A shared commitment to act toward a compelling goal.

Why do I like it?

• First, it emphasizes that strategy is about action – not about analyzing, forecasting, writing papers, filling out forms, compiling spreadsheets, but about action.
• Second, it speaks of a shared commitment – the kind of commitment that management needs so that they continue to act as a team, even when things get tough.
• Third, it recognizes the importance of a compelling goal – the objective, that, when realized, brings vision into reality.

I recognize that the statement makes no declaration about what the goal should be or about what actions should be taken, but I ask that you ride with that gap for the moment — all will be revealed in due course. I also recognize that are many ways of building a shared commitment to act and of defining a good strategy. Scenario planning, which I will focus on, is just one of them.

Gods, Gamblers, Grinders, and Guides

All organizations have their own dominant beliefs, and top managers have their own styles. Some people believe, for example, that it is possible to predict the future (if not in general, then at least as far as their own organizations are concerned); others prefer to believe that the future is uncertain and that the journey into the future is one of exploration. As regards style, some leaders exercise very strong control, while others seek to empower those in their organizations (see “Four Leadership Styles”).

Strong, controlling leaders who believe they can predict the future are much like gods: Not only do they know what they want, they know best, too. You don’t have to read Homer to learn that any mortal who incites the wrath of an angry god soon has an uncomfortable time. Such leaders need no tools and techniques to formulate a strategy: They know. From time to time, they might actually be right.

Strong, controlling leaders who are less certain of their powers of prediction often behave like gamblers: They place a bet that the future will evolve in a certain way and, if it does, fine; if it doesn’t, well, let’s throw the dice again and see what happens a second time. Gamblers, too, need few tools and techniques, but they might like some financial analyses to give them a feel for the odds.

Empowerers who believe they can predict the future are convinced that, somewhere out there, the “right” strategic answer exists, if only they can find it. These are the grinders, managers who are forever grinding away on more analyses, more research, more numbers. These people love tools and techniques, with their five forces, their value chains, their PERTS, and their SWOTS.

In many cases, the most successful leaders may be those empowerers who choose to serve as guides: They seek to carefully steer their organizations through the uncertainties that the future will inevitably bring. How can they steer the safest course? Well, to do so, they need a map. The problem is that no such map can be found, for maps exist in space, not in time.

It is in this last arena that scenarios can help, for scenarios are stories describing how the future might evolve. Scenarios therefore do a similar job in time to that done by maps in space. But because the future might evolve in many ways, there are many possible scenarios, each of which represents one possible view of what might happen over the next five, 10, or 20 years. Importantly, the emphasis within each scenario is not on the internal aspects of the business, but rather on the external context in which the business might operate; robust scenarios depict the future in terms of politics, economics, sociology, demography, technology, and industrial structures.

By imagining what such a future might be, you can test whether or not a particular strategy for your own business will be beneficial, should that future indeed come to pass. And by explicitly recognizing that there might be several different futures, any one of which might happen, you can test your strategy against each and see if some strategies are more robust than others. In essence, scenario planning is a form of simulation: It is the business manager’s equivalent of the jet pilot’s flight simulator. The scenarios project you and your organization into the future, and provide a realistic, rich context in which you can examine whether or not particular strategies – the development of new products, the entry into new markets, or whatever – are likely to be successful.

Scenarios also serve to heighten your understanding of risk, so that when you put your strategy into action, you will be much more aware of how changes in the external environment are likely to impact your business. Then if you notice that the world is in fact evolving in a direction for which your strategy is less appropriate, you will be able to change course easily and quickly, far more so than your competitors, who may not have noticed what is going on, or, if they have, may continue for some time in a state of denial.

But how does scenario-based strategic planning – to give it its full name – actually work?

Scenario-Based Strategic Planning

Scenario-based strategic planning comprises two principal activities:

• First, the development of a small number of scenarios – say, up to five – each of which describes a different view of how a future world might look.
• Second, the agreement on a strategy – a set of actions that the organization is committed to take.

As indicated by “Scenario Development and Strategy Formation,” the process of scenario development is divergent and strives to embrace as broad as possible a view of how the future might evolve, in order to encompass the future’s inevitable uncertainties. This is done through a series of group workshops, supported by research, and the gathering of expert opinions. The purpose of the scenarios is to provide a series of backdrops against which different strategies can be assessed. Questions such as “Should we enter the [whatever] market?”, “What are the risks of making [whatever] investment?” and the like are tested against each of the scenarios. Participants assume that, yes, they do enter that market, and that, yes, they do make that investment, and then imagine that they and their organization are projected into each scenario 10 years into the future. They can then assess, using “projected hindsight,” whether or not those decisions were “good” or “bad.” By exploring various decisions against each scenario in this way, team members can then determine that set of decisions that they collectively feel most comfortable taking now and therefore converge upon an agreed strategy.

The following pages describe the process in more detail. First, we need to introduce and define three terms that have a special role in scenario planning: worlds, levers, and outcomes.

Worlds. A world is a comprehensive description of the context in which a business operates. Worlds are therefore described in terms of (often long!) lists of adjectives and adjectival phrases, describing all aspects of the world of interest, including the political, social, economic and regulatory structures, nature of market competition, technology, and all the rest.

SCENARIO DEVELOPMENT AND STRATEGY FORMATION

The process of scenario development is divergent and strives to embrace as broad as possible a view of how the future might evolve, in order to encompass the future’s inevitable uncertainties. The purpose of the scenarios is to provide a series of backdrops against which different strategies can be assessed. By exploring various decisions against each scenario in this way, team members can then determine that set of decisions that they collectively feel most comfortable taking now and therefore converge upon an agreed strategy.

The most familiar world is today’s world, and an important part of the scenario planning process is to come to a shared view of just what it is. Different people see different things, and some lively workshops can be run focused on describing today’s world. Ultimately, any description of today’s world must pass the Martian Test: If the description were e-mailed to a group of Martians approaching Earth, on stepping out of their saucer, they must be able to recognize where they have landed.

If today’s world is defined in terms of a long list of descriptive phrases, then, by definition, a different world must have a different list. A major milestone in scenario planning is to generate a small number of different worlds – three to five is usually sufficient – that have self-consistent descriptions. These worlds should be significantly different from one another, and from today’s world.

Some of the different worlds might appear favorable, others harsh; some may appear to be relatively likely, other less so; some might be desirable, others positively repulsive. At the moment, though, such issues aren’t important; all that matters is that any different world must be believed to be, in principle, possible.

Levers and Outcomes. Levers represent the actions and decisions that managers can take. For example, managers can determine product range, target markets, staffing levels, skills, investments in infrastructure, level of R&D, location of manufacturing sites, amount spent on advertising, and so on. At any time, each lever has a setting – the numeric amount associated with that lever.

Outcomes represent the commercial results of the organization: levels of sales and profit, reputation, share price, market share, staff morale, and so on. At any time, each outcome has a numeric value.

Fundamentally, the job of strategic management is to determine the levers and assign their settings, so as to generate desirable outcomes. As every manager soon learns, however, levers are not directly connected to outcomes; there simply is no lever to allow managers to directly control profit, market share, or share price. Rather, the levers that managers can actually pull are only indirectly, and sometimes rather loosely, coupled to the outcomes, and managers act in the belief – or hope – that by cutting costs here and increasing staff there, shareholder value will be increased. To make matters worse, time delays occur before any change in a lever setting begins to take effect.

This process is, as we all know too well, very complex. A powerful tool in taming this complexity is system dynamics modeling. This kind of simulation goes far beyond the typical spreadsheet and can handle loosely coupled variables, time lags, and feedback loops. (For a more complete definition of system dynamics, go to http://www.systemdynamics.org.)

The Rules of Innovation

Many people feel that inventing new worlds is difficult, fearing not only that they lack the expert knowledge, but also – and far worse – that they just don’t have the imagination. In fact, inventing new worlds is easy and a lot of fun, provided, of course, that you do it in the easy, fun way – and that is to borrow from the techniques of innovation.

Briefly, two of the key rules that make innovation deliberate, systematic, and safe are:

• Rule No. 1: Don’t try to leap directly into the unknown – start from something or somewhere you know well.
• Rule No. 2: New ideas are best generated not by waiting for lightning to strike, but by challenging assumptions and asking, “How might this be different?”

A simple but nonetheless startling example of these rules in action is the familiar nine dots puzzle (see “Nine Dots Puzzle”). There are two questions:

• How can you join all nine dots with four straight lines, without taking your pencil off the page?
• And if that is too easy, how many different ways can you find of joining all the dots with just one line?

Most people tackle the first question by picking up a pen and drawing various alternatives; they usually don’t even know where to start with the second question. But then most people don’t know the two rules of innovation. Picking up a pen, drawing, and trying to solve the puzzle by trial and error breaks the first rule – you’re leaping into the dark. The first rule says “Let’s understand all we can about the nine dots.” There are nine, they are in a square array, they are an inch or so apart, and they are about a quarter-inch square. The second rule says, “Challenge the assumptions.” Is the shape the dots form a square? What would happen if the dots weren’t an inch apart? They might be a mile apart or close together. But if they were close, I could wipe a felt-tip pen across all nine at once. So, if they’re an inch apart, I need a thick pen – maybe a paint roller. Ah yes, that’s it, a paint roller. And the puzzle is instantly solved.

Inventing New Worlds

The easiest way of inventing new worlds is therefore to apply the two key rules of innovation defined above. In the context of scenario planning, if we follow Rule No. 1, our starting point is something we all know well indeed, namely, today’s world. In fact, we take the time to define today’s world not only to build a genuine, deeply shared view of where we are, but also as a springboard to innovation.

One observation about today’s world might be that “the current industrial structure is consolidating.” Rule No. 2 requires us to challenge assumptions and ask, “How might this be different?” How might the industrial structure be different? Well, perhaps it will concentrate even further into a global monopoly; perhaps it will fragment as a result of government intervention; perhaps new entrants will come in on the back of a new technology.

Applying Rule No. 2 thus results in many alternative possibilities. As a group begins to list these potential futures, people start associating characteristics together, so that a small number of self-consistent worlds emerge, each with its appropriate set of descriptions. Created by a process of deliberate challenge and deliberate and systematic innovation, these descriptions will be very different from today’s world. When you are in the middle of the process, it can appear to be something of a muddle, with hundreds of post-its all over the walls. But rest assured that it works: The human mind is quite adept at seeing patterns. Just as the solution to the nine dots puzzle emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, so the process of challenge, coupled with the interactions of a group and the human ability to see patterns, will create a compelling series of new worlds.

“Scenario Planning Summary” forms the heart of a scenario planning exercise. Each column represents a different world, the first being today’s world. The often extensive descriptions of each world are incorporated in the first row. The levers are named in the title box of the second row, and the corresponding lever settings are identified in the appropriate column. Similarly, the outcomes are named in the title box of the third row, and the outcome values, for the defined lever settings in each world, are assessed and entered into each column.

The question then becomes, What are the lever settings and what new levers might be required to give favorable outcomes in as many of the worlds as possible? Once the most favorable set of levers and lever settings have been determined, then your strategy is that set of managerial actions required to move the levers from their current settings to the desired ones.

Testing the Levers

By now, you will have:

• Defined today’s world.
• Defined up to five alternative worlds.
• Defined the levers and the outcomes.
• Seen how the lever settings in today’s world generate today’s outcome values.

It is at this point that the scenarios themselves are written, each scenario being a vivid story describing how each of the alternative new worlds evolved, in its own particular way, from today’s world. Well-written scenarios capture your imagination and are powerful vehicles for communication and training. Immersing yourself in the scenarios builds “a memory of the future,” so that as time passes and the future becomes reality, you recognize what you see. But the scenarios themselves are not the end of the exercise: The purpose of the scenarios, and the alternative worlds they describe, is to form a context in which your business might operate in the future.

To test out this method:

• Imagine that the levers and their settings are the same as in today’s world. What will the outcome values be in the different worlds? Are they favorable or unfavorable?
• If the outcome values in any alternative world are unfavorable, what would the lever settings have be to give rise to favorable outcomes? Do you need to invoke any new levers?

This process is best carried out through group discussion; it can also be supported by modeling and specific, well-focused analysis. The objective is to examine how robust different lever settings are to future uncertainty. Suppose, for example, you decide that the current lever settings give favorable outcome values in just one of the alternative future worlds. That analysis implies that, if you leave the lever settings as they are and that particular future does indeed come to pass, your business is likely to be successful. But if the future were to evolve toward any of the other worlds, things might not be so rosy.

Turning Scenarios into Strategy

As a result of the exploration of the lever settings in the various worlds, you will discover one of a number of things, for example, that:

• The current levers, and their settings, are indeed robust under future worlds, or
• The current levers, and their settings, are not robust under future worlds, or
• Some different lever settings are robust under many of the future worlds, including today’s world; or there are no lever settings that work well under many worlds, but several clusters of settings that work well in some worlds but not others; or there are no generally safe lever settings – each world has its own.

These insights are guides to strategy. How so? Let’s go back to our definition of strategy: a shared commitment to act toward a compelling goal.

A shared commitment to take what specific actions, toward which particular goal? Well:

• The goal must be defined in relation to one or more of the worlds, and
• The actions must be to move existing levers to new settings or to deploy new levers.

The process of strategy development is therefore that of deciding which levers need to be placed at what settings. And the strategy itself is the set of actions you decide to take to move the levers from their current settings to their new ones.

Scenario-based strategic planning has the objective of providing a framework to enable managers to make strategic decisions (see “The Scenario-Based Strategic Planning Process”). These decisions can relate only to levers and their settings; managers, quite literally, can do little else. As we all know, the problem with resetting the levers is that some of them are difficult to reset; some, once reset, cannot be reversed to their original settings; many require a long time to reset; and, once settings have been reset, it may be a long time before the results are actually achieved—time during which the world is fast evolving, often in such a way as to make the new settings no longer fit for their originally conceived purpose.

THE SCENARIO-BASED STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS

Scenario-based strategic planning has the objective of providing a framework to enable managers to make strategic decisions. As such, it comprises a number of activities, beginning with defining today’s world and the range of actions that managers can take to creating scenarios of different possible worlds to testing levers in different settings and, finally, identifying effective actions.

But the levers must be reset from time to time. Doing nothing, and so betting that the world will stay still, is often a worse bet than taking a gamble on one particular future. The process is exciting, challenging, stimulating, exhausting, amazing – and, most importantly, it works.

Dennis Sherwood is the author of nine books, including Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager’s Guide to Applying Systems Thinking, Smart Things to Know About Innovation, and Unlock Your Mind. For 12 years, he was a consulting partner with Coopers & Lybrand and was subsequently an executive director at Goldman Sachs in London, a partner in Bossard Consultants, and vice president of SRI Consulting. He is currently with the Silver Bullet Machine Manufacturing Company. Dennis was educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Yale, and California, and is a Sloan Fellow, with distinction, of the London Business School. He is a well-known speaker at conferences, has written many journal articles, and has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s programs In Business, Shoptalk, and Nice Work.

The post Turning Innovative Scenarios into Robust Strategies appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Nevertheless, despite the progress illustrated by these and other cases, the forces of unsustainable growth and resource exploitation have continued to compound. So the release of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Chelsea Green, 2004) by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows comes at an important time. For newcomers to the systems approach, the 30-Year Update presents the logic of overshoot and collapse and emphasizes the urgent need for sustainability without dwelling too much on the mechanics of the methodology (see “Key Terms”). At the same time, those already inclined to see things from a systems perspective not only have their mental models reinforced and refined, but also have a series of cogent examples to draw upon when spreading the gospel of sustainable development.

Systems and Growth

Three themes emerge in the book: background on systems and the mechanics of growth; the introduction of a formal computer model, known as World3, and some of the scenarios that it produces; and implications and recommendations (see “The World3 Model” on p. 9). Throughout the volume, but particularly in the first three chapters, the authors explain the basic laws of system structure and behavior with a lucidity that comes from decades devoted to the dissemination of these concepts.

Though usually considered “best practice,” it is not common to come across computer modelers who clearly communicate the purpose of their model and its associated boundaries; that is, the question the model was intended to address and those for which it loses its ability to provide meaningful insight. So it is a treat (for modeling geeks, anyway) to have the authors devote several pages to just these concerns in the course of their introduction to the World3 model. The central question they mean to address is: Faced with the possibility of global collapse, what actions can we take that will make a difference and lead to a sustainable future? It is clear that this is a model whose primary purpose is to help us think, not to provide the answer. In the course of laying out their model’s purpose, the authors make one of the best cases for “modeling for learning” that I have come across.

The authors introduce a variety of potential actions into the World3 model, at first, one-by-one, then in logically consistent groups. Each run, or scenario, provides insight into how that potential action or group of actions might affect the course of future events. In this way, Meadows, Randers, and Meadows are able to prioritize potential actions in order to come up with the set that offers the greatest opportunity for avoiding the worst consequences of collapse.

Recommendations for Action

In the end, World3 does provide an answer. Of the various assumptions tested and given the boundary conditions of the model, we can still make a transition to a sustainable global society if people around the world immediately take the following actions:

1. Stabilize the population
2. Stabilize industrial output per person
3. Add technologies to:
   • Abate pollution
   • Conserve resources
   • Increase land yield
   • Protect agricultural land

The bad news is that we have already begun to experience symptoms of overshoot—water tables are dropping rapidly in some areas and incidents of coral bleaching have risen but two of the most urgent signals. The good news is that, as the authors’ account of the ozone story demonstrates, once the global community sees the clear need for change, change can come about quickly.

According to the authors, people respond to signals that a system has overshot its limit in one of three ways:

1. Deny, disguise, or confuse the signal that the system is sending
2. Relax the limits through technological or economic action
3. Change the system structure Certain elements of society are

stuck in response 1, regardless of the growing mountain of evidence calling for action. We see this mindset in the refusal by some politicians to acknowledge the science behind global warming. Others place their faith solely in the market and/or technology, even though the price would be extremely high if the market system and new technologies fail to save the day. The only truly effective response is to change the system structure, the sooner the better.

This was the core message of the original Limits to Growth. And while that message became a part of society’s broad environmental consciousness, the warning went largely unheeded. The result is that the party’s nearly over, and we need to figure out how to minimize the hangover.

Restructuring Society

Because structure determines behavior, the highest-leverage approach to these problems is to change the underlying structures that have created them, such as farming techniques, forest management policy, end-user attitudes toward consumption, recycling, and reuse, and legislation regulating pollution. So how do we go about restructuring the global system? The authors share the tools they have found to be useful: rational analysis, data gathering, systems thinking, computer modeling, and clear communication.

Notice that these tools really have more to do with making the case for change than they do with enacting change that has been agreed upon. That is, they are exceptionally useful for helping lawmakers understand the need for change and explaining to corporate decision makers the logic behind a shift. These tools can even guide the overall implementation of a change effort. But once the case has been made, the day-to-day activities can look somewhat like business as usual: rewriting laws, redesigning products and processes, reorganizing departments, and so forth. The difference is that the guidance offered by these tools means the change is less like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and more like fixing the hole in the ship.

The 30-Year Update is compelling: We have already overshot the planet’s carrying capacity on numerous vital resources. Whether humanity is successful in avoiding the most disastrous effects of collapse will be determined in part by the actions taken by people across our society and planet. Unfortunately, politicians and other leaders often seem to be linear and “black-and-white” thinkers. Navigating the turbulence ahead will require decision making that appreciates non-linearities and shades of grey. The 30-Year Update will bring some to the sustainability camp. But more important, it will inspire others—those with the necessary perspective—to take action. There’s no time to waste.

Gregory Hennessy is honored to have worked with Dennis Meadows on several occasions and to have met the late Dana Meadows once.

The post Scenarios of the Future: The Urgent Case for Sustainability appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Some books have lengthy lives—a measure perhaps of how much they touch their times. Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (current version by Currency/ Doubleday, 1996) is one of them. Five years after its original publication, the book continues to pop up— deservedly—on business best-seller lists.

Schwartz earns his living building “scenarios” for organizations. Scenario builders combine the known forces already at work (demographics, technology, cultural change) with other—less certain—elements to create scenario plots, alternative descriptions of the future. Armed with the most likely maps, the theory goes, we can test out strategies and decisions against different futures, and know where to look for the signals of change.

The Future in the Nile

Schwartz uses a fascinating story from ancient Egypt to illustrate the idea of scenarios. In the time of the Pharaohs, the most important event in Egypt was the annual flooding of the Nile and its rich agricultural basin. The Nile is born out of the flow of three upstream tributaries—the Blue Nile, the White Nile, and the Atbara. Each year, the level of flooding was determined by which of these rivers had received the most rainfall and therefore dominated the downstream flow.

If the Nile was dominated by the clear waters of the White Nile, the flood would be mild and late, and the crops would be poor. If the river appeared dark from the flow of the Blue Nile, the flooding would produce a bountiful harvest. If the greenbrown waters of the Atbara prevailed, the flooding would be catastrophically high. Each spring, the temple priests would gather upstream, check the color of the water, and report to the Pharaoh on the flooding to follow.

Every set of scenarios contains driving forces. In this case, it was the rainfall on the headwaters of the Nile. The unknown but crucial element was the rainfall’s distribution. Where the rains fell heaviest that year would determine crop yields, grain stores, taxation, public works programs, even plans for war. The sign of the future was the color of the water in springtime in the Sudan.

When we presume a predetermined outcome, we fail to test strategies and decisions against other possibilities.

Like modern-day leaders, the Pharaohs faced uncertain futures. Royal planning that failed to account for all the scenarios would have opened them to catastrophe. Schwartz’s point is that too often organizations plan to what he calls “their Official Future”—the most likely scenario, or the one the organization desires the most. When we presume a predetermined outcome, we fail to test strategies and decisions against other possibilities. And we fail to look for the signs that might speak of a different future.

Gorbachev’s Rise—and Shell’s Potential Fall

Schwartz points to a case in his own career in planning at Shell Oil. His team was asked to develop scenarios in which the price of natural gas might fall. The biggest potential market influences were the vast gas reserves of the Soviet Union, which, as part of longstanding Soviet policy, had never been fully opened to the free market.

After intense research into possible sources of change in Russia, Schwartz’s team identified a few obscure politicians, any of whose rise to power would likely signal a new era of economic cooperation with the West. One of those they identified was Mikhail Gorbachev. When Gorbachev began his ascent, Shell took it as a sign of changes to come and saved themselves from disastrous investment decisions.

Scenario-planning is not just for big business. Peter Schwartz and Paul Hawken used scenario-planning to help assess the viability of starting a mail-order company specializing in high-quality imported garden tools. When all the probable scenarios— from economic recession to boom— showed a profitable niche for such an enterprise, the soon-to-be highly successful Smith & Hawken mail-order company was launched.

The book includes a user’s guide that makes scenario-planning accessible. Best of all, it reads like a summer novel. Anyone interested in their business’s future should take a long look at The Art of the Long View.

Terry O’Keefe is a business writer from Oakland, CA. His book reviews appear in business publications around the country.

The post Planning for Multiple Futures appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

But although such problems may seem intractable, there is a creative power underlying most conflicts that, if tapped, can energize a group, community, nation, or even the world, as people work collaboratively to improve their situation. By focusing not on the symptoms but on the roots of problems, people can transform deep conflicts into opportunities for participatory and systemic change. By envisioning a different future, they can change conflict from being a barrier to hope and a cause of hurt into a doorway to healing and fulfillment of mutual needs.

Beginning in early 2001, groups in Cincinnati began to successfully apply participatory tools for engaging conflict and transforming an intensely emotional debate about racial profiling into systemwide change. After a six month process of visioning and consensus-building, representatives from various stakeholder groups reached agreement on a five-point platform for change. This platform in turn served as the foundation for a collaborative settlement agreement that launched a new era in police-community relations in the city by marrying ongoing community participation with structural reforms. This model will be studied and replicated throughout the U. S. for years to come. We’ll describe what was learned during the process, what worked and what can be improved, and how you can adapt a similar approach to situations within your communities and organizations. We rely on a systems thinking approach to shed light on the process and describe the benefits of integrating simulation modeling into efforts to resolve seemingly impenetrable clashes.

The Cincinnati Collaborative

In 1999, Bomani Tyehimba, an African-American businessman from the west side of Cincinnati, claimed that two police officers had violated his civil rights by handcuffing him and unjustifiably pointing a gun at his head during a traffic stop. Then in November 2000, an African-American man suffocated while in police custody after being arrested in a gas station parking lot. These events led the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to join forces with the Cincinnati Black United Front and Bomani Tyehimba to file a class-action lawsuit against the Cincinnati Police Department. The suit alleged that the department had treated African-American citizens differently than other racial groups for more than 30 years. Through this action, the petitioners hoped that a judge would issue a court order or a consent decree that would force the Cincinnati police to change the way they conducted internal investigations and would mandate that they collect data about the handling of traffic stops and other incidents.

The federal judge assigned to the case, Susan Dlott, did not believe that traditional litigation was the answer to the problems of alleged racial profiling. In her view, court action would only further polarize the parties and would not solve the social issues underlying the police-community conflict. Through Judge Dlott’s efforts, all parties eventually agreed to set aside normal litigation and instead pursue an alternative path of collaborative problem solving and negotiation. In April 2001, Jay Rothman was retained as special master to the court to help mediate and guide the parties along this new path.

Jay began holding regular meetings with leaders from the three sides—police, city, and community. He first proposed to launch a problem-definition process, suggesting to the parties that without a common definition of the problem, they would have difficulties finding a common solution. However, the police leadership strongly resisted this approach. They argued that focusing on problems would only result in finger pointing—at them! Moreover, the police and city attorneys were unwilling to engage in an effort to define a problem—racial profiling—that they simply did not agree existed.

In response to these concerns, the mediator suggested that the parties instead undertake a broad-based visioning process focused on improving police-community relations. The city and police department accepted this proposal because it seemed a constructive way for representatives from all parties to work collaboratively. The leaders of the Black United Front found this approach appealing largely because it was to be conducted within a framework that promised some form of judicial oversight during the process and after its conclusion.

Thus, only weeks before the city was engulfed in riots in April 2001 following the police shooting of a young African-American man, an ambitious collaborative process called the Cincinnati Police-Community Relations Collaborative—was launched. Jay appointed representatives from the Cincinnati Black United Front, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cincinnati city and police administration, and the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police as his Advisory Group. As its first act, the group decided to invite participation from all citizens in the goal-setting/visioning process. Based on previous studies of tensions in police-community relations, they organized the population into eight stakeholding groups (African-American citizens, city employees, police and their families, white citizens, business/foundation/education leaders, religious and social-service leaders, youth, and other minorities). With considerable cooperation from the media, the Advisory Group invited everyone who lived or worked in Cincinnati or were from surrounding suburbs to answer a questionnaire and participate in feedback groups to envision a new future for police-community relations. Thirty-five hundred people responded, and some 700 of those respondents engaged in follow-up dialogue and agenda-setting.

A Broad-Based Process

The Cincinnati Collaborative used methodologies for engaging conflict (the ARIA Process) and for involving stakeholders in forming goals and action plans to shape the future (Action Evaluation). Citizens and oth ers were invited to answer a simple What, Why, How questionnaire, either online or in writing:

• What are your goals for future police-community relations in Cincinnati?
• Why are those goals important to you and what experiences, values, beliefs, and feelings influence your goals? and
• How do you think your goals can best be achieved?

After only a month of a “getting out the voice” campaign, the Collaborative sponsored the first of eight four hour feedback sessions, this one held by religious and social-service leaders at a local church. Following this first session, at a pace of one or two a month for the next six months, members of each stakeholder group were invited to meet with other members of their own group to dialogue about and reach consensus on a platform of principles. Participants in each feedback session selected representatives to work with representatives from the other groups to craft a platform of goals for improving police-community relations (see “Vision of the Future: A Collaborative Platform”). This intergroup platform then guided negotiators, who were the lawyers for the parties who had served all year on the mediator’s Advisory Group, as they worked to successfully craft a settlement agreement.

Judge Dlott ratified the agreement, which will be implemented over five years at a cost of $5 million. In addition to court oversight, the lasting power of the process is that it engaged people’s hearts and hopes.

People’s responses to the questionnaire—especially their “why” stories—captured their concerns about fairness and respecting differences, needs for safety, and expressions of support for the police. The discussions that they participated in were tremendously powerful. They enabled the citizens of Cincinnati to experience resonance with one another—to find commonalities between their own and others’ fears, hurts, hopes, and dreams (see “Participants’Voices”).

Many found this outlet to express themselves critical—up until that point, they felt that they were not being listened to and that their concerns were not being heard. As a young African-American woman said, “When we felt pain, no one from the city came to listen to us. We needed someone to comfort and listen to us.” Healing began as city leaders finally heard people’s ideas. The inclusive and participatory process has helped citizens feel a sense of ownership for the agreement and move from fear and mistrust to cooperation and joint problem solving. The ability and willingness to truly listen and hear others will continue to be critical as Cincinnati’s citizens and public officials begin to implement the changes that are outlined in the settlement agreement.

A Systems-Informed Solution

In Cincinnati, citizens, public officials, and the police force came to realize that the city needed to move away from enforcement-style policing and toward problem-oriented policing. These two styles represent two ends of a continuum. Enforcement-style policing focuses on the apprehension and prosecution of criminals. Public safety experts have begun to question the enforcement paradigm in recent years for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the struggle to deal with increasing tensions between police and minority communities. These minority groups often feel unfairly targeted by police enforcement activities.

Whether real or perceived, such allegations serve to highlight a problem with the enforcement paradigm, especially in modern American cities with poor, minority neighborhoods. Poverty is considered a leading indicator of crime; that is, the higher the poverty rate in a given area, the higher the crime rate will tend to be. Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine and West End neighborhoods are examples of areas with extreme poverty and also high crime rates. Unfortunately enforcement-style policing does not foster good relationships between police and community members in these kinds of communities, because residents often feel that the police aren’t concerned with what they perceive to be the most important issues, such as vandalism, weapons, and other quality-of-life issues. While most community members and police officers agree that violent criminals must be apprehended and prosecuted, they agree less on other policing priorities.

TWO POLICING STRATEGIES

The enforcement approach (the first outflow) seeks to reduce the stock of safety issues by enforcing the laws. Through the Cincinnati Collaborative, stakeholders emphasized more of a problem-solving approach to prevent crimes from occurring (and entering the stock of safety concerns) in the first place by mitigating underlying conditions.

In problem-oriented policing, officers seek to build a working relationship with the community to address quality-of-life issues. Problem oriented policing requires citizen input and involvement. By centering on solving problems with the entire community instead of on simply apprehending and punishing criminals, this model transforms police community relations and prevents crime from happening in the first place. It should not be surprising that a recommendation for problem oriented policing would result from a participatory process such as the one used in Cincinnati.

For community problems to be effectively identified, analyzed, and addressed, citizens and police officers must be able to trust, understand, and communicate with each other in a productive manner. The collaborative agreement signed on April 5, 2002, two days short of the anniversary of the riots, provides for specific mechanisms for police officers to collect the input and concerns of community members and to incorporate this data into their patrolling and policing activities. Through its emphasis on problem solving, the agreement encourages the police to foster working relationships with the residents they serve. In the spirit of mutual accountability, the agreement also spells out through its “community partnering plan” that citizens must be willing to work with police officers to address problems and create solutions. In this way, the police and citizens have formed a mutually beneficial, proactive partnership with the goal of creating safety, respect, and trust.

A Systems Thinking Analysis

Why has the collaborative process described above worked so well? Although we didn’t use system dynamics models in the Cincinnati case, we have done so retrospectively to shed light on how and why the approach was successful, what the implications are for the solution, and where implementation problems might occur. The purpose of these models is not to discover “the Truth” about what happened, or to accurately predict what will happen; rather, we’re trying to build the most useful theory—open to testing!—of why the process has gone the way it has, and to use that theory to think about possible futures.

We’ll start with the solution of implementing a problem-oriented policing strategy (see “Two Policing Strategies”). We can think of safety issues in a community as a “stock.” The stock of safety concerns continually grows as crimes occur and diminishes as they are resolved, usually through the arrest and prosecution of perpetrators. (For an introduction to the language of stocks and flows, go to www.pegasuscom/stockflow.html.) The enforcement approach (the first outflow in the diagram) seeks to reduce the stock of safety issues by enforcing the laws. Through the Cincinnati Collaborative, stakeholders agreed to address safety issues differently. They emphasized adopting more of a problem-solving approach. Such an approach attempts to prevent crimes from occurring (and entering the stock of safety concerns) in the first place by mitigating underlying conditions and focusing more generally on quality-of-life issues within neighborhoods.

The key to making this process work is the active participation of community members in partnering with police to identify and reduce these underlying conditions. Unless residents work closely with the police and city staff, the problem-solving approach will be impossible to implement. So, let’s turn our attention to how community members become active participants. As you’ll see, the model suggests that the visioning process employed in Cincinnati was instrumental in beginning to develop such contributors.

During the intervention, some members of each stakeholder group were what we might call “Grudging Participants” (see “From Grudging toActive Participation”). In the initial meetings, Jay noticed the difference in commitment between individuals who were accepting of and those who were enthusiastic about participating. He wondered how to motivate everyone to take equal ownership for the process. In this case, an unfortunate turn of events actually spurred the participants to new levels of engagement the riots in early April 2001. They dramatically surfaced the problems in the city for all to witness and focused energy and attention on trying to address underlying causes. Optimally, however, groups seeking to emulate this collaborative process can launch their projects in a more proactive way before a crisis requires it!

By getting 3,500 people to discuss their dreams for the city—how it should work and feel—stake holders began building trust and creating a shared vision. Somewhat uncharacteristically, the media seemed to capture this positive outlook as well. This virtuous cycle led to higher levels of participation and commitment to a vision. The end result: There are now more and more active participants involved in the problem-solving approach to combating crime (see R1 and R2 in “From Grudging to Active Participation”). That’s the good news!

Looking Ahead

But, of course, there’s more. The initiative is only beginning. The community must identify and avoid potential barriers to success. To do so, the Cincinnati Collaborative must:

1. Build greater levels of trust (keeping participation high)
2. Avoid reverting to an enforcement approach (preventing a loss of trust)
3. Give them selves time and resources to show success with the problem solving approach (building more trust and shared vision)

Although a participatory process should automatically build trust, several factors threatened to prevent this from happening in Cincinnati. One of the African-American stakeholder groups, the Black United Front, was instrumental in filing the proposed suit against the city. A large part of their strategy was to keep pressure on the civic institutions through negative press and an ongoing economic boycott, even while the collaborative process was forging ahead. So while on the one hand the Black United Front was participating in the collaborative process, they were also continuing their more adversarial activities.

Also, it’s unclear whether the city’s involvement in the Collaborative was a strategic decision—to address social problems through an inclusive process—or merely tactical so it could avoid litigation. As the Black United Front continued to take confrontational actions, the city’s participation became increasingly lukewarm and inconsistent. In this negative cycle, each side was able to cite ample evidence to support its own assumptions about the other side’s antagonistic goals and motivations. The danger in this pattern of behavior is that, over the long run, it might undermine trust. If so, active participants might cease contributing. Let us hope that the momentum of the agreement itself will indeed prove the saying that “Failure is an orphan while success has a thousand parents.” If so, all sides will appropriately share credit for the agreement and work to ensure its fulfillment. Another issue is that, if the level of safety doesn’t increase to satisfy the community’s or police’s expectations, the police will tend to fall back on the more traditional enforcement approach—with the support of some residents. African-American citizens might experience such enforcement activities as racial profiling—something that would seriously reduce trust and perhaps convince many residents to stop participating in the collaborative process. This scenario could undermine or reverse any progress made!

FROM GRUDGING TO ACTIVE PARTICIPATION

The process of building shared vision together—along with the crisis spurred by the April 2001 riots—helped move grudging participants into the stock of active participants. The reinforcing loops (R1 and R2) create a virtuous cycle of increasing numbers of Active Participants.

Thus, in order to keep the current virtuous cycle going, the city must practice the problem solving approach intensively enough to show some improvements in important indicators of safety and quality of life. And leaders should widely publicize those successes. Doing so will keep stakeholders involved (because they’ll see the fruits of their efforts) and also bring others into the process.

What Systems Thinking Adds

Systems thinking isn’t just useful in doing an “after the process” analysis (as described above), but also as part of the development of an intervention. In any conflict that involves multiple stakeholder groups, because participants have different backgrounds and perspectives, they often have difficulty understanding each other. Building systems thinking maps (similar to those in this article) requires stakeholders to use a common language to refine a collective “mental model” of the important system behaviors they wish to address. To be successful, a systems thinking approach also must involve voices from all parts of the systems, giving participants the chance to hear other points of view.

This common language encourages stakeholders to answer the crucial questions: How does this system work and how is it producing the behavior that we see? We used this framework to develop the maps above to determine what convinces stakeholders to participate in the Collaborative and what might cause them to stop participating. Also, because the process of building and refining a collective map breaks down the “us versus them” barriers, participants generally come to trust each other more.

Further, if they desire, a group can convert their maps into computer models to run in public sessions or even over the Internet. Using these simulation models, interested parties can see if the agreed-to goals are achievable, and if so, what strategies would be necessary for achieving them. In this way, the models help participants reach agreement on appropriate goals and strategies and understand how the system will behave over time as the strategies are being implemented.

For example, we mentioned that in the Cincinnati case, the police might begin to feel pressure to revert to an enforcement approach—and that much of the pressure might come from the community! A model can simulate how this pressure might arise and show that if the police and community can ignore it and stick to the new policing strategy, then the pressure will subside as the new approach begins to show success. When people see this “worse before better” dynamic play out in a computer simulation, they are generally better able to wait it out in real life.

Suggestions for Similar Processes

For other organizations and communities experiencing conflict around a contentious issue, the Cincinnati experience holds tremendous promise. Here are some suggestions for how to implement (and improve on) the process employed there:

1. Identify stakeholder groups.
2. Work with both individual stakeholder groups and cross-stakeholder groups to identify What, Why, and How goals (consider employing or adapting the Action Evaluation Process described at www.aepro.org).
3. Use the systems thinking language of stocks and flows or causal loop diagrams to focus discussion and identify high-leverage goals.
4. Build simulation models to explore policies for achieving the goals (optional).
5. Assemble a cross-stakeholder group to refine the goals during an iterative process of exploring diagrams or models, reflecting, and engaging in dialogue.
6. Communicate the resulting goals to others in the stakeholder groups. Use public forums, workshops, and perhaps even the Internet to engage others in the process and make the goals a reality.

The conflict engagement process used in Cincinnati is already a dramatic improvement over the adversarial and legal approach traditionally taken in such situations. Many positive things have resulted, including the development of five goals that all stakeholders agree are worth trying to accomplish. The most important outcome is the commitment by citizens, public officials, and the police department to a community-based problem-solving approach.

By developing the goals together through a participatory framework, the stakeholders have created the foundation for a shared vision of what the community should be and how citizens and city officials should work together. From a systems perspective, this shared vision may be the most crucial component in ensuring the long-term success of the agreement. Only time will tell how the agreement will affect Cincinnati’s well being and if it will be the beginning of the deep healing process the city needs after many years of racial unrest. Systems thinking—as used in this article and as part of similar stakeholder processes—can help us understand how new behaviors will ultimately unfold and create positive and self-fulfilling prophesies.

The post From Riots to Resolution: Engaging Conflict for Reconciliation appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

BCC has dominated several sectors in the consumer waste containment business. Its cans and pails are found in many, if not most, American households, offices, and factories: under the sink, in the garage, in the laundry room, in home offices, near the toilet, in the garden, by the water cooler, in the copy room, at the vending machines, in the cafeteria, next to production lines, and so on. BCC has built and maintained its competitive advantage in its solid waste business through a strategy that focuses on distribution channel management, marketing and advertising, manufacturing processes, and materials science. BCC is a major center of knowledge about the various substances that make up its products, such as plastics.

In the domain of their consumer products, BCC’s materials science managers works closely with engineers and others, throughout the company, on integrating materials science with the manufacturing process, how product ingredients support marketing, and so on. For example, BCC’s waste pails are internationally renowned for their ability to withstand “punishment.” That is, the user can mistreat them in all sorts of ways, and they don’t break (for example, throwing them on the ground and banging them against hard surfaces, putting all sorts of substances in them, and/or placing them in locations where they are exposed to extremes of heat and cold for extended periods of time). The physical strength of its products is one of BCC’s key competitive advantages.

Recently, one group of BCC’s experienced technology managers noted some disturbing trends, including:

• The materials used in the business have become more complicated and, therefore, more expensive;
• Waste management containers are beginning to be linked with information technologies in new and disruptive ways; and
• Recycling regulations are becoming ever more stringent and they are affecting the design of BCC’s

While coming from scientific and engidisciplines, these technical managers were jointly responsible for the administration of the new product development pipeline. They had become more aware the onslaught of the future when they faced a period of accentuated conflicts and tensions during a recent product launch. Addressing a long-standing customer concern, the new product incorporated a deodorizing ingredient into the production of plastics for BCC cans. Required to mesh the work of their Intellectual Licensing, Basic Research, Prototype Scale Up, Manufacturing Design, Materials Procurement, and New Product Development Program Management units in a very tight frame, the managers of these Consumer Product Technology groups (about 100 people) found that:

• They disagreed over who was supposed to do what when (role confusion), and
• They would soon need to display excellence in various scientific, manufacturing, and managerial competencies that they hadn’t even considered (staffing issues).

Although test market data indicate that the new product will be successful, this complicated innovation left feelings bruised among many members of this technical community and their managers.

Rather than accept this uncom-fortable situation as a permanent reality, on their own accord, the managers of these units took the initiative to start meeting to discuss and plan for the future. They did not want a repetition of this experience. The importance of this self directed act will be more fully discussed subsequently. At present, let us simply assert that it is unique for a group of middle managers in different technical organizations to take steps to analyze and manage a problematic situation confronting their units with neither their superiors nor their subordinates demanding that they do so.

With one member of the group, in particular, championing the effort, managers representing the Intellectual Licensing, Basic Research, Prototype Scale Up, Manufacturing Design, Materials Procurement, and Program Management units met periodically over the course of several months to address role responsibilities and technology planning. They found that conversations regarding the management of their independent processes led to a significant reduction in tension between both the managers and members of their teams. Furthermore, these discussions fostered experiments, such as the sharing of information and certain key personnel between units for the purpose of ironing out bumps that had traditionally plagued the sharing of informa-tion and materiel between functions.

The managers began to reflect seriously on the impact of prospective innovations on technology strategy and the implications of possible new directions for the staffing and structuring of their units. Specifically, they began to construct “capability matrices” projecting out 25 years. They came to feel that their own thinking about their future was being constrained by their living and working within particular frames of reference. That is, their technical disciplines, their existence within Big Can, their age, their ethnicity, the ethnocentrism of their multinationals, etc. biased them in ways that they knew they did not know how to assess. One might say that they knew that they did not know how their existing mindsets limited them. They sought assistance from a consultant to open their eyes to new possibilities and to help them articulate a long-term technology vision.

They came to feel that their own thinking about their future was being constrained by their living and working within particular frames of reference.

The Futures Workshop

With an ostensibly enthusiastic blessing from the vice presidents for the various functions represented by these managers, the technical managers approved the design of a two-day planning workshop. The objective of the workshop was to generate a broad range of ideas about the forces that might be shaping the consumer product businesses in the future and to assess the possible organizational and structural impacts of these forces on the consumer products technical community.

The workshop moved through the following steps:

• A Metaphor Exercise in which groups of participants created a visual metaphor for the future of BCC’s business. The graphic indicated the key forces on the minds of its creators as well as three key opportunities embedded in the situation and three threats or concerns. For example, one graphic showed a picture of a box that represented the traditional relationship between BCC’s Materials Basic Sciences and its Engineering organizations, with an “outside the box” concept represented by bomb bursts coming from other scientific institutions, such as universities. The notion of a paperless society was introduced into the drawing as a threat. This concern was counter-balanced with the possibility that waste containers would have a built-in bar scanner that would assess the monetary value of used electronic equipment and other household equipment via a wireless Web connection.

• The managers then built a 25-year timeline that surveyed their opinions and hunches about prospective development in six different domains (, “STEEPA” categories):

  • Societal changes
  • Technological advances
  • Economic developments
  • Environmental considerations and regulations
  • Political issues
  • Aesthetic norms

Although this was not a rigorous investigation, every member of this intellectually curious group introduced a broad range of provocative ideas into this rich and vigorous multihour discussion. Here are a few of them:

• The prospect that pick-up charges for waste haulers will rise precipitously, putting garbage services out of reach for many current customers.
• The emergence of highly sophisticated recycling services that work best with increasingly complicated waste management equipment configurations, including containers that act on their contents in some way, e.g., weighing and prepackaging metal products.
• The introduction of containers that store hazardous wastes, such as certain types of batteries and lubricants, and track their value in the recycling market through wireless internet connections that can be read out through an electronic display on the storage device.
• An explosive growth of international opportunities linked to recycling.

Using an abbreviated version of a scenario construction technique, the team ranked the trends in each of the STEEPA categories and then chose two that represented the highest impact/highest uncertainty (, “cost of capital” and “interaction with information technologies”). They then mapped out four story lines, reflecting ways in which these trends could interact. Next, they chose their “preferred organizational narrative,” i.e., the scenario they most wanted to see happen in the future and, therefore, the one that they wanted to design their organization toward.

This discussion of the kind of world they would like to live in set up a multi-hour conversation about BCC’s structure: What was the most robust technical organization these managers could envision? That is, what structure might achieve the state of innovation and productivity desired by the managers, but would also be flexible enough to respond to whatever vicissitudes BCC would face?

Each member of the team laid out his or her response to these questions, and they discovered quite a bit of commonality. One member synthesized all the ideas into an elegant graphic. This was a farreaching proposal that would change a variety of BCC’s long-standing organizational structures for the management of technology, but offered much to hope for in terms of new efficiencies and interunit collaboration.

At this point, the managers became quite excited. They realized they had developed a proposal that would change each of their units, but would also, in their opinion, secure the future of BCC’s consumer product lines to which they were very committed. Further, they felt that they were in an ideal position to pro-mote these changes, since they knew the most about the actual workings of their particular technology groups. The scene had some similarities to one where the captains who will be most affected by a phase of a military campaign generate their own action plans rather than having them dic-tated to them by generals viewing the scene from some distant, and un-informed, locale.

Managers Get a Headache

The meeting ended with the managers doing some initial planning about meeting with the vice presidents to whom they reported and discussing how to inform members of their group who had been unable to attend the meeting. Also, because of prescheduled commitments, two of the members of the group—including the champion of the entire process had to leave the workshop early, even though they very much wanted to stay. Furthermore, the group itself was undergoing personnel changes. One of its members, the director for Basic Research, was leaving the company after 20 years of service and another going on to a position in Europe.

Almost from the moment the meeting ended, the managers’ hopes began to dissipate.

The Director of Basic Research was being succeeded by a younger scientist who expressed concern during the workshop with the idea that he was going to have to advocate these changes to his superior. This was his first time meeting with the group as a whole, and he was unsure of the agenda coming in. Members of the group assured him that they would assist him in making the group’s case to his president, and he seemed comfortable with the product of the group’s work.

Things did not go as planned. In fact, almost from the moment the meeting ended, the managers’ hopes began to dissipate.

First, the timetable for their meeting with the vice presidents changed dramatically. As soon as their superiors heard that the managers had had a useful planning session, the vice presidents moved up the initial timetable for discussing the results. This conversation occurred more than two weeks earlier than anticipated. The managers had intended to spend a full day thinking through an approach to the important conversation because they realized that their ideas were highly innovative and, therefore, politically charged. They were all supporting significant change in their own work situation. They were all willing to give up something in their units in order to achieve a higher degree of integration of BCC’s technology strategy. They knew that they were going to have to convey the importance of their strategy to their superiors. The eradication of their opportunity to prepare for the meeting made this impossible. However, no one thought that the group could say “no” to the vice presidents’ request for an early briefing.

Second, both anticipated and unanticipated personnel changes took effect. The seasoned manager of Basic Research retired, and the Program Manager representative attached to the Consumer Container Business took a new job as planned. Surprisingly, the member of the group who had captured the will of the team in a particular graphic was asked to stop participating in its deliberations because he was seeking a promotion that other members of the group would influence. The replacement for the manager of Basic Research was afraid to tell his vice president about the changes the team was advocating. And a new representative of Program Management struggled to become fully acclimated to the group, both because he had little background in the Consumer Products Business and he had no real connection to the other members of the group.

The meeting with the vice presi-dents was disastrous. The managers assumed the vice presidents would recall the background of the situation. Instead, they seemed to have forgotten a great deal about what was at issue in the managers’ meeting. Thus, the presentation was experienced as abstract and erratic. Even though the managers felt they had gotten a clear signoff from their superiors regarding the purpose of the workshop, one vice president criticized them for “having gone beyond your charge”: You were supposed to be looking at staffing issues for the immediate future and the next year. What is all this stuff about 10 and 20 years from now?

Another was nearly livid in his complaint: You’ve pushed yourselves into decision-making domains that you have nothing to do with! [He went on, essentially, to assert that the managers were trying to do his job.]

After the meeting, the managers beat a hasty retreat. They reworked their material to focus on the near term. The new member from Program Management took the lead in managing the “political interface” between the managers and their superiors by asserting that the group had misunderstood and mismanaged the political nature of their relationship with their superiors and that he should be the person to repair the situation; the other members of the group accepted this definition of the situation. The new manager of Basic Research distanced himself from the group. The “synthesizer” who had crafted the graphic that was so helpful to the group stopped attending meetings and spoke with excitement about other activities. The champion of the Futures Thinking project was humiliated by the entire experience. Feeling unsupported, he began looking for options outside BCC.

Summary: This team, which made such headway in understanding the future, decided to put the project on hold

A Specific Example of a Generic Organizational Disease

Particularism provides one lens on this story. That is, one could conclude that these particular individuals made mistakes. One can almost hear the chorus of critiques:

• , “They should have waited for the personnel changes to take effect before holding the workshop.”
• , “They should have said ‘no’ to the demand for an earlier meeting with their VPs.”
• , “They should have gotten clearer up-front approval for the Workshop.”
• , “They weren’t going to get anywhere without a greater commitment from the Basic Research guy, so why did they push ahead?”

On the other hand, this story can also be seen as an illustration of an all-too commonplace system dynamic called “The Failure of Middle Integration.” The human systems theorist, Barry Oshry, offers us this perspective. Oshry’s theory is based on hundreds of simulations of organizational life focused on the way in which the systemic dynamics created by social structure affect the power and efficacy of individuals and groups. Approximately 40,000 people have participated in these programs, and they overwhelmingly report a high level of coincidence between the generalizations of Oshry’s theory and their own experience in specific organizations. Interventionists, such as organization development practitioners and line managers who use these concepts to manage change efforts, also support the validity and utility of Oshry’s ideas.

Oshry contends that the systemic forces exert predictable impacts on groups at various levels of an organi-zational hierarchy. Unseen, these forces will almost certainly limit the effectiveness of any group and, therefore, the level of satisfaction people have in being part of it.

Using the terms “Tops,”, “Bot-toms,”, “Middles,” and “Customers” to represent people who either spend most of their working lives in the strata of organizational life suggested by these terms or can be described as having that position on a particular project, Oshry oversimplifying his argument—holds that:

• At the Top of a system (or any subsystem within it), specialization will emerge as a strategy for managing information overload (e.g.,Vice Presidents for Research, Operations, Infor-mation, etc.). The consequence of over-specialization is, ultimately, competition over the strategic direction of an organization (or a subsystem) and rivalry over which particular function should have the highest organizational status and receive the lion’s share of the available resources. He refers to these Top dynamics as “turf issues.
• At the Bottom of a system, solidarity and de-differentiation become preferred strategies for dealing with the inherent vulnerability of being in a system where others make decisions that affect Bottoms without the participation of the Bottoms themselves (e.g., plant closures and changes in procurement policy). Bottoms organically unite in the face of these conditions, and they frequently resent individual members of their group who attempt to differentiate themselves from others.
• In the Middle of the system—our primary interest here individual managers are pulled away from each other, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Oshry contends that this “alienation in the middle” results from both living and working within silos (functional, geographic, business line, etc.) and having to deal with issues that Tops and Bottoms in a particular silo have with each other. In other words, members of Middle groups disperse because they are kept at a distance from each other through the dynamics of the system. The more complex, the more bureaucratic, and/or the more hierarchical the system (as with BCC), the greater the level of dispersion in the middle management ranks. Dispersed Middles have difficulty integrating. They are “disintegrated.”

There are multiple negative consequences for Middle disintegration:

• Tops in a system have more issues and problems coming at them from all sides because Middles haven’t been able to pay attention to them.
• Bottoms are made more vulnerable because a seemingly functioning Middle team is not mediating arbitrary changes in their work and their level of security.
• Customers and suppliers get mixed signals because organizational functions aren’t working well together.
• Interpersonal distance between Middles separated by organizational boundaries tends to increase when managers and supervisors have both little contact with each other and regular experiences of being disappointed by one another.
• Middles as illustrated in the BCC case always have “something better to do” than interact with each other. They can’t find time to meet. They are continually pulled away from these meetings when they do occur by “important phone calls that will just take a second” or other interruptions. Since something else other than being with each other is typically more important to individual Middles, it is easy to see why Middles may not feel very close to each other as a group.
• They are regularly being promoted, demoted, fired, or transferred without much regard to the impact of these changes on Middle groups or without much Middle input into the processes by which these decisions are made. These personnel shifts provide Middles with frequent reminders of their low power status in organizations, with all of the attendant results of such self-perceptions.

Not surprisingly, given these outcomes, Middles are frequently seen as weak, incompetent, unreliable, indecisive, and/or prickly by both their superiors and their reports. Thus, they are also seen as the most expendable if and when the time comes to cut back on personnel.

Middle Integration

Oshry proposes “Middle Integration” as an antidote to these problems. Middle Integration occurs when the managers of various subsystems consciously make an effort to mitigate the effects of organic separation by meeting regularly to identify and address issues without their subordinates or their superiors being present. Middle Integration works best when it has the enthusiastic support of the superiors to whom middle managers report. Superiors demonstrate their encouragement for Middle Integration by refraining from “messing down,” e.g., demanding to have specific information about the conversations occurring among Middles, which was not so of the Tops in the BCC case. It should be noted, however, that they did not act in a significantly different manner than most others in their position would have if presented with the same set of events. They were not “the bad guys.” In fact, given Oshry’s theory, one would predict that Tops would be (1) either unaware of the systemic and structural conditions that make turf struggles, or aware of the conditions but unable to counteract them effectively; and (2) concerned about any integrative activity by Middles that would affect the “game of power” at their level in an unpredictable and unplanned for fashion.

For Middle Integration to occur, Tops should support the independence of Middles to meet, plan, and act without having to seek constant approval from their superiors. In turn,

Operational issues have been identified earlier and handled better, and relationships among middle managers and their units became more positive.

Middles should address the legitimate need that Tops have for information about Middle Integration activities by communicating regularly with Tops and aligning their integrating activities with the agendas, needs, and per-spectives of their superiors. This sort of linking process fosters the empowerment of Middles, who are constantly threatened with being isolated in their silos, while also bolstering the long-range strategic activities of Tops.

In the BCC case, for example, the Tops might have pointed to the far-sightedness of this Middle group as a reason to lower the cost of long-term credit, which is becoming an impor-tant issue to the whole company as international competition heats up.

Oshry outlines eight levels of Middle Integration:

1. No integration: The common condition, i.e., no awareness of systemic forces that pull Middles apart and no self-generated information exchange.

2. Sharing information: The simple transfer of data about different parts of the system .

3. Working the information: Diagnosing what the system (or its sub-components) needs

4. Coordinating responses to issues identified

5. Problem solving: Addressing identified needs through self-initiated experiments.

6. Mutual coaching: Helping each other with issues faced by individual members of the group

7. Sharing best practices: Enhancing organizational learning

8. Power bloc: Uniting as a Middle team to affect organizational direction and policy.

Compared with the preceding level, each degree of integration requires a higher level of commitment between Middle group members to their team effort. And, each higher level may entail greater political risk and, therefore, each demands a higher and higher level of encouragement and understanding from the Tops of the organization. For example, the Tops in the BCC situation could have expressed appreciation for their Middles’ work on the articulation of a technology management structure even if they, the Tops, were also considering the matter. Instead of punishing them for their initiative, the Tops could have treated the work of their subordinates as a valid option for their consideration.

Many organizations, including Microsoft, Ashland Chemical, Hewlett Packard, and Union Carbide, have been experimenting extensively with Oshry’s ideas. In instances where Middle Integration has been fully implemented, the results have been quite encouraging. Senior executives have been relieved of operational responsibilities and are more able to concentrate on larger strategic questions without sacrificing organizational efficiencies. In fact, operational issues have been identified earlier and handled better, and relationships among middle managers and their units became more positive with a variety of quantitative and qualitative results.

At BCC, however, there had been little explicit support for anything like Middle Integration. These managers were working against the grain of their system. In spite of their apparent endorsements early in the process, their superiors did not welcome the inventive initiative of these Middles. Instead, they saw the Middles’ behavior as poorly organized or ill considered, at best, or, worse, as insubordinate. The middle management team thought it had a level of support for its initiative that it clearly did not have. Rather, their superiors criticized them for being late to do the job that they were supposed to do, adding to the docket of their vice presidents’ responsibilities and implicitly criticizing them by stepping in to the vice presidents’, “turf.” As soon as they met this sort of resistance, the managers returned to their typical disintegrated state.

Middle Integration and the Survival of the Fittest

The collapse of the planning effort by the technology managers of BCC’s Consumer Products Division constituted the loss of a unique opportunity for this corporation. A group of senior managers moved from hope to disappointment. In spite of the fact that the members of this group demonstrated real talent as in investigating the future, the likelihood that any of these managers would initiate (or even participate in) such an undertaking was diminished. As a result, BCC has become considerably more vulnerable to competitors who are in a position to capitalize upon vulnerabilities to which this company chose not to attend.

Clayton Christensen points out that most “disruptive technologies” (i.e., technologies that take an industry into an entirely different direction) were initially evaluated and passed over by the firms that dominated particular industries. If, 10 years from now, BCC has lost much of its dominance of the consumer products containers business to more nimble competitors, it may well be because it didn’t have the capacity to learn from this group of forward-thinking, enterprising, and integrated middle managers.

This case may also be a cautionary tale for participatory theory at a general level. Interventions that bring multiple stakeholders and all levels of an organization together for visioning and problem-solving activities rely on the belief that highly stimulating and interactive processes can transcend the boundaries and rigidities created by organizational structure. The BCC case indicates that such interventions may be short-lived, however, if they are not supported by a commitment to organizational learning activities that makes the players conscious of the forces impinging upon the systemic “space” they occupy. Without such “system sight,” highly participative, short-term interventions may, in fact, become a foundation for enduring cynicism once people are again confronted by the Real politik of organizational life.

* Under the terms of the author’s confidentiality agreement, the case data presented here were deliberately designed to camouflage the identity of the company under discussion. However, the Big Can story remains true both to the issues faced by the client company and to the actions of the men and women discussed in this article.

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