Winds of Change Group Blog

California Speaks -- Will the Legislature Listen?

A couple of weekends ago I had the privilege to partner with an amazing array of people across the State of California.  The day-long dialogue and message-making meeting was organized, hosted, and managed by AmericaSpeaks, a relatively small (17 core staff) but powerful group of people who have transformed participative democracy from theory into practice.  Founded in 1995, AmericaSpeaks has lived out its mission of engaging citizens in the public decisions that impact their lives in New York City around the re-building of Ground Zero, with native New Orleans residents regarding land use after Katrina, and dozens of other projects both large and small.

What did the Saturday event I participated in look like?  3,500 participants met at 8 sites throughout the State.  Governor Schwarzenegger opened the meeting from Los Angeles and then joined a table group of 10 people for a good portion of the morning to listen and learn.  The 8 sites were connected via satellite link, radios, cell phones, and video feeds.  The purpose of all of this effort?

To have the people of California voices' heard in shaping the direction and key decisions involving in reforming our healthcare system. 

Throughout the course of the day, we used voting keypads and laptops on each table to drill down beyond broad platitudes to provide concrete direction to legislators.  Here are a few of the many recommendations developed during the day:

• Eighty-two percent of participants said the state’s health care system requires “major changes” with only 1% saying the health care system is fine the way it is.

• Eighty-six percent of participants said it was essential or important to pass health care reform this year.

• Eighty-four percent of participants said they were very-to-somewhat willing  to share in the responsibility of paying for health care reform that covers all Californians.

To give you a better sense of what really went on in these massive meetings across the state, here's a link to the flickr site where you can see pictures of this groundbreaking event.

What I'm unclear about is what was most remarkable about the day: 

1. bringing together the 3,500 participants, educating them about the complex issues associated with health care reform (a comprehensive, custom-designed participant discussion guide helped immensely with this), and managing the actual meeting         OR
2. bringing together the hundreds of volunteers, facilitators, video, audio, site producers, and logistics teams required to make this all happen so seamlessly.

I remarked to Steve Brigham, an old friend I had the pleasure of partnering with in San Diego, that I thought one of AmericaSpeaks' core competencies is to become this strange attractor.  An organization that creates contexts where others want to be, where others can contribute, where others can be part of something much larger than themselves.  CaliforniaSpeaks provided me an opportunity to work with two other old friends and colleagues, Carolyn Lukensmeyer and Daniel Stone.  And meet up with another dozen people, some of whom I had not seen in nearly ten years!

So the questions this leaves me with is, what if this "special event" were part of everyday governance in our country?  AmericaSpeaks describes their work as "the 21st century town hall meeting."  In some ways, I wonder if going back to the future is what we need more of in this country.  The democratic rigor and discipline AmericaSpeaks instilled in that Saturday session (and in the exceptionally efficient four weeks that preceded it) made it seem like a very special experience for all those involved.

What would that same level of consciousness look like in our everyday lives?  Without the video links, participant discussion guidebooks, and hundreds of table facilitators?  What AmericaSpeaks does is a wonderful service to all those who come in contact with their efforts.  What can you and I do to create these same kind of dialogues when they're not able to be around?

The Right Rhythm For Your Business

I recently led a session for a group of entrepreneur’s at MIT’s Endicott House Training Center.  The session was part of the Entrepreneur’s Organization Advanced Business Program.  This unique learning lab was conceived and is coordinated by Verne Harnish.  Verne has been named one of the "Top 10 Minds in Small Business" by Fortune Small Business Magazine.  He and his business, Gazelle's Inc. focus all their time and energy supporting small businesses become bigger, more profitable, and more effective.

I led a session on “Solving Unsolvable Problems” at the ABP using a combination of Polarity Management and Real Time Strategic Change principles and tools.  In Verne’s book, The Rockefeller Habits, he points to the importance of what he calls “rhythms of the business.” These “rhythms” provide much-needed stability in the businesses he deals with everyday – those undergoing fast-paced growth. 

Jake and Verne at MIT

In my work with some very large corporations, they have also used something
similar to this “rhythms of the business” approach, but I think in a different way.  Verne identifies five kinds of connections to held at distinct intervals:

• Daily Huddles:  Quick 5 minute check in’s on a focus for the day
• Weekly Problem Solving Meetings: 1-2 hour working sessions aimed at identifying and resolving business problems (or after my session, identifying and managing key polarities as well)
• Monthly Development Sessions:  Half-day learning gatherings with specific links to skills and knowledge required to grow the business
• Quarterly Strategy Reviews:  Longer “deep dives” around how existing strategies are positioning the firm for growth and any course corrections that need to be made
• Annual Strategic Planning Meetings:  Multiple day retreats where the past year is assessed and the coming one planned

At face value, these seem pretty straight-forward.  Your organization might have a similar list.  The unique view Verne is that he recommends varying the frequency of each of the meetings based on the amount of growth (I’ll add “change”) you’re experiencing.

Annual strategic planning meetings might be better held quarterly if market changes demand.  Sometimes it’s even necessary to let go of the annual planning calendar and do major strategy work before budget timelines dictate.

Here is what Verne had to say about the session I led:

Radical change requires radical stability -- Robert "Jake" Jacobs was our first presenter in the Advanced Business Program I chaired up at MIT. He explained "why" the Rockefeller Habits of meeting rhythms and quarterly themes are so important. They provide a kind of stability that most employees need if they are to deal with the change leaders of growth firms are often thrusting onto their organizations. This is why it's said "if you want to move faster, pulse faster." The more you change, the more stability you need.

Some questions for you to consider:  What kinds and how much change is your organization experiencing right now?  How much stability does that mean you need to create—and what do you have in place right now to do that?  Finally, what else do you need to put in place -- standard meeting schedule or otherwise – that will create the stability you (or your people) need?

Organizational Identity

We are currently working with a leading hotel and hospitality grouping to ensure that employees are able to consistently deliver Customer experiences in line with the promises that underpin their new portfolio of brands. It's not enough that we understand organisational change; we need to understand how branding and culture come together to develop a unique organisational identity.

To develop the required leadership and employee insights we need to confront the siloed nature of organisational life. The challenge is to create a common logical connection from an organisation’s brand portfolio and the promises it makes to its segmented marketplaces and the way in which employees behaviour needs to be shaped to deliver Customer experiences in line with the brand promises. In many organisations, the fields of expertise to ensure that this really happens are often the domains of different organisational groupings.  Marketing understands brands, their hallmarks and promises.  HR understands organisational culture and its role in shaping behaviour.  Operations understands the nature of the Customer experience they need to deliver in order to be successful.

Change practitioners cannot be successful until they understand the fundamentals of these concepts and how to leverage the kinds of conversations and insights required for organisational groupings to connect and understand how they need to collectively apply their skills, knowledge and resources to effect change. This requires developing new collective organisational capabilities in the fields of innovation, 21st Century marketing and collaboration.

Making the invisible visible, developing a common database of information with common models to facilitate understanding and insight are important aspects of the engagement that change practitioners are required to engineer to build and activate these capabilities. The insights that are required occur at different levels – insight into how the work of organisational groupings interconnects to effect change, as well as insight into the systems and processes that underpin and impact on the way work is conducted.

One of the most important insights that we at Winds of Change focus on throughout our change work is that there are usually significant indestructible, underpinning tensions influence processes of change. These are usually not only problems to solve but also polarities that we need to identify, understand and manage successfully over time. These are usually key areas of leverage that accelerate and sustain our change journeys. One of these key polarities is understanding the ‘part’ and ‘whole’ connectedness of everything that happens in an organisation. This is the key polarity we're helping our hospitality client manage in creating their organization's Identity across the competing perspectives held by marketing, HR, and operations.

All of these functions are right about what they think needs to happen for the company overall to succeed.  The problem they have been experiencing is that each only has a piece of the total puzzle.  Understanding and tapping each other's wisdom is what makes it possible to create a powerful identity shared by the entire company -- without any function losing in the process.

Hardwiring the Brain to Change

An increasing number of books and articles over the last two years have provided great insight into the neurological underpinnings of the human brain.  You don't just see these articles showing up esoteric science journals either.  Special issues of Time, Newsweek, and other popular magazines have recently taken on the previously un-sexy topics such as neurotransmitters, the amygdala, and our motor cortex.   There's been some really interesting research and writings making connections between neuroscience and organizations.  We thought we'd advance that dialogue by looking at the implications of this latest thinking for large scale change methodologies like Real Time Strategic Change.

David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz’s article ‘The Neuroscience of Leadership’ published in Strategy and Business, a range of articles in Scientific American Mind on ‘Mirror Neurons’ and the other neurological underpinnings of change, and Daniel Goleman’s book ‘Social Intelligence’, all point to the same thing. The emergence of a strong body of research on the physical changes in our brains that create the necessary hardwiring required for sustainable behavioural change. What gets interesting about all this is that much of the research strongly supports the methodology of large scale interactive change. Originally seen as an emerging ‘movement’ (including the  recent Nexus for Change conference), large scale interactive change has relied on intuitive knowledge, experience and anecdotal evidence to support the tools, methodologies and techniques employed. Now at last we can refer back to some empirical, rich research to fine-tune and adjust our toolkits to ensure that our work is more effective and sustainable.

So what are some of the most important contributions of this body of research? David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz claim, ‘Managers who understand the recent breakthroughs in cognitive science can lead and influence mindful change: organisational transformation that takes into account the physiological nature of the brain and the way it predisposes people to resist some forms of leadership and accept others.’ Their research flies in the face of some of the most commonly accepted beliefs of behavioural change held by managers, namely that reward, punishment and empathetic persuasion are the primary tools for guiding desired behaviour.

Their research concludes that for the brain to develop new neurological connections to hardwire change people's attention has to be focused on the organisational issues that underpin change as well as on the specific behavioural changes desired. It goes on to show how critical it is for people (and their brains) to be intimately connected to complex issues thought by some to be best reserved for those at the top of the hierarchy.  Broad-based topics such as stimulating and creating insight about an organisation, its strategy and the linkages to the everyday work of people are all essential to sustain change. Their research confirms the requirement of ongoing ‘attention density’ on crucial issues to ensure permanent hardwiring of desired behavioural change.

So, what’s new you may argue, haven’t we always known that these are important pre-requisites for change?

Well, intuitively as change practitioners we’ve always held that the principle of developing insight through engagement is a critical element of sustainable change. Now we’re able to explain to leaders why the so called ‘soft’ methodology we employ achieves the ‘hard’ wiring required for change. We’re able to move from the realm of the intuitive and the anecdotal to supplement our guidance with a clear, rational explanation. We’re able to explain why and how engagement works to develop insight and how ongoing, focused attention sustains change.

We’re able to show how Rock and Schwartz’s assertion that ‘Large scale behaviour change requires a large-scale change in mental maps. This in turn requires some kind of event or experience that allows people to provoke themselves, in effect, to change their attitudes and expectations more quickly and dramatically than they normally would.’  These are the types of events and experiences that need to be translated into concrete programmes of leadership and employee engagement.

Daniel Goleman’s book ‘Social Intelligence’ builds on the neurological research and asserts that ‘Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person.’ What Goleman succeeds eloquently in doing is moving beyond the intra-personal into the interpersonal aspects of change. In so doing he moves beyond the original work of Emotional Intelligence, from ‘one person psychology …. to a two-person psychology: what transpires as we connect’

Social Intelligence provides us with a far reaching exploration of why we connect with others -- or don’t. It engagingly explains the role of our neurons in influencing consciously and unconsciously the way we relate to others and develops our insight into the impact of our behaviour on others. Goleman asserts ‘Businesses are on the front lines of applying social intelligence. As people work longer and longer hours, businesses loom as their substitute family, village and social network – yet most of us can be tossed out at the will of management. That inherent ambivalence means that in more and more organisations, hope and fear run rampant.’

In structuring the organisational events and experiences that engage the collective wisdom of the people in our client organisational systems, understanding the key aspects of social intelligence is critical in structuring an effective design. What are the key behaviours, images, or stories that will fire  the mirror neurons to focus attention rapidly and sustainably? How do we balance the key polarities of emotional and rational connection to develop the required insights? How do we address people’s hopes and fears about change and about committing to a new world of work?

Whilst Rock, Schwartz, Goleman and others have done much to advance our understanding of the reality of mindful behavioural change they also raise an important question. Does our understanding of neuroplasticity provide us with the tools to manipulate and control? What are the ethical boundaries between goal-directed organisational change and the subversion of free will?

What do you think? Are we moving towards an era of more informed manipulation of employees or of informing people’s discretion to act wisely? Let us know your thoughts. We’ll talk more about this important topic in future postings.

 

 

 

No More Lose-Lose Arguments

Wouldn't it be great if you could eliminate forever those energy-draining, blood pressure-raising lose-lose debates in your organization?

Sound like a tall order?  Not if you follow the teachings of my long-time friends and colleagues, Barry Johnson and Chandra Irviv.  They were in town the past two days teaching a Consultant Development Intensive on Polarity Management. Polarity Management is about understanding and tapping the power of paradoxical thinking.  Polarities are an often experienced (and sometimes just as often misunderstood) phenomena of interdependent opposites. 

Ever been in a conflict-filled meeting trying to solve the problem of whether it's better to centralize or decentralize operations?  How about a hot issue for many companies these days of whether to focus resources on local or global markets?  Has anyone ever found the right answer to whether IT other support systems should develop common systems for the whole company or custom ones for different parts of the business?

The problem with trying to solve these problems?  You can't do it  That's because they're polarities that need to be managed over time.  Each side of these arguments, in Barry's and Chandra's words, is right.  However alone, they are only half right.  Each "pole" needs its interdependent opposite for you to succeed over time.  Think about it.  There are upsides to gain from focusing on each point of view.   There are also downsides that will cost you if you over-focus on one point of view to the exclusion of the other.  Learning when and how to do this well is what Polarity Management is all about.

Check out Barry's web site to learn more about how this tool below could help you. 

He also has written a book and developed a web-based training program that'll make the title of this post seem way more than wishful thinking.

The book is filled with practical examples of this powerful phenomena.  Order it from Amazon > Polarity Management.