I have also observed that the amount of trust that exists within a group of people greatly affects the results they can achieve together. A guest on a recent talk-radio show on financial investments demonstrated the impact of trust within the U. S. economy. A highly respected portfolio manager with 40 years of success in mutual fund investing, he remarked that, despite Alan Greenspan’s testimony before Congress that the economy is moving in a positive direction, the stock market is still slumping. Historically after recessions, markets recover first, followed by the rest of the economy; yet in our current situation, the economy is showing signs of recovery but the markets are still experiencing downward trends. Why? The guest attributed the slow market improvement to human factors. He asserted that, in response to gross misrepresentation of earnings and other mismanagement by top executives from companies such as Enron and Worldcom, many people now distrust large corporations and hesitate to invest in them. In other words, despite signs that our economy is getting back on track, trust — or lack of trust, in this case — appears to be significantly limiting the recovery of the markets and the economy as a whole.

As a result of my observations and conversations with others about this topic, I have been investigating how to build trust in organizations, particularly schools. I’ve looked at numerous studies that have attempted to define trust and explain how it works. While thought provoking, their findings leave me unsatisfied. One of the reasons I am not adequately convinced by many researchers arguments is that their approach to understanding trust tends to be deconstructivist.

They break apart the concept into many different components in order to analyze it, and the more they do, the less I understand and connect with it.

I have come to believe that we can better understand trust by looking at it as a system composed of many independent yet interrelated and interconnected factors, including but not limited to integrity, honesty, character, reliability, and competence. Because the power of trust lies in the synergy of these variables, building it requires us to understand their interplay in our relationships and in our organizations.

In a recent article, Peter Senge touched more deeply on this process when he discussed the importance of “holism,” a way of understanding the world whereby “the whole is enfolded into each element or part” (see “Creating the World Anew,” The Systems Thinker, V13N3). It is a way of seeing not only the interconnections among the parts and the whole, but also how they mutually evolve together. I believe trust is a concept to which holism applies: We cannot adequately understand and nurture its components without looking at the essence of the whole concept. In our attempts to break it into what appears to be its constituent parts, the “spirit” of trust no longer exists.

To illustrate, let’s try to isolate one of trust’s components, honesty. Although honesty is a positive trait for which we should strive, an honest person is not necessarily reliable or dependable, two other components of trust. Would we trust an honest but unreliable person? We might have confidence that that person will tell the truth, but we probably wouldn’t trust him or her to follow through with commitments. As Stephen Covey puts it, would we really trust an honest but incompetent surgeon to perform a major operation on us? This example hints at the complex nature of this seemingly simple characteristic.

Defining Trust

Let’s begin by defining trust. Webster’s Dictionary says trust is “firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing” and “assured resting of the mind on the integrity, veracity, justice, friendship, or other sound principle of another person.” Stephen Covey defines it as “the balance between character and competence.” These definitions focus on a particular state of mind that one needs to be able to trust someone.

But if instead we think of trust as an underlying condition necessary to support all effective human interactions, then it becomes a foundational systemic structure. In this supporting role, trust is not visible in the traditional sense; like the wind, only its effects can be seen. For example, trust is absent if we think a relationship might jeopardize our personal or professional interests and well-being. Similarly, we can comfortably surmise that high levels of trust exist in organizations in which members feel a sense of community and connectedness.

To explore the idea of trust as an actual but intangible structure, let’s consider the iceberg metaphor. When you look at an iceberg, only the tip is visible; the greater mass lies out of sight below the surface. By looking “beneath the surface” of daily events in your organization, you can determine the structures that influence people’s behavior. If we apply this metaphor to understanding trust, the tip is our daily interactions in which we experience varying levels of trust or mistrust (see “The Iceberg Model of Trust” on p. 2). These interactions, a series of seemingly unrelated events, are the concrete results of an organization’s climate of trust, which exists in the patterns and structures “below the waterline.” One unpleasant encounter may not lead us to feel an overall sense of mistrust. But if the behavior continues over time, it’s likely to undermine relationships and erode trust throughout the organization. (Note that certain events, such as layoffs, are significant enough to be “trust busters” the first time they occur.)

Using the Trust Lens

So how do we notice patterns of behavior that support or undermine trust? By looking through a “trust lens.” In almost every interaction between people, a “trust transaction” takes place that transcends the actual event; that is, based on what occurs, levels of trust rise or fall. To determine the degree of trust being transacted during an interaction, you can take the following elements into consideration:

1. The history of interactions between individuals and/or groups (What has happened between them in the past?)
2. The literal meaning conveyed through the interaction (What words are being expressed?)
3. The inferential meaning conveyed through the interaction (What voice tones, facial expressions, and body language are being used?)
4. The result of the interaction (Did one party gain an advantage over or “hurt” the other in some manner?)

If we think of trust as an underlying condition necessary to support all effective human interactions, then it becomes a foundational systemic structure.

Knowing the history between two parties offers us the greatest insight in determining the level of trust transacted in a given encounter. Consider, for instance, how different your conclusions would be if you knew that two individuals you were observing had been best friends their entire lives or that two groups had previously experienced a significant conflict with each other.

Because we don’t always know the history, we can try to “read” the trust transaction at both the literal and inferential levels. At the literal level, we analyze the words and phrases being transmitted between the parties involved. In general, using deceptive, demeaning, and intimidating language diminishes trust, while communicating openly and honestly with what Covey calls “courage and consideration” builds it.

Observing literal transactions has its limits, though. According to numerous studies, the words we use make up only about 10 percent of what we communicate. It is at the inferential level — the voice tone, facial expression, and body language — where we do 90 percent of our communicating. Psychologist Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon says that “language is seen as the primary vehicle” to transmit information and “non-verbal communication is primarily seen to transmit emotional information.” Thus, actively observing all aspects of an interaction and asking, “Do these behaviors convey trust or lack of trust?” is crucial in determining the degree of trust being transacted.

We have to be cautious, though, whenever we try to determine levels of trust, because we each bring to any situation our own set of assumptions about how the world works. Therefore, when we use a “trust lens,” we need to consider how our mental models are influencing our perceptions. A continual comparison between actual data and our assumptions will help us to discern whether we are making accurate judgments or whether we are overgeneralizing based on limited information.

How Trust Becomes a Structure

When a pattern of transactions occurs over a period of time, it creates a structure that becomes the “cultural norm”—a climate of trust or mistrust. In a reinforcing process, our behaviors strengthen the cultural norm, which strengthens the behaviors, and so on. For example, suppose a number of people in an organization behave dishonestly — perhaps by misrepresenting financial data — to help the organization “get ahead.” If the organization’s leaders fail to censure the dishonest conduct, the organization will assume that “this is how we do business.” In this way, isolated behaviors grow into a pattern of dishonesty. Likewise, when trustworthy behaviors, such as honest communication, competence, and integrity, are modeled and reinforced, they eventually become the cultural norm.

Another example is using standardized testing as the sole mechanism for assessing the quality of a school system, which may end up creating a culture steeped in cynicism and deceit. In order to maintain their school’s stature in the community and — in some cases, even it’s funding — some teachers might end up “teaching to the test,” basing their lesson plans on the test questions rather than on sound curriculum. And, in extreme cases, this emphasis on “making the grade” might even influence students to cheat, especially if passing the test is the only way to advance to the next grade or graduate.

The scenario seems like a “chicken and egg” syndrome: Did the structure cause the behaviors, or did the behaviors create the structure? I believe the answer is “yes” to both questions. We may blame lack of trust on the “system,” but we need to remember that, with or without intention, we create and reinforce that system through our behaviors.

LOW TRUST IN AN ORGANIZATION

If the lever is a district’s strategies for reaching its objective — helping every child reach his or her potential — then the position of the fulcrum reflects the level of trust within the organization. In a low-trust environment, the fulcrum is far away from the goal. People end up expending more effort to achieve the objective than they might otherwise in a high-trust environment.

In this sense, we might view trust as an example of what system dynamicists call “dynamic complexity,” because the effects of trustworthy or untrustworthy behaviors in an organization are not always closely related in time or space to when they actually happen. In fact, the impact is often felt much later. So to nurture trust, we need to practice the art of simultaneously “seeing the forest and the trees” — seeing the organizational culture and the individual behaviors within it.

Leveraging Trust

Activities such as mandated standardized testing, which attempt to solve a complex problem in one fell swoop, reflect the prevailing system of management in most organizations today. In a keynote address at the Systems Thinking and Dynamic Modeling Conference in June 2002, Peter Senge described the attributes of this type of organization:

• Culture of compliance
• Management by measurement
• Right and wrong answers
• Managing outcomes versus designing systems
• Uniformity
• Predictability and controllability
• Excessive competitiveness
• Loss of the whole (person, connections to others and to the world)

This management structure creates an environment that undermines trust and produces a, “Trust Death Spiral,” in which mistrust and low performance continually reinforce each other. In this setting, people may feel that they must do whatever necessary to get ahead or even survive in the organization. From a systems thinking perspective, to move away from this kind of management system and toward one that is fundamentally transformational and empowering in nature, we need to understand how an organization’s interrelationships, processes, patterns, and underlying structures influence individual and group behaviors — and how we can leverage trust to change those dynamics.

What does it mean to leverage trust? Archimedes, one of the world’s great mathematicians, claimed that he could transport the globe with a lever, saying, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.” The principle of how a lever and fulcrum work together can help us understand how trust influences an organization’s ability to reach its goals.

A lever is a stiff beam that rotates about a point of support called a “fulcrum”; one end of the beam goes under an object to be moved. The purpose of this simple machine is to lift a heavy load using the minimum possible force. How much force you need depends on the length of the lever and where you place the fulcrum. Since it’s often not possible to change the length of the lever, to get the highest leverage, you need to focus on the position of the fulcrum. To minimize effort, place the fulcrum so that it’s close to the object and push on the other end. This is how a jack raises a car so we can change a tire. If the fulcrum is farther away from the object, you’ll need to apply greater force to the lever to lift it.

Low Trust. Let’s apply the metaphor of a lever and fulcrum to the organizational setting. If the lever is a district’s strategies for reaching its objective — helping every child reach his or her potential — then the position of the fulcrum reflects the level of trust within the organization. In a low-trust environment, the fulcrum is far away from the goal. People end up expending more effort to achieve the objective than they might otherwise in a high-trust environment. For instance, if administrators of a school district and its professional teacher organization mistrust each other, the district may spend more time settling disputes than fulfilling its true mission to educate children (see “Low Trust in an Organization” on p. 4).

High Trust. When the trust fulcrum is in a more advantageous position, most institutional actions can be directed toward fulfilling the organization’s mission. In the example above, if the school district works closely with its professional teacher organization to nurture a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship, it will likely not have to direct so much effort to managing that dynamic and can instead focus on educating children (see “High Trust in an Organization”).

Organizations that build systems and structures that nurture high trust and mutually beneficial relationships can trigger a “Trust Growth Spiral.” In this positive reinforcing process, trust and consequently high levels of performance mutually reinforce one another. Increased trust results in intangibles, such as confidence, pride, and ownership, which lay the psychological foundation for continued success, thereby inspiring even greater levels of trust.

Building Trust

In most organizations, the process of building trust consists of occasional events designed to promote teamwork. Many of us have participated in activities such as “supportive chair trust circles,” in which people simultaneously sit on the lap of the person behind them and support the person in front of them; eventually, the entire group is seated in a circle without the use of any props. In “trust falls,” one partner closes her eyes and falls backward, trusting that her partner will catch her before she hits the floor. While fun (unless your partner doesn’t catch you!), these exercises only tap the surface of what it takes to build trust in an organization.

Creating lasting trust is not a one-shot deal; it is an ongoing process that requires deep, long-term commitment from everyone involved. So how do we begin? Following are some examples of how my organization, the West Des Moines Community School District in Iowa, has sought to understand the systemic nature of trust and then work to create structures and engage in behaviors that enable it.
In 2000, the administrative staff development planning team, part of the Administrative Leadership Team (ALT), began to design a three-year leadership development program. We found that we value what the IABC Research Foundation has identified as five qualities that high-trust cultures generally acknowledge and reward:

• Competence (workers’ effectiveness)
• Openness and honesty (amount, accuracy, and sincerity of information shared)
• Concern for employees (exhibition of empathy, tolerance, and safety)
• Reliability (consistent and dependable actions)
• Identification (sharing of common goals, values, and beliefs)

To evaluate the levels of trust in our organization, the ALT disseminated a 16-question trust survey to all its members. The results revealed that, while the perceived level of trust was generally high, some items scored relatively low on the overall trust barometer. Based on those results, we initiated a four-session in-service training during the 2000-2001 school year. The sessions involved all building and district-level administrators and focused on identifying trustworthy and untrustworthy behaviors and their impact at the interpersonal and organizational levels. Feedback following each session was overwhelmingly positive. Results from a follow-up survey revealed an improvement in perceived levels of trust among ALT members.

HIGH TRUST IN AN ORGANIZATION

When the trust fulcrum is in an advantageous position, most institutional actions can be directed toward fulfilling the organization’s mission rather than dealing with interpersonal issues.

Here are some of the breakthroughs we have achieved through our efforts:

Building a Shared Vision. For several years, the district, with the vision and support of its superintendent, has embarked on building a learning community. One step in this process has been to develop a shared vision statement for the district through a series of collaborative processes with parents, students, staff, board of education members, and interested citizens. Through continued dialogue, the district generated a simple, yet powerful statement: “The West Des Moines Community School District will be a caring community of learners that knows and lifts every child. We will inspire joy in learning. Our schools will excel at preparing each student for his or her life journey.”

This shared vision is now guiding the district’s discussions, decisions, and future plans. It has:

• Provided the foundation for a major reorganization of the high school
• Caused the administration to seek to identify the students who do not feel “known or lifted” and to improve our services to them
• Influenced some conversations to focus on why and how we want students to experience joy in learning
• Brought forth community members who challenge the district to do better

In a nutshell, through a foundation of trust built through the development of our vision statement, avenues of communication are opening up.

Changing Our Mental Models.

In the early 1990s, the district’s school board created a policy that supports and encourages “participatory management.” This policy, which allows greater partnership and ownership in decision-making among all district stakeholders, has strongly influenced our mental models about how decisions should be made. At the event level, this policy demonstrates a belief in actively including those directly impacted by decisions in the process. Below the surface, the message is one of trust in the integrity, character, and competence of those once uninvolved, who now have a greater role in influencing policy.

Developing Personal Mastery.

The year-long trust-building workshop for members of the district’s administrative leadership team has brought trust and trustworthiness to the forefront of our consciousness and conversations. Our understanding of the gap between the current reality of our district’s trust climate and our future vision of a high-trust culture has inspired us to grow and learn as individuals and as a group.

Engaging in Team Learning.

Central office administration regularly conducts “maintenance” meetings with the leaders of our district’s professional and support organizations. These meetings provide opportunities for team learning through honest conversations. The conversations go beyond polite talk to deeper listening, engagement, and feedback. Using reflective skills has helped team members more effectively manage disagreement and resolve conflict.

Building Trust Informally.

Through the development of policies, practices, and cultural norms, an organization can make conscious efforts to build and maintain trust

In addition to formal organizational efforts to build trust, more informal interactions have also contributed to a high-trust climate. For example, recently, a confrontation between a teacher and student required an administrative response. Rather than the principal dictating how the teacher should handle the situation, the principal conducted a dialogue with the teacher based on the spirit of “knowing and lifting every child.” She helped the teacher recognize why the interaction did not align with the shared vision; turned the meeting into a learning opportunity; and indicated that she trusted the teacher to do the right thing. The teacher ultimately resolved the conflict with the student in a way that maintained a positive teacher-student relationship.

Benefits of a High-Trust Culture

When the level of trust in an organization is high, its influence is felt and observed at every level and in every aspect of its operations. High trust allows organization members to focus on their primary mission rather than taking precious time and energy to deal with the numerous crises that prevail in a low-trust environment. They can then focus their resources and energy to reach their goals.

For schools, “profit” is measured by student achievement. A multi-year study completed by University of Chicago professors Anthony S. Bryk and Barbara Schneider resulted in the book Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), which links higher student achievement with high levels of trust between teachers and principals and among the teaching staff. Bryk and Schneider go so far as to say that without trusting relationships, school improvement efforts are “doomed to fail.”

For all kinds of enterprises, trust is a high-leverage resource that sustains success and effectiveness. Through the development of policies, practices, and cultural norms, an organization can make conscious efforts to build and maintain trust. As an organization reaps the “profits” of a trusting culture, it simultaneously perpetuates, or sustains, trust as an important commodity unto itself.

Ultimately, trust involves developing and maintaining relationships. Today’s workplace requires effective, skilled, and compassionate transformational leaders — not just managers — who recognize the need for trust and who facilitate organizational change to create high-trust cultures. We can start this process by taking to heart the words of Edward Marshall, who said, “The answer to leading others to trust and high performance may be found by looking in the mirror and asking: Am I trustworthy?” Ensuring the answer to that question is “yes” may be the highest-leverage action we can take as leaders today.

Doug Stilwell has 22 years of experience in education. He is currently the principal of Crestview Elementary in the West Des Moines Community School District in Iowa. Doug is also a doctoral student in Educational Leadership at Drake University.

The post Trust As A Systemic Structure in Our Organizations appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Many of our current cultural stories seem to reinforce a belief that challenge and conflict lead to collapsing systems. Stories of breakdown are everywhere — a struggling economy, political polarization, declining high school graduation rates. Yet even as these systems falter, new beginnings are all around us. The more we look for stories of innovations launched and challenges overcome, the more visible they become.

When we allow ourselves to look through this lens, we see that a renewal is under way, a modern renaissance fueled by the passion and commitment of many who have dared to pursue a dream. In communities, organizations, industries, and other social systems, new ways of living and working are flourishing. For example, many consider journalism to be an industry in decline. But even as traditional forms of journalism are dying — because they aren’t serving us well — I see signs of rebirth every day. Bold experiments are underway. Spot.us uses “crowdfunding,” in which community members pool money to support investigative reporting. News Trust, which rates the news for accuracy, fairness, and other criteria, is drawing increasing readership and participation to its site. Similar innovations are arising in other areas, ranging from healthcare to politics.

Given these parallel dynamics of collapse and rebirth, what can we do to help the systems of which we are part move toward productivity and resilience?

For more than 50 years, experiments in organizations and communities and across social systems have shaped practices for “whole systems change” — methods for engaging the diverse people of a system in ways that lead to unexpected breakthroughs. In 1992, Margaret Wheatley’s groundbreaking Leadership and the New Science contributed to theory by connecting our changing understanding of science to human systems. As the current generation of whole systems change practitioners mix and match methods such as Open Space Technology, The World Café, Future Search, and Appreciative Inquiry, many of us have been seeking a deeper understanding of the patterns that make these practices work.

My quest to unlock the mystery of what is involved in changing whole systems began in the late 1980s. I thought that understanding how change works was key to creating a world that works for all. I still do. I started noticing shifts in how change occurs when using whole systems change practices. See “Traditional and Emerging Ideas About Change” for examples.

Born from my own practice, my interactions with friends and colleagues, and my immersion in what science has taught us about chaos, complexity, and networks, I noticed a pattern of change through the lens of emergence — increasingly complex order self-organizing out of disorder. What follows describes that pattern, along with questions, principles, and practices for successfully engaging with upheaval.

The Nature of Emergence

Emergence is nature’s way of changing. We see it all the time in its cousin, emergencies. What happens?

A disturbance interrupts ordinary life. In addition to natural responses, like grief or fear or anger, people differentiate — take on different tasks. For example, in an earthquake, while many are immobilized, some care for the injured, others look for food and water, a few care for the animals. Someone creates a “find your loved ones” site on the Internet. A few blaze the trails and others follow. They see what’s needed and bring their unique gifts to the situation. A new order begins to arise.

This pattern of change flows as follows:

• Disruption breaks apart the status quo.
• The system differentiates, surfacing innovations and distinctions among its parts.
• As different parts interact, a new, more complex coherence arises.

(See “A Pattern of Change.”)

In journalism, cracks began to appear in the 1990s as newspaper readership declined. This disruption was generally correlated with the rise of the Internet. Worse, advertisers, who provide a principle source of revenue for journalism, started to leave. When the economy came to the precipice in 2008, the decline became an avalanche (Johnny Ryan, Newspaper circulation decline).

With the ability for anyone to publish made possible through increasingly sophisticated online tools, the assumptions about what journalism is and how it is done are in flux. A myriad of experiments are testing those assumptions — the relationship between journalist and audience, the economic model, even the purpose of journalism itself. These experiments shed light on what to conserve from traditional journalism that still serves us well and what to embrace that wasn’t possible before. Journalism is differentiating into its elemental nature, helping us understand new ways in which news and information is created, distributed, and digested.

While a new coherence has not yet arisen and likely won’t for a while, we do have clues. We know it is more of a conversation than a lecture. It still is about making sense of our complex world so that we can make wise individual and collective decisions. And it calls for a broad-based digital literacy movement, similar to the literacy movement sparked by the coming of age of newspapers that served the formation of democracy in the U. S.

People often speak of a magical quality to emergence, in part, because we can’t predetermine specific outcomes. Emergence can’t be manufactured. It often arises by drawing from individual and collective intuition — instinctive and unconscious knowing or sensing without deduction, reasoning, or using rational processes. It can be fueled by strong emotions — excitement, longing, anger, fear, grief. And it rarely follows a logical, orderly path. It feels much more like a leap of faith.

Emergence is always happening. If we don’t work with it, it will work us over. In human systems, it often shows itself when strong emotions are ignored or suppressed for too long. While emergence is natural, we don’t always experience it as positive. Erupting volcanoes, crashing meteorites, and wars have brought emergent change. Yet even wars can leave exciting offspring of novel, higher-order systems. The League of Nations and United Nations were unprecedented social innovations from their respective world wars. New species or cultures fill the void left by those made extinct.

Emergence seems disorderly because we can’t discern meaningful patterns, just unpredictable interactions that make no sense. But order is accessible when diverse people facing intractable challenges uncover and implement ideas that none could have predicted or accomplished on their own. Emergence can’t be forced. It can, however, be fostered.

Why Does Engaging Emergence Matter?

Emergence isn’t just a metaphor for what we are experiencing. Complexity increases as more diversity, connectivity, interdependence, or interactions become part of a system. The disruptive shifts occurring in our current systems are signs that these characteristics are on the rise.

Today’s unprecedented conditions could lead to chaos and collapse, but they also contain the seeds of renewal. We can choose to face our seemingly intractable challenges by coalescing into a vibrant, inclusive society characterized by creative interactions among diverse people. In many ways, this path is counterintuitive. It breaks with traditional thinking about change, including the ideas that it occurs top-down and that it follows an orderly plan, one step at a time.

We don’t control emergence. Nor can we fully predict how it arises. It can be violent, overwhelming. Yet we can engage it, confident that unexpected and valuable breakthroughs can occur.

Benefits of Engaging Emergence

Although specific outcomes from emergence are unpredictable, by engaging with it some benefits are foreseeable. To illustrate these benefits, I draw from Journalism That Matters, an initiative that convenes conversations among the diverse people who are shaping the emerging news and information ecosystem.

Individually, we are stretched and refreshed. We feel more courageous and inspired to pursue what matters to us. With a myriad of new ideas and confident of the support of mentors, collaborators, and fans, we act. At an early Journalism That Matters gathering, a recent college graduate arrived with the seed of an idea: putting a human face on international reporting for U. S. audiences. At the meeting, she found support for the idea. Deeply experienced people coached her and gave her entrée to their contacts. Today, the Common Language Project is thriving, having received multiple awards.

New and unlikely partnerships form. When we connect with people whom we don’t normally meet, sparks may fly. Creative conditions make room for our differences, fostering lively and productive interactions.

A reluctant veteran investigative reporter was teamed with a young digital journalist. They created a multimedia website for a story based on a two-year investigation. Not only did the community embrace the story, but the veteran is pursuing additional interactive projects. And the digital journalist is learning how to do investigative reporting.

Breakthrough projects surface. Experiments are inspired by interactions among diverse people.

The Poynter Institute, an educational institution serving the mainstream media, was seeking new directions because its traditional constituency was shrinking. Because Poynter served as a cohost for a JTM gathering, a number of staff members participated in the event. They listened broadly and deeply to the diverse people present. An idea emerged that builds on who they are and takes them into new territory: supporting the training needs of entrepreneurial journalists.

Community is strengthened. We discover kindred spirits among a diverse mix of strangers. Lasting connections form, and a sense of relationship grows. We realize that we share an intention—a purpose or calling guided by some deeper source of wisdom. Knowing that our work serves not just ourselves but a larger whole increases our confidence to act.

As a community blogger who attended a JTM conference put it, “I’m no longer alone. I’ve discovered people asking similar questions, aspiring to a similar future for journalism. Now I have friends I can bounce ideas off of, knowing we share a common cause.”

The culture begins to change. With time and continued interaction, a new narrative of who we are takes shape.

When Journalism That Matters began, we hoped to discover new possibilities for a struggling field so that it could better serve democracy. As mainstream media, particularly newspapers, began failing, the work became more vital. We see an old story of journalism dying and provide a place for it to be mourned. We also see the glimmers of a new and vital story being born. In it, journalism is a conversation rather than a lecture. Stories inspire rather than discourage their audience. Journalism That Matters has become a vibrant and open conversational space where innovations emerge. New language, such as news ecosystem — the information exchange among the public, government, and institutions that can inform, inspire, engage, and activate — makes it easier to understand what’s changing. People say, “I didn’t know I could be effective without a big organization behind me. Now I do.”

These experiences show that working with emergence can create great initiatives, the energy to act, a sense of community, and a greater view of the whole — a collectively intelligent system at work.

As more people engage emergence, something fundamental changes about who we are, what we are doing, how we are with each other, and perhaps what it all means. In the process, we tear apart familiar and comfortable notions about how change works. We bring together unlikely bedfellows and re-imagine and re-create the organizations, communities, and social systems that serve us well.

Three Questions for Engaging Emergence

Three questions can help us think about how to work with change:

• How do we disrupt coherence compassionately?
• How do we engage disruption creatively?
• How do we renew coherence wisely?

Like all appreciative questions, these direct our attention toward possibilities and open us to exploration. They are posed as questions rather than statements to remind us that when the terrain is uncertain, focus and fluidity both support us to be nimble in our response.

You can use them as you might an affirmation. Just as affirmations help us attend to what we wish to create, these questions help us adapt to the specifics of our situation. We can connect our circumstances with the flow of change by prefacing each question with, “In this situation…”

These questions create temporary shelter for us to consider the challenges of a changing system. They help us experience and offer compassion in disruption, engage creatively with difference, and support both personal and collective renewal while potentially wise responses coalesce.

If you are familiar with Zen Buddhism, think of the questions as koans — paradoxical riddles or anecdotes that have no solution. They may — if you seek to understand them in an intuitive way and work with them in your life — provide flashes of insight into what’s going on and how to engage it.

Principles for Engaging Emergence

A principle is a fundamental assumption that guides further understanding or action. Principles help us make order out of chaos. They describe the landscape, enabling us to discern useful characteristics so that we can make useful choices. Principles support us in designing our initiatives, organizing our work and ourselves, determining what to do and how best to do it. For example, a commonly cited medical principle is “first, do no harm.” This fundamental understanding guides life-and-death decisions without prescribing a specific approach.

I derived the principles for engaging emergence listed below by connecting my understanding of whole systems change processes with what science tells us about the dynamics of emergence (see “Principles for Engaging Emergence”). In short, scientists frequently cite four dynamics of emergence:

• No one is in charge. No conductor is orchestrating orderly activity (ecosystems, economic systems, activity in a city).
• Simple rules engender complex behavior. Randomness becomes coherent as individuals, each following a few basic principles or assumptions, interact with their neighbors (birds flock; traffic flows).
• Feedback. Systems grow and self-regulate as the output from one interaction influences the next interaction. (We talk to a neighbor, who talks to a neighbor, and suddenly everyone in town knows a story.)
• Clustering. As we interact, feeding back to each other, like attracts like, bonding around a shared characteristic. (Small groups of women meeting in living rooms grow into the women’s movement.)So if emergence occurs through these dynamics, what are the implications for how we engage with it?

These five principles are my answer to this question:

• Welcome disturbance. Disruption indicates that the normal behavior of a system has been interrupted. If we ignore the disturbance, chances are conditions will get worse. If we get curious about it, the disruption could lead to breakthroughs.
• Pioneer! Break habits by doing something different. Prepare and jump into the mystery, working with the feedback that comes.
• Encourage random encounters. Remember, no one is in charge. More accurately, we never know which interactions will catalyze innovation. Maximize interactions among diverse agents, knowing unexpected encounters will likely trigger a shift.
• Seek meaning. Meaning energizes us. As we discover mutuality in what is personally meaningful, we come together. Like clusters with like. Shared meaning draws us to common awareness and action. When shared meaning is central, we organize resilient, synergistic networks that serve our individual and collective needs.
• Simplify. Principles — simple rules — equip us to work with complexity. When principles break down and the situation grows chaotic, what is essential? What serves now? As answers coalesce, we become a more diverse, complex system around re-formed principles at the heart of the matter.

These principles help us work with the flow of emergence. Welcoming disturbance encourages us to begin, knowing all change starts with disruption. To support differentiation, pioneering guides us in thinking about what to do. Encouraging random encounters reminds us to consider who to involve. Seeking meaning provides a thread of coherence by helping us clarify why. And simplifying helps coherence emerge by guiding us to the how.

Practices for Engaging Emergence

If principles help us sort through what to do, practices guide us in how to do something. A practice is a skill honed through study and experimentation. The practices for engaging emergence are rooted in the skills of everyday conversation (see “Practices for Engaging Emergence”). As such, we all know something about them. They are our birthright. When issues are complex, stakes are high, and emotions are right below the surface, these practices help us engage with each other.

Because working with emergence has nothing A-to-B-to-C about it, no one right way exists to use these practices. They help us identify what to notice, what to explore, what to try. They are helpful hints for flying by the seat of our pants.

Just as scales prepare a musician and drills train an athlete, these practices equip us for the challenging conversations, the ones that involve disruption, difference, and the unknown. They are the conversational backbone for improvisation, enabling us to stay in the flow even if we don’t know the specific path we’re taking. Honing these conversational skills is a great way to engage emergence.

I organize the practices into four groups:

Prepare to Engage Emergence

• Embrace mystery, choose possibility, and follow life-energy to cultivate a composed state of mind, alert to aliveness and potential. This enables us to face whatever shows up with equanimity or even delight.

Host Emergence

• Clarify intentions and welcome people. These are skills of being a good host. In exercising them, you create a “container” — a hospitable space for working with whatever arises. These practices are the yin and yang of hosting. One provides focus — clear direction and purpose. The other ensures fertile ground for relationships and connection.
• Invite diversity to encourage people to look beyond our habitual definitions of who and what makes up a system. Doing so prepares us for innovation by increasing the likelihood of productive connections among people with different beliefs and operating assumptions. Inviting diversity is one of the most time consuming, challenging, and critical activities of engaging emergence.

Engage

• Take responsibility for what you love as an act of service. This practice is a game-changing skill. It liberates our hearts, minds, and spirits. It calls us to notice what deeply matters to us and to put our unique gifts to use for ourselves, others, and the systems in which we live and work. The more this practice becomes our operating norm, the more innovation, joy, solidarity, generosity, and other qualities of well-being appear. The capacities for listening and connecting grow through this practice.
• Stepping in to inquire appreciatively is a second game-changing skill. The questions we ask determine the answers we uncover, shaping our experience, actions, and outcomes. Typically, the more positive the inquiry, the more life-affirming the outcome.
• Open yourself to the unknown. This practice is an act of faith. Once open, we can’t go back. It may be the most counter-cultural practice of them all, requiring the courage to be vulnerable.
• Reflect, name, and harvest — these can be sacred acts. They call forth that which previously didn’t exist. The arts — music, movement, visual arts, poetry, film — often enhance the effectiveness and reach of these practices.

Iterate: Do It Again . . . and Again

This practice reminds us of the never-ending nature of change. It takes time and perseverance to make its mark. Because our attention tends to get caught in our routines, iteration is the most elusive of the practices. Together, these practices form a system for acting, providing insight into what our role is, how we support others, and what we can do together.

What’s Possible Now?

Whenever we work with this pattern of emergent change, a turning point occurs as coherence arises. We experience ourselves as part of something larger. Perhaps our voice rises in harmony, a sweet blend of each and all. Or we overcome an obstacle because we used our different skills and abilities to accomplish something together that none of us could have done alone. We change through such experiences. The principles and practices I’ve described help us break through habits of separation that keep us fragmented. Our personal stories become a doorway into the universal.

Joel de Rosnay, author of The Symbiotic Man: A New Understanding of the Organization of Life and a Vision of the Future (McGraw-Hill, 2000), introduced a notion I find promising called the macroscope. Just as microscopes help us to see the infinitely small and telescopes help us to see the infinitely far, macroscopes help us to see the infinitely complex. Rather than a single instrument, they are a class of tools for sensing complex interconnections among information, ideas, people, and experiences. Maps, stories, art, media, or some combination could be used as macroscopic tools that would help us to see ourselves in a larger context. For example, consider the brilliant use of technology in a sports stadium. We are able to experience the game from many angles. At a glance, the scoreboard tells us the state of play. Cameras zoom in so that we can see the action not just on the field but also in the audience. Television dramatically extends the reach of the event. And a history of statistics available online lets both professional commentators and ordinary people put the activities in perspective. We can immerse ourselves in the experience and understand it from many perspectives. Imagine applying such thoughtfulness to making the state of the economy, education, or a war visible to us all.

Both microscopes and telescopes sparked tremendous innovation. Macroscopes have such potential today. As we appreciate our interconnectedness, our sense of who is our community expands. The conditions for greater trust and courage emerge. We act, knowing something about the collective assumptions and intentions we share. We become better equipped to work with upheaval and change.

Let us put these notions to work so that we fully engage with the nascent renaissance that is underway. Begin simply, wherever you are. I offer three suggestions:

• Be compassionate disrupters, asking possibility-oriented questions.
• Creatively engage, interacting with people outside our comfort zone.
• Support wise renewal, telling stories of upheaval turned to opportunity.

Peggy Holman has designed and hosted meetings for diverse groups handling complex issues since 1992, including the National Institute of Corrections, Microsoft, and the Associated Press Managing Editors. In the second edition of The Change Handbook, Peggy and co-authors Tom Devane and Steven Cady profile 61 change methods, including Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, and the World Café. Her new book, Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity (Berrett-Koehler, 2010), dives beneath these change methods to make visible deeper patterns, principles, and practices for change that can guide us through turbulent times.

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In this new context, managers must develop a different mindset. They need to deal with a high level of unpredictability and accept the incompleteness of our knowledge base. Moreover, they need to act on the fact that the key differentiating factor between success and failure will be the ability to learn collaboratively with others — both within and outside of their organizations.

Why collaborative learning? In the current business climate, no one person or organization can bridge the chasm between present levels of skills and knowledge and the level of understanding necessary to take advantage of breaking technologies. The challenges of the global economy require that we join with customers, vendors, competitors, and partners from other industries to share insights. Organizational survival into the next century may well depend on our ability to configure collaborative arrangements within and across organizations — quickly, flexibly, and with a clear learning strategy. Companies that cannot network with others to share key knowledge — using the latest technology — will fall hopelessly behind their rivals.

The Practice of Collaborative Learning

What is collaborative learning, and what does it entail in practice? Collaborative learning is the process of generating new knowledge and capability that occurs when two or more people explore key business issues together, with the goal of fulfilling organizational needs and continually building their ability to work and learn in tandem. The practice of collaborative learning moves relationships beyond the mere exchange of information that characterizes most project teams or corporate partnerships. Collaborative learning begins at the individual level. For it to take root in an organization, employees must first develop a collaborative mindset and a collaborative skillset.

A Collaborative Mindset: Seeing New Opportunities

Individuals who adopt a collaborative mindset maintain an active awareness of the collaborative learning potential in every business transaction. They possess an openness and keen interest in others’ perspectives, and develop the ability to gather resources to experiment with and implement new ideas. These employees realize that their own tacit knowledge — when combined with a colleague’s tacit knowledge — may hold the key to a new innovation. Therefore, individuals working from this orientation constantly seek opportunities to explore collaborative potential with partners, coworkers, and even those who seemingly have no direct connection to the business. They leave themselves open to serendipitous opportunities for new partnering that may arise on airplanes, in shopping malls, or in other environments that we typically do not think of as supporting learning.

But a collaborative mindset at the individual level is not enough. To foster this same mindset on an organizational level requires that a firm understand the learning and data acquisition styles of partner organizations. Then the firm must deliver information and knowledge in forms that partners can use. This activity can be as simple as providing a list of the organization’s commonly used acronyms, or as complex as opening the company’s intranet to partners so that they may understand the firm’s inner workings.

When companies become aware of the potential in collaboration, knowledge-generating opportunities arise both by conscious design and by chance. For example, a manager at one firm gave a presentation to a partner company, knowing that a dissatisfied customer sat in the audience. By working from a collaborative mindset, this manager openly engaged the customer in recounting the problems he had experienced with the product and made a commitment to remedy the situation in front of the audience. Over time, this collaborative stance led to a new partnership with the now satisfied customer and resulted in several joint projects, including one at a major airport. Working from a collaborative mindset means continually seeking opportunities to build on existing relationships, and turning neutral or negative circumstances into advantageous ones.

A Collaborative Skillset: Spanning Boundaries

In addition to developing a collaborative mindset, individuals need to build a set of competencies that let them cross boundaries between groups and companies, learn from others, and disseminate that learning throughout their organizations. The six “boundary-spanning skills” described below provide managers with the tools they need to work more productively with others — within and outside of the organization — and to create and manage the knowledge gained through those interactions (for a boundary spanning competency model, go to www.pegasuscom.com/model.html).

Double-Loop Learning. The usual approach to a new experience or piece of data is termed single-loop, or adaptive, learning. (These concepts derive from the work of Chris Argyris.) Single-loop learning occurs when we alter our actions based on new information but we do not question the assumptions and beliefs concerning that data. We see an example of this in how organizations typically handle failure. Analyzing the “lessons learned” from a particular problem may be valuable, but it often results in a list of do’s and don’t’s — single-loop learning. This technique doesn’t delve into the assumptions that brought about the shortfall, nor does it seek to change the system created by those assumptions. In double-loop, or generative, learning, when we encounter failure, we explore our assumptions and commit to behaving differently in the future. Developing skill in double-loop learning involves increasing our awareness of the filters and suppositions that we use to interpret reality, and acting on this insight.

Communication (Dialogue, Feedback, Listening). Effective boundary-spanning relies on hearing, understanding, and empathizing with others. This ability involves listening not only to others but also to ourselves to uncover hidden biases. The practice of dialogue, as first defined by physicist David Bohm, can help. Dialogue supports divergent communication, in which a group allows a stream of viewpoints to flow through the conversation without feeling a need to reach a set conclusion. It also teaches us how to listen to others without judging them. Another component of boundary spanning communication is the capacity to give and receive feedback. This challenging skill helps us to see beyond our own view of reality and improves our ability to communicate with others. Tactfully done, feedback conveys potentially ego-damaging information in a neutral and helpful way. Mediation. As organizations continue to move toward flattened hierarchies, they have less need for traditional management techniques. Instead, they must help their workers learn to influence their peers in productive ways. In particular, mediation capabilities let parties go beyond political maneuvering and a winner-take-all attitude to achieve alignment through a focus on shared interests.

Systems Thinking. Systems thinking provides the essential backdrop for understanding the cause-and-effect relationships between organizations and their larger environments. This perspective highlights the functioning of the system as a whole, rather than the discrete parts that make up that system. The systems thinking toolbox — which includes causal loop diagramming, systems archetypes, stock and flow diagrams, and other tools — provides a powerful methodology for surfacing barriers to change, identifying leverage points for effective action, and building new connections.

Peer Learning. Peer learning is a vital and, in many cases, the most effective form of learning. Traditional corporate learning models involve either in-house classroom training or university courses. These methods emphasize the transfer of theory and case studies from the expert to the student. In current business practice, however, learning must take place “just-in-time,” with theory and practice developed in parallel and all players taking part in problem-solving activities. The concepts of self-directed work teams, 360-degree feedback, and communities of practice all support the increasing relevance of peer learning.

Cultural Literacy. Research shows that success in managing relationships with individuals from other cultures hinges on flexibility, openness, sensitivity, tolerance, curiosity, the ability to handle stress, and a sense of humor. Even armed with these skills, people can still fall victim to their own cultural values and assume that their perspective is the right one. This attitude can spawn unexpected conflict. To work successfully on a global level, organizations must continuously build awareness of cultural differences among employees and help them develop a level of comfort working across cultural boundaries. Such awareness emerges primarily from actual interactions with members of other cultures; it cannot be acquired from books and lectures, no matter how engaging or insightful.

A Collaborative Environment

By combining a collaborative mindset and skill set, managers acquire the skills and flexibility they need to move their organizations forward. As a result, they can inspire individuals to cross boundaries, learn from others, and disseminate that learning through-out the organization (see “The Collaborative Learning Cycle”). Such boundary spanning activities give workers access to business expertise in the moment — and can lead to rich, new insights.

However, there is another prime ingredient necessary for collaborative learning: the organization must support and sustain a collaborative environment. Organizational consultant Edward Marshall defines a collaborative environment as consisting of:

• A Collaborative Culture: a set of core values that shape a business’s behavior, including respect for people, honor and integrity, ownership and alignment, consensus, trust-based relationships, full responsibility and accountability, and recognition and growth
• Collaborative Team Processes: including team formation, management, self-sufficiency and renewal, and closing processes
• A Collaborative Structure: support for collaboration from human resources and information systems
• Collaborative Leadership: the ability to recognize many leaders, not just one; these leaders fulfill a number of functions, such as facilitator, coach, healer, member, manager, change agent

How can an organization bridge the gap between individuals’ development of a collaborative mindset and skillset and the company’s development of a collaborative environment? One way is to form an internal learning group. Drawn from various divisions and levels within the company, such a group focuses on building collaborative capability — and deriving business results from that enhanced capability — within the organization.

These groups begin by assessing the organization’s level of support for collaborative efforts. For example, one company found that workers failed to share technical information across departments because they didn’t understand the firm’s policies regarding intellectual property. In this case, the organization provided additional training to help employees work through these concerns.

Internal learning groups cultivate boundary-spanning skills and practice collaborative learning themselves in addressing the company’s business challenges. For example, a small West-Coast chemical company experienced communication barriers after merging with a lab on the East Coast. Management assembled a group consisting of members from each of the merged entities to address issues of collaboration. This team put together a personnel directory and a compendium of technical success stories from both firms. In addition, it designed a plan for an organization-wide session to inform employees about the merged organization’s new accounting processes, lab procedures, technical competencies, and customer care approaches. In the process, the group discovered pockets of people who were interested in exploring collaboration. Encouraged by this finding, it began to support ongoing experiments in collaborative learning, such as periodic meetings of project managers to exchange knowledge and practices.

These internal learning groups also play a central role in disseminating new knowledge throughout the organization, using tools such as after-action reviews, internal publications, and intranets. The sharing of cutting-edge tools and ideas with other teams creates value because it improves processes and hones collaborative skills. For example, the learning group of a Fortune 500 company experimented with the use of e-meeting software and disseminated that knowledge throughout the company through the technical staff. Finally, the learning group members experience an enhanced degree of interdependence, which steps up collaboration — and performance — even further. The group’s process both begins and ends with a reassessment of the organization’s collaborative learning capability, at an increasingly fine-grained level of inquiry.

Forming a Learning Network

Once the internal learning group has completed some successful projects, it will likely encounter barriers to moving the organization to a fully collaborative environment. These barriers often take the form of inherent conflicts between espoused beliefs, such as “We are a collaborative company,” and core values, such as “The individual is who counts here; watch out for number one.” One way to surmount these barriers is for the group to participate in a learning network (see “The Learning Network” on p. 1), drawn from the work of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Edgar Schein on the learning consortium.

A learning network is a cross-organizational forum in which internal learning groups from diverse organizations can explore challenges together. Group members come together on a regular basis to give and get feedback and create new knowledge. The interaction among the parties sparks behavioral changes that create value for each organization. This is because outsiders may have a more objective view of an organization’s operations and strategies than do those who are involved in the firm’s day-to-day operations. For example, when an information technology company’s learning group presented a new project for a Web-based internal instructional system to the other members of its learning network, someone from another company asked how it would implement the program in countries where Internet access is limited. This query served as powerful feedback for the presenting group.

For a learning network to succeed, the organizations involved must decide how to deal with differential power among the stakeholders; define the network’s mission, goals, and norms; involve dedicated and trained participants; develop a level of trust among individuals and organizations; and assume a win-win orientation. Each member group engages in a process of experimentation, application, and dissemination of knowledge within its own organization. The network member groups then meet regularly to share knowledge and to engage in collaborative projects across organizations. These projects can take the form of joint research, standards setting activities, experimentation, problem-solving, or peer-teaching seminars. Interdependence and trust strengthen when network members follow through on commitments, provide feedback, and come to new insights together.

The ongoing support and vitality of internal learning groups is central at this stage. To create value within their home organizations, member groups in the learning network must capture and transfer learnings from the network’s cross-organizational programs. They can do so through ongoing activities that link internal groups’ projects to the network. This might include visits between companies, the design of collaborative spaces — both physical and Web-based — for network activities that are broadly accessible to members, and frequent face-to-face and virtual meetings, both internal and cross-organizational.

For instance, the Collaborative Learning Network is a consortium of seven companies from a variety of industries dedicated to understanding how collaborative learning can enhance organizational performance. Its members have engaged in a series of monthly virtual seminars over the past year that link semi-annual face-to-face meetings. Network members have found that experimenting with virtual processes for cross-firm communication has directly helped their business units build expertise in collaborative tools. Below are some findings from these joint experiments:

• For virtual meetings, simple tools like phone conferencing, e-mail, and Powerpoint presentations shared on the Web work best. These tools are standardized across organizations and platforms.
• Synchronous meetings, whether face to face or virtual, garner more consistent participation than more open-ended, asynchronous methods, such as Web-based discussion boards.
• Information overload is at best irritating and at worst debilitating. Networks must find a balance between “push” (e-mail, phone, print) and “pull” (Web sites, scheduled events, conferencing) methods of information exchange.

Of course, companies must receive a return on their investment in collaborative processes. Questions to pose in assessing learning network results include: What has been the bottom-line impact of new sources of learning? Have new applications of technology emerged from the network activities? If so, are they now producing profit or cutting costs? Has senior management acted on any feedback received through the learning network’s activities? If so, what has been the outcome?

Each learning network will have a natural life cycle. Once the initial period of activity has concluded — as agreed at the outset — the network members need to enter a closing or renewal phase. If the network chooses to disband, then the participants should schedule a formal closing meeting to celebrate the network’s achievements. Members might also document the network’s experiences in some final form, such as a learning history. As a final outcome, members could assemble a core group of mentors willing to guide other individuals in each organization who may wish to initiate their own learning network (see “Forming a Learning Network”).

Bringing It All Together

If used skillfully, collaborative learning can improve work performance; heighten strategic awareness; enhance responsiveness to changes in the marketplace; and foster more productive relationships with customers, vendors, and other stakeholders. It can also encourage teams to experiment with fresh approaches for addressing problems and for working and thinking together. By combining collaborative awareness and skills at the individual, group, firm, and inter-firm levels, organizations can effect significant and lasting change. In this challenging climate, we all need to develop powerful new models of partnership and learning. Collaborative learning offers a structured way for organizations to quickly adapt to the needs of a changing business environment — to the benefit of individual employees and the organization as a whole.

Dori Digenti is president and founder of Learning Mastery, an education and consulting firm focusing on collaboration and learning. Over the past 20 years, Dori has worked with business, academia, and government to develop cultural literacy, learning capacity, and collaborative competence. She has written the Collaborative Learning Guidebook (1999), as well as articles for Reflections: The SoL Journal, the Organization Development Journal, and other publications. Dori is webmaster for www.learnmaster.com, www.collaborative-learning.org, and a forthcoming Web site on the work of Edgar Schein.

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The question that stands before us now is not who can take part in the cultural transformation needed to address these complex problems, but how shall we stand together to do so? Will we simply try to fix the problems we now face with the same mindsets that created them or will we learn to be together in new ways?

Fortunately, every person can participate in and contribute to the creation of a new global ethos of partnership and peace. In fact, we do so each time we choose:

• discernment instead of judgment
• appreciation over criticism
• generosity in place of self-interest
• reconciliation over retaliation

A culture of partnership is one that supports our full humanity and helps us reach our highest human potential. Whether we build this culture depends on the choices we make, from the seemingly insignificant to the most exalted. By understanding our options, we can make wise decisions.

Reframing the Conversation

Through two decades of research, Riane Eisler (one of the authors of this article) found a fundamental difference in how human societies evolved (for a detailed discussion, see The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Harper Collins Publishing, 1987). She documented that, from the beginning, some cultures oriented more to what she termed a dominator system and others to a partnership system — and that gender roles and relations are structured very differently in each (see “Dominator-Partnership Continuum” on p. 10). In dominator systems, social ranking begins with our most fundamental human difference—the difference between female and male. The male and what is stereotypically considered masculine is valued over the female and the stereotypically feminine. This foundational ranking of one gender over the other sets in place a pattern of social rankings based on other differences, such as ethnicity, race, religion, and so on.

In partnership systems, societies value both halves of humanity equally and recognize that humans are social animals with a unique wisdom and capacity to work and live together. Here, stereotypically feminine traits and activities such as caring, nonviolence, and caregiving are highly valued — whether they reside in women or men. This orientation profoundly affects the society’s guiding system of values in all institutions, including business, government, and economics. For example, using the lenses of these social categories makes it possible to see that caring for people, starting in childhood, and for the Earth are important in human and environmental terms.

Toward the dominator end of the spectrum, social systems organize relationships at all levels according to a hierarchy of control, status, and privilege. They routinely extend rights and freedoms to those on top and deny them to those on the bottom. Such rankings lead to thinking limited to two dimensions: superior or inferior; dominating or dominated. Since there is no awareness of the partnership alternative, both parties live in fear. Those on top fear loss of power and control while those on the bottom perpetually seek to gain it. This ranking structure then leads to conflicts — sometimes over trivial issues — that escalate, often leading to cycles of violence, resentment, and retaliation. Such conditions do not generally contribute to growth, learning, or peace.

Social systems toward the partnership end of the spectrum are characterized by more egalitarian organizational structures in which both genders are seen as equal yet different, each capable of unique manifestations of value. A hierarchy of roles may exist, but delegation tends to be based on competency, rather than rankings by gender or other arbitrary groupings. Each group is capable of appreciating the unique value of the other. Differences are seen as opportunities for learning, and both individuals and groups organize through mutual accountability and individual responsibility. Empowerment stems from one’s unique contributions, and connections are made at the level of values, rather than by gender, ethnicity, and other social categories.

In her most recent book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (Berrett-Koehler, 2007), Riane provides extensive evidence of how caring business policies that result from partnership values are actually more profitable than those that stem from dominator values. Economists tell us that building “high-quality human capital” is essential for the postindustrial, knowledge economy. Nations that invest in caring for children are doing just that—while those that do not will dearly pay for this failure.

Learning Conversations

In a global society, we see all shades in the spectrum between dominator and partnership systems. But the necessity to make headway on our intractable challenges requires that we accelerate the movement toward the partnership side of the continuum. A simple way to contribute to designing the future we desire is conversation. Conversation costs nothing but time and can include everyone. Conversations are one of the cornerstones of civic engagement. For millennia, they have served as a means to explore, defend, persuade, connect, and heal. Conversations become the threads of the social fabric of our lives, contributing to communal beliefs, expectations, and judgments about the structures and relationships underlying our families, tribes, communities, institutions, and nations. Conversations are so powerful that in an effort to control their subjects, despots and dictators often limit what topics can be discussed and how or if conversations are allowed.

DOMINATOR-PARTNERSHIP CONTINUUM

The necessity to make headway on our intractable challenges requires that we accelerate the movement toward the partnership side of the continuum.

Modern social science and psychological research has found that the what and how of conversations often lead to defining moments. The what of conversations are the topics we choose to discuss, and the how includes ideas for holding conversations from which we can learn and grow, rather than persuade, coerce, or intimidate. The purpose of holding conversations about our fundamental differences is, therefore, not to blame or judge each other or ourselves. Conversations are held in order to learn what still binds us to the dominator dynamic and to allow us to see each other and our world more clearly.

To understand what divides us, we must look honestly and earnestly at our differences. We must make an effort to understand the other’s point of view and to share our own. The best way to have a powerful conversation about what separates us is to simply listen, become aware of the meaning we may be making for ourselves from what we hear, and recognize that what the other person is saying is true for her or him.

At first, it may be difficult to hold neutral conversations due to the learned meanings we draw from words, phrases, and even tone of voice. Even if you hold your heart for humanity deeply, you are likely to carry some biases based on the tacit meanings that come from your experiences in life related to your own gender. To truly understand the other, you will want to consider what it is like to be in the other’s shoes, to have their beliefs, points of view, and experiences. The “Learning Practice of Leadership” may serve as a helpful reminder for how we can lead ourselves through the controversial waters of gender conversations (see “Learning Practice of Leadership” on p. 11).

Tips for Partnership Conversations

Below are tips for holding partnership conversations and some sample questions to get you started. These tools will be particularly useful in dealing with emotionally charged issues.

1. Convene the conversation in circle so that everyone holds an equal position.
2. Take time to allow people to get settled and leave their work and other concerns behind. Prepare a question that allows people to get introduced and learn a little about why they have joined this conversation.
3. Allow each person to speak when they are ready. There is no need to pressure anyone to talk. People will learn both from listening and speaking.
4. Allow each person who wishes to speak adequate time to do so without interruption.
5. Select a question to start the gender conversation. Several are included in the bulleted list below.
6. As you explore the conversation more deeply, use open questions. Open questions are questions to which there is no “yes” or “no” answer. They are not intended to lead to a specific outcome. Open questions come from a genuine place of curiosity. They often begin with words like “how,”, “what,” “when,” and “why.”
7. Be mindful of your intention when asking any question. If you have a judgment behind your question, it will likely show through., “Why” questions are particularly tricky as they sometimes sound accusatory, such as “Why do you believe that?”
8. Be transparent by stating your personal experiences in relating a position or asking a question.
9. Listen and try to put your judgments aside.
10. Resist the temptation to voice either your own affirmation or your disagreement with another person’s point of view. Allow each speaker to be accountable for their own words.
11. If you find you are having a strong reaction to someone’s comment, good or bad, make a note for later reflection. Ask yourself, what is creating this reaction?
12. In these conversations, it is not important to convince or draw conclusions, but to listen and learn. Have something to write on. Jot down what you notice. And when time allows, journal about what you notice about what you notice. See where a deeper inquiry leads without trying to find the “right answer.”
13. When the conversation has concluded, take time to record notes about what you’ve learned.
14. Reflect on new questions you may have as result of the conversation and new options for relating with others.

Examples: Gender Topic Questions

• What is the first memory you recall in which gender played an important role?
• What happened?
• Do you recall any conclusions you may have drawn as a result of this experience?
• Did the experience make you feel more satisfied to be your gender or less? More empowered or less?
• How do people in your church, work, or community express gender equality and gender rankings?
• What evidence do you find that men are more valued than women?
• What evidence do you find that women are more valued than men?
• What do males and females have in common when it comes to personal values?
• What do you believe about the expression of gender in living species that influences your attitudes about gender differences in humans?
• Think of a major historical event in your lifetime. If you were a different gender, how would your interpretation of that event be changed?
• How do the perceptions we hold about gender influence our attitudes toward power and money?
• What would be different if you had been born a different sex?
• How would the sexes have to change to live more closely aligned with the partnership model?
• What would be the impact to government, business, and other social systems?

Not Just a “Women’s Issue”

Exploring the issues that divide us by examining how we are influenced by our experience of gender can be powerful. It may lead to further inquiry to uncover how gender differences impact your family, community, work, and institutional relationships. In turn, these explorations may give rise to questions about how culture and nations impact each other through our policies, markets, and impact on the planet.

Beginning with our most fundamental human difference, the difference between male and female, it is now time to understand deeply how our gender privileges, limitations, and experiences have shaped and continue to influence us, not only as individual women and men but as members of a world that has inherited a system of values that is heavily influenced by dominator valuations.

One of the most interesting, and important, outcomes of open-ended conversations about gender is a new understanding of what it means to be human for both women and men — and that gender is not “just a women’s issue” but is a key issue for whether we move to a more peaceful and equitable world. As more of us talk openly about these matters, we become participants in the cultural transformation from domination to partnership — not only in gender relations but in all relations. We also help create more effective, humane, and sustainable business practices and government policies when we bring these unconscious impediments out into the open.

Note: References to behavior resulting from the ranking and hierarchy of roles in dominator and partnership systems were adapted from the work of Virginia Satir and the Satir Institute of the Pacific.

Riane Eisler is a social scientist, attorney, consultant, and author best known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now published in 23 languages. Her newest book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking” and by Peter Senge as “desperately needed,” proposes a new paradigm for economic systems. Riane keynotes at conferences worldwide, teaches transformative leadership at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org).

Lucy E. Garrick is an organizational leadership consultant, speaker, artist, and founder of Million Ideas for Peace, a public project designed to help individuals connect their personal and social passions to peacemaking (www.millionideas4peace.com). Lucy consults with corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, and public groups to improve individual and group leadership and performance. She holds a masters degree in Whole Systems Design, is chair of the OSR Alumni Association board of directors, and is principle consultant at NorthShore Consulting Group in Seattle, WA (www.northshoregroup.net).

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As long as we conceive of power as the capacity to exert one’s will over another, it is something to be wary of. Power can manipulate, coerce, and destroy. And as long as we are convinced we have none, power will always look negative. Even esteemed journalist Bill Moyers recently reinforced a view of power as categorically negative., “The further you get from power,” he said, “the closer you get to the truth.”

But power means simply our capacity to act., “Power is necessary to produce the changes I want in my community,” Margaret Moore of Allied Communities of Tarrant (ACT) in Fort Worth, Texas, told me. I’ve found many Americans returning power to its original meaning — “to be able.” From this lens, we each have power — and often, much more power than we think.

One Choice We Don’t Have

In fact, we have no choice about whether to be world changers. If we accept ecology’s insights that we exist in densely woven networks then we must also accept that every choice we make sends out ripples, even if we’re not consciously choosing. So the choice we have is not whether, but only how, we change the world. All this means that public life is not simply what officials and other “big shots” have.

So the choice we have is not whether, but only how, we change the world.

One related evidence of our power is so obvious it is often overlooked. Human beings show up in radically different notches on the “ethical scale” depending on the culture in which we live. In Japan, “only” 15 percent of men beat their spouses. In many other countries, over half do. The murder rate in the United States is four times higher than in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan.

Plus, behavior can change quickly. Germany moved from a country in which millions of its citizens went along with mass murder to become in a single generation one of the world’s more respected nations. An incomparably less consequential but still telling example: In only a decade, 1992 to 2002, U. S. high school students who admitted to cheating on a test at least once in a year climbed by 21 percent to three-quarters of all surveyed.

So what do these differences and the speed of change in behavior tell us? That it is culture, not fixed aspects of human nature, which largely determines the prevalence of cooperation or brutality, honesty or deceit. And since we create culture through our daily choices, then we do, each of us, wield enormous power.

Let me explore related, empowering findings of science that also confirm our power.

Mirrors in Our Brains

Recent neuroscience reveals our interdependence to be vastly greater than we’d ever imagined. In the early 1990s, neuroscientists were studying the brain activity of monkeys, particularly in the part of the brain’s frontal lobe associated with distinct actions, such as reaching or eating.

They saw specific neurons firing for specific activities. But then they noticed something they didn’t expect at all: The very same neurons fired when a monkey was simply watching another monkey perform the action.

“Monkey see, monkey do” suddenly took on a whole new meaning for me. Since we humans are wired like our close relatives, when we observe someone else, our own brains are simultaneously experiencing at least something of what that person is experiencing. More recent work studying humans has borne out this truth.

These copycats are called “mirror neurons,” and their implications are staggering. We do walk in one another’s shoes, whether we want to or not.

“[Our] intimate brain-to-brain link-up . . . lets us affect the brain — and so the body — of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.” — Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

We literally experience and therefore co-create one another, moment to moment. For me, our “imprintability” is itself a source of hope. We can be certain that our actions, and perhaps our mental states, register in others. We change anyone observing us. That’s power.

And we never know who’s watching. Just think: It may be when we feel most marginalized and unheard, but still act with resolve, that someone is listening or watching and their life is forever changed.

As I form this thought, the face of Wangari Maathai comes to mind. A Kenyan, Wangari planted seven trees on Earth Day in Nairobi in 1977 to honor seven women environmental leaders there. Then, over two decades, she was jailed, humiliated, and beaten for her environmental activism, but her simple act ultimately sparked a movement in which those seven trees became forty million, all planted by village women across Kenya.

In the fall of 2004, when Maathai got the call telling her she had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, her first words were:, “I didn’t know anyone was listening.” But clearly, a lot of people were beginning to listen, from tens of thousands of self-taught tree planters in Kenya to the Nobel committee sitting in Oslo.

From there I flash back to a conversation with João Pedro Stédile, a founder of the largest and perhaps most effective social movement in this hemisphere — Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, enabling some of world’s poorest people to gain nearly twenty million acres of unused land. Under Brazil’s military regime in the early 1980s even gathering a handful of people was risky. And, in that dangerous time, who helped motivate João Pedro? It was César Chávez, he told me, and the U. S. farm workers.

I’ll bet Chávez never knew.

Just as important, the findings of neuroscience also give us insight as to how to change and empower ourselves. They suggest that a great way is to place ourselves in the company of those we want most to be like. For sure, we’ll become more like them. Thus, whom we choose as friends, as partners, whom we spend time with — these may be our most important choices. And “spending time” means more than face-to-face contact. What we witness on TV, in films, and on the Internet, what we read and therefore imagine — all are firing mirror neurons in our brains and forming us.

As the author of Diet for a Small Planet, I’m associated with a focus on the power of what we put into our mouths. But what we let into our minds equally determines who we become. So why not choose an empowering news diet? I’ve included my own menu suggestions in Recommended Reading at the end of Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad (Small Planet Media, 2007).

Power Isn’t a Four-Letter Word

Power is an idea. And in our culture it’s a stifling idea. We’re taught to see power as something fixed — we either have it, or we don’t. But if power is our capacity to get things done, then even a moment’s reflection tells us we can’t create much alone.

From there, power becomes something we human beings develop together — relational power. And it’s a lot more fun.

“Relational” suggests that power can expand for many people simultaneously. It’s no longer a harsh, zero sum concept — the more for you, the less for me. The growth in one person’s power can enhance the power of others. Idea 3 (see table) contrasts our limited, negative view of power with a freeing, relational view.

Let me tell you one story of relational power.

In the 1970s, pollution in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was so bad that drivers had to turn on headlights at noon to cut through it. But in the 1990s, this once-charming city — famous for its choo-choos — went from racially-divided ugly duckling to swan, winning international awards and the envy of its neighbors.

The city’s rebirth sprang in part from big investments in the city’s cultural renewal — including the world’s largest freshwater aquarium, attracting over a million visitors a year; a renovated theater involving one thousand volunteers annually; and a new riverfront park.

But all these weren’t the city fathers’ ideas.

IDEA 3: RETHINKING POWER

Twenty years ago, fifty spunky, frustrated citizens declared that the old ways of making decisions weren’t working and drew their fellow residents — across race and class lines — into a twenty-week series of brainstorming sessions they called “visioning.” Their goal was hardly modest — to save their city by the end of the century. They called itVision 2000. They drew up thirty-four goals, formed action groups, sought funding, and rolled up their sleeves.

By 1992, halfway along, the Visioners had already achieved a remarkable 85 percent of their goals. Smog was defeated, tourism was booming thanks to the new aquarium, crime was down, and jobs and lowincome housing were on the rise. People stayed downtown after dark, and the refurbished riverside had become an oak-dappled mecca.

Chattanoogans didn’t stop there. In 1992, a citywide meeting to shape a school reform agenda drew not the small crowd expected but fifteen hundred people, who generated two thousand suggestions.

By now the approach has seeped its way into the city’s culture. In 2002, to plan a big waterfront project, three hundred people participated in a “charrette” where teams used rolls of butcher paper to draw what they wanted to see happen.

“Basically, everything we do, any major initiative in Chattanooga, now involves public participation,” said Karen Hundt, who works for a joint city-county planning agency. From Atlanta to West Springfield, Massachusetts, from Bahrain to Zimbabwe, citizens taken by Chattanooga’s story are rewriting it to suit their own needs.

Here power is not a fixed pie to be sliced up. It grows as citizens join together, weaving relationships essential to sustained change.

Relational Power’s Under Appreciated Sources

While we commonly think of power in the form of official status or wealth or force restricted to a few of us, take a moment to mull over these twelve sources of relational power available to any one of us:

• Building Relationships of Trust. Thirty-five hundred congregations — Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and some Evangelicals and Muslims — are dues-paying members of one hundred thirty-three religious networks nationwide. These local federations with members adding up to as many as three million Americans are successfully tackling problems that range from poverty wages to failing schools. Their genius is what they call “one-on-one” organizing strategies. These involve face-to-face meetings allowing ordinary people to discover their own capacities because someone — finally — is listening.
• Ability to Analyze Power and Self-Interest. One such organization, Communities Organized for Public Service in San Antonio, analyzes corporate interests before bringing corporations into dialogue on job-training reform.
• Knowledge. National People’s Action documents banks’ racial “redlining” in lending and helps to pass the federal Community Reinvestment Act, which has brought over a trillion dollars into poor neighborhoods. Workers at South Mountain Company in Massachusetts buy the company and apply knowledge from their direct experience to make it profitable and to incorporate energy efficient methods.
• Numbers of People. The congregation-based Industrial Areas Foundation is able to gather together thousands for public “actions,” commanding the attention of lawmakers.
• Discipline. Young people in the Youth Action Program — precursor to the nationwide Youth Build — handle themselves with such decorum at a New York’s City Council meeting that officials are moved to respond to the group’s request for support.
• Vision. In the Merrimack Valley Project in Massachusetts, some businesses “catch” the citizens’ vision of industry responsive to community values and change their positions.
• Diversity. Memphis’s Shelby County Interfaith organization identifies distinct black and white interests on school reform and multiplies its impact by addressing both sets in improving Memphis schools.
• Creativity. Citizens in St. Paul devise their own neighborhood network to help the elderly stay out of nursing homes. Regular folks in San Antonio devise a new job training program that’s become a national model.
• Persistence. Members of ACORN, a two hundred twenty-five thousand member-strong, low-income people’s organization, stand in line all night to squeeze out paid banking lobbyists for seats in the congressional hearing room debating the Community Reinvestment Act.
• Humor. Kentuckians for the Commonwealth stage a skit at the state capitol. In bed are KFTC members portraying legislators and their farmer chairperson pretending to be a coal lobbyist. They pass big wads of fake cash under the covers. Grabbing media attention, they get their reform measure passed.
• Chutzpah — Nerve. Sixth graders in Amesville, Ohio, don’t trust the EPA to clean up after a toxic spill in the local creek, so they form themselves into the town’s water quality control team and get the job done.
• Mastering the Arts of Democracy. Organizations of the Industrial Area Foundation network, over fifty nationwide, evaluate and reflect — often right on the spot — following each public action or meeting. They ask: How do you feel? How did each spokesperson do? Did we meet our goals? A seasoned organizer will also try to teach a lesson about what the organization sees as the “universals” of public life, such as relational power.

Drops Count

Sadly, though, many of us remain blind to such a promising reframing of possibility. Imagining ourselves powerless, we disparage our acts as mere drops in the bucket … as, well, useless. But think about it: Buckets fill up really fast on a rainy night. Feelings of powerlessness come not from seeing oneself as a drop; they arise when we can’t perceive the bucket at all. Thus, to uproot feelings of powerlessness, we can work to define and shape the bucket — to consciously construct a frame that gives meaning to our actions (see “Spirals of Powerlessness and Empowerment” on p. 5).

powerment” on p. 5). That satisfying exploration begins, I believe, when we recognize that our planet’s multiple crises are neither separate nor random. They flow largely from a partial, and thus distorted, view of our own nature, which leads us to turn our fate over to forces outside our control, especially to a one-rule economy violating deep human sensibilities, not to mention our common sense. Our deepening crises flow, as well, from humanity’s to-date lack of preparedness to identify and skillfully to confront the tiny minority among us who seem to lack empathetic sensibilities.

As you now know, for me a “bucket” that both contains and gives meaning to our creative, positive acts is Living Democracy. It springs from and meets humanity’s common and deep emotional and spiritual needs. So, I wonder: In a world torn apart by sectarian division, could Living Democracy become a uniting civic vision complementing our religious and spiritual convictions — a nonsectarian yet soul-satisfying pathway out of the current morass?

I can’t be certain, of course, but I think so.

And then again, I ask myself often, whatever the real odds of reversing our global catastrophe, is there a more invigorating way to live than that of making democracy a way of life?

In answering that question negatively, I am certain.

Frances Moore Lappé is the author of 16 books, beginning with the 1971 three-million-copy bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, which awakened a whole generation to the human-made causes of hunger and the significance of our everyday choices. This article is reprinted with permission from Chapter 4 of her newest book, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad (Small Planet Press, 2007). For more information, go to www.gettingagrip.net. For chapter source notes, go to “The Book—End Notes.”

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According to the dictionary, trust has essentially two meanings:

• To have confidence in someone, or
• To expect/hope/suppose that someone will act or something will happen.

In the workplace, we need to consider this distinction. For me, real trust is about the first definition — the belief in a person’s ability to perform a specific task under specific circumstances. It is a positive statement about the relationship between two people:, “I believe you are capable of [taking some action].” This form of trust implies interdependence and is crucial to the development of a healthy relationship.

The second meaning connotes obligation:, “I expect that you will [take some action].” As such, it implies dependence in the relationship. This attitude blocks the development of an equal partnership, where both parties can feel fully valued. Unfortunately, this latter definition of trust is all too prevalent in many organizations.

We Are in This Together

Why is real trust so important? Studies have shown that it improves task effectiveness, because it reduces the need for people to check up on each other. Great teamwork requires real trust because members need to feel confident that their coworkers are fulfilling their commitments as they work interdependently toward the same aim. In relationships based on the first definition of trust, people feel relaxed and can communicate openly; these factors boost individual and group enthusiasm for joint undertakings. Lack of real trust increases anxiety, diverts attention from the task, stifles innovation, and drains energy.

But real trust can be difficult to achieve. All too often, we see people as assets or things that are ultimately replaceable. We forget that others have aspirations and needs, and, given the opportunity, want to do their best at work. We fail to acknowledge that the individuals who design, operate, and manage our organizations are key to our mutual success.

Dynamics of Trust and Control

When an organization fails to achieve the desired performance, managers have a choice (see “Trust and Control”). They can set in place mechanisms designed to reduce the performance gap — procedures, scripts, checks, and measures that assess and constrain performance. Or they can trust their staff and colleagues and support them by having a clear common purpose, coaching and encouraging them, and engendering a collaborative learning culture.

Command Loop. One option for addressing the performance gap is to introduce control, setting in motion the Command loop. At first, the control may take a supportive form. Common, standardized practices can help everyone behave consistently and successfully. Managers usually introduce control with this positive intent, believing that if the implementation is well managed and aligned to a common purpose, then everything should be okay.

The problem occurs when managers see control mechanisms as the means to minimize performance gaps and use them more and more frequently. They rely less on coaching and open discussion for learning and fine-tuning performance, falling back instead on policing mechanisms designed to ensure compliance with rules.

TRUST AND CONTROL

In the Command loops, managers address a performance gap by instilling control mechanisms and standardized practices. This approach works in the short term, but over time, workers’ level of commitment falls and further undermines performance. In the Nurturing loops, real trust builds on itself, leading to improved performance.

Inherent within the Command loop is the second definition of trust — “I trust that you will…,” meaning “I expect you to adhere to these rules/standards.” These requirements do not constitute real trust in someone; they are about compliance with a directive.

Yet people are not machines. As Maslow documented more than a half century ago, we all have a basic need for fulfillment and involvement. To command performance in a work environment may have been successful when commanders held the lives of workers or slaves in their hands. Today, workers have a totally different set of rights and expectations. People typically respond to being told what to do by digging in their heels or complying with reduced self-motivation. Both responses are saying, “If you don’t trust me, then why should I bother?”

If you’ve never experienced this dynamic, believe me, you don’t want to. It can be debilitating for any team or organization. Compliance costs people and companies money, mental energy, and time. When the use of control mechanisms escalates, it undermines individual and team performance and leads to a pervasive lack of trust.

When this happens, the challenge becomes more than just addressing the performance gap; it involves addressing increasing numbers of employee issues. Employees behave in ways that may not conform with their supervisors’ wishes as they seek to rationalize the rules with their own needs and understanding of what will work. They may lack motivation or commitment, as demonstrated by increased absenteeism; they may become obsessive and emotionally volatile, rejecting all outside input; or they may become politicized, seeking allegiances and undermining perceived threats to their survival.

Suppliers, customers, and other third parties readily pick up on the lack of trust. The organization probably uses the command loop with them, too. No doubt it seemed like a good, or at least an expeditious, idea at the time!

Once lost, real trust can be hard to rekindle. In a control culture, if people’s performance isn’t what managers want it to be, then managers ironically put additional controls in place. But, as Evert Gummesson states in Total Relationship Marketing (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999), “Trust cannot be assured through contracts.”

Nurturing Loop. The other option is to address the performance gap through the Nurturing loop. Here, real trust allows for open communication when a problem occurs. Healthy relationships and open communication enable people to work together to proactively learn how to address the gap efficiently and effectively. Basic guidelines and protocols provide consistency and help people avoid illegalities. However, any control mechanisms should be minimal, designed with the involvement of the relevant operational teams.

For the Nurturing loop to succeed, the organization must have a clear, explicit common purpose to which all goals and decisions are aligned. This provides a coherent message and environment with which people can engage and to which they can contribute positively. Everyone is explicitly going in the same direction. Trusting appropriately recruited people to meet the agreed performance goals breeds a positive, supportive team environment and serves as a basis for success.

People may lack a common purpose because none exists in the organization, or because it’s not clearly communicated. Humans are goal-oriented beings. We need something to justify our actions and from which to derive self-worth and a sense of identity. Without a common purpose to work toward, we create our own goals or ask colleagues and friends until we find one that makes sense for us.

As a result, most people in the organization have different goals and act in disparate ways. When different parts of the organization try to achieve different things, tension builds. Managers then put more controls in place. In these circumstances, it can be hard to establish a common purpose, as people may have been working to their own strongly defined goals for some time and will be wary of the new initiative.

Solutions

If you find yourself in a control culture, take heart; there are things that you can do.

1. Understand why the situation is as it is, identify the difference that will make a difference, and leverage change for the better. Finding out about the situation helps to inform you of the underlying dynamics:
   • What and who is sustaining, or benefiting from, the distrust?
   • Who is predisposed and motivated to address it?
   • What sense of “we’re in this together” exists?
   • Where is the leadership?
   • What do people feel they need to move forward?

   Once you’ve identified the dynamics; the players and their goals, motivators, and beliefs; and people’s openness to change and desire to get involved, then you can start to plan your approach to reinstate real trust. The aim is to decide on the most efficacious route to break the patterns in a sustainable way. This can be difficult; organizations driven by red-tape, procedures, and protocols are usually plagued by inertia, providing an extra challenge to change.

2. Stop the cycle of distrust and find ways as a group to rebuild positive relationships.
3. Get a commitment from top leaders to follow through on a program of re-engagement and realignment in the organization.
4. As an individual, define your own overarching goal. Work to nurture and protect your team as you build support for your approach with colleagues and senior managers. All the time, you must align your actions and decisions to your goal, even if you don’t explicitly refer to it. If people are used to following controls, you may even have to create new, aligned procedures and processes until you are able to dismantle the old ones.

Some organizations are so deeply entrenched in the cycle of distrust that one person alone won’t be able to make much of a difference. In that case, you have two choices. First, you can accept the ways things are, do your 9 to 5, and enjoy life. If you work in a large organization full of inertia, you’ll be okay for a while. At some point, you’re likely to become deadwood in the eyes of colleagues. At that point, you either should move on or take another stab at implementing change.

The second choice is to find somewhere else to work. You’ll feel good and will leave on a positive note, looking forward to the next part of your life.

Conclusion

Tom Peters speaks of trust as being the “single most important contributor to the maintenance of human relationships. And for business, it can, quite simply, mean the difference between success and failure.” Relationships are about achieving more together than we could on our own. If problems occur, the most fruitful approach is to work with people to resolve them, based on trust, open communication, and proactive learning. For once you start putting in systems of control that force or constrain behaviors, you will be on the slippery slope toward lower performance and a dysfunctional organization.

David Newport (david@effectivevision.co.uk) is an NLP Practitioner and ergonomist, with a background in qualitative research and operations direction. He works with people and organizations to help them understand the behavioral traits and dynamics that impact both their customer experience and bottom line.

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As in the NASA case, most executives either overlook or dismiss the underlying systemic structures and embedded processes that make up an organization’s culture. Because culture is untidy, muddled, and abstract, people tend to ignore it when making complex decisions or seeking concrete solutions. Consequently, many leaders act as if their decisions are objective and logical. They pretend that clusters of interests, organizational attitudes, or ingrained patterns of behavior do not influence their choices or affect business results. Only when crises occur do they scramble to look for reasons below the surface. It is our task as systems practitioners to draw attention to these misperceptions before disaster strikes.

The Power of Culture

Every organization has a unique culture. With minimal effort, groups with as few as 10 employees will develop chains of command, acceptable codes of behavior, and unique language that support and sustain their beliefs and attitudes. For example, in the “startup” frenzy of Silicon Valley in the 1980s, the engineers and young programmers who populated the computer industry, many fresh out of high school, balked at wearing traditional business attire: dark suit, white shirt, and staid tie. The casual dress they preferred stood for and propagated a cultural belief that hardware and software developers are independent, creative individuals who work best when not bound by the constraints of hierarchical authority.

Ignoring the hidden impact of organizational culture can have serious consequences.

Over time, this attitude led to a series of practices, procedures, and policies that came to characterize the Silicon Valley culture. For example, Apple Computers was one of the original and most well-known startups in California. Employees and managers alike wore sandals or hightop sneakers, ragged blue jeans or shorts, and collarless tee shirts; played basketball on outdoor courts set up by the company; and binged on junk food while working grueling hours. Cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs declared his programmers “artists” and “pirates,” and he rewarded their commitment with perks of stock options and working retreats at cushy resorts. His claims that Apple products were “magical” and would “change the world” became embedded in the organizational culture and convinced many – media, shareholders, directors, and employees – of the superiority of the company’s hardware.

Unfortunately, this cultural climate had numerous unintended consequences. Demanding product schedules fueled a pattern of divorce, health problems, and even suicide. And despite the hyperbole, for practical reasons, such as pricing, the products failed to gain dominance in the marketplace.

The Apple example shows how an organization’s culture develops over time, how it affects the way the enterprise operates on a daily basis, and how it is perceived within and outside of its walls. It also illustrates how executives frequently make crippling judgments when they do not factor the effects of their organization’s culture into their strategic and tactical decisions.

The Complexity Factor

Because of the complexity of an organization like NASA, the likelihood that multiple and conflicting views will develop is high. Within the space agency, three subcultures each saw the space shuttle through their unique lenses. Petroski says that “to scientists the vehicle (shuttle) was a tool.” For the NASA managers who lobbied Congress for the Agency’s budget, the shuttle was a technology, and even a flawed mission was proof of success. But the managers’ view was light years away from that of the engineers, a group who, according to Petroski, “achieve success in their designs by imagining how they might fail.” In 1986, when the two groups clashed over the safety of Challenger, managers, fearing a loss of public support and political funding if the shuttle did not fly, pulled rank and ignored the engineers’ advice.

With both of the doomed flights, these groups faced off with little or no understanding of each other’s views or agendas. From the evidence, we might hazard a guess that NASA’s overarching culture didn’t support healthy collaboration or respect for differing opinions, and that dissent and conflict were suppressed. Fortunately, most organizations do not regularly make life and death decisions. Nevertheless, the NASA case reiterates that ignoring the hidden impact of organizational culture can have serious consequences.

Culture: Ties That Bind

The image of the “iceberg,” commonly used in the systems thinking literature, is useful to conceptualize the role of culture (see “Looking Beneath the Surface”). We can consider culture to be a systemic structure that shapes and is shaped by individuals’ feelings, attitudes, and beliefs as well as by official and informal policies and procedures. These structures give rise to patterns of behavior and, ultimately, to specific events. Because events are easily visible and patterns and structures are usually hidden from sight, we often focus our problem solving on the surface level.

Using published reports about NASA, we can use the iceberg model to explore how its culture might have contributed to the shuttle tragedies.

Events: The space exploration program is a symbol of vibrant scientific endeavors and military strength. To the public and politicians, space flights serve as a gauge of success. Thus flights are the focus of NASA’s multiple goals and are the observable events or outcomes of its programs.

Patterns: In both failures, the managers’ subculture exercised its authority in the face of engineering and scientific concerns. Following each shuttle accident, NASA management focused on the technical issues that led to the failures and didn’t delve beneath the surface to explore the human factors that might have contributed, that is, how people in the organization communicated with each other and made decisions.

Structures and Cultural Beliefs: NASA’s executives, the manager subgroup, understood the need for ongoing government funding. Because they perceived that delays in flights could affect political support, public enthusiasm, and financial backing for the program, they overrode the engineers’ recommendations. The NASA culture supported this unilateral decision making and squelching of conflicting opinions.

Rarely, if ever, can we pinpoint a single reason for a success or failure, and too often, we miss the complexity. By delving beneath the surface to examine the elements of an organization’s culture, we can uncover potential risks or opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed and remedy or leverage them.

The Practice of Systems Discovery

Different tools are useful for casting light on an organization’s culture, including climate surveys and organizational gap-analyses. Whatever the nomenclature, input gathered from face-to-face interviews is critical to uncovering the deep belief systems that drive what organizations do. The commonality among these activities, regardless of name, is that (1) information is gathered from across the organization, (2) the input is grouped into thematic categories, and (3) the data/themes are analyzed. This process works best when people from throughout the organization participate in a face-to-face process. Online employee surveys cannot uncover systemic gaps as they lack the level of detail needed to make complex situations clear.

Uncovering the beliefs and behavior from throughout the organization raises our awareness of underlying assumptions, stereotypical attitudes, disrespectful behavior – even fear of conflict. Awareness coupled with motivation can build better collaborations and, in turn, more effective thinking and acting.

Initiating this process in an organization can be difficult! Rarely will executives expend for information about the environment or agree to a massive reengineering project. But as we have seen from the NASA example, surfacing underlying dynamics can be vital to an organization’s success. The key is to keep the process simple., “Steps for Surfacing Belief Systems” provides a skeletal checklist for practitioners.

The Role of Leaders

The CEO and the organization’s managers set the tone for any and all interventions through their actions and dedication. If today’s leaders are skeptical that organizational culture is key to operational and financial success, unlocking the mysteries of an organization will be beyond his or her reach. And many executives are “naysayers,” labeling the management of interpersonal issues as soft skills and relegating it to the “nice-to-have” column. This is a fallacy. These are the challenging issues of the workplace, and they require sophisticated skills. Pretending that interests and attitudes do not impact the bottom line is a mistake.

But, buyer beware! There is no panacea or “flavor of the month” solution, only the hard collaborative work of delving into the forces that cause our organizations to work the way they do. Executives must comprehend the rigorous demands of what they are “buying.” Not all problems can be solved with a single effort. We, the practitioners, must set clear and realistic expectations for an intervention. Sell simply; see complexity; seek clarity.

The news today is littered with stories of organizational failure. Executives can and must learn from these, but it is the meaty challenge of systems practitioners to look at the dynamics that led to these sensationalized failures and translate them into terms that managers value and understand. The bottom line is that cultural knowledge is an important asset for success.

Pat Salgado is a principal with Hatteras Consulting Group located in Pleasanton, California. She worked inside Silicon Valley computer companies for 15 years and more recently was the CEO of a large performing arts theater. Pat holds a Ph. D. in Human and Organization Systems from the Fielding Graduate Institute.

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Rarely will a company retrospective be written by someone whose involvement with an organization’s senior management team can compare to Ed Schein’s relationship with DEC. From 1966 through the early 1990s, Schein coached DEC’s senior management team on problem solving and worked with founder and president Ken Olsen on a wide range of other matters relating to organizational behavior. Schein’s perspective on DEC is supplemented by those of the supporting authors, a bevy of historical documents, and interviews or correspondence with an extensive list of former DEC employees.

All told, what emerges from DEC Is Dead is an insightful, three-dimensional picture of Digital through its growth and maturity. Although the book is well organized and well written, be prepared for some hard thinking. Unlike so many business case studies that oversimplify the story, DEC Is Dead presents a sophisticated view of the company and rich lessons for other organizations.

Three Developmental Streams

Schein centers his analysis of Digital on three developmental streams that can be used to uncover the forces behind the evolution of any organization: technology, organization, and culture. Here’s how the author describes these streams:

The Technology Stream. The technological environment in which a company operates and its own contribution to that environment through its products

The Organizational Development Stream. The ways in which an organization working in this technological context begins, grows, evolves, and, in the case of DEC, dies; the structures and processes that result from success, growth, size, and age

The Cultural Stream. The founding values that are shared through early and continued business success and eventually become embedded as shared, taken-for-granted assumptions about how an organization should be run

The author’s primary proposition is that early on, these three streams were aligned at Digital, creating a highly innovative and entrepreneurial organization. But the streams evolve at different rates. Technology can advance rapidly, sometimes through spurts of extremely rapid change. Culture, on the other hand, is slow to change; by serving as the “brakes” on an organization’s development, it can gradually erode the company’s capability to succeed in the marketplace and can cause an increasingly poor alignment among the three streams.

At DEC, the powerful culture stream had served the organization well during the formative years of commercial computing. But following the emergence of open architectures, microprocessors, and numerous other innovations in the industry, the culture became a barrier to making the changes in the technology and organizational streams that were required for ongoing success. A look at DEC’s formative years describes the culture and how early success entrenched the cultural beliefs.

The Early Years

Technologically, DEC was at the cutting edge and was responsible for many of the innovations in computing that moved the industry from mainframe to networked minicomputers. Its engineering prowess enabled the company to continually churn out new products that delighted the technically oriented buyers of the era.

Organizationally, DEC was structured around product lines, driven in large part by the engineering focus of the leadership team. Supporting business functions, such as finance and marketing, were centralized. Decision making was decentralized, with Ken Olsen preferring to let his management team wrestle things out. Olsen typically played the role of devil’s advocate, challenging any stance his managers would take to ensure that it was robust. Because the organization was still relatively small, local leaders felt responsible to the whole of DEC, and decentralized decision-making usually resulted in decisions being made by the most informed party.

Underlying the technology and organizational streams was DEC’s engineering-oriented culture, which adopted many traits from MIT. As Schein makes clear in his account, in the early years, there was tremendous harmony among DEC’s three streams. The culture suited the organizational structure, which in turn buoyed an engineering effort that was giving the nascent IT market well-made and highly desirable products.

Resistance to Change

Nevertheless, as the marketplace evolved and the technological context shifted, the strong culture impeded DEC’s ability to match these changes. Success in its early years reinforced the belief in and support of the “DEC way of doing things.” Any attempt to effect a change that violated a core cultural tenet triggered the “cultural immune system,” a host of behavioral responses that resist the intended alteration. The statement “That’s not the way we’ve done it before” is perhaps the most common example of an immune system response. Such responses are not explicitly designed by anyone; rather, they usually arise from the well-meant defense of an organization’s core cultural assumptions.

Perhaps the most important example of how the dominant culture was hampering the organization’s development had to do with marketing. Because like in many engineering-dominated environments, marketing was almost a bad word at DEC, early attempts to strengthen its role were met with stiff resistance. DEC engineers held the long-standing beliefs that good products will sell themselves and that customers just needed to be educated on the features and quality of DEC products in order to be persuaded to choose them. Marketing executives arrived, found it virtually impossible to make a dent in the way DEC’s products were presented, and left for more receptive environments. Meanwhile, DEC was beginning to fall behind its competitors in terms of technological innovation and fulfillment of customers’ needs.

Too Little, Too Late

By the time Olsen left DEC in 1992, the alignment between technology, organization, and culture had deteriorated dramatically. In an effort to save the company, new CEO Robert Palmer made wholesale changes to the organization and culture in order to bring them in line with the realities of the current marketplace. Many DEC employees, recognizing that the changes meant an end to the company they knew, moved on to other firms in the computer industry. Although these changes were inadequate to provide for DEC’s survival as an independent entity, they helped the company hang on long enough to be acquired by Compaq in 1998.

Lessons Learned

What does the DEC experience teach us? Schein identifies 15 lessons for other organizations (see “Lessons from DEC”).

Depending on the reader’s background and interests, DEC Is Dead is more than a comprehensive case study of one company’s growth, maturity, and eventual decline. Organizational development consultants are offered fascinating historical accounts of Schein’s early innovations in the realm of change management and process consultation. Leadership coaches can draw insight from the book’s extensive coverage of Ken Olsen’s management and leadership style and its strengths and weaknesses across time. System dynamicists are offered a detailed example of how structure drives behavior. And strategists can benefit from seeing the company’s evolution from an entrepreneurial organization with an emergent strategy to one with a more modern, analytical one. The richness of the tale — and of Schein’s telling of it — will surely make it a classic for a variety of audiences long after the computer industry has moved on to its next set of established technologies and companies.

Greg Hennessy is president of Speed Circuit Training Associates, a provider of motorsports-themed organizational and professional development workshops covering team effectiveness, change management, and competitive strategy. Speed Circuit partners with indoor karting centers across the country to integrate the development of vital skills with the excitement of wheel-to-wheel racing.

The post Rising from the Ashes of Digital appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

THE URGE FOR EFFICACY

This diagram describes two sets of actions we might take to satisfy our desire for efficacy. Loop B1 represents the mechanistic or “impactful” fix to a problem, in which we push through a solution that involves a radical action. Loop R2 depicts the unintended consequences of this approach, fragmentation, which further exacerbates the original problem, or even leads to new ones. Loop B3 shows how taking actions that are intended to join people together, allowing their ideas and talents to emerge, can help to develop the interconnections necessary for organizational success.

How often, though, have we found ourselves in situations where our best efforts have fallen short of producing the benefits we intended and so deeply desired? Perhaps we have experienced success once, but for some unexplained reason we have been unable to reproduce or sustain the results. More confounding still are those times when, rather than improving performance, creating new knowledge, or adding value, we have found that our actions have had an opposite effect. In these cases, the harder we have tried to push ahead, the more resistance we have encountered.

Why do negative consequences often occur when we attempt to have an impact? For one thing, when we successfully execute actions that are specifically designed to radically alter current work processes and outputs, we generally break apart existing structures (see “The Urge for Efficacy”). Sometimes doing so is necessary, as breaking up and clearing away the old is truly the most effective way to create space for the new. But other times, the result can be fragmentation of a sort that isn’t immediately apparent. The sudden shift to a new “order” can shatter many things people previously counted on to be solid, including relationships, the value systems upon which decisions are based, and the motivations of others. Trust, quite literally, is shaken. People retreat into themselves or in small, tightly knit groups to try to sort out what has just happened and to reestablish their own center. This process can lead to a compartmentalization of ideas and energy within the system, often at a time when the health of the system is most dependent on maintaining and growing its interconnections.

In this article, we will explore the nature of these unexpected consequences and how they might occur, despite our good intentions. We will examine how the work cultures we have created, and even the language we use to describe the act of making a difference, may be partly responsible for unhappy or unsustainable results. We will explore a model that suggests different language choices, as well as a less mechanistic and more organic approach to satisfying our urge for efficacy in our organizations, our communities, and the world. And, we will examine a recent case study in which many of the ideas presented here continue to be tested.

Clues in the Language

“Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.”

—Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Scratch, 1988

Over the years, I have been fortunate to work with leaders and teams in extraordinary organizations. My own passion for issues related to health, education, and overall quality of life has meant that most of my colleagues and clients have been affiliated with hospitals, educational institutions, the public sector, or government service. As I often find myself working as a strategic learning partner and coach with organizations that are experiencing significant change, the initial conversations quickly and urgently turn to the subject of “what are we going to do?” I have noticed similarities in the language people in organizations use to describe their concerns, questions, and quest to “do something.” Here are some examples of commonly used expressions:

“We’re going to have to wrestle that one to the ground.”

“They’d better be prepared to go to the mat.”

“We can’t afford another idea that bombs.”

“This should break down the barriers to our success.”

“We’ll just keep grinding away at it.”

“Our approach must hit the target.”

“Whatever we do, it’s got to have an impact.”

These phrases all have one thing in common: They employ physical or mechanical metaphors that involve something hitting against or breaking up something else.

My growing curiosity has caused me to listen more closely to the nature of the language people use in organizations to describe their problems and challenges. As I have grown more aware, I have noticed that some individuals and teams, particularly those who strive to carefully consider the nature of any crisis prior to reacting, tend to use a different type of metaphor. Here are some examples of these phrases:

“How can we nurture an environment that supports excellence?”

“Is it possible to go with the flow without being swept away?” “What pathways will take us there?” “Is this part of a larger cycle?” “What can we do to grow these ideas?” “Can we take actions that will create a ripple effect?” “Are we really understanding the nature of the system that created this dilemma?” “What are the healthiest and most sustainable solutions?”

Does the language we use to describe our activity say something about the culture of our workplaces and the methodologies we employ to make meaning?

There are two interesting characteristics of these expressions. First, they are all in the form of questions. Second, they all use natural or ecological images to describe an action or state of being. As I have continued to listen for these language differences, however, I have noticed that the more organic, questioning metaphors are not the norm.

I began to seriously wonder: Does the language we use to describe our activity say something about the culture of our workplaces and the methodologies we employ to make meaning? And, as I heard story after story about change initiatives and performance improvement programs failing, I further wondered if a mechanistic mindset, and, subsequently, approaches to our work, might somehow be connected to producing results that are either unsatisfying or unsustainable (see “Mechanistic vs. Organic Fixes”).

Take the word “impact,” for example. Whether used traditionally as a noun (, “We need to make an impact on our customers”) or perhaps more questionably as a verb (, “How will this impact our bottom line?”), this word describes something hitting against something else. Some of the synonyms for “impact,” found in the Synonym Finder (J. I. Rodale, 1978), include “collision,” “crash,” “clash,” “striking,” “bump,” “slam,” “bang,” “knock,” “thump,” “whack,” “thwack,” “punch,” “smack,” and “smash.”

It then occurred to me that an interesting exercise would be to substitute some of these synonyms for the word “impact” in the common and popular phrases I have heard in organizations. Here are some of the more darkly humorous results:

“We need a growth plan that will slam our customer base.”

“This new policy will surely whack the morale of our employees.”

“Our new process improvement program is designed specifically to smash against the quality of our services.”

“Whatever we decide must collide with our community.”

Interestingly, this is also the language that is often used to describe military or war efforts. One example is an article titled “From the Front,” featured in the Albuquerque Journal on March 9, 2003. Writing from a military camp in Kuwait, journalist Miguel Navrot describes the attributes of the redesigned Patriot missile:

“This time, the Patriot is intended to slam directly into targets, destroying it in the supersonic collision.”

While most people do not consciously think about their well-intended solutions as actions that are either based on a military model or designed to smash, crash, and dash something to pieces, one must wonder if there are unintended consequences to this way of talking and thinking about problems and opportunities. Is there not, for example, a natural fragmentation that occurs when we implement actions that constantly hit against ideas, values, work processes, and people? And does this fragmentation support our efforts in the long run, when it causes people to feel disconnected, relationships to shatter, and innovation to become compartmentalized or even disintegrate?

Undeniably there are times when the most effective and necessary actions are those that do, indeed, break something apart, but have we overused these tactics in our quest for efficacy? And, if so, what might constitute the characteristics of a balanced approach?

Looking for an Oasis

Because metaphors paint a verbal picture of ideas, I wondered what would happen if people were asked to draw pictures to symbolize characteristics of different kinds of organizations. Would mechanistic or organic themes appear in their images? To begin exploring this question, I took advantage of three opportunities. The first was an invitation I had received to deliver the closing keynote address to the Public Service Commission of Canada’s annual Emerging Issues Forum for Leaders. The second was the chance to work with members of the Research Association of Medical and Biological Organizations (RAMBO), a diverse group of scientists in New Mexico that gathers regularly to explore scientific questions of mutual interest. The third was an invitation to speak at the 2001 Gossamer Ridge Institute, a think tank of teachers and administrators, mostly from public schools.

At the Canadian conference, I distributed drawing paper, along with markers and crayons in many colors, to all of the participants. I then asked them to create two images: one symbolic of the characteristics and attributes of a typical organization, and the second of the traits of an ideal organization. With the RAMBO group, I asked them to draw a traditional organization of which they had once been a part, and then to draw the RAMBO organization. I asked the educators to draw representations of the typical school and the ideal school.

With each of the three groups, the results were astoundingly similar. Drawings of the “typical” organizations included boxes, squares, and lots of right angles, mostly in black and white or monotone colors. Many drawings depicted rows of people who all looked the same, often captured in contained and compartmentalized cubes. Several incorporated mazes. In almost all cases, the blocky, unifying principles of these pictures were immediately apparent. When asked to describe the meaning of their drawings, people used words such as “constrained,” “programmed,” “stifling,” “demanding,” “demoralizing,” and “dead.”

Drawings of the “ideal” organization showed equally amazing similarities. Brightly colored images of overlapping circles, spirals, prisms, and other free-form designs emerged, with the unifying forces more felt than immediately seen. Depictions of natural landscapes were by far the most common themes: Trees, complete with root systems, were laden with fruit hanging on their branches and birds roosting in their nests. Creatures that looked like amoebas floated in a bright blue sea. Flowers bloomed in the midst of a desert oasis. Purple mountains soared above lush, green valleys and flowing rivers. When asked to describe the symbolism of these drawings, the creators used words such as “flowing,” “creative,” “diverse,” “renewing,” “energizing,” and “alive.” The visual metaphors of the desired organizations, along with the verbal interpretations, indicated a desire for a more organic model than currently existed.

A “Live” Issue

As I mentioned earlier, there are some individuals, teams, and organizations that have consciously chosen to slow down and attempt to understand the nature of the problems or opportunities they are facing, rather than charging full ahead with solutions. The language they tend to articulate reflects a way of thinking that is based on an organic model or world view, rather than a mechanistic one. The use of words such as “nurture,” “create,” and “grow” suggests that the problems and issues are alive and must be treated as such. In fact, this language suggests that the very solutions we employ must themselves be alive. Furthermore, we must understand that the processes we use to choose and implement solutions will ultimately influence the results.

If we choose to think of our opportunities and problems as being alive, how might we change the ways in which we go about planning and taking action? I recently took the opportunity to explore this and other questions about the “urge for efficacy” with Tres Schnell, who serves as the chief of the Injury Prevention and Emergency Medical Services Bureau for the New Mexico Department of Health.

In the aftermath of 9-11 and in defense against possible bioterrorism threats, state health departments throughout the U. S. have been charged with creating and implementing a plan to vaccinate physicians and others who would potentially serve as first responders against smallpox. Over the past few months, New Mexico Public Health Division personnel have devoted much time to developing a thoughtful plan to comply with this request. Based on the principle of “first, do no harm,” the division created a phased approach that would begin with identifying healthcare workers who would likely be the first ones to deal with a patient with smallpox, and then carefully screening to identify and remove from the vaccination pool anyone with risk factors that could lead to adverse effects. The inoculation program would then move forward with its first phase of vaccinating a small group of these primary responders, all of whom understood the potential risks and had volunteered for the program. Over time, the approach would be to carefully and methodically extend the vaccination initiative to other first responders in communities throughout the state, with constant monitoring of any adverse effects or signs that adjustments to the strategy should be made. The plan was implemented during the first week of March, with a handful of key personnel receiving the vaccine.

However, as fears of pending war with Iraq began to escalate, the call came to step up the program and to take actions that would have greater “impact” on the goal of vaccinating more people in a shorter period of time. The Department of Health was suddenly faced with a new sense of urgency to get the job done. I asked Tres about her views on the request to move faster, the possible unintended consequences of doing so, and an approach that could serve to mitigate or avoid those consequences.

When people feel that they are not being heard, they tend to compartmentalize themselves according to their alliances. Blaming often occurs, and then conscientious objection becomes passive, and then active, resistance.

Tres began by relaying the story of the planning process. “As we planned our approach in New Mexico, we did so knowing that opinions about the whole process were diverse,” she explained. “There are many health professionals in this country who do not feel that vaccinating people against smallpox is the right thing to do, given the potential risks of the vaccine itself, and the fact that doing so will divert resources away from other critical public health initiatives. Knowing this, we listened to all views, carefully weighed the risks, and developed a plan that held sacred the charge to ‘first, do no harm.’We were well on our way, through building a strong public health infrastructure and trust in a thoughtful process, to implementing a smallpox vaccination strategy in New Mexico. What we must do now is to respond to this new sense of urgency without creating a situation that divides us internally and diminishes the organic approach we believe is critical to the safety and effectiveness of this initiative.”

Throughout it all, Tres said, “We have the goal of remaining whole, because it is through wholeness that we can be most effective. The danger is that when people feel that they are not being heard, they tend to compartmentalize themselves according to their alliances. Blaming often occurs, and then conscientious objection becomes passive, and then active, resistance. We begin to rationalize that the people who don’t think like we do must be ‘bad.’ So, we cannot allow ourselves to be seduced into a defensive posture that builds those barriers to open, honest information sharing and dialogue. We cannot afford to fragment our relationships as we address the smallpox issue.”

In her role as leader of Emergency Medical Services, Tres insists that decisions on how to proceed cannot be made until the health professionals and their concerns have been heard, no matter how diverse or controversial the ideas. “Our diversity is our true strength,” she says. “This will help people to remain united, not harming each other in ways that will hurt our ability to be effective in the long run. Maintaining and nurturing relationships with one another is more critical now than ever.”

Asked about the messages she is sending to her colleagues, Tres responded, “We need to consciously choose our language — our mantras, if you will — selecting those that maintain and communicate our core principles and values. We must prioritize around our commonalities, not our differences. The threat we are currently facing is the added sense of urgency. If we can respond well to this one, we will learn and respond even better the next time.”

The messages are clear: that the language used and the methods employed must serve to join ideas, perspectives, and people if this very serious issue is to have a positive outcome. In the case of smallpox vaccination plans in New Mexico, the health professionals are finding strength and connectivity in their shared passion for protecting the public’s health. It is a critical time for leaders to model the willingness to listen deeply to differing viewpoints and honor one another’s professionalism. This willingness, coupled with strong relationships that have grown from working together in the past to address public health issues, is enabling the team to move forward more quickly with the plan while at the same time continually monitoring concerns and issues as they arise.

Improving Our Awareness

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

—Confucius

Do we consciously choose our metaphors and our methodologies for taking action, or have our responses and approaches somehow become automatic? And if the latter is true, how can we make a conscious attempt to become more aware of our own language and the influence that our words may have on the nature of the actions that we and those around us take?

The “Language/Action Assessment” on p. 5 is intended to help us to explore our own favored metaphors and the kinds of actions they describe. Take a moment to consider the questions it includes. As you think about your responses, reflect on how experimenting with other language choices might possibly lead to solutions and actions that are more organic and alive than other possibilities. Engaging in this exercise can also be helpful when done as a team activity, especially as part of a strategic or operational planning process.

In answering these questions, we become more aware of our past tendencies. As we more clearly understand our past, we are better able to make thoughtful choices about our future language usage and subsequent actions. In this way, the exercise can help us to achieve true, lasting efficacy.

Choosing the Words We Live By

Whether we are addressing global issues such as the threat of bioterrorism or concerns more specific to our organizations and local communities, thoughtfully and consciously choosing our words and deeds is surely the wisest course of action. The desire to make a difference may well be our birthright. But how we go about attempting to make that difference can affect the quality and sustainability of the outcomes and of our lives. The words of an anonymous philosopher serve to remind us of how what we think can shape who we are:

Watch your thoughts, they become your words.

Watch your words, they become your actions.

Watch your actions, they become your habits.

Watch your habits, they become your character.

Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

Being human means that we are endowed with the wondrous capacity to consciously choose our words and actions. May we increasingly exercise our ability to do so with clarity, compassion, and an understanding that what we say and do will create our future.

Carolyn J. C. Thompson has devoted more than 20 years to helping organizations create vision driven and values-centered workplaces that are able to ask and address hard questions through engaging the power of the human spirit. She teaches, writes, and consults both in the U. S. and abroad on applying systems thinking and complexity principles to organizational issues. Carolyn resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The post The Unintended Consequences of “Having an Impact” appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

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

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

Elements of the Third Place

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

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

Informal Conversation and Organizational Change

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

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

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

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.

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