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

Habit or Innate – Does it Matter?

I just finished reading the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  During this time I’ve also been paying attention to discussions and exchanges on the topic of innateness.  And being in the work preference assessment business this topic often comes up.

Our position on preference assessments has been made clear in a variety of posts; we lean toward the social construction of preference as measured by these types of assessments, which would put us more onto the side of habit than innate.

But outside of preference assessments does it really matter if important parts of our behavior are learned habits or innate characteristics?

Well, I think it matters a lot!

Especially because the idea of innate seems to get thrown out there so often with very little evidence to support what actually can be proven as such.  And when the term innate is used to describe behavior it tends to be interpreted as something that the individual has very little, if any control over and something that will not change.  At this point all types of troubling things can happen; acceptance without question of behavior that is problematic, loss of accountability to change that behavior, the search for innate traits and characteristics that produce desirable (or non desirable) behavior, a belief that important parts of our identity are created outside of the influence of ourselves and others, and perhaps the most troubling of all; a belief that we have little choice or affect in changing our own behavior.  We are who we are, like it or not.

Duhigg’s book however points out numerous examples of people changing by focusing on behavior as a habit and trying to understand the dynamics of that habit and then actively pursuing changing the dynamic and thus the behavior.

For me the reason this matters and why looking at behavior as primarily a habit is that it keeps alive the possibility of change.  It keeps alive one of the most important things we own, choice.  That possibility, that choice is either severely compromised or dissipates completely when we see behavior as primarily innate.

I don’t see this as a naïve or rose-colored glasses perspective.  That anyone can choose to behave any way they want and if they want it enough it will happen.  Changing habits is not easy, in many cases this type of change may be the biggest challenge of our lives, and it may not work.

Yet if we focus on behavior as a habit we will continue to try to understand the dynamics of the habits of our lives since the possibility of change exists.  If we focus on behavior as innate we either give up on change or try and understand just what is innate.  And for me, the search for that understanding is naïve given our highly connected and interactive experiences as a human being.

So I land on the side of behavior as habit.  If you want to try to change my thinking I would assume you must think the same way

Author – Tom

Balancing the Psychological and the Social

This post was originally published in the TMS Learning Exchange – December 2012.

We seem to live in quite a ‘psychological’ world. A world where everyone understands the words ‘ego’, ‘personality’, ‘psyche’, ‘identity’, ‘self’ and so many other words and phrases that, in some way or other, have a sense of individual creation and then ownership attached to them.

The starting point for a world understood psychologically is internal and individual. The first sentence of the prolog of Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, captures this well:

“My life is a story of self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.”

One of my sincere hopes for 2013 and ongoing is that we find ways to take the best of this psychological perspective and balance it with a social perspective. A perspective where the words ‘construction’, ‘emergence’, ‘transformation’ and ‘interaction’ are better understood as part of what makes us who we are at any one point in time. And that who we are is seen not so much as an identity we own, but one that is more fluid, contextual, and shared in its construction by the countless day-to-day interactions we have with others.

I think the pendulum has swung too far to the psychological side and has created a place, for the individual that psychology has created, that too often is lonely and full of guilt, shame and blame. Perhaps with a little more balance toward the social we can find more ‘human’ places to ‘be’.

As the psychological perspective has taken precedence the idea of the individual has become paramount. We, as individuals, are seen as both born with and having created the identity we now own. We are alone in its goodness or badness, its rightness or wrongness, its worth or lack thereof. And it is the I, the individual, who is seen as having sole and unfettered domain over this identity.

As the concept of the psychological individual has become dominant, what that individual should ‘be’ has been idealized in almost every walk of life. We are inundated explicitly and implicitly with what we should be like as a leader, a manager, a mother, father, daughter, son, consumer, citizen and on it goes. These idealized identities are virtually impossible to attain, yet we are somehow supposed to measure up, and as sole proprietors of our identities it is up to us alone to attain these mythical standards of personhood. And when we cannot reach these heights on our own, we find ourselves in this place of guilt, shame and blame.

The gifts of the psychological perspective; deep reflection, a search for greater awareness, comfort with the transpersonal experiences we all share as well as the vast differences we do not, get lost as the pendulum swings too far. No perspective, exclusive of others, is healthy, and I hope we can let the pendulum swing back a little, and our health as perfectly normal humans can be reclaimed.

What does a social perspective bring, and how might it help us to find balance?

A social perspective brings context into focus. A perspective that reminds us that who we are is significantly affected by the place, time, and people we find ourselves in and with. A focus on context allows us to be a little more the product of the space we find ourselves in and a little less of the person that should be able to transcend that space.

A social perspective brings relationship into focus. Relationship and interaction as immediate causal factors in the emergence of our very selves. As we have discovered through complexity science, the relationship between things may be more important than the things themselves and this can be another way of seeing ourselves. A focus on relationship allows us to believe that the potential for true personal and social change resides in every interaction and allows us to see ourselves less as the expression of innate, unchanging characteristics.

A social perspective brings a focus to the present. A realization that the future resides in the here-and-now and that history can be reimagined by how we think about it today. An acceptance that nothing is more important or real than what, or who stands before us at this moment. An understanding that, while we are dramatically influenced by the weight of our histories and the lightness of our futures, we are not shackled to them since we have the capacity to choose in the present. We have the capacity to choose to act into an uncertain future.

A social perspective brings acceptance to irresolvable paradox. Where context is important, rightness and wrongness become more relative, truth is no longer absolute. The heroes and heroines of yesterday can be the pariahs of today. What is accepted in one place and time is not in another and this can be understood. We can find space for difference while not losing our sense of belief. Paradox need not be resolved.

The social perspective allows for the natural existence of uncertainty. George Herbert Mead talked of a ‘conversation of gestures’, where meaning is not found in the initial gesture alone. Meaning emerges from the interplay of gesture AND response. The incredible complexity of our past and as well as our hopes for the future come to bear on each interaction we have and the outcomes of those interactions are founded on this complexity. Uncertainty exists in every interaction we have. It is normal and natural. Acceptance of uncertainty allows us to fail or succeed and move on, rather than being racked by the impression we should have been able to somehow manage the uncertainty away.

Finding a little more balance toward a social perspective is a challenge. A broad challenge. The psychological perspective has influence from our first realizations that we are a separate being: from the first time we are scolded and told to ‘think about what you have done!’; from the first time we walk into a school and experience a teacher; from the first time we are told who the heroes and heroines of our society are; from the first time we are measured as an individual. We are taught from childhood that we are individuals, and that we are separate and distinct, and these teachings spread into the makings of our institutions, organizations and societies. It no longer seems to be a choice of which perspective we shall take. It is more like the water in our fishbowl, simply an unrecognized need of our existence.

My hope for more balance is not unfounded. As we struggle with the individual consequences of a pendulum swung too far, there are hints that perhaps a choice of perspective does indeed exist. The challenges of unprecedented levels of depression, stress, bullying, and a resurgence of fundamentalism are not being adequately addressed by a psychological approach. There are hints of change needed, some even from within:

James Hillman and Michael Ventura in their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And The World’s Getting Worse say “…Because psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore.” Robert Aziz in his book The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung states, “In great contrast then, to the highest symbol of the Jungian Paradigm, the archetype of the self – which is linear as opposed to nonlinear, concretized and fixed as opposed to dynamic – the highest symbol of the Syndetic Paradigm is that of the Empty Mandala.”

But perhaps more importantly for me are the hints of change I see with the people I work with. Having shifted focus away from many of the dominant perspectives that inform organizational development work, most being psychologically based in the service of certainty, I now focus with people on the day-to-day interactions they have. And how those interactions create patterns that may be sustaining and how we might consider changing those interactions. We talk openly about the uncertainty of our organizational lives, and that even in the midst of this uncertainty we will move on together, because that’s what we do.

The stories and experiences people have in organizations resonate with this perspective. We see ourselves much more fully. In many cases we can position the trappings of organizational process and procedure as simply more formal platforms for the continuing conversations that make up what we call organizations.

It is a more balanced perspective I think, and one that seems to fit, just a little better, with what we experience, what we live in our lives and our organizations.

I hope for a balance since a swing too far to a social perspective may create a focus where context is paramount and individual choice is meaningless, where irresolvable paradox swallows belief, and where uncertainty paralyzes decision. No perspective exclusive of others is healthy.

In 1914, on the brink of the first Great War Natsume Soseki in his book Kokoro wrote “Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.” We have been paying this price for quite some time and my hope is that we now can begin to choose not to pay it quite so much.

I hope that we choose to balance a psychological perspective with a social one and perhaps find ourselves with a different way of understanding where such wars, both internal and external are no longer a price to pay.

Author – Tom

The Burden of Expectations on Experience

‘Don’t burden my experience with your expectations!’

I don’t really know where this phrase came from but I like it!  Often uttered with a bit of a smile or an air of lightness, it is intended to bring to attention that someone is expecting you to be, or do something different.  You happen to be quite fine currently being or doing whatever you are, and you are gently reminding the person to just back off a bit and focus on what THEY are being or doing and let you have this experience as you choose.

If you change one word in this phrase it takes it to a whole different place, one that I think is important to focus on.

‘Don’t burden my experience with my expectations!’

We of course need expectations, they are probably even inevitable as we consider the future and try to imagine what future, big or small, we might want to have.  Expectations help us to plan, to organize and to focus on what we want.  They also serve to significantly constrain what we experience.  Our focus becomes our expectations and our capacity to focus outside of this becomes problematic.  More problematic is that deviation from our expectations is seen as bad, tainting our experience with a cloud of negativity.

A simple example, perhaps recently encountered by many.  You are planning a nice family get together and dinner.  People are coming from various places and you have high expectations of good conversations, laughter, good food and a nice time to be had by all.  Everything and everyone is living up to your expectations until dessert is served and it’s burnt.  For a surprisingly large number of people this mismatch of expectation and experience will have far greater impact than its logical relevance.  It becomes imbued with the silent ‘Oh, how could I?’ or ‘Oh, how could you?’ and any number of other silent catastrophes that begin to cast a shadow of negativity over the entire experience.

While we may see this experience and smile in recognition, what we often do not recognize is that we create expectations for our experiences that we do not even think about.  We build unstated expectations into almost every experience, often idealized expectations, and do not even realize they are there until they do not match our experience.  By then we have uttered sentences that start with, ‘If only…’, or ‘It would have been better if..’, or ‘I wish that…’ all expressions, when completed will hold some hint of negativity.

As this pattern firmly entrenches itself we find no experience lives up to expectations.  It always could have been better.  Also, experience itself gets constrained into a narrower and narrower band of perception.  We cannot be present to what is actually emerging since we are constantly judging the experience as good or bad against unstated expectations.

Basically we don’t experience much and we feel bad about what we do experience…. Yuck!

Yet this is what the burden of expectations can, and does create.  I think we would be better off thinking about the IDEA of expectations rather than the expectations themselves.  The IDEA of expectations allows for the excitement of what we want and what could be to push us forward with energy.  The burden of the detail is not nearly as important.  The IDEA of expectations provides for a much broader range of actual experience to measure up, perhaps very unexpected experiences.

It seems hard to imagine taking this concept of the IDEA of expectations into our organizational lives.  What on earth would a performance objective look like?  What would a strategic plan look like?  Somehow I think they would look more like what we actually do experience rather than what we expect we should experience.

And there would be much less weight to carry around.

Author – Tom

The Scariest Halloween Costumes Your Boss Can Wear!

As Halloween approaches just imagine the scariest costume your boss could show up in if she or he came to your workspace asking for treats.  Perhaps they might be totally scary showing up with no costume at all but here are a few that we think instill shivers of terror into most of us who inhabit the land of the undead sometimes called organizations:

1. The Budget Meeting Costume – Covered with random numbers that don’t quite seem to make sense.  One huge hand asking for more treats while the other hand slaps at it telling it not to be so greedy.  Depending on your boss, their treat bag is either giant or tiny, but either way don’t reach too far in as both sizes are lined with sharp objects waiting to stab you.
2. The Strategy Costume – Primarily a giant cloud with a number of ugly heads in it.  There seems to be no part of the costume that is actually resting on solid ground.  The term trick or treat is also replaced by phrases such as ‘I have a VISION of candy’ or ‘I am so ENGAGED with the INTENT of ACHIEVING a full treat bag.’
3. The Training Costume – A plain beige bag covering the entire body with nothing of interest on it at all.  Covered in a mysterious sticky substance that the candy sticks to.  Unfortunately the sticky substance loses its effect after 10 minutes or so and all the candy is left behind in a sad trail.  No one really notices though.
4. The Motivation Costume – A collection of posters and coffee mugs with cool sayings on them like – Dream It and YOU can Achieve It or There is no I in Team.  This costume also spits out 100 dollar bills at random intervals but only when accompanied by a strong gust of air which makes it almost impossible to catch them.  It is very hard to walk in this costume as it is laden with everyone else’s candy.
5. The Alignment Costume – Usually a large arrow shaped thing with a picture of a flock of geese flying within the arrow.  This costume is often seen in the company of the Strategy Costume and in fact they are best buddies.  If you ask what the geese are all about before giving out the candy they often turn and run.
6. The Performance Management Meeting Costume – Usually the ugliest costume of them all!  One of those costumes that when you first see it you think it’s not all that scary and then it haunts you at night and causes really bad nightmares.  Interestingly the inside of the costume is covered with a horrible scratchy material so no one really wants to wear it.  However your bosses Mom has told him or her they have to wear it.  They usually only get a couple of candies and just give up.

So what might be the scariest costume your boss could show up in?!?!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Author – Tom

Passion – Choice or Destination?

There’s a lot of talk in the OD world about passion and doing what you have a passion for.  So just imagine what it might be like if everyone in the world took this sage advice and went looking to find the work they had this wonderful passion for.  You’re probably now wondering where your next meal is going to come from, you have no place to live in and you’re walking the streets naked.  Well, there likely wouldn’t be too many streets to walk either.

Too much of this OD rhetoric treats passion as something to be found, a wonderful destination ‘out there somewhere’ and our work is to search until we find this nirvana.  Besides being an arrogant slap in the face of the 99% of the world that has to work at something to get by to the next day, week or month it is a devastating message about passion itself.

The message is that passion lies outside of us somewhere.  That passion is not a choice to be made but a destination to be discovered.

To me it represents another example of the problems with the creative tension model  However; this example grates on me like nails down a chalkboard.  Certainly, I hate what I see as the arrogance of it but perhaps more importantly I think it compromises our capacity of choice.  And when it comes right down to it, is there anything more central to our identities than the power to choose.

I think it is far more powerful (and realistic) to see passion as a choice.

When passion is seen as a choice we cannot escape ourselves and off load the idea that somewhere out there is a place, thing or job that will ‘unleash’ our passion.  Yes, ‘unleash’ which is another very popular word in OD circles these days.  Unleash our passion like it has been chained up somewhere; probably by some boss, teacher, circumstance, whatever we might choose that is outside of ourselves and getting in the way of us being passionate.

Those who see passion as a destination tend to be always looking for something better.  Their ‘current state’ is never good enough and typically the reason for this lies somewhere outside of them.  They’re always waiting for something better and looking for someone or something to blame when the wait gets too long.  They tend to be generally unhappy in a subtle way and a drain on the energy of those around them.

Those who see passion as a choice do good work, even if it may seem mostly meaningless.  Primarily because it is them doing it and they have the power to choose to do good work or not.  And even if the work is mostly meaningless they choose to bring meaning to it by building relationships with those they work with.  The choice may have little to do with the actual tasks at hand and more with the context in which those tasks are done.  And those that see passion as a choice see the most important context in the work they do is quite simply, them.

A few weeks ago I heard a CEO talking to a small group of new employees I had the privilege of working with.  One of the things he said to them was to be passionate about what they do.  The ‘do’ of that statement could be anything; the passionate part was their choice.

What choice are you making?

Author – Tom

Uncertainty and Shrinking Conversations

In March 2012 we wrote the post Motivation in an Environment of Uncertainty .  We looked at the nature of organizational conversations during uncertain times and how those conversations could sustain the choices people make to be motivated.  Unfortunately quite often the opposite happens in organizations.  During uncertain times conversations begin to shrink, both in quantity and quality.

We are definitely experiencing uncertain times in our organizations right now.  Perhaps one of the most important things for leaders to do is to keep conversations happening, rather than shrinking.  This however is not easy, primarily because these particular conversations are not ‘typical’ of leadership driven conversations.

Throughout history leaders have been charged with knowing where they want to go and how to get there.  If they got to that destination they were deemed successful leaders, if not they were incompetent as leaders.  At the heart of this is a direct correlation between leadership and the ability to create certainty.  Most ‘typical’ organizational conversations are founded on this correlation.  Strategy and how well it is executed, performance and how well it is managed, budgets and how well they are adhered to, results and how well they have been achieved are examples of organizational conversations based on the leaders ability to create certainty.

So when high levels of uncertainty exist, resulting in unrealized strategies, up and down performance, budget variance and poor results two very challenging things tend to happen:

• The assignment of blame, shame, guilt and incompetence increases.
• We don’t know how to talk about our experiences outside of the above dynamic.

The result of this is that conversations, at least those of any value tend to shrink in times of uncertainty.   The tendency is to protect ourselves from shame and guilt and the accusations of incompetence and just stay out of the way.

So what are the conversations leaders can be having in these times of uncertainty?

1.   Information about what is going on with the business and the market in which the business operates.  Since there is uncertainty these conversations tend to be different than typical conversations on this topic.  The phrase ‘we’re not sure what will happen’ is the biggest difference.  It’s often surprising to leaders how many times they may have to say this and how many times these conversations need to happen before this reality of uncertainty actually sinks in.  The correlation between leadership and the ability to create certainty is very strong and insidious.  Many people will think leadership must have an answer, or even THE answer and they are just not telling people. 

It’s also important in these conversations to be able to talk about what is being planned and tried out.  People want and need to know that movement forward is happening and how they can contribute to that.  It is often good to frame this activity as what is thought to be the best thing to be doing given what we know right now rather than THE answer to solve this uncertainty problem.

2.   Conversations about what it is like to be in the organization right now.  These are often the most challenging conversations to have.  They are intensely process focused.  What is expressed may have no solution and leaders are supposed to have solutions.  They also require openness not usually encountered or wanted in organizations.  It is important for the leader to express their perspective here as well, not just be there to listen.  This is not so much about an expression of vulnerability as it is a recognition that everyone, in their own way is feeling challenged.  While each person is unique in their subjective reactions there is also a realization of the commonality of facing this reality of uncertainty.

The leader plays a key role here in not letting these conversations shift into the assignment of blame, incompetence, guilt or shame.  If this happens the conversations are of very little value.  The experience of being in the organization is simply what it is.  Some exceptional discoveries may come from these conversations and even some powerful moving forward actions, but that is not the purpose.  The conversation begins with the genuine question, ‘How are we doing here, really doing?’, and then engaging with each other.

These conversations help people to move forward together into an uncertain future.

3.   Conversations about doing the best we can with what we control.  When we experience uncertainty we feel out of control.  Each of us however largely controls our own behavior.  When a leader asks, ‘What can we actually do?’, and focuses the responses on the actual behavior of those engaged in the conversation a sense of control is re-established.  It is critical here to acknowledge that doing our best at what we control may not necessarily create certainty or even make things better.  It does provide us with a sense of purpose and perhaps even more importantly a sense that we are doing something well.  Doing something well may or may not be tied to the ultimate results of what is being done.  Either way value is realized.

As noted above when things are not going as planned in organizations, blame and guilt are elevated out of their normal background existence.  People do not want to experience these things.  Conversations about doing what we control well, elevates confidence and self management, perhaps the two most important personal characteristics we can exhibit in the reality of uncertainty.

These are three types of conversations that leaders cannot afford to have shrink away.  They may be challenging to have but the alternative is that people will simply make up their own conversations and fill in the leader’s input with whatever assumptions they may have.  There is a good chance those assumptions will not be positive.

Ask yourself if these types of conversations are happening in your organization and are you actively initiating and engaging in them?

And remember, we are all leaders.

Author – Tom

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

More Interaction, More Change

Most current perspectives on the future of organizations will begin with comments on the accelerating pace of change.  The consequential generation of ideas for dealing with these phenomena focuses on leadership, management, technology, character, relationship and just about any other topic of interest.

I think it is very important to make sure we scratch hard at the surface of these ideas and try and understand what assumptions they are resting on.  It can be too easy to grasp at virtually any suggestion for dealing with this pace of change, simply in the hope it will affect some relief.

My belief is that many, if not most of these ideas rest on the assumption that this pace of change and the specific changes within it can be predicted and/or controlled. 

George Herbert Mead pointed out that when interaction takes place it is the dynamic between the ‘gesture’ and the ‘response’ that produces meaning.  That is, the gesture and the response together create meaning.  What is critical here, is that the meaning that may actually result from any given interaction is uncertain.   Interaction rests on a foundation of uncertainty.  Within this uncertainty is always the potential for novelty; and novelty means change.

One fundamental thing that has changed in our world over the past 20 years or so is the number of interactions that people have with other people.  Interaction now takes numerous forms due to technological advances, social media, etc.  They may or may not be intentional or attended to but there is no doubt we are interacting more these days. 

As our levels of interaction increase we can expect more novelty, more uncertainty, more change.  Less predictability and control. 

This is why it is important to look closely and critically at the ideas currently being espoused to deal with the experience of accelerating change. Many of these ideas, especially those informed by complexity science point to increased interaction as a way of dealing with these situations.  What is often attached to these solutions however is a subtle sense that increasing the number of interactions will ‘make things better’.  The subtlety tends to come in descriptions that the quality of these interactions must change as well and if the quality changes then things will get better.  From Mead’s perspective, the quality of the interaction was immaterial, the interaction rested on uncertainty.

As an example of this, below is an excerpt from a paper published in 2000 – Leading at the Edge: How Leaders Influence in Complex Systems, by Birute Regine and Roger Lewin.

We can restate this in the language of complexity science as follows: In complex adaptive systems, agents interact, and when they have a mutual affect on one another something novel emerges. Anything that enhances these interactions will enhance the potential creativity and adaptability of the system. In human organizations this translates into agents as people, and interactions with mutual affect as being relationships that are grounded in a sense of mutuality: people have a mutual respect, and have a mutual influence and impact on each other. Mutuality lends itself to an appreciation of the wholeness of the other person, which increases the range of responses and possibilities between people.

I like this paper now and I liked it when I first read it years ago.  Nevertheless I also think it represents a very subtle slip into giving the impression that ‘good’ interactions will produce something ‘predictably good’ as well.  The bolded text above represents that subtle slip.

Interaction produces the possibility of novelty, the ‘goodness’ of that novelty is uncertain.

This does not mean that we shouldn’t try and have the very best interactions that we think we can have with others.  Of course we should.  It does mean that we should not burden these interactions with the expectations of predictability and control.

I agree that more, and more authentic interactions are a good way to ‘be’ in these times of high uncertainty.  It increases the potential for ‘good’ novelty.  It also increases the uncertainty we feel, especially the uncertainty we feel as predictability and control erodes away with each new uncertain interaction.

Perhaps the greatest gift we have as humans is our adaptability.  We have a tendency to adapt and be ‘ok’ in a very wide range of circumstances.  It seems our current drive in organizations for predictability and control has compromised our trust in our capacity to adapt.

As we enter this new year, we would suggest you ask yourself and your teams a question as you make decision after decision, each one resting on the uncertainty of the interactions surrounding them:

Will we be ok?

Push hard on the answer and you will likely find or rediscover that trust in our very human capacity to adapt.

Author – Tom

Conversations in a Climate of Fear

What are the types of conversations that are the most valuable in organizations when a thread of fear seems to be wrapping itself around us and makes us feel like we don’t want to talk to anyone?

It feels like many of us are in this position right now, a climate of fear permeates so many organizational settings, either hiding in the corners or screaming from the rooftops.  And often it causes us to withdraw, feel victimized, place blame, feel very sad or angry.  It puts us in a place where words are hard to come by, at least those words that might be helpful, useful and purposeful.

Fear is an interesting thing, especially now.  We often talk of reactions to fear being fight or flight.  These reactions however are generated from parts of the brain that developed very early on, not only in humans but many other species as well.  They are reactions that apply when fear represents a clear and present danger to our safety, in the moment.  It is a visceral reaction and the reason to fear is right in front of us.

The fear that seems so present now is more of an intellectualized fear, not a bodily reaction.  It exists more as ‘what ifs’ than ‘what is’.  It’s a little more out into the future than the fear that stimulates fight or flight.  We’re not afraid for our safety, we’re afraid of things much more complex, much more intellectual and hard to put words to.  And this tends first to close down conversation, or creates conversations that no longer fit or do very little to acknowledge our reactions to this type of fear.

What we find, from our own experiences in our organization, as well as working with others is that the most valuable conversations where the climate of fear is present are conversations that start with the ‘what is’ rather than the ‘what if’.  Conversations that move us back from the future into the interactions of the present and emerge from that very present reality.

 

When really tough choices need to be made in these times where a climate of fear is present we find it valuable to pose questions that bring us back to what is happening right now.  Questions such as:

 

• What do our present interactions tell us about what we are afraid of?
• If this fear wasn’t present how might this conversation be different?
• What do our present interactions tell us about what we’re trying to protect?
• If someone you really admire was part of this conversation, would it change at all?  How?

 

Questions such as these bring us back into the present, help us take our present interactions seriously and seem to ground us in a way where we can move forward to thinking and conversing about the ‘what ifs’ from a place of a little more strength, a little more accountability and perhaps even power.  They do not necessarily dissipate the fear but they do seem to provide a place from which to more effectively move forward together.

 

So much of our time in organizations is spent thinking about the future or analyzing the past that we are no longer very good at talking about what is really happening with our present interactions.  Back in April of 2009, a few months after the economic collapse of late 2008, we wrote a post called Different Times, Different Conversations and we talked about how we needed to give ourselves some space to find the words for different conversations.  I think one of the things we’ve learned in our work with others and about ourselves since then is that this space is about the present interactions we are having right now.

 

Over the past number of years we have had quite a lot of these types of conversations, within our own organization and with people in other organizations.  Connect in with us if you would like to talk more about the facilitation of this type of process.  Because one thing we do know for sure about times when fear is present in organizations; we move through it most effectively when we use our greatest gift, our capacity to talk with each other.

 

Author – Tom