On Living, Leading, (Re)designing, and Coaching

Beyond "Knowledge Management"

Years ago (in 2001) I developed a model of how leading and organizing develops through fundamental stages of development. Each stage has a different way of observing and organizing. The simple version of this model goes like this: First we must learn to make assessments, then setting visions, then looking for and initiating action to capitalize on opportunities to realize the vision, then structuring the tasks, then optimizing the processes, then enabling the generation and sharing of knowledge, and so on (yes, there are other stages).

Within each of these stages there are observers, discourses, and methods for organizing work. For example, the observer of the task stage structures work hierarchically and takes divide and conquer approaches to completing work. The practices of traditional project management (e.g., PMI) were born from this observer. In addition, the observer of the process stage conceptualizes work as transformations of inputs to outputs within workflows that are optimized by feedback and feedforward loops. The practices of process management were born from this observer.

And so it is with the knowledge stage - the observer here has given birth to the practices of "knowledge management." I put this in quotes because I do not literally mean managing knowledge in the traditional sense of managing as a form of control. While there are leadership and management practices born from each stage's observer, the practices of leading and managing (and organizing) are fundamentally different because they are assessing and responding to fundamentally different worlds. In fact, my savvy writers in this field prefer to use terms like enabling knowledge creation and sharing or enabling innovation rather than knowledge management. And I must say, I like these linguistic reframes as well.

And so it is today that the most developed approach to leading and organizing that is commonly talked about in academia, leadership and business books, and in the popular press is this so-called "knowledge management."

Since my model was derived from research in developmental psychology I was able to speculate that the stages of development that were deeper/higher than the "knowledge stage" would generate a way of leading and organizing that was beyond knowledge management. I called this "compassionate management" (again the term management needs some reframing).

The major shift in perspective from "knowledge management" to "compassionate management" is that the purpose of business is not just to make money. The purpose of business (as explored in previous posts) is to support personal development and cultural (and societal) evolution. This is not in opposition of profit-making. Indeed, profit-making is an imperative. However, when we shift the raison d'etre of business from profit to people, to say it in a snappy way, we shift the organizing principle at the heart of the business. And this new organizing principle is compassion.

I'm working with a client right now (a >$1B pharmaceutical company) that is the largest example I've come across of compassionate management. Prior to taking on this client, I only saw examples of this in small teams, never on such a large scale.  Earlier this week, one of their Senior Business Partners captured the spirit of the shift to compassionate management by saying, "We usually see that you can get work done through people. However, we also see that you get people 'done' through work."

Compassionate management does not oppose knowledge management (or any prior form of management). Instead, it includes them all but what it adds is that these forms of management (including profit-making) are in the service of "getting people 'done' through work" as the central organizing principle.

More on compassionate management in another post ... for now, I hope that this has been food for thought.

Take care,

-Steve

The Offer of Leadership

This post explores the third part of an integral reconstruction of leadership that I have been exploring in recent posts on authenticity and responsiveness.

After first unsettling the notions that leadership require a certain position like CEO or President and then, after unsettling the notion that leadership requires certain personality traits and attributes we begin to open up the possibility that anyone can lead regardless of their position or personality.

We take for granted that leaders require followers. But if anyone can lead, perhaps our usual distinction between leader and follower must also be revisited. What is it that makes a leader? a follower?

At the heart of this part of the reconstruction is that leadership is fundamentally an action, not a certain position and not a certain personality. And further, the kind of action that leadership is is an offer. Leadership is an offer of service to others. This is a reversal of our common understanding of leadership in which it is the followers who serve the leader. And within this interpretation of leadership, a follower is anyone who accepts the leader's offer.

This interpretation opens the way for a much more complex and dynamic interpretation of leadership and followership - one in which who is a leader and who is a follower changes over time depending on who steps forward with a leadership offer and who accepts it.

What is a leadership offer an offer of? Leadership is an offer of service to produce a certain future situation that meets certain conditions of satisfaction that address core concerns that a would-be follower has in the face of tough realities. That's a mouthful!  Let's look at this one piece at a time.

"Leadership is an offer of service to produce a certain future situation ..." - leadership is an offer to produce outcomes and results.

"... that meet certain conditions of satisfaction ..." - not any outcomes, but certain outcomes that generate assessments of satisfaction (at least for now).

"... that address core concerns that a would-be followers has ..." - the offer is spoken into the "concernful" listening of would-be followers as a way to address those concerns.

"... in the face of tough realities." - when things aren't turning out, and our situation is tough to face, and we don't know what to do, we look for leaders.  Leadership (and therefore followership) are two of the practices that our culture has learned over time for coping with the difficulties and instabilities in life.

Extending this kind of service offer from a centered foundation of authenticity and responsiveness is a powerful act of leadership.

Take care,

-Steve

A Responsive Way of Being

In a recent post I articulated several essentials of Integral Leadership and have been expanding on each (see my last post on an authentic stance in the world).  Today, I'll take up an exploration of a responsive way of being, the second part of my proposed integral reconstruction of leadership.

Often leaders speak of their jobs as fire fighting. Indeed, one of the best illustrations of responsiveness are fire fighters, hospital emergency room nurses, and other emergency responders - professions where we have learned a lot about how to quickly, decisively, and effectively respond because human life is at stake. If you study a modern fire department what you will find is the following:

• trained fire fighters who are educated, practiced, in good physical shape, and who embody a critical set of skills so they can act reflexively to resolve anticipated breakdowns
• fire fighters and equipment that are available, ready, and on-call
• processes and procedures for responding to fires that are already worked out ahead of time that everyone has practiced over and over again to build their skill and, ultimately, obsolete the use of them as processes and procedures
• roles that are worked out ahead of time that, again, everyone has practiced over and over again
• ways of coordinating between the roles, again, worked out ahead of time and practiced
• fire prevention activities such as fire inspections, installing fire alarms, controlled burning (in parks and other open spaces where large fires could erupt), improving building codes, fire potential warnings on flammables, and fire safety advertising

Modern fire departments are exemplars of responsiveness and offer a stark contrast to what many leaders call "fire fighting" which amounts to reactively putting out fires when they erupt if they can find the available and skilled resources to do so. A fire department is responsive as opposed to reactive.

Reactiveness, on the other hand, is unpracticed and therefore unskilled action. Reacting is often necessary since we can't prepare for any and all situations. However, with reactiveness, your mileage will vary. Just as inauthenticity is the condition for authenticity (which I explored in my last post), reactiveness is the condition for responsiveness. They are phenomena that are distinguished relative to each other.  Whenever we find that we are reacting, we have found a new domain in which to learn and become skillful and responsive. The possibility of responsiveness arises from our reactiveness.

What does practice do that enables responsiveness? Practice builds our ability for centered action even in the midst of physically and emotionally difficult - even horrific - situations that easily trigger us.

When we act from center we do what needs to be done with
expediency, skill, care, creativity, and economy.

And this kind of action is what we most want in dire situations. Those who are reacting are the ones whose fears and anxieties are triggered, who are paralyzed by the circumstances, who are running around frantically, or are running away. In our reactiveness, if we stop, center ourselves, and then move into action we are already starting to respond. We can immediately bring more expediency, skill, care, creativity, and economy even without all of the training and preparation of a professional responder such as a fire fighter.

Perhaps this is most evident in the other classic examples of responsiveness - playing sports and martial arts. In both sports and martial arts, we practice to embody a range of skillful actions. When we walk onto the playing field or onto the mat, we have no idea exactly what will happen and how we must respond. Instead, we engage from a place of skillful capacity. So responsiveness is never mechanistic, although it is practiced.

Today leaders find themselves in difficult situations facing risk, uncertainty, dilemmas, paradoxes, shocking demographic trends, potential environmental catastrophes, political upheaval, scare resources, unsustainable ways of living, and a mess of other forces of change. The need for a responsive way of being is no less for leaders in today's world than it is for emergency responders.

Take care,

-Steve

The On-going Choice of Authenticity

In a recent post, I put forth the idea that an essential part of Integral Leadership is an authentic stance in the world. However, authenticity, it seems to me, is not widely understood.

What is authenticity? Authenticity is simultaneously being true to where we find ourselves and our freedom in that. Let's explore what this means by first looking at inauthenticity.

We often get trapped in seemingly being true to where we find ourselves without simultaneously being true to our freedom. This is called inauthenticity. In our inauthenticity we take ourselves to be victims of our past, to be locked in to certain given futures, and to have no choice in the present about it. In other words, we aren't being true to our freedom but instead taking ourselves to be imprisoned.

Here is typical example of an inauthentic complaint, "Sorry I didn't get that task done, I have no time to work on it." The person speaking this feels victimized or trapped by "having no time." The cost of taking an inauthentic stance such as this is that it disempowers us, paralyzes us, and we numb ourselves to our situation instead of owning it. So inauthenticity becomes a vicious cycle unless we awaken ourselves with an authentic response.

A more authentic response to the same situation would be, "Sorry I didn't get that task done, it wasn't a priority for me and I didn't complete it." The person speaking this is owning where she is - I haven't completed the task - and owning her choice of priorities. Within her authentic stance, she is both owning where she finds herself and her freedom in choosing her priorities in the first place and in choosing different priorities going forward.

Authenticity is not a moral stance, although it is too easily taken to be one. The condition of authenticity is inauthenticity itself. We can't have one without the other.

An authentic stance is an on-going choice to own our situation and our freedom in it - our freedom to reinterpret our past, our freedom to craft and project new identities and narratives into our future, and our freedom to remain open, vulnerable, and receptive in the present.

So inauthenticity is a form of self-betrayal. But it is not a trap for we can never be cut off entirely from our authenticity. The possibility of an authentic response is always present. All we must do is to own it and act from our authentic self. This is easy to say but not so easy to do always. This is a state of being self-led - that is led by our True Self. This is a life-long practice - a practice of presence.

And in my experience, this is essential to Integral Leadership.

Take care,

-Steve

What will you do?

A friend of mine, Robert Masters, recently posted an interesting question to me that I'd like to share and discuss with you.

If you were the only person in a remote tribe of 1000 that knew a tsunami was going to hit your village in 5 minutes, what would you do?

You can't save everybody. Who would you save? What guides your action?

Worse case is that you all get wiped out.  The best case is that, somehow, your tribe survives even though many will die.  What must you do to ensure that best case?

This is a fictitious yet relevant scenario to consider for leaders who, today, face a world of fundamental political, health, social, economic, and environmental breakdown.

-Steve

The Discourse of Integral Leadership

Yesterday I wrote about three leadership discourses: Briefly, they are:

Discourse 1. Leadership requires a certain position

Discourse 2. Leadership requires certain attributes, traits, and character

Discourse 3. Leadership requires followers

In looking at these closely, I find exceptions or issues with each of them (again, see yesterday's post for a sketch). Either individually or taken together, they don't capture what's essential about leadership and therefore, don't offer a firm grounding for building leadership development programs (which is my aim in the background of this inquiry).

An integral reconstruction of leadership, points to a fourth discourse, which is simultaneously a reconstruction (reinterpretation) of the first three discourses that distills them to something more essential about leadership (and eliminating that which points us in a misleading direction) while adding something new at the same time.

Reconstruction of Discourse 1. Leadership is a stance of authenticity

In reconstructing Discourse 1, I eliminate is the interpretation that this stance can only be taken by people in  certain leadership positions. Anyone can be authentic and a stance of authenticity amid a world where inauthenticity is rampant is a powerful move.

Reconstruction of Discourse 2. Leadership is a responsive way of being

What I eliminate is the interpretation that there is some set of personality attributes, traits or character. Any fixed set we pick will work sometimes and fail other times.  And this is the downfall of most competency-based leadership development programs. They attempt to codify leadership competency.

But isn't responsiveness a competency you ask? No. Why? Because the test for responsiveness is never-ending. You can never declare yourself competent in being responsive because the next crisis you aren't expecting might paralyze you. In order to be responsive on-goingly, you must continue to learn, adapt, develop, and evolve through breakdowns - periods of time when you aren't responsive. Responsiveness is a way of being not a competency and this way of being requires that you continue to die to your ways of leading - the antithesis of fixing to them.

Reconstruction of Discourse 3: Leadership is a service to others

What is eliminated is the notion that leadership is about having followers which can easily be a narcissistic trap. Yes, there is a special relationship between leaders and others. But who is following whom? When we look at real life situations, we can easily say that sometimes the followers are leading and the leaders are following. This completely unsettles our taken-for-granted notions of leading and following and doesn't offer leaders anything helpful.

So this reconstruction is an attempt to offer leaders a helpful perspective distilled from Discourse 3. Leadership is a service - an offer - to others.

Discourse 4 includes these reconstructions and adds: Leadership is marshalling new inner and outer, individual and collective resources to face tough realities that demand development and evolution

In this fourth discourse, the leader doesn't assume that they know where to go or how to address the current challenges. In fact, the leader is well aware that the complexity and messiness of the challenges that must be faced are greater than any one person, including themselves, can hold and respond to.

So their act of leadership (their offer) is to create the conditions that call for others to 1) be authentic, 2) develop a responsive way of being, 3) be of service to others, and 4) support leadership development as they are doing. This, I claim, is what's essential to leadership.

This destorys the myth of the leader-savior who will take us to the promised land. The leader isn't the savior - we are all saviors.

In future posts, I'll explore the topics of authenticity, responsiveness, service to others, and individual and collective development/evolution with more depth.

I hope you have found this provocative. I'd love to hear your comments.

Take care,

-Steve

The Deep Source of Our Behaviors

I want to complete a thread I was in the midst of exploring when I went on hiatus in December. In order to do that this post is going to violate my sacred rule of brief postings. I thought of serializing it, but I don't think that would serve.

In a series of posts in November I was exploring transformation design and how the practice of design is on the cusp of a major step change from designing of things to designing of behaviors according to some in the design community.

If design is on the cusp of a major shift from the design of things to the design of behaviors then designers need powerful interpretations of how behaviors are generated. In my post 'Designing behavior' I started a thread exploring several interpretations about how behavior is determined.

To recap ... two of the most common interpretations about how our behaviors are generated: 1) the interpretation that we act to avoid pain and seek pleasure and 2) the interpretation that we are rational creatures who act to satisfy our desires (e.g., we eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, have sex when horny, and so on). I'll call these the behavioral interpretation and the rational interpretation respectively.

I propose we evaluate these interpretations from two angles.

1. What do each of these interpretations say about us as human beings and how closely does that corresponds to our actual experience of ourselves.
2. How well does each interpretation enable designers to design (and deploy) new behaviors.

In other words, how powerful are these interpretations in supporting the major shift in design that is suggested by the RED unit of the Design Council in their paper Transformation Design which I previously discussed.

From the behavioral interpretation, human beings are simple machines that operate by stimulus-response programming. According to this interpretation, the response is tied to the stimulus and is always the same when the same stimulus is applied. For example, we always avoid pain and always seek pleasure.

How well does this correspond to our experience of being human? At first glance, we might be tempted to say it corresponds pretty well. But upon a closer look, the correspondence is pretty shallow. Take for example, conversations. Conversations between people are riddled with stimulus and responses. But how well are we able to predict how someone will respond simply from hearing what we say? Not very well. In fact, we have no idea what they even heard us say, often, until a minute more when we realize that they misunderstood what we said.

Living systems, including humans, are much more complex than the behavioral interpretation allows. For example, there's no room for art, love, creativity, or intuition in the behavioral view. It's a pretty poor interpretation of human behavior.

And yet, that doesn't stop us from trying to use behavioral tactics to get people to improve their performance at work like bonuses and threats of being fired. This explains why the correlation of these approaches to performance is actually quite poor. The behavioral interpretation is an impoverished interpretation that doesn't allow for most of what makes us human beings.

Such an impoverished interpretation of human behavior doesn't yield much for designers trying to design new behaviors save creating new and improved carrots and sticks.

Now, let's look at the rational interpretation which is somewhat less impoverished. From this interpretation, human beings have desires and we behave in order to satisfy our desires. This results in an understanding of ourselves as agents of exchange. I want an iPod with 80G  - a desire. So I go to the store and buy one - that is, I exchange $350 for one. All very rational.

Unlike the behavioral interpretation, the rational interpretation has been used extensively by designers working on building and marketing products. From this interpretation, if you want to get someone to change their behavior, figure out what they want (desire) and offer to satisfy them. And if you are really crafty, you can even manufacture new desires and then offer to satisfy those too.

How well does this correspond to our experience of being human? Well, we all have desires that we want to be satisfied. And most of us rationally organize our life to make sure they get satisfied. Or we feel unhappy, miserable, and worthless that our desires aren't being satisfied. So, in a way, the rational interpretation can account for at least some of our behavior (and our emotions). Certainly, this interpretation seems to correspond to our experience of ourselves more than the behavioral interpretation.

But does this view really account for all our behaviors? Do we ever have desires that we never try to satisfy? Yes. Do we ever have desires that conflict? Yes, and then usually our behavior doesn't satisfy either. Do we ever behave in a way that is unrelated to satisfying desires? Yes.

If we closely observe ourselves in the midst of action we notice that most of our behaviors aren't aimed at satisfying desires. Most of our behaviors simply happen as we cope with the world around us without any intervention whatsoever from a rationality scheming for satisfaction.

We can interpret all of our actions as satisfying a desire of some sort or another. But this isn't the task at hand. We aren't trying to rationalize our behavior post hoc. We want to understand what determines and generates our behavior in the first place because that is where designers need to intervene to generate new and different behaviors.

So what does the rational interpretation buy designers who want to design new behaviors? For example, what if we want to design new behaviors for consumers that result in a more sustainable way of life for everyone on the planet? The rational interpretation suggests perhaps three tactics:

1. We need to make sustainability itself more desirable than desires which result in unsustainable living (in other words, change the reward structure)
2. We need to find sustainable ways to satisfy our current desires
3. We need to find ways to generate sustainable desires and eliminate unsustainable desires

In a way, we've been working these tactics for decades with only marginal success. And yet our sustainability problem grows larger and larger. What's going on here? We have competing and conflicting desires. We love our gas guzzling, CO2 emitting SUVs (just to pick on them for the moment) and, at least for now, they are much more desirable than reversing global warming.

And, what if you want to design new behaviors for yourself - like a New Year's resolution?  I have a desire to loose 20 lbs. The rational interpretation would ask me what I want to exchange in order to loose 20 lbs.  I might need to exchange yummy fattening food and time for exercising in order to achieve my goal. But I don't want to make that exchange because I enjoy food and am way too busy to exercise. As anyone who has ever made a New Year's resolution and failed to keep it will attest, there is more going on with our behaviors than merely satisfying desires.

When we apply the rational interpretation by itself to design new behaviors to achieve new outcomes, we often end up in a morass of competing and conflicting desires. Satisfying our desires is less an approach for transforming our behaviors and more an approach for entrenching behaviors.

There is something missing from both the behavioral and rational interpretations of how our behavior is generated. And this shortfall - whatever it is - has and continues to undermine efforts to design and change behaviors.

It is not so much that these interpretations are wrong - they are narrow, incomplete, and limited in their power to generate new behaviors. Both interpretations are, as Ken Wilber would say, "true but partial." These interpretations have the power to explain some behaviors but they fall to explain many others. Depending upon what we're up to, these interpretations might offer some help. But if we are up to transforming fundamental behaviors, they don't offer much to the designer.

Fortunately, there is another  - much less well-known - interpretation about how we behave in the way that we do. One could say that the behavioral interpretation comes from engineering, the rational interpretation comes from psychology and economics, and this alternative interpretation comes from philosophers (especially phenomenology). Here goes ... [drum roll] ... the phenomenological interpretation of behavior.

We act as our way of being.

First of all, what is a way of being? A way of being is what Heidegger called "being-in-the-world." A way of being is a way of skillfully inhabiting, encountering, and coping with our World. In fact, we act as our way of being with such skill that we are blind to our way of being until it breaks (see my post on breakdown). Our way of being determines how we experience ourselves, others, and our environment in our world and this experience gives rise to a certain responses.

So in order to change our behaviors, we must change our way of being. This is the secret at the heart of all effective coaching. And, this post is already too long, so I'll save that for another time.

Thanks for hanging in with this long post. Take care,

-Steve

A Survey of Three Leadership Discourses

Lately, I've been working on an integral reconstruction of the discourse and practice of leadership.

Here is a survey of three historical discourses of leadership. You will recognize them in your own interpratations of leadership. And my intent in articulating them is re-open the question 'what is leadership?' by unsettling the power of these apparent answers.

Discourse 1: Leadership requires a certain position

You either inherit the position as tribal chiefs, matriarchs, and patriarchs do or you take the position by force as feudal emperors do. Within this discourse, leadership is rarified air. Historically, this is how this discourse emerged - in tribes and feudal systems. But this discourse has staying power. We still see leadership through this discourse today when we see positions such as CEO, VP, Director, Manager, Senator, President, etc. as necessary to leadership.

And yet, within this discourse, there is no room for the person who steps forward in a difficult situation - without position, inherited or taken - to articulate orienting assessments that marshall resources to do what's necessary to take care of what needs caring. So there is something fundamental to leadership that is not positional.

Discourse 2: Leadership requires certain attributes, traits, and character

You either have them - and you are leadership material - or you don't and you aren't. Or you can take the approach of developing these leadership attributes, traits, and character. This, btw, is the approach that many corporate leadership development programs take. They identify their company's core leadership competencies and then build leadership development programs around supporting their leaders to develop these competencies.

And yet, no one set of leadership attributes, traits, or character guarantees successful leadership in the face of any situation. Different situations call for different leaders. Winston Churchill was a great leader during his times. But he may not fair so well today. So there is something fundamental about leadership that is independent of attributes, traits, and character.

Discourse 3: Leadership requires followers

In this discourse, you either have "your people" whom you speak for and support or you develop your following. On the face of it, this looks pretty obvious - leaders require followers. And there is certainly some truth burried in this discourse, as there is in all three.

As a correction to Discourse 2, which focuses on what the leader posesses as an individual, Discourse 3 seems to be extreme in the other direction granting all power to the collective in the making of a leader. Something is still missing from this understanding of leadership.

Is it any wonder that we tend to be bad at assessing leadership competence? We promote and vote people into leadership positions who, time and time again, fail to rise to our need for leadership. And yet, there are leaders who success time and time again through different situations.

Integral leadership is a fourth discourse that reinterprets each of these three discourses in a way that distills their enduring truths and leaves behind the parts that aren't essential to leadership. More to come on this in future posts.

I'd love to hear what you all make of this? Are there other discourses?

Take care,

-Steve

Reinvention is the Next Productivity Collective

What is a productivity collective? It is a collective movement to unsettle a current way of working in order to bring new interpretations of waste and new practices for removing them and improving productivity.

You might know about productivity collectives by their "brand names" - Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, ISO 9001, CMMI, Agile Project Management, etc. The history of ways of working in every sector is made by the emergence of new productivity collectives.

I'm working with several others, including my friend Guillermo Wechsler, on a paper exploring the phenomena of productivity collectives. Take a look and let me know if you want to join the conversation.

Why are productivity collectives important? We live in exponential times. Times they are a' chang'n'.

In order to remain competitive and stay alive, over the next two decades businesses must get good at (at least) one thing - re-inventing themselves and their ways over and over again. But an historical survey quickly reveals that businesses often take years and sometimes decades to fundamentally re-invent their ways.

The times we live in call for a different approach to reinvention - they call for a reinvention of reinvention - and this is birth of a new productivity collective.

What are the newly emerging productivity collectives? Here's an interesting one - holacracy.

-Steve

What is the purpose of business?

Well, it has been a while since I posted. Life and work have taken a prioirity over writing. So I'm going to reinvent this blog somewhat. The focus will be the same, however, the written volume will be smaller but more regular, and unfortunately, a lower volume of graphic art.

Today's consideration ... what is the purpose of business? Some may say profit. Some may say growth. But I'd like to propose an alternative thought.

Business is a vastly complex "mechanism" for personal development and social evolution. In business we are always coming up against our learning edge both individually and collectively. Which means that business is a powerful generator of openings for development and evolution. Business creates the conditions necessary for both on a regular basis.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't concern ourselves with growth or profit. In fact, without these concerns, business might not generate openings for development and evolution. However, the superordinate purpose of business must be recognized as personal development and social evolution. And once this is the case, then we will be more able to balance the concerns of growth, profit, social responsibility, work-life balance, and sustainability.

This shift is necessary to build a world that works for our children and their children.

Take care,

-Steve