The Taste of Now

Some years ago I was working with Dr. Ed Freedberg http://www.activationonline.com/index.html  whose concepts of Self Management I have worked with and lived with for years now.  At one point he was a practicing clinical psychologist and then moved into the world of organizational consulting and coaching.  I asked Ed if he ever had hypnotized people since I have always found that topic and practice quite interesting.  He said that yes he had so I asked him if he would hypnotize me so I could have that experience.  He said sure.

So the day comes and we’ve been working away for the morning then go out for lunch to a local pub and I ask about the hypnotizing thing.  I happened to be eating chicken wings and Ed says just really concentrate on eating those chicken wings…. what do they really taste like in your mouth…. what are the sensations you feel…….. really concentrate.  So I did for a few minutes and of course noticed things I would otherwise have not.  Then Ed said; “So that’s pretty much it, that’s what hypnosis is, a different kind of concentration”.  I looked at him and said; “Well that was kind of a non event!”  He explained a bit more, including that early in his work he found it much more effective to not put people ‘out’ with hypnosis since they couldn’t really remember what happened.  Then the experience was subject to his interpretation which might or might not be accurate and more importantly it would not have been arrived at through the conscious interaction between him and his client.

I’ve never forgotten that, but it is only these many years later that I am beginning to understand how important that interaction was.

Dr. Freedberg was having me really focus on the ‘feeling’ aspects of what I was doing in the moment; the sensual, body centered feelings of the now.  In this case, the taste of now.  By doing this I was making a real effort to put my body first in the experience and my head second.  A lot of things have been written about this, about how you can be more present to the moment by really focusing on the sensual aspects of the moment.

This can be very powerful but it is also very difficult to maintain for any length of time.  Our heads demand very quickly to be involved.  So what is it about our heads, our way of perceiving the world intellectually that drags us out of the present?

The dominant western worldview is that the future is created by individuals making choices, perhaps groups of individuals, and then acting on those choices to create a better future which is primarily predictable.  This then means that this predictable future is better than the now we are in.  While this alone is pretty much enough to not want to stay in the present it is not the bigger challenge.  The bigger challenge I think, is that we believe the future is predictable and based on individually driven choice.  This is a very enticing, even intoxicating worldview. 

Through our own, individual choice we can create the future we want. 

And this mostly invisible worldview is completely an intellectual, or head, exercise.  No sensual experience is necessary and thus we find it very, very hard to stay in the present.

Is it possible to see our world emerging in a different way?  How might this sound?  Together, with others, we act on our individual choices and through that interaction the future emerges, primarily unpredictable and both constrained and enabled by the choices we make.

If you see a world emerging in this way, you must stay in the present to see what is going to happen next.  You would need all your senses and intellect to make meaning out of what was emerging in the now.  You would be in the present, not just using the present to get somewhere else.  And perhaps the most impactful thing of seeing the world this way, is that being present would be perfectly natural.  It would not require the tremendous effort it now seems to require.

In 2010 we will be writing more on this topic and what it can mean to organizations.  We hope you will add your thoughts.  For now however, especially with many people celebrating this time of year, perhaps you can consider this:

At some point over the next couple of weeks, when you are with people, simply remind yourself that you are creating this moment together and ask yourself; “I wonder what will happen next”?  I imagine you may be surprised, perhaps not, probably interested, no doubt very aware; and most likely, wonderfully present.

Author – Tom

Talk Matters – By Lynée Brown

We are very fortunate to have the following post by guest author Lynée Brown.  We met Lynée at the OD Network Conference and she had been asked to attend the conference and do an article on her impressions and thoughts of her experience.  This is the article.

By Lynée Brown writing for the Pacific Northwest Organizational Development Network in Seattle, Washington, ©2009, www.pnodn.org  Used here with permission.

The last minute invitation to attend this year’s National OD Network conference came minutes after I’d thrown a tizzy fit about my life being too busy.  The delay in my son’s after school activity set me back an hour.  That hour was the ‘straw’.  Before locking myself in my room I emphatically declared that all my spinning plates—wife, parent, employee, and student, to name the biggies—couldn’t handle any more disturbance.  I started my catch-up mania by opening email and found the invitation.  The conference, with the theme Now is Our Time, was only a few days away.  The pendulum swung quickly that evening and I decided that now was my time to drop everything for four days to attend a conference—the very one I decided I couldn’t afford last spring.

The conference attracted the full range of participants: students, seasoned practitioners, and even the “gOD parents” of the field, such as Edgar Schein and Edith Seashore.  What a rush to hear several of the authors of my current coursework in Organizational Psychology, Peter Block and Roger Schwartz to name only two.   I participated in sessions that encouraged me to relax into my learning, characterized by following the thread of relationships.  I also participated in sessions that triggered the more familiar mania of needing to know.  My continued reflection on the four days of saturation in various topics and approaches expose tension in my own interpretations and values surrounding the broad discipline of OD. 

The conference started by offering participants a mentorship for the duration of the program, which I immediately discredited.  Back to that spinning plates story of not having enough time.  Something snagged my vein of thinking and I went to the initial session, if for no other reason then to observe how they designed the pairing of the mentor and mentee.  Curious, though not yet convinced of the value of short-term mentorship, I played along with the ‘speed dating’ of sorts.  Intrigued by Candido Trujillo’s work with creativity in organizations, I decided to join his mentee group.  The six of us sat around a small table in the hotel coffee shop.  Only partway into the introductions I knew this spontaneous conversation was a gift.  Over the next four days we shared life and work experiences, reflective thoughts from various conference sessions, stories, and informal literature reviews—a potpourri of emergent learning. 

The unexpected value in the group mentoring contributed to my deepening realization that the most powerful learning is in the relating.  Even before graduate school I thought I subscribed to this ‘truth’—the bulk of my professional life has been facilitating group learning, after all.  The mentoring and a few other significant conversational experiences at the conference built another speed bump of sorts on the travel worn path to my competing values of task and time.  Evidence of this came several weeks after the conference when I received a last minute invitation to a dialogue circle convening over the topic of change.  The dialogue would supplant the half-day of much needed studying I had scheduled, but I accepted with surprisingly little hesitation.  Just as the mentoring conversations had been full of sense making, so was this.  These conversations are my learning.  They frame what I learn from the task—the assignment on the syllabus.  It no longer feels coincidental that these kinds of social processes, wherever they occur, have relevance to what is on the syllabus.

In the context of a work environment, how do we capture the value in these conversations? Near the beginning of the conference I attended a presentation that focused on the application of measuring OD interventions.  In our current economic climate we are especially pressed to justify the expenditures of OD.  Understandably, we adopt management lingo and methods to measure our monetary value.  What is the return on the investment?  How does the intervention expedite production or services?  The resigned part of me goes along with the necessity of measuring outcomes.  After all, if OD gets a spot at the table, then they have to know the ‘house’ table manners and be willing to partake of the meal.  But I left the session feeling unsettled about structuring change within an organization using the existing structures and assumptions of that organization uncritically.  As Einstein is famously credited with having said, no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.  However, in the face of uncertainty, we resort back to what is most familiar—in this case, choosing readily definable interventions.  Only a fledgling in this field I’m struck with how quickly the human element can be factored out of what is a human equation.

During one of the keynotes addresses Carolyn Lukensmeyer of AmericaSpeaks declared the key demands on all of us in today’s world: the capacity to imagine the non-existent; tolerance of complexity, which includes holding space for paradox; and persistence.  Try to measure that! 

I’m reminded of a time in my career marked by the collective imagination Luckensmeyer spoke of.  Several of the family educators I worked with years ago started having occasional, spontaneous conversations after our evening classes.  Standing outside the borrowed space of our storeroom—or more comfortably in the nearby chocolate café—we swapped stories about the delight and challenge in teaching new families.  We also discussed our frustrations of feeling invisible, even marginalized in our large organization.  These informal conversations fueled tremendous collaboration among us.  Today this group looks and functions quite differently.  It serves a much broader population and has its own name, manager, and designated space.  We did not start with these specific ‘ends’ in mind—they evolved organically out of our self-organization.  Ironically, in the moment we rarely recognized progress because it was messy and uncertain. I’m guessing the only certainty I would have claimed in those years was the strengthening identity of our team—the pushing and pulling, coming along side of, lifting one another up.   Looking back, these early, unmanaged conversations of imagining the non-existent were undoubtedly the catalyst for the transformation in our microcosm.

The tension between visioning OD outcomes and trusting the value of emergent conversations may be the proverbial chicken and the egg.  However, the less familiar of the two captures my awe: initiating and fueling spontaneous conversations about what matters most to the participants in the discussion.  When such interactions are a regular part of everyday work and life, conversation is placed at the very core of organizational change.  Applying traditional economics to human relationships is not only difficult—as Peter Block mentioned in his keynote address—it is detrimental.  Starting with the answers we’re working towards—what vision statements can turn into—has its appeal because we’ve been steeped in a mechanistic model that promises victory for the problem solvers.  However, prescribed destinations leave too little room for the kind of ingenuity Luckensmeyer so poignantly called us to.   The extraordinary creativity emerges from the social processes of those seeking to identify relevant questions.  Because we are social meaning-makers the power in these conversations allows us to get to the deeper complexity of our most fundamental challenges and issues.

I arrived at the last session feeling overwhelmed by how to situate the more holistic, conversational OD in our mainstream mechanistic paradigm.  Serendipitously, that session gave a name to this different dimension I’d been struggling to express: Complex Responsive Processes.  I suspected this OD paradigm was counter-cultural based on the lively push back during the presentation from a handful of seasoned practitioners.  The conversational structure of this approach supports self-organization through the chaos of relating to each other—up and down and across the board.  It resonated deeply with my churnings and my experience.

All the processing of the distinctions in the paradigms and the various coordinating and opposing concepts strips away even more of my certainty.  In her session, Edith Seashore spoke of a similar feeling in her earlier days as a practitioner.  To her more seasoned colleagues she admitted her worry that she didn’t know the concepts.  They reminded her that the concepts are embedded in her stories.   We are still working to validate and incorporate into our organizational structures the relational-based practice she embodied some fifty years ago.

Back to the serendipity of learning, I didn’t choose the Complex Responsive Processes session based on the title—of which I’d never heard.  It stood out in the myriad of offerings because I’d had several inviting and meaningful conversations with one of the presenters, Bonnie Cooper of Team Management Systems-Americas.  We met at the orientation and kept spontaneously ‘finding’ each other throughout the conference.  I followed my intuitive sense that she was a part of my learning—yet another illustration of the power in our interactions.   Whether in conference rooms, hotel coffee shops, workplace hallways, or formal dialogue circles, my most profound learning can be traced back to conversations.  Conversations that won’t happen unless I loosen the grip that time and task have on me.  As untidy of an assignment, Now is Our Time to show up to these conversations.

Lynée Brown lives near Seattle and is a MA candidate in Organizational Psychology at Antioch Seattle.  For the last 15 years she’s been a family educator in a healthcare setting.  Her most profound learning comes from daily life with her husband of twenty years and their three spunky children.

Outward and Broader – Two Things We Do

In our last post we reflected on our experience at the OD Network conference in Seattle in October.  One of the key reflections was that we think it would be of value for OD practitioners to go outward and broader in their efforts to improve performance in the work they do to offset the much more common inner and deeper approach of the psychotherapeutic model.

In this post we will take a brief look at a couple of things we do in our work that go outward and broader.  

Short Duration Coaching

The first is short duration one-to-one coaching that wraps up with a team session with the individual’s immediate team or work group.  The basic design is as follows:

1. Agreement to move forward and objective setting.
2. Identification of another internal resource for the participant to work with in addition to us as their coach.  The role of this person is to act as an immediate resource for the participant regarding the achievement of their coaching objectives during their daily interactions.
3. Data gathering – using individual and 360 assessments.
4. Five, 45 – 60 minute phone debriefs with the participant.
5. Data gathering with the team – using a team 360 assessment.
6. Half day on site session with the team using their own data – note: it is here where the individual participant articulates what she/he has learned from the one-to-one coaching and actively applies that learning in a transparent fashion throughout the half day session and ongoing.

The key difference in this coaching model and where it receives the most resistance from coaching practitioners is the transparency of the work.  Transparency and interaction regarding what is happening is critical right from the initial identification of an additional internal resource for the person to work with, through to the group session.  Certainly this level of transparency is not applicable to all coaching work but we have found that many, many coaching scenarios are kept unnecessarily hidden from the social and interactive realities in which the participant exists, to the real detriment of the changes the participant is trying to make.

Peer Coaching

The second example is management development where we form peer coaching/learning groups to focus on real work issues but seeing these issues through new concepts delivered to the participants.  This basic design is:

1. Formation of an internal steering committee to oversee the process.
2. Identification of management concepts to be worked with and formation of peer coaching/learning groups.
3. Introduction of a formal structure for the group coaching meetings.
4. Delivery of initial management concept and structure of the peer coaching group meetings. 
5. Coaching groups meet weekly for 4 – 6 weeks.
6. Replication of steps 3 and 4 usually 2 or 3 times.

The key difference with this design is that the coaching groups meet without any assistance from a formal coach.  The initial meeting structure enables the best use of the management concepts being worked with as well as constrains power dynamics.  Generally the groups work very well without any outside influence.  Many practitioners resist this saying the groups will need ‘expert facilitation’ but our experience does not support this.  The design recognizes the interactive nature of development and change and that people make sense of things as they work with concepts in real situations rather than being taught something outside of the context in which the learning will be applied.

Both designs are quite simple and de-emphasize the role of the ‘expert’ which is very much emphasized when the inner and deeper psychotherapeutic method is used.  Broader interaction and emergent learning are emphasized within the actual context in which that learning is applied.  We have also found that by de-emphasizing the role of expert, the change that occurs is more sustainable.  Interestingly, de-emphasizing the role of expert also seems to be where the most resistance comes from practitioners….

If you would like more information on these designs we have a paper on the group coaching/learning that you can access – http://bit.ly/78kF9s - or connect with us via a comment on this blog or email at inquiry@tms-americas.com

Author – Tom

Reflections on the OD Network Conference – Seattle 2009

Two weeks ago my colleague and I attended and presented at the OD Network conference.  It was an interesting time with lots of conversation, chances to meet new and interesting people and then to reflect on the experience and see what emerged.

Perhaps the first thing that stands out for me was that the people who I met there and conversed with were really good people.  Everyone seemed to be very sincere in their efforts to make a positive difference in the work they did and were at the conference to learn new things and meet new people that would help them in their work.  It is nice to be with a group of people where you sense that sincerity alongside high levels of competence.

The second thing that emerged for me was that the primary and often unquestioned method by which OD practitioners look to help their clients was to assist them go ‘inside and deeper’.  By this I mean to look inside oneself or one’s organization and try and go deeper inside until some core truth or meaning is found and then by bringing forth that deeper truth into the world, improvement could be made.  This might be referred to as true vision, who you really are, deeper meaning, core self, or some other manifestation that resides within us to be found if we go deep enough.

This models the psychotherapeutic method and while this method can add value it struck me as the conference moved on how dominant this viewpoint and approach was and how little it was questioned let alone the investigation of alternative methods.  In fact I would surmise that a large percentage of the attendees at the conference have never considered or been exposed to other methods of making sense of the work world.  They have certainly seen a variety of ways of approaching the ‘inner and deeper’ approach (many illustrated at the conference) but not often exposed to a fundamentally different perspective.

As an example I was with a group of about 15 where the word psychotherapeutic was used and everyone nodded in agreement of some understanding what was meant by that.  The word social construction was then used a little later and only one person knew what was meant by that, and they were an academic studying the subject.  Intrigued, I then experimented in the same way with two other groups with almost identical results.

Our presentation was on complex responsive processes – http://bit.ly/1svNY4 – the work of Ralph Stacey and colleagues – http://bit.ly/12TIKd – which has a solid grounding in social constructionist thinking, or basically the ‘outward and broader’ view of the world and people in it.  In contrast to psychotherapeutic thinking, social constructionism posits that we exist and develop in a world that is social and this social process is primary.  It is not exclusive of inner and deeper approaches but would say that even if discoveries were made by going inner and deeper those findings came into being by a social process and do not gain meaning until played out in a social context.

I believe it is time for the OD world to be much more inclusive of social approaches to development and change.  At a very practical level it matches what is actually happening in the world of our clients.  They interact in a social process continually and if we engage that process we can work within it, not outside of it which is what the psychotherapeutic process requires.  Too often the OD world asks, even demands that the work world slow down and go inner and deeper.  Perhaps it is time to match the pace of the world and go outward and broader.

I have no doubt that the people I met at the conference have the capacity to do this.  They were smart, awesome people.  The theme for the conference was Now is Our Time.  I would agree.  Now is our time to move outward from the constraints of the psychotherapeutic model and seriously look to additional ways of adding value.

Author – Tom

Flocking to Seattle – Sounds like ‘Simple Rules’

The OD Network conference in Seattle, Washington this week is using the phrase ‘flocking to Seattle’ as a catchphrase for the large group of OD people and others that will come together to learn and converse together about various and diverse topics that concern the world of organization development.

I don’t know the actual reason why this phrase is being used but I do know what it stimulated me to think about.  Flocking is one of the concepts that is used quite often when discussing some of the findings of complexity science and specifically the idea of self-organization through simple rules.  There are numerous writings on the idea of simple rules and many people have taken the idea and suggested the phenomena of flocking found in birds and what seems to be the simple rules that govern it can be transferred directly into how we run organizations.

I think this is very problematic and yet very common, and also illustrates some of what I hope to converse about with people in Seattle.

Flocking can be replicated in a computer simulation by programming each unit with typically 3 ‘rules’.  When these rules are then activated, the units then display a form of self-organization in the absence of any pre determined plan and flock in a way very similar to what we observe in birds.  The assumption is then made that if we can find similar ‘simple rules’ in our organizations that we should be able to increase alignment to various goals, get everyone moving in the same direction in a coordinated way and generally improve performance because of this.

This is a common problem that occurs in the OD world with the findings from complexity science.  A direct transfer is made from findings in the natural or computer world to the world of human interaction in organizations.  The reason this is a problem is that human interaction is not the same as interaction in the natural or computer world.  Direct transfers of these types of concepts generally are unhelpful and ineffective.  In addition it can cast the findings of complexity science onto the growing heap of discarded ‘tools’ to better understand organizations.  Another fad or flavor of the month.

We wrote about this in earlier blog posts: Sh__t Happens – But What Causes It and Sh__t Happens – The Sequel.

The point of this post is not to review the points made earlier but to articulate the hope that we as practitioners of OD can really challenge our thinking over the course of this conference.  Like most conferences such as this there will be keynote speakers and presentations (even my colleague and I will be doing one) and I think too often we treat these sessions as illustrations of best practices to be taken back and implemented in our own organizations.  Kind of like the simple rules thing.  I’m hoping we can more often take the sessions we will attend as starting points to better understand the thinking behind what people are saying and then better understand and question our own thinking.

If OD is to be a field that contributes to making things better in organizations, however you might define better, I think we really must challenge our own thinking, since I’m not so sure we’re thinking much differently than the people we are trying to help.

I’m hoping to have those kinds of interactions while I’m in Seattle, and those types of interactions certainly will self organize themselves but are definitely not governed by simple rules.

The Beauty of Speed

Last week I was driving along listening to music when Tori Amos’ Beauty of Speed came on.  I love the beat and rhythm of that song and the title is intriguing.  For me that’s about enough to turn the volume up and disappear into the music for a while.   However this time for some reason the lyrics jumped out at me and got me to thinking about change, especially change in organizations.  Maybe it was the time of year here in Ontario, Canada where the leaves are changing as fall takes a firm hold, or maybe it was that our organization has gone through a lot of change lately.  Whatever the reason, the following are some musings on change stimulated from snippets of the lyrics from that Tori Amos song

We climbed through the canopy
only to find a crack in our gauge.

I think an awful lot of our gauges concerning change are seriously cracked and probably totally broken.  Of the 63 million plus links that come up on a Google search for change management I would surmise that most of them illustrate a step by step process that if done just right will lead us through the canopy to a beautiful mountaintop view of our wonderfully changed organization.  Yet it’s reported that 80% of all change efforts fail.  It would be kind of tough to figure out which of the 20% of that 63 million links might be the good ones.  Perhaps better to just throw them all out.

Smacked upside of the head
with the harsh of daylight.

Most of us have felt this as we diligently try to implement the next and best change management model.  We get to oh, step 3 and then it hits us that things aren’t going quite like they’re supposed to.  People are resisting, something unexpected happened; all sorts of things never laid out in the model.  Now you are stuck since you only have three responses.  One, you didn’t do the steps correctly so you are wrong.  Two, the people you are working with didn’t follow your directions so they are wrong.  Three, the steps in the model you are using are wrong.  Typically it depends on how much power you have in the situation which determines which of those 3 responses get acted on, but more often than not it’s two or three.

Afraid we’ve been changing
in a way I wasn’t loving.

Most change management models assume that people will resist change  (unless the outcome is beneficial for the person – but that’s typically not called change) and that resistance must be managed.  I have yet to see any change management model that can do this when people are ‘afraid’ and not ‘loving’ what’s happening to them.  It’s messy, complicated, unpredictable and certainly not a ’step’ in a linear process to an end point.  It requires interaction with people and that process can take any number of pathways.

Feel those colors changing
The beauty of speed

I was reading some blog posts the other day on the merits and problems of Lean, Agile and 6 Sigma.  The discussion was about which dealt with the ‘people’ aspect of the change that implementation of these processes created.  Regardless of the passion the comments held, all of them separated out the ‘people’ as if they were something to be managed within the process.  Lean, Agile, 6 Sigma etc. simply do not exist without people, and people cannot be separated out from them.  These processes are nothing more than thinking tools and when change happens, we ‘FEEL those colors changing’.  When there’s talk of the people aspect of change, I think they most commonly are thinking about people’s heads.  Unfortunately people come with bodies too, loaded up with visceral inputs and outputs. 

The beauty of speed.  Change happens and most times it happens at a speed we cannot plan for or predict.  There is a certain beauty to this I think in that no matter how much we want to have control over change, we only have a small amount.  And that amount of control plays out in the local interactions we have with those around us, and even then it is highly unpredictable.  If we focus on those local interactions we can move forward in the change together, or perhaps be left behind.  The world will move on however.

Even still I was built
to tolerate your temper  -  ature
It fluctuates so I must break
through the bleak of winter

Nice to think about us being built to ‘tolerate your temper  -  ature’.  If we look back over history it is a testament to how tough we can be as we move through and in change.  The bleak of winter just might be all those change management models that seem to endlessly show up calling for us to use them.  Maybe we can break through the use of them and interact seriously with people when we are in change.  Because that is where change happens, in the interactions between people; taken seriously…….   Feel those colors changing.  The beauty of speed.

Author – Tom

 

 

 

Our Social Media Experience

Social Media – it’s all the buzz right now.  Do you use it?  Is it valuable?  Is it a time waster?  Are you really working?  Who really cares what you are eating for lunch?

 Prior to the end of April, 2009, we at TMS Americas weren’t really involved with social media.  Oh, we knew that Oprah had discovered Twitter; that kids shared everything on Facebook; and that we should probably increase our presence on LinkedIn because that’s where the professional people hang out.  And, then we attended Podcamp!  We discovered we were in good company trying to understand social media, that it was okay to jump in and play, test things out, create your own rules, experiment, and that there are a lot of people out there willing to share their thoughts, expertise and experiences on a whole world of topics.  And, so began our journey in to Social Media and Social Networking.

 Right now, there are not many rules.  The purpose, for us, behind our activities is to connect with and become a part of communities.  Those communities vary in their focus as do the reasons for our actively becoming contributing members.  But, the common goal behind every action and interaction is to learn, share, connect and collaborate.  And, we are – with people we would have never had the opportunity to meet through traditional methods. 

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/doniannone/3329913281/

A couple of weeks ago, we officially announced that TMS Americas was Tweeting on Twitter and that a Corporate Facebook page had been launched.  And, that generated responses:  Congratulations!! Way to go!!  Best of Luck!! Why would you pick Facebook over LinkedIn – that’s unprofessional!  What are you doing on Twitter – who really cares what you are doing right now?  Response is a great thing.  It means you have engaged people and that is our intent.  We each tweet about topics that are of interest to us and our respective roles.  More often we share tweets from others – we may not always have a lot to say but others we are connecting with do and we are happy to share their thoughts, ideas, requests, and questions. 

We have built TMS Americas’ Facebook as a corporate page (very different from a personal profile) as a dynamic site allowing us to quickly and easily share what our TMS accredited network members are thinking and doing because people are thinking and doing amazing things.  We are on LinkedIn but in a different way – connecting one to one.   We find it a great way to locate and connect with specific people, quickly and directly.  These are our reasons for actively participating and learning in the forums we have chosen.  They have been chosen specifically and strategically, through on-going dialogue, as a team.  And, right now they work for our organization – they might for you, they might not.  But, to know if they work, you have to explore, play, stay open, have some fun, be ready to be frustrated and excited (sometimes all at the same time) and to admit that you have a huge learning curve ahead, that the game will change and that’s okay.  And, you will meet a lot of really amazing people along the way.

 Our October Web Meeting will give you the opportunity to tell us about your experiences, we can share our journey to date and we can all learn, share, connect and collaborate.  We’d love if you could join us!  Help us build the content for that meeting.

 What are your experiences with Social Media?

Author – Kathi

The Hero With A Thousand Deaths

Earlier this September, Network Member Steve Boehlke http://www.sfbassociates.com/ was in Johannesburg, South Africa working with a group of young African entrepreneurs in conjunction with the African Leadership Academy http://www.africanleadershipacademy.org/site .  On one of the days there he tweeted that the group was testing the hero’s journey and linked us to an article by Candace Allen that talked about the hero’s journey within the context of the entrepreneur. http://www.dallasfed.org/research/ei/ei9701.html

 She talks of Joseph Campbell’s great work, The Hero With A Thousand Faces where he illustrates the classic myth of the hero’s journey and how this myth is seen across cultures and time in various ways.  It is a myth that in many ways we all share and Campbell shows us how we have been, and still are linked together within this journey of the hero.  Allen outlines the mythical hero’s journey as described by Campbell as follows:

The first stage involves departure from the familiar and comfortable into the unknown, risking failure and loss—a venturing forth for some greater purpose or idea. The second stage is the encountering of hardship and challenge, and the mustering of courage and strength to overcome or discover. The third is the return to the community with something new or better than what was there before. Ultimately, the hero is the representative of the new—the founder of a new age, a new religion, a new city, the founder of a new way of life or a new way of protecting the village against harm; the founder of processes or products that make people in their communities and the world better off.

I think that most managers in today’s organizations are actually stuck in the second of the three phases of this journey. It is this stuck and stunted hero that is dying and rightfully so.  In organizations we never stop encountering hardship and challenge.  We never stop slaying the dragon so to speak.  And yet now, as organizations change at unprecedented rates, and roles are changing just as fast, the completion of the hero’s journey is being forced upon virtually all of us. 

•  We are asked to slay dragons every day, to lead the charge and then we sit in leadership courses that tell us we need to share leadership.
• We learn we must have control of our business units while we have no real idea what the people in those business units are doing let alone what they know. 
• We diligently take accountability for results that we know in our bones we have no control over. 
• We live in a constant state of irresolvable paradox and expect that we should be able to resolve them. 

 We are being dragged into the return phase of the hero’s journey and it is not easy to cross the threshold of return, being stuck slaying dragons for so long and being rewarded for it. The stunted hero of organizational life today – the manager – is dying, some metaphorically, some literally.  The challenge still remains as it has through the ages.  Do we have courage enough to let something die so that something transformed can return?

 As Campbell points out near the end of the book, the journey of the hero of today is not the same journey of myth.  But the need to complete the third step of the mythical journey is still there.  The need to return; to return to the community with something new or better than what was there before.  That something is not a new product or better efficiency, although that might be achieved as well.  The key word in that phrase above is not the word new or better.  It is ‘community’.  But it will not be the ‘community’ as we might define and understand this term today. 

 As Campbell points out the hero of myth had very little relationship to the word ‘I’.  The hero of myth identified very strongly with some kind of a ‘we’, be that family, tribe, community, region, kingdom or country.  This does not pertain just to myth.  Sociologist Norbert Elias in his book The Society of Individuals ( http://bit.ly/BKX1t) points out that this ‘we’ identity changed as society changed and those that at one point in history identified with the ‘we’ of tribe, could not imagine someday identifying with a ‘we’ called kingdom.  But whatever it might have looked like, it was still an important ‘we’ identity.  It was not until well into the Middle Ages that a word to represent an individual, a word like ‘I’ even existed.  Today it seems it is just about ALL that exists, especially in organizations, and especially with managers and those ‘taught’ to be leaders.

 It is this ‘I’ – the hero as an ‘I’ – stuck in the second phase of the hero’s journey that is dying a thousand deaths. 

 It is not dying, then to be replaced by some all powerful ‘we’, but to be transformed into something that has a least some semblance of a ‘we’ identity.  Something that means and identifies with more than just what a single individual means.  Just as in the past we do not know what that will look like.  The hero of myth did not know what the impact would be from what she or he returned to the community with, just as we do not know what a ‘we’ identity will look like in the next generation of organizations. 

 I hope those young African entrepreneurs were engaged to find a way to be part of shaping this transformation, this ‘community’, this ‘we’ however it may be experienced.

 We will all be part of this.

Author - Tom

Problems With Complex Responsive Processes

If you have read some of our blog entries you might have discovered that we do our organizational development consulting through the lens of complex responsive processes http://www.herts.ac.uk/courses/schools-of-study/business/research/complexity-and-management-centre/complexity-and-emergence-in-organizations.cfm

In addition, my last couple of posts looked at problems I have encountered with the Creative Tension model, eventually causing me to stop using it.  This post looks at some of the problems encountered when using the ideology of complex responsive processes and asks how you might deal with them.

One of the key things in working with this ideology is that you are intensely process oriented.  By process I mean that you recognize that organizations change and develop through the process of interactions between people and nothing, nothing happens outside of these interactions.  This means that my time with a client fits into this process; it is part of the ongoing interactions between people of which I am a part for a relatively short period of time compared to the people that actually work in the organization.

However, the typical expectation of a ‘consultant’s’ time in an organization is for you to be intensely results oriented.  If you are with a client for a day, 2 days, even 2 years, most interactions you have are expected to end in some kind of moving forward action, complete with plans, timelines and specific people held accountable.  By far the majority of interactions between people in organizations do not end in this way but as a consultant your interactions are expected to.  Otherwise you have not done your job!

So the question is how do you balance the fact that you are really just a part of the process of ongoing interactions when the expectations of you are quite different?  If you simply say to the key person you are working with that it doesn’t make sense to deliver on their expectations of you you are likely shown the door and your goal of helping the organization quicky comes to an end.  If you say that of course you can meet those expectations the same thing usually happens, but you’ve managed to hang around for a period of time.

Another problem I find with this balance is that the mainstream expectations of me have been internalized a fair bit.  Although I have worked from a process focus for many years I still feel twinges of discomfort if my time with the client doesn’t end with tight action plans.  It still feels like I haven’t done enough, even though I know I have done what is most effective in terms of how I understand organizations to operate.  The idea of the ‘hero’ consultant still seems to have its grasp on me somehow or other.

It can be an uncomfortable place to be.  I would be interested in the perspectives and experiences of others that may identify with what I have described above and how you deal with it.

Thanks for your input!

Author – Tom

Problems with the Creative Tension Model – A Recent Story

The last post dealt with some of the problems I have encountered using the creative tension model which eventually caused me to stop using it.  Last week I spent a day with a senior management team and a related problem reared its head.  This was a group of very smart, committed people.  Their organization was doing well and they wanted to continually improve.  I liked working with them.

The creative tension model is simply an illustration of how change can happen.  The problems that arise are the way that illustration is thought to actually happen, specifically the role of management within the model.  I think the concepts of vision, current reality and creative tension have value.  However, when positioned and used the way they are commonly used within this ‘model’ is where you experience problems.

The way this model typically defines the role of senior management is to first set the vision for the organization, clearly understand the current reality in which the organization exisits and then design the systems, policies and processes etc. that will move the organization to the vision.  This is the mainstream and dominant thinking in organizations and what the role of senior management is.  And this certainly was the case with the group of senior managers I worked with last week even though they never had seen the creative tension model (this I discovered quite late in the day).

What I noticed during the day was that they talked of their organization almost as if they were separate from it, as if it existed as a thing outside of themselves and that they needed to do ‘things’ to it in order for it to perform more effectively.  I had used the model I now like to use to frame the day, which for me captures some of the essence of complex responsive processes.  My thinking was that it would be help them really focus on their own local interactions and behaviors and how that would have the greatest impact on moving forward with the people in their organization.

What I recognized as the conversations progressed was that simply illustrating this new model in place of the creative tension model did very little to affect the way the group looked at their role in the organization or how they talked about it.  From a visual perspective it looked to me like they were in a separate room, kind of like the top of a lighthouse, looking out over their organization and they had levers and buttons to push and pull that would affect the way their organization performed.  They just had to find the right levers and buttons.  And as I think back to other experiences with senior groups like this the visual image is very much the same.  Indeed for years I joined them in that room to ‘help’.

Near the end of the day, just before they were to going to decide on some moving forward behaviors I drew the creative tension model and we talked about some of the problems experienced with it.  We talked about their own experiences through this lens and the challenges they faced in using it, even though they had never seen it before.  Then we came back to the other model and talked about how it might inform those same experiences and they were able to see those experiences in a different way as well as their role in them.  It seemed to bring them back into their organization and their primary moving forward behavior was shaped around their local interactions and how they needed to act in those interactions.  It seemed very real and doable.

It was important for me to be part of that experience and see how powerful the mainstream thinking about management’s role is.  We might have made dents in that thinking but it is very powerful.  After the ‘action planning’ was done the senior person asked the group if that action would really ‘get us to where we need to be’.  I cringed a little since it seemed to be such a good illustration of mainstream thinking right near the end of a day trying to question that thinking.  But as Bruce Cockburn says in one of his songs, ‘you have to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight’.  Lots of kicking left to do I think….

Author – Tom