After experiencing his first World Café dialogue at a program on self-organizing systems, Bob Veazie had an uncomfortable epiphany. At the time, he was a senior engineer and manufacturing manager at a Hewlett Packard plant in Oregon. In that World Café, Bob experienced how the collective intelligence of a group can become visible as people move from one table to another over several rounds of conversation, cross-pollinating ideas, making unexpected connections, developing new knowledge, and creating action opportunities. Afterward he said:

“Something profound but disturbing happened to me during those Café conversations. I realized that the boxes on my organization chart might more accurately be depicted as webs of conversations. Each day, we are engaged in conversations about different questions, just like in those table conversations, and we move between the ‘tables’ as we do our work in the company. It hit me with laser-beam clarity: This is how life actually works! So I began to wonder: If our conversations and personal relations are at the heart of our work, how am I, as a leader, contributing to or taking energy away from this natural process? Are we using the intelligence of just a few people when we could gain the intelligence of hundreds or thousands by focusing on key questions and including people more intentionally in the conversation?”

Shortly thereafter, Bob was charged with co-leading a corporation-wide safety initiative that eventually engaged more than 50,000 people in manufacturing plants around the world in conversations about safety risks and how to address them. Meeting people at every level of the company in the settings where they normally gathered, he went in with questions rather than answers and hosted conversations aimed at tapping each group’s own experience, relationships, and mutual intelligence in coming up with better ways to reduce accident rates. His core team took good ideas from one plant to another, shared stories, and brought key people from different levels and parts of the company together to learn from one another. “Each of the employee meetings I attended was like a table in this large, ongoing safety café — this network of conversations,” Veazie explained. “The ‘tables’ all over the company were connected by the key questions.”

The outcomes were impressive. In Puerto Rico, the accident rate plummeted from 4.2 percent to 0.2 percent. In Oregon, it fell from 6.2 percent to 1.2 percent. The overall company accident rate was reduced by 33 percent, and these gains were maintained in plants where the safety conversations continued.

The shift in how Bob Veazie viewed his organization prompted a new approach to leadership that dramatically increased HP employees’ collective capacity to achieve their shared aims. He had discovered the power of conversational leadership in action.

Seeing Conversation as a Core Process

“An organization’s results are determined through webs of human commitments, born in webs of human conversations.”

— Fernando Flores,

former Chilean Minister of Finance

As defined by educator Carolyn Baldwin, conversational leadership is “the leader’s intentional use of conversation as a core process to cultivate the collective intelligence needed to create business and social value.” It encompasses a way of seeing, a pattern of thinking, and a set of practices that are particularly important today, when the most important questions we face are complex ones that require us to develop new ways of thinking together to foster positive change.

Spurred by financial crisis and the prospect of an increasingly uncertain future, leaders in all sectors are seeking new ways to leverage organizational and community resources to produce greater strategic impact. Efforts to cut costs, be more efficient, compete more effectively, or innovate have all intensified. Yet many such initiatives fall short of achieving their intended aims or create unintended consequences that require additional interventions.

What if increasing the success of these efforts depended on our intentionally focusing on a deeper process — the core process of conversation and meaning-making through which we as human beings have always co-evolved new realities? As evolutionary biologist Humberto Maturana points out, we live in language and the sophisticated coordination of actions that language makes possible. Since our earliest ancestors gathered in circles around the warmth of a fire, talking together has been our primary means for discovering common interests, sharing knowledge, imagining the future, and cooperating to survive and thrive. The natural cross-pollination of relationships, ideas, and meaning as people move from one conversation to others enables us to learn, explore possibilities, and co-create together.

From this perspective, conversations are action — the very heartbeat and lifeblood of social systems like organizations, communities, and cultures. In all these settings, to use Maturana’s phrase, we “bring forth a world” through the networks of conversation in which we participate. Analytical tools such as social network analysis can help us visualize those networks, while emerging digital technologies and social media such as blogs, wikis, and online communities of practice let us extend, enrich, and deepen conversations and collaboration among an ever-expanding number of participants. As new possibilities and the coordinated actions based on them start in small groups and then spread through wider networks, we bring the future into being.

Conversational leadership takes root when leaders see their organizations as dynamic webs of conversation and consider conversation as a core process for effecting positive systemic change. Taking a strategic approach to this core process can not only grow intellectual and social capital, but also provide a collaborative advantage in our increasingly networked world.

How we come together to address critical challenges and opportunities, and the collaborative social technologies we use to think together about key issues, may mean the difference between “business as usual” and the breakthrough thinking and action we need today. By designing, convening, and hosting conversations about questions that matter—and linking those conversations in disciplined ways — leaders have unprecedented opportunities to tap collective intelligence and guide committed action toward the fulfillment of shared purposes.

So, instead of admonishing our children at school and employees in organizations to “Stop talking and get to work,” we might be better served to encourage them to “Start talking and create together!”

A Framework for Exercising Conversational Leadership

What does it mean to take a strategic approach to the development of conversation as a core process, or for an organization to begin “thinking together for a change?” If conversation is the medium through which the art of leadership is practiced — the vehicle through which social and business value are created — how do we get good at it?

We’d like to offer a simple framework for understanding the practice of conversational leadership. It can be applied at several levels, from the design of single meetings to the development of multi-faceted programs or long-term, large-scale strategic change initiatives.

To design effective architectures for engagement, a conversational leader will:

• Clarify purpose and strategic intent
• Explore critical issues and questions
• Engage all key stakeholders
• Skillfully use collaborative social technologies
• Guide collective intelligence toward effective action
• Foster innovative capacity development

These six processes are represented in “Conversational Leadership: Creating Architectures for Engagement” (see page 3). We will explore them briefly in turn. As you read, reflect on what happens when you consciously use them as part of your leadership. Also, consider the impact when any one of them is missing or used ineffectively.

Clarify Purpose and Strategic Intent

“The goal of strategic intent is to fold the future back into the present. . . .While strategic intent is clear about ends, it is flexible as to means — it leaves room for improvisation. Achieving strategic intent requires enormous creativity with respect to means.”

—Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad,

“Strategic Intent,” Harvard Business Review

Clarifying purpose or strategic intent is the first step in designing ways to engage. Purpose determines which issues or opportunities are important and which questions matter. It helps leaders discover who the relevant stakeholders are and select which social technologies will support the types of collaboration needed to fulfill that purpose. It guides the development of strategy, and enables all participants to decide both what to do and what not to do as they are called upon to make real-time decisions in rapidly changing circumstances.

When Dr. Phil Cass agreed to serve as CEO of the Columbus Medical Association and Foundation in Ohio, he was well versed in “command and control” leadership but knew another way forward was needed., “I started my new job with the express purpose of creating stakeholder involvement in a way that liberated both the staff and the board’s intelligence,” he said., “I had no idea how to do it and told my staff that we were going to need every bit of ‘grey matter’ we had in order to be successful. But I held the clear intention of creating a ‘leaderful’ system and haven’t wavered from that all this time.”

To fulfill this purpose, Phil introduced first his own organization and then the broader community to innovative ways of engaging key stakeholders in dialogue on critical issues. His initial experiments with conversational leadership later led to the creation of Our Optimal Health, a county-wide multi-stake-holder initiative aimed at creating a fundamental shift in individual and community well-being while simultaneously enabling the current health system to function more effectively. Over time, a sense of collective purpose has evolved, and many are engaged in renewing and realizing it., “The early stages of work with community leaders began with the short-term intent of seeding conversations that matter in our public spaces,” he said, “but the longer-term intent was to shift the quality of dialogue throughout our community.” Ten community assemblies and new public-private partnerships have begun to embody that opportunity.

Bound by clear intent and supported by social technologies like the World Café, U Process, and Art of Hosting, Phil and a growing network of leaders from throughout the community are pioneering ways to transcend entrenched positions in healthcare and forge collective solutions together. Their efforts demonstrate how purpose and strategic intent serve as a potent “attractors” around which emergent action can organize in today’s complex systems.

Without clarity of purpose and strategic intent, no one knows where they are headed or why.

Explore Critical Issues and Questions

“Something fundamental changes when people begin to ask questions together. The questions create more of a learning conversation than the normal stale debate about problems.”

—Mike Szymanczyk, Chairman and CEO,

The Altria Group

Leaders at every level of an organization are typically judged on how well they address the issues and strategic questions that define their domains of responsibility. For leaders as for the rest of us, issues focus attention, evoke our passion, and galvanize our energy. We are motivated to learn and to act by the questions we care most about. Yet we often quarrel about or act on an issue without taking time to thoughtfully define it or to articulate the deeper, underlying questions that can stimulate fresh thinking. A conversational leader develops the capacity for evoking and articulating those core questions — and fosters that capacity in others throughout the organization or community.

Under the leadership of Paul Borawski, for example, the American Society for Quality (ASQ) began a “living strategy” process to determine the future direction of the association. The goal of the initial session with the board’s Strategic Planning Committee was not to produce a traditional one page plan based solely on the obvious critical issues but rather to discover the key strategic questions that called for further exploration. Paul recalls that the first session “turned ASQ strategically inside out. The committee began to ask questions they discovered weren’t theirs to answer. Some needed to go to the full board; others needed the input of the full membership. The whole thing started to blossom into a realization that many more voices were needed to discover the answers to the key strategic questions raised at that initial session.”

Phil Cass also discovered the power of reframing issues during the initial community dialogues on healthcare he sponsored in Columbus. One powerful shift took place at a conversational leadership learning program with key community leaders when a physician asked, “How can the community create affordable and sustainable healthcare for all?” A second shift occurred when participants in later assemblies realized that a fundamental change in focus was needed from the traditional concern for treating disease to promoting optimal well-being. Together, these breakthroughs inspired the pioneering initiative Our Optimal Health.

Without a focus on critical issues and the questions they evoke, there’s no reason to act and no context for collaborative learning.

Engage All Key Stakeholders

“The task of leadership is to be intentional about the way we group people and the questions that we engage them in.”

––Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes

As the ASQ experience suggests, the process of identifying critical questions may also illuminate the need to have diverse voices representing key parts of a system or multiple perspectives on an issue present for innovative solutions to reveal themselves. Gary Hamel highlighted this when he noted that “effective strategy evolution depends on creating a rich web of conversations that cuts across previously isolated knowledge sets and creates unexpected combinations of collective thought and insight.” The emergence of cross-functional teams, multi-stakeholder dialogues, and large-scale processes that emphasize getting the whole system in the room all reflect growing awareness that a more robust “ecology of thought” is needed to fully understand any truly important issue, develop viable systemic solutions, and catalyze widespread engagement and support for organizational or community change.

Conversational leadership starts with a belief in the possibility of collective intelligence — the recognition that we can be smarter, more creative, and more capable together than we can alone. In practice, this leads to asking, “Who needs to be at the table because they have perspectives or information that’s needed? Because they play key roles in decision making? Because they will be involved in implementation? Because they are affected by decisions made and actions taken?”

Engaging all key stakeholders and cross-pollinating diverse perspectives was a guiding principle in Nokia Corporation’s 2007 global initiative to renew its core values. Nokia staff and World Café Community Foundation associates co-hosted 16 separate “Nokia Way Cafés” in nine countries, involving more than 3,000 employees from every level of the organization. Factory workers, product designers, sales people, software developers, senior executives, and others participated in face-to-face conversations about the values that would best serve Nokia as an internet company, and how to link core values to business success. Highlights were harvested and shared online with everyone in the company through a video blog. The process culminated with a “Nokia Jam” that engaged all employees worldwide in a 72-hour strategy dialogue. While discovering the common themes in this far-flung global enterprise was challenging, the four new values that emerged were fresh and energizing. They were also widely embraced, because the process had included people from all parts of the company, across functional, cultural, and hierarchical boundaries.

Without engaging all key stakeholders, there is little chance of breakthrough thinking or finding innovative paths forward on critical issues.

Skillfully Use Collaborative Social Technologies

“If you can design the physical space, the social space, and the information space together to enhance collaborative learning, then that whole milieu turns into a learning technology.”

— John Seely Brown, former chief scientist,

Xerox Corporation

Discovering shared purpose, evoking collective intelligence, and crafting effective strategies for action don’t happen by accident. To address critical issues and questions with diverse stakeholders effectively, we must be intentional about choosing processes for engagement that allow the contributions of all to coalesce in ways that foster “coherence without control.” Otherwise, bringing key stakeholders with diverse perspectives together can lead to polarized debate, chaos, or a proliferation of ideas without the ability to choose and act.

Since the 1980s, we have witnessed the development and increasingly creative use of highly effective social technologies for thinking and acting together in purposeful ways, including the World Café, Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, Scenario Planning, and Future Search, among many others. The second edition of The Change Handbook, edited by Peggy Holman, Tom Devane, and Steven Cady, features more than 60 methods for whole systems change. Today these face-to-face technologies have powerful complements in the virtual world. Web-based videoconferencing, online collaboration tools, virtual communities of practice, social media, Second Life, “crowdsourcing,” and other rapidly evolving digital tools are now available to support community building, knowledge development, and complex, coordinated action.

Conversational leadership involves understanding these and other collaborative social technologies, wisely choosing those appropriate for a given purpose, and integrating them in skillful architectures of networked inquiry and cascading action. Mike Szymanczyk, chairman and CEO of the Altria Group, has used these principles and practices of conversational leadership to lead his company in reinventing its future. He told us that:

“If you want to use conversation as a core process, then you have to be intentional about designing the infrastructures that will evoke people’s capacity for thinking together in new ways. . . .We’ve done a number of things over the years to create infrastructures for dialogue and engagement. Some of our choices may seem ‘outside the box,’ but we’ve found they’ve made a real difference. For example, very early on we invented a strategy process, the Game Plan, based on collaborative dialogue and inquiry that is used organization-wide. It focuses on discovering the big questions at the heart of shaping the future and on creating initiatives that respond to those critical strategic questions.

We regularly utilize a variety of conversational architectures and creative meeting formats that foster collaborating thinking and innovative solutions. As part of our large-scale change effort, we’ve introduced World Café conversations, dialogue circles, Open Space sessions, scenario planning, outdoor experiential learning, and even dramatic theater presentations to stimulate dialogue and breakthrough thinking around critical issues. We use graphic recording and visual language as a key resource to help people think more systemically, connect ideas, and surface difficult concerns…. We’ve also created special meeting places with double-screen technology to support conversations at a distance in ways that allow us both to see our colleagues from different sites and to work with visual materials related to questions or projects we’re exploring.”

As the Altria and other stories show, a growing number of leaders recognize that diverse methodologies and their underlying design principles can be used to develop new capacities and create architectures of engagement in and across all levels of an organization (see “Design Principles for Hosting Conversations That Matter”). While Bob Veazie of Hewlett Packard never actually hosted a formal World Café, he said that “throughout the whole safety effort, I held the principles and pattern of the World Café as a guiding image for what was happening in the organization.” Understanding the deeper principles involved also enables leaders to integrate different methodologies effectively and to improvise with confidence and skill.

Without the skilled use of collaborative social technologies, dialogue often devolves into diatribe, and solutions are owned by those with the loudest voices or the most power.

Guiding Collective Intelligence Toward Wise Action

“A leader these days needs to be a host — one who convenes diversity; who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our mutual intelligence can come forth.”

––Margaret Wheatley, The Berkana Institute

The outcome of all this activity is wise, effective action in service of purpose and strategic intent. Once leaders begin to view the organization or community as a living network of conversations, they can focus that network on questions that truly matter. In addition, they can design infrastructures, like the Altria Game Plan process, that enable the “harvests” from those conversations to connect and complement each other at every level of system.

Research and best practices in every sector are demonstrating that successful outcomes and measurable results are more likely when we bring the voices of all key stakeholders to bear on critical issues using face-to-face and online technologies carefully chosen to foster effective engagement. This is true whether we aim to strategize, foster innovation, improve organizational processes, or nurture community connections.

Conversely, the potential for collective intelligence or wise action is compromised when any ingredient of the framework is missing or poorly executed. We’ve all experienced meetings that are “all process,” dialogues in which polarized positions lead to paralyzing debate, narrow consensus among a small group that doesn’t represent the whole, and well-designed meetings that go awry when a leader is unclear about intent, loses trust, or decides to exert inappropriate control.

Without collective intelligence and wise, effective action, the future of our organizations, our communities, and our planet remain imperiled.

Innovative Leadership and Capacity Development

“How can we begin to cultivate both the organizational infrastructures and the personal leadership capabilities that are needed to access and act on the wisdom that already exists in our organizations and communities?”

––David Isaacs, co-founder, the World Café

In today’s environment, developing the capacity for conversational leadership and fostering “process intelligence” at every level of the system may be one of the most productive investments that organizations can make. Yet our formal school systems, executive leadership programs, and on-the-job experience poorly equip present or future leaders with the mental models, personal capacities, or process skills needed to respond creatively to the complexity of today’s challenges (see “Personal Capacities of a Conversational Leader”).

We need an expanded concept of leadership development — one that encompasses the skills, knowledge, and personal qualities required to create and guide collaborative networks and inquiring systems that continually renew their capacity to learn, adapt, and create long-term business and social value (see “Developing Conversational Leadership”). The pioneering work being done by Phil Cass and his colleagues to transform healthcare in Ohio exemplifies such an approach. After participating in programs at the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership on hosting strategic conversations and leadership in networked systems, Phil introduced new capacity-building opportunities for his staff. He helped them learn how to host World Café conversations, began learning circles to explore key authors’ ideas, and redesigned staff meetings and planning retreats to encourage knowledge sharing and whole systems thinking across organizational boundaries. He then cosponsored workshops in the community for leaders from associated organizations and youth to learn and practice the capacities for hosting that lie at the heart of conversational leadership.

Without leadership capacities that rise to today’s complex systemic challenges, we rely on perspectives and approaches from an earlier era that are no longer adequate and undermine our best intentions.

Shaping Positive Futures

Conversational leadership uses conversation as a core process to create tipping points for change. It invites us to complement our traditional focus on methods for business process improvement with a focus on methods for talking and thinking together effectively to simultaneously create the social process improvement needed to maximize business and social value. At the heart of this work is an understanding of organizations as networks of conversations and a belief in the power of collective intelligence. This knowledge invites leaders to host diverse voices in addressing critical issues using the most powerful face-to-face and online process technologies now available. Our individual and collective power is amplified as we “think together” in disciplined ways and then connect our conversations to create possibilities for large-scale systemic change.

“True learning organizations are a space for generative conversations and concerted action, which creates a field of alignment that produces tremendous power to invent new realities in conversation and to bring about these new realities in action,” wrote Peter Senge and Fred Kofman. It is through conversational leadership that we can bring such organizations into being. In an era in which all of us are called to step forward with courage, it has the potential to transform how leaders understand the organizations they serve, how companies and communities can employ the collective intelligence of all stakeholders in service of shared aims, and how all of us participate in “thinking together, for a change.”

Thomas J. Hurley serves as a senior advisor and executive coach for leaders seeking innovative approaches to strategy development and large-scale systems change. He was co-founder of the Chaordic Commons, a nonprofit consulting organization in which he partnered with VISA founder Dee Hock, and served for 17 years with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a leading global organization on expanded human capacities and positive futures. He is currently guiding the global evolution of the World Café.

Juanita Brown, PhD, is the co-originator of the World Café. She collaborates as a thinking partner and design advisor with senior leaders across sectors to create innovative forums for strategic dialogue and multi-generational collaboration on critical business and societal issues. Her award winning book, The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter, co-authored with David Isaacs and the World Café Community, has been translated into 10 languages.

We welcome your insights, questions, and perspectives. Please contact us via conversationalleadership@theworldcafe.com.

For Further Reading

Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, “Conversation as a Core Business Process,” The SystemsThinker, December 1996/January 1997

Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, EricVogt, and Nancy Margulies, “Strategic Questioning: Engaging People’s Best Thinking,” The SystemsThinker, November 2002

Eric E. Vogt, Juanita Brown, and David Isaacs, The Art of Powerful Questions (Pegasus Communications, 2003)

Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, and the World Café Community, TheWorld Café: Shaping Our Futures through Conversations that Matter (Berrett-Koehler, 2005)

The post Conversational Leadership: Thinking Together for a Change appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Our fate and future is and always has been intertwined with nature, despite the widespread failure of most humans to act in a manner that reflects a deep understanding of this relationship. And now, for the first time, we have gone full circle, causing the fate and future of nature to become entwined with our own.

The contours of the future we are now forging, however, are yet to be fully determined. Simply restated, the future is emergent and, within limits, plastic. While conscious design is unlikely to afford us the capacity to control the future directly, how we craft our sphere of concern and how effectively we link this to action will likely influence the future in profound ways.

In the recent past, many have assumed that economic growth is a surrogate for social progress. But some are beginning to value learning over economic growth as the vehicle for bringing about a more sustainable and desirable world for all. My goal in this article is to explore some of the likely requirements and potential stumbling blocks associated with employing learning, and in particular social learning, to achieve a vision of the future I refer to as “ecocultural sustainability.”

Ecocultural Sustainability

Ecocultural sustainability refers to both a state of dynamic equilibrium and a social process that is desirable and ecologically sound. It requires that a society can, at a minimum, continually renew itself and its members by supporting:

• the flourishing of rich cultural and biological diversity;
• forms of governance that are just, egalitarian, transparent, and participatory; economies that are sufficient, equitable, accountable, and bioregionally sound; and
• production and consumption that promotes universalizable lifestyles and keeps its wake in check by both learning from and working with nature and limiting its total life-cycle costs (social, environmental, and financial).

Successful implementation of the ecocultural sustainability paradigm rests both on integrating reason and emotion and on inculcating a balance between the needs of individuals and the imperative of the common good (human and nonhuman). It calls for educational processes and systems that nurture active citizens and open minds by encouraging wonder, creativity, tolerance, cooperation, and collaboration. By propagating the skills to regularly monitor and evaluate the activities of individuals and organizations — to learn from their mistakes and celebrate their successes — it promotes vigorous self-criticism, combats rigidity and apathy, and fosters anticipatory decision-making and adaptive learning. And by cultivating the agility to distinguish between needs and wants, meaningful innovation and sheer novelty, the sacred and the profane, and a balance between specialization and generalization, such societies prepare their individuals, organizations, and institutions to counteract maladaptive forces and respond to unforeseen challenges and changes that are beyond their control with hope, joy, and imagination.

I am interested in exploring whether social learning inspires and fosters planned, directed action and behavior that is more consistent with our highest values and aspirations regarding improving quality of life. If so, is this force strong enough to counterbalance the historical tendency toward anthropocentric and ethnocentric approaches that tend to advantage narrow self-interest? In short, does social learning give an edge to anticipatory, holistic, egalitarian, and non-anthropocentric planning processes and decisions that favor continual quality of life improvements for all — humans and the biosphere as a whole?

The Gap

Our generation isn’t the first to experience a gap between the world of our aspirations, hopes, and dreams and the world we create with our policies, practices, and everyday actions. Of particular significance to our contemporary dilemma is the seduction of material affluence and the corresponding failure to recognize, appreciate, or effectively respond to the predicament of our seemingly interminable quest for ever greater consumption and its potential to undermine the ecological and social basis of our existence.

What is most surprising or perhaps troubling is that while environmental concerns and attitudes are widely supported and long-standing, they have generally not, at least in the U. S., translated into consistent, effective actions and behaviors — voting habits, purchasing decisions, and lifestyles — for improving environmental quality. Similarly, on the international level these concerns and attitudes have not generated effective treaties for responding to contemporary, global-scale environmental challenges. Simply put, awareness of a problem, accessibility of extensive information on its origins and impacts, and even stated concern about it do not guarantee action or imply that, if taken, the action will be appropriate or effective.

The Greening of Progress

The ideological commitment to sustainable development as continuous improvement in the overall conditions of human life is unavoidably rooted in the notion of progress — at least for those of us in the West. The orthodox view of the idea of progress, which dates back to at least the time of Xenophanes in the late 6th century B. C. E., holds that moral, political, economic, technological, and social betterment are inevitable. Such a view of ineluctable, boundless progress became widely adopted in the West during the Enlightenment and continues to be broadly embraced today. This perspective has been justified by — and tied to — humankind’s expanding capability to control and manipulate nature. It is also wrapped up in a conviction that humankind is perfectible. Yet many of today’s interconnected environmental and social problems — over-consumption, poverty, over-harvesting, climate change, stratospheric ozone reduction, over-population, biodiversity loss, pollution, fresh water shortages, invasive species, fisheries collapse, deforestation, over-grazing, erosion, desertification, and salinization — are the unintended, generally unforeseen (but not necessarily unforeseeable) consequences of a failure to recognize, adequately appreciate, or effectively respond to the reciprocal character of humankind’s relationship with nature.

The famous American environmentalist, Dave Brower, was fond of saying that he was not “blindly against progress, but against blind progress.” This phrase could be a mantra for the less dogmatic, constructive critics of the orthodox notion of progress. Their work suggests that progress is multifaceted and contingent. Progress in one realm need not imply progress in another. In fact, progress in one realm can be inversely related to progress in another. Excessive progress in one realm can even foster a lack of resilience that engenders collapse. What’s more, past gains can be irreversible — and irretrievable, as with lost languages or the skills, traditions, and wisdom that are forfeited when a culture becomes extinct.

The fundamental challenge is to better understand our nature — and learn how to work with it — to identify levers that can help us bring about the change we seek.

I have coined the term “greening of progress” to refer to the process of modifying the orthodox notion of progress to support a transition to ecocultural sustainability. This revising of progress incorporates three assumptions. First, the idea of progress cannot be separated from our values and assumptions about human nature (are humans inherently good, bad, both, or neither), technology, economics, what is sacred, and our views about the way the world works. Furthermore, every decision will, almost inevitably, generate tradeoffs. Second, humankind’s quality of life is ultimately tied to, and constrained by, our ability to maintain the health and flourishing of nature and the planet’s various ecosystem services along with our ability to stay within the planet’s biogeophysical carrying capacity. Third, the rate and character of progress are shaped by our concern for the common good; our ability and proclivities to acquire, process, evaluate, and share information about nature and the current state of affairs (particularly feedback data); the types of decision-making processes and criteria we employ; our proficiency at understanding and reflecting our highest concerns in our institutions, policies, and lifestyles; our adeptness at acting in an anticipatory and adaptive fashion (as opposed to a simply reactive one); and our capacity to support individual and institutional self-renewal.

In contrast to others, I have specifically chosen not to include a formal requirement for radical value change. I have done this because I believe the surveys of the public’s environmental attitudes and concern demonstrate that the underlying values to support such change, while possibly not deep enough or well enough informed by science and a sophisticated understanding of causal relationships, nevertheless already exist, are sincere, and are widely embraced. Rather than eliciting a sweeping change in values, the more fundamental and crucial steps may involve better understanding our existing palette of values (and their relative implications for improving quality of life), reprioritizing or realigning our values in relation to this improved understanding, and eliciting greater consistency in their application.

Niels Röling offered a provocative and challenging admonition that alludes to the essential change embodied by my “greening of progress” perspective when he stated, “Until now man has fought nature. From now on, he will fight his own nature” (translation of French). Rather than fight our nature, however, I believe the fundamental challenge is to better understand our nature — and learn how to work with it — to identify levers that can help us bring about the change we seek.

From my greening of progress perspective, I take Röling to mean that environmental management must become much more about managing people—especially the way we learn, form and test our values, and use nature to satisfy our needs and desires—than managing nature per se (i.e., attempting to control and manipulate soil, forests, marine environments, and ecosystems). I would also modify Röling’s insight to incorporate the idea that a greening of progress tradition, or at least a countercurrent, has existed for at least several millennia. But why hasn’t this modified view of progress taken hold? The pivotal issue, in my mind, is to clarify the role that learning can play in supporting the greening of progress and in facilitating a transition to ecocultural sustainability.

Social Learning and Ecocultural Sustainability

If a transition to ecocultural sustainability is ever to take hold, unprecedented individual and collective change must occur. Change of this character and scale, however, has no chartered course. While no society has yet to successfully make such a transition, it is not for lack of interest or effort. Comprehensive, coordinated change — spanning our behavior, practices, policies, institutions, and, perhaps, values — is extremely difficult.

Any planned, directed change by individuals or collectives is built on learning. Using the Oxford American Dictionary definition as a rough guide, I define learning as the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, norms, values, or understanding through experience, imitation, observation, modeling, practice, or study; by being taught; or as a result of collaboration. I also note that “understanding” is interpreted very broadly here to also include intuition, which may be the product of extensive study, spiritual practice, divine inspiration, or even serendipity, rather than conscious reasoning alone.

Contrary to widely held views, I do not believe that learning must necessarily engender behavioral change. Not all learning warrants behavioral change and sometimes competing interests, goals, and objectives militate against change. It is only through learning, however, that we acquire our values, attitudes, and concerns along with our conception of reality. By acquiring new information (or exploiting existing information), we have the possibility to test these values and concerns against our understanding of reality and, if warranted, we can take measures to rethink our values, realign our behavior and action, or do both. When corrective responses result from anticipatory learning (as opposed to simple adaptation), I refer to them as planned change.

In contrast to others, I view almost all learning by individuals as some form of social learning. The exception is pure trial-and-error learning through direct personal experience, essentially immune from the influence of others. When individuals engage in the process of learning, they more frequently employ observation, imitation, modeling, self-instruction, conversation, and mentoring, among other strategies. All of these strategies, however, rest on some interaction with living beings or at least employing the artifacts (e.g. language, tools, books, drawings, videos, music recordings, software, etc.) of living, or once living, beings.

Albert Bandura has argued that modeling, from the standpoint of behavior elicitation, is the most significant form of learning in which individuals engage (Social Learning Theory, Prentice Hall, 1977). His social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous interaction among cognitive, behavioral, and environmental influences. Bandura separated the conditions for successful behavioral modeling into four components:

1. Attention — a “model” behavior in the environment must grab or capture a potential learner’s notice.
2. Retention — the learner must remember the observed behavior.
3. Reproduction — the learner must be able to accurately replicate the observed behavior.
4. Motivation — the environment must offer a consequence (reinforcement or punishment) that increases the probability for a learner to demonstrate what they have learned.

While Bandura’s social learning theory was developed to explain individual behavior, it can be applied to collectives with great efficacy, too.

As long as learning, by individuals or collectives, involves some form of input drawn from others, I characterize it as social learning. The more salient distinction, I find, is differentiating between what I refer to as passive social learning and active social learning. Passive social learning rests on the prior learning of others. It does not require inputs in the form of communication or interaction — direct feedback — from other living beings. Passive social learning includes learning that results from reading a newspaper, watching a blacksmith forge a tool, viewing a movie, listening to a radio program, attending a lecture or poetry reading, searching the internet, or following a recipe. It also includes observing the practices of, and interactions among, others.

Passive Social Learning. Passive social learning has many advantages for cultural evolution over trial-and-error learning because it can lead to the same results at much lower cost in terms of time, effort, and danger. A drawback is that most results must be accepted uncritically — i.e., on trust. Another potential drawback is that it generally requires tacitly embracing the values and assumptions that are encoded in the transferred knowledge. While the passive social learning process may yield important new insights for the individuals involved, it generally has limited applicability for directly spawning substantively new social innovations.

Most learning in our contemporary world is passive social learning. Because it relies on the received wisdom of others (frequently experts), passive social learning can be used to readily propagate behaviors that favor narrow interests over the common good. Such maladaptation is ubiquitous today. An example is the orthodox notion of progress, which supports a general belief that environmental problems do not need to be addressed today because new technologies can always be created to cost-effectively address any problems that might subsequently arise. Vested interests and those unwilling to share power generally have a significant interest in perpetuating such behaviors.

Employing Bandura’s framework, ecoculturally sustainable behaviors are commonly seen as less appealing, so they fail to grab our attention. The behaviors are frequently unfamiliar so they are less likely to be retained. They are also often more involved or more complex, so they are less likely to be reproduced. Finally, the behaviors are routinely perceived as inconvenient, more expensive, more time consuming, not fun or “cool,” unsafe (as with smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles or bicycles), or as activities of the counterculture, so there is little motivation to try them out.

The motivation for employing more ecoculturally sustainable behaviors is further diminished for two key reasons. First, a behemoth advertising industry bombards us with models of people enjoying unsustainable behaviors, without experiencing any negative side effects or tradeoffs. Second, the negative side effects that do exist are often not readily visible or they are distributed in space and time far away from those causing the impacts.

Maladaptive behaviors are widely modeled in the media and in society. It is should be no surprise, as Bandura suggests, that such behaviors are likely to be perpetuated despite widespread information documenting the negative overall consequences of maintaining them. Simply put, our societal emphasis on passive social learning and our proclivity for modeling unsustainable, as opposed to sustainable, behaviors severely hamper the possibility of facilitating a transition to ecocultural sustainability.

Active Social Learning. Active social learning, on the other hand, is built on conscious interaction and communication between at least two living beings. It is inherently dialogical. Active social learning can be broken into three rough categories that are a function of the skills and values of the individuals in the collective and the power relationships that define them:

1. Hierarchical — based on predetermined, inflexible relationships between established teachers and learners;
2. Non-hierarchical — based on two-way learning, where each participant, as an “expert” in their own right, shares their knowledge and experience; and
3. Co-learning — based on nonhierarchical relationships, collaboration, trust, full participation, and shared exploration.

Hierarchical and non-hierarchical active social learning are widely applied and used with great benefit to expand the penetration of existing knowledge. Co-learning, because of its requirements for team building, complete engagement, “learning-by-doing,” and accountability, supports the generation of new knowledge and novel strategies for addressing real-world problems. Co-learning supports positive change by building capacity in three fundamental areas: critical evaluation of existing knowledge and problems, knowledge generation and penetration, and application of this new knowledge to policy, practice, and everyday life.

Active social learning can take place in the context of a conversation, a course employing the Socratic method, dancing with a partner, symphony practice, a community meeting, an open, participatory public review process, and video conferencing over the internet. Opportunities for cross-fertilization and emergence make it much more effective than passive social learning at creating innovations and widely diffusing novel behaviors. Active social learning, because of the opportunity to directly engage both a broad range of perspectives and the whole human, also has the potential to promote more open, equitable, and competent learning processes. Furthermore, the potential to receive direct feedback from other living beings and gain a palpable “taste” for the effects of our own unsustainable behaviors offers a powerful motivation for challenging the desirability of the underlying, taken for granted assumptions, values, and principles that guide our theories in use, routinized policies, practices, and individual behaviors. As such, the highest, most diverse and participatory forms of active social learning appear to offer a viable prospect for combating maladaptation.

I believe these forms of active social learning can be used with great advantage in our learning environments and decision-making processes to promote a societal shift toward ecocultural sustainability — if they also model those principles. Active social learning can support widely different levels of engagement and inquiry. It supports multiple-loop learning, which can be used to question both existing practices and the values that undergird them. Because active social learning can involve diverse players with competing or even conflicting values and interests, I posit that the most successful forms will result from non-coercive relationships that rest on building a common language, transparency, tolerance, mutual trust, collaboration, shared interests, and concern for the common good. Such forms of active social learning can employ conflict in a positive way by challenging complacency and encouraging “out-of-the-box” thinking.

The more active forms of social learning can also facilitate anticipatory responses by examining routinized practices, such as the creeping escalation of standards for comfort, cleanliness, and convenience. Examples of activities that benefit from these forms include playing in an improvisational jazz band and participating in collaborative, integrated systems design projects — such as a green building, an organic farm, an ecological design project applying biomimicry, or a green planning initiative. A further benefit of the more active forms of social learning is that their requirement for elevated levels of engagement — especially when diverse constituencies are involved — aids in building critical thinking skills, supports a richer form of rationality that integrates reason and emotion, and promotes contextualization and accountability that are crucial for helping to close gaps between peoples’ values and actions.

Two significant potential weaknesses of active social learning come to mind. First, benefits do not accrue automatically from employing the process — active social learning, particularly in its hierarchical forms, can be used with equal ease and effectiveness to support maladaptation (consider efforts to stimulate ethnic conflict by Hitler and the Belgians in Rwanda). I believe realizing the potential of active social learning rests on the collective’s choosing what level process it will employ, with full awareness of the requirements and demands.

A second significant weakness of active social learning is that its success depends on effective capacity building. Success rests at least as much on the preparedness, competence, openness, and maturity of the individuals engaging in it as on the rules that guide particular organizational learning, public participation, or decision-making processes. Furthermore, as wise as the decisions that a group arrives at may be, they are only as good as the potential of the new policies and actions to be successfully modeled and embraced by the society at large. Thus, if a society fails to make the educational infrastructure investments to prepare all of its citizens to fully participate in the highest forms of active social learning, it will fail to reap its benefits, and ecocultural unsustainability will likely persist.

A Social Learning Research Agenda

To paraphrase John Gardner, the great proponent of individual and societal self-renewal, we have before us some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems. In an effort to advance the process of turning these ostensibly insoluble problems into breathtaking opportunities, I offer this tentative list of eight challenges for review, discussion, and testing in real-world settings:

1. Develop consistent and coherent working definitions of “social learning.”
2. Initiate a comprehensive, systematic review of existing applications and case studies of “social learning.”
3. Explore the possibility of creating a consistent and coherent working definition of “social learning for sustainability.”
4. Identify well-documented, testable social learning “levers” that have significant potential to help individuals and collectives respond more effectively to situations where they have a general familiarity with a problem but, nevertheless, choose not to respond or respond ineffectively.
5. Create well-documented, testable strategies for applying social learning to “minding the gap.”
6. Develop and evaluate educational strategies to support capacity building for individual learning, so that people are poised to participate in the highest forms of active social learning.
7. Apply social learning to model strategies for recognizing, understanding, publicizing, and responding to maladaption — and evaluate their efficacy.
8. Apply social learning to model ecoculturally sustainable behaviors — and evaluate their efficacy.

As noted earlier, there is as yet no widely accepted, clear, and coherent interpretation of social learning. This, however, is no reason to abandon the term — quite the contrary. A modest degree of vagueness and ambiguity can provide an entry point for all and stimulate a process of clarification, questioning, and conversation that, in the end, may prove far more important than any definitional consensus.

The paradox of social learning is that it can result in our ruination or our renaissance. Our goal is not simply to evade collapse. Steady improvement in quality of life for all rests on developing and continually renewing our capacity to bridge the gap between our values and our actions. The secret to making this ostensibly insoluble problem soluble hinges on recognizing that information is not knowledge and knowledge is not understanding. The promise and power of learning for sustainability involves internalizing this distinction and learning to appreciate that understanding results from access to information, the capacity to make sense of it, the opportunity to openly debate its significance, the sophistication to draw meaning from it, and the wisdom to both put it into context and act on it. This is how we build the capacity and conviction — individual and collective — to bring consonance between our highest values and our actions.

While many of the ideas and concepts embraced by advocates of social learning have tremendous potential to facilitate a transition to ecocultural sustainability, the term currently runs the risk of being perceived as a silver bullet or panacea. At its best, active social learning may very well encourage a deeper, more robust understanding of cause and effect, ongoing moral development, and creative, anticipatory problem solving. I have attempted to add some modest clarity and coherence to our understanding of the meanings and potential of social learning and outline some of the challenges before us — but many questions remain unanswered and considerable work and collaboration remains before us.

Harold Glasser (harold.glasser@wmich.edu) is an associate professor in the Environmental Studies Program and Environmental Institute at Western Michigan University. This article is adapted with permission from a longer piece that appears in Social Learning Toward a Sustainable World: Principles, Perspectives, and Praxis, edited by Arjen E. J. Wals (Wagingingen University Press, 2007, pp. 35-61): http://www.wageningenacademic.com/sociallearning.

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All businesses desire high and stable profitability, period after period for as long as possible. That surely is the goal of most performance improvement programs, including lean initiatives. However, such programs invariably boost profitability for only a while, followed by increasing instability and reduced performance until the cycle repeats and management once again rolls out another improvement program. Again, profitability increases for a while, followed by another disappointing downturn that leads to yet another improvement program. As a consequence of such improvement-initiative cycles, average results over the long term move in the opposite direction to the desired result, despite brief periods of improvement in the short run.

Unintended Consequences of Improvement

I believe this unintended consequence of improvement initiatives occurs because management’s view of what causes business results differs greatly from how the business system itself would naturally produce those results. In virtually all businesses today, and for the past 50 years or more, management actions meant to improve financial performance reflect a mechanistic view of what causes financial results. In that view, financial results are a linear, additive sum of independent contributions from different parts of the business.

In other words, managers believe that reducing an operation’s annual cost by $1 million simply requires them to manipulate parts of the business that generate spending in that amount each year. Because managers assume that all parts of their operations make independent contributions to overall financial performance, like the parts of a machine, they would consider any or all of the following steps to be equally effective: lay off employees whose annual pay equals $1 million; force suppliers to accept reduced prices for their goods or services; outsource employment or contract purchases to less-developed countries. It doesn’t matter what steps are chosen, as long as they eliminate $1 million of annual spending.

Were managers to assume, however, that the financial performance of business operations results from a pattern of relationships among a community of interrelated parts, and is not merely the sum of individual contributions from a collection of independent parts, their approach to reducing cost could be entirely different. In that case, managers might attempt to reduce costs by improving the system of relationships that determines how the business consumes resources to meet customer requirements. This would suggest that they view “improvement” primarily in terms of a system of relationships the human social system that is the business and not simply in terms of an arithmetic sum of separate parts. Viewing current operations through the lens of this vision would enable everyone in the organization to see the direction that change must take to move operations closer to that vision.

However, such thinking has not yet influenced business education and practice. Indeed, the thinking and behavior of almost all managers in today’s business world reflect a worldview grounded in the whole-equals-sum-of-parts and win-lose competitive principles of 19th-century mechanics and 18th-century classical physics, not the systemic, cooperative, and win-win symbiotic principles of 21st-century cosmology and life science. That explains, I believe, why virtually all improvement initiatives, including so-called lean initiatives, inevitably generate long-run financial results that fall far short of what was intended by the initiatives’ designers.

Confusion of Levels

This failure has to do with a “confusion of levels,” a phrase writers often use to describe what the 20-century systems thinker Gregory Bateson called a type of epistemological error. Bateson said that humans in any culture share certain premises about epistemology, that is, “about the nature of knowing and the nature of the universe in which we live and how we know about it” (Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 478). Many of these premises, because they work at some levels and under certain circumstances, are misapplied to other levels. Problems occur when this happens.

People in Western cultures have premises for explaining or understanding the world at two main levels, referred to briefly above. At one level, call it the mechanical, all events are explained by the influence of external force or impact on independent objects. At the other level, call it the living, all events are explained by patterns of relationships connecting a world of self-organizing beings. The premises at the first level have been successfully used for nearly two centuries to study mechanical processes and to promote engineering technology. They are the basis for scientific and business education and practice in the Western world today.

But problems have grown increasingly severe from the erroneous application of these premises to human dealings with nature and to social organizations, such as businesses, that embody principles of living systems. For example, viewing reality through the premises of the first level, a management accountant in modern business views a spreadsheet of financial results as the company. Oblivious to premises at the second level, this person fails to see the system of human relationships that produces those financial results as the company. As a consequence, the person promotes policies to “improve financial results” by arbitrarily destroying relationships through layoffs or outsourcing, not by nurturing and reinforcing the features of those relationships that produce robust results. The long-term outcome, predictably, is less than expected.

Lean Practices Versus Toyota Results

In their customary way of doing things in business, managers confuse linear cause-effect connections at the abstract quantitative level of financial results with the non-linear, complex cause-effect connections that naturally exist at the concrete level of relationships among employees, suppliers, customers, owners, and community. Their business training and experience cause managers to believe that linear cause-effect connections at the abstract quantitative level apply everywhere in the world, including the level of real operations. Thus, they proceed to manipulate and control people and things according to the linear principles that apply at the abstract quantitative level.

Therein lies another confusion of levels. Whereas in a mechanical system, one-dimensional quantities can both describe results and enable one to control the linear process that produces those results, in a living system, quantities can only describe results, but cannot explain or enable one to control the multi-dimensional interactions and feedback loops of the process that produces the results. As I discuss in more detail below, this confusion of levels invalidates all management accounting practices in which businesses attempt to use financial quantities to explain and control financial results. Those practices, which are endemic to American management but are not evident at Toyota, are the main reason why lean initiatives fail to have their desired impact on financial performance in American business.

An example of the damaging impact of this confusion is in a case (co-authored with MIT Professor David Cochran) I describe elsewhere that compares the financial (and other quantitative) results in two automobile bumper-making plants (H. Thomas Johnson, “Lean Accounting: To Become Lean, Shed Accounting,” Cost Management, Jan/Feb 2006, pp. 3-17). One is run by an American “Big Three” automaker whose managers continually manipulate separate parts of the plant’s operations and arbitrarily increase output in order to achieve unit cost targets defined by an abstract financial cost equation. The other is run by Toyota, whose managers focus on nurturing systemic relationships in the plant according to a constant vision that has guided all operations in the company for many decades. The case demonstrates that Toyota does not confuse linear cause-effect connections at the abstract level of financial cost equations with the complex cause-effect connections at the concrete operating level of human relationships and that it, in turn, achieves lower costs and higher overall performance.

I believe lean initiatives fail to achieve results like those observed at Toyota because they do not change the underlying mechanistic thinking that has guided management decisions in virtually all American businesses for the past half century or more. Lean initiatives in non-Toyota companies invariably fail to embody Toyota’s unique way of thinking about business and the fundamentally different approach to management. Thus, businesses transplant Toyota practices into a context of alien thinking that overpowers and dilutes their effectiveness. As a consequence, such companies can demonstrate Toyota-style management practices, but not Toyota performance results.

“Going to the Place”

The prevalence of management accounting control systems in American business probably contributes more than any single thing to the confusion of levels that causes managers to believe they can run operations mechanically by chasing financial targets, not by nurturing and improving the underlying system of human relationships from which such results emerge. It is significant, then, to note that Toyota doesn’t use management accounting targets (or “levers”) to control or motivate operations. I argue that this is an important reason why Toyota’s financial performance is unsurpassed in its industry.

People at Toyota place great importance on genchi genbutsu, or “going to the place” where the problem occurs to see it firsthand. They don’t rely on secondhand reports or charts of data to get true understanding of root cause. Instead, they go to the place (gemba) where they can watch, observe, and “ask why five times.” This attitude shows a deep appreciation that results (and problems) ultimately emanate from and are explained by complex processes and concrete relationships.

Managers in a Toyota plant, unlike their counterparts in American organizations, do not refer to accounting documents such as standard cost variance budgets to discuss the state of current operations. Indeed, in 1992, during my first of scores of trips to Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky plant, I was told that the Toyota accounting system treats daily plant operations essentially as a “black box” that it does not enter. Accountants of course record everything that goes into the plant and all the products that come out. But within the plant they don’t track the flow between incoming resources and outgoing finished product. Everything one needs to know about the transformation that takes place inside the plant is inherent in the flow of the work itself. Indeed, a key feature of the Toyota Production System is that the work itself provides the information needed to control its state.

Professor Kazuhiro Mishina introduced me to this aspect of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in 1992 when he showed me a high-level “material and information flow map” for the Georgetown plant. He explained that the map is designed to show material flowing from left (raw material) to right (finished autos) and information flowing from right to left. Basically there was only one line going from right to left a line to represent the customers’ orders entering the plant each day and going directly to the body-welding operation. Today this type of map is familiar to anyone who has studied “value-stream mapping.” But Kazuhiro pointed out to me that no lines representing information enter the plant from either the accounting system or the production control system. The work itself provides all the information that in non-Toyota plants customarily comes from computerized material requirements planning (MRP) and standard cost variance reports.

While the value-stream mapping literature does an excellent job of showing how the TPS dispenses with the need for production controls in daily operations, it is silent on how the TPS also dispenses with the need for accounting controls in daily operations. This is an unfortunate lapse, in my opinion, because it has left the door open to the idea that lean manufacturing programs must include lean accounting controls.

In Toyota plants, all information needed to control operations is in the work, simply because all work flows continuously at a balanced rate through virtually every operation, from the beginning to the end of the manufacturing process. The work has been carefully designed so that one can “see” its current state quite literally. Is it on time to meet the day’s orders? If not, how much additional time will be needed? Have defects or other errors occurred along the way? Are components to final assembly being replenished on a timely basis? Has any undue inventory accumulated anywhere? Are problems being identified and addressed according to standard procedures? Such questions, and hundreds more, can be answered every moment in every step of the process throughout the plant. Any “exceptions” that managers might need to address to keep financial results on track are visible real time as the work is being done, not days, weeks, or months later in a report from the accounting department.

The Wrong Question

If traditional management accounting practices are the key problem preventing American businesses from emulating Toyota’s performance, what should companies do? Many proponents of lean accounting suggest that companies should reform management accounting itself by doing things such as activity-based value-stream costing, direct costing, cash-flow accounting, value-add capacity analysis, and more. These proposals should cause a sense of deja vu among those who are old enough to recall the proposals 20 years ago to gain better control over burgeoning overhead costs with activity-based cost (ABC) information. ABC seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect it was a good answer to the wrong question. We see better today, when we understand more fully what Toyota does, that reducing manufacturing overhead costs requires a new way to organize work, not better cost information. The question that proponents of ABC should have been asking was how to organize work to eliminate the causes of overhead activity, not how to trace costs of overhead activities to products in more discriminating ways.

The question most companies ask now is how to control the financial results of business operations, as if financial results are a linear sum of individual contributions from separate parts of the business. Accounting control information seems the logical way to show how those contributions, and changes in those contributions, add up to the organization’s overall financial results. But if we assume that financial results emerge from complex interactions and non-linear feedback loops in the interrelated parts of a natural living system, then attempting to control those results with linear accounting information is not only erroneous, but possibly destructive to the system’s operations in the long run. In this case, the new question is: How does one control, if at all, the financial results that emerge from operations that abide by the principles that govern a natural living system?

Managing by Means

An early answer to this question was provided in the 1930s and 1940s by Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming, both trained in mathematical physics and experienced in using state-of-the-art statistical tools in business and government. One of their lasting contributions was to devise a scientific way to estimate the “control limits” within which a business system’s results would normally fall until one of two steps were taken that altered the limits. One step was to ignore all but abnormal variation in results and work to improve the system itself, thereby narrowing the control limits and improving long-term performance. The other step, a less desirable but more common way of managing, was to try to improve long-term performance by intervening in the system every time results varied from a desired target. The inevitable consequence of the second step, Shewhart and Deming proved, is to widen the system’s control limits and impair its long-term performance.

In essence, Shewhart and Deming likened a well-designed business system to a living system in nature. Its results vary over time, but the range of variation has limits. However, in a human system such as the operations of a business, managers can improve performance by taking steps to reduce that range of variation. The key to performance improvement, then, is to nurture the system that produces results, not to drive the system to achieve targets that fall outside its normal performance limits. In his early work, Deming articulated 14 principles (or points) that defined what he meant by nurturing the system. Those principles included things such as create constancy of purpose, constantly improve systems by reducing variation, cease dependence on inspection, do not base purchases on price alone, do not reward individual performance, institute training, eliminate management by objectives, and more.

This is precisely the approach that Toyota takes to manage its operations. Toyota lives by a set of deep underlying systems principles that I tried to sum up in my own words with the concept “managing by means.” As I outlined it in my book Profit Beyond Measure, the essence of that concept is that satisfactory business results follow from nurturing the company’s system (the “means”), not from manipulating its processes to achieve pre-determined financial results (a mechanistic strategy popularly known as “managing by results”). In other words, nurture the process and satisfactory results will follow.

This sentiment is central to Toyota’s deep-seated belief that one cannot improve financial performance by intervening in the system and forcing operations people to achieve results targets. Instead, they emphasize the importance of defining the properties their operating system should manifest and of having everyone in the organization work assiduously to move the system toward those properties. Toyota people frequently refer to those properties as “True North.” True North in Toyota’s system includes safety, moving work always in a continuous flow, one order at a time on time, with no defects, with all steps adding value, and with the lowest consumption of resources possible. The assumption is that the more that every process in the system manifests the properties of True North, the better will be the company’s long-term performance.

These three approaches to managing operations the Shewhart-Deming approach, managing by means (MBM), and Toyota’s approach all suggest how different it is to nurture the system that produces a company’s financial results than it is to arbitrarily intervene in and wrench the system in an attempt to force it to produce a desired result beyond its current capabilities. The latter strategy is, of course, followed by virtually all large companies in the United States today, especially the large publicly traded companies whose top managers are pressured to deliver results demanded by financial markets and other outside interests. Many of those companies are pursuing lean initiatives in the expectation of achieving performance like Toyota’s. The fact that they will not or cannot forego pressure to drive operations with management accounting “levers of control” makes the likelihood of their realizing such expectations nearly zero.

Accounting Controls or System Principles?

If managers look primarily at financial information to judge the performance of a business, then they are certain to be working in the dark. Financial quantities cannot reveal if a system is improving or not. To assume otherwise is to fall prey to confusion of levels. If a company requires cost information to show the “savings” from “going lean,” it will never get there. When managers look at cost information in order to eliminate unfavorable unit cost variances, they discourage people from continuously removing sources of delay and error. Instead, employees will create workarounds such as rework loops, forks, and inventory to keep work moving (even if it is not continuously flowing). In other words, the demand to justify operational decisions with cost information causes people to forego root-cause problem solving and, instead, to build “cost-effective” workarounds that violate systems principles. Eventually the systems principles are forgotten, and managers spend increasing amounts of time working to improve the efficiency of the workarounds.

No company that talks about improving performance can know what it is doing if its primary window on results is financial information and not natural system principles. No amount of financial manipulation will ever improve long-term results. The dilemma facing all companies that intend to become lean is that they can follow a truly systemic path to lean or they can continue to use management accounting “levers of control.” They can’t do both.

Life-Enhancing, Not Life-Denying, Businesses

Management accounting controls impose a curse on lean management programs; they cause managers to believe that addressing the imperative of growth is compatible with the possibility of systemic well-being. Abstract quantities by themselves can of course grow without limit. However, the universe has never allowed any real, concrete system to grow endlessly. Such attempts inevitably fail.

Nevertheless, all businesses that chase accounting targets for revenue, cost, profit, or return on investment somehow believe they are an exception to this universal pattern. They are deaf to the primordial message being delivered every time their real operations fail to deliver the long-term performance that their abstract equations and their occasionally favorable short-term returns seem to promise. They fail to see that the pursuit of endless growth is incompatible with the long-term survival of the system.

This message applies to the entire human economy as well as to individual businesses. Even if every company in the world were to become as lean as Toyota, the economy in which they operate is not sustainable. Forces drive it to focus on quantitative goals, hence, on extensive growth. Government tax, spending, and monetary policies promote more and more production and consumption, to grow GDP endlessly. Financial markets drive companies, including Toyota, to play in the same game. But an economy that lives on steroids is no more sustainable than any growth-driven organization operating within it. Until they can escape the curse of endless growth, both the economy and all its members are doomed to collapse and die.

Our Earth and its life-sustaining biosystem, as well as all systems in the entire universe from which Earth emerged, reflect the existence of continuously open fields of possibility. The most fundamental and pervasive process in the universe, and especially on our Earth, is the constant emergence of newness out of what went before. Nothing ever constrained the flourishing of possibility in that process until humans introduced the idea of quantitative choice to the system. Quantity automatically limits possibility and emergence to outcomes that can be measured. Quantum physicists have suggested that undisturbed systems in the universe naturally stay in multiple states simultaneously, unless someone intervenes with a measurement device. Then all states collapse, except the one being measured. Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost.

By using quantitative targets to manage results without regard for the effect our actions have on the underlying system from which the results emerge, we close fields of possibility and limit ourselves to what our measures will produce. In effect, that describes existence inside a machine, not life. Life implies flourishing in fields of continuously renewing possibility. Mechanistic existence suggests a repetitive, homogeneous system running down to death, without hope of renewal or new possibility. Our worship of quantity virtually guarantees that the economy we inhabit today and the businesses within it are life-denying, not life-enhancing.

Businesses, like any living systems, should grow to be what they are supposed to be, not more. Ants grow to be ants, elephants grow to be elephants and humans grow to be humans. Each in its context flourishes in life, in being not in growing, accumulating, or having. Sustainability, as my colleague John Ehrenfeld has said, is the possibility that humans and other life flourish on the Earth forever. Nurturing that possibility is the challenge that companies, citizens, and the communities we inhabit must accept in the name of sustainability. Lean management in the sense of running companies according to living system principles is an important first step in meeting this challenge. Then comes the hard part: conducting our economic activities within the limits of Earth’s regenerative processes. To fail at that will make all the lean initiatives irrelevant. But we can succeed, as long as we choose to live according to the principles of living systems and not according to the imperative of quantitative growth.

© 2006 H. Thomas Johnson. All rights reserved. This article is adapted with the author’s permission from his 2006 working paper that received the 2007 Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research. A later version of that paper appeared as chapter 1 of Lean Accounting: Best Practices for Sustainable Integration, edited by Joe Stenzel (Wiley, 2007).

H. Thomas Johnson is Professor of Business Administration at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, U. S. A. Direct comments to tomj@sba.pdx.edu.

For Further Reading

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Ballantine Books, 1972).

Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living (Doubleday, 2002).

Ehrenfeld, John. Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy forTransforming our Consumer Culture (Yale University Press, 2008)

Johnson, Elaine B. The Dismantling of Public Education and How to Stop It. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), Ch. 3.

Johnson, H. Thomas., “Using Performance Measurement to Improve Results: A LifeSystem Perspective,” International Journal of Strategic Cost Management, Vol.1, No. 1 (Summer 1998), 1-6.

Johnson, H. Thomas, and Anders Broms. Profit Beyond Measure: Extraordinary Results through Attention toWork and People (The Free Press, 2000).

Joiner, Brian L., and Marie A. Gaudard. “Variation, Management, and W. Edwards Deming,” Quality Progress (December 1990), 29–37.

Rother, Mike. Toyota Kata (McGraw-Hill, forthcoming in Sept. 2009).

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It was a long day of heated discussions with little agreement or progress against an ambitious agenda. Sam asked how I thought it had gone. I recall saying, “It depends on your desired outcome. If success meant getting through the agenda and getting resolution on the issues, you did not meet that objective. If, however, you wanted to get a view of the team dynamics, I believe you had a very successful meeting.” He laughed and said, “What should I do about this situation? I need a team of VPs who can work together to create uniform standards of manufacturing that are necessary for us to achieve our revenue and profitability targets. Can you help me?”

The Team’s Current State

In the meeting I attended, I observed a team that was ill equipped to work in a collaborative and productive manner. Some of the behaviors I saw included:

• An inability to focus on an agenda and make decisions
• A lack of willingness to engage in dialogue
• Poor capacity to listen to one another
• An apparent lack of respect for one another’s ideas
• A tendency to personalize the conversation and get defensive

These observations led to some preliminary hypotheses — that the group lacked trust and the willingness to operate as a team; that they were focused on furthering their individual agendas; and that they would be unsuccessful in creating a standardized manufacturing platform for the company unless they were able to come together and operate with mutual respect, trust, and a willingness to listen to and learn from each other.

In the meeting I attended, I observed a team that was ill equipped to work in a collaborative and productive manner.

During conversations concerning Sam’s 360-review, I had developed a rapport with each member of the team. I leveraged this to have open and honest discussions on what I’d observed during their business meeting. One of them commented, “It was embarrassing to have you witness that meeting. That is so typical of the way we operate. It’s a challenge to get through an agenda with this group.” These one-on-one conversations helped validate my hypotheses around specific concerns and enlisted the executives in Sam’s overall objective — of creating a cohesive team who could work well together in executing an aggressive and critical element of the organization’s strategy.

I also used a team effectiveness questionnaire from Edgar Schein (from Process Consultation: Its Role in Organization Development, Addison-Wesley, 1988, p. 57–58) to get the team to self-assess and have a structured view of their current effectiveness. When I shared the results of this assessment, one of the executives commented, “I had no idea we were so disruptive in the way we operated.”

Based on the assessments, and with Sam’s agreement, my mandate for a 12-month engagement was to create a team that:

• Made sound business decisions in a considered and timely manner
• Had the ability to work together to solve critical production and quality issues
• Engaged in meetings that were productive, energetic, and constructive
• Showed evidence of listening, collaboration, and mutual respect
• Set aside personal agendas and depersonalized the conversation
• Collaborated to develop and implement a world-class manufacturing strategy

The Design of Interventions

I saw this as an amazing opportunity to delve into territory that is typically not explored. I based the design of my interventions on a model of human structural dynamics derived from the work of David Kantor (see “Human Structural Dynamics Model”). This model suggests that human interactions are a function of the social context in which they take place and of what goes on in people’s hearts and minds (Ober, Kantor, Yanowitz, “Creating Business Results Through Team Learning, The Systems Thinker, V6N5, June/July, 1995, pp.1–5). I chose to focus on two aspects of this model—the team or what is described as the face-to-face structure, and the deeper individual structures and how they might influence the team’s interactions, either one-on-one or in the team.

I chose to include individual-level interventions because they cover ground that is typically less acknowledged and yet significantly impacts behavior — what we see at the face-to-face level. It also meshed well with my belief as an OD practitioner that all change starts with individual change, and that our behavior as adults is strongly influenced by our mental models, core beliefs, and stories — many of these arising from experiences in our formative years. I had a sense that if I was able to allow for the surfacing and at some point sharing of deep imagery from each individual, it would help this team coalesce and begin the process of trusting each other.

The Team Interventions

At the team level, the interventions were designed to help develop trust and connection, and start to develop the capacity for listening. The following models, beliefs, and assumptions influenced the choice of interventions:

• A high-performing team is characterized in part by strong personal commitments to the growth and success of each team member (Katzenbach and Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High Performance Organization, Harper Business, 1993).
• Appreciation of individual experiences and gifts is a powerful foundation for transformation and allows for creation of powerful outcomes (Cooperrider and Whitney, Appreciative Inquiry, Berrett Koehler, 1999; Elliott, Locating the Energy for Change: An Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry, International Institute for Sustainable Development, 1999).
• The ability to listen deeply allows for connection and a foundation for collaboration and “thinking together” — the essence of dialogue (Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, Currency/Doubleday, 1999).
• Dialogue fosters and maintains the high levels of openness and trust that are present in healthy teams.

“Progress Toward Trust and Cohesiveness” demonstrates how the different elements were integrated to guide the team’s progress toward trust and cohesion. In addition to determining the current state, five other building blocks contributed toward creating a team that was able to sustain behavioral changes that enabled an environment of trust, collaboration, and cohesiveness:

Establishing Structural Elements. Sam wanted the team to own and follow basic housekeeping guidelines. This set of interventions was aimed at establishing a process by which the team could focus its discussions and deliberations and make decisions in an effective manner. It involved clarifying roles and responsibilities, delineating decision rights, and setting up operating guidelines between Sam and his team, as well as within the team.

PROGRESS TOWARD TRUST AND COHESIVENESS

The interventions were integrated to guide the team’s progress toward trust and cohesion.

Developing the Capacity for Deep Listening and Dialogue. The more challenging aspects of this engagement were around creating a safe container for the team to have strong dialogue. To achieve this, I introduced the principles and intentions of council to structure the meetings (Zimmerman and Coyle, The Way of Council, Bramble Books, 1996; Baldwin, Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture, Bantam, 1998). These principles included always being seated in a circle and using a talking piece that the team co-created. The intentions of council are speaking from the heart or being honest and authentic; listening from the heart or being deeply present and attentive when another speaks; being “lean of expression” and learning to be succinct; and allowing for silence as well as spontaneous expression.

To facilitate their interactions within this structure and to help them make the distinctions that would allow them to realize the intentions of council, I introduced the four behaviors of dialogue as described by Bill Isaacs — voicing, listening, respecting, and suspending (see “Developing the Capacity for New Behaviors”). At one level, the intention was to help the team develop a capacity for listening without judgment and reaction, and at another it was aimed at helping them experience how deep listening could result in more powerful outcomes and decisions. Above all, it was aimed at building trust within the team.

DEVELOPING THE CAPACITY FOR NEW BEHAVIORS

The four behaviors of dialogue as described by Bill Isaacs are voicing, listening, respecting, and suspending.

Over the course of my engagement (and subsequently), the team adopted sitting in a circle as part of their meeting protocol. Initially they struggled with the some of the practices of council — in particular with holding a silence. They tended to reach for the talking stick before the person who was speaking had finished. Over time, as they became more comfortable with the practices, the use of the talking stick as a mechanism to allow “one voice at a time” and to help “hold the silence” evolved from a forced behavior to a more natural and comfortable one. Their discussions went from individuals fighting to say their piece to comments that were more indicative of listening and building on what has been said. The reaction to silence went from a rush to fill it to actually asking for a moment of reflection during the course of a conversation. Although there was evidence of progress, it was more of an iterative process than a linear progression. The awareness and reinforcement of dialogic behaviors was one that continued throughout my 12-month engagement with this team and continues to be a core part of the team’s operating model.

Appreciating the Diversity of Skills and Capabilities. While most of Sam’s team had been at this company for many years and had deep roots in the industry, some of the more recent additions were brought in with different industry experience, including experience in creating world-class manufacturing organizations. The input of these individuals was often not considered and valued by their colleagues. As Sam put it, “I hired Joel and Charisse for their expertise in Lean Manufacturing. I am concerned the rest of the team is shutting them out. I suppose I could be more directive by simply telling people we have to rely on their experience, but I don’t want to add to the resistance.”

The team needed to operate in an environment of respect and appreciation for the diversity of style, skills, experiences, and contributions. They also needed to understand how to work effectively with this diversity and leverage the strengths of each other. To create this culture and capacity, I used interventions derived from Appreciative Inquiry, team role preference (Margerison and McCann, “Team Management Profiles: Their Use in Managerial Development,” Journal of Management Development, Vol 4, No 2, pp 34–37, 1985), and individual assessments such as DiSC as building blocks on the foundation of dialogue.

These interventions had the desired impact. For instance, the Appreciative Inquiry exercise used in the first session allowed for a breaking of the ice in the team. The team found many points of connection — shared experiences, interests, hopes, and desires. After that session, some of the sources of tension dissipated, such as the resentment of the role an individual played or the lack of industry experience. In addition, the resistance to being seen as and operating as a team started to fall away as they worked through their stories of positive team experiences.

In using the Team Management Profiles, the team was able to appreciate the different work preferences and styles that were present in the room. It allowed them to identify strategies that would be most effective in interacting with this group of individuals and to value the different roles each member of the team tended to prefer in a team setting. It also gave them a snapshot of what might be missing and how they could develop those roles as a collective.

Becoming an Observer of the Self. As I worked with the team, I felt it was important to facilitate the development of their capacity for diagnosis and action in order to make them self-correcting and self-sustaining after I had transitioned out of the process. I also wanted them to have a greater awareness of how to facilitate a dialogue by understanding the roles they tended to gravitate to in a conversation. I introduced another element of structural dynamics — that of boundary profiles and, more specifically, David Kantor’s “four-player system” (Kantor and Lonstein, “Reframing Team Relationships: How the Principles of ‘Structural Dynamics’ Can Help Teams Come to Terms with Their Dark Side,” The Fifth Discipline Field book, Currency/ Doubleday, 1994).

My intention was to get this team of individuals to see their patterns of interaction. I believed if they were conscious of their operating tendencies, how these impacted their effectiveness, and what roles were being played out in their team interactions, they might be able to shift the roles they played and engage in more productive and effective dialogue. It would help them notice whether their conversations were dialogic in nature or at the level of discussion and debate. At a minimum, it would increase their self-awareness of how they showed up and help them develop a capacity to become observers of their own behavior. To facilitate their learning, I videotaped some of their meetings and had them analyze their interactions afterward.

One of the insights that emerged was the difference in expectations of how the team should operate. For instance, Sam expected his team to be his equal partners in the decisions they made. There were some members who would defer to Sam’s decisions. Another insight came from seeing two members of the team frequently engaging in a move-oppose dynamic and how it stymied the progression of the conversation.

Creating Sustainability of Change. The emphasis of each intervention was to help them not only become familiar with the skills but also to practice and develop a level of mastery with that skill. Each session built on the previous ones. The final intervention was a visual image storytelling process (Reeve, Creating a Catalyst for Change via Collage Inspired Conversations, unpublished Master’s thesis, Fielding Graduate University, 2005) where the team incorporated the various building blocks (i.e., practices of dialogue, appreciation and knowledge of self and other, and observation) to co-create their vision for their team. It required them to collaboratively create the guiding principles and core values of the team, and the behaviors that would govern their interactions going forward, by building on the values and vision of each individual. I chose a visual process to shift the context from the verbal, left-brain activities that this team was facile with to a process that would invite them to activate in a positive way some of the drivers of their behavior — their beliefs, values, and mental models. As the team moved from sharing individual values and beliefs to co-creating a shared set of guiding principles and vision, they exhibited respect for individual ideas and the diversity of opinions. There was a remarkable absence of the heated arguments that had characterized the first meeting I’d attended. In its place was an energy of collaboration and partnership, resulting in the creation of a shared vision that each individual had contributed to, owned, and had personalized through the storytelling process.

The Individual Interventions

While working with the team as an entity, I was also coaching individual members. A core outcome for the coaching sessions was to help the individual become an observer of the self and understand what drove behavior so they were able to choose how to act, rather than acting from a place of habitual tendency. The ultimate goal for the “Human Structural Dynamics Model” is authenticity; insight, mastery, and alignment are intermediate stages that lead to authenticity. In an effort to be pragmatic (and recognizing the journey toward authenticity is a lifelong one), I focused on a realistic goal of building the capacity for insight through self-awareness and inquiry into the underlying causes of behaviors, along with varying degrees of mastery.

Using a subset of the human structural dynamics model as a base, I worked to help each individual become aware of their feelings, mental models, belief systems, and deeper stories that governed their behavior in the team context. Specifically, the intent was to make visible those factors that were invisible or less visible and enable the individual to act in an authentic manner.

As I used this model to guide the individual coaching sessions with each executive, my role evolved in the following manner:

• Help the individual become aware of feelings, mental models, belief systems, and deeper stories
• Create and strengthen their capacity for embracing these deeper structures
• Facilitate their understanding of how these structures impact their behavior and how to recognize the shadow aspects
• Help them develop the ability to reframe and choose the internal structures that influence behavior

Interplay Between Individual and Team Interventions

Having simultaneous interventions at the individual and team levels and playing a dual role as facilitator for the team and as personal coach allowed me to observe shifts that occurred as individuals gained insight into their behavior and changed how they interacted with the team. The team meetings also provided me with direction on how to intervene at the individual level with different executives.

The Results

Over the 12-month period, there were many visible changes at both the team level and with individuals. For instance, the team’s interactions were much less fractious and chaotic. Their discussions resulted in key decisions being made in a timely manner with each individual feeling heard even if their idea was not included. They had greater appreciation and respect for what their colleagues brought to the team, “I had no idea Charisse had such wide-ranging experience. It is quite refreshing to have someone who hasn’t grown up in this industry.”

They were able to appreciate silence and the quality of reflection and insight that came from it, “I realized how much of my time is filled with doing things — meetings, conference calls. I never get time to think. I was actually able to think about and find a solution to this problem.” There was a greater sense of camaraderie and trust among them. In self-assessing their progress on the team effectiveness instrument used at the beginning of the process, on all measures, the team had moved from a “below average” score to an “above average” rating.

When I started my work with the team, I would have described members as exhibiting behaviors characteristic of “breakdown.” Probably one of the more profound changes I saw was their ability to maintain a quality of inquiry. At rare moments, particularly in our last session together, there were moments when their interactions had elements of flow.

At the individual level, the changes varied depending on the person. Certainly some of them moved more than others. As their capacity to observe their own behavior grew, it created greater awareness and ownership of their own issues, and led to more courage and honesty in their communications. As they stepped in to appreciate and value their own contributions and role on the team, their insecurities went down; they developed more confidence and demonstrated a greater sense of presence as leaders. The awareness and legitimizing of their individual stories allowed them to have respect for and appreciation of the same in others. By practicing compassion for themselves, they developed the capacity for compassion toward others. This in turn allowed for a level of trust and a commitment to each other’s success, which provided a strong basis for collaboration.

Critical Success Factors

I was operating at two levels of the system simultaneously and addressed not only the behaviors that emerged in team interactions but also the underlying triggers of these behaviors. One reason I was able to successfully take this path was Sam’s uncompromising sponsorship and support, as well as the trust we had built as a result of our long-standing relationship and my candor in the early stages of the engagement. Over the course of the 12 months, he allowed me tremendous creative freedom to introduce the ideas behind council practices and dialogue. He’d been exposed to the practices and was a great believer in the notion of “going slow to go fast.”

Although some members of the team were initially resistant to the team process, because of my work with them individually, they grew to trust me with their inner stories and thus trust the process I was taking the team through. Their cynicism and resistance started to wear down as they experienced having a voice in the conversation and being heard as a result of using council and dialogue practices.

One of the other unexpected contributors to the success of the engagement was my knowledge of the organization, its business, and the dynamics within the industry. It allowed me to connect the interventions aimed at strengthening team effectiveness to core business issues the team was dealing with, rather than have “stand-alone” team-building sessions. By integrating business issues into the design of the interventions, the team had an immediate context for applying and practicing their new skills, which enhanced the capacity for retention and recall of new behaviors.

Challenges Encountered

There were some challenges during the course of this engagement. Even as they saw the value of the practices of council and dialogue, the team didn’t readily embrace some aspects. It took a while for them to honor silence and not jump into the fray. “I find it so difficult to sit still and not say something when no one is speaking. It makes me wonder if I did something wrong,” said one of the executives early in our sessions. While this reflected the challenge of holding silence, it was also a powerful example of how our inner story shows up in our behavior. Over time, and with the help of reflective practices in their individual coaching as well as in their team sessions, they started to see the value of having silence and silent time in their process.

Another difficulty that was more present in earlier sessions than in later ones was a desire to be “in action.” This is reflected in the comment from a team member that “we talk a lot and I enjoy our sessions, but when do we make decisions for the business?” Fortunately, given Sam’s experience with dialogue, he was able to support me and provide a context of “We are making decisions. By talking about and resolving the issues, our decisions are becoming clearer.” It took them a while to realize that by being in dialogue, they were “in action” around decisions.

In creating the experience of being an observer of the self and using the four-player model, there were some unintended consequences. During the debrief, one of the team commented,

The human structural dynamics model provided a valuable set of lenses to examine this team’s issues.

“We sure were on our best behavior today. I suppose we knew we were being watched.” Had I anticipated this better, I might have introduced a disturbance to the system to raise the stakes, because when the stakes are high, people tend to revert to “default” or typical behaviors, especially in early stages of behavioral change.

Summary

The human structural dynamics model provided a valuable set of lenses to examine this team’s issues. At the same time, it allowed for improvisation in the choice of interventions used to address different team issues. The occasion to work with an intact team over an extended period of time helped create a robust foundation wherein the skills introduced had a chance of taking hold. It helped build trust with each individual and created a space for personal growth. This systemic approach presented a powerful learning opportunity for all of us engaged in the process.

A longer version of this article appears in Reflections: The SoL Journal on Knowledge, Learning, and Change, Volume 9 Number 1. For more information, go to www.solonline.org/reflections.

Deepika Nath (dnath@indicaconsulting.com) is the founder and principal of Indica Consulting, where her focus is on bridging strategy and organizational development to bring about growth and lasting transformation. She is a trusted advisor and coach to senior executives seeking to define an authentic and effective leadership style. Her experience spans 15 years of strategy and organizational consulting with leading firms such as the Boston Consulting Group and Ernst &Young. A member of SoL, she holds a PhD in Management and an MA in Organizational Development.

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The Problem with Focusing on Performance

Managers tend to define effective teamwork in terms of performance outcomes, such as improving efficiency or achieving a measurable goal on a predetermined task. As the first American to summit the world’s tallest 14 mountains and one of five people to do so without supplementary oxygen, Ed Viesturs has experienced some of the potential consequences of focusing solely on performance:

When you’re up there, you’ve spent years of training, months of preparation, and weeks of climbing and you’re within view of the summit, and you know, you have — in the back of your mind you’re telling yourself,

“We should turn around ‘cause we’re late, we’re gonna run out of oxygen,” but you see the summit, and it draws you there. And a lot of people — it’s so magnetic that they tend to break their rules and they go to the summit — and, on a good day, you can get away with it. And on a bad day, you’ll die.

Viesturs’ experience helps expose some of the limitations of conventional wisdom on team effectiveness. These limitations include the following:

• When teams focus on performance, they tend to lean on prior learned behavior rather than learn new behavior (“years of training, months of preparation, and weeks of climbing”).
• Effective teamwork requires attention to managing emotions (the summit “draws you there”; it’s “magnetic”).
• Effectiveness relies on balancing tired strategies of action with contingencies and adjustments (“On a good day, you can get away with it. And on a bad day, you’ll die”).

The experience of Viesturs and other mountain climbers provides a metaphor for team effectiveness. More than that, it echoes one of the most important findings I have come to after observing, consulting for, and training hundreds of groups: The best teams manage their environment by attending to both performance and learning demands. Team effectiveness requires that teams successfully interpret the nature of the task they face and design an appropriate action strategy.

Over the last few years, I have learned that teams of all sorts need to develop behaviors that promote both learning and performance. Mountain climbing conjures images of a lone individual conquering the untamed mountain. However, mountaineering is most of all a social process that requires learning, problem solving, cooperating on distinct parts of a task, and coordinating different kinds of expertise and experience.

A growing body of research and theory on team learning suggests that teams should act with caution when adopting outcomes that are purely performance driven. Performance behaviors drive success when teams face problems — such as assembly production, sales goals, or operational improvement — that have clear parameters. When teams face novel situations, however, the problem-solving activity that normally leads to effective outcomes often leads to failure. The problem with performance emerges because the behaviors that enhance it in some situations may prove disastrous when teams need to learn new skills, develop capacity, or respond to crisis.

Task Epistemology

The distinction between learning and performance is a matter of how a team interprets the knowledge requirements of its task. I call this interpretation process “task epistemology” because the team develops a theory about the kind of knowledge that is required to perform its task effectively. Said simply, a team’s task epistemology and its subsequent response form the basis of its effectiveness.

The distinction between learning and performance began to emerge as a colleague and I observed teams in a manufacturing environment. The teams were working on a continuous, highly interdependent task; essentially, an assembly line. Our objective in this research focused on determining which team-level behaviors improved performance. We believed in a general set of competencies that existed across teams of all types. Our research revealed a more complex picture than we imagined. We developed a picture of team behaviors that were dependent on the particular task performed by the team. We quickly found evidence for what others had been saying about team effectiveness: task mattered.

Our research led us to consider the special interaction between knowledge and task. Successful task completion involves gathering and processing knowledge. Further study confirmed this initial finding but led us to believe that conceptualizations of team task based simply on task interdependencies failed to tell the whole story. Tasks also carry knowledge demands. In other words, tasks have their own epistemology, in the sense that certain tasks demand different types of thinking for successful completion than others.

Task Knowledge Demands

This task epistemology can be illustrated by the process of climbing a mountain, a kind of short-term project. The first ascent of a mountain requires climbers to use a host of behaviors, including deciphering a new situation, identifying routes, trying out the routes and knowing when to abandon them, and establishing new techniques and then applying them in novel situations. Once climbers successfully summit a peak, they must enlist another set of behaviors in their subsequent pursuit. The new strategy might include following a predefined route, clocking estimated ascent and turnaround times, identifying weather patterns, and following stop rules that specify when to abandon the pursuit. The first ascent requires learning-directed behaviors, while later ascents, assuming other factors remain relatively stable and that processes have been determined, likely require performance-directed behaviors.

This distinction between learning and performance-related task conditions forms the basis for a task epistemology. A task epistemology rests on at least three considerations:

• Problem. An ill-structured problem can be contrasted to a well-structured one by at least two characteristics. First, an ill-structured problem has no clear outcome; experts will disagree as to what answer is correct. Second, the solution necessary to achieve the outcome is not clear, and experts will disagree as to the correct method. The complexity of the problem is another consideration. Complexity is the degree to which the task requires integration and differentiation of knowledge, as well as the technical knowledge required to complete the task. Integration requires the ability to see connections between seemingly diverse and disparate variables. In contrast, differentiation requires noticing slight differences and recognizing uniqueness in seemingly related or similar concepts.
• Context. Environmental factors impact how the team accomplishes its task and measures its outcome. One example of a contextual factor impacting task epistemology can be found in the nature of the organization’s goals. For example, an organization that has multiple goals will put different demands on a team than one that has a single well-defined goal.
• Work Processes. One important consideration is whether or not the team has an established process or strategy to accomplish its task and whether or not the work process can be maintained until task completion. A second consideration is whether the team has established stop rules. Stop rules consist of a specified timetable or set of work processes that trigger different actions. For example, a mountain-climbing team will abandon its pursuit of the summit if certain weather patterns are detected, and a manufacturing process will be shut down if certain quality infractions are detected.

Taken together, problem, context, and process factors provide the basis for understanding task epistemology. The epistemology of task becomes the basis for understanding the different conditions under which teams need to focus on learning versus performance. Simply stated, when teams face a complex and shifting problem, then learning processes are most likely to enhance teamwork.

Performance Conditions

When performance conditions prevail, a team’s goal becomes clear, and teamwork entails developing a relatively stable set of goal-directed strategies. Once a team has developed effective goal-directed strategies, it can then develop means to improve efficiency and effectiveness by slight modifications in reaction to new information or changes. A performance strategy works when several conditions exist based on the problem, context, and process factors related to task.

Problem Factors

The Problem Is Preexisting. A preexisting problem exists when a team faces a problem that has been seen before and for which a clear and effective solution has been developed. In some cases, the team itself has faced the problem before; in other cases, another team has faced the problem and developed a clearly defined strategy to accomplish the task. Examples of teams with preexisting procedures include an airline cockpit crew on a routine flight and an assembly-line production team working on a continuous process.

The Task Is Well Structured. A task is well structured when it can be completed by following a simple formula, such as a team of chefs working at a restaurant. A well-structured task involves a minimal number of steps to complete, and each step requires no special skill beyond the current expertise of the team members. Typically, a task will be considered well-structured if the process necessary to achieve the goal can be agreed upon by experts. For example, some types of medical surgery qualify as well-structured tasks because they seldom produce any difficulties and the steps necessary to successfully complete the procedure require no new skills.

The Task Is Low Complexity. A task can be considered low complexity if it requires little integration or differentiation of knowledge, such as when a sports team plays a game.

Context Factors

The Environment Is Stable. An environment is stable when it produces few anomalies and only routine change. Examples of a stable environment include a team of students working on a class project and a construction crew building a highway.

The Goals Are Narrowly Defined. A narrowly defined goal usually has a single measure of success, and success is easily measurable. The more easily defined a goal, the more likely the problem will be narrowly defined. Examples include a mountain-climbing team summiting a mountain, a sales team seeking to increase revenue, and a mutual fund investment committee seeking to increase the value of a fund.

Process Factors

Clear Stop Rules Have Been Established. Clear stop rules exist when the team clearly understands when to abandon pursuit of its outcome and seek additional help. A good example of clear stop rules exists in the case of an airline cockpit crew that cannot take off for flight until it receives a go-ahead signal from air traffic control or a chemical safety team that evacuates a plant during specific conditions.

Work Processes Are Established. Under conditions requiring performance, teams typically rely on past strategies, processes, and problem-solving abilities to perform the task. The team does not require new skills or abilities for effectiveness.

In summary, performance conditions describe a situation in which existing processes prevail, with a relatively low need for new knowledge or innovative uses of old knowledge. We might call these conditions routine in the sense that a team’s extant beliefs and behaviors provide the raw material for effectiveness. Task knowledge demands remain relatively low because the situation requires little knowledge creation. When all or most of these conditions exist, a team focus on performance-related behaviors becomes likely to produce effectiveness. In contrast, learning leads to effectiveness when different conditions prevail.

Learning Conditions

Team learning leads to effectiveness when situations are novel, adaptive, and complex. The conditions for learning have several characteristics related to the problem, context, and process of the task factors.

Problem Factors

The Problem Is Ill Structured. The definition of the problem itself as well as the solution to solve the problem is difficult to identify. This means that even if a resolution to the problem is reached, there will be little agreement as to the “correct” solution. Consider, for example, a feature film that costs millions to produce and achieves critical acclaim yet fails miserably at the box office. Little consensus exists as to the success of such an outcome.

The Problem Is Highly Complex. When learning demands emerge, the team will probably need to reconfigure knowledge in such a way as to make it useful. This reconfiguration requires synthesis or integration of existing disparate knowledge into a new whole or dissection of knowledge to find new essence or application. Examples include a research and development team that needs to identify a new approach to manufacturing an existing product.

Context Factors

Environmental Stability Is Low. When environmental stability is low, the team works under conditions in which external forces are constantly changing. An example is a military expedition faced with guerilla warfare, where both the nature of the attacks and the nature of the enemy are constantly changing.

Multiple Competing Goals Exist. Another condition consists of facing multiple and often conflicting goals. Such is the case in many foreign policy decisions, where the goal is to remain in good standing with allies while at the same time exerting pressure to make an unpopular decision.

Process

Ambiguous Stop Rules Exist. The rules or procedures to determine when to abandon a project or goal are not clear, as in the case of an expedition team with no knowledge of the surroundings to help them determine a turnaround time.

Work Processes Are Difficult to Maintain. This situation occurs when a team faces a problem that is constantly evolving, changing, and developing with new information or events, such as a television production team that is constantly trying to respond to the changing tastes of viewers.

Taken together, the above conditions for team learning require adaptation and demand new knowledge or reconfiguration of existing knowledge. Extant knowledge, team beliefs, and behaviors remain inadequate for effective task performance. Demands for problem solving are high. Under these conditions, knowledge demands are relatively high because teams require new knowledge for effective teamwork.

“Conditions for LearningVersus Performance” summarizes the conditions that support learning versus performance in teams. These distinctions provide the first step in building a knowledge-based approach to tasks.

Situation Approach

When teams can distinguish between performance and learning conditions, they can choose the behaviors necessary to take effective action. In “Model of LearningVersus Performance in Team Effectiveness,” task knowledge demands and solution complexity are classified as high or low. Learning and performance occupy distinct, opposing positions in the model. The model provides a useful way for teams to determine whether a performance or learning focus is appropriate based on task knowledge demands.

Teams are more effective when they engage in behaviors appropriate for the task. When task knowledge demands are high and the solution complexity is high, then conditions for learning exist. When task knowledge demands are low and the solution complexity is low, then conditions for performance exist. Surely, understanding the basis of teamwork requires a more detailed explanation than can be shown using a simple 2 x 2 matrix. However, depicting teamwork in this way provides a useful framework to understand the distinction between team learning and performance conditions. Indeed, learning and performance behaviors exist to some degree or another under all conditions, but the degree of focus can be determined more specifically through adherence to this model.

I suggest that team effectiveness begins when teams match the complexity of their solution with the “correct” interpretation of task knowledge demands. While the main focus of this article is the relationship between learning and performance as they are related to task effectiveness, the remaining two quadrants of the grid also deserve attention because they may limit effectiveness.

“Goalodicy.” I have developed the term “goalodicy” to describe how the normally useful process of goal setting can actually drive failure. Goalodicy describes the processes in which group members and leaders closely identify with a future as yet unachieved goal. The term is a conflation of the ancient Greek word for “justification” or “judgment” (dikee) with the Anglo-Saxon word “goal” (gal).

As shown in the figure, goalodicy seems more likely when the combination of high task knowledge demands and low solution complexity emerges. Such a situation might result in groupthink, where groups overindulge in consensus at the expense of critical thinking and complex decision making. In this situation, teams continue to engage in performance-related behaviors, despite a situation calling for complexity of thinking. Problems that might result from this condition include the sacrifice of long-term objectives for short-term successes, unforeseen consequences that undermine teamwork, and unethical behavior driven by single-mindedness inappropriate for the task.

Overcomplexity. Diagonally down and across the grid is a situation requiring low complexity that is met by a team response of high complexity. Examples are an organization that adopts complex legal procedures to regulate behavior between its members or a government program designed to improve transportation that requires decades to implement. Academics are fond of making complex solutions out of simple tasks as well. One problem with overcomplexity lies in people’s inability to integrate and differentiate knowledge appropriate for the task so that the problem becomes too complex to solve effectively.

Effective teamwork involves engaging the appropriate behaviors for the situation. Teamwork becomes ineffective when solution and task are out of sync. The situational approach takes the first step in developing the conceptual distinction between learning and performance based on task and solution complexity. The next section highlights some of the insights that might be gained from this idea and explores the future directions for study and implications for practice.

Key Insights

Let’s return to the theme of mountain climbing by looking at key insights centered on diverse learning competencies, psychological and emotional dynamics, the usefulness of goal setting, and the relationship between learning and performance in teams.

Learning Competencies. Team learning implies a variety of processes that may lead to team effectiveness. My observations suggest that mountain climbers must engage in a variety of learning activities, from problem solving to cooperative learning and adaptation to changing circumstances. For example, one team of climbers I studied found themselves trapped in a blinding storm with no compass; they were unable to identify the path home. The team tried several different strategies to learn their way out. They suggested various solutions (problem solving) and discussed potential solutions (cooperation). Finally, a short clearing in the clouds provided a view of the stars that allowed the leader to navigate back to camp (adaptation). When climbers talk about “years of training, months of preparation, and weeks of climbing,” they imply developing a variety of learning competencies.

Psychological and Emotional Factors. The growing interest in the cognitive aspects of team learning implies that learning aims to achieve rational outputs such as detecting and responding to errors, improving effectiveness, or achieving predefined goals. However, when mountain climbers talk about a summit that “draws you there,” of a goal that has a “magnetic” quality, they imply that emotions account for an important part of the effectiveness equation. One study I conducted revealed that climbers often fail to heed pre-established stop rules in the form of turnaround times. Over time, climbing teams establish turnaround times that estimate the last possible time to abandon a push for the summit and return down safely. Many times, however, climbers ignore the turnaround times. This explains, in part, what happened in the 1996 Mount Everest climbing disaster, in which eight climbers died, attracting worldwide attention. Lulled by the magnetic force of the summit, climbers allowed emotions to take over and continued to the top, despite the rational rules standing between life and death.

Usefulness of Goal Setting. The climbers also highlight the importance of goals. Managers and scholars alike readily recognize that effective teamwork involves presenting multifaceted solutions, requires complex thinking, and mandates the balance of multiple, if not conflicting, goals. When advocates of goal setting propose it as a way to help improve effectiveness, they ignore the unintended consequences that often result from setting and pursuing difficult goals.

Goals, whether they are learning or performance in nature, work best when tasks and desired outcomes are easily defined. Goals provide managers with an important tool to enhance performance when organizations face clear parameters such as changes in production, sales, or revenue but often prove disastrous when organizations need to learn, develop, or respond to crisis.

For teams to realize the benefits of goal setting, a number of additional considerations become essential. First, learning follows anything but a rational path. Second, learning requires a number of interrelated psychological processes, often involving hidden defenses, ego preservation mechanisms, and self-deception. Third, the goal-setting approach to learning fails to consider the distinction between learning and development. Learning describes an iterative process that results in development — a qualitative change in how people learn over time. The failure to distinguish between learning and development misses the distinction between the process and the outcome of task performance. Fourth, research shows that fundamental differences exist between which goals predict performance and which goals predict learning, seriously challenging the generalizations made about the benefits of goals in improving team effectiveness. Goals may improve task performance, but the impact of goals on task learning remains unclear. Fifth, research reveals that learning requires an organizational culture that supports psychological safety among members of the organization. A culture lacking in such psychological safety may not support team learning, even when conditions demand it. In short, the relationship between learning and performance in goal setting deserves further attention, and the setting of something called “learning goals” should be approached with caution.

Relationship Between Learning and Performance. Effective teamwork emerges from the ability to respond to changing situations. Learning and performance occupy a distinct but interrelated territory of the task demand equation. The best mountain climbers, for example, demonstrate the ability to understand contingency and shifting of circumstances. These climbers understand that when they take certain actions, “on a good day you can get away with it. And on a bad day, you’ll die.” This ability to understand contingency may explain why it took American Ed Veisturs 16 years to achieve his goal of summiting the world’s highest peaks. The 16 years of effort hint at the need for both learning and performance-directed behaviors in many circumstances.

Most tasks faced by teams involve both learning and performance outcomes. Some aspects of a task are familiar, while others are novel. Effective teamwork requires balancing the unique demands of learning and performance. Some of the team processes that support both learning and performance include interpersonal understanding and proactivity in problem solving.

• Interpersonal understanding is team members’ awareness of other members as well as of themselves. On teams that share a high degree of interpersonal understanding, individuals possess an accurate understanding of the preferences, moods, and emotional states of other team members. Unlike other shared beliefs, such as team cohesion, interpersonal understanding does not necessarily create positive feeling toward other group members. A strong sense of interpersonal understanding in teams seems to lead to learning because it allows members to gauge and, therefore, respond to or compensate for others at any given moment. Interpersonal understanding makes tacit knowledge more explicit by surfacing hidden aspects of knowledge that may not be readily visible.Interpersonal understanding can be built in a team by setting aside time during each meeting for members to “check in” with each other. During the check-in session, team members briefly talk about their current state, including demands and recent challenges faced outside the team environment.
• Proactivity in problem solving involves anticipating and working to head off potential problems before they occur. It can be thought of as a form of learning in which teams develop strategies that allow them to adapt to changes in the nature of the task and the environment as they arise. This is an essential skill for learning since it allows teams to acquire new knowledge about the task as it develops.

Two Distinct Approaches to Teamwork

Learning and performance describe two distinct approaches to teamwork, each of which leads to team effectiveness under different circumstances. Like mountain climbers who recognize the difference between following an existing route and blazing a new one, successful teams are those that distinguish and respond to tasks that require learning versus those that require performance.

D. Christopher Kayes (Ph. D. Case Western Reserve University) is Dean’s Research Scholar and Associate Professor of Management at George Washington University. He has won awards for his unique approach to learning, including best paper awards and nominations from the Academy of Management Learning and Education, Human Relations, and the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society. He was awarded the first “most significant contribution to the practice of management” award by the Organizational Behavior division of the Academy of Management. Chris is author of “Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mt. Everest Disaster” and more than 40 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. You can contact him at dckayes@gwu.edu.

The post Performance Versus Learning in Teams: A Situation Approach appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The challenges of rapidly changing environments raise the concern: Can people’s ability to acquire new knowledge in the workplace on an ongoing basis keep up with the continuous introduction of new change initiatives/new programs/new opportunities? Organizations’ preoccupation with acquiring the latest information or knowledge rarely takes into account the processes required to reassess and release already acquired beliefs and previous learning. As result, the challenge that many organizations face when managing change programs and organizational transformation is to learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Unlearning should not be viewed as an end in itself, but as a means to ensure learning excellence, innovation, and ultimately change.

As a trainer, I have always dealt head-on with conflict, disagreement, resistance to new ideas, differences of opinion, common fears, anxieties, and feelings of incompetence in any class I have taught. A workshop with those elements is the rule not the exception and — more important — confronting the dimensions of unlearning and relearning results in more effective learning experiences that strengthen the possibilities of real organizational renewal and change. Unlearning should not be viewed as an end in itself, but as a means to ensure learning excellence, innovation, and ultimately change. I have come to believe that, to effectively train adults in the workplace, trainers must intentionally and deliberately attend to the process of unlearning and then relearning.

I have guided groups through learning and change in conditions of high uncertainty, little management support, and scarce budgets. Whether training on a new company policy, improving teamwork skills, or working on organizational transformation, I have faced unlearning decisively, with the idea that it must be confronted before the class, in the class, and after the class. In this article, I would like to share the strategies and suggestions that have proven helpful for me in supporting individual and team unlearning in the classroom.

In this article, I talk about:

1. Unlearning and learning theories with a quick overview of the literature on the subject
2. Three behaviors that facilitate the inner work of unlearning
3. Four roles for facilitating unlearning as a team process
4. Six strategies for facilitators to handle the unlearning process effectively
5. Three strategies for handling the unlearning process before and three for handling it after the class

Removing the Debris

• Three hours have passed. I am in the middle of a workshop on “Facilitation Skills for Project Managers.” A man raises his hand and says, “The answers you gave are possibly correct for HR types. But you need to state and clarify to the class that, if you are not an HR type, then this is not necessarily the correct thing to do.”
• In a new system implementation class, a trainee asks a stream of questions in an increasingly confrontational tone. I give an answer and then another and then another . . . at one point, with frustration, she stands up and storms out of the room, screaming, “I am not going to take this anymore!”
• “No, thanks,” says one trainee in a workshop about effective teamwork as we talk about a way to increase effective listening., “I do not think I will use this. I understand it, but I do not believe this skill will make a difference in my teamwork.”

If these scenarios are familiar, then you have probably experienced firsthand how removing the “debris of previous construction” to rebuild the foundation for new understanding creates disorder and disorientation for the trainer as well as for the learner. While I have learned through the years not to take these reactions personally, at the beginning of my career, I often wondered how to deal ethically and effectively with people fighting the content I was teaching.

In this task, I received little help from professional training books. They call this behavior “dysfunctional” and recommend dealing with it through a mix of tact and assertiveness, with the goal of maintaining control of the class and minimizing disruptions. In fact, dismissing or labeling those behaviors did not really provide an answer to my questions:

• What are the most effective ways by which I can help the people in my class deal with letting go of old knowledge, assumptions, and ideas?
• Why do adults refuse to learn? Should adult educators protect the learner’s right to refuse to learn the content taught? If so, how?
• How can a learning facilitator be an effective facilitator of unlearning? How do we manage the process most effectively in our team learning experiences?
• How do we design instruction for adults that is unlearning/relearning friendly? How do we design/plan for unlearning/relearning?
• What role do conflict management skills and creativity play in the process? What best practices can trainers follow to handle the chaos or disruption that all this entails?

I sensed that something essential to the learning process and to the new organization whose birth we are trying to facilitate might hide in the answers to these questions.

Learning Theories on Unlearning

“I find that another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.”

—Carl Rogers

“Unlearning” is not the failure to learn (often treated with remediation, additional training, improved instructional activities, or sanctions) or willful non-learning — the deliberate refusal to learn and to unlearn for personal reasons. So what is unlearning?

Despite a lack of empirical studies, the concept of unlearning has an important place in the learning theories of Kurt Lewin, David Kolb, Jack Mezirow, Chris Argyris, and others (see “Overview of Theories on Unlearning”). While it doesn’t use the term unlearning, Lewin’s three-stage model (the unfreeze-change-refreeze model) centers on the identification and rejection of prior learning in order to replace it. Kolb defines experiential learning as “a process whereby knowledge is created through transformation of experience” and as “A solitary act that happens in relationship with others . . . making the strange familiar” (like reflecting on unexpected events) as well as “making the familiar strange” (like reflecting on our everyday practices).

The ability to analyze what we consider “familiar” — our current way of doing things, assumptions, and mindsets—in order to experience it as “strange” is critical to the concept of unlearning. This perspective is at the heart of Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theories as well as Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s double-loop learning. Mezirow touched on the issue of unlearning by identifying stages of the learning process in which learners “become critically aware of their own tacit assumptions and expectations and those of others and assess their relevance for making an interpretation.” He defines emancipatory education as “an organized effort to help the learner challenge presuppositions, explore alternative perspectives, transform old ways of understanding, and act on new perspectives.” According to Mezirow, the core of transformative thinking is the uncovering of distorted assumptions. As a result, supporting unlearning is seen as engaging and questioning assumptions in the class; the job of the educator is to make those assumptions explicit, examine them, and let the learner decide whether the assumptions should be rejected or confirmed.

Argyris and Schön’s double-loop learning, a process that involves questioning the assumptions and processes that underlie errors, is centered on the idea of unlearning as making the familiar strange. In this context, learning (and unlearning) is born out of the process of uncovering the hidden incongruence between what we think we do and what we actually do. Because this process can feel threatening, to paraphrase William Noonan, the work of learning needs to overcome defensive routines that individuals in organizations use to remove conditions of embarrassment and threat. Being emotionally triggered by certain situations prevents us from learning from them. Moreover, we have become so skilled at our competence to deal with these situations that we cannot even recognize — let alone change — those behaviors. The core of double-loop learning is the uncovering of distorted mental models through a commitment to self-reflection and willingness to engage differences.

Overview of Theories on Unlearning

For the purpose of this article, I use the term unlearning to describe:

1. An individual process of personal transformation executed with the intention to change ideas, attitudes, or skills though personal emotional/ cognitive work as well as a dose of courage.

2. A group process through which individuals in learning teams build new knowledge by releasing or transforming prior learning, assumptions, and mental frameworks in order to accommodate new information or values.

Pragmatically, as facilitators of learning, we ask the following key question: In our sessions of workplace team learning—before the class, in the class, and after the class — how do we jumpstart the unlearning process and help our learners question their assumptions?

Three Behaviors That Facilitate the Inner Work of Unlearning

“If we wish to blossom, we should remember that a seed will only germinate if it ceases to be a seed.”

— The Mithya Institute for Learning and Knowledge Architecture website

How do individuals within an organization decide to embark on the journey of creating a new life or new results? Brian Hinken identifies two kinds of “awakeners” that can lead someone to “snap out of the non-learner posture” and take the first step on what he calls “the Learner’s Path”:

1. A desire to create a new life or new results (an inside-out awakener, as it originates in the internal processes of the individual)

2. Feedback that contradicts someone’s belief about the results they thought they were getting (an outside-in awakener, as it can come in the form of new data or new events)

The path to unlearning is marred by anxiety, solitude, embarrassment, and anger: upheaval within us as well as in our relationship with our world. The road to replacing assumptions, concepts, and values is uncomfortable. What does this imply for us as facilitators of learning? How can we support the unfolding of this inner process in our learners?

Rather than labeling people’s behaviors “dysfunctional,” we can do three things to help:

• • Regards: We Must Accept Where Our Learners Are Coming From. All trainees come to a session with a rich repertoire of experiences. I find it easier to handle that baggage if I believe that everyone is always right—not moral, not legal, not correct, but always right in their circumstances of doing what they do and having the ideas they have. During the needs analysis phase of any workshop, I try to surface those difficult feelings and get ready to listen with interest.

It is tough to discover, explore, and develop ourselves if all we worry about is safety.

• Awareness: We Must Acknowledge That It Is Our Job to Deal with the Upheavals of Unlearning, and We Have to Do It Openly. Facing the process of unlearning is key. In A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, Edwin Friedman denounces the “avoidance of the struggle that goes into growth, and unwillingness to accept short-term acute pain that one must experience in order to reduce chronic anxiety.” Friedman claims that, as renaissance explorers ready to move into the unknown, we should foster a sense of adventure in our learners to prevent their “missing out on challenging opportunities to grow.” Indeed, it is tough to discover, explore, and develop ourselves if all we worry about is safety. We confront this challenge not by being in denial about it, but by seeing it as part of our job and by stressing to learners the importance of venturing out of our comfort zone.
• Compassion: We Must Bring Our Own Compassion or More to This Task. Herbert Kohl talks about his experience of helping William, an elementary school student termed an “underachiever.” He describes his first task as “helping him unlearn his sense of failure . . . cultivating his ability to resolve this sense of inferiority in a coherent and productive way.” He summarizes his most important message to William as: “I won’t let them make me stupid.” By demonstrating an understanding of the difficulties involved in unlearning, educators can nurture an inner dimension of compassion and solidarity in their students.

The Four Roles That Facilitate Team Unlearning

“I find that one of the best, but most difficult, ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to the other person.”

—Carl Rogers

“Uncertainty creates the freedom to discover meaning”

—Ellen Langer

How do people in a team learning experience decide as a group to identify what they have learned and if/how they want to change it? How can a facilitator of learning lead that process? I once worked with a trainer who would bring candy to class. I have always deemed such strategies ineffective for increasing motivation, as if it can be accomplished through seduction and ultimately manipulation. Instead, for unlearning, trainers need to radically rethink their role in the class and manage it according to four different dimensions:

• Host: As a host, the trainer creates a safe place for all parties where empowerment starts with comfort and freedom of expression. This role sets the stage for the unlearning process to take place. Allow plenty of time for complaining, disputing, and fighting the new content (all signs that the trainees are taking it seriously), and make it safe for the trainees to disagree with you and with the subject matter. I try to let confrontation unfold and never take disagreement personally. Instead, I view these as signs of unlearning.
• Co-Learner: As a co-learner, the trainer joins the inquiry process as one voice among many others, questioning assumptions and seeking to understand. This role stimulates an environment where assumptions — all assumptions — are worth examining and where non-defensive communication is the rule.
• Provocateur or Devil’s Advocate (also known as *#+!@ agitator): The trainer needs to challenge openly and vigorously, present new ideas, insinuate complexity, dispell comfort, and sow doubts. This role creates the premise for real creative controversy, for challenging assumptions, and for modeling the ability to deal with the ambiguity of real life.
• Supporter/Resource: In this role, the trainer assists the revision of old or inadequate concepts in an effort to facilitate the process in its entirety. This role sets the stage for a safe experience and a new beginning.

The literature often covers these roles; however, I tend to focus on the role of the trainer as provocateur, using the theory of Jack Mezirow to analyze what that role entails. The work for the facilitator here is not to manage a simple problem-solving exercise, but rather a less tidy and more involving process of self-discovery and meaningful self-revelation. In fact, people might not necessarily be aware of their assumptions, and it might be hard to make them explicit. From there, they still might not want to give them up due to their associated sense of security.

In order to deal with this challenge, Mezirow talks about a stage in the learning process of “disorienting dilemma,” a moment of confusion that jump-starts the work of critical self-reflection for transformative learning. Why does disorientation help people unlearn? Because it is in this apparent confusion that new meanings and new beginnings find their place. So, in the role of the provocateur, we must confuse our learners for their own sake. However, to be effective as provocateurs, we need to have answered “yes” to three questions (see “Three Questions” below).

Here are six strategies I have used successfully in my own workshops to facilitate team unlearning:

1. State Ground Rules That Deal Openly with Unlearning. I set the following ground rules:
   • Confusion is O. K.: letting go of the old brings new beginnings
   • Cleverness is not O. K.: instead, seek what is truly meaningful to each of us
2. Analyze the Current Mindset of the Learner in the Class. In a facilitation class, we asked participants to describe what a superb facilitator would do in a given situation. This process creates a picture of exemplary performance (e.g., “She would never let conflict derail the meeting”) that reveals hidden assumptions (e.g., “Conflict is bad for meetings”) that the trainer can openly challenge.,/li>
3. Create Disorienting Dilemmas for the Learners in the Format of Case Studies to Discuss. In a training session on a new policy for a government agency, we wrote a fictional case of an architectural firm that was struggling with the same compliance issues the training was supposed to address. Two key managers described in the case — each impersonating one of the prevalent opinions about the work ahead — had come into conflict over how to deal with the issue of compliance. The dilemma was discussed in the class.
4. Use “Creative Controversy” Tasks in Which Different Groups Support a Particular Position and Argue its Merit. In order to be most effective, this process needs to allow disagreement and confusion to unfold: The trainer must resist the temptation to come to the rescue with the right answer, letting the learners confront the reality that there is not a single perspective, but rather competing and discriminatory processes of establishing a truth valuation.
5. Manage the Power of Feedback, Given in a Non-Threatening Way by a Fellow Learner (Not by the Facilitator), as a way to candidly reflect the learner’s action back to him or her. You might want to establish the rule of “no feedback on feedback”; recipients should respond with a ritual “Thank you.”
6. Tap into Your Creativity to Surface Unexpressed Emotions. In a class, I once used the “wall of shame”: I left the room and asked this group of learners — who would clearly rather be in a dentist’s chair than in the class — to write anonymous messages on a poster that looked like a wall, stating openly (within the limits of decency) why they would rather leave than stay in the session. In another exercise with a different group, I asked that they write down their past bad experiences with the content I was teaching — their “baggage.” All their messages were read aloud, collected, locked in a tiny box, and dropped in the garbage. At the end of the class, I asked people to write the message “Goodbye . . . Welcome . . . ,” naming what they had jettisoned and what they actually gained from the class.

THREE QUESTIONS

Before and After the Unlearning Class

A trainer who deals openly with unlearning needs to address it as a process not only in the class but especially before and after it. In his classic study on the transfer of learning, John Newstrom defines the three dimensions of before, during, and after the class and maps them with the three roles of supervisors, trainers, and learners. He identifies nine possible ways for successful learned behavior to be used in the workplace. Newstrom’s findings emphasize the role of supervisors; the degree and quality of work with trainee’s supervisors before a session is the top predictor of use of the skill in the workplace.

I recommend the following activities before the class to ensure successful unlearning:

1. Prepare the Client for the Rollercoaster of Unlearning. Unlearning is counterintuitive; therefore, it is important to clarify your assumptions with your stakeholders. Explain to them in advance that behaviors that are commonly termed as unprofessional (like anger and blaming) actually prove the effectiveness of the strategy.
2. Define Unlearning/Emergence Objectives. As is the case with learning, unlearning can have unpredictable results. The following three metaphors (“sunglasses”, “contact lenses,” and “eye surgery”) can exemplify the possible outcome of many unlearning/relearning efforts (see “Unlearning Outcomes”). Define the objective of your class in advance. Keep in mind that, while unlearning/relearning is the fuel of healthy organizational culture, it is not required for every workshop, for every client, and to the same extent in every case!
3. Add Time to the Agenda (based on your objectives) to allow conversations to emerge that deal with the unlearning process. I normally schedule an hour for unplanned activities that might be necessary to support unlearning.

The creation of support mechanisms (formal and informal) that identify and manage the emotional and cognitive work of unlearning after the class is also an important factor in successful unlearning — and represents a great problem for limited training engagements. While many desire the benefits of unlearning, only a few understand that it cannot happen without an expense of time and effort. The following is a list of low-cost activities that can be used to engage a community of non-learners after a class:

1. Create an Online Community. This work ensures that your learners continue to use each other and you to bring about the change that unlearning empowers.
2. Ask the Supervisors to Meet with the Learners After the Class. In this meeting, learners engage with their direct supervisors in a conversation about how to bring about the changes that unlearning entails.
3. Create Informal Events (Happy Hours, etc.). These activities allow for the camaraderie and fellowship of the learning community to continue to support its unlearning effort.

An Openness to Experience

“Wisdom comes along through suffering’’ says the poet, and the philosopher reminds us that “The truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience.” The openness to experience in general, to new things, to new ideas is addictive. As facilitators of learning, we need to cultivate that openness in ourselves and in our learners.

UNLEARNING OUTCOMES

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

For Further Reading

Becker, Karen Louise. Unlearning in the Workplace: A Mixed Methods Study, Queensland University of Technology Thesis, 2007

Broad, Mary L., and John W. Newstrom. Transfer of Training: Action-Packed Strategies to Ensure High Payoff from Training Investments (Addison-Wesley, 1992)

Cranton, Patricia. Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide for Educators of Adults (Jossey-Bass, 2006)

Delahaye, Brian, and Karen Becker., “Unlearning: A Revised View of Contemporary Learning Theories?” in Proceedings from Lifelong Learning Conference, 2006

Duffy, Francis M., “I Think, Therefore I Am Resistant to Change,” Journal of Staff Development, Vol. 24 No. 1, Winter 2003

Kohl, Herbert. “I Won’t Learn from You” and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment (New Press, 1995)

Macdonald, Geraldine., “Transformative Unlearning: Safety, Discernment and Communities of Learning,” Nursing Inquiry, Vol. 9 No. 3, 2002

Mezirow, Jack, and Associates. Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning (JosseyBass, 1990)

Soto-Crespo, Ramon E., “The Bounds of Hope: Unlearning ‘Old Eyes’ and a Pedagogy of Renewal” in Thresholds in Education (May and August, 1999)

The post Journey to Chaos and Back: Unlearning in Workplace Training Programs appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Each of the four conversations has a different purpose, and produces a different kind of result or impact on the listener. Used at the right times, and in the right combinations or patterns, these conversations can speed things up, add accountability, and reduce misunderstandings.

• Initiative Conversations share new ideas, goals, visions, and futures with people who can participate in implementing and making them real
• Understanding Conversations build awareness and knowledge of a new or existing idea in a way that helps people see how to participate in using or accomplishing it
• Performance Conversations are requests and promises that generate specific actions, results, and agreements, and pave the way for accountability
• Closure Conversations support experiences of accomplishment, satisfaction, and value; strengthen accountability; and give people an honest look at the successes and failures encountered on the way to reaching a goal

  TEAM TIP

  Use the “four conversations” framework to engage in the right conversation at the right time.

  Most of us want to be better at initiating things, getting people to understand our message, promoting effective action, and completing things. Now you can develop mastery in using the four conversations to produce results. Start by learning which conversations you are using, whether you are using the best one(s) for your purposes, and how to include all the components that will engage others in the ways you want.

Missing Conversations

Used at the right times, and in the right combinations or patterns, these conversations can speed things up, add accountability, and reduce misunderstandings.

The four types of conversations get things done, and build more productive and respectful relationships, but not everybody uses them in the same way. Most people are very successful with some types of conversation and less adept with others. Many people do not use all four types of conversation, either because they do not know there are other types of conversation that they could use, or because they choose not to use them. Our “missing conversations” can compromise the quality, timeliness, or participation in whatever we are doing, and sometimes even reduce our credibility and relatedness with staff and coworkers.

Jason is a mid-level manager accountable for two different installation projects in a communications company. Project A was progressing well, but Project B was three weeks behind schedule and regularly missing deadlines. Since the same people were involved in both projects, Jason’s explanation for the problem was that his team members were not working well together on the two installations, and he needed more budget resources. “People problems and money problems,” he said. “Those are always the culprits.”

To test his assumptions, Jason kept a project journal for one week, making detailed notes of what was said in his conversations with people about both projects. He also reviewed his emails and meeting summaries to take note of his conversational patterns. He expected to see a lot of talk about personnel and resource issues, but after reviewing his conversational records, he came to a different conclusion about the problems of Project B.

“The difference in my communications in the two projects was surprising,” he explained. “In Installation Project A, I asked for new ideas from my team members, explored ideas with everyone, and then we all made agreements about what we would do before our next meeting. In every weekly project meeting, we reviewed what had happened since our last meeting, did post-mortems on things that didn’t go as expected, and then decided what we should do next. But, in Project B, I didn’t do all that. The reason is that I have done the B-type installation before. I know how it should go, so I just explained to everybody what needed to be done instead of asking for their ideas and input. I gave people their assignments, and expected them to do their work. I was confident that these are capable people, so I didn’t follow up with them.”

Jason’s review of Project B conversations showed he was missing Initiative Conversations (soliciting new ideas), Understanding Conversations (making sure people had a chance to interact about what needed to be done), and Closure Conversations (following up with his team on what was and was not accomplished). He decided to change his conversational pattern by talking with his Project B team about how to make the installation more successful and instituting a weekly follow-up meeting where team members could acknowledge work that was completed, what they had learned, and what remained to be done.

The first result he noticed was improved creativity and collaboration among the team members. The next was that productivity picked up. Five weeks later, Jason reported that his new conversational pattern had gotten Project B back on schedule.

Initiative Conversations. Some people do not set goals for themselves or their group, or, if they do, believe there is no need to communicate them to others. One executive explained, “People should know their jobs, and their jobs don’t change just because I am setting a new goal for our division. If people need to alter their responsibilities, I will talk with them about it. I don’t want to give a big speech, or publicly commit my whole division to a particular vision.”

This particular executive was in a rapidly changing organization that was struggling to respond to major shifts in its own product technology and its industry’s economic position. It was understandable that he did not want to “commit his whole division” to one goal, preferring to keep people focused on the familiar. At the same time, he was disappointed in his people’s ability to be more creative in solving problems, and to collaborate across functional groups for creating what he called “new efficiencies.”

Some people do not set goals for themselves or their group, or, if they do, believe there is no need to communicate them to others.

This executive did not connect his lack of Initiative Conversations with the lack of creative thinking and teamwork. When he finally agreed to try them, he held an all-staff meeting and told everyone his top two strategies for surviving the organization’s current risk position. Then he told them that he wanted all employees to stay focused on their jobs while also looking for opportunities to “find new solutions to old problems.”

Several of the meeting participants mentioned later that they were glad to have a “bigger conversation” than just the day-to-day routine. The executive was pleased to see a new spirit. “It’s like everybody’s sense of humor came back,” he said. “It looks like Initiative Conversations create a little more confidence in the future, and that’s what we needed here now.”

Understanding Conversations. Some people do not invite input and discussion after they unveil a new idea, goal, or plan. “Why do we need to explain the details?” one manager asked. “Everybody knows the goals here since they are posted on our intranet. People should take their assignments and do them, without having everyone waste time in a meeting to figure out what they’re supposed to do.” This manager was strong in setting goals (Initiative Conversations) and in giving people feedback on progress (Closure Conversations). But once the goals were set, he preferred to give his staff their individual work assignments, and he saw no point in holding a group conversation to hear employee questions or comments.

When this manager saw that having an Understanding Conversation might give his employees a chance to hear and learn from each other in new ways, he agreed to have several group meetings to discuss department goals. In each discussion, he focused on the current process they were using to develop customer proposals. He was pleased to discover his people had many ideas to improve both teamwork and their communication between teams.

“I thought I was going to be put on the spot to defend things,” he said after the second meeting. “But instead, the employees started talking to each other, and we listed problems and solutions on the board. Everybody jumped in to answer the questions. I should have done this long ago!”

Performance Conversations. This type of conversation is most often one of the weakest in communications. “I shouldn’t have to ask people to do specific things,” one director said, explaining why she didn’t use them. “My people are very experienced and know what is expected without being asked.” She was opposed to the specific requests-and-promises requirement of Performance Conversations, fearing it would “disempower” people and make the workplace seem “cold.” Still, she also wanted people to have more respect for deadlines and budgets, and wanted her teams to be more effective in working together to assemble new editions of their organization’s monthly publications. “Can’t we work like a well-oiled machine without keeping track of every little thing?” she wondered.

This director called a meeting of all her team leaders to identify what she called the “top ten internal agreements we need to keep with each other.” This started as an Understanding Conversation and led into the requests and promises of Performance Conversations. Her goal was to discover where her staff members thought they needed to spell out deadlines, communicate expenditures, and establish agreements between teams, and then have people commit to those agreements.

“We have five main teams in this organization,” she told the group. “We want to work together in a way that nobody is ever waiting for something from another team. Let’s get ahead of the curve and really help each other be productive.” The group created a list of fourteen items they said they needed to communicate more clearly. They called it their “Ask and Promise” list, and posted it by the conference room door as a reminder to make those specific requests and promises whenever they were needed.

“Just agreeing to ask for and promise specific times for people to deliver their magazine copy was a breakthrough,” said one team leader. “We have been trying to avoid being too business-like here, but sometimes it causes delays and bad feelings. I’m glad we have an ‘Ask and Promise’ board, and we can add to it whenever we want. We’ve been focused on being nice instead of being productive. The surprise is that we are nicer when we’re more in sync with each other.”

Closure Conversations. These conversations are frequently among the missing because, as one chief operating officer (COO) put it, “They’ve already been through a difficult challenge to finish the project. Why make everybody go back through it again?” This COO had introduced a new system for communicating customer business information between his sales people and his technical service staff. If used properly, his internal document management system would help the sales reps inform the “techs,” who could then provide the right services to the customers, and prevent failures in meeting customer expectations.

The problem was that only some of the sales reps were reliably using the system, and most of the techs were reluctant to report the problem. “We don’t want to point fingers,” said one tech. So the customer business information was not always reliable, and some customers did not receive what they expected.

In the face of internal disagreements, a Closure Conversation can clear the air. The COO called his three sales managers and two technical team leaders into a meeting. “We need to look at where we are with using our document management system,” he said. “Here are the facts.” He listed the customer accounts that had a “gap in expectations” created by sales reps who were not putting complete information into the system. He said, “You are all bright and talented people. You know how to use a document management system and how to capture information. What is the problem here?” He discovered a few issues that kept people from doing things properly. One sales rep had delegated the data entry job to someone who was savvier with computers than he was, and that person disregarded the instructions for using the system.

Another entire sales team held an inaccurate belief about which data fields were their responsibility to fill in, believing the office administrator should complete some fields. Finally, almost all sales reps disliked the new system, saying, “We never had any input in the way this document management system was designed, and the format for the technical data doesn’t fit the way we have been trained to sell our customer accounts.”

The COO agreed with this last statement, saying, “Given how much we’ve spent on sales training, I can’t believe I didn’t have one of those Understanding Conversations to get the sales team involved in the process of designing the data entry form for the system. No wonder the team wasn’t using it. We’re going to go back and get the team members engaged, and then have a sales meeting to review the form. We will make whatever changes in the document management system that they can give me a good reason for making.”

This COO has a new awareness of Closure Conversations. He says, “We will debrief at the end of every project. We’re going to have a monthly status review of progress toward goals. And we’re going to have regular team evaluations. I can’t believe we went eight months trying to get something to work when we could have solved it much sooner with a few Closure Conversations. It was an expensive lesson, but I’ve learned it well.”

As long as we are in situations where the types of conversation we know best are effective, everything is fine, and we get what we want. But when our interactions are not successful, or do not produce the results we want, we may attribute the problem to something about “them” (the other person or group) or “it” (a specific situation or environment). The alternative is to learn to apply other types of conversation in some of those “stuck” or difficult situations.

Difficult Conversations

A difficult conversation is anything you find hard to talk about. Examples of potentially difficult conversations include asking your boss for a raise, firing an employee, giving someone a performance review, publicly asking critical questions about a popular issue, giving a friend bad news, or calling someone to account for poor work. They can be unsettling because we do not know how we, or the other person, will respond, and we may be afraid of where the conversation could go. As a result, we may be unsure of ourselves and put off the conversations or not have them at all.

Tori was apprehensive about talking with one of her employees because her past conversations with him had not produced any improvement in his performance, and she was facing a performance review deadline.

“What am I going to say to him that I haven’t already said?” she asked. “He’s on probation, and if he doesn’t improve I will have to fire him, which I really don’t want to do if I can avoid it. I am at a loss about what to say, and I am not looking forward to talking with him.”

After learning about the four types of conversation, Tori realized she had only used Understanding Conversations with this employee. She had repeatedly explained the need for him to improve the quality of his work, but had never reviewed with him the regional goals (Initiative Conversation). She also had not made specific requests and agreements for outcomes (Performance Conversations), or met with him to review his specific work practices and results and acknowledge him for what he did accomplish (Closure Conversations).

Tori decided to try a combination of Understanding and Closure Conversations. “I told him that I was sorry I hadn’t made my conditions clear to him,” she said. “I apologized for the uncertainty we both had had for the past two months (Closure Conversation). Then I itemized the three attributes of his work that I was going to measure from now on and we talked about them (Understanding Conversation).

He promised that he would change his work practices and focus on making a measurable impact on those measures (Performance Conversation). We agreed that we would review his performance on the measures every Friday and every Monday, just to gain some momentum (Closure Conversations). His performance began improving in the second week.”

Some conversations are difficult because we do not know which type of conversation to have, or even that there are different types of conversation. This is what happened in Tori’s case. Other conversations are difficult because we do not know all the elements of whichever type of conversation is critical for success.

Incomplete Conversations: The Conversational Elements

One way to make sure each type of conversation is used completely is to borrow a tip from journalism: ask the questions Who, What, When, Where, Why and How to get as much information as possible. The trick is to use these questions in a way that supports each of the four conversations.

For each type of conversation, the questions What-When-Why go together, because they all focus on whatever it is that you want to accomplish or make happen:

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• When do we want to accomplish it?
• Why is this accomplishment important?

The other three questions Who-Where-How go together, because they all relate to the resources and methods involved to make it happen:

• Who is involved?
• Where will the resources come from?
• How will it get done?

If some of these vital pieces of information are left out, the conversation is incomplete and even potentially productive conversations can slow people down or fail to engage them. Consider four managers who left out key elements from each type of conversation.

1. One manager had a quarterly meeting to announce the division’s goals, but he did not connect them to the larger corporate goals or explain why the non-financial goals were as important as the financial ones. This is an Initiative Conversation without the Why element. This manager believed his employees’ poor communication with other corporate offices was due to their lack of ability to link their work to the bigger picture, but he had not helped them make that connection.
2. Another manager explained a new procedure for submitting weekly status reports, but did not work with the staff to clarify the specifics about which communication channels and system authorizations were required. She had an Understanding Conversation without the What element. Those few staff members who knew about an available intranet reporting system did not have an opportunity to clarify the process for everyone else. When many employees failed to implement the procedure fully, this manager blamed them for not paying attention and resisting change, but if she had talked with them about her goals for the reporting process, they could have avoided the problem.
3. A supervisor asked an employee to undertake a project without stating the desired milestones or the final deadline. He had a Performance Conversation without the When element. The employee left the conversation uncertain about the timeline and, as a result, failed to accomplish the project to meet the supervisor’s expectations. The supervisor blamed the failure on the employee’s incompetence and lack of commitment, but the fault was in the incomplete Performance Conversation.
4. An executive delegated a large responsibility to a senior staff person. He complimented the staff person on her ability to keep things organized and praised her as being the perfect person to do the job, but he dismissed her genuine resistance to accepting the new responsibility. The executive had a Closure Conversation without the What element, so he missed the opportunity to hear about problems from the past that were still influencing his senior staffer’s perceptions of the new responsibility. When she was timid and hesitant in fulfilling the new role, he believed she was not bringing all her skills to bear. Instead, he could have noticed he had an incomplete Closure Conversation with her before he launched her on a new assignment.

One way to make sure each type of conversation is used completely is to borrow a tip from journalism: ask the questions Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How to get as much information as possible.

Michelle, a senior manager in Human Resources, is responsible for implementing a variety of programs in her organization, including the Training Project, which will eventually affect most of her organization’s employees. Michelle reported that the Training Project was “not progressing well” despite the fact that she was, in her words, “talking about it all the time.” Her team was missing deadlines and members’ results were generally poor.

To determine why things were moving so slowly, Michelle reviewed her emails, memos, and meeting notes for the Training Project. Her review of past conversations confirmed that she was talking about the project often, and with the right people. It also suggested that the project launch had gone well, and that everyone understood the importance and intent of the Training Project, so she was confident that her Initiative and Understanding Conversations were not the problem.

“The Performance Conversations seemed okay too,” Michelle said, “because I made lots of requests. But then I noticed that I made most of those requests without mentioning the time by when things should be done. No deadlines! I might as well have been wishing instead of communicating! Second, I made very few promises, and I did not ask other people to make promises either. Third, I saw a pattern in the way I made requests: I continued to ask for the same things in the same way, without ever nudging people out of their comfort zones to do anything outstanding, beyond the ordinary. Finally, I saw that I was good at thanking people when they did things for me, but I was not following up with people who promised results but failed to deliver. I had no way to hold anyone accountable for what was not getting done. Bottom line: I never would have believed I was so sloppy in my communication with my staff.”

Michelle used Performance Conversations, but without including When she wanted actions and results, and without getting “good” promises. She realized she was never quite sure if people knew exactly what they were promising. She used Closure Conversations for appreciation, but she did not use them to follow through with people on What parts of their agreements were finished or to clarify what was still incomplete. This meant she had no system to help people be accountable for their work or their promises.

By not using the four conversations completely, Michelle was unknowingly contributing to the failure of her team. Some of her conversations were actually slowing things down. When she began asking people to specify what they were going to do, adding timelines to her requests and promises, and following up on the status of requests and promises, the project’s momentum picked up.

“We started having short weekly ‘debrief ’ meetings,” Michelle said. “We reviewed what we had done and what was still on the list. We began seeing the victories instead of only the problems. Our meetings became little celebrations. People took on new tasks more happily than they did before. Within three weeks we were unstuck and back to making good progress on the Training Project.”

Conversations: Your Personal Advantage

As you learn and practice using Initiative, Understanding, Performance, and Closure Conversations, you will see new ways to address these limitations and enhance communication, productivity, and relationships in your workplace. Changing your conversational pattern is not difficult. It does not require extensive training or a change in your personality or values. All it takes is a willingness to examine your current conversational patterns, identify the types of conversations and conversational elements you are missing, and practice using them. This will expand and strengthen your conversational tool kit to support your success in a wide variety of situations.

Jeffrey Ford is associate professor of management in the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

Laurie Ford is a consultant to managers and executives in business, government agencies, and associations on organization redesign and change implementation.

This article is condensed with permission from chapter 1 of The Four Conversations: Daily CommunicationThat Gets Results (Berrett-Koehler, 2009).

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Indeed, over the last 25 years, such a new understanding of life has emerged at the forefront of science. I want to illustrate this new understanding by asking the age-old question, what is life? What’s the difference between a rock and a plant, animal, or microorganism? To understand the nature of life, it is not enough to understand DNA, proteins, and the other molecular structures that are the building blocks of living organisms, because these structures also exist in dead organisms, for example, in a dead piece of wood or bone.

The difference between a living organism and a dead organism lies in the basic process of life—in what sages and poets throughout the ages have called the “breath of life.” In modern scientific language, this process of life is called “metabolism.” It is the ceaseless flow of energy and matter through a network of chemical reactions, which enables a living organism to continually generate, repair, and perpetuate itself. In other words, metabolism involves the intake, digestion, and transformation of food.

Metabolism is the central characteristic of biological life. But understanding metabolism is not enough to understand life. When we study the structures, metabolic processes, and evolution of the myriads of species on the planet, we notice that the outstanding characteristic of our biosphere is that it has sustained life for billions of years. How does the Earth do that? How does nature sustain life?

Ecological Literacy

To understand how nature sustains life, we need to move from biology to ecology, because sustained life is a property of an ecosystem rather than a single organism or species. Over billions of years of evolution, the Earth’s ecosystems have evolved certain principles of organization to sustain the web of life. Knowledge of these principles of organization, or principles of ecology, is what we mean by “ecological literacy.”

In the coming decades, the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy — our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly. This means that ecoliteracy must become a critical skill for politicians, business leaders, and professionals in all spheres, and should be the most important part of education at all levels—from primary and secondary schools to colleges, universities, and the continuing education and training of professionals.

We need to teach our children, our students, and our corporate and political leaders the fundamental facts of life—that one species’ waste is another species’ food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.

All these principles of ecology are closely interrelated. They are just different aspects of a single fundamental pattern of organization that has enabled nature to sustain life for billions of years. In a nutshell: Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. No individual organism can exist in isolation. Animals depend on the photosynthesis of plants for their energy needs; plants depend on the carbon dioxide produced by animals, as well as on the nitrogen fixed by bacteria at their roots; and together plants, animals, and microorganisms regulate the entire biosphere and maintain the conditions conducive to life.

Sustainability, then, is not an individual property but a property of an entire web of relationships. It always involves a whole community. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature. The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community. A sustainable human community interacts with other communities — human and nonhuman — in ways that enable them to live and develop according to their nature. Sustainability does not mean that things do not change. It is a dynamic process of co-evolution rather than a static state.

Systems Thinking

The fact that ecological sustainability is a property of a web of relationships means that in order to understand it properly, in order to become ecologically literate, we need to learn how to think in terms of relationships, in terms of interconnections, patterns, context. In science, this type of thinking is known as systemic thinking or “systems thinking.” It is crucial for understanding ecology, because ecology derived from the Greek word oikos (“household”) — is the science of relationships among the various members of the Earth Household.

Systems thinking emerged from a series of interdisciplinary dialogues among biologists, psychologists, and ecologists, in the 1920s and ’30s. In all these fields, scientists realized that a living system — organism, ecosystem, or social system — is an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. The “systemic” properties are properties of the whole, which none of its parts have. So, systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. The early systems thinkers coined the phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

What exactly does this mean? In what sense is the whole more than the sum of its parts? The answer is: relationships. All the essential properties of a living system depend on the relationships among the system’s components. Systems thinking means thinking in terms of relationships. Understanding life requires a shift of focus from objects to relationships.

For example, each species in an ecosystem helps to sustain the entire food web. If one species is decimated by some natural catastrophe, the ecosystem will still be resilient if there are other species that can fulfill similar functions. In other words, the stability of an ecosystem depends on its biodiversity, on the complexity of its network of relationships. This is how we can understand stability and resilience by understanding the relationships within the ecosystem.

In science, we have been told, things need to be measured and weighed. But relationships cannot be measured and weighed; relationships need to be mapped.

Understanding relationships is not easy for us, because it is something that goes counter to the traditional scientific enterprise in Western culture. In science, we have been told, things need to be measured and weighed. But relationships cannot be measured and weighed; relationships need to be mapped. So there is another shift: from measuring to mapping.

In biology, a recent dramatic example of this shift happened in the Human Genome Project. Scientists became acutely aware that, in order to understand the functioning of genes, it is not enough to know their sequence on the DNA; we need to be able to also map their mutual relationships and interactions.

Now, when you map relationships, you will find certain configurations that occur repeatedly. This is what we call a pattern. Networks, cycles, feedback loops are examples of patterns of organization that are characteristic of life. Systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from contents to patterns.

I also want to emphasize that mapping relationships and studying patterns is not a quantitative but a qualitative approach. Systems thinking implies a shift from quantity to quality. A pattern is not a list of numbers but a visual image.

The study of relationships concerns not only the relationships among the system’s components, but also those between the system as a whole and surrounding larger systems. Those relationships between the system and its environment are what we mean by context.

For example, the shape of a plant, or the colors of a bird, depend on their environment — on the vegetation, climate, etc. — and also on the evolutionary history of the species, on the historical context. Systems thinking is always contextual thinking. It implies a shift from objective knowledge to contextual knowledge.

Finally, we need to understand that living form is more than a shape, more than a static configuration of components in a whole. There is a continual flow of matter through a living system, while its form is maintained; there is development, and there is evolution. The understanding of living structure is inextricably linked to the understanding of metabolic and developmental processes. So, systems thinking includes a shift of emphasis from structure to process.

All these shifts of emphasis are really just different ways of saying the same thing. Systems thinking means a shift of perception from material objects and structures to the nonmaterial processes and patterns of organization that represent the very essence of life.

Current World Problems

Once we become ecologically literate, once we understand the processes and patterns of relationships that enable ecosystems to sustain life, we will also understand the many ways in which our human civilization, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has ignored these ecological patterns and processes and has interfered with them. And we will realize that these interferences are the fundamental causes of many of our current world problems.

It is now becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent. One of the most detailed and masterful documentations of the fundamental interconnectedness of world problems is the new book by Lester Brown, Plan B (Norton, 2008). Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, demonstrates in this book with impeccable clarity how the vicious circle of demographic pressure and poverty leads to the depletion of resources — falling water tables, wells going dry, shrinking forests, collapsing fisheries, eroding soils, grasslands turning into desert, and so on — and how this resource depletion, exacerbated by climate change, produces failing states whose governments can no longer provide security for their citizens, some of whom in sheer desperation turn to terrorism.

When you read this book, you will understand how virtually all our environmental problems are threats to our food security — falling water tables; increasing conversion of cropland to non-farm uses; more extreme climate events, such as heat waves, droughts, and floods; and, most recently, increasing diversion of grains to biofuel.

A critical factor in all this is the fact that world oil production is reaching its peak. This means that, from now on, oil production will begin to decrease worldwide, extraction of the remaining oil will be more and more costly, and hence the price of oil will continue to rise. Most affected will be the oil-intensive segments of the global economy, in particular the automobile, food, and airline industries.

The search for alternative energy sources has recently led to increased production of ethanol and other biofuels, especially in the United States, Brazil, and China. And since the fuel value of grain is higher on the markets than its food-value, more and more grain is diverted from food to producing fuels. At the same time, the price of grain is moving up toward the oil equivalent value. This is one of the main reasons for the recent sharp rise of food prices. Another reason, of course, is that a petrochemical, mechanized, and centralized system of agriculture is highly dependent on oil and will produce more expensive food as the price of oil increases. Indeed, industrial farming uses 10 times more energy than sustainable, organic farming.

The fact that the price of grain is now keyed to the price of oil is only possible because our global economic system has no ethical dimension. In such a system, the question, “Shall we use grain to fuel cars or to feed people?” has a clear answer. The market says, “Let’s fuel the cars.”

This is even more perverse in view of the fact that 20 percent of our grain harvest will supply less than 4 percent of automotive fuel. Indeed, the entire ethanol production in this country could easily be replaced by raising average fuel efficiency by 20 percent (i.e. from 21 mpg to 25 mpg), which is nothing, given the technologies available today.

The recent sharp increase in grain prices has wreaked havoc in the world’s grain markets, and world hunger is now on the rise again after a long steady decline. In addition, increased fuel consumption accelerates global warming, which results in crop losses in heat waves that make crops wither, and from the loss of glaciers that feed rivers essential to irrigation. When we think systemically and understand how all these processes are interrelated, we realize that the vehicles we drive, and other consumer choices we make, have a major impact on the food supply to large populations in Asia and Africa.

All these problems, ultimately, must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most people in our society, and especially our political and corporate leaders, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.

The main message of Lester Brown’s Plan B, is that there are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican Revolution. Systems thinking and ecological literacy are two key elements of the new paradigm, and very helpful for understanding the interconnections between food, health, and the environment, but also for understanding the profound transformation that is needed globally for humanity to survive.

Fritjof Capra is the bestselling author of The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, and other books. A physicist best known for his work in systems thinking, Capra is also cofounder and chair of the board of the Center for Ecoliteracy.

“The New Facts of Life” by Fritjof Capra was originally published by the Center for Ecoliteracy. © Copyright 2008 Center for Ecoliteracy. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. For more information, visit www.ecoliteracy.org.

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Is that a good thing? Well, it depends on the quality of the meeting. Educational professionals concur that most of the time they spend in “meeting mode” could be better used otherwise. Are we to conclude, then, that meetings should be abolished? On the contrary, an understanding of systems and learning suggests that meetings can and should be powerful vehicles of positive change, leading participants to common understanding that results in authentic engagement and alignment.

A Systems Perspective

The fault is not in the meeting form itself but in our approach to meetings. According to Fred Kofman and Peter Senge (in Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow’s Workplace, edited by Sarita Chawla and John Renesch, Productivity Press, 1995), “the main dysfunctions in today’s organizations are actually by-products of their past success.” As a culture, we have become accustomed to going to meetings that are rarely interesting, much less opportunities for learning and community development. Nevertheless, those poorly constructed gatherings have managed to move us forward as schools. Any hint of doing away with or dramatically changing them is often perceived as heresy, heard as “that’s not the way we do things here.”

As a culture, we have become accustomed to going to meetings that are rarely interesting, much less opportunities for learning and community development.

The solution? Looking at the school district from a systems perspective. In a systems worldview, as we move from the primacy of the pieces to the primacy of the whole, each meeting provides an opportunity for participants to develop a collective understanding of their connectedness and interdependence. As people evolve from focusing on self to focusing on self as a member of a larger community, the purpose of meetings shifts from solving problems to creating, from defending absolute truths of the moment to achieving coherent and collective interpretations of what they want their school to be.

Gone are the gripe sessions, the meetings that take place simply because it is the appointed time for the appointed group to convene, and the gatherings that subtly pull a subsystem (department, grade level, staff sector) off the track of established vision and mission. Participants no longer come to the table with the traditional burning questions: How is my job to be redefined today? or How can I use this meeting to get what I want within the system? Instead, every meeting within the entire school district centers on aligning people’s efforts to help achieve the system’s vision and mission.

This new meeting paradigm enables leaders to steward the system rather than control it. Instead of poking around in unfolding educational and administrative processes, the facilitator clarifies and aligns the action of the group. Time is redirected from typical “administrivia” and ritual actions to the development of shared meaning, as each participant experiences personal learning through conversation. This shift enables meeting leaders to “identify problems that can best be addressed through collective action and then involve others in finding solutions” (Liebman and Friedrich, “Teachers, Writers, Leaders” in Educational Leadership, 65(1) September 2007). The leader of such a meeting is now a community agent helping to align his or her group with the system’s goals and facilitating the design of methods for achieving those goals.

A FOCUS on Conversational Leadership

To make this shift, in school systems across the country, district and school-level leaders regularly engage people in results-oriented, focused meetings based on a communication model called “conversational leadership,” a phrase to my knowledge coined by Carolyn Baldwin, an elementary principal from Winter Haven, Florida. Conversational leadership (CL) uses multiple learning tools to develop a common understanding and aligned action in an organization. The philosophical foundations of this approach lie in Malcolm Knowles’s adult learning models, the total quality work of W. Edwards Deming, Peter Senge’s learning organizations, Edward Schein’s ideas of process consulting, leadership philosopher Robert K. Greenleaf’s servant-leadership, and effective communication theory.

Using the conversational leadership model, the designer and steward of each meeting is responsible for helping to achieve the organization’s desired outcomes through learning. The successful meeting, then, will have as its particular outcome some type of personal or team structural change — i.e.,a change in thinking, acting, or interacting. As this change occurs, the group becomes realigned with the system’s goals, identifying and committing to methods it can adopt to help achieve those goals. As each and every meeting is focused on supporting the success of the system as a whole, the meeting leader — whether teacher, principal, PTO president, or curriculum supervisor—crafts and stewards the meeting in alignment with the system’s mission and goals.

Each meeting begins with ground rules, which can be posted and referenced as needed. We recommend FOCUS (each of these items is defined and explained below):

F: Follow the learning conversation guidelines (see “Five Guidelines for Learning Conversations”)

O: Open with Check-in and CPO (Context, Purpose, Outcome)

C: Clarify each agenda item with CPO

U: Use Closing-the-Learning-Loop protocols

S: Support safe space

Begin with a simple check-in procedure, inviting each participant to make a short statement that bridges the gap from their previous task/experience to the one at hand, ending with “I’m in.” Once participants have been reminded of the ground rules and have centered themselves, the leader provides a quick but essential overview to put the meeting in the context of the larger picture: How does today’s meeting fit into our larger, ongoing efforts and vision? He or she then states the purpose of the meeting (which should never be “because it’s the day of the month we always meet”) and tells participants exactly what outcome they can expect.

Context: How this meeting/agenda item fits into the overall mission/vision

Purpose: What common understanding or shared meaning we intend to develop

Outcome: What we will each know or be able to do when the meeting concludes

Some examples of context might be:

• An incident involving student rights has occurred that needs our attention.
• We are three months out from our ten year accreditation filing deadline.
• The Board has requested our input on a matter of policy at its next meeting.

Using those three examples, a purpose statement might be:

• I want to share the details of the incident and build consensus for a response.
• Today we’ll look at our timeline and make course corrections.
• I want your opinions on this matter to help me make a recommendation that represents your interests.

Finally, with those purposes in mind, the outcome might be stated in one of these three ways:

• At the close of this meeting, each of us will know the Board’s position and how we can support it.
• By the end of the meeting, we’ll have identified a handful of target areas and the steps we’ll take, collectively and individually, to bring them up to speed.
• I hope to have a rough draft of my recommendation, with your help, before we adjourn.

Once the CPO is clear, the leader can engage the participants through conversational learning techniques, clarifying for understanding as needed. Some organizations devote numerous meetings and retreats to truly mastering the concept of “learning conversation.” The leader’s efforts to confirm for common understanding are critical in developing shared meaning that leads to purposeful action. She does so by closing the learning loop — inviting participants to share their understanding about the information presented thus far. And, through it all, the facilitator must work to create a safe space, a team setting that promotes forthright sharing and discussion because participants feel comfortable and trusting.

Groups often apply three steps of this four-step process over and over throughout the meeting, bringing each topic of interest through the stages of learning conversation, clarity, and confirmation. When all business has been concluded, it is important to invite participants to assess the meeting’s effectiveness for the purpose of improving on the process at the next meeting. Such a protocol, in partnership with a new understanding and appreciation of the meeting as a valid way for a system to learn and grow, can turn your gatherings into meetings that matter.

One Voice

Once all the leaders at all levels within the system are able and willing to use conversational leadership to facilitate meetings that move the system toward its goals, the system begins to speak with one voice. That does not preclude disagreement. Vigorous disagreement among leaders using learning protocols does not damage effective communication. Conversely, disagreement allows for learning and enhances understanding, which leads to shared meaning. Sincere disagreement should not be construed as disloyalty or as a threat to the system’s unity. Difference of opinion marks an opportunity to deepen understanding, enhance the quality of working relationships, and accomplish alignment. Disciplined meeting conversation is one of the answers: “If we cannot talk together, we cannot work together” (William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, Doubleday, 1999).

Through conversational leadership, participants are gradually able to recognize the interdependence of the varying subsystems and appreciate the value of constructive interaction with others. The steady stream of documents for approval disappears from the regular agenda as the “approval” syndrome becomes inconsistent with proper delegation. Everyone does his or her own work instead of pretending that endlessly supervising the day-to-day action of others is a meaningful contribution.

Meetings no longer aim at managing individuals or incessantly redefining operational details. The executive team learns that what it previously thought was “monitoring” was merely wandering around in the presence of data. Meetings no longer focus on complaints. Problems are expected to be resolved locally; if not, the issue is viewed as symptomatic of a system flaw. All players get to “have their say,” but they maintain the priority of the school’s performance outcomes and common mission.

More meetings are spent learning diverse points of view regarding the heart of the school’s responsibility —  supporting and nurturing the student body by projecting future needs and garnering wisdom for long-term decision making about performance results and structures. On a daily basis, teachers learn from one another through conversation with their peers; this becomes the predominant meeting structure. Gone is the preoccupation with what schools do in favor of clearly defining what schools are for. Finally, leadership becomes visionary, focusing on the shared dreams of the community, because it is no longer forged in a flurry of trivia, micromanagement, and administrative detail.

Successful meetings in schools and school systems, at all levels and for all purposes, can become significantly more effective and productive if they follow a carefully tested protocol. A good meeting is highly structured in its core processes, but fluid in nature, welcoming and encouraging participation. Ironically, the more carefully structured the meeting, the easier it is to invite dialogue and allow meaningful conversations to take their course. Following the format outlined above, meetings will achieve clear communication and common understanding — something vitally important in today’s educational institutions.

Raymond D. Jorgensen, Ph. D., consults, facilitates, and conducts workshops for public and private school systems, city and county governments, hospitals, banks, branches of the military, physicians’ offices, and a variety of private businesses. He spent 30 years in private and public schools as a teacher, coach, department head, collegiate faculty member, and school administrator. Ray holds an M. S. in Teaching and wrote a doctoral dissertation on learning organizations and organizational change.

For Additional Reading

Brown, Juanita. TheWorld Café: Shaping Our FuturesThrough ConversationsThat Matter (Berrett-Koehler, 2005)

Caine, Renate Nummela, and Geoffrey Caine. Education on the Edge of Possibility (ASCD, 1997)

de Geus, Arie. The Living Company: Habits for Survival in aTurbulent Business Environment (Harvard Business School Press, 1997)

Gardner, Howard. Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds (Harvard Business School Press, 2006)

Schein, Edgar., “Dialogue and culture,” Organizational Dynamics (1993, autumn)

Senge, Peter, et al. Schools That Learn: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Currency Doubleday, 2000)

Sergiovanni, Thomas J. Building Community in Schools. (Jossey-Bass, 1994)

The post Meetings That Matter: Conversational Leadership in Today’s Schools appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

It is insufficient and often counterproductive for leaders merely to act as good cogs in the machine. Leaders perform a valuable service when they discern that a venerated system or process has outlived its usefulness, or that it is operating as originally designed but against the organization’s overall purpose. Sometimes we forget that systems are created by people, based on an idea about what should happen at a given point in time. A wise senior warrant officer referred to this phenomenon as a BOGSAT — a bunch of guys sitting around talking.

Systems Endure

Although times and circumstances may change, systems tend to endure. We seem to be better at creating new systems than changing or eliminating existing ones. Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term “goal displacement” to describe what happens when complying with bureaucratic processes becomes the objective rather than focusing on organizational goals and values. When that happens, systems take on a life of their own and seem immune to common sense. Thoughtless application of rules and procedures can stifle innovation, hamper adaptivity, and dash creativity. Wholesale disregard of rules and procedures, however, can be equally disastrous.

When members of an organization feel as though they must constantly fight the system by circumventing established rules and procedures, the result can be cynicism or a poor ethical climate. Because of their experience and position, leaders are invested with the authority to intervene and correct or abandon malfunctioning systems. At the very least, they can advocate for change in a way that those with less positional authority cannot. Leaders at all levels should, therefore, be alert to systems that drive human behavior inimical to organizational effectiveness. It is arguable that military organizations placing a premium on tradition and standardization are predisposed to goal displacement. We need leaders, therefore, who can see both the parts and the big picture; to this end, some of the concepts of systems thinking are useful.

The Department of Defense is a large and complex social system with many interrelated parts. As with any system of this type, when changes are made to one part, many others are affected in a cascading and often unpredictable manner. Thus, organizational decisions are fraught with second- and third-order effects that result in unintended consequences. “Fire and forget” approaches are rarely sufficient and are sometimes downright harmful. Extensive planning — combined with even the best of intentions — does not guarantee success. Better prediction is not the answer, nor is it possible. There are so many interactions in complex systems that no individual can be expected to forecast the impact of even small changes that are amplified over time.

Getting Beyond the Machine Metaphor

In her book Organization Theory: Modern, Symbolic, and Postmodern Perspectives, Mary Jo Hatch provides an introduction to general systems theory that is useful in thinking about organizations. She makes a point worthy of repeating: The use of lower-level models is problematic when applied to higher-level systems. Thus, the language of simple machines creates blind spots when used as a metaphor for human or social systems; human systems are infinitely more complex and dynamic. In other words, it can be counterproductive to treat a complex dynamic social system like a simple machine.

Noted management scholar Russell Ackoff puts it another way. He asserts that we are in the process of leaving the machine age that had roots in the Renaissance and came into favor through the industrialization of society. In that era, the machine metaphor became the predominant way of looking at organizations. The universe was envisioned by thinkers such as Isaac Newton as having the characteristics of a big clock. The workings of the clock could be understood through the process of analysis and the analytical method.

Analysis involves taking apart something of interest, trying to understand the behavior of its parts, and then assembling the understanding of the parts into an understanding of the whole. According to Ackoff, “One simple relationship — cause and effect — was sufficient to explain all relationships.” Much machine-age thinking remains with us today; however, there are alternatives.

An Identifiable Purpose

Systems, like the human body, have parts, and the parts affect the performance of the whole. All of the parts are interdependent. The liver interacts with and affects other internal organs — the brain, heart, kidneys, etc. You can study the parts singly, but because of the interactions, it doesn’t make much practical sense to stop there.

Understanding of the system cannot depend on analysis alone. The key to understanding is, therefore, synthesis.

The systems approach is to:

• Identify a System. After all, not all things are systems. Some systems are simple and predictable, while others are complex and dynamic. Most human social systems are the latter.
• Explain the Behavior or Properties of the Whole System. This focus on the whole is the process of synthesis. Ackoff says that analysis looks into things while synthesis looks out of things.
• Explain the Behavior or Properties of the thing to be explained in terms of the role(s) or function(s) of the whole.

The systems thinker retains focus on the system as a whole, and the analysis in step three (the third bullet) is always in terms of the overall purpose of the system. Borrowing Ackoff’s approach and using the example of a contemporary defense issue might help clarify what is admittedly abstract at first glance.

Consider the Institute for Defense Analyses report Transforming DoD Management: The Systems Approach. The authors of this study suggested an alternative approach to Service-based readiness reporting, one that considered the entire defense transportation system. One section of the report suggests that knowing the status of equipment, training, and manning of transportation units is helpful but insufficient to determine the readiness of a system that includes elements such as airfields, road networks, ships, and ports. The defense transportation system includes elements of all Services and even some commercial entities. It only makes sense, therefore, to assess readiness of these elements as part of a larger system that has an identifiable purpose — to move personnel and materiel to the right place at the right time. In this example you can clearly see the approach recommended by Ackoff.

While it may be important to orient on values, goals, and objectives, the urgent often displaces the important. Fighting off the alligators inevitably takes precedence over draining the swamp.

The Problem of Busyness

Few would disagree, in principle, that senior leaders should see not only the parts, but also the big picture. So why don’t we do more of it? One reason is because we are so darned busy. Immersed in the myriad details of daily existence, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. While it may be important to orient on values, goals, and objectives, the urgent often displaces the important. Fighting off the alligators inevitably takes precedence over draining the swamp.

The problem of busyness can be compounded by senior leaders who are over-scheduled and uneducated in systems thinking. It seems as though military officers today work excessive hours as a matter of pride. A cursory examination of the calendar of most contemporary officers, especially flag officers, will indicate an abusive pace. Consider as an alternative the example of one of America’s greatest soldier-statesmen, Gen. George C. Marshall. Even at the height of World War II, Marshall typically rode a horse in the morning for exercise, came home for lunch and visited with his wife, went to bed early, and regularly took retreats to rejuvenate. To what extent are such pauses for reflection and renewal valued today? Simple cause and effect thinking combined with a culture of busyness can result in decision makers who rapid-fire short-term solutions at long-term problems without taking time to think about the actual impact of those solutions.

A common symptom of this phenomenon can be seen in leaders who unrealistically demand simplicity and certainty in a complex and uncertain environment. The drive for simplicity can lead to the need for excessive assumptions. Few contemporary issues of significance can be understood, much less solved, in a two-page point paper or a PowerPoint® slide. We might also ask whether speed and decisiveness in decision making, so valued at the tactical level, work to the detriment of good decisions at the strategic level. Absent some discipline and techniques to do otherwise, it is very hard to find time for reflection and thoughtful decision making.

In Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, May 2003, Stever Robbins wrote, “Most people expect learning to just happen without their taking the time for thought and reflection, which true learning requires. In the past, with slower communication systems, we often had a few weeks to ponder and rethink a decision. Today we’re accustomed to e-mails, faxes, overnight letters, and cell phones, and have come to believe that an immediate response is more important than a thoughtful one.”

Interrelationships, Not Things

Peter Senge submits, in The Fifth Discipline, that systems thinking provides just the type of discipline and toolset needed to encourage the seeing of “interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.’” Senge argues that this shift of mind is necessary to deal with the complexities of dynamic social systems.

He suggests that we think in terms of feedback loops as a substitute for simple cause and effect relationships. As an example, systems scholar Daniel Aronson suggests that we imagine a farmer who determines that an insect infestation is eating his crop. The conventional approach is to apply a pesticide designed to kill the insect. Our example at this point depicts the lowest level of the thinking hierarchy — reaction. In response to the appearance of insects, the farmer applies a pesticide because he assumes that what has worked in the past will work in this instance. As additional insects appear, the farmer applies more pesticide. While the farmer’s goal is to produce a crop, his activity is increasingly consumed by recurring applications of the chemical. He is surely busy, but he may not necessarily be productive. A systems thinker might step back from the problem, take a broader view, and consider what is happening over time.

For example, he might think about whether there are any patterns that appear over weeks or months and attempt to depict what is actually occurring. Recognizing the pattern of a system over time is a higher-order level of thinking. The systems thinker might notice that insect infestation did decrease after applying pesticide, but only for a short time. Insects that were eating the crop were actually controlling a second species of insect not affected by the pesticide. Elimination of the first species resulted in a growth explosion in the second that caused even more damage than the first. The obvious solution caused unintended consequences that worsened the situation.

An accomplished systems thinker would model the above example using a series of feedback loops. The specifics of the modeling technique are less important at this point than the observation that systems thinking tends to see things in terms of loops and patterns aided by constant assessment of what is happening, rather than flow charts and reliance on what should be happening. At the highest level of thinking, the farmer would try to identify root causes or possible points of intervention suggested by these observations.

The Importance of Continuous Assessment

In Why Smart Executives Fail, Sydney Finkelstein examined over 50 of the world’s most notorious business failures. His analysis indicated that in almost every case, the failures were not attributable to stupidity or lack of attention. To the contrary, the leaders of well-known corporations such as Samsung Motors, WorldCom, and Enron were exceptionally bright, energetic, and deeply involved in the operation of their businesses. Up to the point of massive corporate failure, they were all extremely successful, and in almost every case, there were some in the organization who vainly raised objections to the course that eventually proved disastrous. In most instances, the executives failed to see or accept what was actually happening. In some cases, they were blinded by their own prior successes; in other cases, they inexplicably held tenaciously to a vision, despite plenty of evidence that the chosen strategic direction was ill advised. The systems thinker’s pragmatic focus on determining what is actually happening serves as a preventative to self-delusional wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is no substitute for a realistic appraisal. In the language of systems thinking, the executives were trapped by their own faulty mental models.

The continuous assessment process that is characteristic of systems thinking is essential in a volatile, rapidly changing environment. It takes time and good habits of critical reflection to engage in this kind of learning, both for individuals and organizations.

A systemic approach to failure is more likely to result in effective long-term solutions. Imagine for a moment if the incidents of abuse at Abu Ghraib were chalked up merely to ineffective leadership or just miscreant behavior by some thugs on the night shift. If other factors contributed to the problem, after relieving the chain of command for cause and prosecuting the abusers, the members of the replacement chain of command might have found themselves in an equally untenable situation. While inspired leadership can make a difference under the worst of conditions, we might ask just how heroic we expect our leaders to be on a regular basis. When a system is so obviously stacked against our leaders, there is a moral imperative to change the system.

Systems thinking is no panacea. There is no checklist to work through that will guarantee someone is thinking in a way that will capture the big picture or identify root causes of difficult problems. There are some concepts and approaches embedded in the systems thinking literature, however, that can be very helpful when considering why a situation seems to be immune to intervention, or why a problem thought to be solved has returned with a vengeance.

Here are some of the concepts:

• Focus on the purpose for which a system was created over the processes and procedures of the system.
• Simple cause-and-effect relationships are insufficient to understand or explain a complex social system. Patterns over time and feedback loops are a better way to think about the dynamics of complex systems.
• Think in terms of synthesis over analysis: the whole over the parts.
• Busyness and excessive focus on short-term gains interferes with our ability to use a systems approach.
• Leaders must see what is actually happening over what they want to see happen.
• Thinking about systems and their dynamics suggests alternative approaches and attunes leaders to important aspects of organizational behavior, especially in military organizations that value tradition and standardization.

George Reed is an associate professor in the Department of Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego. He served for 27 years as a military police officer including six as the Director of Command and Leadership Studies at the U. S. Army War College. He holds a doctorate in public policy analysis and administration. Send questions or comments to him at george.reed@us.army.mil.

This article was originally published in Defense AT&L, May-June 2006.

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