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

Different Ways of Leading and Organizing Generate Developmental Mismatches

Just as individuals develop so do organizations. More to the point, we could say that the ways individuals organize develops. We've all experiencing the difference between a team leader that organizes projects well and those that don't.  A big part of the difference, I suggest, is in the way of organizing taken by each leader.

Around 1999-2000, I developed a model for several different styles or ways of leading and organizing that follows the well-understood trajectory of adult development (from developmental psychology). My premise is that the way individuals organize expresses the level of development of their observer.

Here is a high-level summary of the model starting with the least developed way of organizing.

1. Assessment responds to the need to ground organizing in our concerns about what's happening
2. Vision responds to the need to establish a direction, identities, and offers
3. Opportunity responds to the need to make immediate progress
4. Task responds to the need for being effective
5. Process responds to the need for improving efficiency
6. Knowledge responds to the need for diversifying offers and renewing (revisioning) identities
7. Compassion responds to the need for placing people (that develop) at the center of organizing
   
8. Wisdom responds to the need for timely action and conservation of energy when acting
   
9. Love responds from the inherent interdependent relationships in which we exist to the organizing challenges
   
10. Presence response from the inherent temporal and spatial co-presence in which everything occurs
    

Together these ways create and respond to the challenging situations every leader faces daily. To achieve effectiveness, efficiency, and the fulfillment of customers and employees in the short and long-term, all ten ways need to be alive and healthy.

Each of these ways displays different self-reinforcing patterns of awareness and action, of concern and response, of language and practice. Each is way is a different observer of the organization and the challenges it faces. And each way has a different way of responding to the challenges.  What is crucial is to match the demands of the challenges that the organization faces with the appropriate response.


Leaders and organizations often struggle because they have mastered one or a few of these ways of leading and organizing but the challenges they face demand a different way of leading and organizing. However, instead of learning new ways of leading and organizing they simply do what they've mastered over and over, harder and harder, with the same unfortunate results. In short, they are stuck and not learning or developing.

Many leaders don't even know that other ways of leading and organizing exist and are possible. And those that see that other ways are possible often don't step into the action learning that is requires to develop those new ways.  For sure this is a hard road to walk. Developing a new way of leading and organizing can take years. And in today's business climate, it is rare for leaders to willingly step into a multi-year deconstruction/reconstruction of how they lead and work.  However, on the flip side of the argument, the acceleration of change we experience in today's world demands that companies reinvent themselves approximately every 3-5 years. In fact what is needed is to take on the practice of development (of transformation) as an ongoing and continuous endeavor. Indeed, it has always been so whether we've known it or not. Better to take it on consciously that to be dragged kicking and screaming unconsciously into the morass that so often accompanies transformation and deep learning.

One early step to taking on this endeavor is to have a map of the territory and a reading on where you are within it. The 10 ways of leading and organizing provide one good map. More than one map is required. And when using such maps one must always keep in the forefront that "the map is not the territory."

With a map of the basic developmental contour of the territory of leading and organizing, you can make an assessment of which ways have been learned and mastered by which leaders, which teams, which functions.  The dynamics are complex between levels of organizing and within the interactions between organizations. As one simple example, teams that are attempting to organizing using a higher ordered way - say Process - will struggle if there management or their collaborators are using a lower ordered way - say Task or, worse, Opportunity. Being able to observe and diagnose such developmental mismatches opens up new ways to respond to organizational problems effectively that didn't exist before.

For sure the description of the map above is insufficient to perform an assessment. If you want to explore performing such an assessment in your organization, contact me.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear what y'all make of this. What new possibilities open up by seeing that there can be developmental mismatches between the styles or ways of leading and organizing used by people.

Take care,

-Steve

How to conduct an effective Project Review conversation

One of the most common "diseases" I witness in leaders, teams, and organizations is failure to act in a centered and grounded way. When we fail to ground our actions in reality, we undermine our chances of being successful and increase our chances of getting stuck.

Here's a common example of not grounding action in reality. Several years ago, I attended a project review for a team of about ten people who were in the middle or toward the end - we couldn't tell - of a project originally estimated to take nine months. I was asked to give an assessment of what was going wrong and make some recommendations to get the project on track because the project manager had, for the third month in a row, slipped the schedule by one month.
         
During the review, the project manager presented a list of all the tasks that had been completed since the last review and a newly revised schedule and completion date. There was some discussion of how some tasks were completed and a discussion of the potential negative impact of the slipped schedule. Based on this, the project manager was asked to do some rescheduling, shift people and task assignments around and pull the date in by two weeks. However, no one talked about where the project actually was that day. The decisions that were made in this review weren't centered and grounded in what was actually happening. Instead, they were a response to what had happened, what might happen, and the fear of the impact of what might happen.
         
After the meeting was over I pulled the project manager aside to ask him some questions. I started by observing, "You presented what happened in the past month and a prediction for what might happen in the months to come. Thank you. That was really helpful context. And it was good to get an update on when you believe the project will finish. However, I still don't know where the project is today and I can't make any sound recommendations." He looked at me with some surprise. "What do you mean? We're 75 days away from completing the project," he said. "Well, last month you where about 75 days away from completing the project too and clearly a lot of work has been done in the last month. You probably aren't in the same place today as you were a month ago. So where are you today?"
         
What was happening was that he was inferring where the project is today by looking at what's happened in the past and what he predicted will happen in the future. Grounding action in reality means knowing where the project is today and responding to that, not responding to predictions. He was making a common mistake of doing planning only for prediction.
         
A better use of planning is to create a language for identifying where the project is today. Discussing where the project is today grounds action in reality and enables successful management of the project to completion. Planning that creates a language to identify where the project is today is different than planning that only creates a prediction for completion. Before we example how planning creates a language that helps us coordinate action and create value, let's look at the structure and content of a good project review.
         
Project reviews are structured conversations in which managing happens. Since managing happens at multiple levels there, multiple levels of review are needed. In general, each higher level of review will have decreasing depth of visibility with increasing breadth of managerial scope. However, any review can reach any level of depth in the service of achieving its purpose. For example, reviews by more senior management will tend toward reviewing exceptions and quality and process effectiveness rather than status about every task on every project.
         
The purposes of all project reviews, regardless of level, are:

1. To assess where we are today
2. To make decisions about what to do next
3. To create commitments that create boundaries of responsibility
4. To learn and improve our effectiveness in meeting commitments

This is accomplished by increasing the visibility of commitments, assessments, breakdowns, and resolutions and enabling decision-making. Regardless of level (depth of content discussed), project reviews follow the same basic format.

1. Assess the current state of projects against the plan and process of record

• What has happened since the last review? What is done?
• What is happening now? What is in-process?
• Are we on plan? Are we on process?
• What is our prediction about future milestones?

2. Identify project and process breakdowns (openings for new commitments and actions)

• Where are we not on plan?
• Where are we not on process?
• What commitments have we failed to meet?
• Where are we stuck? Where are we not taking needed action?

3. Learning from our breakdowns (where we are failing to meeting our commitments)

• What was our commitment (including conditions for satisfaction)? Is it still relevant and needed?
• What was our strategy (plan or process) for meeting it?
• What action did we take?
• What happened when we did that? How do we know that that's what happened?
• Do we have all the necessary perspectives on what happened? If not, how can we get them?
• What did we assume that turned our to be false (if anything)?
• What didn't we account for in our plan or process? Where are our blind spots?
• How do our actions and/or strategy need to change, based on what we learned from this breakdown?

4. Taking (new) action

• What new commitments are we establishing? What are the conditions of satisfaction? Who are the customer's of the committed action? Who are the performers of the committed action?
• What has to happen immediately, if anything? (What fires need to be put out?)
• What new action must take place? What is the new and revised plan?
• Who is responsible for what?
• How will the change in plans be communicated? To whom?
• What do we expect to happen by the next review?

Based on this structure and content of a project review, we can see how central commitment negotiation is to project planning and tracking.

Best wishes on the success of your next project review.

Take care,

-Steve

But is it integral? Who cares!

I haven't been reading much in the way of integral writings for the last several years.  Today, I dipped back into a few of them.

I keep finding people in the integral community asking the question "Is it integral?" about all kinds of things - leadership, psychology, medicine, law, coaching, etc. as if being integral was the goal.

Whatever happened to pragmatism - does it work?

I'm sure someone will say "But being integral means it works better and in more cases."  This is probably true - we'd need to look case by case - but what I find is that in promoting the question "Is it integral?" we are taking our eye off the ball. Many people who are new to the integral community (and many who are "old" too) are developing a really funky critical theory where being integral is "it" and not being integral is passé. How very non-integral!

Is it integral? Who cares. Picking up the banner of pragmatism, I suggest that a better question is "Does it work?" This question opens are more useful space of possibilities by putting us in more direct contact with the nature of whatever we're questioning and how well it responds to present circumstances.

Take care,

-Steve

Relishing Greatness

Much of the time we live life from the assessment that something is wrong. We do all manner of things because something is wrong.

We change jobs because something is wrong. We get married because something is wrong. We break  up because something is wrong. We go to school because something is wrong. We start friendships because something is wrong. We end friendships for the same reason. We have kids because something is wrong. We move houses, neighborhoods, cities, states, and countries because something is wrong. We call meetings because something is wrong. We launch new projects because something is wrong. We build new products because something is wrong. We discover new medicines because something is wrong. And on and on ...

Everything we do seems to be for covering up the something-wrong-ness of existence. But alas, the something-wrong-ness of existence appears to be bottomless with no end in sight.

This bottomless-endlessness of the something-wrong-ness points, I think, not to something that is true of life but rather something which is true of us - those who hold that there is something wrong.

What it points to is that we are that something is wrong - as an identity. And everywhere we show up ... guess what? ... we find that something is wrong.  That's what we bring to every situation we encounter.

What if the things we did were for being satisfied and relishing the greatness of existence? 

Who would we need to be - as an identity - to have this existence?

What keeps us from living as that identity?

-Steve

On the Power of Letting Go and Taking Another Look

The process of dwelling-in-a-distinction consists of repeatedly "getting" and "loosing" the distinction.

I often remind students in the Integral Coaching courses I teach in that throughout the year they will "get" what coaching is and then "loose" what coaching is over and over again.   And I tell them not to worry.  That this is the necessary process of assimilating and dwelling in new ontological distinctions.

Of course, what they "get" each time is slightly different - slightly deeper in richness and subtle nuances.

Indeed this was and remains my own path as a coach - getting it, loosing it.

Best not to grasp and try to hold on ... that only makes the process more difficult, confusing, and anxiety-producing.  Instead, always be ready to let go and to yet take another look.  Letting go, then taking another look is a very powerful way of participating in our own unfoldment.

Take care,

-Steve

Stuff

Everyone on the planet should watch this ... http://www.storyofstuff.com/. Shifting to a sustainable way of living depends on everyone understanding what this video is pointing to.

Enjoy!

-Steve

A Couple of Rat Turds - more insights on The Witness and The Observer ...

This post is an addendum to The Witness and The Observer posted a few days ago. As with that post, those of you who don't have an interest in the boundaries between hermeneutic-phenomenology and spirituality might like to skip this.

Adding to what was already written ...

The Witness is the home of meaninglessness. The Observer is the home of meaningfulness.

The Observer exists in the domain of opposites, polarities, and paradoxes (e.g., good and bad, warm and cold, male and female, existing and not existing). The Witness never experiences opposites, polarities, and paradoxes.

The Witness has no structure or form and is outside of time in the eternal Now. The Observer has a narrative structure and is temporal, having a past, present, and future.

From the interpretation of The Observer we exist as an historical being - a self. From the experience of The Witness we are an ahistorical being - a Self.

As a self, we have concerns, emotional reactions, beliefs, intentions, goals and agendas, and conditioned tendencies (habits). As a Self, we have none of that. As a self we have choices. A quality of the Self is choicelessness.

The Self is the self's possibility for freedom and transformation.

It is within the dialectic between The Witness and The Observer that transformation of The Observer occurs.

This dialectic at once (partially) deconstructs The Observer through experiences of meaninglessness and  reconstructs The Observer as meaning is construed and constructed.

The Self is the "nothingness" out of which declarations are created. Declarations always refer to the world of The Observer.

Transformation of The Observer changes the form of our existence to ourselves in the present. The Witness is never transformed for that which is formless cannot be re-formed.

Transformation of The Observer allows us to take greater responsibility for the historical being we are. In taking greater responsibility for our historical being, we can live into new future possibilities through declaration of new self-narratives.

This distinction of The Witness and The Observer is dualistic. This brings to mind the notion from the Heart Sutra "Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form." Form characterizes The Observer whereas emptiness characterizes The Witness. But as Hakuin says in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, "A nice hot kettle of stew. He ruins it by dropping a couple of rat turds in."

A couple of rat turds - form and emptiness, The Observer and The Witness. Perhaps we shouldn't ruin the stew.

I recall an instance when I was volunteering in the kitchen at Green Gulch Zen Farm with a friend of mine who is also a student of spirituality and philosophy. We were "talking shop" as we cooked and in the middle of our conversation he asked "But what or who experiences non-duality?" And without a moment's hesitation to think I said, "Non-duality 'experiences' non-duality." And within the distinctions I'm exploring here that means no Witness and no Observer can experience non-duality.

Hope you enjoyed this ...

-Steve

The Buddha's Business Narrative

Lately, I've been working on building three different businesses. And at the center of all business-building is  articulation of the business narrative.

The dramatic structure of the narrative follows the "plot mountain" that we all (supposedly) learned in grade school - exposition of conflict, rising action, climax or turning point, falling action, and resolution or denouement. Is it coming back? Not too nightmarish I hope.

A business narrative frames the conflict that the business addresses, how the it addresses the conflict, and what you'll get from buying the resolution from the business.

For some reason I had the weird idea to look at the world's major religions through the lens of business narratives.

One of the very first teachings Buddha gave after becoming enlightened was on The Four Noble Truths.  They are:

1. Life is suffering.
2. The origin of suffering is attachment.
3. The cessation of suffering is possible.
4. The way leading to the cessation of suffering is The Noble Eightfold Path.

This is Buddha's business narrative.  The exposition of conflict is Noble Truth #1 - life is suffering.  The rising action is Noble Truth #2 - recognition of the origin of suffering. In a way the second truth doesn't really get us anywhere because we can understand where suffering comes from but still not be free from suffering. But the second truth does give the Buddha some credibility. Perhaps this is leading somewhere helpful we might be thinking.

The climax or turning point is the Buddha's declaration in the third Noble Truth that the cessation of suffering is possible. What a radical departure from how we experience life.  On the heals of the climax, he offers us the way - The Noble Eightfold Path. This is the falling action that leads to the implied denouement - no more suffering.

Wonder how much The Noble Eightfold Path costs? :-)

Unfortunately(?), it costs nothing less than giving up everything you take yourself to be, everything you take others to be, and everything you take the world to be. In spite of his crappy pricing strategy, he's doing pretty well with anywhere from 350 million to 1.7 billion customers worldwide, including me.

-Steve

 

The Witness and The Observer

If you aren't interested in the ontology of the observer you can skip this post. It is somewhat philosophical and will only be of interest to a few of you, I suspect.

Last week I was reflecting on the notion that you can only observe that which you have language for in light of experiences I frequently have that I don't have language for.

An insight ... there is a distinction between witnessing and observing even though we usually consider these as synonyms in our everyday usage of the words.

Indeed you can only observe what you have language (distinctions) for. As a result, observations can be shared with others. What you can observe determines what exists for you - not what is real - just what exists for you. What can be observed is determined by our structure of interpretation. The observer is an interpreter.

From observations we get narratives and, perhaps most importantly, self-narratives. That is our notion of ourselves - who we are to ourselves - comes from observations.

As an illustration of this refer to Helen Keller's account of learning her first word "water" and how that brought into existence for her the meaning of meaning, temporal narrative (past, present, and future) and her sense of being a self.  Yes, all of that requires the distinction of language itself.

The witness can experience experiences for which there is no language. That is, the witness can witness what can't be observed.

Of course, the obvious question is what is being witnessed? Is it reality? All I can say is that what is witnessed cannot be described by any distinction and, in particular, cannot be described as existing or not existing.

This calls to mind Lao Tzu's claim that "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao." And just to cut off a road commonly taken he goes on to say you can't say the Tao is Nothingness or Beingness for those are distinctions too.

Of course, all I'm doing here is merely observing the witness. What of witnessing the witness?

This points to the answer to so many Zen koans ... "What is your original face?" for example ...

-Steve

Why we should teach philosophical inquiry to kids ...

There was an interesting post in TEDblog earlier this month called "Why we should teach philosophy to kids". The post reports on a study of 105 kids who were taught using the Socratic Method for 1 hour a week for 16 months. The study concluded that "compared with 72 control children, the philosophy children showed significant improvements on tests of their verbal, numerical and spatial abilities." Further, when the "philosophy children" were tested again much later, the differences between the "control children" remained or even grew.

This touches something that I've been thinking about a lot lately.  That our educational system often aims at closure rather than openness.  We don't want questions that open new spaces of exploration so much as we want answers that close down exploration. We want certainty and conclusiveness.

Think about it ... did you ever take a test in school that asked you to generate new questions? I hope that some of you will say yes and tell stories of the best teacher you ever had who taught you to think new thoughts instead of regurgitate old ones. Unfortunately, in my own education - K through college - as far as I can recall, they always asked me to answer questions. And this includes my experiences in the working world.

Is it any wonder that companies often get stuck when faced with the necessity to innovate?  Is it any wonder  that people often get stuck in bad habits?

My growing sense is that (philosophical) inquiry is essential to living the good life.

-Steve