Thoughts on Heifetz, Kahane and Lewis

The opening session at the 2006 IAF Conference in Baltimore featured a panel discussion around the relationship between leadership and group facilitation. Strong cases were made for the possibilities that could lie in combinations of the two, and the demand for “facilitative leadership” was heard. Those chickens have all come home to roost as I have recently read two books and part of a third in sequence and over just a few days. What follows is much less a review of them than a suggestion to go and take a look.

I have always been circumspect if not cynical about the importance that so many organizations attach to leaders and leadership. Just a little reading about the likes of Horatio Nelson and Thomas Jefferson is convincing that even the “great ones” are at least as flawed as the rest of us, and we should be careful to use the broader society to assure that most of what emerges from leaders is good. The first book added some necessary layers to my simplistic view.

In Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz describes leadership as “mobilizing people to tackle tough problems.” A distinction is made between “technical” and “adaptive” leadership, terms also used in the Baltimore discussion. Whereas technical leadership is a matter of knowing what to do and when to do it, adaptive leadership involves conflicts in values, or gaps between values and reality, neither of which lend themselves to easy answers. In adaptive work, change and transformation are the preferred outcomes, and these require work by the many rather than the few or the one.

Beginning with an assessment of “the gap,” a leader can take a path of shifting and/or sharing the work of major change to those being led, taking care to provide a productive environment and to match the rate of the presentation and discovery of issues to the capacity of the collective to deal with them. From a facilitator’s standpoint it makes for fascinating reading as it provides insights to a leader’s constraints and risks that actually come from both stakeholders and subordinates, as in the final analysis both are the sources of the leader’s authority.

Two of the case studies Heifetz uses are the Civil Rights movement and the Viet Nam War, issues – as well as leaders - seemingly far larger than most of us in this business will face. The relevance of the messages was improved, however, by the next book, Solving Tough Problems. Adam Kahane has not been involved in the Viet Nam War, but has instead dealt with national-scale issues in places like South Africa and Guatemala. His book describes his experiences in dealing as a facilitator with large-scale adaptive issues, involving groups both large and powerful.

Kahane describes his experiences and the lessons learned in how groups can come together to talk and listen meaningfully. The huge challenge and subsequent value of adaptive processes such as “generative dialogues” comes through in the quote from one participant: “We did not put our ideas together. We put our purposes together. And we agreed, and then we decided.” If there are doubts about the feasibilty of the approach described by Heifetz, Kahane begins to show what actually occurs among people that makes transformations possible. Of particular note were the ways he describes “listening,” such that I’m now trying to relate that to occasions when I was using graphic recording as a tool for tuning in my own attentiveness.

The third book in the trio, Excellence Without a Soul by Harry R. Lewis, sharpened the messages of the other two by way of contrasts. I may try again later, but so far there has been little appeal in what comes across – to me at least – as a hatchet job on Harvard. (Oddly enough, Ronald Heifetz works at Harvard.) In all fairness, this is a book about the issue of purpose in great universities and not about planning or leadership per se. The book has value, however, at least as a reminder of the inability of much of the world to appreciate facilitative leadership.

“They discovered that a great curriculum does not crystallize out of scribbling by bureaucrats or squabbling among professors if the leaders cannot breathe into it direction and purpose.” Should we not think of a leader as someone who can mobilize the discovery of direction and purpose? Compare the quote, and its implied dependency upon leadership for purpose, to the experience described above, where a group put its purposes together. The need is argued for a leader whom “others will follow, not unquestioningly, but with confidence and respect.” Faculty, students and staff are then compared to “volunteers” who need motivating accordingly. It recalls Kahane’s broadened description of apartheid systems as well as Heifetz’s explanations of how adaptive challenges can be mistakenly treated as technical issues.

The need for enlightened and enabled leadership proclaimed in Baltimore is ever-present. Some of the tools for creating it, however, are before us in two of these books.