Family life, like organizational life, is filled with challenges and complexity. We begin family life with great hopes of love and warmth. We dream about learning and growing as we build our lives together. Yet for numerous families, and friends living together as families, learning together seems rare. Too often, people are stymied when faced with the complexity and difficulty of actual family living.

Part of the reason for this difficulty is that couples and single parents often lack the perspective, skills, and tools for mastering the increasing rate of life changes. One essential perspective that we often miss is that our families are complex systems and, as such, are more than a group of individuals. Even divorced partners who are now co-parenting find that family dynamics persist. Any kind of shift for one member — such as a new job or a bad grade on an exam — has an impact on the family as a whole.

In the face of life’s inevitable changes and the complexity of our relationships, how can we thrive even when family dynamics become challenging? How can we pay attention to our difficulties in such a way that our relationships grow together, not fall apart? We believe that the five disciplines can help to create a learning family at home as much as they can build a learning organization at work.

Two Essential Capabilities

Family life is one setting where people can become more skillful at navigating life transitions in order to fulfill their aspirations. To do so, they need to feel a sense of safety, believe that what they want is important, and trust that the hard times, including painful feelings and difficult exchanges, can actually be sources of growth and healing. Two essential capabilities help families cultivate these experiences: 1) living in a creative orientation and 2) building a powerful context or “container” for speaking and listening deeply. Let’s take a closer look at these two capabilities.

Living in a Creative Orientation. Many families dwell in what author Robert Fritz calls a “reactive orientation.” They feel overwhelmed by forces that they believe are beyond their control, such as lack of time for family and friends, work and financial pressures, lack of support, and violence in the schools and media. These pressures tend to pull families apart even when members wish to be closer to each other. In addition, family life has its own inherent challenges such as working out differences between spouses, parenting children through different ages, and facing critical life passages such as birth and death. In a reactive mode, people start to blame themselves or others for their difficulties, or they simply feel helpless.

Fritz contrasts this with the concept of a “creative orientation.” In a creative orientation, we deepen our understanding of ourselves, we turn toward the possible, and we look for our own contribution to a current situation. In this way, we restore the sense of purpose and efficacy that we forget when we are in a reactive mode. Through our families, we also have the opportunity to deepen our understanding of others, their values, and their dreams. We learn to give what’s needed and to hold fast to each other’s aspirations, even when despair sets in. Together we learn how to stop blaming each other; clarify the values, aspirations, and talents that unite us; and affirm the kind of contribution we want to make to the outside world.

Building a Container. Building a container involves developing the capacity to listen and speak deeply together. In discussing the concept of a container, Bill Isaacs, author and organizational consultant, suggests the image of a sturdy vessel that holds its bubbling hot contents without cracking, allowing them to transform into something of profound value. Too often, our families are the last people we turn to when we want to be heard, because of the intensity of emotions involved in intimate relationships. However, we can change that through carefully creating this kind of a container. A strong container can help us bring stability and resilience to life’s difficult situations instead of rushing in to fix them prematurely or running away from them. To build a container:

• Develop ground rules for engaging in difficult conversations.
• Establish uninterrupted times and places to explore and resolve tensions.
• Meet the challenges you and others are facing with commitment, courage, and curiosity.
• Slow down and reconnect with your heart.
• Respect other family members’ feelings, and seek to understand the thinking that leads them to feel the way they do.
• Agree on how to behave with each other on a daily basis.
• Trust that difficulties, when handled well, can lead to genuine growth.

The Five Disciplines at Home

We believe that the five disciplines point to actions that families can take to build such a container and to create fulfilling and loving lives together. A virtuous cycle can unfold in which applying the five disciplines enhances our ability to live in a creative orientation and build our containers, which in turn strengthens our ability to practice the five disciplines. Personal Mastery. In the early years of Innovation Associates’ Leadership and Mastery Program, participants’ spouses were encouraged to attend the training in recognition that a leader’s professional vision can be achieved only within the context of his or her personal aspirations. As an individual in a relationship, you have a responsibility to both yourself and your family to fulfill your potential. You also have a responsibility to help your partner and children realize their potential.

We suggest four ways to explore the path of personal mastery within your family:

The five disciplines point to actions that families can take to build such a container and to create fulfilling and loving lives together.

1. Make compromises and avoid sacrifices. Psychologist Nathaniel Branden suggests that compromising means being willing to change what you do in service of another. It is an essential aspect of family life. By contrast, sacrifice means trying to change who you fundamentally are to satisfy another, which is ultimately a disservice to both parties. Learning who you are and knowing what you really care about enable you to make compromises and avoid sacrifices.

2. Appreciate others for what they contribute to you and to the world around them. A relationship counselor we know asks each clients to list 25 things in their lives for which they are grateful. Her premise is that you cannot create joyful intimacy without appreciating all the gifts you already have. Being grateful for your life and for each family member’s place in it helps you reconnect with how unique and valuable they are. For example, we find it helpful to reflect with each other at the end of every day on what has enriched us, and what we appreciate about each other, ourselves, and our relationship.

3. Adopt the perspective that family challenges can help us grow. It’s easy to get distracted by the idea that family members are being a pain in the neck and are keeping us from moving toward our vision. However, psychologist Harville Hendrix observes that we attract a mate who is different from ourselves in precisely the ways in which we need to grow, and that our children’s behavior presents an opportunity for us to parent in just those ways that we were not parented ourselves. The key is to recognize relationship challenges as stemming from our own innate desire to heal and grow, rather than from faults in other people.

4. Remember that we are all more than the sum of our successes and failures. Focusing only on successes can be difficult for everyone in the family. It can be difficult for the successful ones because they may feel that people care about them only when things are going well, and difficult for others because failures then become a source of shame. Supporting a partner or child through failures entails seeing his or her good qualities under all circumstances. A learning family can learn much from failure and can come to celebrate successes in inclusive ways.

Shared Visioning. “What are we about as a family? What do we envision for ourselves this year . . . five years from now? What do we deeply care about?” Our visions and dreams can easily get lost in the everyday pressures of errands, to-do lists, and piles of laundry. It’s hard to envision making a difference when you can’t find a pair of matching socks.

Shared visioning is a conversation that helps people open their hearts to hearing each other’s deepest wishes and loves—their hearts’ desires. As children get older, shared visioning can help a family see what they have in common and how they can inspire each other to pursue their desires and create more of what they want in life. When people open their conversation to visioning, they can recall the hopes, dreams, values, and images that brought them together. Sharing these moments is particularly powerful during difficult times because these memories restore the energy of loving connection:

“Now I remember, that is why we are together!”

In visioning together, we explore what we can do together and how we can be together. We imagine how to spend our time together, how we want to be involved in our community, where we want to live, how we want to socialize, and where we want to travel. We can share our visions yearly, monthly, or daily. For example, Mark and Ellen take a walk together each week, during which each one reflects on the lessons of the past week and identifies a vision for the coming one. They then share their visions with each other, allowing both partners to feel support in the growth and learning they are embarking on. The ritual itself becomes a strong container of trust and respect that increases their ability to create what they want in their lives individually and as a partnership.

Mental Models. The discipline of mental models helps us gain a greater understanding of how our minds work. With careful observation, we begin to see that our beliefs have an impact on our perceptions, which in turn influence our actions, and then our reality. Our mental models serve us when they enable us to focus on what we want. However, they are always simplified, and therefore incomplete, views of reality that can hurt us when we miss something important or when the conditions under which we created them change.

Family life provides a great setting to develop skill in surfacing and testing our beliefs, revising them when necessary (see “Surfacing Mental Models of Family Life”). Not only do families offer ample opportunities to explore differing perceptions, but also the love on which they are based encourages people to take risks in exploring these differences and misunderstandings. Home is a place to experience humility and to learn.

The tools of the discipline of mental models, such as the ladder of inference, balancing advocacy and inquiry, and the left-hand column, can be useful when tried out at home. For example, recognizing that there might be a difference between how you experience your partner’s or child’s behavior and what he or she intends can help you accept that certain actions are not intended to hurt you (or make you mad or jealous), no matter how hurtful they might feel. This assumption can lead you to ask several questions when you are experiencing conflict:

• What pressures is my partner or child facing?
• What might he or she be intending to accomplish?
• How might my behavior appear to him or her?
• How can we share our respective intentions and learn about the impact we have on each other?

As you consider these questions, you might find yourself growing calmer. Then you can raise your frustration in such a way that the other party is more likely to listen to you with interest and speak with compassion. For example, Brad would sometimes leave his breakfast dishes in the sink on his way out the door, assuming that he would just do them later. However, Michelle perceived the dirty dishes as a chore that she was obligated to do. When they discussed the issue, she learned that he did not intend for her to do his dishes. At the same time, he learned that, because her office was at home, the dishes were an imposition on her space. With this new understanding, both were able to change: Brad usually did not leave his dishes in the sink out of respect for Michelle’s work space, and Michelle was more willing to do his dishes occasionally, knowing that she had a choice.

Another helpful tool is to use the ladder of inference to provide feedback. This approach consists of a series of statements. The first describes observable behavior; it begins with “When you do or say [the observable data].” The statement then continues with “I feel [a particular feeling, such as angry, hurt, jealous].” The feedback continues with “I think [or the story I tell myself is],” which explains my assumption based on that observation and feeling. It concludes with “What I want is ____,” and makes a specific request of the other person. Adhering to this structure, however clumsy at first, can open a genuine dialogue.

For example, Larry and Aisha were returning from a party where Aisha had felt ignored by him. Her initial reaction was to want to tell him, “You abandoned me, just like you always do at parties, and I’m sick and tired of being ignored when we go out.” Instead she said, “When you spent an hour looking at Joe’s Australia photos and didn’t invite me to join you [data], I felt hurt and angry [feeling]. I think you were ignoring me [interpretation]. I want to figure out with you a way we can enjoy parties together [request].”

Team Learning. Meaningful conversation takes time, skill, and intention. Weeks, even months, can go by without a family’s carving out the time to sit and simply explore what is going on with its members. If there are tensions between family members, it becomes even easier to postpone “family council” time. Yet, gathering regularly to listen to each other may defuse tensions before they build to a crisis, help the family to identify issues that people are grappling with, or simply offer a time for parents and children to be together and listen to each other’s thoughts and concerns. To create a “learning conversation,” set aside time and find a private space. Then identify some guidelines and a purpose. Even for two people, some of the following guidelines may help shape a surprisingly rich and gratifying conversation:

• Be fully present.
• Be open-minded.
• Listen, listen even more deeply, and then respond.
• Acknowledge the other person’s feelings and reality as true for him or her.
• Speak from your heart instead of from your head. Try breathing slowly, and notice how you are feeling.
• , “Lean into” discomfort. Discomfort is a spark of enlivening energy that is a clue that something can be learned here. “Leaning in” suggests receiving that tension with a quality of alert inquiry.

Team learning offers a way for people to open themselves to learning together. This is a time to practice listening for insight, for something fresh, for a way to reach below our familiar everyday clamor to the surprising wisdom that we carry inside. By practicing team learning, we can listen to one another with a renewed interest and focus.

A learning conversation can be a good time to revisit our vision of family and remind each other of what our family stands for or what we are grateful for. For example, one family gathers after their Thanksgiving meal to ask the question, “What are you thankful for this year?” Each person then has 3-5 minutes of uninterrupted air time as everyone else listens quietly. Then, they reflect together on what they heard.

Bringing the five disciplines home involves identifying and changing well-entrenched patterns of behavior, which can be both rewarding and painful.

Systems Thinking. Systems thinking encourages us to see our family and our role in it in a new light. Every family is a system. When you and other family members fall into typical, ongoing struggles, consider how your behavior is likely to affect theirs and vice versa. After all, you are deeply connected, although in moments of conflict, you might want to deny that fact!

We use two simple tools to help us out of binds: interaction maps and the “Accidental Adversaries” archetype. Interaction maps were developed by Action Design to show how two parties become locked in a vicious cycle by thinking and acting in particular ways. Party A thinks something negative about Party B, which leads Party A to act in either a defensive or an aggressive manner toward Party B. As a result, Party B develops negative thoughts about A, acts out toward A, and reinforces A’s negative thinking. The result is a vicious cycle.

The parties can break this dynamic first by noticing its existence, then by testing the mental models they have of each other, and finally by developing more effective ways of behaving in support of their more complete understanding of the other person’s reality. For example, Rachel thought her partner Carol was too close to her parents and asked her to limit her weekly phone conversations with them. This led Carol to think that Rachel was jealous of her relationship with her parents, prompting her to defend them. Her impassioned defense, in turn, reinforced Rachel’s belief that Carol was too close to her folks. When Rachel and Carol recognized this dynamic, they were able to test their mental models. They discovered that Carol felt pressured by her parents’ insistence on regular weekly contact. When she understood Carol’s position, Rachel was able to relax her own concerns and actually share some of the responsibility for maintaining contact with Carol’s parents.

Many family members become “accidental adversaries”; that is, they possess an enormous potential to cooperate with and serve each other, but tend to end up in conflict because each is subconsciously trying to address a personal hurt, fear, or discomfort. For example, when Bill believes that he will not get something he wants, he becomes aggressive and insists that he has to have it. This behavior gets him what he wants in the short run. However, Joan then becomes concerned that she will not be able to achieve what is important to her. She withdraws from Bill, which makes him feel that he can’t rely on her to support him. For that reason, he finds himself being even more aggressive the next time he thinks he won’t get what he wants. To break out of this negative pattern of behavior, both Bill and Joan need to reaffirm their commitment to supporting each other in achieving their individual and shared visions. Then they can identify their individual needs and reflect together on how they can both help each other meet those needs in ways that don’t make life more difficult for the other person.

Systems thinking also enables us to appreciate some of the challenges in bringing the five disciplines home. For instance, applying the disciplines to family life often means breaking out of a powerful “Success to the Successful” archetypal structure (see “Bringing the Five Disciplines Home”).

Because many of us spend more time at work than with our families, we tend to become more successful in our professional lives than at home (R1, R2, R3). However, using some of our time at work to develop new interpersonal skills can not only lead to more success at work (R4), but can also provide us with tools to support our success at home (B5). It is helpful to realize that, until we experience more success in the family, we might be tempted to convince ourselves that we are too busy at work to apply the skills back home (R6).

First Steps

Bringing the five disciplines home involves identifying and changing well-entrenched patterns of behavior, which can be both rewarding and painful. We suggest that you start small, be patient, and let your new successes at home naturally shift your work/family balance over time. You might begin by reviewing what you are grateful for in your own life. Then continue by looking at your relationship with one family member. Consider the areas of conflict with that person as a systemic issue, rather than as a problem with him or her. Engage in a learning conversation to begin to shift the dynamic. Over time, you might work toward creating a shared vision with your family, one that combines success at work and success at home to shape a life where each domain energizes and enriches the other.

Marilyn Paul is an independent organization consultant in Lexington, MA with a PhD in organization behavior from Yale. Peter Stroh is a founding partner of Innovation Associates and a principal in its parent company, Arthur D. Little. Marilyn and Peter are a married couple interested in supporting learning families. We welcome learning more about your own experiences in applying these tools, or any others you find helpful. Please send us your stories by e-mail to mbpaul@erols.com.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Betty Byfield Paul.

For Further Reading

Branden, Nathaniel and Devers. What Love Asks of Us. Bantam Books, 1987.

Fritz, Robert. The Path of Least Resistance. Ballantine Books, 1989.

Hendrix, Harville. Getting the Love You Want. Henry Holt and Company, 1988.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home & Home Becomes Work. Henry Holt and Company, 1997.

The post The Learning Family: Bringing the Five Disciplines Home appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

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

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

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

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

Common Barriers in Managing Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

Vedanta Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

A Definition of Maya

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

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

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

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

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

Maya and Quantum Mechanics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspectives from Dialogue

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

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

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

Listening

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

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

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

Respecting

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

Suspending

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

Voicing

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

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

Perspectives from Systems Thinking

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

Fragmentation

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

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

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

The symbol for Om, representing all existence

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

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

Resources for Leaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The struggle to have both a good personal life and a good career arises from a dominant societal image of the ideal worker as “career-primary,” the person who is able and willing to put work first, and for whom work time is infinitely expandable. This view translates into work practices that include dawn meetings; planning sessions that run into the evening, often ending with the suggestion to “continue this over dinner”; and training programs requiring long absences from home. Commitment is measured by what one manager proudly declared as his definition of a star engineer: “someone who doesn’t know enough to go home at night.” At lower levels in the organization, the belief in the dominance of work translates into tight controls over worker time and flexibility.

In situations where “ideal workers” are assumed to be those whose first allegiance is to the job, people with career aspirations go to great lengths to keep personal issues from intruding into work. Some people give false reasons for leaving work early: They feel that attending a community board or civic meeting is not likely to brand them as uncommitted, while taking a child for a physical might. Some secretly take children on business trips. Others leave their computers on while picking up children from sporting events, hoping that colleagues passing by will think they are in a meeting.

When Individuals Try to Change

BUSINESS CASE FOR RELINKING WORK AND FAMILY

As management’s support of family-sensitive work practices rises, employees experience less work-family conflict, leading to greater worker satisfaction and better quality of work.

Some workers, because of their positions, their financial resources, or their perceived value as employees, are themselves able, at times, to forge satisfactory links between work and family. The rest simmer with discontent. In all cases, energy and loyalty are diverted unnecessarily from the organization (see “Can Your Company Benefit from Relinking?”). Because people feel powerless to deal with these concerns on their own, relevant work-related issues cannot be discussed at the collective level, where real systemic change might yield significant business and personal results.

When individuals change, but the system remains the same, there may be unexpected negative consequences for both. For example, one team leader arranged a four-day schedule to cut down on a long commute and to spend more time with her children. Not only did this arrangement serve her needs, but because the team leader rotated group members to take her place on the fifth day, she developed their self-management skills. By all measures, including productivity and satisfaction, the group was thriving. But the arrangement did not last long. In the end, the manager was stripped of her supervisory duties and moved to the bottom category of performance. Management regarded the team leader’s efforts as a negative reflection of her future potential and management capability. Similarly, a full-time sales technician who negotiated earlier hours was forced to give up the arrangement because her managers were unwilling to adjust their daily demands to conform to the schedule they had approved. From the beginning, the managers imposed so many “exceptions” that the employee was putting in extra hours and was unable to pick up

her child at school much of the time — the reason she wanted the earlier hours in the first place. In the end, she reverted to her old schedule and became very disillusioned.

In this context, it is not surprising that managers typically view requests for flexibility as risky to grant. Even though they may sympathize and want to grant such requests, especially when it comes to their most valued employees, they worry about the potential negative consequences of allowing such arrangements. Not only do they worry that productivity might suffer, but they fear that, in negotiating and monitoring these special arrangements, they might have an increased workload. As a result, managers often end up sending negative signals indicating that the use of flexible, family-friendly benefits is a problem for them and for the company as a whole.

The important point is that it is problematic when work-family issues are viewed as individual concerns to be addressed only through flexible work practices, sensitive managers, and individual accommodations. This approach often fails the individuals involved, and it may lead to negative career repercussions. More important, by viewing these issues as problems, companies miss opportunities for creative change. For example, management could have perceived the unusual arrangement of the team leader with the four-day schedule as a chance to embrace this innovative work practice and to rethink the criteria for effective management. Similarly, the revised schedule of the sales technician could have been an opportunity to rethink the way time is used in the organization.

Consider, also, the following example: two workers, one in sales and one in management, requested a job-sharing arrangement that would have allowed each of them to spend more time with their families. In an extensive proposal, they outlined how they would meet business needs under the new arrangement. As an added benefit, they also suggested a way to revamp the management development process so that a sales representative, working under the guidance of a sales manager, took on limited management duties. Such an apprenticeship model promised to be a significant improvement over the existing practice of “throwing sales people into management” with little training. Nevertheless, the company rejected the proposal because it was seen as stemming from a private concern (a desire for more personal time) rather than a work concern (a wish to increase the organization’s effectiveness), and the opportunity was missed.

Thus, despite the potential benefits to the company, making the link between work and employees’ personal lives in today’s business environment is, to say the least, not easy. Significant organizational barriers — for example, assumptions about what makes a good worker, how productivity is achieved, and how rewards are distributed — militate against such linkage. Work-family benefits are often designed and administered by the human resource function but implemented by line managers. Associating strategic initiatives with line managers and work-family concerns with human resources reinforces perceptions that business issues are separate, conceptually and functionally, from individuals’ personal lives.

Putting Work-Family Issues on the Table

Putting work-family concerns on the table as legitimate issues for discussion in the workplace turns out to be liberating. By talking about such issues, people realize that they are not alone in struggling to meet work and family/ personal demands. Such discussions help people see that the problems are not solely of their own making, but stem from the way work is done today. The process of transforming personal issues to the collective level engages people’s interest and leads to more creative ways of thinking. It also provides a strategic business opportunity that, if exploited correctly, can lead to improved bottom-line results (see “Business Case for Relinking Work and Family” on p. 1).

For example, at one site we documented the work practices of “integrated” individuals — people who link the two spheres of their life in the way they work. We found that integrated individuals draw not only on skills, competencies, and behaviors typical of the public, work sphere, such as rationality, linear thinking, assertiveness, and competition, but also on those associated with the private, personal sphere, such as collaboration, sharing, empathy, and nurturing. Their work practices include working behind the scenes to smooth difficulties between people that might disrupt the project, going out of their way to pass on key information to other groups, taking the time from their individual work to teach someone a new way of doing something, building on rather than attacking others’ ideas in meetings, and routinely affirming and acknowledging the contributions of others. We showed the value-added nature of this work—the way it prevented problems, enhanced organizational learning, and encouraged collaboration. Offering a new vision of the ideal worker as an integrated individual, someone who brings skills to the job from both spheres of life, helps the organization recognize the importance of hiring and retaining such individuals.

Where appropriate, we also pointed out to management the dissonance between policy and practice. For example, at an administrative site, despite the presence of a wide range of work-family policies, managers limited their use to very minor changes in daily work times. Employees dealt with the situation by “jiggling the system” on an ad hoc, individual basis to achieve the flexibility they needed, often by using sick days or vacation time. Thus, for instance, a man whose mother was chronically ill had to take a combination of sick days and vacation days to be with her. The costs to the site for this companywide behavior were considerable in terms of unplanned absences, lack of coverage, turnover, and backlash against people who took the time they needed. It also created employee mistrust of an organization that claimed it had benefits but made using them so difficult that the result was lower morale and widespread cynicism.

By bringing family to bear on work, we also focused attention on the process by which work is accomplished (see “How Long Hours Become the Norm”). In one sales environment, for example, we found that a sales team habitually worked around the clock to complete proposals for prospective customers. In the morning, the workers were rewarded with cheers from managers and coworkers, complimenting them on their commitment and willingness to get the job done. In response to our interventions, one manager recognized that this behavior reflected poor work habits and made it tough on these people’s family lives. Not only were their families suffering, but it took several days for these workers to recover, during which time they were less productive.

The manager told his team that their behavior demonstrated an inability to plan. He also began to share his perceptions with other managers. As a result, the sales team began to recognize and reward new work habits such as planning ahead and anticipating problems rather than waiting until they were crises.

We have found that changes in work practices can be brought about by looking at work through a work-family lens, linking what is learned from that process to a salient business need, and pushing for change at each step of the process (see “The Synergy of Linking Work and Family”). We begin to make the systemic link between work practice and work-family integration by engaging three lines of questioning:

• How does work get done around here?
• What are the employees’ personal stories of work-family integration?
• What is it about the way work gets done around here that makes it difficult (or easy) to integrate work and personal life so that neither one suffers? Ultimately, however, success also depends on the existence of two specific conditions:
• a safe environment that minimizes individual risk, freeing employees to take part in the change; and
• room in the process for engaging people’s resistance — in other words, addressing their objections, concerns, and underlying feelings with a view toward creating options that were not previously envisioned.<;i>

Creating Safety and Engaging Resistance

By giving people permission to talk about their feelings and their personal dilemmas in the context of redesigning work, a surprising level of energy, creativity, and innovative thinking gets released. But raising these issues may not be easy for those who fear they will be branded as less committed or undependable if they acknowledge such difficulties. At the same time, managers who are used to viewing gains for the family as productivity losses for the business may fear they will bear all the risks of innovation.

Therefore, collaboration and sharing the risks across the organization are important aspects of the process. In concrete terms, this means getting some sign from senior managers that they are willing to suspend, if only temporarily, some of the standard operating procedures that the work groups have identified as barriers both to work-family integration and to productivity. Such a signal from upper management also helps people believe that cultural change is possible and provides higher-level support to individual managers seeking to bring about change. The point is that employees need concrete evidence that they are truly able to control some of the conditions that affect their own productivity. And managers need assurance that they will not be penalized for experimenting in this fashion.

The process of relinking work to family creates resistance because it touches core beliefs about society, success, gender roles, and the place of work and family in our lives. We found, however, that such resistance almost always points to something important that needs to be acknowledged and addressed collaboratively.

Engaging with this type of resistance means listening to and learning from people’s objections, incorporating their concerns and new ideas, and working together to establish a dual agenda. To be effective, the process cannot be shortchanged. It requires trust, openness, and a willingness to learn from others.

Challenges

The next challenge is how to sustain these efforts over the long term and to diffuse them beyond the local sites. Lasting organizational change requires mutual learning by individuals, by the group, and by the system as a whole. It is important to continue to keep the double agenda on the table, ensuring that benefits from the change process continue to accrue to employees and their families as well as to the organization. If not, the individual energy unleashed will dissipate — triggering anger and mistrust within the organization.

What’s more, if local changes are to be sustained and if lessons from them are to be diffused, the work needs to be legitimized so that operational successes become widely known. Given the tendency to marginalize and individualize work-family issues, the overt support of senior management is essential here. Such support reinforces “work-family” as a business issue that is owned by the corporation as a whole.

Lasting change also requires an infrastructure, a process for carrying the lessons learned and the methodology used to other parts of the organization. In one organization, that process took the form of an operations steering committee working hand-in-hand with the research team to carry on the work in other parts of the corporation.

Our experience also suggests that multiple points of diffusion must exist. We sought opportunities, for instance, to present our work as part of special events as well as operational reviews and to look for internal allies among line managers, people involved in organizational change, and so on. Diffusion is also a challenge because, as people reflect on how the various operational pilots meet business needs, they tend to want to pass on to other teams only the results that yielded the productivity gains, rather than information about the process itself. This tendency shortchanges the process and seriously undermines the chances for replicating its success and sustainability.

Conclusion

As corporations continue to restructure and reinvent themselves, linking such change efforts to employees’ personal concerns greatly enhances their chances for success. Such relinking energizes employees to participate fully in the process because there are personal benefits to be gained. It also uncovers hidden or ignored assumptions about work practices and organizational cultures that can undermine the changes envisioned.

But relinking work and family is not something that can be accomplished simply by wishing it were so or by pointing out the negative consequences of separation. It is something that touches the very core of our beliefs about society, success, and gender. And it implies rethinking the place of families and communities and a new look at how we can nurture and strengthen these vital building blocks of our society.

The assumed separation of the domestic and nondomestic spheres breeds inequality, since present practices, structures, and policies — at all levels of society — favor the economic sphere above all others. As a result, employment concerns are assumed to take precedence over other concerns; achievement in the employment sector is assumed to be the major source of self-esteem and the measure of personal success. And, since employment skills are most highly valued and compensated, they dominate government, educational, and organizational policy

In the end, the goal of relinking work and family life is not simple and it is not just about being “whole.” It is about shifting to a more equitable society in which family and community are valued as much as paid work is valued, and where men and women have equal opportunity to achieve in both spheres. Such change is possible and provides real benefits not only to individuals and their families, but also to business and society.

Suggested Further Reading

Bailyn, L., Breaking the Mold: Women, Men and Time in the New Corporate World. Free Press, 1993.

Hochschild, A., The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. Avon Books, 1997.

Perlow, L., Finding Time: How Corporations, Individuals, and Families Can Benefit from New Work Practices. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Schor, J., The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. Basic Books, 1993.

This article is excerpted from Relinking Life and Work: Toward a Better Future (Pegasus Communications, 1998), which is an edited version of a report originally published by the Ford Foundation.

Rhona Rapoport is co-director of the Institute of Family and Environmental Research in London, England. Lotte Bailyn is the T Wilson (1953) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Deborah Kolb is professor of management at the Simmons Graduate School of Management and director of the Simmons Institute on Gender and Organizations. Joyce K. Fletcher is professor of management at the Simmons Graduate School of Management. Contributing authors include Dana E. Friedman, Barbara Miller, Susan Eaton, and Maureen Harvey.

The post Relinking Life and Work: Toward a Better Future appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Organizations can use this framework to create a personal development path an employee might pursue using the five disciplines, as described by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline(click here for “Shifting from Knowing to Learning”). With this framework, employees will be able to understand what progress feels like moving from reacting toward creating, from protection toward reflection, from “my part” toward “the whole,” and so on.

At Gerber Memorial Health Services (GMHS), we have invested heavily in organizational learning, providing training and support to our leaders, along with implementing some structural changes that ensure that we use these ideas in cross-departmental teams. But until we incorporated the “knower to learner framework,” we only had vague expectation for leaders to improve their skills by practicing the five disciplines. Now, we are clear on what successful development along the continuums looks like, and we are holding leaders accountable for that development.

But there is still another problem. Even if our leaders successfully developed themselves in the use of the five disciplines, they still sometimes achieved mediocre results. Through the use of a framework called “the Learner’s Path,” we have found a way for people to ensure that they tie their learning to actual results.

The Five Learner’s Path Questions

The Learner’s Path utilizes a five-question framework that leads the learner toward increased responsibility, ownership, and self-reflection. The five questions are: (1) Are you producing desired results? (2) Is this issue yours to address? (3) Is it necessary to use alternative action strategies? (4) Is it necessary to use action strategies that are beyond your current action repertoire? and (5) Are you open to renewal and correction?

The individual or group answers the five questions in succession. If they answer each question successfully, they increase the likelihood that learning will occur (by “learning,” I mean “increasing one’s ability to achieve desired results through effective action” and not simply the accumulation of more information in one’s head). When you answer the first three questions successfully, you can say that you have become a learner, and not before. Affirmatively answering questions four and five will, thereafter, deepen your learning.

The Anvil of Learning

We might think of these five questions as the “anvil” against which we shape and form our knowledge. Imagine a blacksmith trying to shape a piece of metal into something valuable and useful without the use of an anvil. He holds the metal to be shaped in one hand while holding the sledgehammer in the other. With no base on which to rest the metal piece, he grips it as tightly as he can while clanging the hammer against it with the other hand. The blows fall at odd angles and have little impact on the piece of metal. But when the blacksmith rests his piece of metal on an anvil, it gives him the stability and leverage he needs to form and change the metal into something useful and valuable.

This same principle is true of any learning effort: When you attempt to learn without the support and testing of the anvil of learning, you are unlikely to transform your learning into something useful and valuable namely, an ability to achieve the results you couldn’t achieve before. Just as the anvil significantly leverages the blacksmith’s effectiveness, so the Learner’s Path leverages the learner’s effectiveness.

Walking Along the Learner’s Path

Let me illustrate how to use this framework with a story. I facilitated a meeting of a group of leaders, who were discussing the possibility of implementing a large-scale customer service improvement strategy. Customer service scores had been flat for two years, and some people advocated for doing something new to improve the scores.

I started out by explaining that I would be walking them through the Learner’s Path/Five Questions framework, which would help them determine what level of learning would be necessary for the initiative. Then, I led them through a progression of the five questions, as follows.

1st Question: “Are you producing desired results?”

After reviewing the trends of flat scores (although at a very high level) over the past two years, they concluded that these scores were not good enough. They wanted to be known for something better than “customer satisfaction” they wanted to give their customers “profound experiences.” Had they said that they were satisfied with the current results, there would be no point for them to continue the conversation. The rest of the five questions would be a waste of time unless they felt some aspiration to improve current results.

2nd Question: “Is it yours to address?”

In other words, they had to decide if they, as leaders, ought to take some responsibility for addressing this issue. They said, “If we don’t take responsibility, who will? What is the alternative?” Again, had they said that they did not want to assume responsibility, the conversation would have stopped, and the group would have had to be content with some wishful thinking that someone else would do something about improving the customer scores.

THE LEARNER'S LOOP

The purpose of The Learner’s Loop is to articulate what capacities a person must develop in order to increase their chances for successfully answering each of the five questions. Progressing along the Learner’s Path is not a linear process; it is a closed loop, an engine of growth, around which a learner circuits, seeking continuous development.

3rd Question: “Is it necessary to use alternative action strategies?” This question forced the group to struggle with some dilemmas. If they said, “No, we can keep using the current strategy,” then I would have had to ask why they hadn’t actually produced profound customer experiences all along. Alternatively, if they believed they should use some type of alternative action strategy, they would have to admit that their current strategy hadn’t worked, which could be threatening or embarrassing to them. In this case, the leadership group decided that they needed to try an alternative action strategy. Again, had they said “no,” there would have been no point in continuing the conversation because they would not be convinced that they actually had anything to learn.

4th Question: “Is it necessary to use action strategies that are beyond your current action repertoire?” At this point, the group answered “yes.” They felt that, if they were to achieve profound customer experiences, they would have to implement an action strategy that they did not yet know how to implement. In other words, they would have to expand their current action repertoire (by “action repertoire,” I mean action strategies they could reliably use to achieve desired results). Had they said “no” to this fourth question, the group would have assembled another action strategy from their current repertoire and, in the process, would be less likely to succeed.

5th Question: “Are you open to renewal and correction?” Without hesitation, the group said “yes” to this question. Because I doubted whether they really understood the implications of this answer, I clarified that this meant they would have to look closely and deeply at themselves regarding how they think, interact, and/or contribute to the current situation. They still said “yes.” They understood that they would be required to examine how their leadership had contributed to the flat scores.

As a result of walking along the Learner’s Path together, the leaders knew that, in order to achieve profound customer experiences, they would have to dramatically change the way they led the organization. They knew that it would not be enough just to do more of the same thing or to do the same thing better than before. They would have to learn to do new things and that this approach would require an openness to renewal and correction. The group used the five questions as an anvil against which they changed and formed their idea of the kind of results they wanted and the kind of learning that would be required of them in order to achieve those results.

Smoothing Out the Path

These five questions are deep and challenging when they are taken seriously. They are particularly difficult, and often threatening, to someone operating from a knower stance. How can knowers be helped to overcome their fear and sense of threat about answering these questions? The Learner’s Loop can help (see “The Learner’s Loop”).

The purpose of The Learner’s Loop is to articulate what capacities a person must develop in order to increase their chances for successfully answering each of the five questions. These capacities are described as a matter of “willingness” is the person willing to take the necessary action to increase the likelihood of answering one of the questions successfully?

Progressing along the Learner’s Path is not a linear process; it is a closed loop, an engine of growth, around which a learner circuits, seeking continuous development. You will notice that there is a suggested order for the first rotation, and then the loop feeds on itself thereafter.

At GMHS, we have designed a curriculum geared toward helping individuals increase their willingness to take the necessary actions and, thereby, increase the likelihood that they will successfully answer the Learner’s Path questions. I will describe below why these “willingnesses” are important and suggest some organizational learning tools, techniques, and frameworks that can be used to increase them.

1. Willing to Acquire a Desire We are more likely to aspire for better-than-current results (successfully answer question #1) when we are willing to acquire a desire to improve current results. If we are totally content with our level of current results, we will feel no prompting to seek new learning at all. Sometimes, people truly are achieving all that they could imagine in a certain area, and, in that case, they should move on to other issues. At other times, people delude themselves into thinking that current results are acceptable, when everything and everyone around them is screaming for better performance. The disciplines of personal mastery and shared vision are key in stoking the fires of desire for improved results.

Organizations investing in their capacity for organizational learning should design their curriculum so that learners:

• Increase their self-awareness (e.g., Myers/Briggs, DiSC, etc.).
• Uncover their personal values and vision (e.g., personal mission statements).
• Work from a creative, not a reactive, orientation (e.g., The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz).
• Empower their actions with creative tension (e.g., The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz).
• Co-create collective aspiration (e.g., shared visioning).

2. Willing to See Your Role in the Whole

We are more likely to own and pursue better-than-current results (affirmatively answer question #2) if we are willing to take some responsibility for seeing our role in the whole scheme of things. Systems thinking is most often thought of as a discipline for analyzing and solving difficult problems and it is useful for these things. It is also helpful for changing our perspective about who should be responsible for addressing problems in the first place.

Those organizations investing in their capacity for organizational learning should design their curriculum so that learners:

• Understand how structure influences behavior (e.g., the Iceberg diagram).
• See life as dynamic, complex, and interdependent (e.g., the concepts and tools of systems thinking).
• No longer see problems as “out there” (e.g., causal loop diagrams).

3. Willing to Resist the Lure of “Sure”

We are more likely to implement alternative action strategies (affirmatively answer question #3) if we are willing to examine the effectiveness of our current action strategies and resist the lure of being sure that we have the right strategy. Knowers are particularly resistant to this examination, for fear that it will be revealed that they didn’t actually know the best action strategy after all. If we are open to considering multiple perspectives, being unsure, or admitting our knowledge is less-than-complete, then we will be more willing to experiment with alternative action strategies and learn how to effectively improve current results.

The practices of the discipline of mental models are especially helpful at this point along the Learner’s Path, and a curriculum designed to teach skills in this area should enable learners to:

• Consider multiple perspectives (e.g.,the story of the blind men and the elephant).
• Examine their thinking and assumptions (e.g., the Ladder of Inference and Left-hand Column).
• Pursue mutual understanding using “reflection mode” rather than “protection mode” conversations (e.g., AND Stance, 3rd Story, “Be in control” vs. “Mutual learning” model).
• Realize that “me” and “my view” are not the same thing (e.g., “I Am Not My Hat”).

4. Willing to Raise the Bar of Your Action Repertoire

We are more likely to consider new action strategies beyond that which we currently know how to implement (affirmatively answer question #4) if we admit we have come to the end of our current action repertoire and want to expand it. Up to this point, as learners, we have used “what we know” to achieve “what we can.” This incremental type of learning is called single-loop learning, and it will only bring us so far — never producing breakthrough results. To expand our action repertoire, we need to examine and challenge the mental framework under which we are doing our learning. This kind of deep learning is called double-loop learning (see “Double-Loop Learning Cycle”).

The group-oriented discipline of team learning is particularly helpful here. We need the help of others to confirm that we have, indeed, reached the end of our capabilities and to have frame-breaking conversations. A curriculum teaching this capacity should enable learners to:

• Implement double-loop learning (see “Double-Loop Learning Cycle”).
• Create the conditions for effective group learning (e.g., Four-Player Model, ground rules from The Skilled Facilitator by Roger Schwarz).
• Generate new insights (e.g. productive conversations, dialogue).

5. Willing to Invite Insight We are more likely to be open to renewal and correction (affirmatively answer question #5) if we are willing to invite insight into how we think, interact, and contribute to problems. Doing new things in new ways and getting better results is an exhilarating and challenging learning experience. But we may still find ourselves reacting to problems rather than creating fundamental solutions; trying to get compliance from others rather than commitment; protecting ourselves during conversations rather than reflecting on our conversational habits; focusing on “my part” rather than on “the whole”; and getting into debates rather than engaging in mutual learning. Advanced learners are continually seeking deep change in themselves as they move along the continuums of the five disciplines toward the learner stance.

Again, this is where team learning is particularly helpful, along with a renewed emphasis on personal mastery. A curriculum teaching this capacity should, additionally, enable learners to:

• Integrate all five disciplines into everyday practice (e.g., action learning projects).

Pursuing the “Trade” of Learning

Blacksmithing is a learned trade. No one could ever attend a three-day workshop and return as a master blacksmith. It takes years of apprenticeship and continual practice. It is not glamorous work, but consider the impact the blacksmith has had on the world. “When the first blacksmith began hammering on a hot piece of iron, little did he know how he was shaping the future. He forged the tools that made the machines that produce everything mankind has today. The blacksmith was the pioneer of the technology that carried mankind from the iron age to the space age. It can truly be said that the first rocket to the moon was virtually launched from the face of the anvil” (Bill Miller, theforgeworks.com).

Just as a blacksmith forms and shapes his metal objects using a hammer supported and leveraged by an anvil, let us shape and form our knowledge using the hammer of the Knower-to-Learner framework and the anvil of the Learner’s Path. By doing so, we develop our capacity for learning and tie our knowledge to actual results.

Like blacksmithing, the “trade of learning” cannot be learned quickly and is not always glamorous. Nevertheless, consider the impact that it can have on our world. Responding to a changing world without deep, intentional learning is a risky proposition. Will it truly be said that the future we created together was formed on the face of the anvil of learning?

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My knowing continued all the way through graduate school and eventually into my first few jobs. Even as my knowing continued to grow, I felt I had it under control. I was young and had the stamina to know late into the night and still work the next day. I received recognition from my peers for these exploits. Sometimes, I would secretly go out and study a subject, even in the middle of the work day, just so I could control a conversation better, appear as if I knew all along, or protect myself from admitting that I really didn’t know what to do next.

Being a knower started out as a harmless way to get noticed and applauded, but it continued as a habit that complicated my life. The pressure increased to keep providing the right answers. I sometimes took panicked action in an attempt to maintain the appearance of effectiveness. I sensed that something wasn’t right, but I never recognized that being a knower was hurting me. Besides, everyone else was doing it, too.

Being a knower finally caught up with me, though, when I lost a job. Even though I presented my case to the people in authority with an abundance of facts, evidence, and documentation, my defense fell short, and I was let go. I had finally hit bottom (more about that later).

Knowers and Learners

When I use the term “knower,” I’m not referring to a person who is somehow defective and will forever carry around that label or implying that what he or she knows is not important. A knower is simply someone who adopts a “knower stance.” A stance is a mental posture, point of view, or particular thinking habit. It is possible to move back and forth between a knower stance and a learner stance.

The difference between a knower and a learner is that a learner is willing to be influenced.

The difference between a knower and a learner, very simply, is that a learner is willing to admit, “I don’t know” and be influenced. Knowers believe that they know all they need to know to address the situations they are responsible for. But, at an even deeper level, knowing is so central to who they are that they sometimes act as if they do know something, even when they don’t. In his excellent article “Learning, Knowledge and Power” (www.axialent.com), Fred Kofman defines a knower as “someone who obtains his self-esteem from appearing to be right.”

As a consequence of adopting this knower stance, knowers can easily become defensive. If they are responsible for addressing an unsatisfactory situation but don’t actually have the ability to get the desired results, in order to hide their not-knowing, they will blame someone or something else, hide the evidence, ignore the situation, or deny that the situation was unsatisfactory in the first place.

Learners are people who operate from a “learner stance.” They choose a mental posture that includes, at a minimum, three decisions: (1) They admit they are not currently achieving desired results — they want something more or better; (2) They take responsibility for addressing the current unsatisfactory situation; and (3) They admit that what they are presently doing is not producing the desired results. Learners often go deeper and make two more decisions: (4) They admit that, to achieve the desired results, they must go beyond the repertoire of actions they can reliably use; and (5) They are willing to be influenced. These five decisions motivate learners to seek new knowledge (see “Learning Path Decision Tree” on p. 3).

“Having Knowledge” vs. “Being a Knower”

Now, you might be thinking, “What’s wrong with being a knower? Knowers possess valuable knowledge. In fact, employers hire people to a great degree for ‘what they know.’ Therefore, it seems that being a knower actually enhances, rather than hinders, success.” Good point. Knowledge, or the ability to produce desired results through effective actions, is essential for being successful in the world. However, “having knowledge” is not the same thing as “being a knower.”

LEARNING PATH DECISION TREE

When faced with any improvement situation, you can follow the Learning Path Decision Tree to clarify what type of learning will be required in order to achieve your desired results. As you progress through, you are called upon to increase your levels of responsibility, ownership, and self-reflection. This diagram highlights the choices you must make, as well as the accompanying consequences you must accept, as you move further along toward the results that you truly desire.

Both learners and knowers can “have knowledge,” they just use it differently. Knowers effectively apply their knowledge to current situations that are static, definable, and knowable. For example, when a nurse discovers a patient in need of resuscitation, she assesses the situation within seconds and applies her knowledge to that static, definable, knowable situation. She knows what to do in that situation and acts skillfully and confidently. In that circumstance, knowing what to do is a good thing. Most people know exactly what to do in certain defined situations, which is fortunate — especially if you are the patient in that bed.

However, when the current situation changes or if the standard actions are no longer producing desired results, both of which happen frequently in today’s world, knowers become ineffective. In other words, it’s O. K. to be a knower, but not to stay a knower. To paraphrase Eric Hoffer, “In times of change, learners will inherit the earth, while knowers will be perfectly equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

In contrast to knowers, learners effectively use their knowledge and expertise not by applying autonomous, unilateral solutions but by inquiring further into the situation. They attempt to implement what they know in order to find out whether or not they actually know it. Learners see their knowledge as only a part of the whole realm of insight surrounding a given situation and not as the single, silver bullet answer.

Secrets of a Knower

As I said earlier, I am a recovering knower. Part of my recovery process is to admit where I have fallen short. These are things that knowers are not particularly proud of, but I share them in the hope that you might recognize some of these tendencies in yourself and seek the help that is prescribed later in this article.

When I am operating from the full-blown knower stance, I adhere to five particular thinking habits; we might refer to these as the “five secrets of a knower”:

1. I Live My Life on a Problem-Solving Treadmill. My life is dominated by solving problems. It is how I feel effective and make progress. I derive energy from opportunities to immediately apply what I know against a definable, existing situation. I solve problems to attempt to eliminate the symptoms I am experiencing, rather than to seek any long-term, fundamental solutions. I resist creating lasting solutions to problems because doing so would require me to design something that does not yet exist, thereby admitting that I don’t have the whole picture, and to eliminate the very source of my effectiveness in the world — problems!
2. I Force Groups to Comply with My Way. I know that groups work best when all members operate from the same page. Therefore, when I work in groups, I must convince others that I have the “right page” and that all they have to do is follow me. If they suggest alternatives, I try to shut them down or point out problems with their ideas, because we might be headed into untried territory. If I am part of a group where I have authority, I manipulate the members through rewards, punishments, policies, memos, and so on to instill a culture of compliance.
3. I Must Protect Myself During Conversations. My objective in every conversation is to win. If I can be seen as right, rational, and not responsible, I have successfully protected my image as a competent person. Any conversation that points out how I may be inaccurate, may be missing something, or may have contributed to a problem must be stopped. I use conversational strategies that counter such threats. I defend my beliefs and conclusions at all costs, because a chink in my self-created armor could cause extraordinary stress for me. It would threaten the core beliefs upon which I base all my knowing.
4. I Focus Exclusively on My Own Little Piece of the World. Because my aim is to control things as much as possible and to make things around me predictable, I focus almost exclusively on my team, department, group, family—in short, my realm. If I can make sure that my areas of responsibility perform well, then I can blame areas outside my domain when problems occur.I must also keep the internal workings of my area a secret in order to ensure that I can do things my way. If others suggest how I could do my work better, I react negatively. I resist interacting with outside entities unless I can get something from them that will make my area function more effectively. Even if a suggested change would benefit the organization as a whole, I am resistant to sub-optimizing anything from my realm.
5. I Direct and Debate During Group Interactions. I expect group members to interact by playing out predictable, consistent roles, which I reinforce by directing the interaction and controlling the agenda as much as possible. If I can put people in little boxes, then I can better control the process and predict the outcome of our conversations. I constantly bring up what worked for me in the past as a way of maintaining the focus of attention on areas where I have expertise. If I have position power in a group, I use it to manipulate the conversation, so that the outcomes are in line with what I want. And I will often work out the details of a plan in advance and then present the plan for approval. When someone challenges my plan, I make them prove why their approach is better than mine.

Moving Toward the Learner Stance

As I mentioned earlier, about eight years ago, I lost a job, in part because I was a knower and not a learner. I supervised a woman who under-performed, played solitaire, and slept on the job. I tried six different methods to improve her performance, all without success. Both the personnel committee and the full board would not even consider my perspective on this issue. Instead, the board launched a “fact-finding” inquiry, culminating in a final determination meeting. I was pleased to finally be able to tell my side of the story at that meeting, but when I arrived, I discovered that it had already been adjourned. Three board members stayed behind and relieved me of my position.

I had done everything I could think of to improve my situation — including having open and honest conversations, collecting and studying data, experimenting with different tools and techniques, attending workshops, reading books, seeking advice and counsel. But there was one thing I lacked: the willingness to be influenced. I spent a lot of time and effort busily learning all this information, really, just so that I might influence others. I tried to protect myself and focus on my little piece of that world. I didn’t reflect on the bigger picture. I tried to shape groups to conform to my notions, and I moved persistently toward compliance. In short, I displayed classic knower behaviors.

My next job was as organizational development facilitator for Gerber Memorial Health Services. One of my responsibilities was to teach leaders the five disciplines of organizational learning. As a good knower, I set out to learn all that I could about the disciplines, determined to know just a little more than those whom I was teaching. But a funny thing happened —I actually learned this material. And by “learned,” I don’t mean that I merely accumulated more information (which is what knowers think of as learning); I mean I increased my ability to produce desired results. I tried the disciplines out, and, to my amazement, they actually made a difference in my life and work. Below, I will describe how I used them to overcome the five secrets of a knower mentioned earlier (see “Shifting from Knowing to Learning” on p. 4).

Personal Mastery

The discipline of personal mastery helped me move from reacting to creating my way through life. As I studied the concept of the creative versus the reactive orientation, as articulated by Robert Fritz in The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life (Ballantine, 1989), I realized that there are two kinds of energy that prompt people to take action: pressure or desire. As a knower, my energy came from pressure, so I always operated from a reactive (problem-solving) orientation. I came to understand that there was an alternative to living my life on the problem-solving treadmill, and that was to bring new things into existence (see “Reacting vs. Creating”).

I became interested in this new framework but had no idea how to go about living from a creative orientation. Fritz’s creative tension model gives structure to the ethereal idea of bringing something new into existence. Creative tension juxtaposes an honest and accurate awareness of current reality with a precise mental picture of your vision or the desired results you want to create (see “Creative Tension Model” on p. 6).
Knowers have a hard time looking at current reality when the results are inadequate and they have some responsibility for them. The concept of creative tension helped me see less than-desired results as just one part of a larger scheme of success.

Shared Vision

Groups operate more effectively when they are aligned around an idea or goal. As I progressed in my knowledge of shared vision, I moved from using a short-term compliance strategy to a long-term commitment one.

The compliance strategy can work, but only for a short while. Four conditions are necessary for employees to feel a sense of dedication to a future direction or desired result: (1) Access to valid and relevant information; (2) Free, informed choices from a series of alternatives; (3) Participation in discussions and decisions; and (4) Alignment of the chosen direction with personal vision and values. If any one of these elements is missing, people will feel manipulated, their trust will be diminished, and their commitment to the decision will plummet.

These four conditions spread control among the members of the group, rather than maintaining it in my hands alone. This is a difficult transition for knowers to make. I must move from having “control over” to having “control with” others. However, breaking the commitment strategy down into four elements is very comforting for a knower—I can get my head around it.

Mental Models

The essence of the discipline of mental models is moving from having conversations in “protection mode” to having them in “reflection mode.” In protection mode, I believe that I must protect the “fact” that I am right, that I have all the information I need, and that I have not contributed to the problem. In reflection mode, I ponder my thinking and actions and ask questions such as “Why did I react so strongly just now?” “What information am I missing?” and “Have I somehow contributed to this problem?”

CREATIVE TENSION MODEL

Using Robert Fritz’s creative tension framework, learners juxtapose an honest awareness of current reality with a precise mental picture of the results they want to create. By doing so, they are able to identify the actions required to move from current reality to the desired future state.

Operating in reflection mode is a huge leap for knowers to make. Knowers feel they must protect what they know — they can’t be wrong or have incomplete knowledge. However, through the discipline of mental models, I have come to admit that there are multiple views on a given subject and that these other views can be valid and rational, too. When I was introduced to concepts such as “left-hand column,” “ladder of inference,” and “learning conversations,” I discovered a way to understand how people think and interact. This is great information for a knower! It takes some of the mystery out of difficult conversations.

Systems Thinking

The essence of systems thinking is moving from focusing exclusively on “the parts” (especially my part) to focusing on “the whole.” As a knower, I focus on “my part” because it is knowable, controllable, and containable, and I pride myself on my ability to address problems. But what if the cause or effect of a problem does not fall within my realm of control? If I pride myself on problem solving, I had better be able to fix this problem. But because I have focused exclusively on my area, I really don’t know how to go about addressing it. Should I admit that I don’t actually know all about my area after all or that I really can’t solve this problem because it falls outside my realm? I can’t be both an expert in how to run my area and a problem-solver extraordinaire when a cause or effect of a problem falls outside of my domain.

The essence of team learning is developing an ability to move from debating who has “the truth” to generating collective insights together.

The solution to this dilemma, I found, was to broaden the scope of what I pay attention to beyond my little piece of the world. I need to focus on “the whole” rather than just “my piece.” Systems thinking tools and principles help in this regard.

Team Learning

The essence of team learning is developing an ability to move from debating who has “the truth” to generating collective insights together. When I debate, I am pursuing the right answer — the correct answer. I am talking about things I know. Within the realm of what is actually knowable, this can work well. We run into trouble, however, when what is “known” becomes outdated and obsolete as the world continues its rapid change around us. Therefore, I gradually recognized that it is necessary to generate new insights in order to make progress. I just had to find a way to do so that wouldn’t threaten me.

I was exposed to a conversational technique called “dialogue,” which is often used to generate collective insight. When I began to try it out in groups, I realized that, at a certain critical point, there is, literally, nothing to debate. We are seeking “emerging knowledge,” which are ideas that have not yet fully emerged. It is impossible to debate who has the “right” emerging knowledge. When new ideas are being revealed, there is no debate.

Team learning does have some attractive and practical qualities for knowers. Knowers are always interested in uncovering new things that can be “known” — they just have to overcome their hesitancy to accept them if they come from someone other than themselves. Dialogue can also be employed as part of a problem-solving process, but it should not be used for making any final decisions — dialogue must precede decision-making. In addition, team learning is a great way to introduce collective responsibility to a group (“how did we each contribute?”), which is particularly attractive to knowers, who are very sensitive to being blamed.

Learn, Unlearn, Relearn

Alvin Toffler wrote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Can you imagine the day when people’s competence is based not on their ability to be knowers, but on their ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn? Will you be ready? Will you be “literate”? By understanding the pitfalls of being a knower and diligently practicing the five disciplines, you will place yourself squarely on the path to success in the 21st century.

Brian Hinken (bhinken@gmhs.org) serves as the Organizational Development Facilitator at Gerber Memorial Health Services, a progressive, rural hospital in Fremont, MI. He is responsible for leadership development, process facilitation, and making organizational learning tools and concepts practically useful for people at all levels of the organization.

The post Confessions of a Recovering Knower appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

We can learn how to recognize and work more effectively with these dynamics by applying systems thinking to:

1. Illuminate the often non-obvious interdependencies among multiple elements that create such problems,
2. Increase awareness of how people unwittingly undermine their own efforts to achieve their stated aims, and
3. Point to high-leverage solutions that benefit the system as a whole.

This article briefly introduces several principles for analyzing the root causes of complex problems; applies them to gain a deeper understanding of the current financial crisis; and recommends high-leverage actions that political and business leaders can take to improve economic performance in sustainable ways.

The Instability of Reinforcing Feedback

The performance of a complex system is largely determined by interdependencies among its elements, many of which are indirect, circular, and non-obvious. Perhaps the most salient of these relationships is reinforcing feedback, which explains the dynamics of both exponential growth and spiraling decline. Such phenomena as compound interest that dramatically increases savings over time and engines of business success that fuel expansion are familiar illustrations of positive exponential processes. On the other hand, vicious cycles such as epidemics and economic collapse are indicative of negative reinforcing feedback.

In order to understand the current financial crisis, we first need to recognize that the same engines that stimulate exponential growth can also lead to sudden collapse. Economic bubbles tend to burst, and bull markets can suddenly turn into bear markets. In the case of the recent housing bubble, low interest rates generated easy credit, which was amplified by new financial instruments such as credit default swaps that spread and leveraged investor risk. Easy access to mortgage money increased housing prices — until higher adjustable mortgage rates kicked in and led to mortgage defaults and foreclosures, steep declines in housing prices, the collapse of key financial companies, and the tightening of credit.

In the case of the stock market, rising credit led to increased consumer confidence and increasing stock values, which in turn created greater purchasing power and fueled more purchases and higher market values. However, the sudden loss of confidence spurred by the financial crisis and declining stock prices has now led to reduced purchasing power, belt tightening, and a widespread recession. The bear market is intensified by (1) the long-term accumulation of debt resulting from credit-driven growth, and (2) the dependence of the previous bull market on purchases of largely non-renewable consumer and military products that have undermined investments in more sustainable innovations and growth. The dynamics of reinforcing growth and collapse are summarized in “The Instability of Reinforcing Feedback.”

Two high-leverage strategies for avoiding the dependence on reinforcing feedback as an unending source of growth are:

• Anticipate and prepare to address natural limits to any growth process. This means remembering that there are no free lunches and that promises of infinite growth inevitably prove false.
• Evaluate and manage growth in relation to independently meaningful goals rather than as an end in itself. We need to understand that money can enhance the quality of our lives by making it easier to realize our aspirations and express our values, but that the single-minded pursuit of money is ultimately deadening.

Managing Unintended Consequences

Another systems principle is that most quick fixes have unintended and delayed consequences that usually neutralize or reverse immediate gains over time. In the case of the current financial crisis, the bailout not only risks significant complications in years to come, but has also led to negative unintended consequences in the short term. First, the bailout has not achieved its immediate aims of opening credit markets or increasing consumer confidence, because banks have largely held onto the money to ensure their own solvency. Second, the resulting increase in the federal deficit, which will be compounded down the line by looming increases in Social Security and Medicare payments, will likely create significant tax increases that reduce purchasing power even further. A higher federal deficit will also generate inflation that reduces purchasing power and increases interest rates, thereby further limiting people’s ability to borrow as a way to stimulate growth.

One higher-leverage way to shift these dynamics is to address the root causes of the financial industry collapse instead of just its symptoms, i.e., prevent foreclosures by restructuring the mortgages of people at risk, and change the financial rules of the game (including incentives and instruments) that led to the collapse in the first place.

The performance of human systems is significantly affected by people’s deeply held beliefs and intentions. With regard to our economic system, many political and business leaders believe that growth measured primarily in financial terms is inherently good and that the ultimate goal of the system is to increase it. This belief results in high pressure for growth, which our country has tended to achieve by stimulating borrowing instead of savings (at the individual, corporate, and national levels) as the basis for investment, and encouraging spending, especially on consumer products and a strong military. For example, consumer spending has been spurred by low interest rates, and military spending has been increased to combat terrorism. The consequences of these strategies include increased deficits (again at all levels) and relatively low investment in renewable resources such as education, research and development, preventive healthcare, and alternative energy.

In order to reduce the high costs of an economic paradigm based primarily on financial growth, we need to shift to a new paradigm designed to achieve sustainable development. This entails:

• Reallocating federal spending and redesigning tax incentives to develop renewable resources such as people and alternative energy.
• Stimulating consumer and business spending based more on interest earned from savings than on interest paid for loans. One way to encourage savings is to gradually shift the tax structure toward reducing income taxes — because earned income tends to generate economic value — while increasing sales taxes (with credits for low-income families) — because consumption often destroys value.

This kind of economic stimulus package can reduce the federal deficit in the short term by decreasing mortgage defaults and thereby strengthening the financial industry. The deficit would decline in the long term due to changing policies that reduce lending risk and increase savings, and by the higher tax revenues generated from a more sustainable economy. These strategies for meeting the financial crisis and redesigning how we approach our economy are shown in “Framework for a New Economy.”

Facilitating Continuous Learning

s In addition, there are several other applications of systems principles that can help political and business leaders make wiser decisions about how to respond to the current economic crisis:

• Because most actions have both unintended and intended consequences, decision makers should always ask themselves what might be the accidental impacts of the solutions they propose before acting. Congress attempted to do so in challenging the bailout, but the fear of further immediate financial collapse resulted in Congressional approval without adequate oversight of how the money would actually be spent.
• Since unexpected outcomes are so common, processes for learning and correction should be built into all decisions. For example, since the bailout has done little to restore the economy so far and many people question its underlying rationale, policy makers and analysts should deeply question the reasons for the shortcomings and make adjustments as needed.
• Most actors in a human system unwittingly create or contribute to the very problems they are trying to solve. This means that as part of the learning about the bailout, decision makers must question their own responsibility for the problem rather than blame other stakeholders for what happened.
• Changes in complex systems often require significant time and patience to take hold. Therefore, any short-term learning and correction needs to be carefully judged against a theory of change that explicitly takes time delays into account.

In summary, systems thinking can support decision makers to increase both the short- and long-term effectiveness of their decisions. The current financial crisis offers an opportunity to alter previous policies and transform the way we develop our economy.

David Peter Stroh is a principal with Bridgeway Partners (www.bridgewaypartners.com) and a founding director of Applied Systems Thinking (www.appliedsystemsthinking.com). His areas of expertise—developed over a 30-year career consulting with private, public, and non-profit organizations around the world—include applying systems thinking to facilitate organizational and societal change, visionary planning, and leadership development.

The post A Systems View of the Economic Crisis appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

When asked how he managed to accomplish this feat, Spielberg credited the use of a large, aerial-perspective map that effectively captured the entire story as well as the camera locations. This rich image, which was much more detailed than a normal film storyboard, showed everyone on the production what was supposed to happen to whom and when. The detailed picture helped the crew come to a shared mindset and allowed them to work quickly and effectively.

Everyone knew the desired result as well as the detailed steps along the way. People on the production could place their efforts in the context of the big picture. They were all on the same page, so to speak; it just happened to be a very big one posted around all four walls of Spielberg’s hotel room.

Old Wine in New Bottles

Of course, the use of pictures to convey messages, encourage dialogue, and shape people’s perspectives is nothing new. A lot of art has this quality, including religious art. Take, for instance, Botticelli’s La Primavera. In the painting, Venus looks out at viewers and, by the gesture of her right hand, asks them to choose which of the Three Graces they should emulate. It is an image designed to challenge the Medici princes of Florence to think about what sort of leadership they should provide: Should they lead with a deeper spiritual quality or should they go for short-term pleasure and gain?

Pictures are effective because they can convey complexity as well as make manifest people’s mental models. For these reasons, they can be useful in a corporate setting in helping leaders articulate their thinking, encouraging organization-wide dialogue to promote greater engagement in strategy and building a shared vision about what the future should look like and how to achieve it. A visual depiction is far more useful than words alone in helping a community of people create common ground.

“Learning Pictures” are a tool used to help people align their thinking about conceptual matters, such as strategy, the nature of change, organizational performance, the competitive landscape, and organizational dynamics. They are large, colorful representations of the business situation, created by a consultant or facilitator with the support of a graphic designer or artist based on input from a leadership team (see “Sample Learning Picture”). The images are then used as a catalyst for group dialogue, usually with a facilitator and one of the leaders involved in creating the picture. Once the picture has been used in these dialogue sessions with people from throughout the organization, they inevitably end up being put on a wall and used for other communication tasks, such as during orientation for new employees.

Done well, a Learning Picture helps to create what Richard Pascale, Mark Milleman, and Linda Gioja, in Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business (Crown, 2000), call “line of sight” understanding. This kind of understanding, they say, “provides an overview of the strategic context. It enables employees on the shop floor to see the direct connection between what they do and the overall corporate results.”

The Process

Leaders responsible for achieving new levels of performance and capability sometimes jump into action without first having thought clearly about the outcomes they seek to achieve. If the wider community of employees has only a tenuous grasp on the strategic outcomes and how they are to be achieved, then their chances of realizing them are severely compromised. Likewise, if the members of the leadership team do not have a similar view about “the what” and “the how,” then they have little hope of arriving at the destination. Thus, the process of creating a Learning Picture is often as useful to the organization as the result.

The process follows six steps:

1. Elicit the Big Picture. In this step, the team accountable for delivering the strategic change participates in a facilitated workshop. The workshop lasts about two to three hours and focuses on the following:
   1. The end state that is desired, the vision (the what)
   2. The challenges and a map through them (the how)
   3. The case for change (the why)

   Most of the focus is on the end state. The facilitator’s task is to probe what this will look and feel like and to drill down to specific details, such as: What sort of relationships will there be between the company and its stakeholders/customers? What will the working environment be like? How will leadership be exercised? What will be different? What are the dominant chains of cause and effect? What will be leading indicators of success? How will key functions interact and how will they create value across departments? What cultural artifacts will be employed to substantiate the desired culture? What would a visitor from another planet see?

   If a picture says a thousand words, then it can certainly help to create the dialogue that leads to shared mindset.

   The key is to elicit participants’ mental models about the future and align them around one version.

   Throughout the session, the facilitator listens for visual metaphors and imagery. At the end of the workshop, participants agree on a visual metaphor for the Learning Picture that might act as the core theme.

   Some possible metaphors include:

   • Islands in the sea
   • Landscape with hills and rivers
   • Built environment with roads, shops, and factories
   • Formula 1 racing
   • Aviation, airports, and airliners
   • The globe showing connected communities and other networking themes
   • Mountains
   • A maze
   • The inside of a computer

   A strategic or conceptual artist – a graphic designer/illustrator who can use standard illustration software – listens to the discussion and starts to conceptualize the Learning Picture with the help of the consultant/facilitator, who acts as a bridge between the group and the artist.

2. Design the Learning Picture. The next stage is to think about the main themes that emerged from the facilitated discussion. With one client, the challenge was to integrate a new function with two existing business units. The management team hit upon the idea of representing the groups in a Learning Picture that showed them all collaborating in a working environment of the future. The image shows people interacting in new ways and leveraging new tools and information to achieve unprecedented outcomes.The management team felt that people in the organization needed to be more interdependent and share information without the intervention of the head office. To depict that concept, the Learning Picture showed one business function in the center with another supporting it around the outside and then further layers of support above and beneath these two core organizational constructs. Collaboration, best practices, visibility of information, a common language, and other ideas were represented in the picture’s details.

   Before they produced this picture, the organization had created plenty of PowerPoint slide packs about the new teams and the processes they would use, but the framework as a whole was not clear. In fact, some people who were supposed to benefit from this new way of working saw the change as a threat. The picture helped staff see in some detail what the future held for them. Through the facilitated dialogue, they explored the impact of the new tools and methodologies they would be given to use and the new information they would have access to. The picture sparked a conversation about how people would relate to each other in different ways. Because the discussion elicited imagined details about the future, it had a grounded quality that led participants to begin to own and desire the changes.

3. Make It Rich. Once the architecture of the picture has been decided, the facilitator and the graphic designer work together to fill in the details in the new structure. For example, to show that the balance of power needed to shift in favor of one department when dealing with suppliers, the graphic designer included two people on a see-saw. The see-saw tipped in one direction as both people looked at a computer screen showing the details of the supplier’s performance over the previous quarter. The key is to fill the picture with lots of vignettes and mini-stories that people can refer to when using the picture as a catalyst for group discussion.The picture may go through one or two iterations, as the leadership team gives its input on the details and the image takes shape.
4. Design the “Cascade” Process and Facilitators’ Guidelines. When the image is completed, it is important to plan the process for using it throughout the organization – the “cascade process” – and to develop facilitators’ guidelines. One way to use the illustration with groups is to lead a conversation by structuring a story around the picture. Another approach is to simply give an overview of the image and then look at specific areas of detail to bring out the most important messages. Classic facilitation questions include:
   • What do you imagine these people are saying to each other?
   • Which theme in this picture is most interesting/threatening/enticing/challenging/appealing to you?
   • Who would you most like to be in the picture?
   • If you could do one thing in this picture, what would it be?

   With an engaging image and a facilitator armed with some well-chosen questions, it is not too difficult to encourage some searching dialogue around core organizational issues.

5. Train Facilitators and Plan a Pilot. We have found it remarkably easy for experienced in-house facilitators and seasoned managers to use the Learning Picture to enable highly valuable conversations. The process is often given a boost if the leadership team facilitates some or all of the sessions; doing so demonstrates their own commitment to the conversation about the future.
6. Roll Out the Learning Picture and Feedback. It is important to build a process into the facilitated sessions through which employees can provide feedback to the leadership team on important aspects of the change. Leaders should approach the roll-out with the spirit of “engage and shape” rather than “tell and sell.” This tactic is particularly important when the desired future represents something of a transformation from the current state.

A Shared Mindset

The Learning Picture is one tool that leaders can use to engage employees in bringing about a desired future for their organizations. If employees have what Dave Ulrich calls a “shared mindset” about the future, then they will be more likely to realize that future. If a picture says a thousand words, then it can certainly help to create the dialogue that leads to a shared mindset. In our experience, a good picture is worth a thousand PowerPoint slides. Just ask Steven Spielberg.

Robert Bolton is associate partner at Atos Consulting, UK. He specializes in creating high performance organizations by finding, designing, and leveraging powerful connections in people processes. He can be contacted at Robert. Bolton@atosorigin.com.

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Likewise, in a time when the global system is spiraling toward unprecedented change, those of us who want to make a difference must jump into a rabbit’s hole in order to understand and change our reality. The other option is to remain standing at the edge, looking down, and endlessly treating the symptoms of much deeper problems, both out of sight and out of control.

Changing the Paradigm

The late Donella Meadows, a renowned systems thinker, converted the metaphor of the hole into systems language in her essay, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in the System” (Sustainability Institute paper, 1999). She described 12 leverage points for effecting change, found deeper and deeper in a system, each with greater power than the last. At the top of this rabbit’s hole, we use linear thinking to tinker with parameters, numbers, and constants, such as taxes and subsidies, as mechanisms of social change. But as we descend deeper into the hole, we reach other, harder-to-see but more powerful leverage points, such as managing feedback processes, information flows, rules, and goals. At the bottom of the hole, in the darkness, lurks the ultimate payoff — a system’s paradigms. Meadows wrote, “People who manage to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.”

In a time when the global system is spiraling toward unprecedented change, those of us who want to make a difference must jump into a rabbit’s hole in order to understand and change our reality.

In her writing over the years, Meadows regularly sought to undermine many conventional paradigms, including:

• One cause produces one effect.
• Improvements come through better technology, not better humanity.
• Economics is the measure of feasibility.
• Possession of things is the source of happiness.
• The rational powers of human beings are superior to their intuitive or moral powers.
• We know what we are doing.
• Growth at any cost is good.

But these paradigms aren’t separate and unique, littering the bottom of the hole like autumn leaves lying on the ground. They fit together into a larger, cohesive structure. Some call this structure “mythology” or “cosmology.” Others call it “worldview.” Although we popularly equate the word “worldview” with “mindset,” scholars define it as a story that answers the big questions of existence: Who are we? What is our significance? What are the laws of the universe? How was the universe created?

At the root of every system, every set of paradigms, beats a story so deep that most people are born into it and then die without ever knowing that a different way of viewing the world might exist. Our worldview operates like a cosmic screenplay that we enact each moment of our lives, guiding our actions and, ultimately, creating our reality. When we don’t realize it exists, our worldview manipulates us like a disembodied puppeteer, guiding our actions and thoughts.

Daniel Quinn traced the origins of civilization’s current worldview in his famed book, Ishmael. He writes that, 10,000 years ago, one culture among thousands that populated the earth took up intensive agriculture. As a result of food surpluses, its population exploded, requiring more land to accommodate its new numbers. With more land, its population grew again and annexed still more land. Quinn calls these people “Takers.” Their culture spread across the planet, assimilating other cultures, taking land, and converting wild lands to agricultural fields.

To justify this unprecedented activity, the Takers separated humanity, nature, and spirituality. In the new paradigm, nature was merely a resource, not a source of sacredness. Productivity became the measure of progress. The Takers believed there was just one right way to live and crushed all those who lived differently. These deep beliefs survived the rise and fall of many civilizations. Now every country in the world and 99.9 percent of the human population participates in this system. The few remaining indigenous cultures (, “Leavers,” according to Quinn) exist on the margins of civilization, often exiled in poverty and isolation.

Critics often rebut the assertion that there is just one dominant worldview, citing the many distinct cultures and worldviews that coexist today — East and West, for example. But, in the grand scheme of Takers and Leavers, the difference between most cultures that participate in the global economy is minor, a question of degree rather than of basic view of the cosmos. To see a truly different paradigm requires studying an indigenous culture, looking back 10,000 years to the birth of civilization, or looking forward to the new spiritual stories that are trying to supplant the dominant mindset.

Most social and environmental change programs deal only with symptoms: erosion mitigation, alternative energies, poverty reduction, and pollution control. They never reach the level of changing the underlying paradigm. At best, these efforts can only slow the degradation. As Quinn says, “Vision is the flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow.” Only a change of vision, a new story, can redirect the flow away from catastrophe and toward sustainability.

An Emotional Shift

Thus, systems thinkers must go after worldviews. Many social change advocates generate data and arguments about why we need to alter our global behavior to avoid terrible consequences. But as Thomas Kuhn wrote in his classic Structure of Scientific Revolutions (from which Meadows adopted the term “paradigm”), when scientists ultimately change from one paradigm to another, they don’t do so because they have proven the new one to be true; they do so because they experience an emotional shift or awakening. Stories can reach these deeper affective levels and, as such, are an intrinsic part of every systemic change process. Changing people’s stories re-orders their relationships with others and the world around them, and thus the system structure in which they live.

Some people have targeted our shared worldview head-on, identifying the assumptions that anchor people’s cosmic story. Physicists Albert Einstein and David Bohm did it; philosopher Ken Wilber and many in the spiritual evolution camp do it. But suddenly seeking to alter a worldview can provoke a maelstrom of resistance. Meadows took on the challenge willingly, illuminating hundreds of murky, deep-seated social beliefs. And she memorably experienced the force of resistance after she, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens published their world-shaking book, Limits to Growth, in 1972. Donella wrote, “We could not understand the intensity of the reaction our book provoked. It seemed to us far out of proportion to our simple statement that the earth is finite and cannot support exponential physical growth for very long. We wouldn’t have guessed that that idea could generate so much surprise, emotion, complication, and denial.”

As most systems thinkers know, treating symptoms at the mouth of the rabbit’s hole usually generates policy resistance because it leads to unintended and unforeseen consequences. Working at the bottom, too, provokes a different kind of visceral reaction, one that Meadows herself learned could actually be seen as a positive sign. No one can change their view of the universe without significant experiential shaking. Resistance may indicate the labored thinking of changing views.

We don’t yet understand what it takes to change the worldview of the earth’s population. Very likely, when enough individuals set off on their own change journeys, their numbers will reach a certain threshold or tipping point, allowing the rest of us to make the transition more quickly. Wilber says this positive feedback loop creates a structure — a field — that drives exponential change. He calls it a “Kosmic habit”:, “And the more people [that] have that [spiritual] experience, the more it becomes a Kosmic habit available to other human beings.”

I took up non-fiction writing at Dartmouth College, where I studied environmental journalism under Professor Meadows, and have been in the field for the past 15 years. Now I write fiction as well, so I can illustrate system dynamics in action. By doing so, I hope to help people see their worldview from the outside and envision a different future through the less-threatening medium of stories.

In the process, I’ve come to believe that, as systems thinkers, we must grit our teeth and jump down the rabbit’s hole, no matter the risk. The farther we fall, the more impact we are likely to have. As Meadows wrote, “It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.”

Jon Kohl is a writer and consultant working to combine systems thinking, spiritual evolution, and global change in his projects, prose, and fiction. For more information about his work or to contact him, visit www.jonkohl.com.

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Kegan, a professor of education, and Lahey, a psychologist specializing in adult development, refer to our powerful inclinations not to change as “dynamic equilibrium,” which they define as “a system of countervailing motions that maintains a remarkably hearty balance, an equilibrating process continuously manufacturing immunity to change.” (Those of us steeped in the language of systems thinking will recognize this description as a balancing process.) According to the authors, much as we might protest to the contrary, the status quo fills some hidden need that ultimately takes precedence over our impulse to change.

Surfacing the inner contradiction between the desire to change and the need to maintain things as they are is difficult, because a web of tightly held assumptions keeps us from seeing this gap. But studying the factors that contribute to our “immunity to change” can serve as a rich source of transformational learning and ultimately lead to lasting results. To facilitate the process, the authors spell out what they call a “new technology for personal learning” built around different ways of talking to ourselves and others (see “A ‘Technology’ for Personal Learning” on page 9).

New Ways of Talking

These seven novel “languages” are tools that “gradually introduce you to your own immune system, your own dynamic equilibrium, the forces that keep the immune system in place, and the possibilities of transcending it.” The first four languages work on the internal or personal level; the final three operate on an interpersonal or organizational level. According to Kegan and Lahey, “The forms of speaking we have available to us regulate the forms of thinking, feeling, and meaning making to which we have access, which in turn constrain how we see the world and act in it.” By moving through a series of inquiries, the reader begins to shift from “NBC (nagging, bitching, and whining) talk” to possibilities for transformational change.

In contrast to other approaches that focus on the positive, the authors believe that it’s important to start by paying attention to people’s complaints, because they represent untapped potential and energy. The first step (which corresponds to the first “language”) is to reframe “what we can’t stand” to “what we stand for.” Readers record these commitments and other responses on a chart, which forms a map of each person’s “immune system.” The second step involves reflecting on what we’re doing that prevents us from fully realizing our commitments. Doing so is more than just accepting blame or fixing a problem; it involves learning from the issue in order to truly change the way we think, so that over time the problem “solves us.”

In the third step, readers identify the deep-seated, unspoken commitments we hold that conflict with our stated goal. For example, someone who articulates a commitment to communicating more openly and directly at work may also be tacitly committed to not being seen as the “Brave Crusader” or “Miss Holier-Than-Thou.” Kegan and Lahey emphasize that the self-protective impulse embodied by the competing commitment is a normal, powerful human motive, and not a symptom of weakness or ineffectiveness. But unless we bring it to light,

Unless we have the courage to examine and update our veiled assumptions, we’ll be trapped in a cycle of déjà vu all over again and again and again.

our efforts to change will be futile, and we will remain in the thrall of the dynamic equilibrium that keeps the status quo in place.

The fourth step is to explore the “Big Assumptions” embedded in the competing commitment. Most professional development activities are corrective rather than transformative, because they don’t help us to explore and dispel the fears and myths that we accept as truths. These “truths” are often assumptions consisting of dire consequences that might result if we take actions to forward our goal; for example, “I assume that if people did see me as a Brave Crusader . . . then I would eventually be completely shunned, have no real connections in my office other than the most formal and functional, and actually I’d find work a nightmare . . .” With the dread of this kind of outcome, no wonder most of us have a hard time adopting different behaviors.

Once we articulate these assumptions, we can then begin to dismantle them by looking for experiences that cast doubt on them, exploring how we came to hold them, and testing them in safe settings. These incremental changes in our thinking can ultimately lead to large shifts in our sense of the possibilities available to us and the actions we can consider taking. As Kegan and Lahey state, “Even small changes in our Big Assumptions can have big implications for permanently altering our once-captivating equilibrium.”

“Language Communities”

After introducing the steps outlined above, the authors offer three additional languages for improving how we interact with others. Through these novel ways of talking, interpersonal problems and conflicts become a curriculum for transformational learning on an individual and group level. By identifying a collective problem, creating an agreement about how to handle it in the future, monitoring when the agreement is kept and when it is violated, and exploring these violations in the spirit of learning, teams can create lasting changes in the ways in which they think and work together.

Throughout this book, Kegan and Lahey emphasize the importance of engaging in this work with a partner or through building a “language community” in order to inform and sustain the change process. They also forward the notion that effective leaders at all levels of an organization must recognize that supporting the transformational learning of others is a key part of their jobs. But perhaps the most important idea that permeates the authors’ work is that, in order to combat and overcome chronic problems, people must change not just what they do, but what they believe. As difficult as that may sound, unless we have the courage to examine and update our veiled assumptions, we’ll be trapped in a cycle of déjà vu all over again and again and again.

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All of us are susceptible to this shortcoming at some point, in part because of what cognitive scientists and others refer to as “mental models.” These deeply held assumptions— formed through experience, biology, and culture—filter our perceptions and fix the scope of our thoughts, words, and actions.

Mental models may work for us (for example, when our assumption of future success fuels such an outcome) or against us (as when fear of making a mistake dooms our best-laid plans). Either way, what all mental models share are stealth and a resistance to modification. They persist because they influence what we see by causing us to select information that supports them and filter out contradictory data. So, if I believe all small cars are unsafe, I will notice news stories of crashes involving small vehicles and ignore any stories involving large ones.

Unless we learn to identify and modify outmoded mental models, we will continue to cling to a partial view of reality. This tendency can lead to conflict with others who have a different perception, an inability to see new options or solutions to problems, and adherence to existing ways of doing things. Fortunately, the field of neuroscience offers evidence that biology may be on our side: the discovery of so-called mirror neurons and their possible role in hard-wiring empathy and perspective-taking. The act of walking in another’s shoes can be the first step toward identifying and modifying our own outdated mental models.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

As is often told of scientific breakthroughs, the discovery of mirror neurons was serendipitous. In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues were studying brain activity in macaques performing simple tasks, such as eating peanuts. During a break between experiments, a lab assistant picked up a peanut in view of a monkey that was still wired to electrodes capturing brain activity. To Rizzolatti’s surprise, the monkey’s brain responded as if it had carried out the action itself. This was the first evidence of motor neurons firing in the absence of physical activity. “It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” said Rizzolatti.

Because these nerve cells appeared to be involved in mentally “mirroring” the actions of others, they were eventually termed “mirror neurons”; just the sound of a particular action in the dark can stimulate them. In macaques, mirror neurons reside in the part of the brain that processes sensory information and emotions. Additional studies proved mirror neurons in humans to be even more numerous, widespread, and robust than in monkeys.

In 2005, human brain imaging studies performed by Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist and professor at UCLA, established the connection between mirror neurons and empathic response. While mirror neurons responded moderately in subjects watching a hand grasp a coffee cup, substantial neural firing took place when the action was part of a social scene—a table set for a party or a messy table in need of clearing. “The mirror neurons are not just encoding the actions, but going deeper,” said Iacoboni., “They seem to respond to emotions or intentions, as well.” Researchers suspect that mirror neurons also play a major role, not only in the evolution of empathy, but also in imitative learning and social understanding as well.

Wired for Empathy

Before the discovery of mirror neurons, psychologists believed that we simply theorized other’s intentions; now research posits that a biological mechanism is involved., “Our empathic resonance is grounded in the experience of our acting body and the emotions associated with specific movements,” said Iacoboni, “as when I observe a circus performer on a hanging wire; I feel I am inside his body.”

V. S. Ramachandran, UCSD neuroscience professor and author of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Brain, makes an even bolder claim, stating that the discovery of mirror neurons— which he terms “Gandhi neurons”—is the underreported story of the decade: “They will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

Ramachandran’s lab investigates the interplay of mirror neurons and the distinctly human achievements of abstraction, symbolism, and language. Mirror neurons may drive our ability to make and understand metaphor and may explain the evolution of the self. According to Ramachandran, neural mirrors create a reinforcing loop between self-awareness and other-awareness: “an autocatalytic cascade that culminated in the fully human sense of self. You say you are being ‘self-conscious’ when you really mean being conscious of someone else being conscious of you.”

Mindfulness for a Change

So, how can this knowledge about mirror neurons help us overcome the negative affects of our mental models? First, knowing that we may be wired for communal meaning-making strengthens the case for practices and tools that bring people together to openly express their individual experiences and perspectives. These include methods that support shared visioning, group learning, scenario planning, dialogue, and non-hierarchical decision-making.

Second, in The Fifth Discipline and The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge and his coauthors address ways we can air out unproductive mental models on an individual level. These include recognizing when we jump to conclusions rather than maintain an observational stance, and being vigilant of contradictions between what we say we believe and what we actually do. The ladder of inference, balancing advocacy and inquiry, and the left-hand column are just some of the ways in which we can improve communication and open ourselves to different perspectives.

Finally, beyond empathy and rigorous self-examination, simply being more mindful helps us identify and adjust our working mental models. Mindfulness is placing one’s full attention on what is happening in and around oneself from moment to moment. While bringing our chattering brain to stillness is a challenge, regular practice can help us get there (see “Mindfulness 101”). When freed from the impulse to integrate our experience of the here and now with the past, the future, arising emotions, and the continual self-talk, we can achieve a state of clarity and start to see the world in new ways.

Some corporations have already begun to bring mindfulness techniques into the workplace, including Apple Computers, Toyota, Volvo, General Motors, and IBM. They report reduced turnover and healthcare costs, improved job satisfaction and performance, and a rise in empathy and teamwork. With the recent advances in the science of mirror neurons, it appears our biology supports these practices typical of authentic learning organizations.

Ann Butler, M. Ed, is a freelance writer in Massachusetts where she writes about science, nature, and teaching. She has been a regular contributor to The Boston Globe and other publications.

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