Rethinking Complexity

Building Cultures of Partnership and Peace: Four Cornerstones

How can we end the cycles of violence and injustice that cause so much suffering and misery? Is a more peaceful and equitable world really possible? If so, what would it actually look like?

My research over several decades has focused on these questions. They are questions deeply rooted in my own early life experiences, when my parents and I narrowly escaped from Nazi Europe. Had we not been able to flee, like most of my relatives, we would almost certainly have been killed in the Holocaust.

As I grew up, I looked for answers to these questions in books and universities. But I never found satisfactory ones.

I wasn’t aware at that time that studying social systems would become my life’s work. By the time I did, like many of us, I saw that our present course is not sustainable. In our time of nuclear and biological weapons, violence to settle international disputes could be disastrous for us all. So also could our once hallowed “conquest of nature” in an era when advanced technologies are causing environmental damage of unprecedented magnitude.

I saw that a grim future awaits my children—and all of us—unless there are transformative social changes. But transformation from what to what?

Complex Change Calls for Cross-Sector Collaboration

I had the opportunity last week to help facilitate a session for non-profit, business, technology, education, and media leaders who came together for the inaugural summit of ConvergeUS.

Co-Chaired by TechNet’s CEO, Rey Ramsey, and Twitter’s Co-Founder, Biz Stone, ConvergeUS drives technology-based breakthroughs for critical social problems and thus accelerates social innovation. ConvergeUS—the non-profit arm of TechNet—is a bipartisan, political network of technology sector CEO’s and senior executives. It was founded this year to mobilize corporations, academic institutions, and other nonprofits to leverage technology to create positive change on critical issues facing American society.

The goal of this organization is to bring together dedicated people across sectors who can identify systemic challenges within our society, who can define ways to address them applying technological approaches, and who can work collaboratively to achieve sustainable and ideally transformative change. To meet this goal, each year ConvergeUS will identify no more than three problem areas to concentrate its resources and reach out to people in business, government, social services, media, and education who have an interest in collaborating to design and implement change.  They also intend to apply research methodology to build a methodology that can be duplicated in many areas.

Collaboration Isn't Easy

It is clear that collaboration is a necessity in navigating today's complex work environments where ambiguity and change are constants.

What is not clear is how to make collaboration part of an organization's culture and the default behavior pattern for leaders.

One possible solution comes from Morten T. Hansen's 2009 book, Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, And Reap Big Results.

Hansen has been studying collaboration since the 1990s and offers a clear model for thinking about and managing collaboration.

He makes it clear that collaboration is fundamental to successful strategic execution; he emphasizes that collaboration must be part of the overall vision in order for improved results to be sustained.

To be an effective collaborative leader, Hansen asserts that three elements are necessary: redefining success, involving others, and accountability.

Kodak's Final Act: An Ode to Theory Z

On Sunday, The Financial Times reported that the recent drop in Eastman Kodak’s share prices may be the final, overt sign that the photography giant is nearing its end.

For a company that spearheaded innovation—in 1885, founder George Eastman invented roll film, which benefited the motion picture industry and inventor Thomas Edison—the only sign that may be left that Rochester, NY, was once the home of something great sits midway down East Avenue where the George Eastman house sits.

In the late 19th century, Eastman sparked up an idea and a patent before dashing to market. A blue-chip, global enterprise once valued at an estimated $200 billion is now a pale contrast of its former self. On Friday, Eastman Kodak shares were valued at an estimated 54 cents per share, losing half of its value in a single day.

So what happened? Kodak competitor Fuji is still profitable and cash flow is healthy.

The answer may be in Kodak’s embedded culture of over-greatness. Over-greatness is a pet name I have given to the phenomenon plaguing Kodak—when a majority of people in an organization are feeling and acting over-inflated to the point of insularity.

Evolutionary Leadership: The Embodiment of Systems Being

In a previous post, I presented the need to move from systems thinking to systems being.

There is a reason for that: I believe that it is through systems being that we will be able to truly transform our world. And transforming the world is the task of leaders. However, the most prevalent understanding of leadership is narrow and hierarchical: one leader on top and many followers below; few with power and many powerless.

As members of society and organizations, we have accepted a passive, victim stance in the face of complex challenges while we point fingers hoping that elected officials and business executives take care of our problems. Our behavior represents a relinquishing of our power. We suffer the problems but we don’t see ourselves as part of the solutions. And if we find ourselves dissatisfied about our leaders, we act as if we can’t do anything about it.

This distorted concept of leadership needs to be revised and expanded, because it is not very useful and it may be dangerous in today’s world. By our mere participation in social structures through our daily lives, we are creating our future. But we haven’t done so consciously.

Peter Senge shares the view that "ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities." He once said, "Because of our obsession with how leaders behave and with the interactions of leaders and followers, we forget that in its essence, leadership is about learning how to shape the future.... Leadership exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances. Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world.”

Dealing with Vulnerability

After my study session wound down earlier tonight, I scanned my bookshelf to find an organizational systems topic that I could write this post on.

Organizational culture. Sustainability. Leverage points. They all jumped out, but none of them grabbed me.

Then my eyes landed on a thin booklet from the Leadership Institute of Seattle (or LIOS)—a booklet I received at Saybrook's January 2011 residential conference. The 43-page manual—a learning guide from a workshop I attended called "InterAct: Skills for Adaptive Leadership"—had been sitting on my shelf unopened for almost nine months. It was pinned between a book by Peter Block and a large, white envelope with a revised copy of my 2010 Saybrook admissions essay and transcripts.

I pulled the booklet off the shelf and flipped through it, immediately assuming I'd find nothing of interest or at least nothing I'd really want to revisit, let alone publicly. That two-day InterAct session, after all, was pretty tough.

InterAct was like a group therapy session only there weren't any psychologists in the room and the group consisted of fellow students who, for the most part, were complete strangers to me. The instructors divided us into two small groups and had us sit in a circle in the center of the room, one group at a time. In the safe space the instructors created, they asked us to consciously react to the assumptions and perceptions each group member in the circle had.

Day one went great for me, but day two was brutal. It wouldn't have been if one minor observation hadn't opened up a can of emotional worms.

Got Assumptions?

One of the best tips I ever got came from journalism school.

The tip involved assumption-making and it was offered in the form of a question-and-answer.

Do you know what happens when you make assumptions? The journalism professor asked my undergraduate, database research class. The first three letters of the word "assumption," that's what you make of yourself.

He was right. I just didn't realize how much.

As a no-nonsense journalist-in-training, I was taught not to take things sources told me at face value. I was taught to always maintain a certain level of distrust in dealing with people. This would allow me to continue questioning everything to shreds until I reached the objective truth through information and fact gathering.

Looking back, I can't help but wonder why I didn't extend that piece of advice to my personal and professional life as well? It might have spared me years of self-inflicted anguish and grief over trivialities. Live and learn, I suppose.

The Leadership Moment

There are probably as many ideas about leadership as there are leaders.

Leadership is a subject that has been explored and documented by academia and practitioners alike.

Numerous models have emerged and are taught at colleges and organizations across the world. Most aim at identifying the actions of good leaders so that new ones can replicate them.

Leadership is viewed as a necessary commodity across every organization. Without it, we feel our organizations could not be successful.

In our culture, the hero and the leader are very closely tied. Our leaders—the ones we want to emulate—have accomplished great feats often times undergoing significant personal sacrifice. For the most part, this hero-leader relationship yields the leader image to be one of a male—a warrior. Someone with a strong personality—a visionary with charisma, and yes, one with a few flaws that we are willing to overlook. This image of the hero-leader limits the many other possibilities in which leadership can take place.

Let’s look at leadership from the perspective of leader, leading, and leadership.

Peaceful Wakeup Call

Striding purposefully through our days and nights, we proceed through myriad experiences, modalities of coping, and technological improvements. We’re assailed by the panoply of lights and sounds of this amazing and complicated society. 

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon."

William Wordsworth wrote these words in the middle of the 19th century, but they’re just as real now. Even today, it’s difficult to remember what is truly precious to us. The quiet peace of nature is all too foreign to the citizen of today. It’s becoming more and more difficult—with the distractions of light and sound and electronics—to remember what is precious.

I’ve often been envious of those individuals who have an amazing grasp of “what’s important and what’s not.” The calm figures who can sweep away the chaff and leave the wheat; who still the anxiety of those of us looking for direction in the face of an overwhelming set of challenges. There are far too few of those insightful, decisive figures in our lives—figures who can help us discern what is truly valuable from what is not.

Once in a great while—even in the absence of a guiding figure—we are presented an opportunity to have that kind of insight; a wakeup call of sorts. An event comes along that forcefully strips away the chaff of 21st-century existence and allows us to experience a taste of life more quiet, more essential, and perhaps more sweet.

Why Can’t People on the Front Lines Talk to Each Other?

Recently as I was listening to a critique of the work done in response to the latest natural disaster when the following comment was made: “We need to get the first responders to talk to each other.”

On the surface, this may sound like a reasonable request and something that we should expect from a group of people dedicated to helping others during emergencies. Yet if we look at this request systemically, we can see that much work is needed to enable people to work together and coordinate their efforts—whether it's in response to a natural disaster, coordinating care of patients in hospitals, or managing just about any complex organizational effort.

For many years, we focused on training people well, providing good policies and incentives, and relying on mangers to provide the direction and supervision to ensure that the work was done as expected. In many organizational situations, those support mechanisms are no longer enough.  We cannot assume that well-trained people dedicated to doing their best work can address the growing complexity of multiple systems and the resulting—often conflicting—needs that arise.

Workers today need to do more than their jobs. They need to understand the dynamics of the systems within which they work. They need to know enough about the work of others to recognize the intersections of their work and the larger system. They need to understand not only their priorities, but the priorities of others with whom they interact and those that define the organizational system. If people don’t see and understand the system and its dynamics, they don’t know how to interact.