The answer is usually unspoken but real. Coaching is something I do to improve another person or team; it’s part of my job. Learning happens to me; it makes me feel vulnerable. Learning focuses on my weaknesses, pressuring me to change the way I think and behave. Besides, I’m a professional, with established competencies and knowledge. I’m paid to get results, not to learn.

Thus, managers’ most common response to the growing demand for corporations to become learning organizations is to scramble to be the teacher, not the taught—the coach, not the coached. But, to be an effective coach, an individual must understand the nature of learning. And to understand learning, a coach must be actively engaged in the learning process and personally familiar with the kinds of vulnerabilities and obstacles a learner experiences.

Developing Learning Capability

Learning, coaching, and building a learning culture are critical to the success of modern businesses. Because learning increases our ability to perform, the capacity to grow capability is becoming indistinguishable from the capacity to grow wealth. However, unacknowledged resistance to learning and coaching can make it difficult for us to realize the ideals of the learning organization.

As children, we were naturally engaged in learning in everything we did. Thus, as adults, we don’t really need to learn how to learn, as much as we need to remember what we once knew. We need to unlearn some of the attitudes and practices we picked up from our formal education that seriously undermine our natural appetite and inherent capability for learning.

The Inner Game approach (see “The Inner Game” on p. 2) is about unlearning the personal and cultural habits that interfere with our ability to learn and perform. The goal is simple, if not easy: to give ourselves and our team’s greater access to our innate abilities. The approach can be summarized in a simple formula:

Performance = Potential – Interference

“Potential” includes all of our capabilities—actualized or latent—as well as our ability to learn; “Interference” represents the ways that we undermine the fulfillment or expression of our own capacities.

Diminishing the Obstacles to Learning

We can achieve increased capacity for performance and learning either by actualizing potential or by decreasing interference—or by a combination of both. In my experience, the natural learning process—which is how we actualize potential—is gradual and ongoing. By contrast, reducing interference can have an immediate and far-reaching impact on learning and levels of performance. Thus, a successful model for skill development must take into account the phenomenon of interference.

But beware: The barriers to learning are often well guarded and may become even more entrenched when challenged. Coaches must generally be gentle in their approach to surfacing interference to learning and performance in an individual or team. Hints, suggestions, and indirect probing, though they may seem to take longer than a more direct approach, are usually more successful over the long run.

I learned a great deal about interference and how to help people work through it while coaching tennis and golf—two sports in which the obstacles to performance are difficult to disguise. And I have continued to find these sports excellent examples for exposing hidden obstacles to learning and performance. In addition, tennis and golf show the kinds of results that can occur when one succeeds in diminishing the impact of interference.

One of my favorite examples is what I call “the uh-oh experience.” A tennis ball is coming toward a player who thinks she has a weak backhand. As the ball approaches, she thinks.

“Here comes a probable mistake.” She tightens her muscles, steps back defensively as if to avoid the threat, then slashes jerkily at the ball. When this action results in either an error or an easy shot for the opponent, she confirms to herself, “I really do have a terrible backhand,” and unwittingly sets herself up for the same results on the next similar shot.

If a coach tried to correct each of the elements of the player’s stroke that were incorrect, it would take months of “learning.” However, if the coach worked at eliminating the player’s negative self-talk by focusing her attention instead on perceiving the details of the ball’s trajectory, most of the positive behavioral changes would take place without conscious effort. Working at changing a player’s perception instead of his or her behavior saves time and frustration for both student and coach.

Below is a partial list of obstacles to growing capability:

• The assumption that “I already know.”Professionals often feel that they must present the appearance of already knowing everything and already being perfectly competent. This is an obstacle to learning that young children do not share.
• The assumption that learning means remediation. For many people, the suggestion that they should learn means there is something wrong with them or their level of performance.
• Fear of being judged. We learn this early, through teachers and parents who used judgment as a means to control behavior and effort.
• Doubt. The uncertainty we feel when we face the unknown is a prerequisite for learning. Young children are not embarrassed by not knowing something. However, as we age, we are taught to feel stupid or incompetent if we lack knowledge or experience or are unable to perform up to expectations. We are especially vulnerable to this feeling when faced with the challenge of unlearning something. The prospect of acknowledging that we might have invested time and effort in a perspective that is no longer valid can seem especially threatening.
• Trying too hard to learn and to appear learned. This phenomenon is a derivative of fear and doubt, and leads to constricted potential and mistakes. Our errors then confirm ours self-doubt and bring about the very outcome that we feared.

Revealing the barriers to learning and performance can be an important first step in maximizing an individual’s or a team’s potential. To find the greatest leverage for reducing obstacles to learning in the workplace, I believe we should start with our definition of work itself. The way we see “work” has an impact on how we perceive everything we do in the workplace.

What Is Work?

If you ask executives the meaning of the word work, they focus on work as doing something—as accomplishing a goal, such as providing a product or service. In other words, to many people, work means performance. But definitions that equate work with performance can be limiting, especially in the current business environment.

Are there other results of work? When I ask executives this question, they generally offer responses that refer to two other distinct aspects of work. One is the domain of experience: How you feel while working is also a result of work. While working, people feel satisfaction, meaning, accomplishment, and challenge, as well as frustration, stress, anxiety, and boredom. Everyone at work experiences feelings that range from misery to fulfillment.

A second set of answers fall into the category of learning: While working, you can grow, develop know-how and skills, and improve your ability to communicate, plan, and strategize. Like performance and experience, learning is a universal and fundamentally human result of work—people of all ages, cultures, and levels of expertise are either learning and growing or stagnating and “devolving” while working. Adults can learn while working, just as children learn naturally while playing.

The Work Triangle

How are these fundamental results of work—performance, experience, and learning—related? They are unquestionably interdependent. If individuals aren’t learning, their performance will decline over time; if their predominant experience of work is boredom or stress, both learning and performance will suffer. These three results can be represented in a mutually supportive “Work Triangle,” with performance at the apex, and experience and learning at the base angles (see “The Work Triangle” on p. 3).

When I ask a group of executives, “Which of the three work results gains the greatest support and encouragement in your work environment?” their response is overwhelmingly, “Performance.” I then place my marking pen at the center of the Work Triangle and slowly draw a line toward the performance apex. “How much more priority is performance given over learning and enjoyment?” I ask. As the pen reaches the top of the triangle, a voice usually says, “Stop there.” In response, the majority chants, “Keep going,” until the line has gone past the apex and is several inches outside the triangle. There is a general chuckle and a sense of a common understanding of corporate priorities.

In the competitive world of business, it is easy to see why performance may be given priority over learning and experience. But what are the consequences of pursuing performance at the expense of learning and experience? In any but the shortest timeframe, the consequences are dire: performance itself will fall. And what will be management’s typical response? More pressure on performance, resulting in even less time and fewer resources directed toward learning or quality of experience.

How does the emphasis on performance play out in practice? Take your average sales manager who meets weekly with his sales representatives. The conversation usually focuses on performance issues, such as, how many calls did you make? What were the results of those calls in terms of sales? What are your plans for next week?

But what if the manager were committed to his own learning, as well as to his team’s development? He might also ask: What did you find out from customers that you didn’t know before—about their resistances, their needs, their perception of our products, how we compare to our competitors? How are different customers responding to our latest promotion? Did you gain any insights into your own selling skills? What is the competition doing? What are you interested in finding out next week? Did you learn anything that might help others on the team?

Our definition of work should include the worker’s experience and learning, as well as his or her performance. The real value of this redefinition of work is that it includes me as an individual. I directly and immediately benefit from the learning and experience components of the Work Triangle. The “Experience” side of the triangle reminds me that I can’t afford to neglect personal fulfillment during my working hours in the hope of enjoying myself only during vacation time or on weekends. I can never replace the hours of my life I spend at work, so I need to make the most of them.

The “Learning” side of the triangle reminds me that my future work prospects depend on the growth in in my capabilities. Even if I’m fired from my present job, I take with me what I have learned, which I can leverage into productive and valued performance elsewhere. When my customers, managers, teammates, and the surrounding culture pressure me for performance results, the Work Triangle helps me remember that the person producing those results is important, too. I neglect my own learning and quality of experience at great peril to myself as well as to my future levels of performance.

The Tunnel Vision of Performance Momentum

The definition of work that focuses strictly on performance results at the expense of learning and experience produces a kind of tunnel vision that prevents workers from being fully aware and focused. I call this state of unconsciousness “performance momentum.” At its worst, performance momentum is a series of actions an individual performs without true consciousness of how they relate to his or her most important priorities. Some call this mode of operation “fire-fighting.” Examples include getting so caught up in a game of tennis that you forget it is a game, or engaging in conversations that undermine a relationship for the sake of merely winning an argument. In short, performance momentum means getting caught up in an action to the extent that you forget the purpose of the action.

I don’t know of a more fundamental problem facing workers today. When individuals are caught up in performance momentum, they tend to forget not only important performance goals, but also their fundamental purpose as human beings. For example, my need to finish an article by the requested deadline obscures the reasons I chose to write the article in the first place, and dampens the natural enjoyment of expressing my thoughts and convictions. The person caught up in performance momentum neglects learning, growth, and the inherent quality of the work experience.

THE WORK TRIANGLE

The fundamental results of work—performance, experience, and learning—are interdependent. If individuals aren’t learning, their performance will decline over time; if their predominant experience of work is boredom or stress, both learning and performance will suffer.

The tunnel vision that results from performance momentum is difficult to escape when individuals are working in a team that confirms and enforces the focus on performance. Any activity that is not seen as driving directly toward the goal is viewed as suspect. However, when a team or individual sacrifices the learning and experience sides of the Work Triangle to performance momentum, long-term performance suffers. More important, however, the individual suffers. And because the individual constitutes the building block of the team, the team suffers as well.

Balancing the Work Triangle

A simple method for assessing the balance among the three elements in the Work Triangle is to evaluate the way an individual or team articulates performance goals in comparison with learning and experience goals. It is revealing that many employees, when asked about learning or experience goals, are vague and express less conviction than when discussing performance goals. Setting clear learning goals is a good way to begin rebalancing the Work Triangle.

However, the distinction between learning and performance is often blurred. Even individuals who have worked on plans for the development of their competencies often fall into the trap of expressing their learning goals in terms of performance; for example, “I want to learn to focus more on the customer”; “I want to learn to reach higher sales quotas”; and“ I’m working on learning how to get a promotion. ”The general rule for distinguishing between learning and performance goals is that learning can be viewed as a change that takes place within an individual, while performance takes place on the outside. Learning is an increased capacity to perform; performance is the evidence that the capacity exists.

A good way to focus on learning goals is through the acronym QUEST.

Q—qualities or attributes you might want to develop in yourself or others

U—increased understanding of the components of any person, situation, or system

E—development of expertise, knowledge, or skills

S—capacity for strategic, or systemic, thinking

T—capacity to optimize what you do with time

Teams and individuals can use QUEST to help form goals regarding what capabilities they want to develop. To be most effective, these objectives should support immediate performance goals but at the same time apply to many future performance challenges.

Coaching: A Conversation That Promotes Learning

When executives list the qualities, skills, and expertise they want from employees, they often list intangible attributes, such as creativity, accountability, sense of humor, team player, problem solver, and so on. So, how can you get the qualities and capabilities you want from people? The first response to this question is usually, “We have to do a better job in hiring.” Clearly, it is important to hire capable people. But the real question is how to build the capabilities in the people you have hired, and how to keep those qualities from diminishing.

Unfortunately, the tools of managing performance are not particularly useful for promoting or developing important qualities and core skills. And it is difficult to imagine a course that teaches the rudiments of initiative or cooperation. So what is left? The word I use for the capacity to promote such desired attributes is coaching.

Coaching is a way of being, listening, asking, and speaking that draws out and augments characteristics and potential that are already present in a person. An effective coaching relationship creates a safe and challenging environment in which learning can take place. Coaches know that an oak tree already exists within an acorn. They have seen the one grow into the other, over time and under the right conditions, and are committed to providing those conditions to the best of their abilities. Successful coaches continually learn how best to “farm” the potential they are given to nurture.

A primary role of the coach is to stop performance momentum by calling a time out and providing questions or perspective that can encourage learning. Actual learning happens through experience—taking actions, observing the results, and modifying subsequent actions. To turn a work experience into a learning experience, a particular mindset must be established beforehand. Establishing this perspective can be done through something I call a “set-up conversation,” which an individual can conduct alone through self-talk or with a coach. The set-up conversation helps make the learner aware of the possibilities that the imminent work experience could yield. In conducting one of these conversations, the coach asks questions that aid in focusing the individual’s or team’s attention.

At the end of a work experience, the coach and individual can hold a “debrief conversation.” During this interchange, they might “mine” the gold of what was learned and refine questions to take into the next work experience. In this way, experience itself becomes the teacher. The coach’s role becomes helping the learner as valuable questions of the “teacher” and interpret the answers.

Coaching is very different from what we are generally taught as managers or teachers. We cannot teach work teams and individuals how to grow capabilities—in the sense of the transference of information in a class-room environment. Nor can we build capabilities through managerial techniques—for example, requiring certain abilities and rewarding employees when they display them or punishing them when they don’t. Neither can we measure learning, because we can’t directly observe it. In sum, it is the learner alone who controls the process and perceives its benefits. Managers don’t even need to reward employees for learning—if learning indeed takes place, it will lead to improved performance. And employers generally award bonuses, raises, and promotions based on an increase in a worker’s performance results.

Employees and managers cannot afford to wait for their corporate cultures to become learning cultures. Workers benefit from an expanded definition of work that includes learning and experience goals, and therefore must make the commitment to achieve those objectives. But companies also benefit from this new perspective on work. Wise are the corporate leaders who recognize that redefining work in this way is a difficult task, but that the company and its shareholders also gain advantages from a balanced Work Triangle. The best managers will provide what support and resources they can to the effort, and will make it their mission to shape their workplace into an optimal learning environment. The payoff will be improved business results and a corporate culture that attracts employees who equally value growth in capabilities.

Tim Gallwey is credited with founding the field of sports psychology. His four best-selling books on The Inner Game have deeply influenced the worlds of business and sports. For the last 15years, Tim has spent most of his time working with companies that want to find a better way to implement change. This article is based on a working progress called The Inner Game of Work, to be published in 1998 by Random House.

Editorial support for this article was provided by Janice Molloy.

The post The Inner Game of Work: Building Capability in the Workplace appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

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

A Knowledge-Creating System

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

THE CYCLE OF KNOWLEDGE-CREATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE STOCKS AND FLOWS OF KNOWLEDGE-CREATION

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

Institutionalized Fragmentation

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

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

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

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

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

Technical Rationality: One Root of Fragmentation

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

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

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

THE FRAGMENTATION OF INSTITUTIONS

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

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

Organizing for Learning

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

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

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

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

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

Learning Communities

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

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

Learning Communities in Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

A LEARNING COMMUNITY

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

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

Perhaps there is an element of self-protection at work — the comfort of being able to hold someone else (namely, top management) responsible for the lack of effective leadership. There is no doubt that a CEO who is opposed to fundamental change can make life difficult for internal innovators, but this hardly proves that only the CEO can bring about significant change.

Two Views on Leadership

Let’s consider some different statements about leadership and change: “Little significant change can occur if it is driven from the top.” “CEO proclamations and programs rolled out from corporate headquarters are a good way to undermine deeper changes.” “Top-management ‘buy-in’ is a poor substitute for genuine commitment at many levels in an organization.”

These statements are supported by the experiences of two innovative leaders, Phil Carroll of Shell Oil and Rich Teerlink of Harley-Davidson.

Phil Carroll recalls, “When I first came in as CEO, everyone thought, ‘Phil will tell us what he wants us to do.’ But I didn’t have a clue, and if I had, it would have been a disaster.” Likewise, Rich Teerlink says, “Anyone who thinks the CEO can drive this kind of change is wrong.”

There are several reasons why leaders like Carroll and Teerlink have come to a more humble view of the power of top management. First is the cynicism that exists in most organizations after years of management fads. When the CEO preaches about “becoming a learning organization,” people roll their eyes and think to themselves, “Here we go again. I wonder what seminar s/he went to last weekend.” Most corporations have had so many “flavor-of-the-month” initiatives from management that people immediately discount any new pronouncement as more “executive cheer-leading” or, as they say at Harley-Davidson, “another fine program.”

A second reason has to do with the difference between compliance and commitment. Hierarchical authority is much more effective at securing compliance than it is in fostering genuine commitment. “It seemed that every year someone pressured us to change our promotion review process to incorporate our values,” reflects former Hanover Insurance CEO Bill O’Brien. “But we never caved in to this pressure. A value is only a value if it is voluntarily chosen. No reward system has ever been invented that people in an organization haven’t learned how to ‘game.’ We didn’t want just new behaviors. We wanted new behaviors for the right reasons” (“Moral Formation for Managers: Closing the Gap Between Intention and Practice,” in Character and the Corporation, MIT Center for Organizational Learning Research Monograph, 1994). There is simply no substitute for commitment in bringing about deep change. No one can force another person to learn, especially if that learning involves deep changes in beliefs and attitudes or fundamentally new ways of thinking and acting.

A third reason a different type of leadership is needed is that top-management initiatives often end up moving organizations backward, not forward. This can occur in obvious ways, such as top-management downsizings and reorganizations that have the side-effect of increasing internal competitiveness, which ends up undermining collaboration and, ultimately, economic performance. But it can also occur more subtly, even in changes explicitly designed to improve learning. For example, a mandated “360-degree feedback” process not only reinforces a compliance mentality, but it also lessens the likelihood of people surfacing what Harvard’s Chris Argyris calls the “potentially embarrassing information” that might “produce real change” (“Good Communication That Blocks Real Learning,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 1994). This kind of information will come into the open only when people have genuine trust, curiosity, and shared responsibility — conditions not usually fostered by mandated programs.

Even so, it must be acknowledged that many large-scale change programs — reorganizations, downsizing, corporate-wide cost reduction programs, or re-engineering programs — can be implemented only from top-management levels. But such changes will not affect the corporate culture if it is based on fear and defensiveness. Nor will they unleash people’s imagination and passions and enhance their ability to form genuinely shared visions. They will not change the quality of thinking in the organization, or increase intelligence at the front lines, where people con-front increasingly complex and dynamic business environments. And they will do nothing to foster the trust and skills needed by teams at all levels if they are to reflect on hidden assumptions and to inquire into the reasoning behind their own actions.

Types of Leadership

For the past 20 years, many colleagues and I have been working with managers and teams to develop enhanced learning capabilities that center around five related disciplines: systems thinking, surfacing and improving mental models, fostering dialogue, nurturing personal vision, and building shared visions. Four years ago, a group of us at MIT began to form a consortium of corporations with two main objectives: to advance the theory and method underlying this work; and to demonstrate what is possible when organizations begin working together toward integrating new learning capabilities into important work settings. The MIT Center for Organizational Learning currently involves about 20 corporations, mostly Fortune 100 firms.

Within these companies, we regularly confront the dilemmas posed by the conflicting views of leadership described above. Resolving these dilemmas requires fundamental shifts in our traditional thinking about leadership.

These shifts start with the simple view of leaders as those people who “walk ahead,” people who are genuinely committed to deep change in themselves and in their organizations and who demonstrate their commitment through their actions. They lead through developing new understandings, new skills, and new capabilities for individual and collective learning. And they come from many places within an organization.

In particular, we have identified three essential types of leaders in building learning organizations, roughly corresponding to three different organizational positions:

1. Local line leaders, who can undertake meaningful experiments to test whether new learning capabilities actually lead to improved business results.

2. Executive leaders, who provide support for line leaders, develop learning infrastructures, and lead by example in the gradual process of evolving the norms and behaviors of a learning culture.

3. Internal networkers, or community builders, who can move freely about the organization to find those who are predisposed to bringing about change, to help out in organizational experiments, and to aid in the diffusion of new learning.

Local Line Leaders

Nothing can start without committed local line leaders: individuals with significant business responsibility and “bottom-line” focus. They head organizational units that are microcosms of the larger organization, and yet have enough autonomy to be able to undertake meaningful change independent of the larger organization. To create useful experiments, they must confront the same issues and business challenges that are occurring within the larger organization. For example, a unique cross-functional task force may be less useful for a learning experiment than a team that manages a process that is ongoing, generic, and vital for future competitiveness, such as a product development team, a sales team, or a business division.

The key role played by local line leaders is to sanction significant practical experiments and to lead through active participation in those experiments. Without serious experiments aimed at connecting new learning capabilities to business results, there is no way to assess whether enhancing learning capabilities is just an intellectually appealing idea or if it can really make a difference. Typically, a Learning Center project will begin with a core team composed of line leaders who might initially work together for six to twelve months. During this time, they work on developing their own skills in systems thinking, collaborative inquiry, and building shared vision, and then begin applying those skills to their own issues. Only then will they be able to begin designing learning processes that might spread such skills throughout their organization and become embedded in how work is done.

For example, a team of sales managers and sales representatives at Federal Express worked together for over a year before they began to develop what eventually became the Global Customer Learning Laboratory “We felt we needed new tools for working with our key corporate customers as learning partners,” says Cathy Stopcynski of Federal Express. “That’s why the Global Customer Learning Laboratory is important. It gives us a whole new way to work together with customers to improve our collective thinking and come up with completely new solutions to complex logistics problems. “At Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a growing network of local line leaders is bringing learning organization principles and methods into work with customers through EDS’s “Leading Learning Communities” program.

Most corporations have had so many “flavor-of-the-month” initiatives from management that people immediately discount any new pronouncement as more “executive cheerleading” or, as they say at Harley-Davidson, “another fine program.”

In addition to playing a key role in the design and implementation of new learning processes, local line leaders often become teachers once these learning processes become established. In fact, the most effective facilitators in learning processes such as the Global Customer Learning Laboratory are usually not professional trainers but the line managers themselves. Their substantive knowledge and practical experience give them unique credibility. Facilitating others’ learning also becomes a powerful, ongoing way for line leaders to deepen their own understanding and capabilities.

However, engaging local line leaders may be difficult. As pragmatists, they often find ideas like systems thinking, mental models, and dialogue intangible and “hard to get their hands around.” “When I was first exposed to the MIT work,” says Fred Simon, former head of the Lincoln Continental program at Ford Motor Company, “I was highly skeptical. I had heard so many ‘academic’ theories that made sense but never produced for us. But I was also not happy with our team’s ability to work together. I knew there must be a better way, and my business planning manager was convinced this could make a difference’

Simon’s view is typical of many line leaders at the outset: he was skeptical, but he recognized that he had problems that he could not solve. He also had a trusted colleague who was willing to engage with him. Again and again, we have found that healthy, open-minded skeptics can become the most effective leaders and, eventually, champions of this work. They keep the horse in front of the cart by focusing first and foremost on business results. Such people invariably have more staying power than the “fans” who get excited about new ideas but whose excitement wanes once the newness wears off.

Because line leaders are focused primarily on their business unit, however, they may not think much about learning within the larger organization, and typically they have little time to devote to diffusion of their efforts. They may also be unaware of—and relatively inept at dealing with—the anti-learning forces in the larger organization. They become impatient when the larger organization does not change to match their new ideas, and may start to feel misunderstood and unappreciated. They can easily develop an “us against the world” mentality, which will make them especially ineffective in communicating their ideas to others.

Innovative local line managers are often more at risk than they realize. They typically believe, “My bosses will leave me alone as long as I produce results, regardless of the methods I use.” But the “better mousetrap” theory may not apply in large institutions. Improved results are often threatening to others, and the more dramatic the improvement, the greater the threat. Large organizations have complex forces that maintain the status quo and inhibit the spread of new ideas. Often, even the most effective local line leaders fail to understand these forces or know how to work with them.

Despite these limitations, committed local line leadership is essential. At least half of the Learning Center companies that have made significant strides in improving business results and developing internal learning capabilities have had little or no executive leadership. But we have seen no examples where significant progress has been made in an organization without leadership from local line managers, and many examples where sincerely committed CEOs have failed to generate any significant momentum.

Executive Leaders

At the Learning Center, our excitement around the practical experiments led by local line managers has frequently made us blind to the necessary and complementary roles played by executive leaders. Local line leaders can benefit significantly from “executive champions” who can be protectors, mentors, and thinking partners. When dramatic improvements achieved in one line organization threaten others, executive partners can help manage the threat. Alternatively, executive partners can make sure that new innovative practices are not ignored because people are too busy to take the time to understand what the innovators are doing. By working in concert with internal networkers, executives can help connect innovative local line leaders with other like-minded people. They also play a mentoring role in helping the local line leaders understand complex political cross-currents and communicate their ideas and accomplishments to those who have not been involved.

In one company, a local line organization had achieved what it regarded as dramatic improvements in the product development process, but its efforts lacked credibility when judged by more traditional metrics. For instance, at critical checkpoints the team had record numbers of engineering change orders. The team interpreted this as evidence that people were more willing to surface and fix problems early in the development process. But outside the team, these same orders were seen as evidence that the group was “out of control:’

Eventually, executives in the company commissioned an independent audit, which showed that the team was indeed highly effective. The executives also supported the development of a “learning history” to help others understand how the team had accomplished its results.

But the “better mousetrap” theory may not apply in large institutions. Improved results are often threatening to others, and the more dramatic the improvement, the greater the threat.

Part of our difficulty with appreciating the role that effective executive leadership can play in learning is that all of us are used to the “captain of the ship” image of traditional hierarchical leaders. However, when executives act as teachers, stewards, and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle, contextual, and long term than the traditional model of the power-wielding hierarchical leader.

“We in top management are responsible for creating an operating environment that can allow continual learning,” says Harley-Davidson’s Teerlink. Although executive leadership has traditionally focused on structure and strategy, Teerlink and other executives are increasingly thinking about the operating environment in less tangible ways.

Effective executive leaders can build an environment that is conducive to learning in several ways. The first is by articulating guiding ideas. “I have always believed that good ideas will drive out bad ideas,” says Hanover’s O’Brien. “One of the basic problems with business today is that our organizations are guided by too many mediocre ideas — ideas which do not foster aspirations worthy of people’s commitment.” Guiding ideas are different from slogans or management buzzwords. They are developed gradually, often over many years, through reflection on an organization’s history and traditions and on its long-term growth and opportunities.

A second way to build operating environments for learning is through conscious attention to learning infrastructure. In a world of rapid change and increasing interdependence, learning is too important to be left to chance. “We have plenty of infrastructure for decision making within AT&T,” says Chairman Bob Allen. “What we lack is infrastructure for learning” (Peter M. Senge, et al., The Fifth Discipline Field-hook, 1994, p. 34).

I have met many CEOs in recent years who have lamented that “we can’t learn from ourselves” or “we are better at learning from competitors than from our own people.” But with little or no infrastructure to support ongoing learning, one might ask, “Why should successful new practices spread in organizations?” Who studies these innovations to document why they worked? Where are the learning processes that will enable others to follow in the footsteps of successful innovators? Who is responsible for creating these learning processes?

There can be little doubt of the long-term business impact of executive leadership in developing learning infrastructure. When the Royal Dutch/Shell Group’s central group planning leaders became convinced that “scenario thinking” was a vital survival skill in turbulent, unpredictable world oil markets, they didn’t initiate a set of scenario-planning courses for Shell’s management. Instead, they redesigned the planning infrastructure so that management teams regularly were asked not just for their budget and their “plan,” but for several plans describing how they would manage under multiple possible futures. “Planning as learning” has gradually become a way of life within Shell — a change to which many attribute Shell’s rise to preeminence in the world oil business.

A third way to build operating environments for learning lies within the executive’s own domain for taking action — namely, the executive team itself. It is important that executives recognize that they, too, must change, and that many of the skills that have made them successful in the past can actually inhibit learning.

I think these ideas will eventually lead to a very different mindset and, ultimately, a different skill-set among executives. “Gradually, I have come to see a whole new model for my role as a CEO,” says Shell Oil’s Carroll. “Perhaps my real job is to be the ecologist for the organization. We must learn how to see the company as a living system and to see it as a system within the context of the larger systems of which it is a part. Only then will our vision reliably include return for our shareholders, a productive environment for our employees, and a social vision for the company as a whole.”

Internal Networkers

The most unappreciated leadership role is that of the internal networkers, or what we often call internal community builders. Internal networkers are effective for the very reasons that top-management efforts to initiate change can backfire — oftentimes, no power is power. Precisely because they have no positional authority, internal networkers are free to move about a large organization relatively unnoticed.

When the CEO visits someone, everyone knows. When the CEO says, “We need to become a learning organization,” everyone nods. But when someone with little or no positional authority begins asking which people are genuinely interested in changing the way they and their teams work, the only ones likely to respond are those who are genuinely interested. And if the internal networker finds one person who is interested and asks, “Who else do you think really cares about these things?” he or she is likely to receive an honest response. The only authority possessed by internal networkers comes from the strength of their convictions and the clarity of their ideas.

It is very difficult to identify the internal networkers because they can be people in many different organizational positions. They might be internal consultants, trainers, or personnel staff in organization development or human resources. They might be front-line workers like engineers, sales representatives, or shop stewards. They might, under some circumstances, be in senior staff positions. What is important is that they are able to move around the organization freely, with high accessibility to many parts of the organization. They understand the informal networks through which information and stories flow and how innovative practices naturally diffuse within organizations.

Internal networkers are effective for the very reasons that top-management efforts to initiate change can backfire—oftentimes, no power is power….The only authority possessed by internal networkers comes from the strength of their convictions and the clarity of their ideas.

The first vital function played by internal networkers is to identify local line managers who have the power to take action and who are predisposed to developing new learning capabilities. Much time and energy can be wasted by working with the wrong people, especially in the early stages of a change process. Convincing people that they should be interested in systems thinking or learning is inherently a low-leverage strategy. Even if they are persuaded initially, they are unlikely to persevere.

When the Liaison Officers from the Learning Center companies were asked how they each got started in this work, they responded, virtually unanimously, that they were “predisposed.” All of them had something in their backgrounds — perhaps an especially influential college course, a particular work experience, or just lifelong interest — that made them more open to the systems perspective. They each had a deep curiosity about learning, or mental models, or the mystery of profound teamwork. In turn, they felt attuned to others they met who shared this predisposition.

In ongoing experiments within line organizations, we have found that internal networkers can help in many ways. In our own Learning Center projects, they serve as project managers, as co-facilitators, or as “learning historians” — people trained to track a major change process and to help those who are involved to better reflect on what they are learning (see “Learning Histories: ‘Assessing’ the Learning Organization,” May 1995). As practical knowledge is built, internal networkers continue to serve as organizational “seed carriers,” connecting like-minded people from diverse settings and making them aware of each other’s learning efforts. Gradually, they may help in developing the more formal coordination and steering mechanisms needed to move from local experiments to broader, organization-wide learning. At Ford, for example, an informal “Leaders of Learning” group was formed by local line leaders and internal networkers who wanted to share leanings and serve as a strategic leadership body. They saw their work as supporting continuing experiments, connecting those experiments with the interests of top management, and wrestling with organization-wide capacity building and learning.

As with local line managers and executive leaders, the limitations of internal networkers are likewise counterparts to their strengths. Because they do not have a great deal of formal authority, they can do little to counter hierarchical authority directly. If a local line leader becomes a threat to peers or supervisors, they may be powerless to help him or her. Internal networkers have no authority to institute changes in organizational structures or processes. So, even though they are essential, internal networkers are most effective when working in concert with local line leaders and executive leaders.

The Leadership Challenges

The leadership challenges inherent in building learning organizations are a microcosm of the leadership issue of our times: how human communities can productively confront complex issues where hierarchical authority is inadequate to bring about change. None of today’s most pressing issues — deterioration of the natural environment, the international arms race, erosion of the public education system, or the breakdown of the family and increasing social fragmentation — will be resolved through hierarchical authority.

In all these issues, there are no single causes, no simple “fixes” There is no one villain to blame. There will be no magic pill. Significant change will require imagination, perseverance, dialogue, deep caring, and a willingness to change on the part of millions of people. I believe these same challenges exist in the work of building learning organizations.

Recently, a group of CEOs from the Learning Center companies spent a half-day with Karl-Henrik Rob rt, the founder of Sweden’s path-breaking Natural Step process for helping societies become ecologically sustainable. The next day, Rich Teerlink of Harley-Davidson came in and said, “I don’t know why I stay awake at night trying to figure out how to transform a six-thousand person company. Yesterday, we talked with someone who is transforming a country of four million people.”

The necessity of creating systemic change where hierarchy is inadequate will, I believe, push us to new views of leadership based on new principles. These challenges cannot be met by isolated heroic leaders. They will require a unique mix of different people, in different positions, who lead in different ways. Although the picture sketched above is tentative and will certainly evolve over time, I doubt that it understates the changes that will be required in our traditional leadership models.

This article is an edited version of P Senge, “Leading Learning Organizations” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Organizational Learning Research Monograph, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Peter M. Senge. It has also appeared in the Peter F Drucker Foundation book The Leader of the Future, M Goldsmith, F Hesselbein, and R. Beckhard, eds. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).

Peter M. Senge is director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization and co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization.

Edited by Colleen P Lannon. Illustrations by Nancy Margulies of Mindscapes (St Louis, MO).

The post Rethinking Leadership in the Learning Organization appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

But assessment strikes fear in most people’s hearts. The word itself draws forth a strong, gut-level memory of being evaluated and measured, whether through grades in school, ranking in competitions, or promotions on the job. As writer Sue Miller Hurst has pointed out, most people have an intrinsic ability to judge their progress. But schools and workplaces subjugate that natural assessment to the judgment of teachers, supervisors, and other “experts,” whose appraisals determine promotions, wealth, status, and, ultimately, self-esteem.

Assessing Learning

Is it possible to use assessment in the service of learning? Can assessment be used to provide guidance and support for improving performance, rather than elicit fear, resentment, and resignation? This has been a guiding question at the MIT Center for Organizational Learning for several years, as we have struggled to find a reasonable way to assess learning efforts. The motivations are essentially pragmatic: our corporate affiliates need some idea of the return on their investments, and we as researchers need a better understanding of our work.

To create a new system of assessment, we started by going back to the source — to the people who initiate and implement systems work, learning laboratories, or other pilot projects in large organizations. We then tried to capture and convey the experiences and understandings of these groups of people. The result is a much-needed document that moves beyond strict assessment into the realm of institutional memory. We call it a “learning history.”

The Roots of a New Storytelling

A learning history is a written document or series of documents that is disseminated to help an organization become better aware of its own learning efforts. The history includes not just reports of action and results, but also the underlying assumptions and reactions of a variety of people (including people who did not support the learning effort). No one individual view, not even that of senior managers, can encompass more than a fraction of what actually goes on in a complex project — and this reality is reflected in the learning history. All participants reading the history should feel that their own points of view were treated fairly and that they understand many other people’s perspectives.

A learning history draws upon theory and techniques from ethnography, journalism, action research, oral history, and theater. Ethnography provides the science and art of cultural investigation — primarily the systematic approach of participant observation, interviewing, and archival research. From journalism come the skills of getting to the heart of a story and presenting it in a way that draws people in. Action research brings to the learning history effective methods for developing the capacities of learners to reflect upon and assess the results of their efforts. Finally, the tradition of oral historians offers a data collection method for providing rich, natural descriptions of complex events, using the voice of a narrator who took part in the events. All of these techniques help the readers of a learning history understand how participants attributed meaning to their experience.

Each part of the learning history process — interviews, analysis, editing, circulating drafts, and follow-up — is intended to broaden and deepen learning throughout the organization by providing a forum for reflecting on the process and substantiating the results. This process can be beneficial not only for the original participants, but also for researchers and consultants who advised them — and ultimately for anyone in the organization who is interested in the organization’s learning process.

Insiders versus Outsiders

One goal of the learning history work is to develop managers’ abilities to reflect upon, articulate, and understand complex issues. The process helps people to hone their assessments more sharply by communicating them to others. And because a learning history forces people to include and analyze highly complex, dynamic interdependencies in their stories, people understand those interdependencies more clearly.

In addition, the approach of a learning history is different from that of traditional ethnographic research. While ethnographers define themselves as “outsiders” observing how those inside the cultural system make sense of their world, a learning history includes both an insider’s understanding and an outsider’s perspective.

Having an outside, “objective” observer is an essential element of the learning history. In any successful learning effort, people undergo a transformation. As they develop capabilities together, gain insights, and shift their shared mental models, they change their assumptions about work and interrelationships. This collective shift reorients them so that they see history differently. They can then find it difficult to communicate their learning to others who still hold the old frame of reference. An outside observer can help bridge this gap by adding comments in the history such as, “This situation is typical of many pilot projects,” or by asking questions such as, “How could the pilot team, given their enthusiasm, have prevented the rest of the organization from seeing them as some sort of cult?”

Similarly, retaining the subjective stance of the internal managers is important for making the learning history relevant to the organization. In most assessments, experts offer their judgment and the company managers receive it without gaining any ability to reflect and assess their own efforts. The stance of a learning history, on the other hand, borrows from the concept of the “jointly told tale,” a device used by a number of ethnographers in which the story is “told” not by the external anthropologist or the “naive” native being studied, but by both together. For these reasons, the most successful learning history projects to date seem to involve teams of insiders (managers assigned to produce and facilitate the learning history) working closely with “outside” writers and researchers hired on a contractual basis.

Results versus Experience and Skills

Companies today don’t have a lot of slack resources or extra cash. Thus, in every learning effort, managers feel pressured to justify the expense and time of the effort by proving it led to concrete results. But a viable learning effort may not produce tangible results for several years, and the most important results may include new ways of thinking and behaving that appear dysfunctional at first to the rest of the organization. (More than one leader of a successful learning effort has been reprimanded for being “out of control.”) In today’s company environment of downsizing and re-engineering, this pressure for results undermines the essence of what a learning organization effort tries to achieve.

One goal of the learning history work is to develop managers’ abilities to reflect upon, articulate, and understand complex issues.

Yet incorporating results into the history is vital. How else can we think competently about the value of a learning effort? We might trace examples where a company took dramatically different actions because of its learning organization efforts, but it is difficult to construct rigorous data to show that an isolated example is typical. Alternatively, we might merely assess skills and experience. A learning historian might be satisfied, for instance, with saying, “The team now communicates much more effectively, and people can understand complex systems.” But that will be unpersuasive — indeed, almost meaningless — to outsiders.

In this context, assessment means listening to what people have to say, asking critical questions, and engaging people in their own inquiries: “How do we know we achieved something of value here? How much of that new innovation can we honestly link to the learning effort?” Different people often bring different perceptions of a “notable result” and its causes, and bringing those perceptions together leads to a common understanding with intrinsic validity.

For example, one corporation’s learning history described a new manufacturing prototype that was developed by the team. On the surface, this achievement was a matter of pure engineering, but it would not have been possible without the learning effort. Some team members had learned new skills to communicate effectively with outside contractors (who were key architects of the prototype), while others had gained the confidence to propose the prototype’s budget. Still others had learned to engage with each other across functional boundaries to make the prototype work. Until the stories of these half-dozen people were brought together, they were not aware of the common causes of each other’s contributions, and others in the company were unaware of the entire process. The learning history thus included a measurable “result” — the new prototype saved millions of dollars in rework costs — but simply reporting a recipe for constructing new prototypes would be of limited value. At best, it would help other teams mimic the original team, but it wouldn’t help them learn to create their own innovations. Only stories, which deal with intangibles such as creating an atmosphere of open inquiry, can convey the necessary knowledge to get the next team started on its own learning cycle.

The Strength of the Story

Some learning histories have been created after a project is over. Participants are interviewed retrospectively, and the results of the pilot project are more-or-less known and accepted. Other histories are researched while the story unfolds, and the learning historian sits in on key meetings and interviews people about events that may have taken place the day before. “Mini-histories” may be produced from these interviews, so that the team members can reflect on their own efforts as they go along and improve the learning effort while it is still underway. But such reflection carries a burden of added discipline: it adds to the pressure on the learning historian to “prove results” on the spot, to serve a political agenda, or to justify having a learning history in the first place.

To create an ongoing learning history, an organization must embrace a transformational approach to learning. Instead of simply learning to “do what we have always done a little bit better,” transformational learning involves re-examining everything we do—including how we think and see the world, and our role in it. This often means letting go of our existing knowledge and competencies, recognizing that they may prevent us from learning new things. This is a challenging and painful endeavor, and learning histories bring us face to face with it. When the learning history is being compiled simultaneously with the learning effort, then the challenge and pain of examining existing frameworks is continuous. But to make the best of a “real-time” learning history, admitting and publicizing mistakes must be seen as a sign of strength. Uncertainty can no longer be a sign of indecisiveness, because reflecting on a learning effort inevitably leads people to think about muddled, self-contradictory situations. Much work still needs to be done on setting the organizational context for an ongoing learning history so that it doesn’t set off flames that burn up the organization’s good will and resources.

Currently, there are almost a dozen learning history projects in progress at the Learning Center. In pursuing this work, we no longer talk about “assessing” our work. Instead, we talk about capturing the history of the learning process. It is amazing how this approach and new language changes the tenor of the project. People want to share what they have learned. They want others to know what they have done — not in a self-serving fashion, but so others know what worked and what didn’t work. They don’t want to be assessed. They want their story told.

George Roth is an organizational researcher with the MIT Center for Organizational Learning and a consultant active in the study of organizational culture, change, and new technology introduction.

Art Kleiner is co-author and editorial director of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, and author of the forthcoming The Age of Heretics, a history of the social movement to change large corporations for the better.

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Why Empowerment Fails

While many managers have embraced the idea of “flat” organizations composed of empowered individuals, the existence of such organizations is far from a reality. If empowerment is truly valued, why have so many companies failed to make it happen?

The answer to this question may lie in the lack of organizational structures and norms that support empowered decision-making. Fundamentally, empowerment is about the distribution of power. In organizations, this is most tangibly represented by decision-making authority — who has the power to make what kinds of decisions. But empowerment does not magically turn everyone into great decision-makers, nor does it suddenly equalize differences in skills and experience. Unless the organization’s decision-making processes are designed to ensure the quality of the decisions, empowerment efforts are destined to fail. Even worse, that failure can lead to bitterness and disillusionment.

So, how can we distribute decision-making authority in a way that truly empowers people, yet still protects the organization from undue risks that can come from uninformed decisions? This is the central challenge of walking the empowerment tightrope: balancing management authority and employee influence.

Organizational Straitjacket

When initiatives such as empowerment or employee involvement are announced, there is a tendency to promote a new way of operating by condemning the old. In the case of empowerment programs, this often translates into a belief that decisions made individually are bad (the old model) and that decision by consensus is good (the new model). But as Robert Crosby, author of Walking the Empowerment Tightrope, explains, management exclusively by consensus can be a disaster. “When overused, consensus is time consuming and is often controlled by the most rigid or resistant members.” In effect, we end up trading one form of tyranny for another.

The assumption that empowerment equals consensus decision-making can create organizational straitjackets that lead to poor-quality decisions — and, ironically, can also leave employees feeling disempowered. One manufacturing operation discovered this counterintuitive behavior when it tried to create a flatter management structure through empowerment. The intention was to increase autonomy while improving both the speed and quality of decisions. But after several months, people felt less empowered to make decisions. Worse, many decisions took longer to make, which meant that more were made “under the gun” — and were therefore based on time pressure rather than on sound thinking and adequate data.

If we look at this phenomenon from a systems perspective, we can draw out the counterintuitive dynamics that are at play (see “Consensus Decision-Making Straitjacket”). In the “new” environment of empowerment and teamwork, the “old” view of making decisions single-handedly is viewed as bad. Therefore, Manager A is reluctant to make decisions on his own, even though his position may require it. Instead, he consults with various people and asks for their input. This reinforces the consulted individuals’ belief that it is a consensus decision, so they begin to research different options and feel that they “own” the decision.

CONSENSUS DECISION-MAKING STRAITJACKET

Lack of clear structure around empowered decision-making can result in a consensus decision-making “straitjacket”—a spiral of ever-increasing resentment on the part of employees and escalating levels of stress and paralysis on the part of the manager.

Although Manager A knows he needs to decide quickly, he feels uncomfortable taking that step alone because others are now actively engaged in the process. The time arrives, however, when action must be taken. Under pressure, Manager A makes the decision even though he has not closed the loop with everyone. Afterwards, he thanks everyone for their involvement and explains the reasons for his action. Although his decision was ultimately a good one, Manager A is left with a nagging fear of being perceived as control-oriented, which further reduces his comfort level with making such decisions and leads to more ambiguous decision-making in the future (R1).

And what about the people with whom he conferred? They are now cynical about Manager A’s commitment to empowerment and the value he places on their involvement. Thus, their willingness to surface their confusion about the decision-making process decreases, and the clarity about who needs to make what decisions never gets established. This, in turn, further reduces Manager A’s comfort level (R2). Both of these loops can lead to a spiral of ever-increasing resentment and mistrust on the part of employees and escalating levels of stress and paralysis on the part of the manager.

A New Decision-Making Model

In order to be effective, any decision-making model should provide clarity along at least two dimensions: 1) the type of decision, and 2) the role of each participant. Clarifying the type of decision provides detail on the level of involvement of each person. Deciding on the specific decision role for each person describes the nature and extent of his or her involvement (see “Decision Types and Decision Roles” on page 3).

Identifying the type of decision up front can be an illuminating exercise:

• Is this a decision that you need to make alone, perhaps due to the sensitive nature of the issue? (Type I)
• Can you make the decision with the benefit of some data-gathering conversations with certain individuals? (Type II)
• Is this a decision that requires a consensus among critical stakeholders in order to ensure smooth implementation? (Type III)
• Or, is the decision better left to those who are much closer to the issue at hand? (Type IV)

Determining what type of decision one is facing also begins to surface issues around a second aspect of the decision-making model: who should be making the decision. In effect, by clarifying the decision type, you are also identifying one of the critical decision roles—namely, that of the decision manager.

Decision Manager and Decision Roles

The decision manager, as described by Paul Konnersman in his article “Decision Role Clarification,” is the person responsible for managing the overall decision process and implementation. But identifying the decision manager still leaves room for ambiguity about what type of participation others will have in the decision. Konnersman therefore defines two other roles: the consulted participant and the informed participant. A consulted participant, according to Konnersman, is contacted during the deliberating stage for the purpose of data-gathering, whereas the informed participant is brought in primarily to help with the implementation of a decision that has already been made.

The fourth role in Konnersman’s typology, the approver, can be the trickiest role to fully understand and manage. Although this role is intended to help prevent the organization from making intolerable mistakes, if it is not used properly it can create a feeling of powerlessness and cynicism about empowerment.

The “Lurking” Approver Role

The approver role is tricky because it can look a lot like the old authoritarian power monger — someone who “empowers” others to make decisions as long as it meets his or her “approval.” And yet, this role is needed when the decision manager is genuinely not in a position — either by breadth of experience or scope of responsibility — to make a decision that is organizationally robust. Although the goal of an empowered organization is to make all decisions as locally as possible, that desire needs to be balanced with the reality of the actual ability to make those decisions.

If viewed from this perspective, the approver role can be the means to judiciously manage the transition into empowered decision-making by acting as a safety net for the decision manager as well as for the organization. But if this role is abused, a virtuous circle of ever-increasing organizational effectiveness can be kicked into a downward spiral, decreasing empowerment and leading to lower quality decisions (see “ ‘Lurking Approver’ Dynamics”).

In some situations, an approver needs to intervene in order to improve the quality of a decision (B3). But if the role of the approver is not clear from the outset, it can serve to reinforce the belief that the approver was “lurking” all along, waiting to see if the decision matched what he or she wanted. If it matched, he or she can then point out how the group had been empowered to make the decision. If it did not match, then the approver role can be invoked to make the “right” decision. As a result, the group feels that they were not truly empowered to make the decision. In the future, they will be less likely to put the same level of enthusiasm or trust into the decision process — potentially leading to lower quality thinking and lower quality decisions, which may require further intervention from the approver (R4).

The Approver Role: Setting Boundaries

In such situations, it is not the approver role itself that is the problem — it is the seemingly arbitrary use of the role that leads to a sense of powerlessness. Therefore, the leverage in this system is to identify the approver role in advance, and clearly establish the criteria under which a decision is subject to approval. It is particularly important to identify the specific parameters — the time frame, organizational risk, dollar amount, scope of impact, and other criteria — that will determine when an approver must be involved. Such boundaries provide a pre-negotiated context in which the role can be used most effectively.

“LURKING APPROVER” DYNAMICS

Sometimes an approver must intervene to improve the quality of a decision (B3). But if the approver role is not clarified at the outset, the intervention may breed resentment and lack of ownership over future decisions — potentially leading to lower quality decisions and further need for intervention (R4).

For example, a group may specify that all marketing decisions are owned by the marketing director, but that they require approval by the strategy council if such decisions are in direct conflict with the international market expansion strategy. Or a company can specify a parameter, such as $1 million for capital expenditure decisions or a headcount cap for hiring decisions, above which the decision manager must get approval.

If the person who is empowered to make a decision only finds out that the decision is subject to approval after the fact, empowerment will become a hollow idea that creates increasing bitterness. If, on the other hand, the details of an approver role are outlined beforehand (or at least the possibility of the emergence of such a role is discussed ahead of time) then the actual intervention of the approver can be seen as a self-correcting mechanism. People can see that building this mechanism into the system actually enables a fuller level of empowerment, while still ensuring the quality of the decisions (B4 and R5 in “Clarifying the Approver Role” on page 5).

Walking the Tightrope

Creating a truly empowered organization is a lot like walking on a tightrope. If we completely let go of managerial authority and let individuals always make decisions on their own, we are sure to be erring on the side of abdication. If we are too cautious and afraid of letting anything go, we will surely be accused of remaining controlling and authoritarian. The path of empowerment lies somewhere between those two extremes.

The approver role is critical for accomplishing that delicate balance on the empowerment tightrope. As an organization develops along the path of empowerment, however, one would expect that the number of decisions requiring an approver would decrease and the parameters might relax over time.

No one is going to be perfect in this process — it requires a certain amount of understanding and trust. But trust is a function of at least two things: integrity and competence. All too often, we misinterpret a lack of competence to be a lack of integrity, and we lose confidence in the system and/or in the people involved. If we are a little more forgiving of others when they falter, we may be graced with more understanding when we do the same. And if we have worked to establish a well-defined decision-making structure, we will at least have created a method for consciously selecting who makes what decisions and why. With this kind of guidance — along with a little understanding — we may eventually create the kind of empowered organization that we desire.

CLARIFYING THE APPROVER ROLE

If the approver role is built into the system as a self-correcting mechanism, it can enable a fuller level of empowerment in decision-making, while still ensuring the quality of the decisions.

Daniel H. Kim is the co-founder of Pegasus Communications and the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, where he directs the learning lab research project.

Editorial support for this article was provided by Colleen Lannon.

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Merlin had foreshadowed Arthur’s struggle when asked what was the most important thing in the world. “Truth,” he answered. “That’s the most important thing. When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.”

When we live the truth, we are truly alive. But when we live a lie, we kill everything around us. Many people are beginning to acknowledge that the systemic problems and limitations we are currently experiencing — in our organizations, our government, the environment — are the result of our continuing to live a lie rather than face the truth of our connectedness.

We are awakening from a lie that we have been brought up to believe — that the individual is but a cog in the wheel of a great machine called industrial progress — to the realization that ours has been a misguided dream. The myth that human relationships could be broken down into their constituent parts, like the parts of a machine, is being replaced by a growing appreciation for the integrity of the whole and the realization that we are all inter-connected with everything. If life is about a deep commitment to the truth, then the learning journey can be the awakening process.

Commitment to the Truth

How many of us feel that the commitment to truth can comfortably extend to include our work environment? How much honesty can we afford? We have come to fear the truth — and truth-telling — in our organizations, especially when it differs from the “company line.” We assume there must be a good reason for stifling the confrontations that would occur if everyone felt free to voice his or her own truth. We have a sense that chaos will take over — that order in our world will cease.

In a learning organization, the discipline of creating shared vision is rooted in personal mastery, and personal mastery is based on a commitment to the truth about current reality. That commitment provides us with a clear idea of where we are and what we believe and allows us to begin to build the creative tension that will propel us toward creating what we truly want (see “Creative Tension” diagram). In order to generate creative tension, we need both a compelling vision, and a clear understanding of our current reality. Without a vision, there is no real motivation to change. Without a clear understanding of where we are, we have no basis for effective action.

Only if we can tell ourselves the truth about the current reality in our organizations can we open ourselves up to new possibilities for innovation and improvement. Only through a commitment to the truth can a learning organization articulate a meaningful set of values that can guide it on its journey (see “Values of a Learning Organization” on p. 3).

When we are unclear about our own truth, we muddy the environment around us. When we clearly express our own truth and also our shared truth — our values — we contribute to the constantly generating field of energy we inhabit. In a “spirited” learning organization, the energy released with this kind of freedom is infectious. People like to come into this kind of space. When we do not have to censor what we really think and care about, we have more energy to devote to creating something that really matters to us.

Multiple “Truths”?

In this constantly changing world, a universe that seems to thrive on diversity and multiplicity and complexity, we can no longer afford to focus our attention on one view or one group of people. Learning organizations need the energy of all of their members, as well as the vision, the aspirations, and inspirations of everyone who is involved in them.

Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, emphasizes that ongoing conversations about personal visions are vital to creating an organization’s shared vision. As important as building shared vision is, however, Senge notes that the hardest lesson for managers to accept is that “there is nothing you can do to get another person to enroll or commit” to a shared vision. “Enrollment and commitment require freedom of choice.”

In the new documentary about Noam Chomsky called “Manufacturing Consent,” the linguist challenges a young reporter who is condemning him for defending the rights of a professor in France who wrote a book claiming that the holocaust never happened. In reply, Chomsky said, “Free speech is not only for people you agree with. Stalin believed in that kind of free speech; Hitler believed in that kind of free speech. No, free speech is for those you don’t agree with.”

True democracy is based on a fundamental belief in the benefits of listening to as many varied, distinct, and disparate voices as can be heard. What holds people together is that belief in the freedom to speak, to disagree, to have a different view. When that freedom is absent, fragmentation, isolation, and hostility are the result.

“I wonder why we limit ourselves so quickly to one idea or one structure or one perception, or to the idea that ‘truth’ exists in objective form,” questions Margaret Wheatley in her book Leadership and the New Science. “Why would we stay locked in our belief that there is one right way to do something, or one correct interpretation to a situation, when the universe welcomes diversity and seems to thrive on a multiplicity of meanings? Why would we avoid participation and worry only about its risks, when we need more and more eyes to evoke reality?”

Studies of chaos have pointed to how sensitive the universe is, and how important each individual piece is to the shape of the whole. This suggests that we need to encourage differences, rather than smooth them over. Wheatley states, “self-organizing systems demonstrate new relationships between autonomy and control, showing how a large system is able to maintain its overall form and identity only because it tolerates great degrees of individual freedom.”

When we are unclear about our own truth, we muddy the environment around us. When we clearly express our own truth and also our shared truth — our values — we contribute to the constantly generating field of energy we inhabit. In a “spirited” learning organization, the energy released with this kind of freedom is infectious.

The Substance of Spirit

Leadership and the New Science offers some interesting insights into the role of space in an organization. The book explores the more recent teachings of “the new science” — those discoveries in biology, chemistry and physics that challenge us to reshape our world view. In particular, Margaret Wheatley’s study of quantum physics, self-organizing systems, and chaos theory makes some challenging connections between our physical world and the organizations we create.

From quantum physics, we have discovered that we and our world are mostly space (99.999% of an atom is empty space). Wheatley suggests that this vast and invisible thing we call space is actually a field, teeming with information and resources, that we participate in whether we are aware of it or not.

“If we have not bothered to create a field of vision that is coherent and sincere, people will encounter other fields, the ones we have created unintentionally or casually,” she explains. “As employees bump up against contradicting fields, their behavior mirrors those contradictions. We end up with what is common to many organizations, a jumble of behaviors and people going off in different directions, with no clear or identifiable pattern. What we lose when we fail to create consistent messages, when we fail to ‘walk our talk,’ is not just personal integrity. We lose the partnership of a field-rich space that can help bring form and order to the organization.”

If space is not empty, but full of images and messages that we continually feed via our thoughts, words, and actions, then the content of our inner lives — our values, thoughts and beliefs — has a powerful impact on the field of space, or spirit, within our organizations. The quality of that field characterizes the spirit of an organization. We create the field around us, whether it be one which inhibits individuals or encourages them to expand and participate. The field view of organizations suggests the importance of actively working to help shape the spirit of the learning organization.

Leadership

What is the role of the leader in creating this kind of space? The leader of an organization cannot be solely responsible for articulating the vision or spirit of an organization and disseminating it, because that spirit must come from the involvement of all individuals in the organization.

But leaders in learning organizations can help to foster these new ideas by “walking the talk,” demonstrating by their own example that this is not a new flight of fancy, or the management solution-of-the-month. Leaders cannot force a tolerance of diversity; however, they can practice and encourage the exchange of views, especially ones that differ from their own.

We can let go of control as the predominant leadership style and choose to move in sync with the natural universe, which allows for more autonomy among its individual members. More importantly, we can choose to become conscious of our beliefs and attitudes (see “Paradigm-Creating Loops” in Vol. 4, No. 2) and become more willing to see the effect they have on others in our organizations.

Communication, explains Wheatley, is key to this task. “In the past, we may have thought of ourselves as skilled crafters of organizations, assembling the pieces of an organization, exerting our energy on the painstaking creation of links between all those parts. Now we need to imagine ourselves as broadcasters, tall radio beacons of information, pulsing out messages everywhere…Field creation is not just a task for senior managers. Every employee has energy to contribute; in a field-filled space, there are no unimportant players.”

Systems thinking is a discipline that continually prods us to examine how our own actions create our reality and identify ways in which we can change our own behavior to make a difference. With the help of new science discoveries and Margaret Wheatley’s thoughts on their application to the way we view organizations, we have a new arena to explore — the unseen, frontier of field-rich space.

Through exploring the values, truths, and meaning we find in the world, we can contribute to the generative spirit of a learning organization by bringing those intangibles to bear in our everyday lives, consciously and intentionally.

Our unique contribution toward building learning organizations may lie in our ability to know intimately the space we inhabit and how we contribute to the overall spirit of the enterprise. Perhaps that is the secret of the Holy Grail — to know the truth about ourselves, in whatever field we inhabit.

Further reading: Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science (San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler, 1992). Margaret Wheatley was a keynote speaker at the 1993 Systems Thinking in Action Conference, November 8-10, sponsored by Pegasus Communications.

Daniel H. Kim is the publisher of The Systems Thinker and Director of the Learning Lab Research Project at the MIT Organizational Learning Center. Eileen Mullen is a freelance writer living in Somerville, MA.

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First of all, we shouldn’t lose sight of the obvious: organizational learning has to do with improving performance. If a team is learning, we expect it to perform better. We wouldn’t consider a basketball team that continues to perform below its potential — regardless of its intellectual sophistication — to be a learning team.

But gauging learning just by performance can be a trap. I think a common misconception these days is that organizational learning is synonymous with improving performance. People are saying, “if product development times, manufacturing cycle times, defect rates, etc. arc getting better, then that organization is learning.” But those figures can be misleading. A team or a company can do all the wrong things and get good performance for a short period of time. The employees may be taking short cuts that will kill them five years down the road in order to get those manufacturing cycle times down, or they can be improving one performance index by wreaking havoc in other parts of the organization. Likewise, a team or a company can be doing a lot of things right but the results won’t show up for a while, either because of intrinsic delays or because there arc forces outside their control that are depressing results.

Signs that organizational learning is occurring are a lot more subtle and harder to measure than performance indicators, primarily because we are not used to looking for them. The sort of things we are going to have to learn to look for are a feeling of spirit and energy throughout the organization, and a sense of alignment. We will have to learn how to recognize an insightful, internally consistent diagnosis of a complex problem and a willingness among co-workers to continually test their favored diagnoses. People will start talking about their jobs differently. For example, you might ask someone “What are you doing?” and instead of rattling off their job description, they will refer to their sense of purpose, the customers they serve, and how their work interacts with others.

“Then we will begin to learn what never could have been learned individually — no matter how bright we are, no matter how much time we take, and no matter how committed we are.”

Another thing we would sense if an organization was learning is a difference in the quality of dialogue. There would be a real freedom among people to acknowledge what they don’t know. An atmosphere of questioning and experimentation would exist at all levels of the organization. People would feel comfortable saying, “Here is where our thinking is right now and here is where we want to be,” and would actively search out new ideas and input.

Perhaps surprisingly, there would also be a lot of conflict occurring in the organization. At Innovation Associates, we have often said that in highly aligned groups there is much conflict of ideas. People’s alignment — their commonality of purpose — would give them the confidence to disagree in a way they normally wouldn’t. As people become partners in creating a common vision, they will begin to feel a responsibility to challenge each other’s thinking in order to gain deeper levels of understanding needed to achieve that vision.

Along with this willingness to challenge thinking, there will also be an understanding of how to probe more effectively into other people’s viewpoints. Conflict will take on a different meaning — it won’t be a personal attack, pitting one person’s opinion against another. Instead, it will be a joint inquiry into how those differing perspectives can be combined to form a deeper understanding of the problem or issue at hand. This type of inquiry would show up in a conversation on the shop floor where one employee would say to another, “Oh, you don’t see it the way I do? That’s interesting. What leads you to see it differently?” Then we would start to see a greater balance between dialogues of inquiry and advocacy.

I think ultimately, the truest sign of a learning organization at work will be when people begin to enter into these dialogues of joint inquiry instead of always advocating their positions. Then we will begin to learn what never could have been learned individually — no matter how bright we are, no matter how much time we take, and no matter how committed we arc. What couldn’t be learned individually will become possible as a group. That will be organizational learning.

Peter Senge, co-founder of Innovation Associates (Framingham, MA), is the director of the MIT Organizational Learning Center and author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday: 1990).

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

A Tool for Corporate “Response-ability”

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

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

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

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

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

A Closer Look at Appreciative Inquiry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Five “D’s”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Steps Toward Appreciative Inquiry

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

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

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

AI in Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining Sustainability

Before sharing what I found, let me define what sustainability means. Our current economic system is fundamentally linear in nature. It focuses on producing products and delivering them to the customer in the fastest and cheapest way possible. We extract resources from the Earth’s surface, turn them into goods, and then discharge back into nature the byproducts of this process as massive amounts of often highly toxic waste (which we call air, water, and soil pollution) or as solid, industrial, and hazardous waste (which we dispose of in landfills or burn in incinerators). After 200 years, this so-called “cradle to grave” production system has become firmly embedded in our psyches as the dominant paradigm.

However, there is an underlying problem with this model: It turns out that the Earth’s air, forests, oceans, soils, plants, and animals do not have the capacity to endlessly supply increasing amounts of resources, nor can nature absorb all of society’s pollution and waste. The field of sustainable development has emerged in response to the mounting ecological and social challenges stemming from the traditional economic paradigm. At its core, this new approach fundamentally transforms the linear model into a circular one — what design experts Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart call a “cradle to cradle” production scheme.

This revolutionary economic paradigm eliminates the concept of waste entirely, because goods and services are designed from the outset as feedstocks for future beneficial use. To achieve this outcome, companies harvest energy and raw materials without damaging nature or communities. Then, as McDonough and Braungart say in their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (North Point Press, 2002), “Products can either be composed of materials that biodegrade and become food for biological cycles, or of technical (sometimes toxic) materials that stay in closed-loop technical cycles, where they continually circulate as valuable nutrients for industry.”

Organizations such as Herman Miller Inc., an international producer of office furniture and services; Inter face Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of commercial floor coverings; and Henkel, a German company that makes a broad range of industrial, commercial, and consumer chemical products are adopting this “cradle to cradle” model. As a result, they are realizing major cost savings, reduced risks, and increased competitive advantage, along with significant social and environmental benefits. But unfortunately, few executives in other businesses grasp the fundamental paradigm shift that sustainable development requires. Blinded by long-held mental models, they fail to fundamentally alter the ways in which their organizations produce goods and services. They believe that sustainability simply involves better controls, marginal improvements, or other “efficiencies” within their existing, linear business model. These managers cling to the fallacy that traditional, hierarchical organizations can manage closed-loop, cradle-to-cradle systems.

Seven Sustainability Blunders

Thus, most organizations seeking to improve their management of environmental and socio-economic issues inevitably fall prey to one or more of seven key “sustainability blunders.” Becoming aware of how these blunders can undermine an organization’s efforts to mitigate its impact on the environment is the first step in creating a sustainable enterprise.

Blunder 1: Patriarchal Thinking That Leads to a False Sense of Security Organizations that struggle to adopt a more sustainable path invariably employ a patriarchal approach to governance. Employees do only what management orders, and the organization strictly follows government mandates. Employees and the organization as a whole seldom, if ever, go beyond the requirements of their “superiors.” No one meaningfully challenges the linear economic paradigm or mechanical organizational designs that control thinking. This is the most serious of the seven blunders, because it creates an addiction to the directives of higher authorities and an abdication of personal responsibility.

Blunder 2: A “Silo” Approach to Environmental and Socio-Economic Issues In most organizations, different functions, such as environmental and labor relations, are usually assigned to separate units. Executives see sustainability as yet another special program and don’t understand how it affects design, purchasing, production, and all other units. Because no single unit can identify all of the ways in which processes or products affect the environment or social welfare, the status quo is perpetuated.

Blunder 3: No Clear Vision of Sustainability

Organizations struggling to adopt a sustainable path usually lack clarity about what they are striving to achieve. Without a clear vision, they often assume that being in compliance with the law is the sole purpose of their policies. But compliance is a backward-oriented, negative vision focused on what not to do. It depresses human motivation. Sustainability is a forward-looking vision that excites people and elicits their full commitment and energy.

Blunder 4: Confusion over Cause and Effect

The prevailing mental models held by most executives lead them to focus on the symptoms, not the true sources, of sustainability challenges. Organizations spend millions to mitigate emissions and discharges, never recognizing that these are the results, not the causes, of their problems. Emissions and discharges stem from the ways processes and products are designed and the kinds of toxic materials, chemicals, and energy used to make them. Pollution controls temporarily mask these problems and keep organizations focused on managing effects rather than on designing out root causes.

Blunder 5: Lack of Information

People need a tremendous amount of clear and easily understood information to comprehend the downsides of the linear production paradigm and the benefits of the circular cradle-to-cradle approach. However, most organizations fail to communicate effectively about the need for and the purpose, strategies, and expected outcomes of their sustainability efforts. Trainings, sign postings, and a few scattered events are insufficient to convey what a commitment to sustainable development involves or why employees should participate.

Blunder 6: Insufficient Mechanisms for Learning

When employees are given limited opportunities to test new ideas, and when they receive few rewards for doing so, not much learning occurs. Organizations struggling to become sustainable rarely institute mechanisms that allow workers to continually test new ideas, expand their knowledge base, and learn how to overcome barriers to change.

Blunder 7: Failure to Institutionalize Sustainability

The ultimate success of a change initiative occurs when sustainability-based thinking, perspectives, and behaviors are embedded in everyday operating procedures, policies, and culture; for example, when an organization links bonuses, promotions, new hiring, and succession planning to performance on sustainability. However, few organizations have incorporated sustainability in their core policies and procedures. Until they do so, employees will remain unconvinced of their employers’ commitment to this crucial issue.

The Wheel of Change

Although one or more of the blunders occur in most organizations, a small but growing number of early adopters are leading the way toward sustainability by successfully changing their traditional production and organizational paradigms. Their leaders grasp that deep-rooted cultural transformation is necessary to overcome the resistance inherent to the profound changes necessary to achieve true sustainability. Here are the interventions that successful change leaders use to resolve each of the seven sustainability blunders:

Intervention 1: Change the Dominant Mindset Through the Imperative of Achieving Sustainability

The false sense of security that people feel when they are in compliance with regulations must be undermined before employees will open themselves to circular cradle-to-cradle thinking and action. Disrupting an organization’s controlling mental models is the first — and most important — step toward the development of new ways of operating. Little change will occur if this step is unsuccessful.

An enlightened leader in a small organization can sometimes alter the controlling mindset by simply talking with senior executives, employees, and stakeholders. Tom Kelly, president of Neil Kelly Co., Portland, Oregon’s largest home remodeling firm, introduced sustainability principles to his employees and asked if they would like to apply them in their work. The workers said “yes.” The firm went on to manufacture the first interior cabinets certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and received the first LEED construction certification in the Northwest from the U. S. Green Building Council for its new showroom.

However, most organizations seem to require a major crisis to spur action. Senior executives at IKEA, a global furniture manufacturer, became committed to sustainability only after the company experienced a series of high-profile environmental and labor crises. Ray Anderson, chairman and former CEO of Interface, one of the world’s largest producers of commercial floor covering, became a convert after customers began to ask about the firm’s environmental policies. In the vast majority of cases, a relentless and compelling message from senior executives is required to make the case that safety from legal challenges, social protest, financial losses, customer defection, or environmental crisis can be achieved only by adopting a new business model based on sustainability.

Intervention 2: Rearrange the Parts by Organizing Transition Teams

Once business-as-usual thinking has been shattered, the next step is to rearrange the parts of the current system. Doing so requires the involvement of people from every function, department, and level of the organization — and key external stakeholders — in analysis, planning, and implementation. This “shake-up” is important because planners and decision-makers often surround themselves with likeminded people, do not trust the unknown, or may feel threatened by change. Consequently, they handle problems in the same way time after time. Changing the composition of groups brings fresh perspectives and ideas to the table. New people can see problems that the old guard couldn’t. They can also suggest different solutions because they are unconstrained by the dominant cultural paradigms.

The leading sustainability organizations shake up the status quo by organizing sustainability “transition teams” that develop new goals, strategies, and implementation plans. Over time, the composition and nature of the teams will change as people go deep into the organization to flesh out problems, break old thought patterns and perspectives, and align practices with sustainability. For example, the initial team may assess company policies and procedures and complete an audit of overall environmental and social impacts. Subsequent teams may be organized to apply the new approach within each unit and function. The most important step each team must take is to get clear about what it is striving to achieve, the role each person will play, and the rules they will follow to accomplish their mission.

Herman Miller Inc. established the Environmental Quality Action Team (EQAT) to “help the corporation through the muddy waters of environmentalism.” Once the EQAT was clear on its mission, it formed nine subcommittees, including the Design for the Environment team, which focused on formulating sustainable products. This team produced the Ergon 3 office chair, which is made with 60-percent recycled content. Ninety-five percent of the materials in the chair can be recycled or reused. Other subcommittees have identified reductions in energy use and packaging that have saved the company millions of dollars.

Intervention 3: Change Goals by Crafting an Ideal Vision and Guiding Sustainability Principles

The third key leverage point for cultural change toward sustainability is to alter the organization’s goals. Change the goals, and different kinds of decisions and outcomes will result. Doing so requires a clear depiction of the new ends the organization seeks to achieve and guidelines for how decisions should be made to achieve them.

The leading organizations use “ends-planning” (sometimes called “backcasting”) to craft an exciting vision of how they will look and operate when they are a sustainable enterprise. Compelling visions are felt in the heart and understood in the mind. Organizations can then adopt principles that support the vision and provide a roadmap for decision-making; for example, by deciding to use materials that are extracted from nature in ways that do not degrade the surrounding ecosystem.

Herman Miller’s vision is “to become a sustainable business: manufacturing products without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations.” The company uses The Natural Step and Bill McDonough’s “Eco-effectiveness” principles (www.mcdonough.com) as the guiding frameworks for its sustainability initiative. Scandic Hotels adopted a vision of achieving environmental sustainability by “moving from resource wasting to resource caring.” This vision led them to realize that ecological sustainability is not a cost but a source of profits and competitive advantage.

Intervention 4: Restructure the Rules of Engagement by Adopting New Strategies

After the organization has adopted new purposes and goals, the next intervention involves altering the rules that determine how work gets done. Doing so involves developing new strategies, tactics, and implementation plans. The organization should come up with both operational and governance strategies in this process. The enterprise as a whole must answer four questions: (1) How sustainable are we now? To respond, you need baseline data describing where and how the organization’s processes and products currently affect the environment and social welfare. (2) How sustainable do we want to be in the future? Adopt clear goals and targets that clarify when the organization expects to achieve certain milestones. (3) How do we get there? Design operational and governance change strategies for achieving the goals and targets. (4) How do we measure progress? Adopt credible sustainability indicators and measurement systems to quantify progress toward goals and facilitate adjustments.

In the early 1990s, the Xerox Corporation adopted the vision of becoming “Waste Free.” The vision catalyzed profound changes in operations all the way back to the initial designs of major product lines. The strategies required decentralized decision-making, which helped to dramatically increase employee morale and commitment. By the end of 2001, the initiative had led to the reuse or recycling of the equivalent of 1.8 million printers and copiers. It also resulted in several billion dollars of cost savings, as well as dramatic improvements in all environmental areas.

Intervention 5: Shift Information Flows by Tirelessly Communicating the Need, Vision, and Strategies for Achieving Sustainability

Even when all other interventions have been successful, progress will stall without the consistent exchange of clear information about the need for the sustainability initiative and its purpose, strategies, and benefits. Effective communication engages people at an emotional level. Sustainability visions and strategies become internalized as people ponder what these changes will mean to them personally. Transparent communication opens the door to honest understanding and sharing.

The leaders at Interface instituted a comprehensive information and communication program to engage employees and stakeholders in sustainability efforts. Now, environmental issues are discussed at almost every staff meeting, in executive retreats, and via internal communications. Board chairman Ray Anderson says, “Sustainability has become the language of the company.”

Intervention 6: Correct Feedback Loops by Encouraging and Rewarding Learning and Innovation

Even with excellent strategies, obstacles will surface. To overcome the barriers to change, the organization must alter its feedback and learning mechanisms so that employees and stakeholders are continually expanding their skills, knowledge, and understanding. The adoption of new learning mechanisms leads to wholesale changes of traditional feedback systems that are oriented toward maintaining the status quo.

The leading organizations provide accurate feedback on progress and setbacks, and rewards for those willing to experiment and learn. Henkel adopted a strategy to differentiate itself from its competitors based on its ecological and social performance. The company believes that “Innovation is the key to sustainability.” To encourage innovation, the company gives out “Henkel Innovation Awards” to employees who develop sustainable new products. The award includes public recognition via press releases and in company newspapers. Henkel also keeps a database of successful ideas generated by employees that is available to its workers worldwide.

Intervention 7: Adjust the Parameters by Aligning Systems and Structures with Sustainability

Because internal systems, structures, policies, and procedures should not be altered until the right kind of thinking and behaviors have been identified and implemented, changing these parameters is the last step in the change process. At the same time, the effort never actually ends at this stage. Change toward sustainability is iterative. The “wheel of change” must continually roll forward. As new knowledge is generated and employees gain increased know-how and skills, the organization needs to continually incorporate new ways of thinking and acting into how it does business.

Patagonia, the U. S. retailer of outdoor gear and clothing, explicitly seeks to create a culture that values protection of the environment and of communities. Raises, bonuses, promotions, and succession planning all depend on the level of contribution employees make to the firm’s core values of environmental protection and social equity. IKEA has followed a similar course. Says Thomas Bergmark, Social Responsibility Manager, “No one has been promoted to the senior management level who does not have a strong commitment to these issues. Before we engaged in sustainability, there were managers who did not take environmental and social issues to heart. These managers are no longer at IKEA. We take great care to get the right people promoted.”

The “Wheel of Change Toward Sustainability” shows how the seven interventions interact to form a continuous reinforcing process of transformation toward sustainability.

Sustainable Governance

Many leaders have found that changes in governance provide the greatest overall leverage for facilitating the successful introduction of the interventions outlined above. What is governance? The Journal of Management and Governance says, “Governance . . . includes the modes of allocating decisions, control, and rewarding rights within and between economic organizations.” In other words, governance systems shape the way information is gathered and shared, decisions are made and enforced, and resources and wealth are distributed. These factors guide how people perceive the world around them, how they are motivated, and how they exercise their power and authority (see “Sustainable Governance Systems”).

The organizations leading the way toward sustainability tend to view all of the people that are affected by their operations — internal members as well as external stakeholders — as important parts of an interdependent system. Their leaders understand that every component of the system must be fully engaged and must function effectively for the whole to succeed. In order for this to be possible, power and authority must be skillfully distributed among employees and stakeholders through effective information-sharing, decision-making, and resource allocation mechanisms.

This model of governance is much more sustainable over time than a patriarchal approach, because as a natural output of the process, employees and other stakeholders have a high level of commitment and involvement. With the proper purpose, vision, and guiding principles, a new production model and organizational paradigm evolves that works to eliminate environmental and socio-economic problems and create business opportunities.

Sustainable governance systems have five dominate characteristics:

1. They follow a vision and an inviolate set of principles focused on conserving the environment and enhancing socioeconomic well-being. Every system has a purpose that is the property of the whole and not of any particular part or person. Sustainability holds equal — or greater — footing with the goals of profitability or shareholder value.

2. They continually produce and widely distribute information necessary for expanding the knowledge base and for measuring progress toward the core purposes. A system of feedback mechanisms produces and widely disseminates timely and credible environmental, social, and financial data to provide the information needed for continued learning and improvement.

3. They engage all those affected by the activities of the organization. Sustainable governance systems involve in planning and decision-making all those affected by the organization, including employees from all units and functions, as well as key stakeholders such as suppliers, investors, distributors, and community, environmental, and labor organizations.

4. They equitably share the resources and wealth generated by the organization. By spreading the return on investment among employees and stakeholders and by equitably distributing resources such as staff, time, and capital to internal units, leaders ensure that all participants give the enterprise their full engagement and support.

5. They provide people with the freedom and authority to act within an agreed-upon framework. Clearly defined, mutually agreed-upon goals, rules, roles, and responsibilities result in clear strategies and implementation plans. Power and authority are decentralized, and people have both the freedom and the responsibility to act.

None of the leading organizations I reviewed can be considered truly sustainable yet. Each is plagued by inconsistencies between their ideal vision and current practices. The early adopters acknowledge that they have just begun the journey to sustainability. But they have all implemented most, if not all, of these principles of governance. The organizations all describe and apply the principles in their own unique ways. But no matter how they are articulated or employed, these tenants provide the governance structure necessary for the long journey to sustainability.

In addition to the focus on governance, leading organizations are blessed with — or take explicit steps to develop — exemplary leadership at the top and throughout the enterprise. It is not possible to initiate or sustain the tremendous transformation required to become more sustainable without exceptional leadership. Thus, good governance and leadership are the two hallmarks of successful change toward sustainability.

Organizations that apply these interventions and make the transition to cradle-to-cradle production and systems-oriented organizational paradigms are certain to be the big winners in the future. Pressure will only increase from consumers, civic groups, and the financial markets for improved environmental and social performance. Executives who believe that these demands will fade or be deflated by shifts in environmental, public health, or labor laws may experience short-term relief from these pressures. In the long run, however, recalcitrant organizations will experience a backlash that may threaten their very existence. The successful leaders of the future will be those who have adopted a more sustainable model of conducting business.

Bob Doppelt is executive director of the Center for Watershed and Community Health, a sustainability research and technical assistance program affiliated with the Institute for a Sustainable Environment at the University of Oregon. Doppelt is also a principal with Factor 10 Inc., a sustainability change management consulting firm.

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We use the term “Habits of Mind” to mean having a disposition toward behaving intelligently when confronted with problems to which we do not immediately know the answers. When humans experience dichotomies, are confused by dilemmas, or come face to face with uncertainties, our most effective actions require drawing forth certain patterns of intellectual behavior. When we draw upon these intellectual resources, the results that we produce are more powerful, of higher quality, and of greater significance than if we fail to employ those patterns of intellectual behaviors.

Employing Habits of Mind requires a composite of many skills, attitudes, cues, past experiences, and proclivities. It means that we value one pattern of thinking over another, and therefore it implies choice making about which pattern should be employed at which time. It includes sensitivity to the contextual cues in a situation signaling that it is an appropriate time and circumstance to employ this pattern. It requires a level of skillfulness to employ and carry through the behaviors effectively over time. Finally, it leads individuals to reflect on, evaluate, modify, and carry forth to future applications their learnings.

Research in effective thinking and intelligent behavior indicates that there are some identifiable characteristics of effective thinkers. Scientists, artists, and mathematicians are not the only ones who demonstrate these behaviors. These characteristics have been identified in successful mechanics, teachers, entrepreneurs, salespeople, and parents — people in all walks of life.

Habits of Mind

Following are descriptions and an elaboration of 16 attributes of what human beings do when they behave intelligently (see “16 Habits of Mind”). These Habits of Mind are what intelligent people do when they are confronted with complex problems. These behaviors are seldom performed in isolation. Rather, clusters of such behaviors are drawn forth and employed in various situations. When listening intently, for example, one employs flexibility, metacognition, precise language, and perhaps questioning.

Please do not think that there are only 16 ways in which humans display their intelligence. It should be understood that this list is not meant to be complete. You, your colleagues, or your students will want to continue the search for additional Habits of Mind by adding to and elaborating on this list and the descriptions (for an example of an additional list, see “13 Habits of a Systems Thinker,” compiled by the Waters Foundation).

1. Persisting

“Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time.”

— Marabel Morgan

Efficacious people stick to a task until it is completed. They don’t give up easily They are able to analyze a problem to develop a system, structure, or strategy to attack it. They employ a range and have a repertoire of alternative strategies for problem solving. They collect evidence to indicate their problem-solving strategy is working, and if one strategy doesn’t work, they know how to back up and try another. They recognize when a theory or idea must be rejected and another employed. They have systematic methods of analyzing a problem that include knowing how to begin, what steps must be performed, and what data need to be generated or collected. Because they are able to sustain a problem-solving process over time, they are comfortable with ambiguous situations.

• Managing Impulsivity“. . . . [G]oal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley cup.”

  —Daniel Goleman

  Effective problem solvers have a sense of deliberativeness: They think before they act. They intentionally form a vision of a product, plan of action, goal, or destination before they begin. They strive to clarify and understand directions, develop a strategy for approaching a problem, and withhold immediate value judgments about an idea before fully understanding it. Reflective individuals consider alternatives and consequences of several possible directions prior to taking action. They decrease their need for trial and error by gathering information, taking time to reflect on an answer before giving it, making sure they understand directions, and listening to alternative points of view.

• Listening to Others — With Understanding and Empathy“Listening is the beginning of understanding. … Wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening. Let the wise listen and add to their learning and let the discerning get guidance.”

  —Proverbs 1:5

  According to Stephen Covey, highly effective people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy listening. Some psychologists believe that the ability to listen to another person, empathize with them, and understand their point of view is one of the highest forms of intelligent behavior. Being able to paraphrase another person’s ideas, detecting indicators of their feelings or emotional states in their oral and body language, accurately expressing another person’s concepts, emotions, and problems — all are indications of listening behavior (Piaget called it “overcoming egocentrism”).

  Peter Senge and his colleagues suggest that to listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow your mind’s hearing to your ears’ natural speed and hear beneath the words to their meaning. This is a complex skill requiring the ability to monitor one’s own thoughts while, at the same time, attending to the partner’s words. Honing this behavior does not mean that we can’t disagree with someone. A good listener tries to understand what the other person is saying. In the end, he may disagree sharply, but because he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is he is disagreeing with.

• Thinking Flexibly“If you never change your mind, why have one?”

  — Edward deBono

  An amazing discovery about the human brain is its plasticity — its ability to “rewire,” change, and even repair itself to become smarter. Flexible people are the ones with the most control. They have the capacity to change their minds as they receive additional data. They engage in multiple and simultaneous outcomes and activities, draw upon a repertoire of problem-solving strategies, and know when it is appropriate to be broad and global in their thinking and when a situation requires detailed precision. They create and seek novel approaches and have a well-developed sense of humor. They envision a range of consequences.

  13 HABITS OF A SYSTEMS THINKER

  The Water Foundation has identified 13 Habits of a Systems Thinker. For detailed definitions of each, click here.

  • Seeks to understand the “big picture”
  • Observes how elements within systems change over time, generating patterns and trends
  • Recognizes that a system’s structure generates its behavior: focuses on structure, not on blame
  • Identifies the circular nature of complex cause and effect relationships, i.e. interdependencies
  • Changes perspectives
  • Surfaces and tests assumptions
  • Considers an issue fully and resists the urge to come to a quick conclusion
  • Considers how mental models (i.e., attitudes and beliefs derived from experience) affect current reality and the future
  • Uses understanding of system structures to identify possible leverage actions
  • Considers both short- and long-term consequences of actions
  • Finds where unintended consequences emerge
  • Recognizes the impact of time delays when exploring cause and effect relationships
  • Checks results and changes actions if needed:, “successive approximation”

  Flexible people can approach a problem from a new angle using a novel approach (deBono refers to this as lateral thinking). They consider alternative points of view or deal with several sources of information simultaneously. Thus, flexibility of mind is essential for working with social diversity, enabling an individual to recognize the wholeness and distinctness of other people’s ways of experiencing and making meaning.

  Flexible thinkers are able to take a “macro-centric” perspective. This is similar to looking down from a balcony at ourselves and our interactions with others. This bird’s-eye view is useful for discerning themes and patterns from assortments of information. It is intuitive, holistic, and conceptual. Since we often need to solve problems with incomplete information, we need the capacity to perceive general patterns and jump across gaps of incomplete knowledge or when some of the pieces are missing.

  Yet another perceptual orientation is “micro-centric” — examining the individual and sometimes minute parts that make up the whole. Without this “worm’s-eye view,” science, technology, and any complex enterprise could not function. These activities require attention to detail, precision, and orderly progressions.

  Flexible thinkers display confidence in their intuition. They tolerate confusion and ambiguity up to a point, and are willing to let go of a problem, trusting their subconscious to continue creative and productive work on it. Flexibility is the cradle of humor, creativity, and repertoire.

• Thinking About Our Thinking (Metacognition)“When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.”

  — Plato

  Occurring in the neocortex, metacognition is our ability to know what we know and what we don’t know. It is our ability to plan a strategy for producing what information is needed, to be conscious of our own steps and strategies during the act of problem solving, and to reflect on and evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking. Probably the major components of metacognition are developing a plan of action, maintaining that plan in mind over a period of time, then reflecting back on and evaluating the plan upon its completion. Planning a strategy before embarking on a course of action assists us in keeping track of the steps in the sequence for the duration of the activity. It facilitates making temporal and comparative judgments, assessing the readiness for more or different activities, and monitoring our interpretations, perceptions, decisions, and behaviors.

  Metacognition means becoming increasingly aware of one’s actions and the effect of those actions on others and on the environment, forming internal questions as one searches for information and meaning, developing mental maps or plans of action, mentally rehearsing prior to performance, monitoring those plans as they are employed. It involves being conscious of the need for midcourse correction if the plan is not meeting expectations, reflecting on the plan upon completion of the implementation for the purpose of self-evaluation, and editing mental pictures for improved performance.

• Striving for Accuracy and Precision“A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake.”

  — Confucius

  Embodied in the stamina, grace, and elegance of a ballerina or a shoemaker is the desire for craftsmanship, mastery, flawlessness, and economy of energy to produce exceptional results. People who value these qualities take time to check over their products. They review the rules by which they are to abide; they review the models and visions they are to follow; and they review the criteria they are to employ and confirm that their finished product matches the criteria exactly.

  To be craftsman-like means knowing that one can continually perfect one’s craft by working to attain the highest possible standards and pursue ongoing learning in order to bring a laser-like focus of energies to task accomplishment. For some people, craftsmanship requires continuous reworking. Mario Cuomo, a great speechwriter and politician, once said that his speeches were never done — it was only a deadline that made him stop working on them!

• Questioning and Posing Problems“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances.”

  — Albert Einstein

  One of the distinguishing characteristics between humans and other forms of life is our inclination and ability to find problems to solve. Effective problem solvers know how to ask questions to fill in the gaps between what they know and what they don’t know. Effective questioners are inclined to ask a range of questions. For example, they request data to support others’ conclusions and assumptions through questions such as, “What evidence do you have?”

  They pose questions about alternative points of view:, “From whose viewpoint are we seeing, reading, or hearing?”

  They inquire into causal connections and relationships:, “How are these people/events/situations related to each other?”

  They pose hypothetical problems: “What do you think would happen if …?”

  Inquirers recognize discrepancies and phenomena in their environment and probe into their causes:, “Why do cats purr?”, “Why does the hair on my head grow so fast, while the hair on my arms and legs grows so slowly?”, “What are some alternative solutions to international conflicts other than wars?”

• Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations“I’ve never made a mistake. I’ve only learned from experience.”

  — Thomas A. Edison

  Intelligent human beings learn from experience. When confronted with a new and perplexing problem, they will often draw forth experience from their past. They can be heard to say, “This reminds me of . . .” or “This is just like the time when I . . .” They call on their store of knowledge and experience as sources of data to support, theories to explain, or processes to solve each new challenge. Furthermore, they are able to abstract meaning from one experience, carry it forth, and apply it in a new and novel situation.

• Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision“I do not so easily think in words . . . after being hard at work having arrived at results that are perfectly clear . . . I have to translate my thoughts in a language that does not run evenly with them.”

  — Francis Galton

  Language refinement plays a critical role in enhancing a person’s cognitive maps and their ability to think critically, which is the knowledge base for efficacious action. Enriching the complexity and specificity of language simultaneously produces effective thinking. Language and thinking are closely entwined. Like two sides of a coin, they are inseparable. Fuzzy language is a reflection of fuzzy thinking. Intelligent people strive to communicate accurately in both written and oral form, taking care to use precise language, defining terms, correct names, and universal labels and analogies. They strive to avoid overgeneralizations, deletions, and distortions. Instead, they support their statements with explanations, comparisons, quantification, and evidence.

• Gathering Data Through All Senses“Observe perpetually.”

  — Henry James

  The brain is the ultimate reductionist. It reduces the world to its elementary parts: photons of light, molecules of smell, sound waves, vibrations of touch — which send electrochemical signals to individual brain cells that store information about lines, movements, colors, smells, and other sensory inputs. Intelligent people know that all information gets into the brain through the sensory pathways: gustatory, olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, auditory, visual, Most linguistic, cultural, and physical learning is derived from the environment by observing or taking in through the senses. To know a wine it must be drunk; to know a role it must be acted; to know a game it must be played; to know a dance it must be moved; to know a goal it must be envisioned. Those whose sensory pathways are open, alert, and acute absorb more information from the environment than those whose pathways are withered, immune, and oblivious to sensory stimuli.

  Furthermore, we are learning more about the impact of arts and music on improved mental functioning. Forming mental images is important in mathematics and engineering; listening to classical music seems to improve spatial reasoning. Social scientists solve problems through scenarios and roleplaying; scientists build models; engineers use cad-cam; mechanics learn through hands-on experimentation; artists experiment with colors and textures; musicians learn by producing combinations of instrumental and vocal music.

• Creating, Imagining, and Innovating“The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.”

  — John Schaar

  All humans have the capacity to generate novel, original, clever, or ingenious products, solutions, and techniques—if that capacity is developed. Creative individuals try to conceive problem solutions differently, examining alternative possibilities from many angles. They tend to project themselves into different roles using analogies, starting with a vision and working backward, imagining they are the objects being considered. Creative people take risks and frequently push the boundaries of their perceived limits. They are intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated, working on the task because of the aesthetic challenge rather than the material rewards. Creative people are open to criticism. They hold up their products for others to judge and seek feedback in an ever-increasing effort to refine their technique.

• Responding with Wonderment and Awe“The most beautiful experience in the world is the experience of the mysterious.”

  — Albert Einstein.

  Efficacious people have not only an “I can” attitude, but also an “I enjoy” feeling. They enjoy figuring things out by themselves and continue to learn throughout their lifetimes. They find beauty in a sunset, intrigue in the geometry of a spider web, and exhilaration at the iridescence of a hummingbird’s wings. They see the congruity and intricacies in the derivation of a mathematical formula, recognize the orderliness and adroitness of a chemical change, and commune with the serenity of a distant constellation.

• Taking Responsible Risks“There has been a calculated risk in every stage of American development — the pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, dreamers who were not afraid of action.”

  — Brooks Atkinson

  Flexible people seem to have an almost uncontrollable urge to go beyond established limits. They are uneasy about comfort; they “live on the edge of their competence.” They seem compelled to place themselves in situations where they do not know what the outcome will be. They accept confusion, uncertainty, and the higher risks of failure as part of the normal process, and they learn to view setbacks as interesting, challenging, and growth producing.

  However, they are not behaving impulsively. Their risks are educated. They draw on past knowledge, are thoughtful about consequences, and have a well-trained sense of what is appropriate. They know that not all risks are worth taking! It is only through repeated experiences that risk taking becomes educated. It often is a cross between intuition, drawing on past knowledge, and a sense of meeting new challenges.

• Finding Humor“Where do bees wait? At the buzz stop.”

  — Andrew, age six

  Another unique attribute of humans is our sense of humor. Laughter transcends all cultures and eras. Its positive effects on psychological functions include a drop in the pulse rate, the secretion of endorphins, and increased oxygen in the blood. It has been found to liberate creativity and provoke such higher-level thinking skills as anticipation, the identification of novel relationships, visual imagery, and analogy. People who engage in the mystery of humor have the ability to perceive situations from an original and often interesting vantage point. Having a whimsical frame of mind, they thrive on finding incongruity and perceiving absurdities, ironies, and satire; finding discontinuities; and being able to laugh at situations and themselves.

• Thinking Interdependently“Take care of each other. Share your energies with the group. No one must feel alone, cut off, for that is when you do not make it.”

  — Willie Unsoeld

  Humans are social beings. We congregate in groups, find it therapeutic to be listened to, draw energy from one another, and seek reciprocity. In groups, we contribute our time and energy to tasks that we would quickly tire of when working alone. In fact, we have learned that one of the cruelest forms of punishment that can be inflicted on an individual is solitary confinement.

  Cooperative humans realize that all of us together are more powerful, intellectually and/or physically, than any one individual. Probably the foremost disposition in the post-industrial society is the heightened ability to think in concert with others and to find ourselves increasingly more interdependent and sensitive to the needs of others. Problem solving has become so complex that no one person can go it alone. No one has access to all the data needed to make critical decisions; no one person can consider as many alternatives as several people can.

• Learning Continuously“Insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

  — Albert Einstein

  Intelligent people are in a continuous learning mode. Their confidence, in combination with their inquisitiveness, allows them to constantly search for new and better ways. People with this Habit of Mind are always striving for improvement, growing, and learning. They seize problems, situations, tensions, conflicts, and circumstances as valuable opportunities to learn.

  A great mystery about humans is that we confront learning opportunities with fear rather than mystery and wonder. We seem to feel better when we know rather than when we learn. We defend our biases, beliefs, and storehouses of knowledge rather than inviting the unknown, the creative, and the inspirational. Being certain and closed gives us comfort, while being doubtful and open gives us fear. The highest form of thinking we will ever learn is the humility of knowing that we don’t know.

In Summary

Drawn from research on human effectiveness, descriptions of remarkable performers, and analyses of the characteristics of efficacious people, we have presented descriptions of 16 Habits of Mind. This list is not meant to be complete but rather to serve as a starting point for further elaboration and description.

These Habits of Mind may serve as mental disciplines. When confronted with problematic situations, students, parents, and teachers might habitually employ one or more of these Habits of Mind by asking themselves, “What is the most intelligent thing I can do right now?”

• How can I learn from this? What are my resources? How can I draw on my past successes with problems like this? What do I already know about the problem? What resources do I have available or need to generate?
• How can I approach this problem flexibly? How might I look at the situation in another way? How can I draw upon my repertoire of problem-solving strategies? How can I look at this problem from a fresh perspective?
• How can I illuminate this problem to make it clearer, more precise? Do I need to check out my data sources? How might I break this problem down into its component parts and develop a strategy for understanding and accomplishing each step?
• What do I know or not know? What questions do I need to ask? What strategies are in my mind now? What am I aware of in terms of my own beliefs, values, and goals with this problem? What feelings or emotions am I aware of which might be blocking or enhancing my progress?
• The interdependent thinker might turn to others for help. She might ask, How does this problem affect others? How can we solve it together? What can I learn from others that would help me become a better problem solver?

These Habits of Mind transcend all subject matters commonly taught in school. They are characteristic of peak performers, whether in homes, schools, athletic fields, organizations, the military, governments, churches, or corporations. They are what make marriages successful, learning continual, workplaces productive, and democracies enduring.

The goal of education therefore should be to support others and ourselves in liberating, developing, and habituating these Habits of Mind more fully. Taken together, they are a force directing us toward increasingly authentic, congruent, ethical behavior. They are the tools of disciplined choice making. They are the primary vehicles in the lifelong journey toward integration. They are the “right stuff” that makes human beings efficacious.

This article is adapted with permission from Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick, “Describing 16 Habits of Mind.” Click here to access the original article. The authors have a new book coming out, Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind: 16 Essential Characteristics for Success (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2009).

Arthur L. Costa, Ed. D., is an Emeritus Professor of Education at California State University, Sacramento and co-director of the Institute for Intelligent Behavior in El Dorado Hills, California. He has served as a classroom teacher, a curriculum consultant, and an assistant superintendent for instruction and as the director of educational programs for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Bena Kallick, Ph. D., is a private consultant providing services to school districts, state departments of education, professional organizations, and public sector agencies throughout the United States and abroad. Her areas of focus include group dynamics, creative and critical thinking, and alternative assessment strategies in the classroom.

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