was comparable to anyone else’s in Western society. He also believed that kids doing or dispensing drugs were cold and heartless; when he got to know them, he saw them exhibit a whole range of emotions and observed that they were mostly scared to death. Jeff also thought he was going into a “godless” world; he has since had some of his most profound theological conversations with these youth. Once he suspended his assumptions, Jeff was able to build relationships with many of these kids.

Building Bridges

The other ministers in the coalition’s core group had similar revelations: Each had to risk the answer he already had to unearth the answer that was needed. Through rich conversations, which they later learned were based on the fundamental principles of dialogue, they generated ideas they would never have thought of individually. The group’s primary goal was to reduce the homicide rate in the area. What they achieved went beyond any of their expectations—building bridges throughout the community.

The first bridge emerged through interactions with the Boston police department, whose gang-unit officers wondered what ministers were doing walking dangerous streets late at night. At community meetings, when officers would pull a pastor aside to question him, they would be unexpectedly gratified to find someone who appreciated their own struggles working with gangs and could offer insight into the troubled youth.

Next, TenPoint formed a partnership with the court system, because the ministers had begun to vouch for and support court-involved youth when they appeared before a judge or probation officer. Like the police, the probation officers asked them about their involvement and wanted to collaborate. Once the ministers realized the two groups normally didn’t talk with one another, they initiated meetings to bring them together. The circle of committed people continued to widen, as community and city agencies learned about the group’s efforts and decided to participate; even the private sector got involved once they realized that reduced violence was good for business.

Eventually, Boston’s youth violence began to decrease dramatically: The youth homicide rate dropped from 151 in 1991 to zero in 1995. The Boston police commissioner reported to Jeff that, at an annual command staff meeting to discuss budgets and purchases, instead of their usual request for bigger guns and more sophisticated surveillance equipment, his officers asked if they could create a program to find jobs for street kids.

Principles of Collective Leadership

Since that success, Jeff has formed the Circle Institute with Bill Isaacs, founder and president of DIA•logos, a company offering transformational leadership programs in dialogue and dialogic consulting and change projects for organizations. Together they have begun to reflect upon and articulate some of the principles and processes for collective leadership:

Magnetic Identity. The starting point for a group discovering the power of collective leadership is to ask, “What is my stand? Where will I focus my energy?” According to Bill, the “charge” you carry is a function of what you yourself put most stock in. When you position yourself around something positive, you tend to organize yourself accordingly. Not only do you move in that direction, the things that support your vision will be drawn to you. In this way, you can polarize your environment to lift it up. Jeff and his colleagues took a stand by adopting a particular spiritual orientation that polarized and expanded their world. For instance, many members of Jeff ’s church initially resisted his youth outreach efforts. But as increasing numbers of young people began to attend the weekly services — including relatives of church members — the congregation began to support his change initiative.

Two in Agreement. “Two in agreement” represents the seed of the collective. It is the discovery of an already existing resonance between at least two people that can be cultivated and expanded with conscious attention and awareness. Agreement, Bill notes, does not mean that people necessarily agree conceptually, but that they connect at a deeper level. This principle builds on the first in that two people, closely aligned in their stand, can polarize interest or response from others, either attracting or repelling them.

Resonant Containers. Most groups collapse under pressure. Creating a container — that is, setting a pattern of relationship where an increasingly large number of people are in agreement — gives a group the capacity to hold pressure. When a core group of people can hold an intense pressure as they inquire into the questions, not the answers, to problems, gradually more and more people can become involved.

Differentiation. As people come into agreement with one another, something counterintuitive begins to happen: They become more distinctive and differentiated, not more alike. This principle emerges from the idea that, as people become more aligned with others, they can relax and become more authentic. Further, by encouraging diversity, a group is able to encompass far more complexity than if it were uniform. Members develop a broader range of vision than before.

Operating from Love. Coming from a place of love creates an inclusiveness that leaves nobody out. This does not mean operating with sentimentality or emotion. It means behaving with awareness, committing acts of kindness, going to where people are instead of expecting them to come to you, suspending assumptions about them, and so on. In the end, the energy that brings and holds a container together is love.

When a group practices these principles, they produce a charged energy field that subtly polarizes people’s thoughts and feelings toward a concrete goal.

Putting It into Practice

Based on the results of TenPoint and other large, multinational organizations, Bill and Jeff have been evolving a sequence of actions for putting collective leadership into practice. They call this process “sea change,” based on a phrase from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest that indicates a universal shifting. Sea change refers to the kind of profound transformation that cannot be understood without experiencing it and that is presumed to be impossible. To foster this kind of transformation in organizations requires creating cascading patterns of deep agreement and genuine resonance throughout the system. When this flow occurs, producing genuine change feels more effortless and requires much less struggle and pain than we’re used to.

Sea change also refers to a shift toward something more stable and lasting than previously existed. For example, as TenPoint helped certain groups in Boston shift their pattern of relationships, that city experienced a drastic reduction of youth violence. Unfortunately, a city’s wider ills cannot be cured permanently by one group, because an urban center is part of a wider ecosystem that constantly influences it. Nevertheless, Jeff and Bill are struck by the degree of profound change that occurred over the past eight years. More than ever, they are committed to advancing collaborative leadership so that, ultimately, people can influence the thought and emotional patterns that underlie any system, no matter how large or daunting.

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications. This article is based on a presentation that Reverend Jeffrey Brown and William Isaacs gave at the 2001 Systems Thinking in Action® Conference. Recordings of this session are available from Pegasus Communications, Inc.

The Circle Institute is a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, MA. It is affiliated with DIA•logos, which uses dialogue and systems intervention to bring together traditionally conflicting constituencies to foster collective leadership for organizational and community change.

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Undertaking a Multi-Level Effort

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building In-House Capability

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

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

Preserving the Best

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

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

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

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