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

Rebuilding Trust in HBR

Harvard Business Review also sees trust as central to the economic recovery.  Their June 2009 issue is dedicated to the topic of rebuilding trust.

Enjoy!

-Steve

A tectonic shift in the landscape of trust

What is happening in the world today? I believe that, among many things, there is a tectonic shift in the landscape of trust.

Historically, we have placed our trust in authorities - politicians, business leaders, spiritual leaders and leaders in the scientific community. We have an unflagging trust in rationality. And we are living in challenging times amidst global recession, climate change, loss of jobs, pandemics, terrorism, war, etc. These are times of crisis. And in the midst of these crises our trust is being shaken. What can we trust? Whom can we trust?

When we feel our trust being shaken many of us are thrown into one of three different moods. We are either resigned that things aren't going well and they will turn out however they do. We are resigned to that and there is nothing we can do. Or we are resentful. We get angry with those in positions of authority in which we placed our trust. We are angry with them for their limitations (e.g., not being in control of things) and angry with them for their abuses of power and their violation of our trust. Or we deny that what is happening both locally and globally has any impact on our lives. We say to ourselves, "It doesn't matter, I'm going to live a fine life anyway." Those of us in denial are living in the misguided notion that it is  possible to live in a bubble detached from the impact of what's occurring around us.

Neither resignation, resentment, or denial are moods that compel us to invest in building a different future. Instead, they compel us to continue ceding power and trust to others.

We need to cultivate a different mood: hope. Obama brilliantly did this in his campaign. He stood for the possibility that the future can be better; that the abuses of trust and power can be overcome. He stood for the possibility that together we can design and build a lifestyle that works better for all.

Of course, there is a danger that we will again place our trust in Obama as the latest authority figure. And when he fails to deliver what we expect, then we will find ourselves being resentful, resigned, or in denial.

Each of us must take responsibility for cultivating hope and optimism in our own lives. Each of us must step forward ...  trust ourselves ... and be a leader in our own lives and the lives of our loved ones.

I think we are in the midst of a tectonic shift in the landscape of trust. From a historical perspective, this shift is more like an 8.0 earthquake. We are being called more and more deeply to find the part of ourselves that is not afraid and in which we can trust without question. We are being called to find our source of inner guidance, our source of true leadership and express that. In a significant way, this shift is a call for a kind of collective spiritual awakening.

I'm not saying that this earthquake will do away with political leaders, business leaders, spiritual leaders, or scientific leaders. They will still exist and we will still need to trust them for their expertise, their unique viewpoint, and their positions of empowerment to affect certain actions.  However, in the future we will not cede all of our trust to them so blindly and excuse ourselves from the table. Instead, we will take our place within the conversation, within the collaboration, within the decision-making and the action.

Already today we see patients taking their medical care more fully into their own hands. Patients are researching options for addressing their medical concerns on the web so that they can more fully participate in the conversation and decision-making with their physicians.

Given what has happened in the financial services sector, I imagine that more transparency (and regulation) is just around the corner. This transparency will be demanded of people like you and me who, trusting more fully in themselves, seek to enter the conversation with their banks and financial advisors in a more consciously empowered way.

Hope compels us to take responsibility for the way things are and step forward to build things anew in a spirit of collaboration and community. However, we can't wait for hope to arise before we take action. In fact, it is in taking action to build a future that works better that we evoke hope in ourselves and others. This is a great act of Self-leadership and if we quiet ourselves enough we all hear the call to take this step forward.

No action is too small. You can do more with what you have than you think. The end of these crises will not, in my opinion, leave us back where we were before they started. That life and lifestyle is gone. This earthquake will leave the landscape of trust permanently and fundamentally changed. We will need to find new paths, new approaches, new collaborations, new communities in order to survive and flourish both locally and globally. We will be living in a new world. And, in a very real way, we already are. Day by day more of us awaken to the realization that we are already in a new world.

In this new world new capabilities and skills will be needed to survive and flourish. Today I can see at least three broad capabilities that everyone will need.

1. Self-leadership - everyone will need to be a leader in their own life. Everyone will need to learn to trust themselves and to face into life's challenges as true leaders do - simultaneously in contact with their fears but also able to bring forth a constructive response from the depth of their capacity, their resourcefulness, and their creativity. In this new world, spectators won't last very long.
2. Entrepreneurship - everyone will need to see and respond to the world the way an entrepreneur does. They will need to see emerging unmet needs and re-vision and re-fashion themselves and their collaborators and communities in ways that offer to fulfill those needs.
3. Self-education - everyone must learn how to learn. Change is occurring at an ever increasing rate. Novelty is winning by leaps and bounds. Those that cling to "the way things have been" will stop being competitive. In fact, the ability to learn and develop yourself, your organization, and your community faster and more powerfully will become the primary competitive advantage.

The world that we are awakening into is the world of the "compassion worker." Many years ago noted management theorist Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" and heralded that knowledge work will be the primary unit of production in the coming age.  Well, the coming age came and went. Of course, I'm not saying that knowledge work will disappear just as Drucker wasn't saying that industrial labor would disappear.

What I'm saying is that knowledge work has to grow up and mature. And that will and is happening as more and more deeply care is being brought into the mission and structure of work. Riane Eisler has a new book that looks to speak to this (I haven't read it yet but it is on the stack :-) called The Real Wealth of Nations. According to the blurb she proposes a reinvention of economics in which caregiving is central. And, most curiously, she propses this as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism.

So the world as I see it will be filled with entrepreneurial leaders who see their primary business as caregiving of some kind and who are able to learn and adapt to emerging unmet needs and invent new possibilities to fulfill them. Pehaps this is just my dream, my hope. It may be, but this is the world that I am personally investing myself in building.

Love,

-Steve

The Seven Most Important Questions in Facing Tough Times

These are tough times for many of us. In tough times it is easy to get overwhelmed. How do we cope? Change is inevitable. Where do we start?

When things change in the marketplace, new possibilities open up and some current possibilities close down. Just an ancient mariners lived by their skill in reading the changes in sea and weather conditions, we must live by our skill of reading the changes in the world we live in.

Lately, I've been having conversations with the people in my life - friends, clients, business partners - framed by the question "what now?" Given the new world we are in today, what now? What is the world that we are already in? How must our responses be different? How must we be different?

Below are the questions I've been asking people. I think these are the seven most important questions we all need to be asking ourselves today in the middle of our tough times.

I invite each of you to consider them in the context of your own life.

Question One: What is your biggest struggle right now?

Of course, I have no idea what specifically you are struggling with. But let me take away some common false answers to this question. Your biggest struggle is not that you lack time, money, or energy. Your biggest struggle is also not that you lack willpower or discipline. In fact, your biggest struggle has nothing to do with lacking anything. The interpretation that your biggest struggle comes from a lack of something leaves you disempowered. How helpful is that? Not! So let's not go down that path.

I'd like to suggest one place among many that you should consider in answering this question. What if your biggest struggle comes from something that you aren't facing fully instead of something that you are lacking? And what I mean when I say "facing it fully" is seeing, acknowledging, owning, and responding to it fully.

In these times there is a lot of fear and even panic. Nobody can get credit, people are getting laid-off, ecological crises seem closer than ever, Obama is going to change things but we don't know (but hope) that they will be better. There are lots of things to be afraid about.

As humans, when we feel afraid, most of us do what we've always done when we feel afraid. Maybe you are already thinking of what you do as you read this. Some of us hide, some of us attack, some of us run away, some of us freeze up. We all have our own particular responses to our fear that life isn't turning out the way we want it to.

When we react out of fear we are not authentically responding to what's happening now. How could this be the case? Because our reactions to fear are learned and conditioned habits. Our response to fear is pre-determined. But there is no pre-determined response that is ever going to be an authentic response to what's happening. We can't act with skill in facing our situation when we're reacting out of habit.

How can you overcome this? Get to know your own habitual responses to fear intimately. What do you do when fear arises? Your ability to acknowledge and own your automatic response reduces the power they have over you. And that - facing your fears - opens the possibility of doing things differently and for generating an authentic response to what's happening.

What I'm proposing is that maybe your biggest struggle is freshly facing that which you don't want to face. Follow the trail of your fear that life isn't turning out. 

Question Two: What is your biggest opportunity in this situation / in this market?

The way I see it, your biggest opportunity will always involve doing something new. It may be bringing forward latent gifts and talents that you have, widening your community, bringing a new level of focus to your work and life, or having a difficult conversation, or taking a bold action. In a business sense, maybe your biggest opportunity comes from a new product or service offering or maybe it comes from deepening customer loyalty. Your biggest opportunity could be anything and I'm betting it will require doing something new. Here's my take on what's at the core of this "something new."

For many of us our biggest opportunity in this market will come from rewriting our future. You might be thinking, "What on earth do you mean? The future hasn't happened yet." And you would be right, the future hasn't happened. But that doesn't stop us from having stories about the future. 

As humans, all of us live within a narrative or a story about ourselves, our life, and our work. One of the funny things about the stories we have about ourselves is that we've already determined the ending. We can't, it seems, live our lives unless we have some certainty about the future even if it is made up. Mark Freeman, author of Rewriting the Self (a book which is excellent, demanding to read, and nearly impossible to come by), points to our need for stories with this rhetorical question:

"Aren't stories ultimately defensive delusions, created as a means of defying the onslaught of time, with its accidents, its unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences, its nameless and unending future?"

We create stories with already determined endings as a defense against the true uncertainty and unforeseeablility of the future. Knowing how it all ends helps us live day by day with the uncertainty of life. However, knowing how it all ends is also a recipe for circumscribing the limits of what's possible in our lives.  Our greatest opportunity opens up by letting go of the certain ending we hold so tightly.

Since we can't seem to live into the future with zero certainty, we need to make up a new ending for our story. So, who are you going to be? What are you going to do? What are you going to have?  All of these questions are open for reconsideration when we invent new possibilities for our future.  Rewriting our future - today - and living into those possibilities in a way that they become our reality is the idea.

When confronted with the question "what is your biggest opportunity in this market?" most of us allow our thinking and imagination to only range within the possibilities that we already included in the ending of our story. So I'm not asking what are your biggest opportunities to play out the story you already know how the ending to. I'm not asking you how to win the game you are already playing. Instead, I'm asking you, "What are the opportunities to reinvent your story's ending, to reinvent the game you are playing?"

If you are a CEO or businessperson, your thinking here should be informed by your study of demographic trends, economic forecasts, an interpretation of the changing political landscape, and a grasp of how newly emerging technologies are shifting the competitive landscape. However, to realize your biggest opportunities, you must not take the game you are playing for granted. You must not take the ending to be certain. Instead, change what it means to win the game - change the end of your story.

Question Three: What crossroads are you at in your life and work?

Question One and Two are challenging but they empower you. Therefore they are questions worthy of true consideration. These questions empower you because they challenge you to 1) be true to and face the results that you actually have in your life and 2) to be true to the freedom you always already have in how you fashion yourself (your public and private identities), your relationships, your commitments, and your responses.  These questions empower you because they call forth the full measure of your authenticity.

Question Three brings the first two questions together. This question challenges you by saying, "Well, you can continue on the same path, doing more of the same, and generating the same results OR you can take a different path. Which will it be?"

I encourage you to take up this question in as much specificity as you can. To say generically, "I choose to take a different path" without a concrete definition of what exactly you will do differently is useless.

What are the specific crossroads? In your closest relationships? At home? At work? In your career?

The crossroads you are at is an opportunity for you to redefine yourself, to redefine your relationships, to acknowledge and re-commit to what you deeply care about, and to generate new results.

Question Four: As you engage the world, what is most important to conserve?

Conservation is an often overlooked but critical part of any change. Change is a funny thing because we want it badly but we hate being in the middle of it. Usually when we go about making a change, we don't know what we are getting ourselves into because we don't know what has to change in order to make the change that we want in the first place. This is why being in the middle of change is so scary for people. When we are in the middle of the unsettlement and uncertainty of change, it seems to have no end or limit.

A powerful way of allowing ourselves to be in the uncertainty of change is to start off with a clear definition of what is being conserved.

Again, please answer this question in a specific way. And if you are leading change within your organization, speak openly and often about what is important to conserve in the midst of this change.

You might be temped to answer this question by stating your values. Values are great. Go ahead and state them. But you also need to take your thinking to the level of action. What are you going to keep doing the way that you are already doing it?

Question Five: What is your "guiding star" as you navigate through the changes you need to make?

How many times have you found yourself in the middle of doing something differently and felt disoriented? Probably a lot if you are like most people. So what do you do when you get disoriented? What or whom do you consult to get re-oriented?

It is odd (but maybe not surprising) that people often launch off into new territory without packing a compass. They don't have a way of getting their bearings in the middle of the the new ocean they are sailing in.

Like all the other questions here, I'm suggesting that you really take this up and really look to see who or what is your guiding star. And just as before, let me take away some answers that I think are false.

Your guiding star isn't some leadership expert or self-help guru. It isn't a book or a method or a process or a plan. Your guiding star isn't your mentor, coach, priest, or spiritual guide. Of course all of these may be helpful but they aren't your true source of guidance.  Your compass isn't outside of you. You are your own guiding star. You might be thinking, "But I'm the one whose disoriented, remember!?" Yes, part of you is disoriented - the part that is trying to get things to turn out a certain way.

Whenever we try to get life to turn out a certain way, we can easily get disoriented. We all have parts of us that are trying to do exactly that. However, as human beings, we also have an indestructible Self that is always whole, unitary, complete, and fully present. Our Self isn't trying to get life to turn out a certain way because from it's perspective life has already turned out. And how it turned out is how things already are.

The amazing paradox is that when we fully accept where we are, true guidance for the journey shows up within us. This is what living and leading from Self is all about. How do we do this? In a way the real answer is different for each of us. However, generically how we do this amounts to letting go of needing to have life turn out a certain way and tuning into what we actually feel and sense in the moment. This is like tuning our radio to the "guidance" radio station.

Question Six: What commitment do you hold that makes this conversation necessary for you?

I'm making a big assumption with this next question - that you already have something that you deeply care about that makes engaging these questions truly worthwhile for you. But I'm on safe ground because human beings are caring beings. We just are. 

Most of the time what we care about just hangs around in the background of our thinking and acting. From what I've observed in my own life and in the lives of my coaching clients, when our cares and concerns just hang out in the background we tend to drift through life. And when we are facing tough challenges in life and work, drifting doesn't help that much. Drifting leaves us feeling powerless.

If we bring our cares and concerns into the foreground and into sharp focus by actually stating them as commitments, suddenly we've set ourselves in the driver's seat. We've set ourselves up for driving instead of drifting. And that is empowering.

I used to start these conversations with this question. However, engaging the previous questions tends to prime people to consider this question for real. So take a look at your answers so far. What cares and concerns have been present all along but hiding there in the background? Bring them out into the open by writing them down as commitments that define who you are.

Question Seven: What action are you going to take next? With whom? By when?

My commitment to anyone who enters this conversation with me is that it be of significant value to them. One of the ways that the value becomes real is through the new actions that people take. Again, I'm asking for real concrete and specific actions. So what new actions will you take? With whom? By when?

The Eighth Step: Do it all over again and again and again

The last step isn't a question. The last step is to make working with these seven questions into a practice. Working through these questions just once is powerful however vastly insufficient. To be truly effective over both the short and long term, your answers to these questions always have to be fresh and alive. Stale answers don't work.

I hope that you've found this article of value. I'd love to hear your comments and questions so please share them on this blog.

I want to thank two friends of mine, Ken Homer and Robert Masters, for being in conversation with me as I thought about these questions. Both of these men are wonderfully gifted coaches and I'm lucky to have collaborators of their caliber. Thanks guys!

Take care,

-Steve

Changing the Way We Change

This past weekend I picked up the published version of Charles Leadbeater's book "We Think".  I've been tracking this project since he published the full manuscript in draft form in 2006 for public editing - a bold and courageous move for an author.

Here is a short video summarizing the major points of the book produced by Charles.

So here is my take about what is happening - we are changing the way we change and this has a direct impact on how our identities are constructed, how people trust us, how people value us, and how well we are able to generate value for others.

And ... people and organizations that don't change the way they change will start dropping like flies. Well, that's a bit extreme. For sure that will happen to some in markets where competitiveness depends on sensitivity to fast-changing customer needs and wants.

Why do I think this will happen? Because what was previously through impossible - changing practices en mass on a global scale in a short period of time - is now possible. And the time period is growing ever shorter as the years go on.

All of this is being fueled by new social technologies - internet, wikis, facebook, myspace, linkedin, google, etc. - but is actually an expression of a new way of being, a new way of relating, and a new way of changing.

And, I might add, this new capacity for change is arising just in the nick of time to resolve the massive breakdowns in sustainability that we have on this planet.  Those breakdowns will not be resolved through management decisions or legislation - although both will play key roles. Instead, they will be resolved by "us" working together collaboratively.

And it seems to me that the challenge in moving forward with this is that whenever anybody says something like I just said - that we must work together collaboratively on a global scale - we see this as without any real traction and without any substantial ownership.  Somehow the idea seems overly idealistic from the perspective we currently have.

And yet if you've read Paul Hawken's latest book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World you'll see evidence of "we think" in action. This isn't an ideal, it is a reality!  Here's a Paul Hawken talking about this to some Googlers.

Enjoy!

-Steve

The Body of Sustainability

This past weekend I launched a new graduate level Integral Coaching course at New Ventures West called Deepening the Somatic Stream. In Integral Coaching, we recognize that people develop in different ways. We call these ways "streams of development" adopting Ken Wilber's lingo.  The streams of development we work with are somatic, emotional, cognitive, relational, spiritual, and integrating.  This course is on deepening development in the somatic stream.

I posed a question to the group as a project over the 5-month duration of the course.  The question is ...

What is the body of sustainability?

Here's my premise ... and I need to start waaay back at the beginning.

When we were born, each of us was born (dare I say thrown) into a cultural narrative not of our own design or choosing. As we grew up in our family, we began to learn and embody our culture.  We learned how to speak the language, how to attend to customs, how to behave, how to relate to others, what is forbidden, what is valuable, etc. We learned how to be a Jewish-American from New York or an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania or a Native American from New Mexico or whatever. And we learned this as simply who we are - as a way of being.

And our way of being is self-sealing. What I mean by this is that the ways we act bring forth the world we live in.  And the world we live in brings forth who we are.  Have you ever talked to a fundamentalist and realized how their worldview has lots of self-consistency.  And anything that doesn't fit, they reject in order to maintain the self-consistency of their worldview.  Well, that's the way we hold worldviews even if we aren't fundamentalist.

Here's the key part of this. In the beginning we didn't have a narrative. Then as we lived and interacted with first our parents and siblings, and then others in our extended family and neighbors and friends and teachers, we embodied a narrative. I say embodied a narrative because that's how it works.  Our culture lives in our bodies. And we express our culture through our speech and behavior and relationships. We express our culture through our actions. And if there are little tikes around, they pick up the culture from us and embody it themselves. This isn't something that we were conscious of, it simply occurs.  This is one of the wonderful inventions of "who knows what or whom" that has supported our evolution thus far.

But our future evolution isn't something that we can take for granted. Today we find ourselves in a "wicked mess" of crises. In this post, I'm going to focus on our sustainability crisis. 

The way we are currently living isn't sustainable.  I'm not going to ground this assessment here. Others have and can do a much better job of that than I can.  But let me say that this is an assessment that I accept.

So where did our unsustainable way of living come from?  Well, I hate to point fingers but it came from our parents and grandparents and the culture that they embodied and passed onto us. We (and by we here I am mainly talking about the Western world) have an unsustainable culture. And it lives in our bodies and is expressed, reinforced, and passed onto our little tikes through our actions.  In short, we have a body of unsustainability. As as the rest of the world (such as China and India and perhaps some day Africa) adopts our Western ways in order to become competitive and stake their own claims on prosperity we in the Western world are getting to see the unsustainability of our ways in stark relief.

So it seems to me a natural question to ask what is a body of sustainability? And how does one go about building one? And how to you "undo" the body of unsustainability?

These are big questions but maybe y'all would like to join me and my students over the next five months in being with these questions.

Disembodied Selves Leads to Over-consumption

Here's a starting place ... from my observation, the very heart of our unsustainable culture is the interpretation that we are separate from our bodies. And because we are separate from our bodies we abuse our bodies. We overeat, we work 80-hour workweeks, and we pop sleeping pills so we get enough rest to keep pushing ourselves. If we do pay attention to our bodies it is some sort of home improvement project like building a six pack or liposuction.  I saw a brochure for a spa the other day in my local organic grocery store that advertised "body management" services. It is as if our bodies are unruly and need to be disciplined.

In the West we have antipathy for our bodies thanks to Calvin and St. Augustine who had difficulties with their own bodies and their own sexuality. We blame our bodies for being sick, for being too weak, for not looking good enough, for falling in love with the wrong people, for being addicted, for being clumsy.  It is as if we didn't get the life we wanted because of the body we have.  We have our bodies like a cage we live in. It is no wonder that we seem to either deny our embodied life or try to take it on as a home improvement project.

This split between ourselves and our bodies creates a disembodied sense of self, lack of true contact with others, detachment from the world, disintegration of our life, meaninglessness, resignation, stagnation, and suffering. In short, our lives seem deficient and empty in some essential way.  It is as if there is a giant abyss in the middle of our lives that we must fill in order to bring significance and fulfillment to our lives. So what do we throw into the abyss to fill it up?  We throw in new cars, iPhones, fancy food, fast food, lots of sex, new shoes, alcohol and other state altering substances, etc. This abyss that's smack in the middle of our lives isn't really a secret. Marketers know all about this and use it as leverage to sell us the latest stuff. But in all these years of consumption, how many of us have managed to fill the abyss? No one.

So my first notion of the body of sustainability is a healing of this split between ourselves and our bodies. As human beings we are embodied beings. We are not disembodied selves in possession of a body. We are bodied selves. And perhaps in this recognition comes the true resolution of the deficiency we feel. Perhaps it is not new cars and phones and other consumables that we need to fill the abyss but it is ourselves, our conscious bodies, that will fill the abyss from the inside out instead of from the outside in.

In her book Getting Our Bodies Back, Christine Caldwell makes the point that addiction is dissociation from our body. This seems right to me. And as a culture we are addicted to eating, drinking, sugar, oil, and shopping malls.  What if our bodies really don't need all that? If we were integral with our bodies instead of dissociated from them, would our way of living be more sustainable?  I believe the answer is a definite YES. 

Earlier I pointed to how our worldviews are self-sealing. It often takes a big breakdown or crisis in order to break the seal. And when such a break happens, we can either choose to re-examine our cherished beliefs about ourselves, our relationships with others, and our world and develop a new worldview that resolves the breakdown ... or we can ignore the breakdown and pretend things are business as usual.  So here we are, on the precipice of a planet-wide breakdown. What will we do?

So this is my first notion of building a body of sustainability - heal the split between ourselves and our bodies. We haven't looked at the separation from each other and from the planet. For sure they have a big role to play here too. More on that later.

So ... please help me distinguish the body of unsustainability from the body of sustainability. What new interpretations are needed? What interpretations do we need to drop?  What new practices are needed? What old practices do we need to stop?

Take care,

-Steve

"Education is meant to take us into a future that we can't grasp."

I'd like to continue the thread on education started in my last blog entry with a look at one of the down sides of the just-in-case approach to education. Our educational system today drums creativity out of our children by making mistakes a bad thing. You can't be creative if you aren't willing to make mistakes.

This, in turn, threatens our children's ability to be creative, adaptive, and innovate in the face of an uncertain future that demands the very creativity, adaptability, and innovation that we drummed out of them in school.

The TED Conference is held every year in Monterey, CA. TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. In February 2006, Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and a leading expert on innovation, creativity, and education gave a talk (see video) on creativity in our educational system. Take a look ... his talk is humorous and impassioned (originally from the TED Blog.

My girlfriend is a fifth grade school teacher in California. At least at her school, there are no art classes. Mind you, the state standards still require some art to be taught. But since there is no test at the end of the year on art (you get E for Effort), not much attention is paid to teaching it. I personally find this very sad and concerning.

And yet I have a vivid memory of art class when I was in third or fourth grade. I finished my drawing, I was proud of the fact that I didn't do it the way the other kids did. My drawing had flare and was messy in just the right way - for me. When I turned it in, the art teacher summarily rejected it saying that I had to go back to my desk and finish drawing everything to the edge of the page.  Even art class can be co-opted into drumming out creativity.

Is our current educational system preparing us for the future - a future that we can't grasp today? From what I have seen, I conclude that the answer is no.

My speculation is that the following are the core competencies needed as we move into future:

• Self-leadership - authoring one's own life (over and over again)
• Adaptability - acceptance of the need to change coupled with the willingness to try something new - even if we risk making mistakes - in order to discover what works
• Innovation - offering new ways to take care of our concerns as human beings in a world that is growing ever more complex and foreign

Each of these requires - in large measure - creativity. As Robinson says, "Education is meant to take us into a future that we can't grasp." But if education drums the creativity right out of us, where will this creativity come from?

Personally, I trust that we'll find a creative way to self-leadership, adaptability, and innovation even with an education system that drums creativity out of us. Creativity loves a great challenge, don't you think?

-Steve

The Historical Opportunity of Our Crisis of Talent

The Oct 7-13th issue of The Economist has a special report on "The Search for Talent: Why it's getting harder to find." They claim that the demand for educated knowledge-workers is exceeding the supply of them by large margins. And from my own 15-year tenure in hi-tech, I've seen this with my own eyes. It's true!

This struggle for hiring the talent needed is exacerbated by two additional factors:

1. Loyalty is down ... particularly after the downsizing of the 1990s, employees are going to the highest bidder. We only have to look at the epic battles for talent between companies like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo to see how the "war for talent" is playing out.
2. The mismatch between, as the article's author says, "what schools are producing and what companies need." From the perspective that the industrial complex must be fed by our educational system, our educational system is in breakdown.

And add to this picture that, by some counts, half of the top people in America's 500 leading companies - the most talented, educated, and experienced leaders and workers - will retire in the next five years (yet another boomer demographic trend).

So we have a talent gap and it is only going to be widening more over the next five years.

This creates an opportunity for innovation in education of historic proportion. The educational approaches that are used today aren't generating competent graduates fast enough to meet the demands of our businesses, particularly in the areas of knowledge work, must change.

For the most part (yes, this is a generalization), our education system today is based on just-in-case learning. In this approach to learning, students are exposed to a vast array of subjects and problems "just in case" they might need that information or problem-solving ability in the real world. 

The value of this approach is that - in theory - graduates have a broad education, their minds have had the opportunity to play in many different fields, and so they are well-rounded people (something my Mom was really big on). Of course, as the clique goes, "All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten." This approach exposes us to a breadth of subjects. But how much is usefully retained (yes, this is the measure of "just-in-case" education!)?

One alternative to just-in-case learning is just-in-time learning. Regarding this distinction, an article from the Knowledge@Wharton "Just-In-Time Education: Learning in the Global Information Age" says,

"The problem with experience, to paraphrase American baseball player Vernon Law, is that it gives the test before the lesson. Students either spend countless hours in classrooms acquiring knowledge that isn't applied until years later (if at all) or they are tested by experience before they even have a chance to learn what they need. Wouldn't it be much better to get the knowledge when and where they need it - in real time?"

In fact, the vast majority of what we have learned - from our parents, siblings, and society - about how to live we didn't learn through formalized just-in-case learning. Instead, the test was given before the lesson, we failed it, we realized what we needed to learn, and then we found out who could teach or coach us in that area.

The article from Wharton suggests that just-in-time learning is characterized by three shifts:

1. From standardized to customized education ... learning that teaches to the test of experience, the test of what a particular student really needs given what they already know
2. From passive to active learning ... learning that engages the whole person in action, not just the left hemisphere of an immobile brain
3. From fixed to fluid time and place ... learning beyond the boundaries of the class time in a classroom - learning anywhere anytime

Coaching is a new discourse of learning that is more in the vein of just-in-time learning. The need for coaching is growing stronger and stronger year after year.

Of particular concern ... how will we cope with the lack of leadership talent? How can we develop the leaders that we need? We need a new way - an accelerated way - to develop leaders.

But I'll save that for another time.

Take care,

-Steve

Do we need new value disciplines? (Part 1)

In the late 90s a business consultant named Geoffrey Moore wrote several best selling books (Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado) that laid the foundation for technology marketing and business development. In these books he posed an interpretation of a model built by Everett Rogers in 1957 called the technology adoption life cycle. In Moore's interpretation, this lifecycle describes the interplay of the value disciplines distinguished by Treacy and Wiersema (The Discipline of Market Leaders and Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines in the Harvard Business Review) - customer intimacy, product leadership, and operational excellence - over the lifespan of technology invention and wide-spread adoption by customers.

Treacy and Wiersema's insight, as their book's subtitle articulates so concisely, is "choose your customers, narrow your focus, dominate your market." In their interpretation, market leaders practice one of three value disciplines depending on what kind of customers they choose rather than attempting to practice several value disciplines at once (which is the business equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time ... its hard to do).

Building on their insight, Geoffrey Moore's insight was that which value disciplines a company practices must change over the lifespan of technology adoption because how your customers define value changes over the technology's lifespan. In the beginning your customers are innovators, then early adopters, then early majority, and then late majority. The innovators find products that are fast to market and valuable and they don't expect stability and polish. On the other end of the spectrum, late majority customers expect stability, high quality, low cost, and excellent support. And finally, the laggards may never adopt your technology. They define value as the status quo. These kinds of customers are very different. They have different risk profiles, different reliability needs, and different pricing needs to say the least.

As Moore illustrates, during the early stages of a technology's lifespan, a company must work closely with its most innovative customers. Therefore practicing customer intimacy is most appropriate. In this practice businesses get close to their customers to undertsand their umet needs so that they can innovate new offers (products and services). From this interpretation, it makes no sense to simultaneously practice the disciplines of product leadership or operational excellence at this point. These other value discplines are needed later as technologies stabilize, the competitive landscape becomes defined, and the market expands and technologies move toward commoditization.

These are brilliant distinctions that help hi-tech business leaders "read the river" of technology adoption and avoid the rapids ... if the company's technologies don't violate any of the model's unrevealed assumptions.

The value disciplines at the heart of Moore's model meet the business challenges of conventional technologies (e.g., hardware, shrink-wrapped software, equipment) head on. They work well in a world of proprietary (closed) technologies, mass market business models where differentiation is key to competitive advantage, where the goal is volume sales, where businesses are designed around value chains, and the cost to innovate, build, and adopt technology is significant.

However, many of these assumptions have already been violated in certain businesses. We already live in a world where closed approaches are superceding by open approaches, where integration is as (if not more) valuable as differentiation, where customers are demanding more customization and less mass produced products, where collaboration is superceding competition, where demands for increased quality and decrease price exist, where the costs of generation and adoption of valuable products is becoming cheaper and in some cases approaches zero, and where services businesses are superceding product businesses.

So the brilliant distinctions of Treacy, Wiersema, and G. Moore that helped us ask the right questions in the late 90s probably aren't as helpful in such knowledge-centric businesses.

The value disciplines at the core of the business narrative must be transformed in order to orient us to the future that is already here. Over the next month's blog entries, I'll speculate about where these value disciplines have come from and where they are going. For now, let's explore where you are with them:

Self-observation Questions:

1. Which kind of customers have you chosen (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority) to target?

2. Which value disciplines have you chosen to practice (customer intimacy, product leadership, operational excellence)?

3. What is working about your current operating model?

4. What is not working about your current operating model?

5. What action will you take based on what you are discovering in this observation exercise?

Take care,

-Steve