Leadership

Why are organizations victim to “negative, culturally-driven patterns” while cities are not, asks Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon. In a most interesting paper, Patrick examines why organizations seem to sabotage  themselves; why cities grow, corporations die and life gets faster; how the food price index is linked to political instability; and a long discussion on the role of witchcraft in most societies.

How Collectives Inhibit Insight (PDF) synthesizes much of my own recent thinking, on bureaucracy and the emergent nature of corporate culture.

These patterns of behaviour are emergent and unintended. Collectives do not sit down and decide by consensus to act in these ways. They just happen. But there does seem to be a “grammar” of collective behaviours, where specific kinds of circumstance will produce specific kinds of social response, and which therefore makes them predictable.

There are two ideas here:

(1) social collectives produce unintended (ie never deliberately planned by individuals or groups of individuals) habits of thinking and behaving, and provide those habits to their members – and these habits have predictable, discoverable “grammars” rooted in the circumstances of the social collective and its needs; and

(2) the natural “grammar” of social collectives in response to insight and innovation is to impose friction on the absorption of new ideas.

If we understand the grammar of how social collectives naturally respond to insight, perhaps we can understand how to work with the insight-activation mechanisms of that grammar, and avoid or mitigate the effects of the insight suppression mechanisms.

Social collectives seem to have a life of their own, no matter what any individual does. This can appear hopeless, but Patrick shows that we a powerful weapon, “we have something that social collectives do not have – and that is metacognition, the ability to reflect on our own thinking processes and to question them.” This is a powerful tool in all that we do within organizations and societies. The ability to see outside of our selves. With much discussion in various venues about 21st century competencies, I would put metacognition at the top of the list, as it’s the core of critical thinking.

Next month I’ll be discussing corporate culture at Sibos in Toronto. My view (not original) is that corporate culture is an emergent property. It is a result of the myriad properties of the organization and its environment. Culture happens, and like a child, once born, the parents are not really in control.

We used to think of organizations like machines, inspired by Newtonian physics 300 years ago. The scientific revolution followed the last communication revolution, the age of print.  Now we face a new revolution as we sit in the middle of the electric age, its disembodied words first spread by the telegraph and now the Internet. With increasing connections and speeds of transmission, our work environments have become much more complex.

In complex environments, emergent practices have to be developed by probing, sensing and responding. This is what I call perpetual Beta; constantly probing the environment, sensing what happens and then responding by creating Beta practices; but always ready to discard them should the situation change. Both culture and practice emerge from the organization and its environment. As John Seely Brown noted, in order to understand complex systems you have to marinate in them.

The one complex system that I know best is my body. I remember as a competitive athlete how in tune I was with my body, feeling the smallest changes. People would ask me what I thought about during races. Most of the time I was monitoring my systems, seeing if I could push a bit harder, change my stride or take advantage of some aspect of the environment. I was marinating in it.

For several decades the idea of the organization as organism has spread, popularized by the work of Peter Senge on the learning organization in 1990.  If you think of organizations like organisms and culture as emergent then it becomes obvious that understanding and monitoring systems is critical.  If you also understand the need to develop emergent practices in order to adapt and thrive, then you know you have to engage the entire organism. As a complex adaptive system, it cannot be directed and there is no obvious link between cause and and effect. You don’t push a button at head office and voilà you get a specific result at the field office. Instead, you keep the body healthy, engaged and constantly learning. The body, and all its constituent parts,  then adapts to its environment.

This is how you develop a healthy corporate culture. Nurture the body, which is composed of people and their relationships, using tools, within a framework of processes and procedures. But designing an effective work system is only part of the solution; it merely sets the stage. Marinating in the resulting complex adaptive system is essential. Monitoring all systems by engaging with them is how we can understand the organization as organism. It cannot be done by managers disconnected from the work being done. It cannot be done from behind a desk. To know the culture, be the culture.

High tolerance for ambiguity is becoming an important leadership trait in increasingly complex, networked environments, explains Riitta Raesmaa in Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions. Three factors that can increase this tolerance are:

1. Systems Intelligence Theory of Esa Saarinen,
2. Value and Importance of Serendipity (the weak links and the edges),
3. Value and Importance of Listening.

I had not heard of Esa Saarinen, but here is how it was described (2007):

By Systems Intelligence1 we mean intelligent behaviour in the context of complex systems involving interaction and feedback. A subject acting with Systems Intelligence engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment. She experiences herself as part of a whole, the influence of the whole upon herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. By experiencing her own interdependence in the feedback intensive, interconnected and holistically encountered environment, she is able to act intelligently … The Systems Intelligence approach is basically about taking [Peter] Senge’s discipline of Personal Mastery and the systems perspective as fundamental, and considering systems thinking only secondary. —Systems Intelligence: A Key Competence in Human Action and Organizational Life

Riitta’s three associations align with our initial work on core skills for our 21st century leadership project.

An example of “intelligent behaviour in complex systems”, is understanding when using a Probe — Sense — Respond approach would be appropriate, as per the Cynefin framework:

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe — Sense — Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane explains what his colleague at Shell, Alain Wouters, told him about complex situations:

There is not “a” problem out there that we can react to and fix. There is a “problem situation” of which each of us is a part, the way an organ is part of a body. We can’t see the situation objectively: we can just appreciate it subjectively. We affect the situation and it affects us. The best we can do is to engage with it from multiple perspectives, and try, in action-learning mode, to improve it. It’s more like unfolding a marriage than it is like fixing a car.”

Enhanced serendipity can be an emergent property of personal knowledge mastery. PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning or as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. Steven Johnson says that “Chance favours the connected mind.”  According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”

Listening, to others and ourselves, often gets lost in the deadline-driven organizational environment. We really need to listen to the environment. My friend Graham Watt shows that when you rely solely on technology in adapting to complex environments, the result can be death:

In Roland Huntford’s book, SCOTT AND AMUNDSEN, a full account is given of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott’s epic competition to reach the South Pole first. Both parties relied on technologies. However, with the arrogance of so-called civilized societies of the time, Scott believed the Inuit to be savages with nothing to teach, and relied on current technologies as well as the British sentimentality towards animals. They wore Burberry cloth clothing, used gasoline tractors as well as ponies, and forsook dog teams for manly man-hauling of sleds. Amundsen, on the other hand, was a lifelong student of Inuit technologies. His sleds were lighter, he and his team dressed in various phases of Inuit clothing. Amundsen used dogs, a proven source of power in the Arctic, able to curl up and snooze at 50 below, and readily edible. A harsh use of them, but no worse than ponies freezing to death in their own sweat.

In the end, the Inuit-based technologies won, and the Amundsen team returned so comfortably they actually gained weight, and at one point, re-climbed a 1000 foot descent from the glacier in order to have another ski run. Meanwhile, Scott and his party, with admittedly bad weather, perished, Scott’s remaining moments spent penning poignant notes to his and his team’s loved ones. Scott emerged as the perceived romantic hero of the whole affair, instead of signaling the death of imperial arrogance. Ironically, Amundsen, the unbiased user of available technologies suited to the task, was dismissed in British circles as perhaps lacking in feeling.

Thus did glory and icy death trump Aquavit and a thousand years of winter experience.