Peagsaus Day 4 - Emotion and Communality

Anne Murray’s forum was entitled To Understand Performance, Follow the Joy, and she built again on the true nature of the systems we’re studying. Anne noted that organizations are networks of living systems, and she made me remember my dentist Randy Fussell. Randy periodically works with dental students in their clinical, and he’s convinced they are thoroughly knowledgeable about each and every tooth and how it works. The role he assumes in that setting is one of making sure the students understand that there is a human being attached to that tooth. So it is with systems.

What kind of network are you in? Are there power issues? Any hoarding of information? Are people anxious to leave? If mapped, would it look like a wheel and spokes? You’re probably in an Ambition Network.

Or do you see trust and excitement? Is there a generative or even magical atmosphere? Is emotion freely displayed? Is there an emergence of well-being? Would a network map show star patterns? If so, you’re in a Collaborative Network. Think of the high accomplishments in your life: was there a prominent social aspect, and waves of emotion?

How might we move forward in either of these? Ask a few questions. Are you inspired? Where do you feel joy? What are you conserving in your manner of being with others? Are you a mindful and compassionate leader?

And then, try something really revolutionary, something your OD and HR people will not like: stop using the word “change.” Ask instead “What do we need to conserve?”

I was left with a question: what does this tell us about what we should capture in our graphics with groups. There is a saying that content is king, and some of us work as if taking depositions. Is there another layer that - if not represented - we should be showing the way to?The conference closed with Betty Sue Flowers and Peter Senge on Connecting with Meaning to Fuel Our Highest Performance. Human systems start in thought, often in untested assumptions. “Grow or die” for example. These thoughts are evident in our stories, and it is on our stories that our lives depend. Those stories can change shape with changes in perspective; the hero story is different from the victim story which is in turn different from the learning story, even if the players are the same.

We may now be caught between two stories: the one from the Industrial Age, and an emerging story of a universe that is alive, with an irreversible trend toward communality and increasing connectedness. This new story is ecological in form and substance; its actors are creators and its mode is expressive. It is a story becoming aware of itself.

Pegasus Conference - Day 3

Last May I attended SoL's Foundations for Leadership Workshop, and heard Peter Senge make the distinction between the mechanical systems that characterize many management structures, and the human systems that are being discovered and validated by the best and brightest organizations. This conference builds on that by repeatedly showing that if we're interested in the quality of what's being produced, we need to get really interested in the quality of human energy that goes into it through the systems of relationships that support it all.

Tuesday began with Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot speaking on Respect as an Active Force. Her memory from childhood, "I'm going to school - will anyone know who I am?" became a guiding theme in the work she's done in studying relationships. Of the 6 dimensions of respect, she highlighted curiosity as evidenced in the work of photograher Daiud Bey, an element that invites connection, unmasked experience and reciprocity. Of the eight lessons she has learned about respect, dissonance was the most surprising. She pointed out that it should not be avoided as it illuminates, and that there is value in disturbing the inertia by saying the unexpected.

A team working with Harvard Medical Associates told how Culture Eats Strategy, citing data that showed how performance problems can be coupled with a compliance model that is especially strong in medicine, and how an overwhemingly disrespectful environment makes matters even worse. They had an anbelievable quantity of content that they actually completed coherently in their presentation, but one piece stood out for me: The Heirarchy of Joining a Team begins with "What do I get?" So often we tell others or are told ourselves to set this aside and think of the greater whole, but systems thinking challenges that duality. We can't take care of ourselves with out taking care of the whole, and we can't take care of the whole without taking care of ourselves. It's not an either-or situation.

Skip Griffin and David Marsing conducted a daunting forum on Inspiring Coherence in Communities by Shifting the Way We Come Together. We speak our social worlds into existence. What we believe is what we can do. Wanting change is very different from wanting life, and there's never nothing going on.

The day ended with Atul Gawande presenting Better: Lessons from Medicine on Performance under Conditions of Extreme Complexity. As the B-17 was originally condemned as "too much airplane," are we now in a situation where there is more medicine than we can handle safely? Why do we fail? One of two reasons: because of what we don't know, or because of what we don't do with what we do know. Complexity in medicine and saving lives demands increasing attention on the latter, and that can take the form of three commitments: to measure ourselves, to seek ingenuity and to "give it a try" - asking ourselves if we can make that change. Complexity - sneaky when it's growing - can be managed through organization, and organization is not a resource-dependent approach; the data shows it.

Pegasus Conference - Day 2

Finally, I get to hear Adam Kahane. His book “Solving Tough Problems” made a fundamental shift in my thinking about the possibilities in sharing our deepest thoughts with each other. Today he talked about addressing our toughest social challenges from the perspectives of power and love. He quoted Paul Tillich’s definition of power as the drive in every living thing to realize itself, and of love as the drive to unify the separated. He said that when these are coupled, they are generative, but they are degenerative when they exist independently of each other. Martin Luther King was quoted as saying that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Adam called for us to be bilingual with these, or even bipedal like the scarecrow learning to walk, one foot in front of the other, lurching for awhile but eventually learning to dance in unconscious competence. Like Nashon stepping into the Red Sea just before it parted, some of us will have to stop sitting on the bank and go ahead and get our feet wet.
Anne McGee-Cooper and Gary Looper hosted a session on “Claiming Bold Dreams” and told the story of how Texas Instruments used servant leadership to exceed its own expectations about the cost of resource-conscious design. They gave a brief overview of the concept by comparing a non-servant approach of hired hands, hierarchies, ego and competition to a servant-leader awareness of engaged hearts and minds, mutual trust and shared visions. That trust will allow a collective to see a way out of hard situations, even though if leaders are servants they are not controlling.

Shaunna Black, TI’s VP for Facilities talked about that organization’s decision to build a plant in the US with one eye on the cost that could be realized in the far east and the other on breaking new ground in sustainable design and operations. Once the head shed at TI was made aware of the value of a sustainable approach, they empowered the project team by taking a servant leadership approach that shared the vision, was open about the unknowns and displayed the trust necessary for high innovation. Systems thinking helped them set aside the usual first-cost/operating-cost debate and instead realize huge economies by fundamental alterations in traditional models. In this case, a LEED certification did not cost the oft-cited 20% extra.

Judy Ringer presented on “Managing Conflict with Presence and Power” using Aikido as a basis for taking the negative energy and responding to it with connection rather than resistance. With an eye fixed on what matters, our energy can redirect opposing forces toward that same goal instead of wasting ourselves resisting external circumstances. Although she was using this approach as a way of dealing with conflict, I’m thinking it could also apply to how we hold all the “stuff” that competes with our visions and often overwhelm them.

Peter Senge, Jeff Hollender and Darcy Winslow ended the day with “Purpose Beyond Profit,” a discussion on SOL’s current thinking about transforming the practice of management to one that supports life. Although the sum of all efforts is still a drop in the bucket, businesses are waking up to the fact that not only is climate change happening but that climate change is only part of the story; the real question is becoming one of how we will all live together. Some scientists insist we have only three to four years to make a significant shift, and hope lies in the belief a few small targeted changes will set others in motion. It does not take large majorities to bring about significant change over time, but that does make it incumbent on some of us to get off the dime and lead. Somehow we have to get out of the “eye of the needle” syndrome that suggests we have to give up something, and instead start looking at what we have to gain.

Pegasus has a poet and a musician working with us as a form of reflective capture, and today they closed with “Where did you go? What was the flow? How did you grow? Where did you start? Where did you grow in your heart?”

Pegasus Conference - Day 1

We spent today with Mike Goodman and David Stroh in their workshop "Applied Systems Thinking to Facilitate Change." Finally, those mystifying causal loops make a little more sense to me now. As with many things, "the map is not the destination," and the process of enabling people to talk through their systems is far more valuable than the final product. We learned that focusing questions evolve as that process goes on, and that the graphs and charts make that question visual. Although the drawings are powerful, their value lies in their ability to help systems thinking to emerge through stortytelling.

I had the good fortune to do my hands-on work with Riet from the Netherlands. She's involved in a cross-organizational puzzle as I am, so we learned quite a bit in our exchange. Some of the photos below are of her presentation of the work we did together. An added bonus was hearing from another group that explored mandated time-to-appointment in a healthcare system, something I've seen before locally.