What Does Systems Thinking Involve?

Why Use Systems Thinking?

Systems thinking expands the range of choices available for solving a problem by broadening our thinking and helping us articulate problems in new and different ways. At the same time, the principles of systems thinking make us aware that there are no perfect solutions; the choices we make will have an impact on other parts of the system. By anticipating the impact of each trade-off, we can minimize its severity or even use it to our own advantage. Systems thinking therefore allows us to make informed choices.
Systems thinking is also valuable for telling compelling stories that describe how a system works. For example, the practice of drawing causal loop diagrams forces a team to develop shared pictures, or stories, of a situation. The tools are effective vehicles for identifying, describing, and communicating your understanding of systems, particularly in groups.

When Should We Use Systems Thinking?

Problems that are ideal for a systems thinking intervention have the following characteristics:

• The issue is important.
• The problem is chronic, not a one-time event.
• The problem is familiar and has a known history.
• People have unsuccessfully tried to solve the problem before.

Where Should We Start?

When you begin to address an issue, avoid assigning blame (which is a common place for teams to start a discussion!). Instead, focus on items that people seem to be glossing over and try to arouse the group’s curiosity about the problem under discussion. To focus the conversation, ask, “What is it about this problem that we don’t understand?”

In addition, to get the full story out, emphasize the iceberg framework. Have the group describe the problem from all three angles: events, patterns, and structure (see “The Iceberg”).
Finally, we often assume that everyone has the same picture of the past or knows the same information. It’s therefore important to get different perspectives in order to make sure that all viewpoints are represented and that solutions are accepted by the people who need to implement them. When investigating a problem, involve people from various departments or functional areas; you may be surprised to learn how different their mental models are from yours.

How Do We Use Systems Thinking Tools?

Causal Loop Diagrams. First, remember that less is better. Start small and simple; add more elements to the story as necessary. Show the story in parts. The number of elements in a loop should be determined by the needs of the story and of the people using the diagram. A simple description might be enough to stimulate dialogue and provide a new way to see a problem. In other situations, you may need more loops to clarify the causal relationships you are surfacing.

Also keep in mind that people often think that a diagram has to incorporate all possible variables from a story; this is not necessarily true. In some cases, there are external elements that don’t change, change very slowly, or whose changes are irrelevant to the problem at hand. You can unnecessarily complicate things by including such details, especially those over which you have little or no control. Some of the most effective loops reveal connections or relationships between parts of the organization or system that the group may not have noticed before.
And last, don’t worry about whether a loop is “right”; instead, ask yourself whether the loop accurately reflects the story your group is trying to depict. Loops are shorthand descriptions of what we perceive as current reality; if they reflect that perspective, they are “right” enough.

THE ICEBERG

How Do We Know That We’ve “Got It”?

Here’s how you can tell you’ve gotten a handle on systems thinking:

• You’re asking different kinds of questions than you asked before.
• You’re hearing “catchphrases” that raise cautionary flags. For example, you find yourself refocusing the discussion when someone says, “The problem is we need more (sales staff, revenue).”
• You’re beginning to detect the archetypes and balancing and reinforcing processes in stories you hear or read.
• You’re surfacing mental models (both your own and those of others).
• You’re recognizing the leverage points for the classic systems stories.

Once you’ve started to use systems thinking for inquiry and diagnosis, you may want to move on to more complex ways to model systems-accumulator and flow diagrams, management flight simulators, or simulation software. Or you may find that adopting a systems thinking perspective and using causal loop diagrams provide enough insights to help you tackle problems. However you proceed, systems thinking will forever change the way you think about the world and approach issues. Keep in mind the tips we’ve listed here, and you’re on your way!

Michael Goodman is principal at Innovation Associates Organizational Learning

The post Systems Thinking: What, Why, When, Where, and How? appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

One of the reasons for this wide-spread institutional failure is that the knowledge-creating system, the method by which human beings collectively learn and by which society’s institutions improve and revitalize themselves, is deeply fragmented. This fragmentation has developed so gradually that few of us have noticed it; we take the disconnections between the branches of knowledge and between knowledge and practice as a given

A Knowledge-Creating System

Before we can address the issue of fragmentation, we need to establish what has been fragmented. In other words, what do we mean by a knowledge-creating system, and what does it mean to say it is fragmented?

THE CYCLE OF KNOWLEDGE-CREATION

Like theories, the tree’s roots are invisible, and yet the health of the root system determines the health of the tree. The branches are the methods and tools, which enable translation of theories into new capabilities and practical results. The fruit is that practical knowledge. The tree as a whole is a system.

We believe that human communities have always attempted to organize themselves to maximize the production, transmittal, and application of knowledge. In these activities, different individuals fulfill different roles, with varying degrees of success. For example, in indigenous cultures, elders articulate timeless principles grounded in their experience to guide their tribes’ future actions. “Doers, “whether warriors, growers, hunters, or nannies, try to learn how to do things better than before and continually improve their craft. And coaches and teachers help people develop their capacities to both perform their roles and grow as human beings. These three activities-which we can term theory-building, practice, and capacity-building-are intertwined and woven into the fabric of the community in a seamless process that restores and advances the knowledge of the tribe. One could argue that this interdependent knowledge-creating system is the only way that human beings collectively learn, generate new knowledge, and change their world.

We can view this system for producing knowledge as a cycle. People apply available knowledge to accomplish their goals. This practical application in turn provides experiential data from which new theories can be formulated to guide future action. New theories and principles then lead to new methods and tools that translate theory into practical know-how, the pursuit of new goals, and new experience-and the cycle continues.

Imagine that this cycle of knowledge-creation is a tree (see “The Cycle of Knowledge-Creation” on p.1). The tree’s roots are the theories. Like theories, the roots are invisible to most of the world, and yet the health of the root system to a large extent determines the health of the tree. The branches are the methods and tools, which enable translation of theories into new capabilities and practical results. The fruit is that practical knowledge. In a way, the whole system seems designed to produce the fruit. But, if you harvest and eat all the fruit from the tree, eventually there will be no more trees. So, some of the fruit must be used to provide the seeds for more trees. The tree as a whole is a system.

The tree is a wonderful metaphor, because it functions through a profound, amazing transformational process called photosynthesis. The roots absorb nutrients from the soil. Eventually, the nutrients flow through the trunk and into the branches and leaves. In the leaves, the nutrients interact with sunlight to create complex carbohydrates, which serve as the basis for development of the fruit.

So, what are the metaphorical equivalents that allow us to create fruits of practical knowledge in our organizations? We can view research activities as expanding the root system to build better and richer theories. Capacity-building activities extend the branches by translating the theories into usable methods and tools. The use of these methods and tools enhances people’s capabilities. The art of practice in a particular line of work transforms the theories, methods, and tools into usable knowledge as people apply their capabilities to practical tasks, much as the process of photosynthesis converts the nutrients into leaves, flowers, and fruit. In our society,

• Research represents any disciplined approach to discovery and understanding with a commitment to share what’s being learned. We’re not referring to white-coated scientists performing laboratory experiments; we mean research in the same way that a child asks, “What’s going on here?” By pursuing such questions, research-whether performed by academics or thoughtful managers or consultants reflecting on their experiences-continually generates new theories about how our world works.
• Practice is anything that a group of people does to produce a result. It’s the application of energy, tools, and effort to achieve something practical. An example is a product development team that wants to build a better product more quickly at a lower cost. By directly applying the available theory, tools, and methods in our work, we generate practical knowledge
• Capacity-building links research and practice. It is equally committed to discovery and understanding and to practical know-how and results. Every learning community includes coaches, mentors, and teachers – people who help others build skills and capabilities through developing new methods and tools that help make theories practical.

“The Stocks and Flows of Knowledge-Creation” shows how the various elements are linked together in a knowledge-creating system.

THE STOCKS AND FLOWS OF KNOWLEDGE-CREATION

Research activities build better and richer theories. Capacity-building functions translate the theories into usable methods and tools. The use of these methods and tools enhances people’s capabilities. The art of practice transforms the theories, methods, and tools into practical knowledge, as people apply their capabilities to practical tasks.

Institutionalized Fragmentation

If knowledge is best created by this type of integrated system, how did our current systems and institutions become so fragmented? To answer that question, we need to look at how research, practice, and capacity-building are institutionalized in our culture (see “The Fragmentation of Institutions”).

For example, what institution do we most associate with research Universities? What does the world of practice encompass? Corporations, schools, hospitals, and nonprofits. And what institution do we most associate with capacity-building-people helping people in the practical world? Consulting, or the HR function within an organization. Each of these institutions has made that particular activity its defining core. And, because research, practice, and capacity-building each operate within the walls of separate institutions, it is easy for the people within these institutions to feel cut off from each other, leading to suspicion, stereo typing, and an “us” versus “them” mindset.

This isolation leads to severe communication breakdown. For example, many people have argued that the academic community has evolved into a private club. Nobody understands what’s going on but the club members. They talk in ways that only members can understand. And the members only let in others like themselves.

Consulting institutions have also undermined the knowledge-creating process, by making knowledge proprietary, and by not sharing what they’ve learned. Many senior consultants have an incredible amount of knowledge about organizational change, yet they have almost no incentive to share it, except at market prices.

Finally, corporations have contributed to the fragmentation by their bottom-line orientation, which places the greatest value on those things that produce immediate, practical results. They have little patience for investing in research that may have payoffs over the long term or where payoffs cannot be specifically quantified.

Technical Rationality: One Root of Fragmentation

How did we reach this state of fragmentation? Over hundreds of years, we have developed a notion that knowledge is the province of the expert, the researcher, the academic. Often, the very term science is used to connote this kind of knowledge, as if the words that come out of the mouths of scientists are somehow inherently more truthful than everyone else’s words.

Donald Schon has called this concept of knowledge “technical rationality.” First you develop the theory, then you apply it. Or, first the experts come in and figure out what’s wrong, and then you use their advice to fix the problem. Of course, although the advice may be brilliant, sometimes we just can’t figure out how to implement it.

But maybe the problem isn’t in the advice. Maybe it’s in the basic assumption that this method is how learning or knowledge-creation actually works. Maybe the problem is really in this very way of thinking: that first you must get “the answer,” then you must apply it.

THE FRAGMENTATION OF INSTITUTIONS

Because research, practice, and capacity-building each operate within the walls of separate institutions, the people within these institutions feel cut off from each other, leading to suspicion, stereotyping, and an “us” versus “them” mindset.

The implicit notion of technical rationality often leads to conflict between executives and the front-line people in organizations. Executives often operate by the notion of technical rationality: In Western culture, being a boss means having all the answers. However, front-line people know much more than they can ever say about their jobs and about the organization. They actually have the capability to do something, not just talk about something. Technical rationality is great if all you ever have to do is talk.

Organizing for Learning

If we let go of this notion of technical rationality, we can then start asking more valuable questions, such as:

• How does real learning occur?
• How do new capabilities develop?
• How do learning communities that interconnect theory and practice, concept and capability come into being?
• How do they sustain themselves and grow?
• What forces can destroy them, undermine them, or cause them to wither?

Clearly, we need a theory, method, and set of tools for organizing the learning efforts of groups of people.

Real learning is often far more complex and more interesting than the theory of technical rationality suggests. We often develop significant new capabilities with only an incomplete idea of how we do what we do. As in skiing or learning to ride a bicycle, we “do it” before we really understand the actual concept. Similarly, practical know how often precedes new principles and general methods in organizational learning. Yet, this pattern of learning can also be problematic.

For example, teams within a large institution can produce significant innovations, but this new knowledge often fails to spread. Modest improvements may spread quickly, but real breakthroughs are difficult to diffuse. Brilliant innovations won’t spread if there is no way for them to spread; in other words, if there is no way for an organization to extract the general lessons from such innovations and develop new methods and tools for sharing those lessons. The problem is that wide diffusion of learning requires the same commitment to research and capacity-building as it does to practical results. Yet few businesses foster such commitment. Put differently, organizational learning requires a community that enhances research, capacity-building, and practice (see “Society for Organizational Learning” on p. 4)

Learning Communities

We believe that the absence of effective learning communities limits our ability to learn from each other, from what goes on within the organization, and from our most clearly demonstrated breakthroughs. Imagine a learning community as a group of people that bridges the worlds of research, practice, and capacity-building to produce the kind of knowledge that has the power to transform the way we operate, not merely make incremental improvements. If we are interested in innovation and in the vitality of large institutions, then we are interested in creating learning communities that integrate knowledge instead of fragment it.

In a learning community, people view each of the three functions-research, capacity-building, practice-as vital to the whole (see “A Learning Community”). Practice is crucial because it produces tangible results that show that the community has learned something. Capacity-building is important because it makes improvement possible. Research is also key because it provides a way to share learning with people in other parts of the organization and with future generations within the organization. In a learning community, people assume responsibility for the knowledge creating process.

Learning Communities in Action

To commit to this knowledge-creating process, we must first understand what a learning community looks like in action in our organizations. Imagine a typical change initiative in an organization; for example, a product development team trying a new approach to the way they handle engineering changes. Traditionally, such a team would be primarily interested in improving the results on their own projects. Team members probably wouldn’t pay as much attention to deepening their understanding of why a new approach works better, or to creating new methods and tools for others to use. Nor would they necessarily attempt to share their learnings as widely as possible – they might well see disseminating the information as someone else’s responsibility.

In a learning community, however, from the outset, the team conceives of the initiative as a way to maximize learning for itself as well as for other teams in the organization. Those involved in the research process are integral members of the team, not outsiders who poke at the system from a disconnected and fragmented perspective. The knowledge creating process functions in real time within the organization, in a seamless cycle of practice, research, and capacity-building.

Imagine if this were the way in which we approached learning and change in all of our major institutions. What impact might this approach have on the health of any of our institutions, and on society as a whole? Given the problems we face within our organizations and within the larger culture, do we have any choice but to seek new ways to work together to face the challenges of the future? We believe the time has come or us to begin the journey back from fragmentation to wholeness and integration. The time has come for true learning communities to emerge.

Peter M. Senge, best-selling author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, is an international leader in the area of creating learning organizations. He is a senior lecturer in the Organizational Learning and Change Group at MIT. Peter has lectured throughout the world and written extensively on systems thinking, institutional learning, and leadership.

Daniel H. Kim is a co-founder of Pegasus Communications, Inc., and publisher of The Systems Thinker. He is a prolific author as well as an international public speaker, facilitator, and teacher of systems thinking and organizational learning

Editorial support for this article was provided by Janice Molloy and Lauren Johnson

A LEARNING COMMUNITY

In a learning community, people view each of the three functions—research, capacity-building,practice—as vital to the whole

The post From Fragmentation to Integration: Building Learning Communities appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

We clearly need ways of improving our thought processes, especially in groups where finding a solution depends on people first reaching a common formulation of the problem. Dialogue, a discipline for collective learning and inquiry, can provide a means for developing such shared understanding. Proponents of dialogue claim it can help groups reach higher levels of consciousness, and thus to become more creative and effective. The uninitiated, however, may view dialogue as just one more oversold communication technology.

I believe that in addition to enhancing communication, dialogue holds considerable promise as a problem-formulation and problem-solving philosophy and technology. It is a necessary vehicle for understanding the cultures and subcultures in which we live and work, and organizational learning will ultimately depend upon such cultural understanding. Dialogue thus becomes a central element of any model of organizational transformation.

If dialogue is to become helpful to organizational processes, it must be seen as accessible to everyone. In order to demystify dialogue, therefore, I’d like to focus on the process — how to get started, and how and why dialogue often breaks down — while exploring some of the issues that groups must address if they are to create an effective dialogue process.

We clearly need ways of improving our thought processes, especially in groups where the solution depends on people reaching a common formulation of the problem.

Dialogue vs. Discussion

To understand the different phases of the dialogue process, I have found it helpful to draw a road map based on Bill Isaacs’ basic model (see “Ways of Talking Together,” p. 2). The diagram maps different forms of conversation in terms of two basic paths — dialogue and discussion.

One basic question that all groups must face before entering into dialogue is, “How do we know whether discussion and/or debate is more or less desirable then dialogue? Should we always go down the dialogue path?” I would argue that discussion/debate is a valid problem solving and decision-making process only if one can assume that the group members understand each other well enough to “talk the same language.” Such a state of shared understanding, however, probably cannot be achieved unless some form of dialogue has previously taken place. The danger in premature discussion is that the group may reach “false consensus”: members assume they mean the same thing in using certain terms, but only later discover subtle differences in meaning that have major consequences for action.

Dialogue, on the other hand, is a basic process for building common understanding. By letting go of disagreement, a group gradually builds a shared set of meanings that make much higher levels of mutual understanding and creative thinking possible. As we listen to ourselves and others, we begin to see the subtleties of how each member thinks and expresses meanings. In this process, we do not strive to convince each other, but instead try to build a common experience base that allows us to learn collectively. The more the group achieves such collective understanding, the easier it becomes to reach a decision, and the more likely it is that the decision will be implemented in the way the group meant it to be.

Getting Started

In the groups that I have observed, the facilitator started by arranging the setting and then describing the concept of dialogue. The goal is to give the group enough information to understand dialogue sufficiently to begin the conversation. Next, small group discussion and reflection is used to link dialogue to past experiences of “real communication” (see “Role of the Facilitator: Setting the Context,” p. 3). This introductory session has several objectives which frame the session and allow a more effective dialogue to occur:

• Make the members feel as equal as possible. Having the group sit in a circle neutralizes rank or status differences in the group, and conveys the sense that each person’s unique contribution is of equal value.
• Give everyone a sense of guaranteed “air time” to establish their identity in the group. Asking everyone to comment ensures that all participants will have a turn. In larger groups, not everyone may choose to speak, but each person has the opportunity to do so, and the expectation is that the group will take whatever time is necessary for that to happen.
• Set the task for the group. The group should understand that they have come together to explore the dialogue process and gain some understanding of it, not to make a decision or solve an external problem.
• Legitimize personal experiences. Early in the group’s life, members will primarily be concerned about themselves and their own feelings; hence, legitimizing personal experiences and drawing on these experiences is a good way to begin.

The length and frequency with which the group meets will depend upon the size of the group, the reason for getting together, and the constraints on members. The meetings that I participated in at MIT were generally one-and-a-half to two hours long and occurred at roughly two-to-three-week intervals.

After watching various groups go through a first meeting, I often wondered how the second meeting of each group would get going. I found that the best method was to start by asking everyone to comment on “where they were at” and to go around the circle with the expectation that everyone would speak. Again, what seems to be important is to legitimize “air time” for everyone and to imply tacitly that everyone should make a contribution to starting the meeting, even though the content of that contribution can be virtually anything (see “Check-In, Check-Out: A Tool for ‘Real’ Conversations,” May 1994).

WAYS OF TALKING TOGETHER

The facilitator has a choice about how much theoretical input to provide during a dialogue session. To determine what concepts to introduce when, I have drawn a road map of the dialogue process based on Bill Isaacs’ model, which describes conversation in terms of two basic paths — dialogue and discussion.

Deeper Listening

As a conversation develops in the group, there inevitably comes a point where we sense some form of disconfirmation. Our point is not understood, or we face disagreement, challenge, or attack. At that moment, we usually respond with anxiety and/or anger, though we may be barely aware of it. Our first choice, then, is whether to allow that feeling to surface and trust that it is legitimate.

As we become more aware of these choices, we also become aware of the possibility that the feeling might have been triggered by our perception of what the others in the group did, and that these perceptions could be incorrect. Before we give in to anxiety and/or anger, therefore, we must determine whether we accurately interpreted the data. Were we, in fact, being challenged or attacked?

This moment is critical. As we become more reflective, we begin to realize how much our initial perceptions can be colored by expectations based on our cultural learning and past experiences. We do not always accurately perceive what is “out there.” What we perceive is often based on our needs, expectations, projections, and, most of all, our culturally learned assumptions and categories of thought. Thus the first challenge of really listening to others is to identify the distortions and bias that filter our own cognitive processes. We have to learn to listen to ourselves before we can really understand others. Such internal listening is, of course, especially difficult if one is in the midst of an active, task-oriented discussion. Dialogue, however, opens up the space for such reflection to occur.

Once we realize that our perception itself may not be accurate, we face a second, more fundamental choice — whether actively to explore our perception by asking what the person really meant, explaining ourselves further, or in some other way focusing specifically on the person who produced the disconfirming event. As we have all experienced, choosing to confront the situation immediately can quickly polarize the conversation around a few people and a few issues.

An alternative choice is to “suspend” our feelings to see what more will come up from ourselves and from others. What this means in the group is that when I am upset by what someone else says, I have a genuine choice between (1) voicing my reaction and (2) letting the matter go by suspending my own reaction. Suspending assumptions is particularly difficult if we perceive that our point has been misunderstood or misinterpreted. Nevertheless, I have found repeatedly that if I suspend my assumption, I find that further conversation clarifies the issue and that my own interpretation of what was going on is validated or changed without my having actively to intervene.

When a number of members of the group begin to suspend their own reactions, the group begins to go down the left-hand path toward dialogue. In contrast, when a number of members choose to react by immediately disagreeing, elaborating, questioning, or otherwise focusing on a particular trigger that set them off, the group goes down the path of discussion and eventually gets mired in unproductive debate.

Suspending assumptions allows for reflection, which is very similar to the emphasis in group dynamics training on observing the “here and now.” Bill Isaacs suggests that what we need is proprioception — attention to and living in the moment. Ultimately, dialogue helps us achieve a state in which we know our thoughts at the moment we have them. Whether proprioception is psychologically possible is debatable, but the basic idea is to shorten the internal feedback loop as much as possible. As a result, we can become conscious of how much our thoughts and perceptions are a function of both our past learning and the immediate events that trigger it. This learning is difficult at best, yet it lies at the heart of the ability to enter dialogue.

Group Dynamics

The dynamics of “building the group” occur parallel to the process of conducting the dialogue. Issues of identity, role, influence, group goals, norms of openness and intimacy, and questions of authority all have to be addressed, though much of this occurs implicitly rather than explicitly. The group usually displays all of the classical issues that occur around authority vis-à-vis the facilitator: Will the facilitator tell us what to do? Will we do what we are told? Does the facilitator have the answers and is withholding them, or is he or she exploring along with the rest of us? At what point can we function without the facilitator?

Issues of group growth and development have to be dealt with if they interfere with or confuse the dialogue process. The facilitator should therefore be skilled in group facilitation, so that the issues can be properly sorted into two categories: those that have to do with the development of the dialogue, and those that have to do with the development of the group. In my own experience, the dialogue process speeds up the development of the group and should therefore be the primary driving process in each meeting. A major reason for this acceleration is that dialogue creates psychological safety and thus allows individual and group change to occur, assuming that some motivation to change is already present (see “Containment”).

The group may initially experience dialogue as a detour from or a slowing down of problem solving. But real change does not happen until people feel psychologically safe, and the implicit or explicit norms that are articulated in a dialogue session provide that safety by giving people both a sense of direction and a sense that the dangerous aspects of interaction will be contained. If the group can work on the task or problem using the dialogue format, it should be able to reach a valid level of communication much faster.

Task vs. Process

Once a group experiences dialogue, the process tends to feed on itself. In several cases, I have been in groups that chose to stay in a circle and continue in a dialogue mode even as they tackled concrete tasks with time limits. I would hypothesize, however, that unless a dialogue group is formed specifically for the purpose of learning about itself, it eventually needs some other larger purpose to sustain itself. Continuing to meet in a dialogue format probably does not work once members have mastered the basic skills.The core task or ultimate problem, then, is likely to be the reason the group met in the first place.

Dialogue is, by definition, a process that has meaning only in a group.

The best way to think about dialogue is as a group process that arises initially out of the individual participants’ personal skills or attitudes. Dialogue is, by definition, a process that has meaning only in a group. Several people have to collaborate with each other for dialogue to occur. But this collaboration rests on individual choice, based on a certain attitude toward how to get the most out of a conversation and on certain skills of reflection and suspension. Once the group has gained those attitudes and skills collectively, it is possible to have even highly time-sensitive problem solving meetings in a dialogue format.

Most people have a general sense of what dialogue is about and have experienced versions of it in their past relationships. Therefore, even in a problem-solving meeting, a facilitator may suggest that the group experiment with dialogue. In my own experience, I have found it best to introduce early on in a meeting the idea that there are always assumptions behind our comments and perceptions, and that our problem-solving process will be improved if we get in touch with these assumptions. Consequently, if the conversation turns into too much of a discussion or debate, I can legitimately raise the question of whether or not the disagreement is based on different assumptions, and then explore those assumptions explicitly. Continually focusing the group on the cognitive categories and underlying assumptions of conversation is, from this point of view, the central role of the facilitator.

One of the ultimate tests of the importance of dialogue will be whether or not difficult, conflict-ridden problems can be handled better in groups that have learned to function in a dialogue mode. Because severe conflicts are almost always the result of cultural or subcultural differences, I would assume that initial dialogue in some form will always be necessary. Dialogue cannot force the conflicting groups into the room together, but once they are there, it holds promise for finding the common ground needed to resolve the conflicts.

Edgar H. Schein is Sloan Fellows professor of management emeritus and a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management. He chairs the board of the MIT Organizational Learning Center and is the author of numerous books on organization development, such as Process Consultation, Vol. 1 and 2 (Addison-Wesley, 1987, 1988).

This article is edited from “On Dialogue, Culture, and Organizational Learning” by Edgar H. Schein, which appeared in the Autumn 1993 issue of Organizational Dynamics. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, American Management Association, New York, NY. © 1993.All rights reserved.

The post The Process of Dialogue: Creating Effective Communication appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The Power of Dialogue

Complex issues require intelligence beyond that of any individual. Yet in the face of complex, highly conflictual issues, teams typically break down, revert to rigid positions, and cover up deeper views. The result: watered-down compromises and tenuous commitment. Dialogue, however, is a discipline of collective learning and inquiry. It can serve as a cornerstone for organizational learning by providing an environment in which people can reflect together and transform the ground out of which their thinking and acting emerges.

Dialogue is not merely a strategy for helping people talk together. In fact, dialogue often leads to new levels of coordinated action without the artificial, often tedious process of creating action plans and using consensus-based decision-making. Dialogue does not require agreement; instead it encourages people to participate in a pool of shared meaning, which leads to aligned action.

Over the past year, The Dialogue Project at MIT has been conducting a series of practical experiments to create dialogue and explore its impacts. While it is still at an early stage, we have witnessed moving and, at times, profound changes in the individuals and groups with which we have worked. For example, labor and management representatives from a steel mill have discovered dramatic shifts in their ways of thinking and talking together. In a recent presentation by this dialogue group, one union participant said, “We have learned to question fundamental categories and labels that we have applied to each other.”

“Can you give us an example?” one manager asked.

“Yes,” he responded, “labels like management and union.”

This particular group has transformed a 50-year-old adversarial relationship into one where there is genuine and serious inquiry into “taken-for-granted” ways of thinking. The steelworkers, for example, recognized that they had far more in common with management than they had previously realized or expected. “We quit talking about the past,” said the Union President.“ We didn’t bring any of that up, all the hurt and mistrust that we’ve had over the last twenty years.” Another steelworker noticed that the category “union” limited him as much as it protected him.“ It’s important to suspend the word ‘union,’” he said.

In another setting, we brought together major health care providers for a city — hospital CEOs, doctors, nurses, insurance agents, technicians, and a legislator — to create a microcosm of the healthcare system. This group has been inquiring into some of the underlying assumptions and forces that seem to make this field so chaotic.

In one session, participants confronted the collective pain felt when assuming responsibility for all the illnesses of a community. One senior physician said, “I am struck by my schizophrenia: the difference between how I treat my patients and how I treat all of you.” This dialogue has begun to surface the underlying sources of counter-productivity inherent in the healthcare system. In the past, people have sought self-protection against such pain, but this has led to costly isolation, misplaced competitiveness, and lack of coordination.

Dia • logos

Dialogue can be defined as a sustained collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that structure everyday experience. The word “dialogue” comes from two Greek roots, dia and logos, suggesting “meaning flowing through.” This is in marked contrast to what we frequently call dialogue — a mechanistic and unproductive debate between people seeking to defend their views. Dialogue actually involves a willingness not only to suspend defensive exchange but also to probe into the reasons for it. In this sense, dialogue is a strategy aimed at resolving the problems that arise from the subtle and pervasive fragmentation of thought (see “Fragmentation of Thought” below).

Physicist David Bohm has compared dialogue to superconductivity. In superconductivity, electrons cooled to very low temperatures act more like a coherent whole than as separate parts. They flow around obstacles without colliding with one another, creating no resistance and very high energy. At higher temperatures, however, they began to act like separate parts, scattering into a random movement and losing momentum.

Particularly when discussing tough issues, people act more like separate, high-temperature electrons. Dialogue seeks to help people attain high energy and low friction without ruling out differences between them. Negotiation tactics, in contrast, often try to cool down interactions by bypassing the most difficult issues and narrowing the field of exchange to something manageable. They achieve “cooler” interactions, but lose energy and intelligence in the process. In dialogue, the aim is to create a special environment in which a different kind of relationship among the parts can come into play — one that reveals both high energy and high intelligence.

The Practice of Dialogue

The pivotal challenge lies in producing dialogue in practical settings. Dialogue poses a paradox in practice. While it seeks to allow greater coherence among a group of people (note this does not necessarily imply agreement), it does not impose it. Indeed, dialogues surface and explore the very mechanisms by which people try to control and manage the meanings of their interactions.

People often come to a dialogue with the intention of understanding their fundamental concerns in a new way. Yet in contrast with more familiar modes of inquiry, it is helpful to begin without an agenda, without a “leader” (although a facilitator is essential) and without a task or decision to make. By deliberately not trying to solve familiar problems in a familiar way, dialogue opens a new possibility for shared thinking.

One story illustrates the power of this kind of exchange. In the late 1960s, the dean of a major U.S. business school was appointed to chair a committee to examine whether the university, which had major government contracts, should continue to design and build nuclear bombs on campus. People were in an uproar over the issue. The committee was somewhat like Noah’s ark: two of every species of political position on the campus. The chairman had no idea how to bring all these people together to agree on anything, so he changed some of the rules. The committee would meet, he said, every day until it had produced a report. Every day meant exactly that — weekends, holidays, everything. People objected, but he persisted.

The group eventually met for 36 days straight. Critically, for the first two weeks, they had no agenda. People just talked about anything they wanted to talk about: the purpose of the university, how upset they were, their deepest fears and their noblest aims. They eventually turned to the report they were supposed to write. By this time, they had become quite close. In the corner you might have seen two people conferring who previously had intensely clashing views. To the surprise of many, the group eventually produced a unanimous report. What was striking was they agreed on a direction, but for different reasons. They did not need to have the same reasons to agree with the direction that emerged.

Levels and Stages of Dialogue

Dialogue requires creating a series of increasingly conscious environments in which a special kind of “cool inquiry” can take place. These environments, which we call “containers,” can develop as a group of people become aware of the requirements and discipline needed to create them (see “Initial Guidelines for Dialogue”). A container can be understood as the sum of the assumptions, shared intentions, and beliefs of a group. These create a collective “atmosphere” or climate. The core of the theory of dialogue builds on the premise that changes in people’s shared attention can alter the quality and level of inquiry that is possible.

The evolution of a dialogue among a group of people consists of both levels and stages. They tend to be sequential, although once one moves through a stage, one can return to it (see “Evolution of Dialogue”). Passing through a level usually involves facing different types of individual and collective crises. The process is demanding, and at times frustrating, but also deeply rewarding.

1. Instability of the Container

When any group of individuals comes together, each person brings a wide range of tacit, unexpressed differences in paradigms and perspectives. The first challenge in a dialogue is to recognize this, and to accept that the purpose of the dialogue is not to hide them, but to find a way of allowing the differences to be explored. These implicit views are often inconsistent with one another. Since we generally deal with inconsistencies in rigid and mechanistic ways, the “container” or environment for dialogue at this stage is unstable.

Dialogue begins with conversation (the root of the word means “to turn together”). People begin by speaking together, and from that flows deliberation (“to weigh out”). Consciously and unconsciously people weigh out different views, agreeing with some and disliking others. They selectively pay attention, noticing some things, missing others.

At this point people face the first crisis and choice of the dialogue process, one that can either lead to the further refinement and evolution of the dialogue environment, or can lead to greater instability. This “initiatory crisis” occurs as people recognize that despite their best intentions, they cannot force dialogue. People find they cannot comprehend, much less impose coherence, on the diversity of views. They must choose either to defend their point of view, or suspend (not suppress) their view and begin to listen without judgment, loosening the grip of certainty about all views (including their own).

2. Instability in the Container

A recognition of this “initiatory” crisis begins to create an environment in which people know they are seeking to do something different. At this point, groups often begin to oscillate between suspending views and discussing them. People will feel the tendency at this point to fall into the familiar habit of analyzing the parts, instead of focusing on the whole.

At this stage, people may find themselves feeling frustrated. Others may defend their views despite evidence that they may be wrong. They may make definitive statements about what is or is not happening, but fail to explore their assumptions or other possibilities. They may see their behavior as a function of how others think and act, and discount their own responsibility for it. Normally all this is either taken for granted or kept below the surface. But in dialogue we deliberately seek to make these general patterns of thought observable and accessible and surface the tacit influences that sustain them.

At this point in the dialogue people begin to see and explore the range of assumptions that are present. They ask: Which are true? Which are false? How far is the group willing to go to expose itself? This leads to a second crisis, namely the “crisis of suspension.” Points of view that used to make sense no longer do. The direction of the group is unclear. Some people experience disorientation or perhaps feel marginalized and constrained by others. Polarization occurs as extreme views become stated and defended. The fragmentation that has been hidden is appearing, now in the container.

For example, in an ongoing dialogue with a group of labor and management representatives from a steel mill, the “same old kind” of conflicts emerged. Some participants felt helpless and defeated, others went “ballistic.” Yet they did not walk out. They stayed to explore the ways in which they had all contributed to the unproductive dynamics. Likewise, in the healthcare dialogue, suppressed conflict, anger, and long-time simmering “myths” about one another began to surface.

To manage the crisis of collective suspension, everyone must be aware of what is happening. Rather than panic, withdraw, or fight, people may choose to inquire. Listening here is not just listening to others, but listening to oneself. And people may ask: Where am I listening from? What can I learn if I slow things down and inquire?

Skilled facilitation is critical at this point. The facilitator, however, is not seeking to “correct” or impose order on what is happening, but to show how to suspend what is happening to allow greater insight into the order that is present. The facilitator might point out the polarization and the limiting categories of thought that are rapidly gaining momentum in the group.

3. Inquiry in the Container

If a critical mass of people stay with the process beyond this point, the conversation begins to flow in a new way. In this “cool” environment people begin to inquire together as a whole. New insights often emerge. The energy that had been trapped in rigid and habitual patterns of thought and interaction begins to be freed.

When we facilitated a dialogue in South Africa, people began reflecting on apartheid in ways that surprised them. They were able to stand beside the tension of the topic without being identified with it. Similarly, in the healthcare dialogue, it was at this point that people began to discuss their status as “gods” and stopped blaming others in the “system” for the difficulties they saw.

As people participate, they also begin to watch the session in a new way. One participant from a group of urban leaders in Boston compared it to seeing the inside of their minds performing together in a theatre. People become sensitive to how habitual patterns of interaction can limit creative inquiry.

This phase can be playful and penetrating. Yet it also leads to crisis. People begin to feel the impact that fragmented ways of thinking has had on themselves, their organizations, and their culture. They sense their isolation. Such awareness brings pain — both from the loss of comforting beliefs and by exercising new cognitive and emotional muscles. The “crisis of collective pain” is the challenge of embracing these self-created limits of human experience. It is a deep and challenging crisis, one that requires considerable discipline and collective trust.

4. Creativity in the Container

If the crisis of collective pain can be navigated, a new level of awareness opens. People begin to sense that they are participating in a pool of common meaning because they have sufficiently explored each other’s views. They still may not agree, but their thinking takes on an entirely different rhythm and pace.

At this point, the distinction between memory and fresh thinking becomes apparent. People may find it hard to talk together using the rigid categories of previous understanding. The net of their thought is not fine enough to capture the subtle and delicate understandings that begin to emerge. People may find they do not have adequate words and fall silent. Yet the silence is not an empty void, but one replete with richness. Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet, captures this experience:

“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrongdoing There is a field I will meet you there When the soul lies down in that grass The world is too full to talk about.”

In this experience, the world is too full to talk about; too full to use language to analyze it. Yet words can also be evocative — narratives that convey richness of meaning. Though we may have few words for such experiences, dialogue raises the possibility of speech that clothes meaning, instead of words merely pointing towards it. I call this kind of experience metalogue, meaning “moving or flowing with.”

Metalogue reveals a conscious, intimate and subtle relationship between the structure and content of an exchange and its meaning. The medium and the message are linked: information from the process conveys as much meaning as the content of the words exchanged. The group does not “have” meaning, it is its meaning. Loosening rigid patterns of thought frees energy that now permits new levels of intelligence and creativity in the container.

Dialogue is not intended to be a problem-solving technique, but a means to explore the underlying incoherence of thought and action that gives rise to the problems we face. It balances more structured problem-solving approaches with the exploration of fundamental habits of attention and assumption behind traditional thinking. By providing a setting in which these subtle and tacit influences on our thinking can be altered, dialogue holds the potential for allowing entirely new kinds of collective intelligence to appear.

William Isaacs is the director of The Dialogue Project, which is a part of the Organizational Learning Center at MIT. He is currently conducting research on dialogue and organizational learning in corporate, political, and social settings around the world.

The post Dialogue: The Power of Collective Thinking appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Articulating Reality

Causal loop diagrams provide a language for articulating our understanding of the dynamic, interconnected nature of our world. We can think of them as sentences which are constructed by linking together key variables and indicating the causal relationships between them. By stringing together several loops, we can create a coherent story about a particular problem or issue.

The next page includes some suggestions on the mechanics of creating causal loop diagrams. Below are some more general guidelines that should help lead you through the process:

• Theme Selection. Creating causal loop diagrams is not an end unto itself, but part of a process of articulating and communicating deeper insights about complex issues. It is pointless to begin creating a causal loop diagram without having selected a theme or issue that you wish to understand better. “To understand the implications of changing from a technology-driven to a marketing-oriented strategy,” for example, is a better theme than “To better understand our strategic planning process.”
• Time Horizon. It is also helpful to determine an appropriate time horizon for the issue — one long enough to see the dynamics play out. For a change in corporate strategy the time horizon may span several years, while a change in advertising campaigns may be on the order of months.

Time itself should not be included as a causal agent, however. After a heavy rainfall a river level steadily rises overtime, but we would not attribute it to the passage of time. You need to identify what is actual driving the change. In computer chips, $/MIPS million instructions per second) have been decreasing in a straight line over the past decade. It would be incorrect, however, to draw a causal connection between time and $/MIPS. Instead, increasing investments and learning curve effects are likely causal forces.

• Behavior Over Time Charts. Identifying and drawing out the behavior over time of key variables is an important first step toward articulating the current understanding of the system. Drawing out future behavior means taking a risk — the risk of being wrong. The fact is, any projection of the future will be wrong, but by making it explicit, we can test our assumptions and uncover inconsistencies that may otherwise never get surfaced. For example, drawing projections of steady productivity growth while training dollars are shrinking raises the question “If training is not driving our growth, what will?” The behavior over time diagram also points out key variables that should be included in the diagram, such as Training Budget and Productivity. Your diagram should try to capture the structure that will produce the projected behavior.
• Boundary Issue. How do you know when to stop adding to your diagram? If you don’t stay focused on the issue, you may quickly find yourself overwhelmed by the number of connections possible. Remember, you are not trying to draw out the whole system – only what is critical to the theme being addressed. When in doubt about including something, ask “If I were to double or halve this variable, would it have a significant effect on the issue I am mapping?” If not, it probably can be omitted.
• Level of Aggregation. How detailed should the diagram be? Again, the level should be determined by the issue itself. The time horizon also can help determine how detailed the variables need to be. If the time horizon is on the order of weeks (fluctuations on the production line), variables that change slowly over a period of many years may be assumed to be constant(such as building new factories). As a rule of thumb, the variables should not describe specific events (a broken pump); they should represent patterns of behavior (pump breakdowns throughout the plant).
• Significant Delays. Make sure to identify which (if any) links have significant delays relative to the rest of the diagram. Delays are important because they are often the source of imbalances that accumulate in the system. It may help to visualize pressures building up in the system by viewing the delay connection as a relief valve that either opens slowly as pressure builds or opens abruptly when the pressure hits a critical value. An example of this might be a delay between long work hours and burnout: after sustained periods of working 60+ hours per week, a sudden collapse might occur in the form of burnout.
  

  TOOL BOX: GUIDELINES FOR DRAWING CAUSAL LOOP DIAGRAMS

  

The post Guidelines for Drawing Causal Loop Diagrams appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

With a total of 300,000 employees, Ford operates in 50 countries around the world. It sells a huge array of products, and offers an equally widespread range of services — from financing to distributing and dealer support.

VENTURING INTO THE BADLANDS

When system and social complexity are high, the organization enters the realm of “the Badlands.”

Like any large organization, it’s also peopled by individuals who come from all walks of life — and who have the different outlooks to prove it. Engineers, accountants, human-resource folks — they all have unique backgrounds and view their work through unique perspectives. Add Ford’s various stakeholders to the mix, and you’ve got even more complexity. There are media stakeholders, shareholders, customers, the families of employees — all of them with different expectations and hopes for the company.

System and Social Complexity: “The Badlands”

Now let’s look even more deeply inside Ford to see what complexity really consists of. If you think about it, the complexity that Ford and other large organizations grapple with comes in two “flavors”: system complexity and social complexity. System complexity derives from the infrastructure of the company — the business model it uses, the way the company organizes its various functions and processes, the selection of products and services it offers. Social complexity comes from the different outlooks of the many people associated with Ford — workers, customers, families, and other stakeholders from every single country and culture that Ford operates in.

Why is it important to distinguish between these two kinds of complexity? The reason is that, if we put them on a basic graph, we get a disturbing picture of the kinds of problems that complexity can cause for an organization (see “Venturing into the Badlands”). We can think of these problems as falling into four categories:

“Tame” Problems. If an organization has low system and social complexity — for example, a mom-and-pop fruit market in a small Midwestern town — it experiences what we can think of as “tame” problems, such as figuring out when to order more inventory.

“Messy” Problems. If a company has low social complexity but high system complexity, it encounters “messy” problems. A good illustration might be the highly competitive network of tool-and-die shops in Michigan. These shops deal with intricate, precisely gauged devices that have to be delivered quickly. However, the workforce consists almost entirely of guys, all of whom root for the Detroit Lions football team — so there’s little social tension.

“Wicked” Problems. If a company has high social complexity but low system complexity, it suffers “wicked” problems. For instance, a newspaper publisher works in a relatively simple system, with clear goals and one product. However, the place is probably staffed with highly creative, culturally diverse employees — with all the accompanying differences in viewpoint and values.

The Winner: “Wicked messes,” or “The Badlands.” When an organization has high system and social complexity — like Ford and other large, globalized companies have — it enters “the Badlands.” Singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen graphically captured that unique region in South Dakota characterized by dangerous temperature swings, ravenous carnivores, and uncertain survival in his song “Badlands.” But the area and the song also represent optimism and possibilities. More vegetation and wildlife inhabit the Badlands than anyplace else in the United States, and Springsteen’s voice and lyrics offer a sense of hope despite the song’s painful and angry chords.

What’s So Bad About the Badlands?

A company that’s operating in the Badlands faces a highly challenging brand of problems. The complexity is so extreme, and the number of interconnections among the various parts of the system so numerous, that the organization can barely control anything. Solutions take time, patience, and profound empathy on the part of everyone involved.

In Ford’s case, a number of especially daunting challenges have arisen recently. For one thing, the Firestone tires tragedy has left the entire Ford community reeling. Ford faces an immense struggle to make sure this kind of fiasco never happens again. The bonds of trust between company and supplier, and between company and customer, will take a long time to rebuild. In addition, Ford and other automotive manufacturers have come under fire not only for safety issues but also for environmental and human-rights concerns.

Clearly, Ford’s business environment keeps getting tougher. The company is held accountable for parts it buys from suppliers and for labor practices in the various parts of the world where it does business. It’s also accountable for resolving baffling patterns — for example, the demand for

All of these challenges come from a single error in thinking: the assumption that human beings can control a complex, living system like a large organization.

SUVs is rising, along with cries for environmentally friendly vehicles. The majority of Ford’s profits come from sales of SUVs; how will the company reconcile these conflicting demands? Ford’s newly launched initiative — to not only offer excellent products and services but to also make the world a better place through environmentally and socially responsible manufacturing — will probably be its toughest effort ever.

But here’s where the big lesson comes in. All of these challenges come from a single error in thinking: the assumption that human beings can control a complex, living system like a large organization. Systems thinker Meg Wheatley compares the complexity of large companies to that of the world. The world, she points out, existed for billions of years before we humans came along, but we have the nerve to think that it needs us to control it! Likewise, what makes us think that we can control a big, complex organization?

Yet attempt to control we do — often with disastrous results.

Our All-Too-Common Controls . . .

We human beings try to control the complexity of our work lives through lots of different means:

System Fixes. When we attempt to manage system complexity, we haul out a jumble of established tools and processes that seem to have worked for companies in the past. For example, we use something we blithely call “strategic planning.” Our assumption is simple: If we just write down the strategy we want to follow, and plan accordingly, everything will turn out the way we want. We even call in consultants to help us clarify our strategy — and pay them big bucks for it. The problem is that this approach to planning has long outlived its usefulness. The world has become a much more complicated place than it was back when organizations like General Motors and the MIT Sloan School of Management first devised this approach to strategy.

We also use financial analysis and reporting models that were probably invented as far back as the 1950s. These models don’t take into account all the real costs associated with doing business — such as social and environmental impacts. Nor do they recognize the value of “soft” assets, such as employee morale and commitment.

In addition, we all keep throwing the phrase “business case” around — “What’s the business case for that new HR program you want to launch?” “What’s the business case for that product modification?” In other words, what returns can we expect from a proposed change of any kind? Again, this focus on returns ignores the bigger picture: the long-term costs and benefits of the change.

Finally, we try to manage system complexity by making things as simple as possible through standardization — no matter how complicated the business is. Standardization is appropriate at times. For example, the Toyota Camry, Ford’s number-one competitor in that class of car, has just seven kinds of fuel pump applications. The Ford Taurus has more than 40! You can imagine how much simpler and cheaper it is to manufacture, sell, and service the Camry pump. But when we carry our fondness for standardization into areas of strategy — unthinkingly accepting methods and models that worked best during a simpler age — we run into trouble.

Social Fixes. Our attempts to manage social complexity get even more prickly. In many large companies, the human-resources department engineers all such efforts. HR of course deals with personnel planning, education and training, labor relations, and so forth. But in numerous companies, it spearheads change programs as well — whether to address work-life balance, professional development, conflict and communications management, or other social workplace issues. Yet as we’ll see, this realm of complexity is probably even more difficult to control than systemic complexity is.

. . . and Their Confounding Consequences

Each of the above “fixes” might gain us some positive results: We have a strategic plan to work with; we have some way of measuring certain aspects of our business; we manage to get a few employees thinking differently about important social issues. However, these improvements often prove only incremental. More important, these fixes also have unintended consequences — many of them profound enough to eclipse any gains they may have earned us.

The Price of System Fixes. As one cost of trying to control system complexity, we end up “micromanaging the metrics,” mainly because it’s the only thing we can do. This micromanaging in turn creates conflicts of interests. For example, when Ford decided to redesign one of its 40 fuel pumps to make it cheaper to build, it unwittingly pitted employees from different functions against each other. Engineering people felt pressured to reduce the design cost of the part, manufacturing staff felt compelled to shave off labor and overhead costs, and the purchasing department felt driven to find cheaper suppliers. Caught up in the crosscurrents of these conflicting objectives, none of these competing parties wanted to approve the change plan unless they got credit for its success. As you can imagine, the plan languished in people’s in-boxes as the various parties jockeyed for position as “the winner.”

Micromanaging the metrics can also create a “Tragedy of the Commons” situation — that archetypal dilemma in which all the parties in a system try to maximize their own gains, only to ruin things for everyone. For instance, at Ford (and probably at many other large companies), there’s only so much money available to support a new product or service idea. People know this, so when they build their annual budgets, they ask for the money they need for the new ideas — plus another 10 percent as a cushion (because they know the budget office would never give them what they originally asked for!). At the end of the year, everyone’s out of funds because they beefed up their budgets too much. And great, innovative ideas end up going unfunded.

The Price of Social Fixes. The biggest consequence of social fixes is probably a “Shifting the Burden” archetypal situation. Upper management, along with HR, tries to address a problem by applying a short-term, “bandage” solution rather than a longer-term, fundamental solution. The side effect of that bandage solution only makes the workforce dependent on management, thus preventing the organization from learning how to identify and implement a fundamental solution.

What does this look like in action? Usually, it takes the form of upper management’s decision to “roll out” a change initiative to address a problem. For instance, employees might be complaining about something — work-life tensions, conflicts over cultural differences, and so forth. Rather than letting people take responsibility for addressing their problems — that is, get involved in coming up with a shared solution — management force-feeds the company a new program (B1 in “Shifting the Burden to Management”). This might reduce complaints for a time, and managers might even capture a few hearts and minds. But these gains won’t stick. Worse, this approach makes employees passive, as they come to depend more and more on management to solve their problems and “take care of them.” The more dependent they become, the less able they are to feel a sense of responsibility and get involved in grappling with their problems (R3 in the diagram).

This “sheep-dip” approach to change — standardized for the masses — completely ignores employees’ true potential for making their own decisions and managing their own issues. For example, consider the difference between a company that legislates rigid work hours and one that trusts its employees to pull an all-nighter when the work demands it—and to head out to spend time with their kids

on a Friday afternoon because the work is in good shape. People can’t learn how to make these kinds of judgments wisely for themselves if their employer treats them like children.

“Sheep dipping” has another consequence as well: Because it makes employees passive, it discourages the fluid transfer of knowledge that occurs when people feel involved in and responsible for their work. Instead of looking to one another, anticipating needs, and collaborating as a team, employees have their eyes on management, waiting to be taken care of. Knowledge remains trapped in individuals’ minds and in separate functions in the organization, and the firm never leverages its true potential.

From Control to Soul

So, if we can’t control complexity, how do we go to work every day with some semblance of our sanity? Should we just give up hoping that our organizations can navigate skillfully enough through the Badlands to survive the competition and maybe even achieve their vision? What are we to do if we can’t control our work, our employees, and our organization? How can we take our organizations to places they’ve never been — scary, dangerous places, but places that also hold out opportunities for unimagined achievement?

The answer lies in one word: soul. “Soul” is a funny word. It means different things to different people, and for some it has a strong spiritual element. But in the context we’re discussing now — organizational health, values, and change — its meaning has to do with entirely new, radical perspectives on work and life.

To cross the Badlands successfully, all of us — from senior executives to middle managers to individual contributors — need to adopt these “soulful” perspectives:

Understand the system; don’t control it. As we saw above, we can’t manage, manipulate, or avoid problems in our organizations without spawning some unintended — and often undesirable — consequences. Understanding the organizational and social systems we live and work in makes us far more able to work within those systems in a healthy, successful way.

Know the relationships in the system. Understanding a system means grasping the nature of the relationships among its parts — whether those parts are business functions, individuals, external forces acting on the organization, etc. By knowing how the parts all influence each other, we can avoid taking actions that ripple through the system in ways that we never intended.

Strengthen human relationships. Success doesn’t come from dead-on metrics or a seemingly bulletproof business model; it comes from one thing only: strong, positive relationships among human beings. When you really think about it, nothing good in the world happens until people get together, talk, understand one another’s perspectives and assumptions, and work together toward a compelling goal or a vision. Even the most brilliant individual working alone can achieve only so much without connecting and collaborating with other people.

Understand others’ perspectives. This can take guts. People’s mental models — their assumptions about how the world works — derive from a complicated process of having experiences, drawing conclusions from those experiences, and then approaching their lives from those premises. Understanding where another person is “coming from” means being able to set aside our own mental models and earn enough of that other person’s trust so that he or she feels comfortable sharing those unique perspectives.

Determine what we stand for. Why do you work, really? Forget the easy answers — “I want to make money” or “I want to buy a nice house.” What lies beneath those easy answers? Around the world, people work for the same handful of profound reasons: They want their lives to have meaning, they want to create something worthwhile and wonderful, they want to see their families thrive in safe surroundings, they want to contribute to their communities, they want to leave this Earth knowing that they made it better. All these reasons define what we stand for. By clarifying what we stand for — that is, knowing in our souls why we go to work every day — we learn that we all are striving for similar and important things. That realization alone can build community and commitment a lot faster than any “rolled-out” management initiative can.

Determine our trust and our trustworthiness. Strong relationships stem from bonds of trust between people. To trust others, we have to assume the best in them — until and unless they prove themselves otherwise. But equally important, we also need to ask ourselves how trustworthy we are. We must realize that others are looking to us to prove our trustworthiness as well. By carefully and slowly building mutual trust, we create a network of robust relationships that will support us as we move forward together.

Be humble, courageous, and vulnerable. Understanding ourselves and others in ways that strengthen our relationships takes enormous courage — and a major dose of humility. It also takes a willingness to say “I don’t know” at times — something that many companies certainly don’t encourage. And finally, it takes a willingness to make ourselves vulnerable — to explain to others why we think and act the way we do, and why we value the things we value.

Find “soul heroes.” We need to keep an eye out for people whom we sense we can learn from — people who live and embody these soulful perspectives. These individuals can be colleagues, family members, friends, customers, or neighbors. If we find someone like this at work — no matter what their position — we must not be afraid to approach them, to talk with them about these questions of values, trust, and soul.

Tools for Your Badlands Backpack

So, to venture into the Badlands, we need soul — whole new ways of looking at our lives and work. But soul alone won’t get us safely through to the other side. We wouldn’t approach the real Badlands without also bringing along a backpack filled with water, food, first-aid materials, and other tools for survival and comfort. Likewise, we shouldn’t tackle the Badlands of organizational complexity without the proper tools.

These five tools are especially crucial:

Systems Thinking Tools.The field of systems thinking provides some powerful devices for understanding the systems in which we live and work, and for communicating our understanding about those systems to the other people who inhabit them. Causal loop diagrams, like the one in “Shifting the Burden to Management,” let us graphically depict our assumptions about how the system works. When we build such a diagram with others, we especially enrich that understanding, because we pull all our isolated perspectives into one shared picture. From there, we can explore possible ways to work with the system to get the results we want. These diagrams also powerfully demonstrate the folly in trying to manhandle a system: When we draw them, we can better see the long-term, undesirable consequences of our attempts to control the system.

Dialogue. The field of dialogue has grown in recent years to include specific approaches to talking with one other. For example, dialogue emphasizes patience in exploring mutual understanding and in arriving at potential solutions to problems. It also encourages us to suspend our judgments about others during verbal exchanges — that is, to temporarily hold our judgments aside in order to grasp others’ reasons for acting or thinking as they do. Dialogue lets a group tap into its collective intelligence — a powerful way of transferring and leveraging knowledge.

Ladder of Inference. This tool offers a potent way to understand why we think and respond to our world as we do. It helps us see how we construct our mental models from our life experiences — and how those mental models can ossify if we don’t keep testing them to see whether they’re still relevant. In the workplace, we all make decisions, say things, and take actions based on our mental models. By using the Ladder of Inference to examine where those models came from, we can revise them as necessary — and reap much more shared understanding with colleagues. (For information about the Ladder of Inference, see The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook published by Currency/ Doubleday).

Scenario Planning. This field has also grown in recent years. Numerous organizations, notably Royal Dutch/Shell, have used scenario planning to remarkable effect. This tool reflects the fact that we can’t control systems. Scenario planning encourages us to instead imagine a broad array of possible futures for our organization or even our entire industry — and to make the best possible arrangements we can to prepare for and benefit from those potential outcomes. This approach thus acknowledges the complexities inherent in any system; after all, there’s no way to easily determine the many different directions a system’s impact may take.

Managing by Means. New methodologies are emerging that can help us assess the true costs of running our businesses — costs to human society, to the environment, and to the business itself. And costs in the short run as well as the long run. We must grapple with these methodologies if we hope to achieve the only long-term business goal that really makes sense: business that doesn’t destroy the very means on which it depends.

Traditional change management methods build things to stick. They do not build things to last and are thus ineffective because well-intentioned people create the strategy, solution, and problem sets based on a narrow set of assumptions. To create a sustainable organization, we must work to understand the complex system dynamics of the environment and experiment with multidimensional strategies. We must also work to understand diverse social dynamics and allow multiple perspectives and behaviors to emerge. Finally, we must trust ourselves, hold true to our core convictions, and have courage, humility, and soul. In these ways, we can navigate through — and even prosper in — the most desolate and challenging of Badlands.

David Berdish is the corporate governance manager at Ford Motor Company. He is leading the development of sustainable business principles that will integrate the “triple bottom line” of economics, environmental, and societal performance and global human-rights processes. He is also supporting the organizational learning efforts at the renovation of the historic Rouge Assembly site.

The post Learning and Leading Through the Badlands appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Right or wrong, the Seattle protests highlighted the widespread influence that corporations exert on people’s lives today. As social institutions, companies have an unprecedented impact on individuals, families, communities, nations, and the planet itself. For instance, who among us does not struggle with the challenge of balancing family and work life? Who among us may not someday benefit from biotechnology breakthroughs? Who among us is not concerned about the impact of manufacturing waste on the environment? Who among us does not take advantage of cheap and reliable telecommunications? The pure size, scope, and transnational nature of the modern corporation have given it a unique — and growing — role in our daily lives.

A Tool for Corporate “Response-ability”

With this level of influence come new demands for responsibility, as the demonstrations in Seattle showed. Simply put, the more impact that corporations have on people’s lives, the more people will insist that businesses take responsibility for their actions. Doing so requires “response-ability” — the ability to acknowledge people’s concerns and create innovations to address those concerns. It means being open to change and learning. This is not a new challenge, but the importance and complexity of the task have increased with globalization. Thus, tackling the opportunities and dangers that face today’s businesses requires an equally radical shift in the nature of change processes and strategies.

The practice and philosophy of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), while still in its nascent stage, is emerging as a revolutionary approach to this kind of change and learning. AI first arose in the early 1980s, when David Cooperrider, a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, conducted an organizational diagnosis of the Cleveland Clinic. During his research, he was amazed by the level of cooperation, innovation, and egalitarian governance that he observed within the organization. Cooperrider and his adviser, Suresh Srivastva, analyzed the factors that contributed to the functioning of the clinic when it was at its best — its moments of exceptional performance. In the mid 1980s, they published the first widely distributed description of the research, theory, and practice of Appreciative Inquiry in the article “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life” in Research in Organization Change and Development, vol. 1, edited by W. Pasmore and R. Woodman (JAI Press, 1987).

AI is based on a deceptively simple premise: that organizations grow in the direction of what they repeatedly ask questions about and focus their attention on. Why make this assumption? Research in sociology has shown that when people study problems and conflicts, the number and severity of the problems they identify actually increase. But when they study human ideals and achievements, peak experiences, and best practices, these things — not the conflicts — tend to flourish. (Did you ever notice that beginner bicyclists tend to steer toward whatever they’re looking at most — like the big rock at the side of the road? See “Watch Out for the Rock!”)

By encouraging people to ask certain kinds of questions, make shared meaning of the answers, and act on the responses, AI serves as a wellspring for transformational change. It supports organizationwide (i.e., systemic) learning through several means:

• Through widespread inquiry, it helps everyone perceive the need for change, explore new possibilities, and contribute to solutions.
• Through customized interview guides, it emphasizes questions that focus on moments of high performance in order to ignite transformative dialogue and action within the organization.
• Through alignment of the organization’s formal and informal structures with its purpose and principles, it translates shared vision into reality and belief into practice.

A Closer Look at Appreciative Inquiry

To see how this process works, imagine what would happen if you shifted the focus of inquiry (i.e., the process of gathering information for the purpose of learning and changing) from the deficits or gaps in your organization to its successes and accomplishments. Instead of asking, “What are our problems? What hasn’t worked?” you might say, “Describe a time when things were really going well around here. What conditions were present at those moments and what organizational changes would allow more of those conditions to prevail?” This simple shift in perspective constitutes a powerful intervention in its own right that can begin nudging the whole company in the direction of the inquiry.

How? Organizations are manifestations of the human imagination. That is, no organization could exist if one or several individuals hadn’t envisioned it first (even if that vision was sketchy or incomplete). The learnings that surface through the AI process begin to shift the collective image that people hold of the organization. In their daily encounters, members start to create together compelling new images of the company’s future. These images immediately initiate small “ripples” in how employees think about the work they do, their relationships, their roles, and so on. Over time, these ripples turn into waves; the more positive questions participants ask, the more they incorporate the learnings they glean from those questions in daily behaviors and, ultimately, in the organization’s infrastructure.

Unlike many behavioral-science approaches to change, AI does not focus on changing people. Instead, it invites people to engage in building the kinds of organizations and communities that they want to live in. AI thus involves collaborative discovery of what makes an organization most effective, in economic, ecological, and human terms. From there, organization members weave that new knowledge into the fabric of the firm’s formal and informal systems, such as the way they develop and implement business strategy or the way they organize themselves to accomplish tasks. This process represents true learning and change.

Finally, AI rests on another deceptively simple notion: that organizational members are competent adults capable of learning from their own experiences and from those of others. In a company that truly believes this precept, everyone feels energized by new knowledge and change. As AI becomes a regular way of working, employees at all levels and all functions identify best practices that the organization can build on in order to respond to new challenges. They then spread that knowledge and initiate action as a matter of routine.

Consultant Diana Whitney has summarized Appreciative Inquiry in the following way:

• AI is a high-participation, full voice process targeted at organizational innovation. People at all levels of an organization engage with one another to discover, dream, and design the corporation’s future.
• AI is an organizational learning process designed to identify and disseminate best practices. AI assumes that people possess high levels of competence and encourages them to discover what works within their own organization as well as in other businesses and organizations.
• AI fosters positive communication and can result in the formation of deep and meaningful relationships. Through simple interpersonal communication, people build relationships, accomplish work, and express value.
• • AI can be used to radically redesign the governance structures and processes of an organization. By applying what they learn from the inquiry, people begin to redesign the organization’s social architecture — its systems, structures, roles, and measures — in ways that better align it with their dreams and needs.

One of the most attractive aspects of AI is its flexibility. Organizations that have implemented AI have found that it engages individuals and teams while it simultaneously provides a framework for companywide innovations.

The Five “D’s”

Thus, AI is a way of managing and working as well as a process for organizational learning and change. From the latter perspective, it is an ongoing, iterative cycle consisting of five phases: Definition, Discovery, Dream, Design, and Delivery/Destiny (see “The Five ‘D’s’ of Appreciative Inquiry” on p. 1). In large companies, the process often begins by engaging individual units or divisions. In small companies, everyone can take part right from the start.

Definition. This phase is arguably the most important one in the AI cycle, because it establishes the initial focus and scope of the inquiry. Defining the direction of inquiry is much more than just sharpening a problem description. Because organizations move in the direction of the questions they ask, the choice of questions is vital.

In the Definition phase, the organization’s focus shifts from describing the problem to determining what its members want to achieve and what they need to know to get there. For example, when a Mexican cosmetics firm wanted to solve the problem of discrimination against women, the management team first asked consultants to help them understand the causes of this unequal treatment. Dissatisfied with the direction their conversations were taking, they decided to shift their focus — to inquire instead into the causes and conditions that contribute to excellent cross-gender relationships in the workplace.

This change led the organization to a whole new body of knowledge about the issue. The members of the firm then came up with a compelling vision that they could work toward based on the conversations that took place during the inquiry process: a business world in which everyone is treated fairly regardless of gender. Not long thereafter, the company won an award for having one of Mexico’s most supportive workplaces for women.

Discovery. In the Discovery phase, participants interview hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people from within and outside of the organization. Interviewers use a customized guide to gather information on the line of inquiry that the group identified during the Definition phase. Frequently, a small group of volunteers develops the guide. These volunteers often represent a diagonal “slice” of the organization, along with representatives from key partners outside the company’s formal boundaries (i.e., customers and suppliers). Sometimes this volunteer group conducts the interviews; other times, hundreds of people gather to interview each other. During the Discovery phase, the organization identifies “best practices,” “life-giving forces,” or “root causes of success.”

This practice represents a dramatic departure from normal statistical “sampling.” AI operates on the premise that the act of asking positive questions is as important as the data it elicits. For that reason, the more people interviewed, the stronger the organization’s movement in the direction of the inquiry.

Dream. Participants then come together to build on the new learnings developed during the Discovery phase. They also ask larger questions, such as “What is the world calling us to become? What are those things about us that, no matter how much we change, we want to continue to do in the future?” Dream meetings can range from small teams to “summits” in which hundreds of people participate.

During this phase, people throughout the business create images of what life in the organization and its relationships with key constituents would look like if the company’s very best practices became the norm rather than the exception. This approach differs greatly from other visioning processes, because these dreams are grounded in what participants know to be the system’s past or present capabilities. For example, the employees of a transnational pharmaceutical company developed the following dream:

“The Research Organization of ABC Pharmaceuticals has four significant assets: an energizing work environment that affords freedom of action at all levels; a research process that is market-focused, goal-oriented, and strategically driven; world-class science supported by state-of-the-art technologies; and multi-disciplinary collaboration that transcends internal and external boundaries.

“Our people like to work here. The work environment is creative and empowering. . . . Our collaborative culture leads to sharing across functions. . . . People leverage and learn from each other’s expertise to jointly reach our organization’s goals. ABC Pharmaceuticals is a scientific Center of Excellence!”

Design. During the Design phase, participants identify the high-leverage changes in the organization’s systems, processes, roles, measures, and structures necessary for achieving the dream. Participants craft micro-images, or design statements, for redesigning the corporation’s infrastructure. For example, a consumer products distribution company wrote the following micro-image (one of about 20) describing its ideal strategy development process:

“DIA accelerates its learning through an annual strategic planning conference that involves all 500 people in the firm as well as key partners and stakeholders. As a setting for strategic learning, teams present their benchmarking studies of the best five other organizations, deemed leaders in their class. Other teams present an annual appreciative analysis of DIA, and together these databases of success stories (internal and external) help set the stage for DIA’s strategic, future search planning” (from “A Positive Revolution in Change: Appreciative Inquiry,” by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney in Appreciative Inquiry: Rethinking Human and Organizational Change, by Cooperrider, et al. (Stipes Publishing, 2000)).

The Design phase is more than just breaking down the dream into short-term actions; it is about “translating” the dream into the “language” of the organization’s social architecture. It is about enacting the essence of the vision in the policies, core processes and practices, and systems — all of the formal and informal structures that sustain the corporation’s essence.

Delivery/Destiny. In the Delivery/Destiny phase, the organization fleshes out, experiments with, and redesigns yet again the innovations that it identified during the Design phase. The hallmarks of this phase are creativity, innovation, and iteration — buttressed by ongoing inquiries into the progress being made and the effectiveness of the changes. Employees work to identify, highlight, and expand what is working well. They also continue to innovate where needed, so that the organization can grow and learn.

The main challenge that groups face during this stage is sustaining — and even magnifying — the inspiration that characterizes the earlier phases. We come from a “project mentality” that values clear starts and conclusions. But we are increasingly confronted with a world in which change does not occur during a separate time period, after which we get back to business as usual. Rather, change is now the very water in which we swim.

We are increasingly confronted with a world in which change does not occur during a separate time period, after which we get back to business as usual. Rather, change is now the very water in which we swim.

First Steps Toward Appreciative Inquiry

There’s no one right way to engage in Appreciative Inquiry; indeed, the process can take many different forms. The examples in the following section illustrate just a few of the many different ways that organizations have applied Appreciative Inquiry — with variations on the topic of inquiry, the process for discovering exceptional moments, the method used in dreaming new futures, and the innovations developed in the Design and Delivery/Destiny phases. But the following conditions seem to be present when Appreciative Inquiry has been most effectively incorporated into a process of organizational learning and change:

• The organization honestly acknowledges any difficulties that currently exist. After all, this kind of struggle often provides the impetus for change. AI practitioners don’t advocate denying negative emotions or problems. Rather, they encourage participants not to dwell on them.
• The organization’s formal and informal leaders have expressed a need or desire for deep inquiry, discovery, and renewal. They’ve also demonstrated an openness to grassroots innovation.
• The organizational culture supports participation of all voices, at all levels — with the understanding that, when participative processes are used, outcomes cannot be known in advance.
• People throughout the organization see change as an ongoing process, not a one-time event.
• The company’s leaders believe in the organization’s capabilities and agree that accessing this “positive core” can drive learning and change.
• The organization supplies the structures and resources needed to collect “good-news stories” and support creative action (from “Appreciative Inquiry: An Overview” by Kendi Rossi, from the AI List Serv, 1999).

These conditions can expedite the AI process, but they are not prerequisites. Unlike other approaches to intentional change, with AI, you can start anywhere, anytime, and with anyone. Most companies learn AI by doing it. The very act of inquiring into the best moments of an organization’s life begins to shift the system. As this process continues, individuals become open to wider applications of Appreciative Inquiry. They begin with some trepidation and generally end up with a strong commitment to the principles and practice.

AI in Action

AI has been used to catalyze change in a wide range of efforts: from business process excellence, diversity, and knowledge management, to customer service, mergers and acquisitions, and community development. Though it is still in its infancy, proponents of this work have scored some remarkable successes, as the examples below reveal.

In 1999, Nutrimental SA, a food manufacturing facility in Paraná, Brazil, shut down so that all 700 employees could talk together about how to beat the stiffening competition facing the company. The co-CEOs invited David Cooperrider (currently a faculty member at Case Western Reserve University) to facilitate. Cooperrider asked employees to identify “the factors and forces that gave life to the company when it was most effective, most alive, and most successful as a producer of high-quality health foods.” In an interview, Cooperrider described what happened:

“With cheers and good wishes, a smaller group of 150 stakeholders — employees from all levels, suppliers, distributors, community leaders, financiers, and customers — launched a four-day strategy session during which they articulated a new and bold corporate dream. Participants said, ‘Let’s assume that tomorrow, when we wake up, a miracle will have occurred: We’ll discover that all of Nutrimental’s best qualities have come to the fore in exactly the way we would like. What would we see when we arrived at work that would tell us that this miracle had happened? What would be different?’ Over the following days, participants clarified three new, strategic business directions.

“Six months later, Nutrimental’s profits had increased by a whopping 300 percent. The co-CEOs attributed these dramatic results to two changes: bringing the whole organization into the planning process, and realizing that organizations thrive when people see the best in one another, when they can affirm their dreams and ultimate concerns, and when their voices are heard.”

At about the same time, in Harlow, England, members of an internal organization-development (OD) group at a transnational pharmaceutical company and their clients decided to use AI in evaluating an intervention. The goal of the initiative had been to improve core business processes and, ultimately, the quality of life for their research scientists. The OD practitioners and representatives from the research community fanned out to ask questions of both the scientists who had participated in the intervention and their supervisors.

But rather than asking whether the intervention worked, they asked how it had helped people to work together more effectively and in what ways the quality of their work lives had been enhanced. As a result, the evaluators compiled a rich collection of data, in the form of stories, themes, and recommendations, that promises to yield even more powerful interventions in the future.

In a primary school in Maine, Tom Morrill, the new principal, faced a faculty struggling with the impact of a recent merging of three schools into one. After a few brief meetings with a consultant, the school’s leadership team decided to engage the faculty and staff in three two-hour meetings. During the meetings, participants identified the best aspects of the cultures they had left behind and explored ways to carry those elements forward into a shared future. Morrill described the outcome of this approach:

“People’s interactions focused on what was working well or on kernels of possibilities, as opposed to lists of what was wrong. Now, you hear teachers talking about AI frequently. We have also used AI in decision-making. I’ve purposefully moved to a more inclusive decision-making model, which reflects people’s desire for inclusion. Also, team leaders have used AI to create reporting processes and even staffing arrangements. This has built better school unity and has strengthened communication. People are getting better about working and planning together.”

Appreciative Inquiry as an approach to intentional change is still evolving. We are all in the process of learning how to use this radically different, yet breathtakingly simple approach in ways that truly energize and sustain learning organizations. But we do know that AI is best learned by doing.

In Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel said: “The world is increasingly divided into two kinds of organizations: those that can get no further than continuous improvement, and those who’ve made the jump to radical innovation.” Companies that see the need for the latter approach to change are increasingly turning to Appreciative Inquiry as a tool for making this leap. We invite you to do the same.

Bernard Mohr (bjmSynapse@aol.com) is the founder of The Synapse Group, Inc., an international consultancy in the fields of organizational learning, design, and capability building. His focus is the collaborative innovation of new work settings that are ecologically sound and economically sustainable, and that bring out the best in human beings. He is a founding partner of Appreciative Inquiry Consulting and co-author of the forthcoming book, Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination (Jossey Bass, 2001).

Author’s Note: Many of the concepts in this article have evolved from ongoing dialogues, both verbal and written, with my colleagues in the Appreciative Inquiry Consulting founders’ group: Jim Ludema, Diana Whitney, Adrian McLean, Marsha George, Jane Watkins, David Cooperrider, Marge Schiller, Diane Robbins, Steve Cato, Frank Barrett, Joep de Jong, Mette Jacobsgaard, Jim Lord, Ada Jo Mann, Anne Radford, Judy Rodgers, Jackie Kelm, David Chandler, Ralph Kelly, and Barbara Sloan.

The post Appreciative Inquiry: Igniting Transformative Action appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

In the world of big data and high-stakes, disruptive change, learning becomes essential for leadership. Reason may have been concerned with high-risk leadership situations, but he could have easily been referring to any leader. In fact, contemporary leaders in business organizations share many of the same challenges faced by well-known high-stress and high-consequence positions such as pilots, surgery teams, and military quick reaction forces.

The Shift from Traditional to Learning-Directed Leadership

Traditional approaches to leadership focus on power, influence, and position as the sources of leadership. No doubt, these are important factors. However, they prove less important in a complex and dynamic world where disruptive change is considered normal. Leaders working in the world of “big data” engage learning rather than power, knowledge rather than influence, expertise rather than position. Learning-directed leaders see continual learning, not the hoarding of power and resources, as their primary advantage. At their core, learning-directed leaders work to be open to new information and ready to revise past assessments of a situation, cultivating knowledge, learning, and expertise along the way as described by psychologist Theodore Mills (1967).

Leadership requires a shift in understanding about the nature of problems and how these problems are solved. The study of knowledge distinguishes between ill-structured and well-structured problems. Well-structured problems require time, patience, and persistence. Given enough time and resources, leaders can always solve well-structured problems. An example of a well-structured problem is reducing a budget by 15 percent. On the other hand, determining a new strategic direction in a fast-changing marketplace is an ill-structured problem.

Well-structured problems are the work of traditional leaders. Learning-directed leaders, on the other hand, work to solve ill-structured problems. No matter how much time, persistence, and patience a leader puts into solving an ill-structured problem, it can never be fully understood, and people will never fully agree on one right decision. In fact, there is no single best solution for an ill-structured problem. “Moving from Traditional to Learning-Directed Leadership” represents the shift in thinking required for a leader to be successful in this context. The shift, although difficult, is essential for leading, as an example from the medical profession illustrates.

CHARACTERISTICS OF A COMPLEX LEADERSHIP ENVIRONMENT

Eliminating Infections in Critical Care Medicine

Medical personnel insert or replace thousands of central line catheters each day. These catheters, which are inserted into veins in the neck, groin, or chest, dispense medications or fluids and can be used to measure blood volume. In the most trying cases, a central line catheter can save a life or limit pain. Inserting one of these devices is a common procedure. Unfortunately every year, an estimated 80,000 patients contract an infection that could have been avoided. Between 30,000 and 50,000 of these patients die as a result (Landro, 2010).

The procedures involved in changing a central line catheter may seem simple and routine, but learning to do something other than the existing procedures is much more difficult. In reality, improving the process of inserting or changing central line catheters has proven particularly challenging. Changing a well-established procedure involves monitoring hundreds of pieces of information, coordinating complex processes, and overcoming deeply ingrained cultural barriers.

MOVING FROM TRADITIONAL TO LEARNING-DIRECTED LEADERSHIP

Several factors contribute to the problem. A medical professional may care for hundreds of patients a month. The human mind is only capable of remembering a limited amount of data at any one time and so keeping track of each procedure becomes difficult. Further, many professionals don’t have direct access to the correct supplies. Changing a catheter may prove a challenge because resources come from different locations and quality is difficult to assess. Adding to the problem, changing and inserting a catheter requires coordination among various professionals.

A group of physicians sought to change the way medical professionals go about inserting and changing catheters in patients to decrease the high rate of infection and death. Led by Dr. Peter Pronovost of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, they tackled the problem by turning learning into action (Pronovost & Vohr, 2010). They began by reviewing prior research on catheter-related infections and related topics. From this research, they identified five practices that showed promise in limiting infection.

First, they introduced an educational program to teach physicians, residents, nurses, and other medical professionals about the existing procedures and how small changes might reduce infections. Second, they created a central cart that included all the materials needed to conduct the procedure with a greater degree of safety. In the past, medical personnel might have to search for the proper equipment, losing valuable time and focus in the process. Third, they instituted a daily care plan meeting that addressed whether patients needed a new catheter. Fourth, and most important, they implemented a checklist procedure, adopted from preflight checklists used by airline flight crews. The process, led by the bedside nurse, ensured that personnel followed proper and safe procedures. The checklist was to be used each time a new catheter was inserted or rewired. Fifth, they called on nurses to stop the process if any care provider failed to follow the guidelines as stated on the checklist. The steps on the checklist were clear and concise. When inserting a catheter, the professionals were to wash their hands; clean the patient’s skin with a disinfectant; wear a cap and gown and use a surgical drape; insert the catheter through parts of the body other than the groin; and remove any unnecessary catheters.

The physicians achieved a successful result by almost any measure. Researchers estimated that, when adopted in 50 intensive care units in Michigan, the procedure might have prevented 2,000 infections, reaching an infection rate of near zero (Landro, 2010). The procedures demonstrate the power of learning-directed leadership. Learning-directed leadership impacts organizational effectiveness through five processes: increasing awareness of a problem or system, learning from (rather than simply repeating) experience, facilitating behavioral change through coordination, improving judgment of individual employees, and breaking down hierarchy to transfer knowledge across levels of the organization. We present each of these in turn.

Increasing Awareness. Like most successful organization-wide learning initiatives, the catheter safety effort began by focusing attention on the general problem. The hospitals that adopted the catheter safety process implemented a training course for the general population and garnered the support of management. Frontline employees, those who were responsible for insertion and replacement of catheters, received additional training that focused on the specific elements of the problem. Increasing awareness stands as the first step in learning by focusing the attention of the entire organization on an otherwise misunderstood or overlooked problem.

Learning from Past Experience. One reason that the intervention proved so successful was that it relied on a comprehensive review of existing knowledge. The researchers didn’t start from scratch; they sifted through years of studies, in fields from medicine to flight crew operations. They identified ways to put these research findings into action. But they went further by culling best practices. They identified what practices were cursory and which were central to success. Much of the success could be attributed to the fact that these techniques had been used before, and only the most successful processes were adopted.

The researchers went beyond use of existing experience; they made gains in applying the model to a new situation. No one could logically accept that a flight crew checklist would be appropriate for a hospital. The researchers knew they had to adapt the checklist for their own unique purposes. The process of adaptation cannot be underestimated, for it seems that many best practices go unused because organizations fail to adapt them to the specific circumstances they face.

Facilitating Behavior Change. The central line catheter awareness program also involved behavioral change by encouraging medical professionals to consider small changes in how they work. Behavioral components included adoption of a common cart, institution of a checklist to detail critical procedures, and establishment of standardized review procedures for each patient.

These changes help medical professionals focus on the processes most important to achieving the goal, in this case infection-free catheter insertion. At the same time, the professionals develop a clearer picture of the larger task, seeing how their individual actions fit into the larger treatment plan for the patient. Learning occurs through the constant monitoring of patient treatment as given by other caregivers. Thus, this approach engages the best element of goal setting. It helps to simplify a complex process by focusing attention on key aspects of a task while simultaneously allowing for learning about the implications for the larger task. The most important behavioral change may not be the actual medical procedures itself, but the improved coordination that results.

We know that learning involves collective rather than just individual processes. Yet, the role of coordination in learning is often characterized as mysterious and therefore often overlooked. Perhaps this is because coordination can be difficult to observe and capture. Psychologist Daniel Wegner (Wegner and Wegner, 1985) has taken some of the mystery out of coordinated learning with something he calls “transactive memory.” His early research was largely confined to laboratory studies. In one study, pairs of individuals who had been in a relationship more than three months were better able to recall words than those who were not in these relationships. Over the last few years, the notion of transactive memory has been confirmed in dozens of studies in real-world settings. These studies largely confirm Wegner’s findings – teamwork matters. The catheter safety program demonstrates the role of transactive memory in learning. Teams that demonstrate transactive memory share three characteristics.

First, team members believe in the credibility of the information shared by other members. The catheter safety program appears to increase credibility because it provides a shared template, common repository, and agreed-upon procedure for documenting knowledge. Essentially, the shared checklist replaces individual memory with a team memory. Credibility increases because the checklist serves as a shared and likely more credible source of memory, so that memory is no longer assigned to the more fallible process of individual cognition.

Second, transactive memory involves effectively coordinating actions. Coordination means that information moves across and between individuals in a way that contributes to the team’s overall performance. The catheter safety program encourages coordination by helping teams establish a common set of procedures that guide action. The development, implementation, and integration of a checklist fosters learning because coordination becomes an everyday practice, not an abstraction. Coordination leads to learning because it necessitates an agreed-upon procedure, standardizes routine processes, and creates a template for improving processes.

Third, the common checklist improves coordination among a group of specialized professionals. Organizations manage complexity by distributing labor. Nurses, physicians, and residents each perform a specific duty. This division of labor helps the organization but creates challenges for coordination. Learning occurs when team members understand, respect, and utilize the unique expertise of these diverse roles. The catheter safety program provides evidence that when learning becomes a daily practice, it improves performance.

Improving Judgment. In addition to creating awareness and making incremental changes to behavior, lessons from catheter safety checklists point to the importance of improving professional judgment. The checklist implementation process marks an important shift from institutionalizing organization-wide policies to allowing experienced professionals to exercise judgment. For example, the development and implementation of a checklist is not abstract but part of the daily routine of professionals. For sure, implementation requires a coordinated effort at all levels of the organization, including strong support from management, but ultimately, the change occurs at the most direct levels of patient care, not policy. The program success results from the learning that occurs as professionals exercise autonomy and judgment unencumbered by overly burdensome institutional rules.

Improving professional judgment is an important part of learning. In a 1986 study, Vimla Patel and colleagues found that experienced physicians saw medical situations in a more holistic and complete way than did residents. In other words, physicians relied on a greater source of data, including patient histories and lifestyle data, to make a diagnosis. In non-routine cases, experts rely on “flexible reasoning” to generate alternatives, revise hypotheses, and develop meaningful courses of action. Judgment and its cousin learning require adapting, looking at a broad range of information, challenging, and understanding context.

Breaking Down Hierarchy. The cornerstone of the catheter safety program can be found in the introduction and use of a common checklist. However, from a learning standpoint, the checklist itself serves simply to facilitate a larger psychological purpose. It facilitates the breakdown of traditional organizational and professional hierarchies.

Medicine’s adoption of checklists builds on a legacy established by commercial pilots. Studies of numerous air tragedies and near misses have revealed that all too often, dysfunctional power dynamics among the flight crews contributed to the disaster. Overly authoritarian cockpit captains ignored the insights and warnings of copilots, leading to a crash or near miss. The checklist serves to neutralize traditional forms of power such as rank or profession because authority no longer rests in the rank of individuals but in their knowledge, and this paves the way for learning. Nurses and residents gain the authority to stop a procedure if it doesn’t conform to guidelines.

Each of these five processes underscores the importance of learning in improving organizational effectiveness. The initial experiment for catheter safety has been adopted by other hospitals around the US. It stands as a remarkable example of learning in organizations. We can’t emphasize enough that the learning from such an effort occurs on two levels. The first level is the learning that occurs from engaging in the process of building the procedure. The second level of learning occurs as an outcome of the continued engagement in the process itself.

A successful program can tell us something important, but an overt collapse of learning can tell us something else. Next we turn to the case of Lehman Brothers and the failure to learn.

Failure to Learn at Lehman Brothers

As one way to understand just how the catheter safety program invokes learning, we can contrast it with an organization that failed to learn. Lehman Brothers can be described as a collapse of learning because it had, at the time of this writing, the largest bankruptcy in the world’s history, topping an estimated $639 billion in assets.

Over years, Lehman grew into a rigid culture, where it enforced strict informal rules for behavior. The culture served the company well at times, but the same rigidity also restricted its ability to learn and adapt. During the mortgage crisis of 2007, the managers at Lehman needed to assess and change their behavior and respond to the need for new direction. Rather, as former chief talent officer Hope Greenfield indicated in Leader to Leader, managers “stood in the sidelines waiting to see who was going to take the reins next” and occupied themselves with “finger pointing and blame.” The culture did not change behaviors even when the company needed that change to survive.

Lehman found itself plagued by widespread turnover, which resulted in continual loss of talent. These trends meant that professional judgment was constantly under threat. As Greenfield pointed out, managers who tried to exercise their professionalism found themselves sidelined and ostracized, and many eventually left the organization. As a result, the culture at Lehman restricted independent professional judgment in favor of rigid thinking. Learning ultimately became stifled.

Team coordination, another hallmark of learning, is built on a foundation of credibility that allows individual team members the freedom to act. However, in cultures that breed a strong sense of competitiveness among managers, it is difficult to build credible, trustworthy teams in which members place the team’s interests and welfare above their personal interests. In this “underdog eat underdog world,” managers prided themselves on their work ethic and fierce competitive spirit rather than good leadership.

This competitive spirit often overshadowed level-headed thinking. The head of Lehmann was bound for retirement, and his number two in command was not a likely successor. This dynamic enhanced the spirit of competition, since according to Greenfield, “any newcomer was regarded as a potential rival and there was smug satisfaction in seeing peers falter.” Although some competition can be a good thing, too much competition can lead to wasted resources, knowledge hoarding, and lack of cooperation. Eventually, problems go unaddressed because leaders lack the information and perspective necessary to overcome them.

Lehmann Brothers had a strong belief in the firm as a family. While this is generally a positive attribute – with, for example, the firm rushing to help when an employee had an ill family member – too much of a family culture means that the hierarchy is rigid and unyielding in decision making. When the firm had 8,000 employees, having only a handful of people at the top making the key decisions may have worked, as these were the handful that Lehmann believed really understood the business. By the end of 2008, the firm had grown large and complex, but the hierarchical family decision-making structure had not changed. The executive committee briefly tried to expand its membership, involving more in the decision-making process, but this effort was short-lived and threatened those in power. The case of Lehman shows that when organizations fail to break down rigid hierarchies, learning and adaptation are the primary victims.

Lehman Brothers’ ultimate bankruptcy stands in sharp contrast to the organizational learning demonstrated by hospitals that adopted the catheter safety procedures. The contrast cannot be overstated: Leaders who foster learning in organizations perform better, provide better work environments for employees, and stand a stronger chance of survival in the face of threats or challenges, as the next example confirms.

Learning-Directed Leadership in Consulting Firms

Whether the organization is involved in healthcare, professional services, or other fields, learning provides an advantage. A recent study by Richard Boyatzis (2006) of Case Western Reserve University illustrates how learning connects to revenue. The study involved a professional service firm with more than 3,000 partners worldwide. Professional service firms serve as a good proving ground for the advantage of learning because they typify the kinds of problems commonly faced by knowledge workers. Only partners and those who ranked at the top of the firm based on quality of client relationships, performance in growing the business, and strength in managing the practice were included. Thirty-two of the top-ranked performers met the benchmark as the best of the best. On average, the partners billed $2.4 million annually and produced a gross margin of 57 percent.

The study first gauged the behaviors and attitudes of the senior partners using a 360-degree feedback process, with five of the partners’ peers, five of their subordinates, and their boss completing a survey. Each partner also completed the survey. The survey sought feedback on 20 different competencies considered important by the organization. One cluster of competencies involved leadership, initiative, and planning. The second included knowledge-based competencies such as pattern recognition, systems thinking, and general knowledge of the job. A third cluster measured the degree to which senior partners valued learning and facilitated learning in others.

Just over a year and half later, the researchers looked at the relationship between the competencies and the partners’ performance. Performance was measured using two clear, agreed-upon measures: revenue, or how much money the partners brought into the firm, and gross margin, or how well the partner utilized the organization’s resources. Once the researchers collected this data, they then conducted various analyses on the relationship between these two performance measures and the 20 competencies.

The results resonate with learning-directed leadership. While several competencies showed value for performance, only two correlated significantly with both revenue and gross margin: valuing learning and facilitating learning in others. We estimate that the competency of valuing learning accounted for almost $800,000 in additional revenue. Facilitating learning accounted for an additional $1.6 million! Performance on gross margin was more than 10 percent higher for those senior partners who valued and facilitated learning.

As with any study, this one had limitations; however, it provides evidence of a clear relationship between desired performance outcomes and the value of learning-directed behaviors. The study not only shows the importance of learning in knowledge work, but also provides solid evidence of how important it is for leaders to facilitate learning in others.

Identifying new problems faced by clients, forging new relationships, and building new business lie at the heart of consulting work. Recall the distinction between ill-structured and well-structured problems. A second consideration for learning involves learning in the face of both complexity and novelty. “Learning Situations Based on Complexity and Novelty” plots these considerations along two dimensions.

Leaders in the medical profession and consultants share something in common: learning in the face of complexity. For the medical professionals, the situation involved routine. The physicians involved in the effort to decrease catheter-related infections learned by focusing on the most important issues and standardizing procedures. The consultants, on the other hand, learned to identify novel situations and new business opportunities. The physicians and consultants both employed learning to improve organizational performance, but learned different things. Of course, the nature of learning is constantly shifting. The consultants will at some point need to learn under routine, just as the medical professionals will also face novel problems.

Conclusion

Through the examples above, we can begin to see how the demands of novelty and complexity shape leadership. The stories of learning in this article highlight the remarkable link between leadership, learning, and organizational performance. We provided examples of how expertise, knowledge, and creativity hold a clear advantage over position, influence, and authority. Ultimately, leadership is embedded in learning-directed actions.

LEARNING SITUATIONS BASED ON COMPLEXITY AND NOVELTY

© 2011 Anna B. Kayes and D. Christopher Kayes

Anna B. Kayes (EdD, the George Washington University) is Associate Professor of Business in the School of Business and Leadership at Stevenson University. She is author of articles on learning and leadership in outlets such as the Journal of Managerial Psychology and the Journal of Management Education, and is co-author of the forthcoming book, The Learning Advantage: The Six Practices of Learning Directed Leadership.

D. Christopher Kayes (PhD, Case Western Reserve University) is Dean’s Research Scholar and Associate Professor of Management at the George Washington University. His article, “The Destructive Pursuit of Idealized Goals,” was recognized as the most significant contribution to the practice of management by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. He is the author of “Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mt. Everest Disaster” and co-author of the forthcoming The Learning Advantage: The Six Practices of Learning Directed Leadership.

References

American Management Association. How to build a high performance organization, 2007. [link]

Boyatzis, R. E., “Using tipping points of emotional intelligence and cognitive competencies to predict financial performance of leaders,” Psicothema, 18, 2006.

The Economist, “Data, data everywhere. A special report on managing information,” February 27, 2010).

Greenfield, H., “The decline of the best: An insider’s lessons from Lehman Brothers,” Leader to Leader, 55, 2010.

Landro, L., “Building team spirit: Nurses hesitate to challenge doctors even when doctors are ordering the wrong drug or operating on the wrong limb,” Wall Street Journal Online, February 16, 2010.

Mills, T. M. The Sociology of Small Groups. Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Patel, V. L., Groen, G. J., & Frederiksen, C. H., “Differences between students and physicians in memory for clinical cases,” Medical Education, 20, 1986.

Pronovost, P., &Vohr, E. Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor’s Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out. Hudson Street Press, 2010.

Reason, J., “Safety in the operating theatre — Part 2: Human error and organizational failure,” Current Anesthesia and Critical Care, 6, 1995.

Wegner, T. G., & Wegner, D. M., “Transactive memory,” in A. S. R. Manstead & M. Hewstone (Eds.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, Blackwell, 1995.

The post Learning-Directed Leadership in a Changing World appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Network thinking has brought about vast improvements in efficiency in all these sectors. But while such ideas have had an enormous impact on technology, we have yet to see comparable gains in understanding social systems. Social networking software and websites such as MySpace claim to provide a meaningful way to bring people together from around the world in virtual communities. However, these Internet-based solutions have gained a negative reputation for harboring child predators and others who take advantage of the web’s anonymity to deceive their victims. The purpose of this article is to introduce the history, scientific theory, and research behind how true value is created in social networks — and to provide ideas for starting to leverage this knowledge for the good of organizations and beyond.

Not in My Space!

Over the past few years, social networking websites have exploded seemingly out of nowhere. MySpace, which was founded less than four years ago, now has more than 100 million users. PC Magazine defines social networking as “a web site that provides a virtual community for people interested in a subject. It provides a way for members to communicate by voice, chat, instant message, videoconference and blogs.” The use of social networking software to form relationships online is a logical extension of the Internet’s communication capabilities. All indicators suggest that social networking providers will continue to flourish, even as new technologies emerge that improve virtual connections, such as Web 2.0 (web-based communities and hosted services that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users) and telepresence services.

But the popularity of existing services is being shadowed by concerns of child predation and social deception. Four families are suing MySpace after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met through the site. Congress introduced the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006, and although it did not pass the Senate, it is likely to be considered again by the 110th Congress.

Beyond concern over legal liability for the actions of people who use their services for criminal purposes, technology companies need to take into account their brand image. Over the long run, those that allow antisocial behavior to flourish — even if it’s through benign neglect — will likely be less successful than those who promote social well-being. In an ever-more crowded marketplace, the adoption of socially responsible technologies will become an important new competitive differentiator.

While technologies such as MySpace claim to be novel social networking solutions, the science of studying and understanding social networks has been developing for at least 100 years. By applying this rich body of work to the business world, I have found that value is created in collaborative social systems that run across a company’s traditional organizational chart. Enterprises that learn how to create an environment that accelerates the functioning of such networks through mutual acceptance, respect, and co-inspiration will realize large gains in performance and the well-being of their workforce. While current social networking technologies are likely to become passé as new technologies emerge, our understanding of social networks will become a core competency for organizations that find themselves in an integrated global economy.

Social Network Mapping vs. Social Network Analysis

The father of social network measurement was J. L. Moreno, M. D., an Austrian gestalt psychiatrist who, in 1915, began charting social relations by drawing “sociograms” that showed group relations as line drawings connecting people. In developing “sociometry,” now referred to as social network mapping, Moreno sought to study social groups in order to recognize and acknowledge the value of each person. Moreno was influenced by George Herbert Mead, who developed qualitative research methods, and by the American educator John Dewey. Dewey saw individuals as inseparable from their social context, just as society is meaningless apart from its realization in the lives of its individual members. Additionally, just as Dewey influenced W. E. Deming and Walter Shewhart in the creation of continuous quality improvement processes, he also influenced Moreno to use social measurement as an action science to continuously improve social well-being.

Sociologists and anthropologists use social network measurement to uncover the overall structure of a social system. In this context, a system can be small, like a family or a manufacturing line, or large, like trade balances among nations. With this knowledge of the interrelationships and social rules in a given culture, social scientists can better understand, for instance, the spread of HIV, with the goal of stopping the epidemic.

Analysis is defined as the decomposition of the whole, so social network analysis, as practiced today, generally focuses on individuals and their roles. For example, someone with many more social connections than others might be described as a “hub.” In contrast, I have followed the path of what I call social action research in order to understand the science of social systems and how human communities generate social, biological, and financial well-being. Instead of observing a network from the outside, following Moreno’s methodology, social action researchers invite everyone in a group to join them in reflecting on their daily actions by employing qualitative research practices, such as participant observation and unstructured interviews, to generate survey questions.

This process is useful in at least two ways. First, managers can refer to the maps when creating strategies and planning work processes to ensure that they enhance rather than detract from the working of the social networks involved. Second, when employees are asked for their views on how they are creating value for their organization, they feel respected, important, and inspired to perform at an even higher level.

Construction of Social Network Graphs

In business, the survey questions employed in social action research typically refer to the creation of value. For example, the following questions were used in studies at Hewlett Packard:

“With whom have you collaborated on the_______________?”

• reduction of quality escalations in inkjet supplies
• ink-elastomer chemical interaction studies
• development of HP’s first digital projector
• creation of product detection software
• sale of computers and servers

The quality of social network data depends on the relevance, timeliness, and validity of the questions used. The survey is designed for individuals to complete. It includes the name of the person completing the survey, the date, the question, and a table for them to identify those with whom they collaborate, how often they collaborate, and the role or location of those they have identified. As surveys are returned, the individuals named are also sent the same survey to complete. This process continues until no new people have been identified (snowball sampling) or until the group decides to suspend the surveying.

The collected data is then compiled. Usually, a social network with a given kind of interaction among a group of people is graphically depicted by a number of points connected by lines. In traditional graphs, each point is called a “node,” representing a person, and each line is called a “connection,” representing relationships between people. In social action research, dots are replaced with the names of people. The lines also have arrows indicating who identified whom as a network member. Finally, each connection can be associated with a value, which usually is the frequency of contact or interaction.

In this example, the social network data shows a relationship between Dennis, Maria, and Yan. Dennis and Maria, and Maria and Yan, have the strongest connections because they meet most frequently and share reciprocal interactions. At the same time, the relationship between Dennis and Yan is the weakest, because it is unidirectional and less frequent.

But we must be careful in making sweeping generalizations using social network graphs. For example, there can be value in weak ties. In our example, it could be that Dennis had valuable information that Yan needed to complete a work assignment. Our explanations of social network graphs must be validated by those involved in the study, which is again why the qualitative research is so important in preceding the social network survey.

Study of Social Network Graphs

Once the social network graph is constructed, it is shared with those participating in the study. This is a reflective process, as those involved in the network validate the quality of the data and in turn respond to its findings. Perhaps the study reveals that an important position is missing from the network, and participants take action to “fill the hole.” In response to another study, employees may choose to expand the number of connections within a social network; for example, a company that becomes more customer centered by shifting the structure of their social networks to include customers.

Following are some of the traditional features of social network graphics that can offer valuable information about their functioning and sources of leverage for change:

Density

Density is a measure of overall connectedness. It is arrived at by dividing the number of ties by the number of possible ties between people.

In this example, there are 5 ties between Maria, Peter, Dennis, and Katy out of 12 possible ties, so the density of this social network is .42. Density measures fall between 0 and 1.0, with 1.0 representing the greatest density or connectedness. The higher the density, the stronger the connections between team members. A low density score could potentially show conflict in the group or structural barriers that prevent members from communicating effectively.

Centrality

Centrality is considered a measure of power, importance, or influence in social networks. It is derived simply by counting the number of connections a person has. In this example, Maria is the most “central” person in the network, followed by Chris and Darla, with Dennis, Katy, and Peter being the least central. Here again, we would rely on the qualitative interviews to learn more about Maria’s role. In some studies, we have found that the person in Maria’s position is a program manager that everyone depends on to keep them on track. Perhaps Maria is the supervisor of Dennis, Katy, and Darla and peer of Chris and Peter. In yet another context, Maria might be the creator of a rumor that is circulating about the office.

Structural Holes

When I use social network mapping as a learning process, those in the network construct and examine the maps themselves. Participants commonly observe structural holes — individuals missing from the diagram who have the potential to contribute to the network’s performance. In one case, a manager was called in to mitigate conflicts between Hewlett-Packard and a plastics supplier. He witnessed long, grueling meetings between the two organizations where little if anything was accomplished. The manager opened his journal and drew this picture representing the engineers in his organization and in the vendor’s organization:

His sociogram showed connections within the organizations but more importantly showed structural holes between the two organizations. With engineers from both organizations present, the manager drew connections for all to see, suggesting that team members from both organizations should work as one team. As the age-old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, quite literally the picture was worth thousands of dollars. Engineers from the two companies immediately began to fill the “holes” by collaborating, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next year.

Social Systems and Living Systems

I have presented a number of traditional social network concepts. When looking at social network graphics, it is important to realize that, like photographs, they are snapshots of how social networks have formed. Social networks are constantly changing, and our greatest leverage lies in understanding them from a perspective of living systems. As currently practiced by many consultants using tools such as those described above, social network analysis is the separation of a social network into its component parts. It attempts to describe or make comments about an individual’s role within a network. So, going back to the social network in which Maria played a central role, an analysis might conclude that Dennis is an isolated “node” in the network and should be more of a team player. Or from a knowledge management perspective, Maria may be seen as a “hub” in the network and therefore should be promoted.

This approach can have value, but to me, it doesn’t go far enough in generating a systemic understanding of social networks. I have found that insights from the study of living systems and cognition provide the philosophical explanations for a deep understanding of social systems.

In 1951, social scientist Gregory Bateson reconceived psychiatric practices by describing a way of viewing the world that shifted from focusing on:

1. parts to the whole,
2. categorization to integration,
3. the individual to interactions,
4. systems outside the observer to systems that include the observer.

This shift was an initial step in leading us away from analysis and separation to systems thinking. But from my perspective, the most profound contributors to understanding social systems are the co-founders of the Matriztic Institute, Dr. Humberto Maturana and Professor Ximena Davila. They explain in great detail how human beings are born to collaborate and how we can move from a culture of pain and suffering to a culture of well-being through what they describe as “liberating conversations.” To me, this perspective offers new questions and insights into the value and practice of studying social networks. Based on their work, we begin our research with a simple statement: “Everything that is said is said by an observer.” We follow up with a fundamental question: “How do I do what I do as an observer of systems?”

This last question in particular is vital, because it brings forth the role of the observer in the social system they are reflecting upon. When someone interested in a particular network realizes that, whatever they do to the network, they do to themselves, too, they are likely to take socially responsible actions. In studying the work of Maturana and Davila, we also learn that social systems are dynamic and that anything that occurs in the social system is determined by its underlying structure.

Studying social systems is an important departure for organizations. Since the late 1800s, we have been accustomed to see organizations as machines. In the Industrial Age, the physical sciences became the frame of reference for guiding economic growth. Using scientific tools of separation, specialization, analysis, and reductionism, a new image of organizations emerged: the organizational, or org, chart. The org chart depicts hierarchy and areas of specialization. Although some still believe that organizations function based on the structures shown in these charts, many people are finding that the life sciences lead to a more valid understanding of social systems in organizations today. This shift in perspective raises new possibilities by leveraging the concepts of self-organization, collaboration, inter- and intra-organizational social networks, and multidimensionality.

Self-Organization

Are social networks static or dynamic? This is not a trivial question. Managing an organization’s effectiveness will depend on the answer to this question. If you believe that social networks are static, you will presume that relationships are always the same. If, however, you believe that social networks are dynamic, you will want to continually refresh your assumptions about how value is being created. Social action research or practices such as management by walking around become critical learning processes for understanding collective knowledge.

By mapping social networks over time, I have found that they are dynamic and constantly changing, even if the members stay the same. People self-organize as employees create new connections, weaken old connections, and so on in response to new opportunities. Self-organization is an important systemic principle, because performance and productivity are maximized as those within the social network have the freedom to organize their own relationships. You might think of self-organization as the antithesis of bureaucracy. Research has shown that the greatest reward for employees is making a timely contribution to their company, and self-organization is the group process for doing so. (See illustration above.)

Collaboration

Humans are social beings. We can pick out a familiar face among hundreds of pedestrians. At a very early age, infants recognize facial patterns. Biologically, facial recognition stimulates a neural network in the amygdala region of the mid-brain, which is also the center of our emotions. Neuroscientists claim that more than 90 percent of the information we receive from others we obtain through facial expression and body language. Unlike any other species, humans are neurologically wired to be social.

As Maturana and Davila have described, we humans are loving beings and are biologically structured to collaborate. This relationship of mutual acceptance expanded as humans formed groups to survive. Through this innate social behavior, we can accomplish tasks without having to spend time deciding on what group structure is most fitting. While companies spend a fortune on organizing their workforce, social systems require no funding or intervening because of their biological nature.

Social network structure varies. Some networks are based on command and control or dominant and obedient relationships. Other networks are distributive in nature, such as the rumor mill that exists in most organizations. Collaborative social networks are social systems in which everyone is accepted as a legitimate member by everyone else. They are cohesive and natural, and are the source of social capital or optimal group productivity. These systems are also the source of value creation, innovation, and performance breakthrough. This illustration shows optimal cohesion, as every member of the social network is connected to every other member in a seamless support system they created for a man with disabilities.

Whenever I have studied how value is created in the workplace, I have mapped collaborative social systems. In our expanding global economy, the performance challenge for executives is to create the conditions for collaboration to occur. Research has shown this can be done by (1) giving employees the freedom to organize themselves and (2) generating reflective conversations on how value is created.

Inter- and Intra-Organizational Social Networks

The theory that underlies most org charts is that work flows from the top of the organization down through the ranks. However, studies of how work actually gets done have consistently shown that it happens in social systems that span the organizational chart horizontally, not vertically. For a department in a large enterprise, I have plotted the collaborative social networks across the organization chart, shown above in blue shading.

The boundaries of value-creating social systems do not end within the organization. I have also studied collaboration in social systems that include two or more organizations. The rejection of plastics created by outside vendors for Hewlett-Packard’s inkjet cartridges was completely eliminated during the most aggressive inkjet cartridge launch in HP’s history, in part due to a collaborative network that included four Hewlett-Packard sites, two formerly competitive plastic suppliers, and subject matter experts. These parties worked closely in developing the use of transducers in plastic injection molding processes.

In another instance, in Puerto Rico, a network of HP engineers and engineers from their supplier Nypro joined forces on a project that refurbished worn manufacturing line parts instead of throwing them into local landfills. This network of collaboration had multiple effects. First, the initiative created social well-being by giving participants the freedom to innovate and the joy of accomplishment. Second, it generated biological well-being, as the factory no longer dumped heavy metals into Puerto Rico’s already taxed landfill waste dumps. Finally, it led to financial wellbeing by saving HP hundreds of thousands of dollars. You might recognize this example as the one cited earlier in the article in which the manager identified structural holes and asked engineers from both organizations to collaborate. In doing so, they saved HP more than $700,000.

Multidimensionality

As social beings, we coordinate our actions in conversations within closed systems that include other business units, vendors, universities, family, and friends in a continuously changing present. This statement challenges our traditional thoughts of the org chart network, isolated internally and externally, as the source of value creation. In his 1982 book, Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming drew an alternative value-production system as a network of suppliers->producers->consumers. In my work, I have found that our networks are multidimensional; for example, in the HP example cited above, those in the social system generated business results but also social and biological well-being.

The illustration at the bottom of page 5 shows the social system of people supporting a man with disabilities who grew up in a state institution. By providing this man with the support he needed to have a job, the network brought his productivity to 100 percent with perfect quality. In doing so, they improved his wages from $0 at the state institution to more than $1,500/month plus benefits, enabling him to leave welfare and public assistance. This shift allowed the man to move from the institution, which cost tax-payers $80,000/year, to his own community, where he became a taxpayer and owned his own condominium. His case is a prime example of how to leverage living, multidimensional, collaborative systems and, in the process, create value and well-being.

Systems Laws

The work of the Matriztic Institute goes a step further to describe systemic laws that can expand our understanding and application of social systems thinking.

Structural Determination

Imagine going to the stadium to watch your favorite sports team, or perhaps you are at a concert hall getting ready to listen to a symphony. You anticipate an extraordinary performance and then learn that an exemplary player has been replaced. Your immediate response may be incredulity. You may think, “How could they perform without this person?” If you do not find an adequate explanation for your question or if you aren’t satisfied with the substitute, you may become disappointed and critical.

Your disappointment in this instance stems from an innate understanding of the law of structural determination. As explained by Maturana and Davila, structural determination states that everything that occurs in a system is determined by the system’s structure. Engineers will immediately understand this concept. They are experts at developing new products as a system and making sure that the interconnected parts are structurally compatible. The same law can be applied to social systems, such as a team, an orchestra, or a workplace. In these settings, performance is determined by the structure of the social network. If critical people are missing, performance will suffer. If there is a lack of collaboration among members of the network, group productivity will diminish, and cost will increase. Emotions will turn from excitement to disappointment as participants and other stakeholders realize that the output may not be of the caliber they had anticipated.

These things often occur in the workplace through restructuring, reorganization, and voluntary workforce reductions. In one case, I mapped a social network that was generating new IT products. First one person and then two others were assigned new roles in the company. The executive in charge of the new IT products noticed a slowing of performance, and it took those remaining in the network months to reorganize their efforts. By understanding social network mapping and the systemic law of structural determination, executives can anticipate how changes to a network will affect its efficiency and overall performance.

Conservation

To exist in the rapidly growing global economy, companies are told they need to keep up with the competitive environment they find themselves in. New management concepts and abstractions are continually emerging to guide organizations through these complex, dynamic challenges. To capitalize on these innovative methodologies and perspectives, managers are told they must promote an internal culture of change. But the management literature tends to focus on new concepts instead of understanding how work is done.

I propose that managers must learn how value is created in our networked world. Although change is inevitable, it is equally important to conserve those practices that improve efficiency, value creation, and well-being in collaborative social systems. When initiatives inadvertently disrupt the network of relationships through which work is accomplished, they can backfire and leave the company even more vulnerable to outside pressures than before.

Research has shown that value is created in dynamic, collaborative social systems that connect people across business units, companies, continents, and cultures. To be successful in the global economy, organizations will need to develop new practices based on understanding social systems.

Although change is inevitable, it is equally important to conserve those practices that improve efficiency, value creation, and well-being in collaborative social systems.

Unfortunately, technological developments labeled as social networking can actually obscure our understanding.

The work of Humberto Maturana and Ximena Davila expands our knowledge of social systems. This knowledge will have positive effects on organizations of all kinds. First, by developing practices that support self-organizing social systems, managers will improve organizational efficiencies through productivity gains. Second, because the quality of our social systems translates to the quality of our knowledge, reflective studies of social systems will lead to financial, social, and biological well-being. Finally, as we reflect on our social nature, we discover that we too live our lives in social networks. Through this insight, we become socially responsible and generate greater social well-being.

Dennis Sandow is president of Reflexus Company, a research company studying performance and knowledge creation in collaborative social systems. Prior to starting Reflexus, Dennis conducted research on social networks and social capital at the University of Oregon. Dennis is a research member of the Society for Organizational Learning and lives in Oregon with his wife and two adult children.

The post Extending Systems Thinking to Social Systems appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

knowledge and shape its future. But the process of co-creating the future through conversation is so natural we usually overlook it.

Since our early ancestors gathered in circles around the warmth of a fire, conversation has been a primary process for making sense of our world, discovering what we value, sharing knowledge, and imagining our future. Small groups exploring important questions — and connecting with other groups that are doing the same — have always played a major role in social and institutional renewal. Consider the sewing circles and “committees of correspondence” that helped birth the American Republic; the conversations in cafés and salons that spawned the French Revolution; and the Scandinavian “study circles” that stimulated an economic and social renaissance in Northern Europe. Reaching out in ever-widening circles, members of small groups spread their insights to larger constituencies, carrying the seed ideas for new conversations, creative possibilities, and collective action (see “Conversation as a Path to Large-Scale Change”).

Today, especially with the advent of the Internet, we are becoming increasingly aware of the power and potential of these dynamic networks of conversation and their systemic importance for large-scale collaboration, learning, and change. The crosspollination of ideas from group to group can lead to the emergence of surprising creativity and focus as we discover innovative ways to support a “system thinking together.”

What if we could create an intentional, simple, and effective approach for fostering greater collaborative learning and coherent thought than is often available in large group settings? Our research reveals that what we have come to call “The World Café” has a unique contribution to make when the goal is the focused use of dialogic inquiry to foster collective insight around real-life challenges and key strategic questions at increasing levels of scale.

What is The World Café? It is an innovative methodology that enhances the capacity for collaborative thinking about critical issues by linking small group and large-group conversations. In the process, knowledge grows, a sense of the whole becomes real, and new possibilities become visible. The World Café utilizes the principles of dynamic networks and living systems to access a source of deeper creativity and shared knowledge that might not be available through more traditional approaches to collaborative work.

The World Café is also an evocative metaphor that enables us to pay attention to aspects of organizational life that are often invisible, hidden by formal structures and policies. It highlights the naturally occurring networks of conversation and social learning through which we access collective intelligence, create new knowledge, and bring forth desired futures. Using The World Café as an organizing image allows leaders to intentionally design processes that take advantage of the natural dynamics that are already at play in order to create sustainable business and social value.

How The World Café Was Born

Several years ago, we serendipitously discovered the unique power of Café style conversations. One rainy morning, we wanted to provide a comfortable setting for participants in a global dialogue on intellectual capital to enjoy their coffee while waiting for the session to begin. We set up small tables in our living room and covered them with paper tablecloths. We added flowers and set out colored crayons, like in many neighborhood cafés.

People were delighted and amused. They got their coffee and gathered in small, informal groups around the tables. Soon, everyone was deeply engaged in conversation. As they talked, people scribbled ideas on the tablecloths. After a while, someone expressed curiosity about what was happening in other conversations. One person agreed to stay at each table as a host while others traveled to other tables to discover what interesting ideas were pollinating there.

People buzzed with excitement. At a certain point, they decided to leave a new host at each table. The other members traveled to new tables, connecting ideas, testing assumptions, and adding to each other’s diagrams and pictures on the tablecloths.

As lunchtime drew near, we took a “tour” of all the tablecloths, seeing what new connections and questions had emerged. Our interactive graphics specialist captured collective insights from the morning on a large piece of newsprint in the middle of the room. We suddenly realized that we had tapped into something very simple but potentially very powerful. Through the Café conversations, a shared knowledge base, larger than any individual or group in the room, had become accessible to us. Our unique contributions had combined and recombined into rich new patterns of living knowledge and innovative thought that had not been visible when we started.

The World Café As Methodology

What makes such a seemingly simple practice — that of talking together about things we care about and intentionally linking the essence of our conversations with others in ever widening circles — so useful? We think it’s because Café conversations offer us the opportunity to notice the possibilities for mutual insight, innovation, and action that are already present in any group, if we only knew how to access them. We are discovering that this process offers a unique mixture of freedom and focus, of coherence without control. Depending on an organization’s needs, Café events can be designed around particular themes or topics. The Café format is flexible and adapts to different circumstances, based on a few simple practices and principles (see “Café Hosting Tips”).

Groups as small as 12 and as large as 1,200 from around the world have engaged in Café learning conversations in a wide range of settings. In a global consumer products company, executives from over 30 nations used Café principles to integrate a new worldwide marketing strategy. In New Zealand, Maori leaders combined The World Café with indigenous meeting formats during regional treaty negotiations. Mexican government and corporate leaders applied The World Café to scenario planning. A Fortune 100 company is using “Creative Cafés” to explore corporate responsibility with stakeholders. And faculty members in the U. S. and Europe are creating virtual online “Knowledge Cafés” to conduct distance-learning programs.

After participating in Café conversations, members share comments such as, “I developed productive relationships and learned more from others than I ever expected. You can actually see the knowledge growing.” Participants often develop an increased sense of responsibility for making use of the practical insights they gain and for staying connected as they expand the conversation to larger constituencies.

The practice of The World Café is based on a set of working assumptions that we continue to explore:

• The future is born in webs of human conversation.
• Compelling questions encourage collective learning.
• Networks are the underlying pattern of living systems.
• Human systems — organizations, families, communities — are living systems.
• Intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways.
• We collectively have all the wisdom and resources we need.

Five Key Operating Principles

We are discovering that the unique contribution of Café learning seems to come from translating these working assumptions into the following five operating principles that, when used in combination, increase the likelihood of generating breakthrough thinking.

Create Hospitable Space. Café hosts around the world emphasize the power and importance of creating a welcoming environment to enliven collaborative conversation. We thrive and are better able to confront difficult questions, explore underlying assumptions, and create what we care about in surroundings that evoke warmth, friendliness, and authenticity than in those that are less hospitable to the human spirit. Most meeting places are sterile, cold, and impersonal. Consider choosing environments with natural light. Create comfortable seating. Honor our traditions of human hospitality by offering refreshments. Play soft music as people enter. Decorate the walls with art. Hospitable space means “safe” space — where everyone feels free to offer their best thinking.

Hosts can create hospitable space even in large, impersonal venues. For instance, at a conference for 1,000 people, we asked the hotel staff to set up small, round cocktail tables instead of rows of chairs in the cavernous ballroom. We then decked out each table with a red-checked tablecloth and a vase of red and white carnations. Volunteers placed sheets of white paper over the tablecloths and left small containers of colored markers for doodling. We also brought in palm trees and other greenery. When people entered the room, they were greeted by soft jazz music. The buzz of conversation almost instantly filled the space.

Knowledge emerges in response to compelling questions that “travel well” as they attract collective engagement and exploration throughout a system.

Explore Questions That Matter. One of our most important learnings in working with The World Café is that discovering and exploring “questions that matter” opens the door to catalytic conversation, insight, and innovation. Knowledge emerges in response to compelling questions that “travel well” as they attract collective engagement and exploration throughout a system. Powerful questions provide focus and coherence to networks of conversation that might otherwise spin off in random directions. Well-crafted strategic questions define intention, focus energy, and direct attention toward what really counts.

Hone the skill of shaping open-ended questions that are relevant to the group’s real-life concerns. These questions need not imply immediate action steps or problem solving. Allow the questions to invite inquiry and exploration. At one Café in Denmark focused on improving a school system, the hosts framed the central question as “What could a good school also be?” rather than as “How can we fix the problems in this school?” In doing so, they opened up the conversation to appreciating what might be possible in the future, rather than limiting the focus to what is wrong in the present.

Connect Diverse People and Perspectives. “Intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways,” according to Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science (Berrett-Koehler, 1992). By cross-pollinating ideas among tables in several rounds of conversation, we intentionally invite a more accelerated and richer network of dialogic interactions on a larger scale than is common in most dialogue circles.

One technique for enriching the ways in which the system connects to itself is to vary the different rounds of conversation. Hosts stay at each table to welcome guests while the other members travel to new tables to share as well as gather insights. Travelers might then return to their home Cafés or continue to move from table to table for several iterations. Sometimes the hosts change, with the first host becoming a traveler during the second cycle. Or several members might stay at the table while the others go out for brief visits as “ambassadors” to other tables, collecting new seed ideas that bring diverse perspectives to the home table.

Additionally, all living systems — including human systems — benefit from diversity. In her book The Quantum Society: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (William Morrow and Company, 1994), Danah Zohar states: “Social evolution requires that different points of view, different ideas, different ways of life, and different traditions recombine into larger, more complex emergent wholes.” Breakthrough thinking is more likely to emerge when diverse viewpoints and perspectives contribute to the exploration. For example, “Strategy Cafés” that engage multiple stakeholders, including employees from all levels as well as customers and suppliers, can offer richer opportunities for innovation than traditional strategic planning activities among senior executives alone.

Listen Together for Patterns, Insights, and Deeper Questions.

Through Café conversations, participants often discover coherent patterns of meaning in what may appear, at first glance, to be a chaotic and messy self-organizing exchange of ideas and perspectives. The emphasis is on shared listening — listening for the wisdom or insight that no individual member of the group might have access to by themselves. To that end, invite members to offer their unique perspectives and listen for new connections in the “space in-between.” Allow for silence and reflection. Ask members to notice what’s evolving in the middle of the table. By focusing on these special qualities of collective attention, we have a greater opportunity to experience what our Danish colleague Finn Voldtofte calls “the magic in the middle.”

For example, in Sweden, hosts of a multi-stakeholder forum used Café conversations to clarify areas of inquiry that could influence the future of both the information/communications industry and the environment. They began the first round of conversation by giving each table of participants a “talking stone.” Each member took the talking stone in turn and presented his or her key insights, thoughts, or deeper questions about the query “How can information technology contribute to a sustainable future?”

The three other participants at each table were to listen carefully and draw any connections they noticed between ideas in the middle of the tablecloth. In the second and third rounds, the Café hosts asked everyone to begin listening as a group for the deeper assumptions underlying their perspectives and to write them on the tablecloth as well. When the final round was over, the group pooled the collective insights and “ahas” that had emerged from linking the small-group dialogues from Café tables and creating a “conversation of the whole.” Through this intentional process of discovering and connecting underlying assumptions and insights, participants who might have opposed each other in a different setting came to a mutual appreciation of the deeper questions they faced together in contributing to a sustainable future.

Make Collective Knowledge Visible to the Group. We’ve come to realize that the simple act of scribbling ideas and pictures on a paper napkin or tablecloth so that the others at the Café table can literally “see what you mean” is integral to knowledge creation and innovation. As Michael Schrage says in Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration (Random House, 1990), “The images, maps, and perceptions bouncing around in people’s brains must be given a form that other people’s images, maps, or perceptions can shape, alter, or otherwise add value to. . . . It takes shared space to create shared understanding.” By providing paper and markers, we encourage the use of “shared space” where people can build on each other’s ideas, weave together their thoughts, and engage in deeper collective listening.

Many Café events include an interactive graphics specialist, who creates large visual maps that synthesize key insights and ideas. Commented Nancy Margulies, who has hosted many Cafés, “It’s like having a big ‘tablecloth’ in the middle of the whole group. Participants can quite literally see that they are creating something new together.” Other possibilities for making collective knowledge visible include having a “gallery walk,” with participants taking a tour of the tablecloths created by the different groups; publishing a Café newspaper on the spot; and creating theater presentations that reflect group discoveries. Each of these techniques allows participants to capture and build on the momentum and ideas that emerge. In addition, creating “storybooks” from the session allows participants to take the results of their work to larger audiences after the event.

The five operating principles seem quite simple, but embodying them as an integrated practice demands creativity, thoughtfulness, artistry, and care. The creativity of the host can make the difference between an interesting conversation and the magic of experiencing what our colleague Tom Atlee calls co-intelligence in action.

Conversation As Action

But is all of this talk just that, talk? What about the urgent need for action in our organizations today? We have found that, by its nature, The World Café challenges the ways most of us think about creating desired results in organizational and community life. Many leaders still preach that we should “stop talking and get to work” — as if talk and work were two separate things. Humberto Maturana, a pioneering evolutionary biologist, has helped us see that human beings think together and coordinate action in and through language. Conversation is “real work.” Through conversation people discover who cares about what and who will be accountable for next steps. We are finding that when people come to a new level of shared understanding around real-life issues, they want to make a difference. When participants return from Café conversations, they often see additional action choices that they didn’t know existed before.

Café As Metaphor

As reported by members of Café events, The World Café is a powerful methodology for collaborative learning and knowledge evolution. We are also finding that it is a provocative metaphor that can help us see organizational and societal change in a new light. How might the metaphor of “The World as Café” invite us to think differently about ways to catalyze system-wide innovation and action?

We are learning that Café conversations are based on a larger natural process of mutual inquiry and discovery that does not depend on small, round tables and red-checked tablecloths. By experiencing the power of focused networks of conversation on a small scale, members see how they might utilize this strategic insight in the larger systems they are part of. What if conversation were as much a core business process as marketing, distribution, or product development? What if it were already the core process — the source of organizational intelligence that allows all of the others to generate positive results?

For example, imagine your organization as a series of Café tables, with employees moving between functions inside the organization as well as connecting with multiple “tables” of customers, suppliers, distributors, and other conversation partners. What difference would it make to your own action choices if you viewed your workplace as a dynamic, living network of conversations and knowledge creation rather than as a traditional hierarchy (see “What We View Determines What We Do”)?

Based on an understanding of The World Café, leaders can take greater responsibility for designing infrastructures that bring coherence and focus to organizational conversations. For example, they come to recognize the key role they play in discovering “the big questions” and hosting strategic conversations with multiple stakeholders. This shift of lens also has practical implications for how leaders work with strategy formation, organizational learning, information technology, the design of physical space, and leadership development.

In one Café session, senior leaders from major corporations were mapping the implications of taking this view. The director of global operations for a company with more than 50,000 employees suddenly jumped up from his seat and exclaimed, “Do you know what I’ve gone and done? I’ve just reorganized my entire global operation. I’ve broken up the informal knowledge networks and relationships that have developed over the years. If I had looked at my reorganization through these glasses, I would have done it a lot differently. It’s going to take us a long

time to recover!” His heartfelt comments stimulated a lively conversation about the role of leaders in developing organizational strategies that honor these less visible but critical conversational and learning processes.

We’re seeing many practical examples of how people are intentionally using the metaphor of The World Café to guide strategic work in larger systems. Executives in a high-tech corporation helped to decrease the injury rate dramatically by using Café principles to engage existing networks of conversation and introduce questions about safety risks. The World Café has led intellectual capital expert Leif Edvinsson of Sweden to observe that the office design of the past is inadequate to support effective knowledge work. In response, he has engaged leading-edge architects in alternative space design.

World Café principles are also being used to redesign a Museum of Science and Industry in Florida to highlight not only formal exhibits but also learning conversations as doorways to discovery. And the initiative From the Four Directions: People Everywhere Leading the Way is intentionally weaving a global network of conversations among leaders of all ages on several continents. Using the Internet and other information technologies, local conversation circles feed insights back into the network, catalyzing these worldwide leadership dialogues into a growing force for societal innovation.

Creating Sustainable Value

The World Café is one path for stimulating courageous conversation about questions that matter to our lives and work—especially in large group settings. We are now seeing the systemic ways in which focused networks of conversation, especially with the support of collaborative technologies, can help organizations and communities evolve. Using The World Café as a methodology and as a metaphor offers a practical yet innovative way to cultivate both the knowledge required to thrive today and the wisdom needed to create the futures we want, rather than being forced to live with the futures we get.

Juanita Brown and David Isaacs serve as strategists and thinking partners with senior leaders, applying living systems principles to the evolution of knowledge-based organizations and large-scale change initiatives. They have hosted Café conversations and strategic dialogues internationally in a wide variety of business and community settings. (Contact info@theworldcafe.com or call 415-381-3368). The World Café Community is comprised of a growing global group of leaders and others committed to courageous conversations and positive futures. We thank Anne Dosher, Ken Homer, Susan Kelly, Janice Molloy, Nancy Margulies, Karen Speerstra, and Sue Wetzler for their special contributions to this article.

The post The World Cafe: Living Knowledge Through Conversations That Matter appeared first on The Systems Thinker.