Margaret Wheatley challenges us to look beyond our current understanding of a world based on control and certainty, and see the beauty and potential of a chaotic, yet orderly, universe.

We are often afraid of the “letting go” that chaos requires, because we believe our world will fall apart without strict controls. And yet the new science of chaos tells us there is an underlying order to the universe that does not require our control, and that chaos can be a gateway to quantum leaps in improvement. -DHK

MANAGEMENT WHEATLEY—NEW SCIENCE AND THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION

For three centuries, we have been planning, predicting and analyzing the world by separating it into parts. We have held on to an intense belief in cause and effect, and we have let numbers rule our lives. Yet at the end of the 20th century, our 17th-century organizations are crumbling.

Today’s organizations are strong, complicated structures. We have built them deliberately to resist change, as we fear what might happen if we loosen our grip or let members of our organizations speak truthfully to one another. We are afraid that things will fall apart. Yet throughout the universe, things work well without us. Wherever we look, we see a landscape of movement and complexity, of bearings gained not from organizational charts or job descriptions, but from natural processes of growth and self-renewal.

In our desire to control our organizations, we have detached ourselves from the forces that create order in the universe. All these years, we have confused control with order. What if we stopped looking for control, and began in earnest the search for the order we see everywhere around us in living, dynamic systems? If we become a community of inquirers seeking to discover the essence of order, we will find that order in the heart of chaos.

Chaos and Order as Partners

Although we have always thought that small influences can be neglected, we are now aware that we live in a universe of exquisite sensitivity. Fortunately this means that it doesn’t rake a large mass to create change; it involves just the right disturbance in a part of the system that is so well-connected it will create change everywhere.

When systems were looked at from a long period of time in 3-dimensional phase space, the “shape” of chaos, called a strange attractor, emerged. There are many different attractors (ways of plotting movement) in science, but these were called strange by two scientists who said the name is deeply suggestive of the unusual beauty and mystery of these objects. We now understand from watching these strange attractors develop that they conform internally. We don’t know how, but when you observe chaos over time, it conforms to a boundary and has a predictable shape.

This realization has led to a very different definition of chaos: “order without predictability.” This paradox of autonomy and control is everywhere in chaos science. Chaos is therefore teaching us that as leaders we can let go of certain things and still create a well-determined, well-ordered organization. We are also learning that we cannot see the order in chaos without time and distance. To allow natural processes of order to be colleagues in our search for well-working organizations, we need to develop a very different relationship with time.

The Edge of Chaos

A second sensibility of chaos theory is chat the pursuit of a stable, balanced life of equilibrium is not possible. Chaos science says you can’t get to a truly creative or transformative solution unless you arc willing to walk through chaos, sit with your confusion for a while, and feel overwhelmed and uncertain. Unless you tolerate moments of deep, personal confusion, you can’t change your mental models. Systems are most capable of responding to change at the edge of chaos; therefore, if we don’t become confident that chaos is a useful state to be in occasionally, then we are going to get incremental, small solutions and miss the moments of great creativity.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogene noticed that living systems will fall apart when faced with radical amounts of change. But after they fall apart, they have the capacity to reconfigure themselves such that they work better within the environment. We may only see the falling apart stage, and get so terrified that we rush in to stop a group or an organization from descending into chaos. But this descent into chaos makes a new level of wisdom available to an organization.

In fact, chaos is a state of pure information — in that state, the system has two choices: it can die or disappear, or it can reorganize itself around the information and become more adaptive to that particular environment. The intriguing thing about self-organization is that many paths of change are possible. The avenue selected depends on the particular structural coupling that occurs with the available information. Self-organization is therefore a process of continuous tinkering — and we don’t normally tinker with organizations.

We need to consider how we can partner with chaos — how we can create processes through which people can generate new information and look at existing information and just be overwhelmed and confused by it. To do this we have to learn that we don’t always need to feel organized; we just need to understand that we will always be in this dance between disorganization and organization.

Managing Patterns of Chaos

The third sensibility of chaos theory is that complex systems can be understood by identifying some very simple patterns. We don’t know how to believe that a deep pattern, when combined with autonomous self-expression and rules of interconnectedness, can give intricate, complex, beautiful, and predictable shape to our organizations. As we learn this, however, it is clearer that as leaders we should be managing patterns, not people.

There is a DuPont facility in Belle, West Virginia that manufactures highly-toxic chemicals. Several years ago, a new plant manager was brought in because the plant had over 80 safety problems in one year. The manager, Dick Knowles, cut the safety or personal injury incidents in half by strong-arming people to comply with EPA regulations and procedures. But he realized he could never get a perfect record with that kind of autocratic management. What he needed to do was implant a desire and an ability to be safe.

So he focused on a pattern of safety by building an environment where safety was the ultimate concern. Every Monday morning, the senior group would meet to talk about anything that had gone wrong, even though it could be detrimental if the EPA got hold of some of the information.

At one particular meeting I observed, they talked about personal injuries. The first incident involved a plant worker who hit a deer while driving on a dark road 300 miles from the plant; the second incident concerned a team leader who had been rear-ended in his car about 12 miles from the plant. The group asked themselves what they could learn from these incidents — concluding they should alert people that the deer are coming out because it is winter, and people should therefore be careful on the dark roads and wear their seatbelts.

At the end of this meeting, I went up to Dick and said, “I don’t understand why you’re talking about these acci-dents that happen hundreds of miles from the plant.” He looked at me like I was from another planet and said, “Meg, if you care about your people’s safety, you care about their safety.”

He is a wonderful teacher. And he is involving his entire workforce in expressing their individual assessments of what the patterns of safety mean. I believe that such pattern consciousness leads us back into the arena of visions, values, and mission statements, but with much greater seriousness and intent. And our work is not just in establishing a core identity for an organization — the work is in creating the processes so the organization can discover its core pattern for itself.

Developing a Capacity for Autonomy in Our Organizations

To develop a strong core identity, we need to develop the capacity in our organizations to constantly self-update, stay connected, be in touch, develop relationships, find necessary information, and know how to interpret that information. Much more of our focus needs to go into how well we work together and how available we are to each other. Such possibilities signal a whole new way of being in organizations.

The biologist Francisco Varela said we need to understand systems as autonomous cognitive systems, and acknowledge that they have the capacity to determine what works best in their environment. They don’t need a template, model, or imposed structure. As self-organizing beings, we all have the capacity to figure out what works best for us in a given environment. And we can develop that capacity in our organizations — if we don’t, we will be in a lot of trouble. But how do we build this capacity in our organizations? I don’t know that answer yet — but I think that is our work for the next 10 years.

One of the terrors of these new lenses of science is that most of what made us “experts” is irrelevant. The process is one of letting go of our certainties and expertise and becoming willing to stay in a place of not knowing for longer than feels comfortable. Together, we are being challenged to open ourselves to a whole new way of looking at the universe and our organizations.

• • •

The changes required by the new science are deep; the challenges are significant. A clear articulation of anew vision of the organization marks the beginning of the journey. Making that vision a reality also requires a core community of people who are committed to helping transform themselves and their organization.

Peter Senge suggests that the concept of community may replace organizations as the focal point of our work. Building these communities will require investments in organizational infrastructures and in what he calls a deep teaming cycle. -DHK

PETER SENGE — BUILDING COMMUNITIES OF COMMITMENT

Something very interesting has been happening at the MIT Organizational Learning Center over the last three to six months. We have started to experience an interesting shift in what I would call the root metaphor of our work. The root metaphor for a long time has been “organization.” That seems to be shifting now and becoming “community.” It is that shift I would like to ponder together: where it is coming from, why it is occurring, and what are the implications.

I want to start by making a fundamental distinction between “organizational architecture” and the deeper learning cycles that are at work (see “Framework for the Learning Organization”). What we mean by architecture is what you actually try to build. I have suggested three dimensions of this architecture: Guiding Ideas; Theory, Tools, and Methods; and Innovations in Infrastructure.

Guiding Ideas

In a recent paper that Fred Kofman and I wrote called “Communities of Commitment,” we tried to articulate what we believe are three guiding ideas that are relevant for learning organizations: the primacy of the whole, the community nature of the self, and the generative power of language.

The idea of the primacy of the whole challenges our tendency to look at the world as if parts arc primary and wholes are secondary. We are always trying to “put the pieces together,” but perhaps they are already together. Maybe there is nothing but wholes within wholes, and it is only our common use of language and our patterns of thought that cause us to see things as isolated and separate.

That leads into the second basic notion, the community nature of the self. We tend to think of “self” as something isolated in time and space: here I am, there you are. But in other cultures, a person only exists in relationship. It is a different way of looking at the world — one that is more consistent with the primacy of the whole.

The generative power of language means that, when all is said and done, “there ain’t nothing out there except what we say is out there.” The basic notion is that we are continually constructing our reality, and there is enormous power in that if we start to recognize it.

Theory, Tools, and Methods

Some examples of tools for building learning organizations are dialogue, systems archetypes, and causal loop diagrams. The theoretical understanding behind these tools is crucial for extending learning beyond a particular situation or setting. Numerous times a group of people has actually achieved a break-through and produced results that are qualitatively ahead of what anyone has done before, but the learning doesn’t spread. Why? I think it is because we have very little idea what it means to build good theory. Deming has a saying: “No theory, no learning.”

A simple illustration of theory building is the product development work at Ford, where they have created causal loop diagrams to better understand the dynamics of resource allocation. Their work is producing superior results, but more importantly, they are building theory.

Innovations in Infrastructure

What are some innovations in infrastructure that are important to our work? One innovation is “learning forums.” In late June I attended AT&T’s Chairman’s Forum, in which the top 150 managers worldwide come together once a year for a day and a half just to talk. The conversation was quite remarkable — I sensed a candor and openness in that conversation that I don’t think I have ever noticed in that kind of group. I asked AT&T’s chairman Bob Allen why he started these forums, and he said, ‘We have a lot of infrastructure in our organization for decision making; we have very little infrastructure for learning.”

Much of our research at MIT is focused on another innovation in infrastructure called “learning labs,” which are practice fields for decision making. Nobody wants to make a mistake that might cost the company jobs or money, and yet all learning is about making mistakes. So somehow we have to create domains, integrated into our work environment, that are literally about making mistakes. That is exactly what a practice field is.

In many ways, dialogue is an attempt to integrate a particular type of practice field into a real work setting. The purpose is to start to think together about complex issues. Not to resolve or make a decision, but literally to improve the quality of our collective thinking, which will then directly inform and improve the quality of decisions.

Petting it Together

The significance of the “Framework for the Learning Organization” is that there is a meaningful distinction between the architecture and the deep learning cycle. All of the stuff in the triangle — Guiding Ideas; Theory, Tools, and Methods; and Innovations in Infrastructure — are the “hard,” quantitative stuff. But there is an irony to it — everything in that triangle could be changed tomorrow if a new CEO came into the company. What is most “hard” turns out to be most ephemeral, most fleeting.

The essence of the learning organization is what is on the right hand side of the diagram — the deep learning cycle. The development of new skills and capabilities, the development of new awarenesses and sensibilities, and a shift in attitudes and beliefs are the soft stuff, the stuff that lasts. Recently I was reading David Bohm’s book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and I came across a remarkable statement about the evolution of the concept of “measurement.” In the West, our prevailing notion of reality is “what is most real is most tangible.” Bohm points out that the word “measure” and the word “mays” in Sanskrit trace their roots to the same word, which means “illusion.” “This startling divergence over some 3,000 years reflects a profound divergence in Western and Eastern notions of reality. In the prevailing philosophy of the Orient, the immeasurable is regarded as the primary reality.”

The idea in “Framework for the Learning Organization” is that there is a progression from the most subtle, what Bohm would call the most “implicate,” to the most explicate or manifest. It is not to say that results are not important, but the deep learning cycle and the architecture lie on a sort of continuum from the most subtle to the most manifest.

Community

Juanita Brown, an organizational change expert, said, ‘The fundamental glue of an organization is economic transaction. The glue that holds together a community is the opportunity to make a contribution.” That is a different root metaphor.

Let me give you an example of that shift, using the idea of shared vision. I don’t think organizations have shared visions. What is an organization that it can have a vision? It is the people in that organization that carry the vision. What really happens when a group of people in an organizational setting build a shared vision? The vision transcends the organizational boundaries, especially when we start to think of building community rather than improving organizations.

Not all visions are created equal. Some have more power than others. This is part of what David Bohm calls the “implicate order”—something wanting to happen. There is a continual unfolding of the universe, and it is our human capacity to participate in the unfolding. So why are we all doing this? I think it is because we sense it is part of the unfolding. It is what needs to happen next.

I remember a beautiful articulation of this idea by Martin Buber, a Hebrew existentialist philosopher. ‘The only thing that can become fate for a man is belief in fate…lt does not keep him in leading strings, it awaits him. He must go to it, yet he does not know where it is to be found. But he knows that he must go out with his whole being. The matter will not turn out according to his decision, but what is to come will only come on what he decides and what he is able to will…Then he intervenes no more. But at the same time he does not merely let things happen. He listens to what is emerging from himself to the course of being in the world. Not in order to be supported by it, but to bring it to reality as it desires.”

Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science, president and co-founder of The Berkana Institute, a non-profit foundation that supports the discovery of new organizational forms. She is also a principal of Kellner-Rogers and Wheatley, Inc.

Peter Serge, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, is the director of the MIT Organizational Learning Center.

Peter Serge’s comments on building communities will appear in a different format in the introduction to the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Doubleday/Currency, forthcoming Spring 1994).

Further Reading: Fred Kofman and Peter M. Serge, “Communities of Commitment: The Heart of Learning Organizations,” Organizational Dynamics (Fall, 1993).

Editorial support for this article was provided by Colleen Lannon-Kim and Kellie Wardman.

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Knowledge management — understood and practiced the right way — promises to make it all possible.

Not Information But Know-How

Yet something unfortunate has happened to the phrase “knowledge management.” Too many IT-bedazzled managers believe that the expression refers to the latest information-handling technology. Worse, they assume that the technology will do all the work of knowledge management for them.

Knowledge management is much more than the latest software, but beyond that caveat, it has proved difficult to define.

In Learning to Fly (Capstone Publishing, Inc., 2001), Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell maintain that knowledge management is about capturing, creating, distilling, sharing, and using not information but know-how—the internal knowledge that each member of an organization has accumulated over time and the documented knowledge the organization has compiled. And it’s not just know-how that matters — it’s also know-what, know-who, know-why, and know-when.

Imagine what might happen if we could get inside one another’s minds and tap the knowledge therein!

Arian Ward of Work Frontiers International offers the following perspective: “[Knowledge management’s] not about creating an encyclopedia that captures everything that anybody ever knew. Rather, it’s about keeping track of those who know the recipe, and nurturing the culture and the technology that will get them talking.” As Collison and Parcell point out, such definitions shift the emphasis away from the creation of vast knowledge repositories and toward strategies for increasing the mobility of the knowledge that’s inside people’s heads. That mobility enables teams, departments, and entire organizations to constantly learn, innovate, surmount new challenges, and achieve new successes. Thus true knowledge management is more about people than anything else. It entails a range of activities, all of which organizations can practice and master.

Put another way, knowledge management is about learning how we learn. Information technology may indeed be fast, powerful, and impressive, but at most it merely supports true knowledge management. Companies that fail to grasp this concept risk investing in expensive IT systems — only to suffer disappointment and unnecessary expenses when the technology proves unable to “manage knowledge” for them.

BP’s Road Map

Telling stories — of successes, failures, elation, and even despair — is among the most powerful of knowledge management tools. “Here’s what happened when I did X.” “Here’s what we learned when Y happened.” “Well, it’s settled: We’ll never do Z again!” Learning to Fly tells the story of BP’s journey toward learning how to “capture the knowledge of 100,000 of the world’s brightest people.”

But the book is more than just an interesting narration of what BP did to become a knowledge-management juggernaut. And it’s far from a brag-fest. Instead, Collison and Parcell offer it as a road map for other organizations that wish to embark on the same journey.

Two longtime knowledge management practitioners at BP, the authors not only share behind-the-scenes details from BP’s experience; they also provide a wealth of hints, tips, tools, and techniques that any company can apply. As they themselves admit, “You won’t find too much theory here.” Rather, this is a book about what the folks at BP have practiced and what they have learned from practicing it.

In addition, Collison and Parcell set out to structure the book in a way that would help readers navigate the information in it, plot their own course through it, and follow whatever line of thinking they found interesting. To that end, the authors instructed their publisher to lay out the text in ways that emulate web pages. There are links between pages to allow readers to follow their train of thought to the pages containing relevant material. Alternatively, readers can work their way through the book in the more conventional, linear manner.

Finally, the authors have liberally sprinkled “facilitator’s notes” throughout the book: advice from seasoned professionals on how to introduce knowledge-management practices into their own organization. They’ve also inserted “action zones,” in which they offer readers ideas for applying their new learning to their own situations.

Clearly, this book is meant to be manhandled, scribbled in, dog-eared, and, well, used. At its heart, however, lie two enduring truths:

1. Successful knowledge management means learning before, during, and after everything you do.

2. Successful knowledge management hinges on a company’s ability to create the kind of environment that enables people to get in touch with “those who know” and to “develop communities [of individuals] who act as guardians of the company’s knowledge.”

What follows is a sampling of the tools and techniques BP has used in service of these truths.

Learning Before: “Somebody Has Already Done It”

Learning before doing centers on what the authors call a “peer assist”: a structured, facilitated meeting or workshop with a specific purpose, to which you ask people from other teams to come and share their experiences, insights, and knowledge with your own team.

A peer assist can have one of any number of purposes, including targeting a specific technical or commercial challenge, identifying new lines of inquiry, or simply strengthening staff networks. The key, however, is to look across the company’s hierarchy — not up or down — to ensure the participants really are equals. As John Browne maintains, “People are much more open with their peers.”

How do you select participants? Look for people who will challenge your mental models and offer fresh options and new lines of inquiry. Consider people from other disciplines, businesses, and even companies. The broader range of experiences you gain access to, the more insights into your problem you’ll generate.

And how do you find these folks? Use these techniques:

• Look for people down the hall who are working on different projects.
• In a large company, use the firm’s intranet Yellow Pages.
• In a small company, look for interested and potentially valuable outsiders — a supplier, a customer, a fellow member of a professional association.
• Post an announcement well ahead of the scheduled time for your peer assist.

Learning During: “Let’s Stop and Reflect”

Learning during doing centers on holding what are normally called After Action Reviews (AARs) while you’re conducting the work process or effort in question (for more information about the AAR process, see “Emergent Learning in Action: The After Action Review” by Charles S. Parry and Marilyn Darling, V12N8). At BP, AARs consist of an open, short (20-minute), facilitated meeting during which participants answer four simple questions:

1. What was supposed to happen? 2. What actually happened? 3. Why were there differences between our intent and reality? 4. What did we learn? The keys to AARs? Hold them while all the participants are still present and their memories of the situation are fresh. And don’t forget to record the responses to the four questions, as well as any agreed-upon actions.

Learning After: “What Happened and How Will We Apply It?”

Learning after doing focuses your attention on ways to capture and (more important) transfer lessons from a project to new challenges. To do so, the authors recommend a simple, facilitated meeting that they call a “retrospect.”

More in-depth than an AAR, a retrospect is akin to conducting an analysis after a war, rather than after one of the battles. During the meeting (which should last anywhere from an hour for a simple project to two days for a complex one), you do the following:

• Revisit the objectives and deliverables of your project.
• Ask “What went well?” Then ask “Why?” several times.
• Ask “What could have gone better?” Then ask “Why?” several times.

Who should attend a retrospect? The authors recommend the project leader; key project-team members; and the customer, client, or sponsor. Most important, make sure everyone understands that the meeting’s purpose is not to assign blame or praise, but to ensure that future projects go even better than this one. See that everyone has a fair share of “airtime.”

Creating a Knowledge Management Environment

Practicing learning before, during, and after a project lies at the core of knowledge management. By building the right organizational environment, you can make these practice sessions even more potent.

As a first step, make sure everyone has the tools needed to share documents and knowledge. Then, focus on encouraging new behaviors: specifically, asking for help, listening actively, challenging one another, nurturing relationships, and building trust.

These behaviors reflect new beliefs — such as “It’s okay to request assistance” — that can create a sense of discomfort within some organizational climates. But by putting new behaviors into action, people can begin gradually reshaping even their deepest beliefs.

BP knows this first-hand — and has the success to prove it.

Lauren Keller Johnson is a freelance writer living in Lincoln, MA.

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Police departments are strictly command-and-control operations. It’s always been that way. But in Carrollton, Texas, police have forged a hard-won model of servant leadership that defies traditional definitions. A dramatic example of this involved a team of volunteers that drastically lowered motor vehicle break-ins in several sectors of the city.

The servant leadership philosophy was first introduced within the CPD by Chief David James, who had read Robert Greenleaf’s essay, “The Servant As Leader,” which defied the “hero-as-leader” model so popular in America, then and today (see “What Is Servant Leadership?”). In its place, Greenleaf described a leadership path that puts the growth of others ahead of personal ambition for power, rank, or pay. James knew immediately that this was what he believed about leadership.

“Servant leadership is one critical component of an effective management style. It is one thread in the law enforcement tapestry that brings consistency and compassion to bear on everyday citizen concerns,” says James.

“We have been encouraged by other organizations committed to servant leadership, like TDIndustries and Ann McGee-Cooper & Associates,” James continues., “When these two companies organized the Servant Leadership Learning Community (SLLC) in Dallas, we jumped at the opportunity to join.”

Chief James has since stepped back to allow Assistant Chief Mac Tristan to represent the police department in the SLLC. For Mac, these quarterly sessions serve to refresh his own commitment as well as connect with other leaders of servant-led organizations in Dallas. Mac always brings an honest disclosure of his own challenges and celebrations. As a result, he has earned the respect and gratitude of everyone in the SLLC. So, the great dream of Robert Greenleaf came to the CPD through David James, then found another servant’s heart in Mac Tristan. And Mac didn’t hesitate to take what he was learning at the SLLC sessions back to his team.

The police/citizen ratio is about 1/1000, so typical police work is reactive. Officers can spend all their time on “urgent” matters and routine operations (, “Driving for Dollars”), never getting around to the important work of solving chronic problems, developing leadership, or practicing the disciplines of a learning organization. Max wanted to create a new model for policing after years of command-and-control hierarchy.

CPOP Traction

Mac’s enthusiasm for empowering officers has inspired a Community Problem-Oriented Policing (CPOP) unit composed of volunteers within the department. CPOP began in May 2004 when Mac invited officers to meet and talk about how they could improve their department as well as their service to the community. His idea was to ignite the passion of these officers by allowing them to act on what they already wanted to do.

Mac also wanted to provide a forum for honest feedback without repercussion, as well as act on urgent crime trends in Carrollton. As a result of his openness and willingness to share power with this group, the officers began to believe in Mac’s sincerity, his “walking the talk.”

The team’s first goal was to communicate more effectively between four sets of 22 patrol officers in different shifts and divisions throughout the CPD. Their second goal was to tackle a tough problem and show the effectiveness of this kind of voluntary servant leadership. The 10 officers on the team ran the meetings, and chose the CPOP name and a chairman. They met twice a month, and Mac made sure he missed some of those meetings to send a consistent message that the officers were the decision makers.

Mac handed out some simple guidelines within which these officers were free to make decisions. When considering solutions to any problems, the team must have a consensus in answering “yes” to each one of these questions:

• Is it ethical?
• Is it legal?
• Is it the right thing for the community?
• Is it the right thing for the CPD?
• Is it within our policies and values?
• Is it something you can take responsibility for and be proud of?

If the team’s answer to all of these questions was “yes,” then it could plan the implementation and do it!

Solving the “Impossible”

The first crime problem the team decided to tackle came in response to an ongoing problem in the community with vehicle break-ins (BMVs).

“What if we could eliminate vehicle break-ins in our community?” Mac asked the team. Some of the officers laughed (not out loud) at this preposterous suggestion. It was an example of a solution that seemed impossible, but Mac believed that it could be accomplished with the collective wisdom of the group and the spirit of servant leadership.

The department was spending 30 hours for each investigation of a BMV and wanted to cut that down drastically. So, they began by targeting the area where most of the break-ins were taking place. This became a significant ingredient in their success. If they had tried to focus on the entire city, they might well have failed.

Then they communicated with neighbors in that part of the community by going door-to-door, leaving fliers when people were not at home. The night shifts reported areas where street lights were out. Street signs were put up advertising the “H. E. A. T.” (help end auto theft) effort.

Officers created a report card that they left on car windshields as they walked or biked the beat. The car got a passing grade if it was locked and no valuables were visible within. Conversely, a failing grade was given (and the reason for it) if the car was unlocked or there were valuables visible. Eventually, as the local media caught on and asked what was happening, the CPD got a lot of free publicity to help further their efforts.

The results were remarkable. The total number of BMVs reported dropped 94 percent in the first eight months. There were only two BMVs reported in 2006. The team moved into the second and third targeted areas and received no reports of BMVs in the first three months of 2005. There was an 83 percent reduction through mid-2006.

To talk to the officers that pulled off this “impossible” feat is to catch the spirit of servant leadership — to see, feel, and hear the passion and energy that is released when those in the best position to effect changes are empowered to do so.

Ann McGee-Cooper, Ed. D., is founding Partner of Ann McGee-Cooper & Associates, a team of futurists and consultants. She is the author of You Don’t Have to Go Home from Work Exhausted, Time Management for Unmanageable People, and The Essentials of Servant-Leadership: Principles in Practice.

Gary Looper, Th. M., serves as Project Leader of the pace-setting Servant Leadership Learning Community, a consortium of 11 organizations that meet to develop unique, leaderful cultures and the learning organization disciplines. He is coauthor of The Essentials of Servant Leadership: Principles in Practice.

Duane Trammell, M. Ed., founding Partner and Executive Vice President of AMCA, has been working with Ann for 25 years. He manages the operations and finances of the company. He is coauthor of Time Management for Unmanageable People and You Don’t Have to Go Home from Work Exhausted.

This article is reprinted with permission from Being the Change: Profiles from Our Servant Leadership Learning Community (AMCA, 2007).

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The plan won state funding, and a new executive director supported by a multi-sector board began steering implementation. Service providers who had previously worked independently and competed for foundation and public monies came together in new ways. One dramatic example was that they all voted unanimously to reallocate HUD funding from one service provider’s transitional housing program to a permanent supportive housing program run by another provider. Jennifer Schrand, who chaired the planning process and is currently Manager of Outreach and Development for Legal Services of South Central Michigan, observed, “I learned the difference between changing a particular system and leading systemic change.”

Calhoun County has done a remarkable job of securing permanent housing for the homeless, especially in the face of the economic downturn. For example, in the plan’s first three years of operation from 2007-2009, homelessness decreased by 13% (from 1,658 to 1,437), and eviction rates declined by 3%, despite a 70% increase in unemployment and 15% increase in bankruptcy filings. Readers can follow the ongoing progress of the initiative at the Coordinating Council of Calhoun County website.

Why was this intervention so successful when many other attempts to improve the quality of people’s lives fall short? For example, urban renewal programs of the 1960s were backed by good intentions and significant funding, yet they failed to produce the changes envisioned for them. Moreover, the programs often made living conditions worse – leading to outcomes such as abandoned public housing projects and increased unemployment that resulted from what appeared to be successful job training programs (see Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics, 1969).

Stories of well-intentioned yet counterproductive solutions abound, as we learn that food aid can lead to increased starvation by undermining local agriculture, and drug busts can cause a rise in drug-related crime by reducing the availability and increasing the price of the diminished street supply. In other cases, short-term successes frequently fail to be sustained, and the problem mysteriously reappears. We see this dynamic when civic leaders invest in programs to reduce urban youth crime only to have the crime rate subsequently rise, or when international donors fund the drilling of wells in African villages to improve access to potable water, with the result that the wells eventually break down and villagers are unable to fix them.

By applying a systems thinking-based approach, the project to end homelessness managed to overcome the pitfalls of these other initiatives. The partners combined two significant interventions:

1. a proactive community development effort that engaged leaders in various sectors along with homeless people themselves, and
2. a systems diagnosis that enabled all stakeholders to agree on a shared picture of why homelessness persists and where the leverage exists in ending it.

In other words, the approach combined more conventional processes that facilitate acting systemically with tools to help the stakeholders transcend their immediate self-interests by thinking systemically as well.

Likewise, a comprehensive initiative to improve food and fitness – and in the process address childhood obesity – illustrates how the application of systems thinking can help organizations make better decisions about how to use their limited resources for highest sustainable impact (much of the first part of this article was adapted from David Peter Stroh, “Leveraging Grant-Making: Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Social Systems,” Foundation Review, Vol. 1, No. 3).

The Non-Obvious Nature of Complex Systems

Lewis Thomas, the award-winning medical essayist, observed, “When you are confronted by any complex social system… with things about it that you’re dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This is one of the sore discouragements of our time” (The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1979). The stories above about failed interventions epitomize this poignant insight. They share other specific characteristics:

• The solutions that were implemented seemed obvious at the time and in fact often helped achieve the desired results in the short term. For example, it is natural to provide shelter, even temporary, for people who are homeless.
• In the long term, the intervention neutralized short-term gains or even made things worse. For example, the temporary shelters provided by Calhoun County led to the ironic consequence of reducing the visibility of its homeless population, which diminished community pressure to solve the problem permanently.
• The negative consequences of these solutions were unintentional; everyone did the best they could with what they knew at the time.
• When the problem recurs, people fail to see their responsibility for the recurrence and blame others for the failure.

How can the interactions over time among elements in a complex system transform the best of intentions into such disappointing results? The reason lies in part in our tendency to apply linear thinking to complex, nonlinear problems. Systems and linear thinking differ in several important respects, as shown in “Distinguishing Linear Thinking from Systems Thinking.”

For instance, a linear approach to starvation might lead donors to assume that sending food aid solves the problem. However, thinking about it in a systemic way would raise concerns about such unintended consequences as depressed local food prices that deter local agricultural development and leave a country even more vulnerable to food shortages in the future. From a systemic view, temporary food aid only exacerbates the problem in the long run unless it is coupled with supports for local agriculture.

Systems vs. Linear Thinking

Because the problems addressed by many organizations are exceedingly complex, one step they can take to increase the social return on their investments is to think systemically (vs. linearly). Implementing a systems approach involves the following process:

1. Building a strong foundation for change by engaging multiple stakeholders to identify an initial vision and picture of current reality
2. Engaging stakeholders to explain their often competing views of why a chronic, complex problem persists despite people’s best efforts to solve it
3. Integrating the diverse perspectives into a map that provides a more complete picture of the system and root causes of the problem
4. Supporting people to see how their well-intended efforts to solve the problem often make the problem worse
5. Committing to a compelling vision of the future and supportive strategies that can lead to sustainable, system-wide change

Based on the insight that non-obvious system dynamics often seduce us into doing what is expedient but ultimately ineffective, the Food and Fitness (F&F) initiative of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) followed these steps in taking a comprehensive systems approach to planning, implementing, and evaluating the program. Initial planning began in 2004, and the first work with systems thinking in the field started in 2007. Implementation continues today in nine communities throughout the U. S.

F&F began as a response to staff and board member concerns about the rising rate of childhood obesity and early onset of related diseases such as type 2 diabetes. The WKKF program officers who initially led F&F, Linda Jo Doctor and Gail Imig, knew that many well-intentioned programs had attempted to address childhood obesity by focusing on nutrition, education, or exercise. Some targeted policy change, whereas others focused on individual behavior, but data clearly showed undesirable outcomes continuing, especially among children from poor families.

WKKF had long supported developing a healthy, safe food supply and increasing consumption of good food. Because the issue was highly complex and prior efforts to address it had been unsuccessful, the program officers determined that a systemic approach would be essential to achieving long-term goals. They believed that applying this kind of process to F&F would increase the likelihood of engaging a diverse group of people and organizations, fostering collaboration and finding innovative strategies to change the underlying systems, and thereby creating and sustaining the healthy results everyone seeks for children and families.

Applying Systems Thinking to Program Planning

Of the three major programming functions – planning, implementation, and evaluation – systems thinking can play an especially important role in improving planning. Here are suggestions for how to integrate these steps into the program planning process.

Step 1: Build a Foundation for Change

Building a strong foundation for systemic change involves engaging diverse stakeholders in the planning stage. This is a cornerstone of the F&F initiative. WKKF developed its knowledge base by bringing together researchers and theorists from around the country in fields such as public health, nutrition, exercise physiology, education, behavior change, child development, social change, and social marketing. The foundation also assembled a group of community thought leaders for a conversation about the current realities in their communities, as well as their visions for communities that would support the health of vulnerable children and families. In addition, WKKF engaged with other foundations throughout the U. S. in conversations about their collective thinking on childhood obesity and the roles foundations might play. From all of this outreach, a collective vision for the initiative began to emerge—not as a reaction to the immediate circumstances, but from an enriched understanding of current realities, as well as deeply shared aspirations for the future:

We envision vibrant communities where everyone – especially the most vulnerable children – has equitable access to affordable, healthy, locally grown food, and safe and inviting places for physical activity and play.

Step 2: Engage Stakeholders to Explain Often Competing Views

Building on the results of Step 1 above, systems mapping is one tool to help stakeholders see how their efforts are connected and where their views differ. This tool extends the more familiar approaches of sociograms or network maps to show not only who is related to whom, but also how their different assessments of what is important interact.

F&F’s conversation among community thought leaders was structured using the systems thinking iceberg model. Examples of questions included, “What is happening now regarding the health and fitness of children in your communities that has been capturing your attention?” “What are some patterns related to health and fitness of children that you’re noticing?” “What policies, community or societal structures, and systems in your communities do you believe are creating the patterns and events you’ve been noticing?” “What beliefs and assumptions that people hold are getting in the way of children’s health and fitness?” This conversation ended with the question, “What is the future for supporting the health of children and their parents that you truly care about creating in your community?”

Initially, each participant’s comments reflected his or her own work and the competition for resources that typically accompanies community engagement. Some believed the lack of mandated daily physical education caused childhood obesity. Others faulted school lunches. Some hoped parents would prepare more meals at home rather than eating out. Several blamed the rise of fast-food establishments. In the ensuing conversation, participants began to consider one another’s thinking. They came to realize that no single explanation, including their own, could fully explain the health outcomes they saw. The conversation revealed different perspectives and experiences but also began aligning participants around common beliefs and a deeper, broader understanding of the issue.

Step 3: Integrate Diverse Perspectives

Systems maps integrate diverse perspectives into a picture of the system and provide an understanding of a problem’s root causes. Participants in F&F came to see that the obesity epidemic in children was the result of national, state, and local systems failing to support healthy living, rather than a consequence of accumulated individual behaviors. They began to recognize the interrelationships among systems such as the food system, the quality of food in schools and neighborhoods, the natural and built environment and its role in supporting active living, safety, and public policy such as zoning. They also started to understand how individual organizations’ good intentions and actions could actually undermine one another’s efforts. These conversations paved the way for collaboratively creating strategies and tactics in later phases of the work.

Step 4: Support Responsibility for Unintended Consequences

One characteristic of social systems is that people often unintentionally contribute to the very problems they want to solve. Systems thinking enabled communities working in the F&F initiative to uncover potential unintended consequences of their efforts.

For example, marketing the concept of eating locally grown food without developing a food system that can provide it can lead to increased prices for that food, putting it out of reach for schools, children, and families in low-income communities and thus decreasing the consumption of good food among that population. Pushing for policies to allow open space to be used for community gardens could have the unintended consequence of reducing access to outdoor areas for children to play and be active.

If people understand how they contribute to a problem, they have more control over solving it. Raising awareness of responsibility without invoking blame and defensiveness takes skill – yet it is well worth the effort.

Step 5: Commit to a Compelling Vision and Develop Strategies
Once a foundation for change has been developed and the collective understanding of current reality has deepened, the last planning step is to affirm a compelling vision of the future and design strategies that can lead to sustainable, system-wide change. This step entails

1. committing to a compelling vision,
2. developing and articulating a theory of change,
3. linking investments to an integrated theory of change, and
4. planning for a funding stream over time that mirrors and facilitates a natural pattern of exponential growth (for details about each of these processes, see David Peter Stroh and Kathleen Zurcher, “Leveraging Grant-Making—Part 2: Aligning Programmatic Approaches with Complex System Dynamics,” Foundation Review, Vol. 1, No.4).

The systems approach to this work resulted in unanticipated positive consequences. Developing relationships, engaging in high-quality conversations, and committing to a common vision during the planning phase produced immediate results in many of the communities. In Northeast Iowa, Luther College, the public school district in Decorah, and the city council created a proposed community recreation plan under which Luther College would grant a no-cost lease on 50 acres of land for a citywide sports center and would raise the money to build an indoor aquatic center; the city would build soccer and tennis courts; and the school district would raise money for maintenance. Documenting these results during each phase of work is critical to maintaining momentum and funding for long-term system change.

A Pause on the Quick Fix

Our continued work in applying systems thinking to social change in such areas as homelessness, early childhood development, K-12 education, and public health affirms the importance of integrating approaches for acting and thinking systemically. Many people have become familiar with tools such as stakeholder mapping and community building, and methodologies for getting the whole system in the room to bring together the range of interests and resources vital to social change. These are positive steps toward overcoming the pitfalls of the failed interventions referenced at the beginning of the article.

However, unless we drastically shift the way we think, bringing diverse stakeholders together all too often fails to surface or reconcile the differences between people’s espoused (and sincere) commitment to serving the most vulnerable members of society and the equally if not more powerful competing commitment to optimizing their individual contributions and maintaining their current practices. For example, shelter directors want to end homelessness, but they actually get paid according to the number of beds they fill each night. Donors want to end homelessness, but their benefactors get more immediate satisfaction from housing people temporarily. Service providers who specialize in helping the homeless may find themselves competing for funds that might otherwise be allocated toward prevention.

As one nonprofit noted, the greatest challenge in creating social change can be mustering the courage to ask different kinds of questions, such as, “What is our organization willing to give up in order for the system as a whole to succeed?” Thinking systemically helps people answer that question in a way that serves their higher intentions. It does so by enabling them to see the differences between the short and long-term impacts of their actions, and the unintended consequences of their actions, on not only other stakeholders but also themselves. The result might be that one shelter director decides to close his facility, while another reinvents her organization to focus on helping the homeless build bridges toward the safe, permanent, affordable, and supportive housing they ultimately need to heal. The net outcome is that people act in service of the whole because it naturally follows their thinking about how the whole behaves.

Ann Mansfield, co-director of the F&F program in Northeast Iowa, summarized the benefit of using systems thinking: “The tools helped us put a pause on the quick fix.” Systems thinking provides frameworks and tools that can enhance organizations’ efforts to achieve lasting systems change results by making a few key coordinated changes over time. By following the five-step change process for achieving sustainable, system-wide improvement as spelled out in this article, we can increase the chances that our interventions will have the results we fervently desire.

David Peter Stroh, Master’s Degree, City Planning, was a founding partner of Innovation Associates. He is currently a principal with Bridgeway Partners, an organizational consulting firm dedicated to supporting social change through the application of organizational learning disciplines. dstroh@bridgewaypartners.com

Kathleen A. Zurcher, PhD, Educational Psychology, partners with communities and organizations to achieve their desired future by applying and building capabilities in organizational learning and systems thinking. In 2008 she retired from WKKF. She was previously a senior administrator for Family Medicine, and a faculty member in the University of Minnesota’s extension service and at Lehigh University. kzurcher33@gmail.com

The post Acting and Thinking Systemically appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Like other observers, Oldenburg has depicted the modern trend toward increasing social isolation as troubling: “Ever since the solidifying effect of World War II passed into history, Americans have been growing further apart from one another. Lifestyles are increasingly privatized and competitive; residential areas are increasingly devoid of gathering places.” What are the effects of isolation on American lifestyles? Despite our material comforts, many of us suffer from boredom, loneliness, and alienation.

Oldenburg’s vision of restoring third places stems from his conviction that when we feel connected to one another socially, we become healthier as individuals and stronger as a society. Conversely, he argues that no matter how advanced technology becomes or how many public policies we implement, when we neglect the informal group experience, we disempower ourselves and weaken the democratic process.

Elements of the Third Place

In the last decade, The Great Good Place has garnered a growing readership among individuals and groups seeking to revitalize urban areas and public life. In 2001 Oldenburg edited Celebrating the Third Place (Marlowe & Company), a collection of essays from people around the U. S. who have been designing and creating public gathering places. Against great odds—many small businesses fail—these pioneers have sustained diverse enterprises by intuitively practicing or learning the principles outlined in The Great Good Place. As employers, they treat their staff with respect, encourage them to take responsibility for the business, and train them well. As hosts, they develop rapport with their customers and create a warm and fun ambience. Most importantly, their businesses embody what Oldenburg identifies as the main characteristics of a third place:

• Neutral ground. In a third place people can easily join in or disengage from the conversation.
• Leveler. All people, regardless of class and status, are welcome and intermingle.
• Engaging Conversation. Talk is the main activity and provides the greatest value. The rules are simple: Don’t dominate the conversation, be sensitive to others’ feelings, speak on topics of general interest, and avoid trying to instruct.
• Accessibility and accommodation. People can wander in almost any time of day or night and find someone to talk to.
• Regulars. The people who frequent the place give it character, set the tone, and welcome both old timers and newcomers.
• Low profile. The decor is plain and unimpressive, discouraging pretension and self-consciousness.
• Playful mood. Displays of wit are encouraged. The congenial environment makes it feel like a home away from home.

Informal Conversation and Organizational Change

What is the significance of third places for those interested in organizational change? For a number of years, observers have been discussing the importance of free-flowing, informal conversation among coworkers in order to share knowledge and spark innovation. For example, Juanita Brown and some colleagues gave birth to the World Café methodology, which links small and large-group conversations to enhance collaborative thinking (see “The World Café: Living Knowledge Through Conversations That Matter,” V12N5). According to Brown, key features of café conversations are that they take place in neutral territory where everyone feels included, and they serve as bridges for people of diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

Likewise, Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice highlights how we create and use knowledge through informal networks (“Communities of Practice: Learning As a Social System” V9N5). These networks share many characteristics with third places, in that individuals are bound by similar interests rather than organizational structures. Wenger cites the example of Xerox repair technicians who learn more about solving problems over breakfast together than from formal knowledge-sharing programs.

Oldenburg warns that we must be diligent in protecting third places: “Neglect of the informal public life can make a jungle of what had been a garden while, at the same time, diminishing the ability of people to cultivate it.” As these examples show, we break the bonds of community at our own peril, for they are vital to our success as a society and are extremely difficult to replace.

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.

The post Making a Garden Out of a Jungle: The Power of “Third Places” appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

I applaud this important effort. But the experiences of other cities, large and small, show that working to improve all aspects of our community will probably be self-defeating. In fact, actually letting go of some of our goals would boost our power to reach the ones we value most.

Huh? you might say. Bear with me a few paragraphs—here’s my thinking, strongly influenced by MIT professor Jay Forrester and his “attractiveness principle.”

The Attractiveness Principle

Imagine for a moment that all our goals for Asheville have been met. Suddenly, we have high wages, inexpensive housing, clean air, no traffic congestion, and a stellar Indian restaurant. What would happen next?

People would start moving here even faster than they already are. Some sectors of the economy and community would flourish. But rents would climb, employers could lower wages and still find workers, the roads would fill, and we would eventually return to a balance of things we like and things we don’t.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, no urban center in a mobile society can remain an overall better place to live for long. By one path or another, changes that improve the attractiveness of one city will result in compensating changes that lessen its attractiveness until it is generally as appealing as other places.

Consider how other cities naturally provide “bads” to balance the “goods.” Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Charlotte have traffic and smog and long commutes to balance the higher-paying jobs and big city perks. Rural Vermont, Montana, and Wisconsin have cold winters and few jobs to balance the open space, inexpensive housing, and clean air. From my perspective, Asheville has expensive housing, low wages, and dirty air (i.e., high surface ozone levels) to balance the inspired culture, low traffic congestion, walkable downtown, high-quality art, accessible mountains, incredible views, beautiful rivers, deep heritage, and easy-going pace of life.

This thinking might sound fatalistic, as though no one should try to improve their hometown. But accepting this principle actually could give us more power to shape our future. If we embrace the “unattractiveness” that we can live with, we make space for something else to get better. Sounds odd, but others do it. People in Seattle tolerate (and even advertise) eight months of rain to balance their hot economy. New York City folks deal with each other acting a bit rudely to gain all that is the Big Apple. Portland, OR, citizens accepted higher rents and population densities when they created an urban growth boundary to preserve open space. I heard that people in Jackson Hole, WY, refused to expand their heavily congested highway, accepting delays over sprawl. Some folks even fight against repairing potholes in the road, knowing it will slow traffic.

Difficult Choices

So what kind of imperfection are we willing to live with? Dirty air? No? Then we will need to choose something else. High rent? A slow development permitting process? High taxes? Mediocre schools? Strict land-use laws? Few jobs? Development fees? Choose, or the urban system, like it or not, will choose something for us.

As for me, at the gut level I’d rather not choose. When I look at my infant son and toddler daughter and imagine them raising kids here in Asheville in the 2030s or so, I find myself wanting to tackle all the problems without much thought to the likely side effects. Letting go is easier said than done, even when my rational mind knows it would help.

Then what will it take to actually make these kinds of difficult choices? We need to ask ourselves several difficult questions about the thinking I have laid out here. Does the “attractiveness principle” really apply to us? Are other cities’ experiences relevant? If we conclude that, in the long term, there is no way to “have it all,” then we might explore what we are willing to let go in order to reach the goals that matter most. The ensuing discussion would boost our power to shape our community for ourselves and future generations. Our children will ultimately thank us for our foresight and courage.

Andrew Jones (apjones@alum.mit.edu) and his colleagues at Sustainability Institute (www.sustainabilityinstitute.org) run workshops and consulting projects using systems thinking and system dynamics simulation modeling.

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

Traditional Leadership Models

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

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

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

The Beginnings of Servant-Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Servant-Leadership Serves Organizations

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

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

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

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

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

A NEW KIND OF LEADERSHIP

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

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

ADDICTION OF FIRE-FIGHTING

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

The Power of Internal Motivation and Paradox

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

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

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

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

A Time for Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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