What would a 285 Year Old Tree Say to YOU?

I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a group of people a couple of weeks ago in a quaint retreat area about an hour outside of Paris, France. This is an extended development initiative with a version of an action learning design and this was one of the initial sessions. The retreat itself is surrounded by wonderful trees and some of the more majestic ones have small labels on them indicating what type of tree it is and the age. Spreading out next to a large patio where a lot of the group ended up working one day was what seemed like the grandest tree of all. It was just beginning to sprout new leaves as spring had taken hold and it had been sprouting leaves for 285 years!

The first leaf on this tree emerged in the year 1728!

I think when we are in the presence of so very old and still so very alive entities we can’t help but imagine what such entities might have seen in their lifetime, what they have experienced and what they might have learned. And we often wonder what they might say to us given an experience of time we can only fantasize about.

I went back out to that tree later one evening once the hustle and bustle of the day’s session had passed and just put my hands on that big old tree and imagined what she might have to say to me (for some reason this tree felt like a she… to me anyway).

Here are some of the things that came forward:

• Try your best to do really good work with all these people, but don’t take yourself too seriously. I’ve seen a lot of people like you and those that take themselves too seriously usually don’t do good work.

• When you get old like me, don’t worry too much how you look. It’s a losing battle and those that care about you think you look majestic no matter what.

• I’ve spread a few million seeds around over the years. Most just blow away or die but some, like that 205 year old youngster over there don’t. The mystery is, you never know which ones might take hold so all of them are important even if it feels like most of them are just a waste of time.

• Don’t keep score too much. It produces way more losers than winners.

• What’s it feel like to be able to move around? Do you ever wonder what it might be like to be rooted and grounded for 285 years? Most of you don’t seem too grounded to me….

• Your best friends are never too far away. Make sure you take the time to look for them.

• Bugs and birds and vines and other stuff have been hanging around me for all my 285 years. Sometimes they are really irritating but mostly they’re just trying to get by. We get along ok even if we don’t understand each other too well by remembering that.

• I’ll likely be firewood some day and I’m ok with that.

• The worst invention ever is the chainsaw. At least with an axe you had to work harder. The guillotine was pretty nasty too I hear but I never saw one of those.

• Ok, you can take your hands off me now and go get some sleep.

This is not a post about nature being a metaphor for learning or how what we do should be more ‘natural’, more connected, more whatever that nature is trying to teach us. It’s simply a post about standing under a really old tree and imagining what the experience of that age might say, did say, to me.

We’ve all had this type of experience and sometimes we make it more complicated than what it needs to be by trying so hard to learn something. Maybe we just need to experience and see what happens.

Maybe that’s true about our organizations as well…..

So what might a 285 year old tree say to you!

Author – Tom

Back to School – What Will You Be Learning This Year?

For many of us there is a different energy in the air this time of year as ‘back to school’ activities begin to happen.  Perhaps it’s finding some cool new back to school clothes, wondering if your best friend will be in your class, and as we get older perhaps wondering what life will be like as we go to school away from home.  And there is always the trip to some store to get school supplies.  We look for just the right, blank notebook so we can capture all the new things we will be learning.

That blank notebook seemed to symbolize the anticipation of learning something new.  That we would diligently fill it up with facts, ideas, doodles; all the things that make up new learning.

So what will you be learning this year?

For me, I just filled up a journal, the last pages written on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park in Ontario, Canada.  My new ‘school notebook’ will be a new journal.  It will be fun to find just the right one.

The last one took about 3 years for me to fill up with descriptions, reflections, ideas, musings, discoveries; all the things that make up new learning.  I looked back to when I started that journal and listed a number of things that had transpired for me and those in my life over the course of those 3 years.  I realized that the majority of what had happened was never really planned with much specificity.  What transpired are better described as ‘possibilities’, perhaps even ideas, but a single, random event could have (and did) change things an awful lot.

This realization brought into clear contrast for me that work; that life emerges in mostly unplanned ways.  And yet paradoxically, at each moment we have the power to choose our course of action.  From one perspective we feel in control, from the other we feel adrift in a sea of uncertainty.  And when these two perspectives come together I think it is best to not let one have precedence over the other.

Perhaps working towards that balance of perspectives is the balance so many are looking for.

I think we are far out of balance right now in our organizations and in many ways our lives as well.  We compromise an acceptance and openness to emergence in the service of control, most often a false control.

So this year I will try to learn how to experience that balance and live more comfortably within it.  I will try to learn how to more effectively weave this balance into the work I do in organizations.  And I will try to learn how to feel a little more grounded in my convictions that this balance is a more realistic way of being and understanding our experience of organizational life, perhaps even life in general.

What will you be learning this year?

Content Addiction

This post is about what seems to be a very common addiction in organizational learning.  That addiction is to content.  The scenario can be described like this:  There is a set period of time put aside where some kind of developmental learning is supposed to happen.  It might be about leadership, maybe change, perhaps communication; something deemed important.  Then whoever is designing this set period of time, in conjunction with who has asked for it, jam that time with as much content as is possible.  Who cares if not much of it can be absorbed, or talked about, or reflected upon.  Who even cares if the content itself can only be treated at a surface level.  Just give us more content!  This scenario can be pictured like this:

We seem to think that learning will occur if we throw as much content at people as possible.  Plus, a lot of money is typically being spent on this time for learning so there is a real pressure to have something tangible to put into this time.  Content fits that bill very well.

Yet, when you ask people what the most important thing for them has been when people gather together to learn, they will say something like, ‘talking to my colleagues’, ‘networking’, ‘exchanging ideas with someone new’, ‘hearing how other people do their work’.  The most important thing typically describes the experience of being in open-ended interaction with other people, often informally.  Content does not fit that bill very well at all.

I think you could take most designed learning initiatives, cut the content by 50% and have much more valuable time and much more valuable learning.  This scenario might look like this:

In this case we look at learning as coming forth from the interactions between people and spreading out in diverse and often messy ways.  This design would have time for interaction, space for reflection, experimentation and exploring.  The accountability to learn would be much more firmly centered on the learner rather than the deliverer of content and the learning would be much more challenging to measure.

A short story that comes from a very good book on qualitatively measuring learning by Michael Quinn Patton describes this very well:

The story is told that at the conclusion of a rigorous course in philosophy, one of the students lamented: “Professor, you have knocked a hole in everything I’ve ever believed in, but have given me nothing to take its place.”  To which the philosopher replied: “You will recall that among the labors of Hercules he was required to clean out the Augean stables.  He was not, let me point out, required to fill them.”

When you reduce content in a learning design you are left with space.  This space is very uncomfortable for those who assume they have accountability for making the learning of others happen in designed learning initiatives.  Indeed some participants will enable this discomfort by assuming someone other than themselves has accountability for their learning!  What happens in this space cannot be measured by traditional means, especially quantitatively; it is hard to observe if anything of value is happening; it puts into question the assumptions about who is creating learning and it probably means everyone will have a unique experience and learn things that are not in the learning objectives.

As in the story above, this space cleans out the stables of traditional learning designs.  Participants don’t seem to mind much though.  They will fill the space with their own wonderful learning.  From a design perspective we are like Hercules, ‘not required to fill them.’

That is of course if we can overcome our addiction to content! 

In the spirit of this post, there is lots of space below for comments and your stories of how you have kicked the content addiction, how you did it and what happened.

Author – Tom

A Change of Preference

In the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to work with a bunch of really great people.  A lot of this work was focused on one of our assessments; the Team Management Profile  (TMP).

Some of the people I worked with had taken the assessment for a second time, after a number of years since their initial use.  And some of those results had changed over that space of time. 

Over the past few months we’ve written some posts that deal with preference assessments and our thoughts on using them – Preference Assessments – What Are They Measuring? – Preference Assessments – Test Retest Reliability – Preference Assessments – Face Validity  It was interesting to come face to face (literally) with the content of what had been recently written about.  Interesting and just very, very nice.

The reason it was interesting and nice was that given our position noted in earlier posts, I did not have to defend or technically explain the changes from the assessment perspective.  I asked each person if the changes ‘fit’ for them and regardless of the answer, I also asked if they would be willing to tell their story about the changes to their colleagues.

As each story emerged, pictures were painted of each person’s pathway through the organization over the years between assessments.  These were not psychological stories; they were stories of interaction, stories of experiences and making meaning of those experiences.  Their colleagues could see themselves in these stories, could imagine similar experiences, could see how they were part of the pathways of others. 

These were stories of work lives constructed together through interaction.

The assessment itself fades into the background as the stories emerge.  Just as my role did as well.  I was given the gift of being part of a good story telling session for a little while.  Nevertheless, a change of preference, as illustrated by the assessment contributed to the reflection and meaning making which helped create the stories themselves.

I think this is the best way to approach and use these types of assessments.  Data that contributes to making meaning of the stories which continually emerge as we move forward, one interaction at a time, into an uncertain future.

The ‘so what’ of this is that when stories of our pathways are told to our colleagues we see ourselves as being connected to those stories.  To some extent we are all in the same story, we are all in this together, good, bad, ugly, interesting, informative, instructive or whatever.  When we see ourselves as connected in this way, it is much easier to see ways of acting together to move forward effectively.  We see ways where we can change our interactions that might change our futures.

Psychological stories tend to be owned by the individual, constructed stories tend to be owned by groups, and eventually all of us.

Which stories do you want to be told in your organization?

Author – Tom

For information on our assessments, click here – Video: Information on Assessments and Accreditation

Preference Assessments – Test Retest Reliability

In follow up to our last post Preference Assessments – What Are They Measuring we’re going to take a quick look at one source of contention when you land on the side of seeing preference as primarily a nature phenomenon as compared to a nurture one.  That point of contention is test retest reliability.

Test retest reliability for any assessment is important since you want to have a decent level of confidence that the assessment is reliable over periods of time and results are not affected by random chance.  This also means that what is being measured by the assessment should be stable over those same periods of time.

If you assume that preference is innate then you would hope to have an assessment measuring these innate preferences to have perfect test retest reliability.  Since no preference assessment has perfect test retest reliability, claims that the assessment is measuring innate phenomena simply open up the door for endless criticism of the assessment.  Criticism that in our view is justified.  For an example of such criticism you can review this article that pops up quite early in a Google search of the MBTI test retest studies.

The unfortunate thing that happens however is that articles such as the one above tend to attack the assessment rather than the assumption of innateness.  This pattern of interaction adds very little value in making these widely used assessments more focused, and potentially valuable.

If you move away from the nature vs. nurture positions and try to balance the perspectives of psychology and social construction you can engage in much more useful conversations about what value these assessments can add.

As noted in our last post we see preferences emerging from the left hand loop of the process above and assessments are measuring recognizable patterns of interaction that have emerged over time.  These patterns have a certain level of stability so a decent level of test retest reliability in an assessment is important.  These patterns are also changeable as everyone can attest to who has ever made some type of behavior change.  Given the actual experience and history of preference assessments regarding test retest reliability, it seems they are picking up this experience of change.  The stories about these changes (or lack of them) have real value, value that these assessments can add to.

If you assume a greater role of social construction in the emergence of preferences many of the statistical arguments can be left behind and greater focus can be put on how these assessments can add value to our present interactions.

Video: Information on Assessments and Accreditation

Author – Tom

Preference Assessments – What Are They Measuring?

There often is quite heated debate about what preference assessments are actually measuring.  It tends to be a variation of the nature vs. nurture argument with passionate positions being taken on either side.  For us we don’t take so much a nature vs. nurture perspective as trying to balance a psychological and social constructionist perspective.  As an example, below is an excerpt from information that was sent to a group of people that were using our Team Management Profile.  This information was sent along with their profile prior to distance debriefing.

…How you use your Team Management Profile (TMP) will determine how much value you can take from it.  We will be talking about how to understand and use this data during the upcoming debrief sessions.  There are a few things we would like to point out now however that you might find of value as read your profile.

The first thing is that our work lives emerge through the interactions we have.  Nothing happens in an organization outside of our interactions.  Our interactions are informed by both our experiences from the past and our intentions for the future.

As a new manager within your organization you will be experiencing new interactions, having new experiences and also adjusting your intentions for the future.  Your success is critically dependent on the quality of the interactions you will now have.  Your preferences and those of others will affect the quality of those interactions.

What is the TMP actually assessing?

The left hand loop in the diagram above is primarily where our preferences emerge.  Over the course of our lives we have had countless experiences and we develop patterns of interaction that ‘work’ for us; that have become repetitive and preferred across numerous contexts.  If when you read your TMP it resonates for you, it will be illustrating those patterns of behaviour that you recognize from your experiences and interactions of the past….

As you likely can tell from the above our position on what the TMP is measuring is weighted toward an interactive and constructionist perspective.  We simply find this provides much better access to the data and avoids often low value arguments that detract from actually using the data to make sense of our interactions.

This perspective also means that behavior change, preference change is a real possibility.  It may certainly be a challenge but it is definitely possible if we seek out and are present to new interactions.  It brings a more active and engaged view to using the TMP, or any other preference instrument.

Over the course of the next few weeks we will be building on some other points about our perspective on what preference instruments are actually measuring and we invite you to come back to these posts and add your own thoughts and comments.

For information on our assessments, click here – Video: Information on Assessments and Accreditation

Bark, Skin and Cedar – The Land as Teacher

In just a few days now I will head off with my son to the midOntariowilderness.  We will spend a week paddling, portaging, sweating, swimming, being amazed and being bitten by bugs.

But right now I’m writing this blog post and beside me is the book, Bark, Skin and Cedar – Exploring the Canoe in Canadian Experience by James Raffan.  It’s good to have a browse through this book before you head off for a canoe trip.  To be reminded of a history and place that extends into the depths of Canadian past.

To be reminded that for all our perspectives we consider new and unique in today’s world, in many ways we share a journey that has been repeated countless times by those forgotten and gone.

I met Jim in Rankin Inlet, Northwest Territories at the time, now Nunavut.  We were both there to speak at a teacher’s conference, him because of his extensive experience in the north and with experiential education, me because my sister was a teacher up there and a good promoter of her brother…. Different pathways, same place.

Jim was a veteran of the north, having spent lots of time there, on the land, with elders, with himself.  I was there for the first time, a rookie and very excited to experience bits and pieces of the north as a ‘tourist’ might.  Still pretty cool; well actually very cold, as it was February and the night time temperature dropped down to – 45 C on a crystal clear and very long night.

Jim’s talk was about the land as teacher.  I subsequently spent some time with him as he helped me take this perspective into a leadership learning initiative that took place near where I will be in a few days.

Sometimes you don’t know how lucky you are until a long time later.

Fast forward about 15 years or so and look into some of the work being done in complexity science as applied to organizations and you will see it focusing on what we can learn from nature.  No doubt we can.  Yet quite often that focus moves in 2 ways.  One, an idealized, almost romantic perspective of what nature has to teach us.  Nature is always right and we need to go back and reconnect with that rightness.  And two, a perspective that what nature does, can, or should be replicated by us in our organizations.  That we should learn the ‘simple rules’ of birds and all flock in the same direction as our vision.  That we should seek our deeper purpose and we will work together as do bees or termites to create things much greater than any one of us.

I’m not sure if Jim and I ever talked about the specifics of the idea of the land as teacher.  But I do remember thinking that at the heart of his message is that the best way of learning from nature is to be part of it.  To be part of it as a human person and to not forget that you are a human person as part of nature.  I think this perspective applies to how we can learn from things like the complexity sciences.

Let’s not forget that we, as humans and part of nature, have our own uniqueness’s as well.  We have a different consciousness than most of the rest of nature.  We interact in different ways.  The choices we make about our behaviour are different as well.  We ARE nature and unique to it at the same time.

I think the lessons from nature and the lessons from complexity science are best positioned as metaphors.  And that we should be very rigorous in recognizing the differences we have as interactive human persons as we transfer these metaphors back into our very human organizations.

I remember Jim telling me how majestic and wonderful the polar bears are and that he had lots to learn from them when he was able to observe them in the wild.  He also said he always kept a gun nearby too when he was observing them…. just in case.

So while I’m in the wilderness over the next week or so, I’ll do my best to remember that I’m a part of it all and still completely unique at the same time.

Perhaps you can do the same thing as you navigate your organizational wilderness.

Author – Tom

Endings and Beginnings – Being Present to Both

Back in August of 2010 I wrote the post Kids, Parents, Organizations, Models and Understanding

It had to do with a conversation with my son, using our model of organizations, as he left for his last year as a hockey player in an elite amateur league here in Canada.

While the message was mostly about ways of understanding organizations, let’s fast forward 7 months.  Two days ago, in the last regular season game before the playoffs, my son was accidentally hit in the face with a shot and collapsed, twisting his ankle underneath him, breaking his ankle.  His time in this league abruptly ended.  There is not a ‘next game’ or ‘next year’.

When you are hit in the face with a puck you are totally present to that experience and very focused on the immediate interactions that are taking place.  Even watching on TV though you could tell that as he was helped off the ice he was at least a little bit thinking of intentions into the future.  It does not take long to feel angry when you know you won’t be helping your team in the playoffs and that anger comes from knowing those intentions will not have a chance to be realized.

You then are being looked after by the team trainer, you go to the hospital, a doctor stitches you up, you get painkillers and x-rays and the news that you will need surgery and that means your season, and time in this league as a player is over.  You are very present to those local interactions and there is still a strong feeling of anger and frustration in the background originating in those lost intentions.  Those feelings stay in the background as people care for you and as that care progresses and a little more time passes a deep sense of loss begins to emerge.  You feel an ending and that ending feels like loss.

And loss is only there because you have a generalized memory of past experience, memories of interactions, and patterns of interactions that you imagine and know you will miss.  Your intentions were to repeat those patterns of interaction, each new one unique and different, but still part of that pattern.

You are very present to this feeling of loss, it’s in your body, somewhere around your heart and you cannot think it away.  It has its own pattern of interaction and keeps you present to it.

People interact with you differently now.  They are sorry for you.  They care for you differently; they are angry and sad as well.  And your team mates in a few days will have an interaction you won’t have; they have a playoff game to play.  Their intentions are now different than yours, and need to be, and you feel different as people interact with you differently and you are very present to that feeling of difference.

And some days down the road as these new patterns of interaction emerge your sadness and anger get edged aside for a moment as you wonder about ‘what’s next’.  You slip a little further ahead of pain, healing, anger and sadness and a new intention makes a brief appearance.  It’s mainly in your head but as it edges other things aside a bit more you also feel it in your body, somewhere near your stomach and it feels like excitement, even though you might not describe it as that yet.  Maybe right now it just feels like inevitability.  That feeling is a beginning and it can wait for you to be present to it.

And you start to have interactions with people that are just a little different.  You bring all of those wonderful experiences forward that made the feeling of loss possible in the first place and mix them up with some new, emerging intentions and you feel just a little different.  In fact you ARE just a little different and so are those you are interacting with; just a little.

As more time passes those present and slightly different interactions begin to form new patterns and you are no longer an elite hockey player you are something different, one interaction at a time.

This is how we use our model above.  Interacting with people as they loop around and around from experience to intention and always through interaction.  They tell their organizational stories within this framework; stories of strategy, change, communication, conflict and friendship.  As the stories are told within this framework, understanding emerges, sometime easily and sometimes with great difficulty.  And people move forward together.

I’m pretty sure your own story could fit in here, or your story of what it is like to be in your organization.  The details of course are different but you and your organization are the product of all those countless interactions you have every day.  Every one of them.  And every one of them balancing naturally on a foundation of uncertainty.

Author – Tom

Adding Value by Getting Out of the Way

As OD professionals we typically are asked to work with individuals and groups to improve performance.  It is assumed we have and can impart some type of expertise that will be one of the causal factors of this improved performance.  In doing this we would be adding value and in our proof driven organizations this means we need to find a way of proving that we did, in fact add value. 

What if the best way we could add value was to get out of people’s way and let them interact and see what might happen?

Last week I was involved in a session with a client group.  They were using one of our assessments to help them improve performance.  In sessions such as these I am typically positioned as the ‘expert’ in understanding and interpreting the data that comes from these assessments and the client typically expects this expertise to be demonstrated throughout the session.

Over the years however I have come to learn that it is best for me to get the data to the group as quickly as possible and then get out of the way and let them interact with and about that data. Together we will see what emerges.  There is often so little time in our organizational lives to actually interact with each other in a reflective and proactive way. I find people simply like to be in conversation with each other about things other than the pressing, immediate needs of the business.

Of course I have a role in putting some structure to the interactions people are having but sometimes I wonder if the group would still have a ‘great session’ if I just tossed the assessments results into the room and left.

In the session last week the most uncomfortable thing I did all day was to interject into people’s conversations so we could make sure we got through all the material.  People were leaning into each other, sometimes huddling as small groups, sometimes laughing, sometimes very serious and each time I said ‘time’s up’ someone would look up and say, ‘can’t we have 5 more minutes?’.  At the end of the day they seemed quite tired, quite happy and very engaged with each other.

Is this going to produce better performance?  Was I adding value by getting out of the way for most of the day?  I would certainly say yes but I’m also just as certain I can’t prove that.  At least in the way organizations tend to understand proof.

I take more of a constructionist perspective on how organizations operate and for this reason I think better performance will occur and that I was adding value.  I see organizations as the patterns of interactions between people and if people are having what they would define as meaningful and effective interactions there is a greater probability that the organization will perform better.  And I can add value if it is helpful to get out of the way of those meaningful and effective interactions.

Most organizations understand proof as being able to measure a causal link from one point to another.  The underlying assumption of this is that there is a planned action to produce these causal links.  This perspective sees organizations as the result of planned activity, rather than constructed through interaction, and this planning is most often seen as being done by people of some expertise, such as senior management or external consultants.

In the context of proof driven organizations, perceived to be created by logical plans there is tremendous pressure to be an expert and in the OD world this so often means getting IN the way.  Getting in the way with our models, theories, tools and techniques and often pontificating our opinions, thoughts and ideas.

From this perspective it is not easy to be seen as adding value by getting out of the way.

Of course you should not be getting out of the way all the time, but I find now that my perceived expertise, and my desire to express it can get in the way a whole lot more than I ever imagined.

In my session last week I imagine that I could have positioned myself as ‘expert’ and might have sounded really good.  I also imagine people wouldn’t have been saying ‘can’t we have 5 more minutes?’  And for me that question last week was enough proof that I was adding value.

Author – Tom

Love Songs, Truth, Ideology, and Wonder

Hard to Concentrate by the Red Hot Chili Peppers – http://youtu.be/8jnRcM8Qf1A – is the best love song ever written.  The lyrics are both beautiful and edgy, the music just makes you want to move and you just feel like you should just give this song to someone.

WHAT!  You have a different best love song ever written?!?  Well, have you ever really listened to Hard to Concentrate?  Have you studied the lyrics?  Do you know its history?  Do you understand the complexity of how the music matches the lyrics?  Well if you did you would know it was the best love song ever written too.

A while ago I joined a couple of LinkedIn groups, one focusing on Systems Thinking and another focusing on Design Thinking.  These are very active groups with thousands of members in each.  And after being in these groups for a while it began to feel like the short narrative above, except it was me that had a different and best ever love song.  I had expressed a different perspective, one that fundamentally differed from the perspectives of the group and the response I received felt like I was being told that I just didn’t get their perspective well enough, that I didn’t understand its nuances.  Hidden just under the surface of this was a sense that their perspective was true, or at least a better truth than mine.  Of course I cannot know if this is what was being thought, but it felt that way.

It’s easy to accept that someone else could have a different, favorite love song.  So much history, context, preference and individuality go into that choice.  We don’t see our choice here as truth.  My experience of these groups however feels like they are expressing the truth, the right and best way to see and understand the world.  What I would call an ideology silently slips into truth.  And when ideology becomes truth, wonder is severely constrained and relegated to ‘wondering’ how I can help people see the truth, rather than what we might discover together in a spirit of inquiry.

Perhaps ideology slips silently into truth because we need to feel like we have something solid and real to stand on, something to believe in that makes us, us.  Perhaps especially in these times of so much uncertainty.  Perhaps as well we might be a little better off if we could, when our ideologies slip into truth add two words – for now.  Those two words – ‘for now’ – could position wonder back in its lofty and valuable position, true wondering about what is and what might be.

I think for many OD professionals, systems thinking is their favorite love song.  And that song is based on the assumption of certainty and if you can just get the system right, you will get the results you want.  Our song is based on the assumption of uncertainty and that we will move forward together into that uncertainty doing the very best we can.  And to do that we will focus intensely on our local interactions and what’s happening in them.  Since it is right there that the future is happening. 

We think it’s a very good song – for now.

Author – Tom