The parable of the boiled frog

Peter Senge wrote 20 years ago about the parable of the boiled frog. If you place a frog in a shallow pan of boiling water it will immediately try and jump out. But if you place the frog in warm water, and don’t scare him, he’ll stay put. If the heat was gradually turned up, the frog would stay in the pan, until it’s too late and he’s unable to climb out. The imagery is somewhat gruesome but the lesson is clear. Like the frog, our internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared to sudden changes, not to slow, gradual changes.

 Those of us involved in leadership and organisational development would do well to pay attention to our disquiet. This is often an early warning sign to which we should pay attention. I’ve been noticing my own unease this past week as I’ve been preparing thoughts for a middle management development for a global company.  Are we willing to wake up to the bigger picture, to the threats and opportunities we sense around us, or is the lull of the warm water just too tempting?

 Here are five issues to which we should pay more attention:

 1. Impact of the recession. This is likely to result in a familiar, but not inevitable, pattern described by Barry Oshry: overwhelmed Tops sucking up yet more responsibility from others; increased fractionation of the Middle with associated personal and system dis-integration; heightened vulnerability at the Bottom with Bottoms blaming Middles and Tops. So, one possibility is increased polarisation and conflict. However, we know from complexity science that at times of great turbulence the system can break down or break through to a new state of order.  We are in, what Robert Kegan describes, as a zone of ‘optimal conflict’. Optimal conflict is characterised by four conditions: the persistent experience of some dilemma; that is perfectly designed to cause us to feel the limits of our current way of knowing; in a sphere we care about; with sufficient support and challenge so we are neither overwhelmed by it, nor able to escape or diffuse it. Our current situation could also be a point of breakthrough if we have the courage to engage with these issues and then the insight to judge how best to act.

 2. Loss of trust in leaders and organisations. Many people have lost faith in Top leaders and organisations more generally. Too many positional leaders have abused their authority (bloated unfair rewards, corruption, abuse of children in the case of churches) and this has infected the trust we have in all leaders, resulting in a generalised cynicism of those with positional authority. People also know from their own experience that many promises made by Tops cannot be honoured and in that sense were not made in good faith. There is much denial of the fact that no one is in control: Marv Weisbord comments that corporate “destinies are entwined in a maelstrom of markets, technology and world events”. Tops make promises about the longevity of changes, ignoring the fact that their tenure is likely to be short and the next sets of Tops will likely sweep away in months the changes from the previous lot.  This climate of cynicism affects anyone in a position of authority: Top, Middle and Bottom. We need to acknowledge where we are, if we want to make progress.

 3. Unlearning our taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘organisations’/organising. Without a basic shift in thinking all our strategies and activities around leadership and organisational development may just be froth on the sea, quick to disappear and of no substance.  Gregory Bateson, the biologist and anthropologist, said 40 years ago “the source of all our problems today comes from the gap between how we think and how nature works.”  In practice, many of us still operate, and our programmes and interventions are designed, as if organisations (and the world) operated as a predictable machine. In fact, organisations are a continuous interplay between formal designed structures and informal human networks. These networks take little account of the boundaries of the legal entities we call ‘organisations’. We would do well to acquaint ourselves much better with complexity science, ecology and the science of living systems and revisit our taken-for-granted governing ideas around organising based on control, prediction, consistency and measurement.

4. Illegitimacy of the current capitalist model and unresolved questions of social justice. No less an institutional figure than Michael Porter (the guru of corporate strategy) wrote in the Harvard Business Review last year about rethinking capitalism: “Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community”. He went on to set out his big idea on ‘Shared Value’ explaining say that “not all profits are equal… profits involving a social purpose represent a higher form of capitalism.” I quote Porter because he is very much an insider, a Demi-God in the world of global business schools.  Dee Hock, founder of VISA, in its early days one of the most radical companies in terms of its design and philosophy, commented that the “highest levels of management in all organisations, commercial, political, social, and educational, are now formed of an interchangeable, cognitive elite with immense self-interest in preserving existing forms of organisation and the ever-increasing concentration of power and wealth they bring”. In the last few weeks in the UK, shareholders are beginning to find a voice to protest about the continuing level of lucrative pay and share deals awarded to Top Directors despite poor company performance. At the same time a dramatic protest by cleaners at the Government Department of Work & Pensions, highlighted that the minimum wage is not a living wage. Inequality is real and growing and our warms words about ‘partnership’ and ’collaboration’ will be empty unless we engage with the reality of our social and political context.

5. Loss of purpose, principles and values. In terms of the recessions in Western economies Meg Wheatley commented: “This isn’t a financial crisis. It’s a global crisis created by a world organised on economic values”.  What is the purpose, principles and values that are worthy of our commitment and which would animate and create the organising structure around which people can mobilise?  “The strength and reality of  every organisation lies in the sense of community of the people who are attracted to it, its success has enormously more to do with clarity of shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them, than with money, material assets or ,management practices, important as they maybe” (Dee Hock). At a societal level, the question of purpose and values is just as important. In the UK, an important public debate will be held next week on the site of the Occupy Movement, St Paul’s Cathedral, addressing the question: What Money Can’t Buy:The Moral Limits of Markets

We are in a complex situation.  None of us are innocent, standing outside the systems of which we are critical. The choice is: do we see ourselves as players or victims? If we wake up to the threats that are around us, find the courage to speak and to play our part alongside others, we can make a difference.  

 Back to my middle management programme…

Making Sense of Complexity: the Personal and the Systemic

 

 

I couldn’t give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity,

but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity

Oliver Wendell Holmes

  

 

 

 

Many of us yearn for simple principles to guide our work and life in a complex world. At the heart of this conundrum is an understanding of the relationship between the personal and the systemic. If some of us have an intuitive feel for the relationship between the two, we often find it hard to explain it to others. The urgency of our organisational, societal and planetary challenges requires us to bridge this divide. Either lens on its own is inadequate. I’ve been party to conversations which seem to presuppose that the locus of transformation is individual leaders, as if they exist in isolation, outside of any wider context. Similarly, the systemic approach can often be impoverished by an inadequate understanding of adult development and leave gaps in how we translate systemic insights into shifts in individual and collective behaviour.    

All metaphors are incomplete but the metaphor of organistions as living systems, developed by Meg Wheatley and Fritjov Capra, illuminates different ways of thinking and acting. By contrast, when you look closely at organisational thinking much of it is still located in ‘the world and organisation as machine’ metaphor. I’ve just responded to a tender for organisational development work where the working assumption seems to be that each leader is a separate unit, capable of redesign and complete transformation, largely independent of the wider culture of the organisation.  Much leadership development is still premised on questionable ‘machine-metaphor’ assumptions:

• Breaking the system into its component parts (individuals and teams).
• Studying each part in isolation.
• Assembling an understanding of the whole as if the collective level is simply an aggregate of the parts that interact weakly and in a linear manner.

For example, you can’t adequately think of shifting the behaviour of the Middle part of an organisational system without understanding the Middle group’s relations with each other, with Tops, with Bottoms and with Customers. This wider constellation of relationships should be the locus of any action inquiry seeking to evolve the system. Focusing on the personal development of individual Middles and expecting a shift in the collective behaviour of Middles is a common but often fruitless endeavour, if you want to evolve whole systems, as Barry Oshry has pointed out.

The self (the personal/individual) and the wider systems of which we are members are not separate. As human beings we are constituted of the same elements that make up the universe.

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The world of quantum physics reveals that the most basic elements of what constitutes us as human beings are not the solid building blocks of atoms, but pure energy, patterns of probability, waves and particles. At the collective level (which includes organisations) my view is that there is no fixed, pre-existing social reality that exists outside of our personal and collective participation in it. This is paradoxical because certain levels of reality appear solid: our bodies seem solid enough and yet we are in constant cycles of dying and renewal, a complex set of processes in motion. Similarly, organisational culture has tangible manifestations: values statements, organisation design charts, procedures and policies. Organisational culture also has a much subtler, less tangible but no less powerful energy field: the emotional history of the organisation carried in story, ritual and myth; the signals and gestures, mostly out of conscious awareness, that encourage and constrain individual behaviour; the vitality (or otherwise) that brings collective purpose to life.  

So what?

Update your maps.  Many maps in use in organisations around individual and collective change are woefully inaccurate. The wider field of leadership and organisational development (OD) has much unlearning and letting go to do. I’m in the process of simplifying my work which is both painful and liberating. If you read Marvin Weisbord’s latest book, Productive Workplaces Revisited: Dignity, Meaning and Community in the 21st Century, reflections on 50 years as a leader in the OD field, he set out ten myths of organisational change which he no longer believes. These myths (changes are sustainable, diagnosis solves the problem, training will fix it…) are unfortunately the common fare of many proposals from business schools and consultancies.

Embrace paradox and uncertainty and remember the map is not the territory. Maps are helpful in pointing to the territory, just as a menu points to the food, but as Gregory Bateson pointed out it’s a mistake to eat the menu. In the same way our plans and maps are useful but provisional. By all means take maps and make good plans, but pay attention to the territory which is in front of you. Solutions to complex challenges emerge over time through the rich interaction between different parts of the system. We have to be willing to embrace the unknown and this includes ambiguity, vulnerability and uncertainty. As the Islamic poet Rumi said: “As you start on the Way, the Way appears”. 

Find a community of practice and deepen your understanding of the interplay between the personal and systemic. In a previous blog posting on Barry Oshry’s website I gave ten pointers (or cairns) to which we should pay attention. Revisit them. Try them out and see if they make a difference. Reflect on and learn from your experiments! In previous times we perhaps had a better sense of the time needed to become a master craftsperson (or master practitioner) but our desire now is often for fast tracks and shortcuts. Drive thru competence which we pick up on a one day workshop is an illusion – the workshop is a first step but the journey requires time, application and learning.

Happy travels!

If you would like to develop your ability to coach for change more effectively at the individual, team and wider system level then join me, Professor Peter Hawkins and faculty from AoEC for the Team Coaching for Systemic Change programme in London on 26/27 June, 2012

Gemstones of Leadership

If we are to be effective in our organisations and our lives it helps to know what’s precious. Recently, I’ve re-discovered some simple, sparkling truths about what’s important. Here are four of these gemstones:

Change really is organic! We may subscribe to this as an idea but at what level do we really know this to be true? Do we have faith in working this way? I was having a conversation with a successful business leader recently and heard a story of transformation in his business. What was remarkable, but shouldn’t be, is the absence of many of the tools and interventions that we tell ourselves are valuable: no grand plan, no blueprint, no roll-out, no Gannt Charts, no detailed monitoring. What was present from this Top leader was his engagement, interest, visibility and some permissions and encouragement – an enabling contribution – with Middles and Workers leading the change locally. What was noticeable was the uneven pace of change and at a certain stage it going viral – this isn’t the ordered, tidy change of consultant toolkits but more of the messy, organic, emergent process that change actually is.

For something to change, something has to change! If the same people are meeting under the same conditions then why would anyone expect anything new to happen.  So one possibility is bringing more diversity of stakeholders into our gatherings: customers, workers not just middles and tops …  Who has important insights, information and knowledge? What relationships need to be better connected? Whose voice needs to be heard? Bringing more diversity into our meetings and gatherings increases the turbulence and the risk but also the possibility of creating a different future.

Deepen the conversation. For many of our daily conversations and meetings we don’t actually need to be present; we could just put a dummy and a tape recorder in the room. Too many of our interactions have a canned and highly predictable quality to them.  I include myself in this.

“Taking a new step; uttering a new word is what people fear most” said Dostoyevsky. 

A lot of the time we are reluctant to ‘show up’ and spend much of our energy managing the situation to reduce risk (of exposure, criticism, getting it wrong, not knowing, anxiety, …) and protect ourselves. Of course, this is a subtle dynamic and we fool ourselves a lot of time that we are not doing this. It feels hard to make a shift in this game as others are playing it too. It’s actually not that hard to shift the quality of conversation.  Here are the four key qualities needed –I learnt them 20 years ago from Angeles Arrien – and of course I frequently ignore or forget them. When I remember them and am willing to risk living by them they make a big difference:  

• Show up – bring the whole of yourself to a conversation – head, heart, gut and spirit.
• Pay attention to what has heart and meaning.
• Tell the truth without blame or judgement.
• Be open to outcomes not attached to them.

Remember the power of good questions. I was having dinner at a conference recently with a group of six people and it could have easily been an average conversation amongst people who don’t know each other: pleasant but not remarkable. Instead, it was a memorable, intimate evening of sharing stories that mattered. The switch came from an invitation from one of the people at the table to start the conversation in a different way. We were invited to share a symbol that told us something important about who we were. It led to an interesting, connected, unfolding conversation…

These four gemstones invite us to embrace anxiety and uncertainty.

Are we ready to befriend uncertainty and anxiety as welcome travelling companions and the catalysts of creativity and innovation?

Or do we flee from uncertainty and anxiety at all costs?

Remembering the basics – leading skilfully in a confusing world

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In recent weeks I’ve been reminded of the complexity, contradiction and paradox at the heart of organisational life. I’ve also noticed my fear and ambivalence of engaging with what seems like a mess and my impulse to withdraw (leave them to it), blame (another good defence mechanism) or criticise (myself and/or them). Barry Oshry says the first law of organisational life is Stuff Happens. It’s how we engage with Stuff, our own and others, that makes the difference.

I’m working with a global firm at the moment that has ‘leading self, leading teams and lead organisations’ in a series of expanding circles as their leadership framework. Nothing particularly unusual in that combination. I notice it’s easy to be inured to what this signifies; the cynical part of me says yet more words on a power point slide – blah, blah, blah… The corporate wheel turns yet again and I’m part of the whole ritual. I’m sure this cynicism is mirrored within the organisation, as in many other organisations whether private, public or not for profit. It’s important to notice the cynicism, both our inner voice and when it’s voiced by others, most often in the informal space of organisations. This cynicism is triggered and reinforced by public narratives about change and leadership that are often incomplete and one-sided, and at some basic level don’t describe the lived reality of the organisation, its history or its possibilities.

As human beings we are paradoxical and contradictory; organisations too are a mixture of light and shadow. As leaders and facilitators of change we need to acknowledge our capacity for light and dark; that way we are less likely to project it unawarely onto others.

So back to the leadership framework: ‘leading self’ is the starting place for being or doing anything useful.

Dee Hock, the founder of VISA said: “the first and paramount responsibility of anyone who purports to manage is to manage self – one’s own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a never-ending, difficult, oft-shunned task…It is ignored precisely because it is incredibly more difficult than prescribing and controlling the behaviour of others”.

This is true in all settings: if you want to have a vibrant, healthy family life; or if you want to create a productive, innovative, high performing organisation. As human beings we are permeable boundaries – continually impacting others and being effected by others and the wider world – and leading self is the basic leadership practice from which all others flow. 

I recommend a simple, mindfulness breathing practice as a way to strengthen awareness: our capacity to see ourselves, others and the wider system more clearly. My own practice is intermittent but I know the simple act of taking some quiet time each day, breathing consciously and stilling the mind with its repetitive, chattering stories creates the space for new possibilities. If we want to be effective leaders and facilitators an awareness practice is basic and foundational.

 

Wake up to Reality: Lessons from the News Corp Debacle

One of the reasons so many organisational change projects fail – a jaw-dropping 70%  - is because we have an over-simplistic, caricatured view of the human condition. 

As leaders, if we want to effect change of any kind, whether local or at scale, we need better maps of how to navigate effectively in a complex  world. Our change and improvement maps, are woefully inaccurate and incomplete in terms of accurately mapping the human condition.

The painting by William Blake hints at the complexity of our character as human beings.

We would be more effective, and more compassionate to ourselves and others, if we could acknowledge the wonderful and painful complexity and contradiction that we are as human beings. 

Learning from the Phone Hacking Scandal

There’s much to learn from this debacle that illustrates the complexity of the human character and has much wider application than News Corp and the UK Government:

Power is not just related to position. There is a strong narrative of powerlessness in our society, even surprisingly among those in very senior positions, that real power to effect change lies elsewhere. This is a fiction which conveniently lets us off the hook. The determining factors of system power are the belief one can make a difference, deep knowledge of the system’s dynamics and insight into when and how to intervene skilfully, and the courage to act.

The hacking scandal has thrown up many people who have exercised this kind of leadership; amidst them is British MP, Tom Watson, not a high ranking individual, one of the foot soldiers in the UK Parliament, someone who has a passion and a determination for unearthing any wrongdoing in this situation. He showed himself as a force to be reckoned with as he politely but firmly held Rupert Murdoch to account in the Select Committee hearings last week. He has clearly learnt how to mobilise people and to use the formal system and its resources to powerful effect.  Sean Hoare, a News of the World reporter at the Bottom of the power ladder, is another who found his voice, blowing the whistle on phone hacking and in doing so brought the issue firmly into the public domain, although he seems to have paid a very high price for it with his untimely death.

Tops should hold themselves accountable for the cultures they create.  A picture is emerging of the intimidatory culture that prevailed at News International and the threats that were made to politicians who dared to jeopardise their interests. There seems little or no ownership of this by the Tops who shaped and oversaw the perpetuation of that culture: Rupert and James Murdoch, Rebecca Brooks, Andy Coulson.

In every organisation, Tops need to think hard about how easy it is in this organisation to speak up, to offer feedback, to contribute ideas. What seems to be consistent between the Blair, Brown and Cameron governments is the isolation of the Tops cocooned in a small coterie of advisers and an inner circle isolated from the wider system and public. There are many organisations where Top Directors suffer the same isolation from their Middle Managers, Workers and Customers with negative consequences for the performance of their organisations, their reputation and their ability to realise their purpose.     

We are all players, there are no neutral observers. An Australian broadcaster, Richard Glover commented at the weekend that: “Nothing I’ve seen in the British Press comes close to admitting the obvious: at least part of the blame lies with the British public. They’re the ones who’ve been buying this paper and other likes it for years. With every purchase, they have endorsed and encouraged this kind of journalism.”  Lest, we be tempted to feel holier than thou – comforting ourselves with the thought that I don’t buy those papers – read Glover’s comment with a wider canvas in mind.

How often are we an unaware co-creator to the very problem or situation we are complaining about?  Often we don’t care to look at our contribution. It’s often so much more attractive to engage in BMW behaviour – Bitching, Moaning, Whining about “THEM”.    

And finally, coming back to Blake’s image it reminds me that we need to design human systems taking into account the wonderfully brilliant and fallible people that we are. The wake-up call from recent events is that we are all needed to play our part.

What issues do we care about in the organisations and communities of which we are members? Where could we take a Stand? Where do we find others who share this concern or passion and with whom we could partner to make a difference?

Are we up for it? Adaptive leadership in the NHS?

Jenni Russell in a recent article in the Guardian raised some critical issues about the NHS which require us to stop short and pause:

• “The whole debate about the NHS is taking place at a level entirely detached from what people experience… the experience of the real person sitting in the clinic or hospital bed (or care home) is too often neglected. And yet that experience is at the heart of what the health service is for.
• The problem is politician’s manic belief in the existence of perfect systems. (This lets us citizens off the hook too easily as many of us also hold a belief in the possibility of  perfectly engineered and designed systems  as if the NHS was a machine with levers and pulleys that could be designed like a Heath Robinson contraption).
• What people want from the health service is indeed efficiency and reliability, but above all they want compassion and care… Politicians (and managers) shy away from this language because it sounds soft and is hard to measure.”

Russell’s article however creates a false dichotomy between a focus on systems or a focus on care. We need an integrated focus that looks carefully at system design and how it encourages or discourages certain behaviours.  The not uncommon incidents of discourtesy, lack of care, bureaucratic attitudes in the NHS are not just breakdowns of individual behaviour – a few bad apples – but also the impact of a culture and a certain kind of management system that has inadvertently created a climate where “an elderly patient can be told by the night staff that they were too busy to help her to the lavatory and she should just wet the bed” to give one example from Jenni Russel’s article.

Leaders at all levels in the health service need not to be afraid to talk about values and purpose. A critical aspect of leadership is to change the conversation and create with others a compelling and motivating narrative about who we are and what we are doing. Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, still one of the world’s most successful companies and at its inception one of the most innovative, said that “clear, meaningful purpose and compelling ethical principles evoked from and shared by all participants should be the essence of every institution.”

Barry Oshry asks what are we jointly committed to?  What’s the purpose that unifies the various players, institutions and tribes in the health service? Above and beyond our specialisation, competition and autonomy (all of which are helpful and necessary) what is the unifying overarching purpose that needs to be renewed? Leaders need to (re-)learn that leadership is both deeply systemic and personal.  System design matters but how we think about that process needs to shift radically.

This is the adaptive nature of the challenge – we need a retooling of how we think and act. But are we up for that level of not knowing, of holding open a space for experimentation and learning, of seeking to create new solutions with others, of sharing responsibility?

The reflex response which we may yet fall into again is to look to the Tops (Cameron, Lansley, Nicholson and the Department of Health) to sort it. That way is well tried and failed –  a few Top Leaders cannot effectively design a complex system from on high in isolation.

So the adaptive challenge is to face up to the stark fact that our thinking and core assumptions about change, leadership and organisation design need to move on.  There are pockets in the NHS who know how to do things differently – can we learn from those places of experimentation and next practice. There is much unlearning for the rest of us to do. Are we up for that? Who has the courage to name that agenda and to step into it for themselves and lead others on that journey.

Back to Visa, with a sixth of the world as its customers, Dee Hock reflected on governance that “agreement is always dynamic, imperfect and malleable. Reaching and sustaining agreement is a continual process, as alive as the people involved”. Public sector notions of governance are often too mechanistic and static, as if the system being governed was an inert object rather than a pulsating, complex web of people in multiple relationships. Hock’s conclusion is that we live in “a world of such complexity, diversity, and multiplicity of scales that there is little possibility of achieved constructive, sustained governance within existing concepts of organisation”.

Without this radical commitment to unlearning and experimentation, we can’t evolve our thinking and action into this new way of organising and leading. Without that step, we won’t be able to shift the dismally low success rate of organisational change projects. The latest book from McKinsey’s published this month, Beyond Performance, quotes a continuing failure rate of 70% of change projects.

Are we up for it? It requires all of us to enter this conversation and play our part.

 

Demons and Tyrants: Facing our Fears and Liberating Leadership

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I encourage you to find better living quarters.” Hafiz

My work is helping leaders at all levels see more clearly the reality they and others are in, building their self-awareness and system awareness to then take more effective action.  Yet this week I have been faced, again, with the uncomfortable reminder that a part of me doesn’t want to see reality and prefers to live in an illusory, dreamlike, Manichean world of good and bad. Of course I’m on the side of good! Our compulsive busyiness also serves as a protective device, our reason for not slowing down, for not pausing to acknowledge or name our fears or to see our part in the situations we find so perplexing.  I’m reminded of the oft quoted phrase: “human beings can only deal with so much reality”.

Perhaps this has been one of the attractions of the Royal wedding in the UK last week, with 2 billion people watching it across the globe on TV, that for a day (or longer) we become entranced in a fairy tale.

In our organisational work we need to have accurate maps of the human condition if we are to be effective.  I remember years ago whilst working for one of the big four consultancies being highly distrustful of the standard change management methodologies mainly because they had an over-simplistic view of how human beings operate. It wasn’t particular to that firm. It’s one of the reasons why 70% of change projects still fail to deliver expected benefits.

So what’s fear got to do with it and how should we work with our and other people’s fears?

There are five key points to remember:

1.    Befriend your fear and learn as you go. Most significant challenges facing organisations are complex. This means what we, or others, have done before may not be useful to create the way forward. We have to befriend ‘not knowing’, which is different from ignorance, if we are to create something new; this is what many of us fear. We also have to be more willing to embrace uncertainty: engaging with stakeholders over whom we may have no formal power, whose worlds we don’t understand and whom, at least at the start, we may even fear. This is why courage is essential to leadership; courage like fear is infectious. Small, everyday courageous acts encourage and engender other acts of courage. As leaders, or as coaches and consultants to senior leaders, we need to create cultures that are conducive to learning, accepting of human fallibility and supportive of creative experimentation.

2.    It’s not just you – fear is epidemic but innoculations are available.  If Descartes said “I think therefore I am” the modern equivalent seems to be “I worry therefore I am.”  As the Iranian poet Hafiz reminds us the house of fear is a place where many people choose to make their home. The first step is to change our living circumstances and see how fear operates in our lives and how it controls us. Honesty is required and courage (again) to acknowledge and name our fears. Many fears dissipate in their potency when exposed to the light of day and when explored and tested with trusted colleagues and friends.  This is where liberation comes in as we re-connect with the power of our choice and intentionality.

3.    You are not alone and you are not solely responsible. One of the most pernicious aspects of our thinking around leadership is the continuing dominance of the idea of the Hero Leader and the associated tyranny of perfection and self-sufficiency; fears and concerns are not shared, responsibility remains located with a few or only one person, and we unwittingly place others in a position of passivity. There is a much greater collective capacity waiting to be released and connected if we can revision leadership as universally available.

4.    Self awareness and system awareness are key. There are strong forces at play within ourselves and within the systems of which we are a part:  power, fear, hate, compassion, love, gratitude, ingratitude, forgiveness, resentment…  We need to be able to distinguish whether our feelings are clues about our own stuff or the condition of the wider system. There is no one practice to rely on to do this but journaling, reflection groups with colleagues/peers, external supervision/coaching and some personal discipline like mindfulness or meditation are also possibilities. We must build this discernment of what is personal and needs attention within us and what is an aspect of the dynamics of the wider system and therefore needs a more systemic approach.

5.    Change the Conversation.  In Brighton where I live, I went down to witness (not support) a ‘March For England’ demonstration (a network associated with far Right groups) and the counter-march by Unite Against Fascism (UAF) in the weekend following St George’s Day. As I left I heard the UAF group start the chant: “Racist Scum! Off our Streets.”  What seemed to unite both groups is the language of fear and hate. The dominant conversation in our communities and wider society is one of fear and control.  If we are to take seriously our role as co-creators of our world we need to change the conversations in our heads and with others to one of possibility, ownership, commitment, gifts and generosity and away from fear and retribution. This applies equally to our organisational lives as well as wider society.

Spirituality and Community on the Leadership Agenda: Authentic or Cynical?

I’ve spoken with internal development people in two global firms, household names, in the last fortnight and noticed, with some surprise, how spirituality is now overtly at the heart of the development agenda for senior leaders. 

Last month, Professor Michael Porter challenged business schools to rethink their curricula and respond to graduates’ hunger for a greater sense of purpose.

Dee Hock, founder of VISA and one of the most radical business entrepreneurs of the last century, describes the journey of his career and life in distinctly spiritual terms as “a story of harbouring four beasts that inevitably devour their keeper: ego, envy, avarice, and ambition; and of a great bargain, trading ego for humility, envy for equanimity, avarice for time, and ambition for liberty”.

Exercising wise leadership requires the kind of growing self-knowledge and self-discipline that Dee Hock refers to, knowing our needs, drives and vulnerabilities, and reaching over time for a purpose beyond and bigger than our small self and our easily threatened ego – all of these are necessary, valuable spiritual leadership disciplines.

Have you also noticed that community is now emerging on the agenda in a new way? Internally, the community question for organisations is framed as how do we create horizontal integration – belonging, commitment and collaboration – to a larger purpose than just my department/business unit or my career. Externally, the question of the moment is can we develop a new kind of capitalism “imbued with a social purpose” and if so, how do we do it?

In terms of the UK and the ‘Big Society’ agenda championed by David Cameron, the government has awarded a contract to train 5,000 Community Organisers to Locality. Jess Steele, Director at Locality, commented that the tender brief required that the successful provider had to draw on the work of Saul Alinsky (Obama was trained in this tradition of community organising) and Paulo Freire (Brazilian radical and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed). Is this a cynical appropriation of community activist traditions – a smokescreen to give sham integrity to the Big Society? Or is it an authentic pursuit of an agenda to which Cameron is genuinely committed, and for which he is getting no political brownie points, from any side?

Authenticity in my mind is associated with transparency, integrity, congruence, openness. Cynicism is a self-protective attitude: people often say the cynic is the disappointed idealist who’s seen too much duplicity and disingenuousness – those times when people (and themselves) have said one thing and done another. Maybe each of us is more a mixture of the authentic and the inauthentic than we care to admit. I know that on occasions I fit in, go along with things, often with good intentions – in that sense, I’m inauthentic.  At other times, I choose not to challenge the power structures and the dominant narrative. Sometimes we don’t have the energy, will or self-awareness to acknowledge the growing gap between our declared intentions and how we are and what we do. That’s where good colleagues and friends, who will point that gap out to us, are invaluable.

So what’s your response to this emerging agenda on community and spirituality? Cynicism? Or do you think it’s authentic?

I recall a conversation with a senior partner in one of the big four consultancies, a number of years ago, when I discussed the topic of spirituality and leadership development. “John”, he said, “that’s a topic that would have been a good bet a year ago, but it’s just not the right time on the FTSE at the moment”.   I was gobsmacked, but shouldn’t have been, as he continued to describe how at a future point, when the market had improved, a spirituality offering could be developed, as if it was just another management tool. The temptation to use people’s deepest motivations, and cynically appropriate or manipulate them, is the quickest way to discredit spirituality and the organisation’s reputation. On reflection, this partner’s comments reflect a systemic problem: the tyranny of measurement, the belief that everything valuable and significant can be measured. Not everything can be or should be monetized and measured. Measurement is a useful tool but only fools worship their tools, and in the domain of community and spirituality, those things that sustain us and give our organisational and wider lives significance and purpose cannot easily be measured.

Drunk and Near the Edge of the Roof?

“Sit, be still, listen, because you’re drunk and near the edge of the roof.” Rumi

We are facing a series of crises and we are near the edge of the roof in business, government and in our communities.

“In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the community…Companies have overlooked opportunities to meet fundamental societal needs and misunderstood how societal harms and weaknesses affect value chains. Our field of vision has simply been too narrow.” Professor Michael Porter, Creating Shared Value, Jan/Feb 2011, Harvard Business Review

“Most of our communities are fragmented…The absence of belonging is so widespread that we might say we are living in an age of isolation. Our isolation occurs because western culture, our individualistic narrative, the inward nature of our institutions and professions, and the messages from our media, fragment us…What keeps this form changing is that we are trapped in a tired old narrative of who we are. If the narrative does not shift, we will never truly create a common future and work toward it together.” Peter Block, Community: the Structure of Belonging, 2009

Whilst our reflex response may be to throw our hands up in despair, carry on with what we were already doing and blame “them”, the sanest and most effective thing may be to pause for a moment, try and understand the deeper structure and causes behind our current dilemmas, our part in unawarely contributing to these problems, and then figure out some practical steps in a new direction, hopefully away from the edge of the roof.

A friend of mine said the theme for current times was – Asking Big Questions and Finding Practical Answers - the latter not as neat solutions but as practical ways of leading, bringing something new into the world. One first step is to reclaim the idea of leadership in a very ordinary, everyday way, so that is seen as a quality that exists in all human beings. I like Professor Peter Hawkins’ notion that “leadership begins when you stop blaming others for things not working and start taking responsibility.” I hope this blog will provide a space to reflect on the messy reality of what it means, in practice, to lead and follow in the complex human systems of which we are all part – families, neighbourhoods, communities, organisations, society.

Another purpose of this blog related to the challenges above is to illuminate how we learn to combine three interdependent levels of action – the systemic, the interpersonal and the personal/individual – all of which are necessary to create sustainable change. Systemic thinking invites us to pay attention to context and trends, not just snapshots of experience. And our bigger social context is one of ambiguity and uncertainty.

In our practice of leadership, old ideas and assumptions still hold great sway. We are creatures of our culture and so we are not immune to its effects; I see the contradictions in myself and others, between what I aspire to and the ingrained habits and deeply embedded governing ideas that shape my behaviour.

Leadership is embracing the freedom and choice we have in everyday matters, as well as on the big questions, to be creators of our lives. Many of our organisational and societal structures have encouraged us to sleep, to retire on the job. Leading our lives in an everyday sense, taking responsibility for what we create in the world, and in our organisations, is what can provide our lives with meaning and purpose. This is the joy of leading.

Peter Block, of whom more in the next posting, asserts that powerful questions are more useful than answers, in that they demand engagement, and engagement creates accountability. So two questions to engage us:

How are you choosing to exercise your freedom and lead in your everyday life?

How are you helping enact the future which is waiting to emerge?