Leadership is not rocket science

How to deepen your ability to host meaningful conversations

Image by coyenator via Flickr

The Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations is a practice that grew out of systems thinking.  It is the DNA of the learning organization, that enables organizations and systems of organizations to connect, self-organize, and learn from each other in ways that support everyone.

It’s not about setting policies or controlling people or controlling what emerges.

It’s a proven approach for these uncertain times, as it comes from understanding how chaotic and complex systems work. 

Yes, you will learn methodologies, but the methodologies alone are not enough.  Many people use the same techniques with limited success.

What makes the Art of Hosting so incredibly effective is the philosophy or approach that underlies the methods and techniques.  It’s the understanding of how systems work, of how important it is to create a safe space for these conversations, of how to balance just enough left-brain structure with right-brain intuition to flow with what comes up.

And most importantly, it’s understanding how important it is to host yourself before you can host others.

Simply put, you have to be able to create a safe space for yourself to step forward authentically before you can do that for others.

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?

The U Process

Over the last 20-30 years, we’ve built a culture of action – if there’s a problem, solve it and do it quickly.  Unfortunately, that culture of reacting is now causing many of today’s insurmountable problems.

Our problems today are so complex that no one party understands all the sides of an issue, and because we don’t take time to learn about the sides we don’t understand, we act on inadequate information and often cause more problems than we solve.

Recently, Otto Scharmer and Joseph Jaworski studied individuals who were phenomenally good at leadership and creative problem-solving, and they discovered a pattern called the ‘U’.  Instead of just jumping to action (re-acting), effective leaders went through three distinct stages in the ‘U’ process: Sensing, Presencing and Realizing.  This corresponds to the emerging new leadership we call co-creative leadership.

Sensing is where you go out and gather more data – find out what’s happening ‘all around the situation’.  This is where you can start to become aware of your own filters and blinders and step out of them to start to see what’s really happening.

Once you have gathered all this information, it can be a bit overwhelming.  Then you have to step back and allow yourself to see the underlying systemic issues that are driving the more visible symptoms.  You don’t need complete information (nor could you get it) to see the systemic issues, but you do need to gather more information than we commonly allow ourselves time to do, and then step back to see what underlies it all.  The data is a step, not an end in itself.

Many people do take time to do sensing in their work and projects, but few invest the time to step back, and even fewer leaders move into presencing.  This is where you really need to step away from the situation and start looking inside yourself.  What is your inner sense of purpose and meaning, what is your inner gift, and how can you bring these to the issue you are working with?

In many of today’s workplaces, this type of personal exploration and engagement is starkly absent.  Business is supposed to be business – a matter of dispassionate facts and anal-ysis.  We are only supposed to bring half of who we are to work – our logical left brain – and leave our emotions and passions behind.

It’s interesting that organizations that are down to ‘nuts and bolts business’, while they can be profitable, have less than half the profitability, profit growth, sales growth and return on investment compared to organizations that also focus on their people, as detailed in my book, StressCosts Stress-Cures.

Presencing is a deeply personal and very powerful process of connecting with the core of your own motivation and passion, and linking it to what is happening outside.  It transforms the ‘job’ into a ‘vocation’, and allows the leader to engage him- or her-self more fully.  And only when the leader is so engaged can anyone else in the organization become truly engaged – and that is when you tap the reservoirs of productivity and passion that somehow don’t ever show up on the balance sheet.

By bringing your internal flame to the issue at hand, you transform the ‘problem’ you are dealing with and you bring new energy, new focus and new insights to the issue.  This is when you can start moving up the ‘U’ and, in concert with the other stakeholders, start realizing new action.

The difference between ‘reacting’ and going through the ‘U’ process is the difference between action and wise action.  It takes time – something we say we don’t have in our busy workplaces.  Yet we always have time to deal with all the problems that arise from all of the previous things we did quickly because we didn’t have the time to do it right.

It’s time we admitted that we have no clothes on and our ‘old way’ of dealing with things doesn’t work.  We need to find a new way of dealing with our complex challenges – and if it’s not the total answer, the U is certainly a big part of that new way.  It’s what the most effective leaders do.

Why the bell tolls for workaholic managers and micro-managers

During the Infusion event I've been blogging about, one consultant spoke up about how (s)he works in a world where things have to move fast and you have to make decisions quickly and act and react quickly - they have no time for reflection or using the U-process, or for slowing things down to actually be present and connect with people.  This person asked how we make that work in that world.

Well, my simple answer is that we don't.

Many effective leaders and mentors have shared with me one common thread.  Whenever there is a change, there will be some small percentage (say 10% for sake of discussion) who are fully on-board, a small percentage (say 10%) who will not go no matter what, and the remaining silent majority waits to see which of these vocal minorities wins.  What these leaders have learned is that to focus on the resistors is a like pounding your head against a brick wall.  You focus on the people who are on-board and the people who are ready to come on-board.  The reality is, not everyone will necessarily come along, and some people will leave.

The same applies to the workaholic-pace managers, micro-managers and the like.  If they're bound and determined to stay that way, they have the right to free choice and I honour their choice to walk that way.  The perfect storm is about to hit them, and it will take care of them.

Across the western world, the baby boomers have now started retiring en masse.   Because this same western world stopped procreating enough to maintain our population decades ago, there is only one person joining the workforce for every two people leaving.  Add to that the fact that baby boomers are workaholics, and the  young generation (nexus/generation y) are not - their priorities are life-work balance and fun - then, effectively for every three workers leaving you only have one coming in.

Now, the boomers aren't going to go away (in fact most haven't saved adequately for retirement), but they're not going to be working full time, so instead of one-third the workforce, you may have half.  And it gets worse.

The younger generation has no tolerance for autocrats or bureaucrats, as opposed to the boomers and gen Xers who put up with it.  If they even get a sniff of that, they're gone, and you won't have even one-third the work force.  And it gets worse (for the workaholic/micromanagers).

The younger generation wants meaningful work and they want to be engaged in decisions and what's happening.  Baby boomers took the work on, even if they knew it was pointless because they were afraid they might get laid off in the next wave.  This generation won't do that.  They won't necessarily do it the way you want it, and they want to have a say.  They want the space that the workaholic managers don't have time for.

We don't have to worry about the workaholic managers or the micro-managers.  In fact, I won't even do business with people who are not willing to at least explore co-creative leadership.  There's a huge number of people who are ready, and that's who I choose to work with. 

The next decade will see turbulence in the workplace that we've never seen.  It's time for the workaholic managers and the micro-managers to go the way of the dodo bird and the dinosaur.  The asteroid has landed - in fact, it landed decades ago when the industrialized world stopped procreating.  Nature has a way of self-correcting itself, and this younger generation will lead the way.

Infusion of Leadership

Over the past couple of postings I've been sharing my thoughts about the Infusion event hosted by Capital Health.  Here I'd like to share some insights about the last half-day, where we were supposed to be going up the second side of the U to realize a new model/prototype for leadership.  I say supposed to, because I think, in some ways, that we were just getting to presencing as we left.

Late in the morning of the last day, we were asked to surface themes that had emerged and were called to crystallize a prototype of what it would look like if those themes came into fruition.  There were some good ideas there.  Some pushed the boundaries, some didn't, but as we discussed them, I felt an increasing discomfort arising among the participants.  Some people spoke of not pushing the boundaries enough.  Some said we'd done enough reflecting and it was time to act and do something.  it was really quite interesting.

What it felt like to me was that we had been in a fairly polite area, and as this conversation evolved, we started dancing to the edge, towards where it was really uncomfortable.  We didn't cross over into it - nobody seemed to want to really push us over, but we danced on the edge.

A few of the comments as we went around connected some dots for me.  One person at the program had floated between groups, gathering ideas and coalesced them into her own concept.  We had craft supplies there to model our prototypes, and she took a blob of play-doh clay and started sticking straws into it with notes on them about what would be required of a prototype.  The clay was the foundation - the beliefs, the values that we came from, and the 'pieces' of the initiative on the straws emerged from and were supported by that foundation.

Interestingly, she found that her foundation didn't hold up the straws, so she had to add more clay and build up the foundation, a beautiful metaphor, I think for what happens in so many organizations. We get so busy doing things and initiatives, and we don't have the time to go into the foundation - the 'messy' stuff: feelings, beliefs and values.  Then we wonder why doing the 'things' doesn't work.

In fact, one person spoke up and said that the organization had the systems and processes the sculptor spoke of, and they weren't doing the job.  And that to me, said it all.  People were too involved in the doing the things and systems, and not enough time had been invested into building the foundation.

So what is this foundation?  It's a number of things.  It's honoring who people are and where they're at.  It's understanding and working to live within the values.  It's understanding what beliefs get in the way and what beliefs make it happen.  It's understanding and knowing your own beliefs, values and sense of purpose, which I'm exploring further in this post in my blog on personal leadership.  It's the 'messy' stuff of human beings which takes time to do and which requires us to show up as human beings, not just as our roles, and this is something that is not in many models of leadership, and is very challenging for people to do period.

One of the participants at the Infusion event spoke of how we need to honour where people are at - their pain, their anxiety, their perspective.  This, to me, is the start of that foundation.  Then we have to support people in connecting to their own personal leadership, because most people don't really know what's important to them and what motivates them - in our society we don't usually make time to do that.  We're too busy being human doings to be human beings.

Once individuals (especially leaders) have greater clarity on their personal leadership, then you can really discuss what are the organizational beliefs and values that you want to live.  What does it look like?  What does it mean?  Who's living them?  Who's not?

That's the foundation.  That's the 'messy' stuff.  That's what we don't invest the time to do.

The challenge is that we still have to do our day-to-day doing as we're remembering how to be human beings.  But I think that challenge is far less than our fear of going into the 'messy' stuff.  That's just a cop-out.

I really have to give kudos to the design/hosting team for the Infusion event.  That was a challenging job, holding that space with all those powerful minds, hearts and opinions, and you did it wonderfully.  From the logistics to the connection between the hosing team to the crafting of the questions and process, and the actual hosting of the event, my hats off to you.

My greatest kudos go to you for not trying to wrap things up in a neat package at the end.  It wasn't neat - it was still messy, and that's a good thing.  I disagree with the people (interestingly all male) who spoke up and said we'd had too much female energy and it was time to have some balls and act.  That's jumpint the U.  That's the fear of going into the messy stuff.  I think this process is just getting into presencing, to the heart of the issue - we've barely started - and to allow it to realize its true potential, you have to give it its time.  Congratulations on letting it be messy.  That takes courage.

Infusion Day 2

Well, today finished the Infusion Event I've been blogging about, coordinated by the Capital Health District in Halifax (and thanks to visual recorder Susan MacLeod for her permission to use her wonderful images and harvests from the incredible seeds of discussion in my blogs).  What an amazing confluence of leaders and thinkers from around the city and around the continent focused on what world class leadership could be and look like (and on a day, when the rest of the world is focused on which leadership will emerge south of our border).

What an interesting journey today was.  We moved into the bottom of the U, and I'm not sure we came up the other side - yet.

The bottom of the U is about presencing - sifting through all the  'stuff' we've gathered to find what are the root factors driving it all - what are the root issues (as opposed to the symptoms) to focus on.  It's also about purpose and passion - what part of this is your personal passion and connects with your personal purpose, and what surfaces as your collective sense of purpose to move forward.

We started the day by exploring what 'big insights' had come from 'sleeping on' all we'd done yesterday.  I posted (potentially incoherently) my insights from yesterday in an earlier posting.   As I discussed this with a couple of other participants, I concretized some thinking.

If what we need to do is as simple as we realized yesterday (and as I've seen in many such conversations), why is it so hard to live it when we go back to the 'real world'?  My 'aha' this morning was that we run into a conflict with our beliefs about what we're expected to do and what makes success.  They stop us dead in our tracks from changing.

In our society, your importance and worth is often governed by how busy you are and how stressed you are and how much you have to do.  The more stressed you are and the more you have to come late to meetings and leave early (to go to other meetings, of course), the more important you are and the more value you're providing.  We wear stress like a badge of honour.

It's into this world that we bring these ideas of creating space for reflection and engaging people and taking the time to listen.  Is it any wonder none of that (or certainly little) seems to stick?

To shift the culture, we have to go into the 'messy' stuff of dealing with beliefs, values and feelings.  We have to honour, as a friend of mine suggested, the anxiety and pain people are feeling.  We have to engage people in discussions that explore what our beliefs and values mean, and what we're doing that supports them and what we're doing that says that we don't really believe in them at all.

Our values are not what's written on the pretty plaque on the wall - our values are what we see walking down the halls.

If we're not living them - which is a constant challenge and journey even for truly values-driven organizations like Gore - they're not worth anything.  The only values that matter are the ones we live.

We have to be able to challenge people when they're not living our values - all the way up to the CEO.  We need to recognize those who are living them.  And we need to hold people accountable for living them.  But to do all that we have to get in to the messy part of what they mean and what they mean to each of us in day-to-day life.

And the other piece to that is that we, as individuals, have to be clear on what our own core values and our own personal sense of purpose is - and that's a whole 'nother conversation which I'll step into tomorrow in my blog on personal leadership.

There's more from today, but I'll come back to that - my brain is getting a little fried.  I'll finish off with a picture of Susan MacLeod and her visual harvest of this afternoon's work.  Great work on your part, Susan, and on the part of the whole hosting team.  Bravo.

Infusion Event Tuesday Morning Harvest

Here is Susan's harvest of this morning's work at the Infusion event:

 

Infusion Event for Capital Health

Capital Health, our major health district in Halifax, Nova Scotia has begun a quest to explore what it would take to create a world-leading haven for people-centered health, healing and learning. Today and tomorrow they are running a 2-day Infusion event, where they are inviting leaders from within their organization, across Halifax, and indeed across North America to infuse their wisdom and to co-create what  leadership that matters and makes a difference could look like.  I'm fortunate enough to be one of the attendees, and I'd like to share a little of what's happening and some of my insights, and I'll be sharing some of the graphical harvests and artwork prepared by Susan MacLeod, a member of the hosting team for the event.

The Infusion event was designed using the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations as its operating system, and it was a joy to be a pure participant of an event like this (as opposed to one of the hosts).  The design also follows the U-process, a proven process for large-scale change and leadership in complex situations.

After a check-in circle with the 60+ participants, we moved into a world cafe.  The first round of cafe asked the question, 'what time is it in the world?' to set the context for what's needed today.  The next rounds explored what leadership is being called for in this time, and what's required to bring that forth.  We were then asked what themes and patterns we saw, and the graphic recorder harvested the following from our feedback:

 

I've been in or hosted discussions like this and many similar themes arise.  We need to create the space and take time.  We need to engage all the players in co-creating the way forward, and then build the structures to support it.  We need to start from a clear sense of purpose and from the principles we want to live by, and then, later get to the structures that are required.  The leader has to let go of trying to control. 

What's amazing is how easy it is for people to surface all of this.  We have the wisdom among us, and all it takes is putting aside our blackberrying for a short while to surface what we already know.  The challenge is keeping this slower pace and insight with us when we leave environments like this.

Once this came out, a discomfort passed over some of the participants, as a need to know 'how to' do all this surfaced.  I've seen this reaction before - a need to 'jump the U', when the essence of the U is that you need to go through not knowing how things are going to work out.  This response, however, often surfaces in this type of discussion.

Over the day and in the closing circle a lot of comments arose about how simple this really might be - it's not rocket science, after all.  There were also comments about how, for significant change to happen, we had to go through a time of discomfort or disturbance, which comes from stepping away from what we know to learn new ways.  These two thought streams gave me an fresh insight/perspective. 

What we're talking about here really isn't rocket science.  It really is simple.  All the things that are being called for in leadership are what came up in the cafe including what I mentioned above - letting go of control, start from purpose, engaging all players and so on. 

I've always thought that the resistance to discomfort was the resistance to learning tough new concepts and new ways of thinking and of dealing with complexity.  What occurred to me today is that, in our busying and blackberrying world, we crave complexity.  Workload and stress and complexity are worn as badges of honour - you're not important if you're not stressed and dealing with tough problems.

My great insight was that maybe our resistance is not to complex new ideas, but rather to the fact that what is being called for from us is simplicity, and what we have to let go of is the complexity and our self-importance that comes from it.

I don't know if this is true or not, but it's certainly an interesting perspective to sit it.  What do you think?

Servant Leadership

I just came across this diagram that depicts the evolution of a servant leader (the copyright at the bottom of the page says to share this freely, so feel free to pass this on).

This framework is totally congruent with co-creative leadership and the art of hosting. 

There's nothing new in the world.  We just have to put it into practice.

New leadership not strong leadership

This article calls for 'strong leadership' in turbulent times.  It says you need to communicate what the turbulence is, and I agree with that.  There's no point giving the corporate bafflegab that says everything's fine and people are your most important asset while you're laying off half your workforce.  Nobody believes that anyway.

If 'strong leadership' means having the strength to admit that you don't have the answers, and then actively engaging your people in co-creating the way forward, then I'm all on board. However, I totally disagree with 'strong leadership' if it means the traditional form of leadership where the leader stands up and acts as if they have all the answers.

In times of complexity, no one person, or even an executive team, can produce a better solution than the whole organization working together. 

Why 'old' leadership is deadly in uncertain times

With all the chaos in global markets the past few weeks, many companies are preparing to cut back as they step into fear and uncertainty - and those are precisely the actions that will increase the turmoil that they have to deal with.  In particular, cutting your people and/or minimizing or 'spinning' your communication to them guarantee that you're sabotaging your own productivity. 

These are the actions that fit the 'old' leadership model.  Today, you have the choice as a leader to stay in the pattern of fear that governed our recent past, or to explore new options for leadership that are proving far more effective in uncertain times.

The 'old' model of leadership called for the leader to

1. have the vision
2. control everything
3. have all the answers
4. be decisive and make the 'tough' decisions to provide quick results

Well, laying off people shows a quick return on the bottom line - salaries are a huge chunk of the income statement.  However, it also produces a long-lasting and life-sucking effect on your long-term productivity and effectiveness.  There's actual hard data that shows that companies that cut during a recession actually take longer to recover when the recession ends compared to those who didn't.

The fact is that things are so uncertain and complex today that no one person can be expected to have the answers.  If you put out one of those business-school corporately sculpted releases that try to put a positive spin on things and say that you know what you're doing, everyone knows that you don't.  And at some level every leader knows that nobody believes them because earlier in their careers they used to roll their eyes when their boss told them the same thing. 

What most leaders don't know is that they have a choice.

It can be scary because it's not what they know.  They keep doing what they do not because it works, but because it's all they know.

It takes courage to step into a new way of doing things, particularly when things are uncertain, and not every leader is ready to do that.

In my previous post, I explained how leadership has evolved from the autocrat to he bureaucrat to the transformational or visionary leadership we've talked about for decades.  In complex and uncertain times, no one person can have a clear vision of how to move forward.  The leader has to step out of his or her ego and admit that they have only one piece of the puzzle and tap the collective wisdom of the other key stakeholders to co-create a way forward.

This means the leader stepping up and admitting that they don't know what to do or how to find the way out.  This can be extremely challenging for most people embedded in the 'old' leadership model.  But only then can you honestly engage your organization in co-creating the way forward - and the social technologies exist today where you can actively engage your entire organization (whether a few people or hundreds or more) and tap the incredible wisdom in all your people to find the way forward.

In contrast to traditional leadership, the co-creative leader:

1. co-creates the vision with the other key stakeholders
2. lets go of control of people
3. explore and co-discover the answers with the other players
4. share decision-making with others so they are already 'bought in' to decisions

Co-creative leadership is about being authentic, and about creating a 'leader-ful' organization, not about doing it all yourself.  You share the burden, the work, and the rewards with others.  You're not alone.

That said, this can be a pretty challenging transition for most people who've had little exposure to it.  This journey involves huge personal transformation, and it's important to have support in the form of a coach or a host or a facilitator to help you through this.  Whoever you work with, make sure that they have the experience of helping others through this transition - speak to their past clients in-depth to ensure they produce results.