What is the (Next) Message?

More on The End of Vision

2012-01-26T13:15:00.000-05:00

I’ve received some considerable feedback about my article on the Linked 2 Leadership blog, “The End of Vision.” Almost all of the feedback expresses appreciation for introducing the idea of tactility—understanding the intentional and mindful, sustained effects throughout the wider social, material, and natural environments among an organization’s various constituencies.

I distinguish tactility from vision – an imagining of objectives to be attained in the unknowable (and most certainly uncontrollable) future. I argue that vision is obsolescent in the contemporary, UCaPP world; that the pervasive proximity which is characteristic of our times precludes vision as a useful sensory metaphor because it is our only sense that necessarily requires distance and separation to work. Tactility, on the other hand, is our most proximate of senses, the one that best corresponds to today’s reality.

Those who took issue with my rather emphatic negation of vision as continuing to provide useful guidance for leaders unanimously point to the ability of vision to inspire. For example, as Dr. Tom Cocklereese notes, “vision statements have motivated people to move heaven and earth to achieve new heights.” Another commenter observes that vision provides, “passion and energy and ultimately what engages and motivates others.” Without question, I agree that passion, energy, and motivation are vital to inspiring organization members to innovate, achieve greatness, and change the(ir) world. An inspiring vision may contribute to helping people discover their passion—Dr. Tom points to the inspiring visions of Moses, Kennedy, and King Jr. But it would be a grave mistake to conflate vision with passion, inspiration, and motivation. The two are not equivalent, or even necessarily connected.

And that’s the problem: Too many organizational leaders assume that the vision statement they (and perhaps several others at the top of the organization) craft will necessarily, if not automatically, inspire passion and greatness. Sadly, often bleak organizational realities might inspire only cynicism, mistrust, and – let’s face it – mediocrity. How many of our leaders – corporate and otherwise – are truly able to inspire genuine passion that can move nations like those to whom Dr. Tom refers?

Have a look at a sampling of vision statements from well-known companies. Many of them read like the laundry list of next year’s key performance indicators, written in bland corporatese. Some of them are downright aggressive and negative, using words like “destroy” and “crush.” They might inspire the sociopaths that often tend to occupy “executive row,” but as an inspirational vision for today’s world...? The majority of them have a vision to “dominate,” or to “be the best,” or to be the “world leader,” and my favourite nonsensical and useless vision-statement phrase, to “exceed expectations” (as if the organization’s leaders have any clue whatsoever what those amorphous expectations might actually be, whether they are reasonable or rational, whether exceeding them is actually what will benefit their constituencies, and so forth). Especially when committed to paper (or screen), they are almost unanimously devoid of passion, absent of inspiration, stripped of their ability to transform cynical compliance to engaged commitment.

More important, as I point out in my article, in most cases organizational vision becomes a type of blinkered vision, with a single-minded focus on achieving the goals and objectives the vision describes. We have all experienced the destruction and dysfunction throughout the world wrought by single-minded corporate, political, xenophobic, and megalomaniacal visions over the past several decades. We have learned that what might have seemed like a good idea at the time turns out disastrously—made considerably worse by a leadership determined to “stay the course,” even in the face of so-called unintended consequences, code for “unanticipated effects.”

No one could reasonably argue against the premise that today’s world is extraordinarily complex. By definition, this means that nothing of significance in our world is deterministically predictable. Today’s “vision” that certain goals and objectives are right, and appropriate, and true may turn out to be tomorrow’s folly. The direction inspired by vision may create unforeseen, emergent effects that may be worse than unintended—they may be considerably at odds with the fundamental values of the organization, and the values of the organization’s members (which is precisely what I found in my research: in traditional bureaucratic, administratively controlled, hierarchical organizations, “individual humanity scales to collective collective callousness”).

Vision was the appropriate sensory metaphor for organizational guidance in an age that was deterministic, more predictable, more linearly explainable by clockwork, industrialized models. In other words, it was appropriate for the 19th and 20th centuries. Even though the reality of our environment has already transformed to become the UCaPP world that we now experience, people take a long time to catch up (about 300 years from the time the dominant form of communications changes; by my estimation, we’re about 168 years through the transition). Vision has had its day; it’s time to embrace the immediacy and presence of tactility in its stead.

So here’s my suggestion: Find your own tactility. Whom are you going to touch and how are you going to touch them today—and each and every day hereafter? Craft that into a statement which expresses what it is that you do that inspires you, motivates you, and most of all, expresses your passion. Take that personal tactility statement with you wherever you go. Embrace it. Live it authentically. Use is as the answer to the cocktail party question, “so what do you do?” Combine it with the tactilities of those with whom you collaborate in your workplace, enabling your organizational tactility to emerge. Most of all, be mindful of the effects you enable and create throughout your world. (For those who are interested, here’s considerably more on Vision, Values, Tactility, and Mission.)

P.S. Here’s mine: “I enable and create great environments of engagement.” And, I say it with passion!

Reverse Mentoring - A Good Start in Creating Leaderful Organizations

2012-01-20T12:04:00.000-05:00

Today's Globe and Mail has a nice article describing the phenomenon of "reverse mentoring" or "mentoring from the bottom," in which a more junior employee serves as a mentor to a more senior employee - often an executive or senior manager - in ways that "can re-energize older employees, keep younger workers engaged and improve relationships between the different generations in the workplace." In particular (and not unexpectedly) the article focuses on how younger employees can assist their more tech-challenged elders with how to employ social media and how to rethink career advancement strategies in ways that are more in-tune with contemporary "personal branding."

Stereotypes and clichés aside, the notion that good ideas, insights, wisdom, and useful knowledge are the exclusive realm of those who hold more seniority in an organization is by now long obsolesced. One of the hallmarks of more-UCaPP organizations is that employees from every hierarchical level, and all degrees of seniority are invited to contribute and actively participate in organizational venues that were once the sole prerogative of those who had climbed the latter and paid their so-called dues. In fact, my research discovered an organization in which employees from all levels and all departments were invited to take up leadership roles for various infrastructure projects throughout the organization, and invited to participate in what otherwise would be considered senior-level, strategy sessions. In the words of the CEO,

What’s non-traditional about it is the level of contribution [more junior employees] have in almost every decision of the company. They’re often amazed that they’re at the table in those kinds of conversations of these kinds of decisions.... They bring whole new ways of us looking at things. They’ll ask a question and we’ll say, gee, we’ve never thought about it that way. It might be somebody who joined the company two weeks ago as an account coordinator, an entry level position. They might have had an experience through a parent who has told their stories at work, or something they’ve learned at college, or they had an internship, or they’re very well-read or connected, and they put a question on the table that completely changes the way you think about it. And that’s what we’re working very hard not to dismiss, is how much we can learn from anybody, versus it has to be the same five to seven [senior] people, because they’re at a certain status. These decisions are no longer driven on status.

What such a reversal of thinking - that decisions are no longer driven on status - accomplishes is to create more engagement among employees - junior employees - especially those about whom more senior managers often have concerns about engagement and commitment. Diverse inclusion not only provides more insight in decision-making, it also helps motivate employees to be more committed to the enterprise. Additionally, such practices conveys a sense of collective responsibility and mutual accountability among all organization members that serve to encourage individual autonomy and agency. What it accomplishes is more than strengthening leadership in a UCaPP context. It sets the stage for transforming our conception of organizational leadership to become focused instead on creating leaderful organizations.

An Opportunity to Engage With Me as Coach

2012-01-16T13:27:00.000-05:00

Have you ever considered engaging the guidance of a professional coach?

Let me reframe the question: Are you feeling a connection with any of the following intentions as they might pertain to either personal or professional aspects of your life:

What do I want to achieve?
What do I really want in my life right now?
How can I bring myself to face this tough decision and move onward?
How can I be an even more effective leader in my organization?
How can I better integrate my professional and personal lives to be able to live more authentically as “me?”
How can I change the way I work (or what I do as an occupation) to be more in tune with my life’s purpose?
What is my life’s purpose?
How can I feel more complete in what I do as a professional? As a parent? As a person?

Or, to frame all of this more succinctly:

How can I achieve more awareness and more fulfillment throughout all aspects of my life via a guided process of learning, reflection, and focused conversation?

I have the opportunity of a couple of openings in my coaching practice for new clients. We can engage our coaching conversations in person, over the phone, or through technology like Skype. After an initial foundational and discovery session (usually about two hours), subsequent coaching sessions typically run, on average, about 45 minutes to an hour. You should expect that our coaching arrangement would run for at least six sessions post-discovery, either weekly, twice-a-month, or monthly, depending on your schedule and needs.

For those who have worked with me in other contexts – as consultant, academic mentor, or facilitator – the coaching relationship is a different kind of engagement. Coaching is based on the fundamental affirmation that the client is creative, resourceful, and whole, and is closely connected to Appreciative Practices (in a consulting context) and Positive Psychology (in a therapeutic context). Most of all, coaching is centred in developing one's individual potential, enabling more productive and meaningful relationships throughout all aspects of one's life.

I invite you to connect with me – be it now or in the future – whenever you find yourself drawn to enabling and creating change that will lead you to your hoped-for aspirations and desired results.

Update (17 Jan 2012): If you're still wondering, "What can a coach do for you?" Harvard Business Review answers that very question!

Honest Leadership: The End of "Vision"

2012-01-16T00:29:00.000-05:00

Over on the Linked 2 Leadership blog, I have a new post, Honest Leadership: The end of "vision." In it, I open with the controversial idea that,

Vision is terribly over-rated as a valuable attribute of leadership... More than being over-rated, I would suggest that vision is counter-productive to providing appropriate leadership in a world that has become unfathomably complex and rife with intractable problems. Now, before you fill the comment stream with rebuttals along the lines of this: “If you don’t have a vision, you won’t know where your organization is headed…” let me suggest that knowing where your organization is heading may be of less value to society and the world-at-large than realizing the direct and indirect effects your organization is creating along the way.

Regular readers will undoubtedly recognize that in this post, I'm building the case for tactility as the dominant sensory metaphor for organizational leadership, answering the question that I suggest is paramount in today's UCaPP world: whom do we want to touch, and how do we want to touch them, today? Head over to L2L, have a read, and please let me know your thoughts.

Why Johnny and Janey Can't Read - en Espanol!

2012-01-06T16:12:00.000-05:00

Among my earlier "big thinks," and one that formed the basis of almost all of my subsequent work including Valence Theory, was my seminal paper, Why Johnny and Janey Can't Read, and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can't Teach. It traces the the thinking of the Toronto School of Communication and its particular take on interpreting history, and challenges the assumptive ground upon which our institutions of education – primary, secondary and tertiary – are built, and raise the real question of our time – and of any time – namely, what is valued as knowledge, who decides, and who is valued as authority.

Friend Diego Leal has taken this paper and translated it into Spanish as Por qué Juanito y Juanita no pueden leer y por qué el Sr. y la Sra. Gómez no pueden enseñar, which is quite an accomplishment. He writes:

Mark Federman, un investigador de la Universidad de Toronto que en una charla de 2005 proponía unas ideas sobre el impacto de la tecnología en la sociedad que yo no había visto con claridad antes (a pesar de que resuena con el trabajo de Marshall McLuhan o Neil Postman). Diría que su forma de exposición me llevó a ver cosas que no me había comprendido antes, y me ayudó a lograr una perspectiva más amplia, con más raíces históricas, que de alguna manera se ha integrado (de manera muy sutil) en ArTIC. La lectura fue inquietante y tranquilizante a la vez, a pesar de algunos puntos de desacuerdo y de los años que ya pasaron desde que la charla fue realizada...

Comprender esto tiene enormes implicaciones para cualquier persona que participe en procesos educativos de cualquier tipo, por lo que encontré muy valioso realizar una traducción de la charla. Como digo, aunque en ella hay muchas ideas que uno se ha encontrado en muchos otros sitios, la mirada desde la que las aborda da una perspectiva histórica que, al menos para mi, resultó invaluable.

Muchas gracias, Diego, for your interest in my work, and even more for enabling the ideas to be more widely disseminated throughout the world.

"Personal Value Proposition?" Not so fast

2011-12-05T11:15:00.001-05:00

The HBR Blog has a post that suggests,

"Executives set value propositions for their products — the target market segments, the benefits they provide, and their prices. It's why a target customer should buy the product.But value propositions go beyond just products. Your personal value proposition (PVP) is at the heart of your career strategy. It's the foundation for everything in a job search and career progression — targeting potential employers, attracting the help of others, and explaining why you're the one to pick. It's why to hire you, not someone else.

On the surface, it seems to make good sense. After all, knowing the unique value one can provide to a potential employer or organization that may wish to engage her/him is an important aspect of both understanding oneself and getting hired.

However...

As I describe in my popular keynote, "Take me to Your Leaders: Collaborative leadership and trust," the models we create and the language we use are not only descriptive, they are generative. In other words, they generate the institutions that in turn generate our society and the world in which we live.

With articles like this one posted on the HBR blog, I have to step back and question whether the use of corporate/business vocabulary, metaphors, and clichés like "personal value proposition" are appropriate for human connections and interactions in our contemporary context. When we adopt this sort of framing, we contribute to the subtle but systemic dehumanizing effects that characterize corporate colonizing of the life-world. It's not surprising that a corporatist/managerialist institution like HBR would promote business language in the context of personal development and realizing what one can provide that is of value.

Nonetheless, I think it is incumbent on those of us who actively promote a more humanistic, relationship-based construction of society - a construction of society that is more consistent with the complex reality of the contemporary UCaPP world - to mindfully transform the discourse. Exchange of value is but one of the five valence relationships (that is, Economic Valence). There are four others - Socio-psychological, Knowledge, Identity, and Ecological - that we should all strive to "build" without giving dominant preference to any one of them. A healthy organization based on healthy relationships strives to balance the valence relationships, in order to make not only better decisions, but more holistic, balanced, effective decisions.To do so means transforming the language we use throughout our daily interactions, especially in workplaces.

The Agenda on Gross Domestic Happiness

2011-12-04T16:36:00.001-05:00

On Friday, I had the pleasure of once again appearing on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, on the topic of Gross Domestic Happiness. Essentially, the premise of the conversation is that, "GDP is an incomplete measure of a country's success. Can you judge success by economic growth alone? Will measuring happiness help government make better policy?" The participants - two in Washington, one in London, England, one in Vancouver, and me with Steve in the Toronto studio - covered a wide range of ideas. For my part, I was able to make pitches for the value of qualitative measures, a focus on effects, a complexity view of the world, and the importance of social innovation. As always, Steve's natural curiosity and inquisitiveness, and his exceptional skills as a moderator created a great engagement among the participants, and a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion.

What We Have Here is a Failure of Leadership

2011-12-02T19:15:00.001-05:00

As a friend of mine often says, “you’re never a complete failure; you can always be used as a bad example.” The latest instalment of the ongoing soap opera, [Toronto Mayor] Rob Ford vs. The Star, has our not-tiny, far-from-perfect mayor instructing Torontonians to join him in boycotting Toronto’s – and Canada’s – largest circulation newspaper. His office will not even share official city communications with Star reporters, because the mayor does not like they way the newspaper’s (mostly critical coverage) of him.

One could easily be critical of Mayor Ford for his fundamental lack of understanding of the role of the fourth estate in civil society and governance. (I’m sure that Ford is not at all familiar with the works of Thomas Jefferson who, in 1799 wrote that, “our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.”) Denying access to particular segments of the press – and more generally, the massmedia – is a favourite tactic of demagogic politicians who know that today’s political media live and die by their access to said demagogues… err.. politicians. Typically, it is mostly right-wing politicians who would prefer the banana-republic or totalitarian versions of a press corps, if not state controlled, then certainly state appeasing.

From where I sit, however, Rob Ford is creating himself as a really good, bad example of leadership. One of the most important aspects of effective, contemporary leadership is the creation of a culture of inquiry. This is an organizational culture where everything, and everyone, is subject to critical questioning about whether or not the organization is steering itself on a trajectory consistent with its collective values and organizational intent with respect to the effects it creates and enables throughout its environment. In a Valence Theory conception, a city is indeed an organization in which it is vitally important that conversations about values, intentions, and effects are robust, thoughtful, engaging, and inclusive. It is not sufficient to create meaningless town hall meetings in which politicos give very limited airtime to people, but ignore all those who express contrary opinions. It is not acceptable to claim carte blanche with respect to all (especially ideologically driven) policy initiatives via a majority mandate obtained during a general election. And, it is unconscionably wrong to force the institutions that the populace trust to shed light on political machinations to “receive Ford’s releases from kind reporters at competing media outlets.”

Instead, contemporary leaders should welcome the type of critical scrutiny they receive from even the most partisan and seemingly biased, opposing media outlets. In a healthy culture of inquiry, leaders can reflect on whether there are indeed kernels of insight that can inform their ongoing learning and future policy directions that they can obtain from these otherwise annoying sources. This, of course, applies to any organizational leader, not just public figures. In this sense, it should be a daily ritual for a leader to look at her/himself in the mirror and ask, what and who have I missed in my thinking, my analysis, my plan?

Leaders who don’t invite naysayers to their table – indeed, those who slam the door in their faces – are missing important guidance for a complex world.

Creating “Smarter” Organizations

2011-11-28T22:11:00.001-05:00

Several items have collided in my field of awareness and that always merits a post (especially since I’ve been remiss on blogging in the run-up to, and during, my teaching trip to Sweden). I took advantage of the travel time to re-read Westley, Patton, and Zimmerman’s great book, Getting to Maybe—How the world is changed. This is a book about complexity, social innovation, and non-deterministic approaches to intractable problems. It’s about both personal transformation, and transforming our collective understanding of how to effect change when one clearly cannot be in control. Arguably, as one of my friends never neglects to point out to me, you may be in charge, but you can never be in control. Mostly true, of course—especially when dealing with complex human systems. However, there are many aspects that we can control: one of which is our intention; another, the intensity we bring to transformational undertakings; yet another is the passion with which we strive towards our intention.

In the somewhat unconventional way I tend to connect ideas and observations, the triplet of intention, intensity, and passion came to front-of-mind when friend Holly MacDonald asked on Twitter this morning, “what are three things that an organization could do to demonstrate it was serious about learning?” My response (expanded from Tweetish) was: For organizations truly serious about learning? More reflection on the effects of actions; less blaming and witch-hunting postmortems in the name of so-called accountability; and more adaptive behaviours to navigate complex environments rather than deterministic planning and expectations of perfect execution.

I cannot count the number of organizations I’ve come across that consider themselves committed to organizational learning simply because they invest in employee training. (I know there will be some readers who will roll their eyes at that, and others who will think, what’s wrong with that?) Organizational learning, like adult education, requires active reflection on lived experiences. It requires a commitment to be accountable for what can be done to achieve success from where one is located right now, rather than defending past decisions or action. It requires navigation among the complexity of the unforeseeable – including the potential to change destinations – rather than “staying” some arbitrary course, if only to demonstrate that a prior decision was the “right” one. To accomplish effective organizational learning – that is, learning where the acquired knowledge sustains and informs future decisions – requires that members bring an intention to bring about desired effects in their (and the organization’s) interactions with others. To persevere in the face of unexpected twists, turns, and setbacks that often characterize complex situations requires one to bring presence, intensity, and even passion to the situation. Most certainly, being able to nimbly adapt when confronted with navigating complex situations necessitates possessing a comfort with ambiguity, uncertainty, and not necessarily knowing where one might end up.

It is this last aspect that often stymies even the best of organizational learning intentions. Because leaders are expected to be in control (not merely in charge), to be able to plan and to execute the plan (or be executed for failure), it is almost invariably deemed unacceptable for organizational learning initiatives to have a mindset of “we don’t know what we’re going to learn, but we’ll know it when we learn it.” But true organizational learning is all about discovery, making inroads on what we don’t know that we don’t know. As such, it’s impossible to plan for and quantify, to set “measurable and actionable organizational learning targets” (paraphrased from a BAH organization’s annual management objectives review form). Rather, leaders who espouse organizational learning as a core value would be advised to enable environments that encourage their organizations to be ready to learn: embracing uncertainties, being prepared for transformation, and directing intention towards relationship effects, that is, the organization’s tactility. Sustaining such an environment, especially in the face of more traditional action, “accountability,” and achieving measurable objectives requires… you guessed it: those same three attributes!

Now, if only more organizational environments were created in such a way so as not to deliberately stifle intention, diminish intensity, and destroy passion, imagine how smart would those organizations become from all the learning they could accomplish!

Reflections on Creating a Degree Program: Conversation Café 3

2011-11-15T16:36:00.001-05:00

Among the “harvested” ideas that came forward from our third, and final, Conversation Café of this phase of developing our new Master’s degree in Leadership and Organization Development, and Executive Coaching was this: our program should have a “future-driving” orientation, in other words, it should create and enable change. Our eventual graduates will be asked to facilitate other individuals’ and organizations’ transformations, enabling them to move to a new place – literally, basho – rather than being satisfied with attaining new specific goals or objectives. But it occurs to me that the specific expression of this idea – future-driving – is not quite correct. Traditional leadership training is all about driving the future, creating the future, living in the future. Consistent with being in a UCaPP world, I think our greater concern, and indeed, our most pressing challenge, is how to drive, create, and live in the present.

In other words, our focus (as the Café participants also noted) might more effectively be directed towards the question of how to encourage leaders to appreciate, understand, and become comfortable with the “complexity of supporting the change that is happening right now.” How do we create the necessary learning to accommodate emergent change as a way of being, without feeling the need to control or “manage” the change in ways that might stifle the appropriate and necessary evolution of the organization? One key characteristic of UCaPP organizations is that their leaders have learned to become comfortable with complexity (ambiguity, uncertainty, and emergence rather than control). They embody this new-found comfort in ways that, in turn, create new forms of engagement and flexible modes of operating that are consistent with the newly emergent properties of their organizational systems. Thus, our program must create learning experiences that enable participants to become comfortable with ambiguity and complexity in an environment not devoid of structure, but not frozen by it, either. One participant suggested the neologistic metaphor of “cloudworks” in contrast to the highly structured, deterministic “clockworks,” connoting a looser structure of flow and emergent, but clearly discernible, form. This metaphor serves to identify the issue of how to create “complexity education”—learning environments appropriate for participants to embody and assimilate principles of complexity as a guiding model for understanding human dynamics.

When we speak of embracing values of social transformation and social innovation, we necessarily involve processes that substantially encompass more than driving towards pre-conceived goals. This concept represents a substantial shift in the notion of leadership for contemporary circumstances: leadership becomes embedded process rather than embodied role. One aspect of contemporary, UCaPP leadership exists as an “ongoing series of conversations around questions that matter.” So, too, must a program that will help to develop contemporary leaders and organizations. Conversations around questions that matter enable cultures of inquiry – invaluable when it comes to navigating a trajectory of intended effects amidst complex environmental interactions – that necessitate fostering a sense of curiosity throughout an organization. This means that organizational members exist in a space of curiosity that opens the mind to be able to imagine what is possible. In doing so, organizations eliminate the fear of failure—sometimes overwhelming, stress-inducing concerns of potentially not being able to achieve a specific end, goal, or objective. This does not mean that “failure” itself is not eliminated (and as reflected in our program, that all students will unconditionally “pass” irrespective of performance or lack thereof). Instead, it reconstitutes the notion of “failure” in a context of complexity, transformation, and innovation, alternative futures that become possible, and navigating for intended effects.

Our first Conversation Café provided the inspiration for a motto: “Transform the individual. Transform the organization. Transform the world.” This Café suggests “4 Ps” that might characterize the type of applicants and students we would want to encourage: those with Passion, Potential, Path/Plan, and Perception. Consistent with the ideas expressed in the previous paragraph, the “plan” would be a different sort of (complexity-oriented) plan than might be typical of a more conventional graduate program. In particular, we would strive to attract people who see the ethos of this program as a personal life goal integral to their passion. We would invite people for whom this program is personally meaningful in the context of “making a difference in the world”; for them, it would not merely be the “next employable thing.”

In traditional education and training, there is often a large gap between what is academically taught, and what is actually experienced (and adaptively applicable) in practice. “Real life” must intersect with “real play” in the learning environment to create transformative experiences that draw on the creativity of the participants. This observation from among our Conversation Café participants is yet another expression of the praxis principle in adult learning that will be embraced and embodied in the context, process, and content of this degree program. Participants introduced the concept of “Living Labs” that extends the common construct of a practicum in useful ways. Living Labs might sustain between courses, and perhaps involve a larger segment of a given cohort, instead of being an individual placement. Living Labs could be a possible way to create a vehicle that enables a more authentic intersection between “life” and “play.” Such extended, collaborative engagements could provide specific but larger opportunities that would enable students to apply, practice, and transfer learning to real world environments, in keeping with some of the transformative aspirations of our program. On an individual level, students would be invited, encouraged, and actively supported to engage in iterative reflective practices as a means of advancing and assimilating their own experiential learning. As an aside, how many contemporary university courses ask their students to write “reflection papers,” or keep some sort of journal, throughout the course, without providing specific guidance on what mindful reflection is really about? Among the “fundamentals” that underlie the overall learning, I would intend to remedy this common oversight in the service of enabling students to become truly mindful, reflective practitioners.

Many of the ideas shared by the Conversation Café participants reflect what are often understood to be good principles of Adult Education. Good adult learning derives from: embedded, embodied, and explicit knowledge, active incorporation of participant (that is, both instructor and learner) experiences; inquiry from within (in other words, reflective practices); hands-on, experiential learning in and from live situations; combined with feedback and feedforward that continually inform and evolve the program content and process. Thus, we create environments of co-learning. Everyone in the environment is both a learner and a co-creator of knowledge. Knowledge, wisdom, and insights exist throughout the room, not just at the front. As a consequence of these principles – co-learning and co-creation of knowledge – we would consider our program to be successful if our graduates can inspire leaders to create environments of co-learning within their organizations. One way of encouraging this is for students to create an organization within their cohort to put their learning into practice via Living Labs, as I described above. Taken together with principles of co-learning, this idea speaks to the true embodiment of learning, reflective practice, seeking transformation, and praxis. It also speaks to an intention towards social transformation within the organizations that our program will touch and hence, expresses the program’s tactility.

For our students, the profound experience of transformation in the context of the program will be embodied in the visceral experience of being simultaneously awe-struck and awe-inspired. But this raises an important question with respect to evaluation and assessment: In a practical sense, how do we jointly accomplish this transformational experience with integrity, that is, being true to both our and the participants’ aspirations, without abdicating our pedagogical ethos and responsibilities? A large part of the individual assessment will necessarily be subjective, collaboratively completed between participants and instructors, and qualitatively expressed via narratives that describe, for example, the circumstances of the student’s most compelling change process. This idea echoes an idea from our first Conversation Café in which students would be assessed not according to whether they achieved specific, pre-conceived goals, but rather according to the degree to which their goals transformed and emerged consistent with their learning experiences throughout the program. Included in such an assessment would be an understanding of how effectively learning is transferred to workplaces, both during the students’ direct participation in the program and thereafter, as a direct application of what has been learned during the course of the degree. In doing so, our students begin to introduce the process of praxis into workplaces in ways that begin to transform those environments towards becoming a true, reflective, learning organization. This, in turn, means that the design principle of praxis must be made explicit to our participants, incorporated as key element of reflective practice, and embodied as a way of being among our students and graduates.

Finally, our participants strongly expressed the notion that we must be in the business of developing the whole person “in relation” through a series of reflective considerations: Who am I; what do I value; what skills do I possess; what behaviours do I enact; what sort of environment do I enable? To support these critical self-reflections over the time of the program, it will be incumbent on us to provide specific guidance for our participants to manage “energy,” more than just time and resources. Mindfulness practices will likely play a large role here. There must be an explicit acknowledgement of the polarity between “tension” and “serenity” wherein the participants must live that balance during their participation in the program. Such active acknowledgement will enable our program to be sustainable, balancing the considerations of performance with renewal.

Reflections on Creating a Degree Program: Conversation Café 2

2011-11-10T16:55:00.001-05:00

Transformation and language—two key themes that came out of our second Conversation Café seeking ideas and inspirations for the development of our proposed Master’s Degree in Leadership and Organization Development, and Executive Coaching. Not unexpectedly, much of the language that I have been using to describe important, healing-oriented processes among organizations has already been co-opted by the managerialist discourse (according to some of our participants). In particular, the increasingly worn cliché of “change” seems to be giving way to “transformation” as a catch-all, synonymous euphemism for instrumental, mostly unwelcome, counter-inclusive processes. One participant even noted that in her practice, she has come across an organization that glibly uses the phrase “organization transformation” to refer to the heavy-handed, BAH layoffs practice formerly referred to as downsizing (or even worse – from the perspective of management clichés – “rightsizing”).

In what some might call a time-honoured practice, more-conventional consultancies often appropriate language that has been deliberately chosen to suggest new ground, context, and meaning. In doing so, those who cynically adhere to managerialist learning from as far back as the famous Hawthorne experiments of the late 1920s and early ’30s, have come to realize that workers can often be manipulated into compliance (possibly resulting in temporary increases in productivity) by introducing change that appears to be positive, including nominative changes in language. Thus, it is vitally important that as a school and faculty that will create its reputation on true transformative practices, we must first fully understand and appreciate what we mean by terms such as “transformation.”

Among the conversations, one simple yet profound aspect came through very clearly: Self is emergent not through deterministic, goal-oriented training, but from the assimilation of reflective learning of one’s experiences in the context of history, culture, and prior knowledge. Transformation in this sense occurs when the individual explicitly realizes, and can articulate, a fundamentally new context for their life in which prior (and future) experiences can be understood with new meaning. In turn, “emergent self” becomes an agent of similar transformation in other individuals, and among environments in which that individual participates. What this means for the development of our program is that specific skills for personal transformation must be encouraged and nurtured among all our members, including both students and faculty, in a suitably safe environment. These skills encompass an ability for self-awareness and mindful reflection; self-cultivation together with collective co-cultivation; realizing the resultant basho that is thereby created; creating a non-conventional self-plan that focuses on trajectory and navigating for effects, rather than necessarily attaining a specific objective or preconceived goal.

In a similar vein, commonly understood (which means that everyone understands them, but few people would unpack them the same way) terms such as “Leadership,” “Organization,” and “Executive” must be clearly and appropriately contextualized in our program in a way that will clearly delineate and differentiate what Adler’s future master’s degree offers that is distinct from any other institution. Likewise, words like “Development,” and “Coaching.”

Among aspects of our program’s tactility, we would strive for our participants – in-program students and especially graduates – to feel a calling to seed and effect transformations consistent with the values of the program. Such emergent dissemination among the various environments in which they participate would occur long after their direct participation in the program has finished. In this sense, the need being addressed by the program addresses the question: How will organizations redefine themselves and their processes given the complex manifestations of transformation that are now occurring throughout society? This suggests a direct, follow-on question: In what ways can our program demonstrate and offer unique guidance – via our students, faculty, and graduates – towards the answer(s) to that question of redefinition? And perhaps equally important for our sustainable success: How do we appropriately identify those individuals who want (and are prepared) to transform themselves in such a manner for this program to be appropriate for them?

The short answer is that we would be seeking those people for whom earning this degree would be more than a simple, instrumental benefit, that is, more than a mere “academic exercise.” In traditional education and training, there is often a large gap between what is academically taught, and what is actually experienced (and becomes adaptively applicable) in practice. Pervading our entire curriculum – every course syllabus and practicum experience – “real life” must intersect with “real play” throughout the learning environments. In this way, we would strive to create transformative experiences that challenge the creativity, engagement, and commitment of all our participants. As those who participated in our Conversation Café expressed these ideas, I observe yet another expression of the principle of praxis in adult learning—experience recursively transforming into embodied knowledge that informs subsequent practice. Conversation Café participants identified the concept of “living labs” comprising intervention engagements with practicum clients that could sustain between courses as a possible way to create a vehicle that enables “life” and “play” to intersect in this context.

Down with Learning Clichés!

2011-11-03T16:48:00.000-04:00

Part of the joy – and part of the challenge – in designing a new graduate program pretty much from scratch is the opportunity to reflect on, and incorporate to some extent, my deeply held values and philosophy of education; especially adult education. With respect to the study of media, Marshall McLuhan claimed, “To understand media, one must probe everything … including the words … and oneself.” I would say the same is precisely true with respect to contemporary education, that we must indeed probe everything—our assumptions, our language, and ourselves as both learners and teachers.

One assumption that has become so pervasive in pedagogy that takes on the characteristic glibness of a cliché is the myth of so-called learning styles, and specifically, the notion that everyone learns differently. Nonsense, I say! People do not “learn differently.” That now overly tired and overdue-to-be-retired cliché derives from a post-Enlightenment, early Modernity understanding of disciplinary segregation of abstract knowledge in formal education. I strongly suggest that such a view is no longer adequate as a relevant basis for pedagogy in our contemporary world that is complex and characterized as ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate (UCaPP).

All people learn through repeated and recursive processes of reflection on experiences, be they formally or informally situated; graphically or textually dominant; predominantly visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, or otherwise; coerced, invited, or spontaneous; and combinations and permutations of the foregoing. The key question – arguably, the only salient question – for contemporary educators is, how best to create environments and circumstances that enable optimal conditions for relevant experiences, well-contextualized reflections, and assimilated embodiment of the resultant knowledge that would enable the intended effects of the educational process; that is, praxis.

Reflections on Creating a Degree Program: Conversation Café 1

2011-10-28T16:45:00.003-04:00

Having spent a good part of this week reflecting on theinsight, suggestions, and collective wisdom shared at our first Conversation Café for the master’s degree we are developing in leadership and organization development, and executive coaching, here are some ideas and inspirations thatstand out for me.

Most academic degree programs are focused on knowledge. Ifthere is a critical or constructivist bent about them, they include a strongacknowledgement of ways of knowing. If the degree is professionally oriented,as opposed to more purely academically focused, it will additionally have astrong emphasis on practice, or ways of doing. What we heard strongly from ourparticipants – consistent with my own thinking – is that this new program mustalso encourage individual transformation—realization of each participant’shuman potential, holding an inherent optimism in the value of that potential,and being true to the notion that individual change is intimately connected andimplicated in the larger project of social change. This adds one more “ways”dimension to knowing and doing, namely an equal emphasis on ways of being inthe world, and particularly, ways of being in relation in the world.

We can consolidate these ideas as Savoir³: Savoir,Savoir Faire, and Savoir Être, or Knowing, Acting, and Being.These three, to be integrated by design into all aspects of the degree program,represent the dual ethos of praxis and transformation thatinforms not only our program and pedagogy, but the intended experiences that weintent to enable among our participants. Thus, what may well become the sloganof our eventual degree program is almost self-evident:

Transform the individual.
Transform the organization.
Transform the world.

How, then, will our students know if they are successful inthe context of such guiding principles; indeed, how will we know if our program itselfis successful? With conventional academic degrees, the answer is fairlyobvious: students are graded for assignments and summative assessmentsaccording to some appropriate rubric, they accumulate a certain number ofcourse credits that are required to complete degree requirements, and theschool itself processes… rather, graduates a continual flow of completedcandidates.

However, if the objective of both the program and (presumably)the students themselves is transformation, how can that be assessed in amore-or-less rigorous, but non-positivist, fashion? (There is another postbegging to be written on how the notion of objectivity – externally constructedmeasures of truth that impose themselves as structure – renders a degreeprogram inorganic; in other words, dead—but that's for another day.) Several Conversation Caféparticipants coalesced around the idea of defining success in terms of theparticipants’ individually held understanding of “where and how do I want togrow?” and “what needs of mine am I trying to fill?” This is a useful startingpoint, as it suggests appropriately facilitated processes of reflection andcheck-in through our participants’ transition through the degree process. However, alarge part of measuring transformation must be rooted in how the individual’sperceived needs evolve and emerge consistent with the individual’s changingworldview. Merely satisfying preconceived needs and attaining goals projectedfrom one’s starting point suggest a deterministic process that is inconsistentwith the type of transformative effects that are at the heart of the program’sethos. In particular, the program can only consider itself successful if thereare aspects that the learner will discover as s/he navigates the programexperiences through which individual transformation begins to emerge. It isquite likely that the successful participants will change their intended anddesired outcomes for growth, personal transformation, and perceived needsduring the course of the program. Conversely, we might say that if one’srecognized and self-perceived needs haven’t changed by the end of the program,the person simply hasn’t been paying attention!

How, then, do we evaluate our students? As a capstone or thesisendeavour, they must be able to usefully demonstrate what they have contributedin their individual and collective transformative contexts to Savoir³—Knowledge,Action, and Reflection on Being. Success is manifest in the studentsnecessarily engaging in complexity thinking, creating connections in socialrelation as a way of being, and having experienced transformation among thethree elements that comprise Savoir³. Part of the summativeevaluation challenge for the students will be for them to design and realize thatdemonstration—how’s that for transformation in pedagogy?

In many contemporary degree programs that address leadershipand organization development, there is a strong thread – if not overarchingtheme – of change. Change management, resistance to change, organizing forchange, ensuring organizational readiness for change, technologies of change—Ihate to use the very tired cliché of “and the list goes on,” but I’ve surveyedquite a few graduate programs and the list indeed continues in this fashion!

In keeping true to the ethos that inspires and provides impetusfor this program we – without question – need to foster a change in ourown understanding and experience of change itself: from deterministic, planful,outcome/objective/goal-biased change to an appreciation andunderstanding of, and comfort with, emergent transformation, navigatingintended effects among complex human environments. This concept stronglysuggests – almost mandates – considerable care in adopting a new(er) lexicon throughout ourcurriculum content and subject matter. Curriculum is only a framework for theprogram. To effect the type of transformation suggested by holding true toSavoir³, our intent in course designs will be to create powerfulexperiences that will enable our students to make sense of their own contextsand histories through both the source materials and collective experiences ofinstructors, other participants, and other engaged constituencies. Out of thesepowerful, sense-making experiences Savoir³ will emerge in ways thatcomplete the course syllabi and overall curriculum.

If you are interested in contributing to this conversation,there are still a few places available for both our November 1 and November 7Conversation Cafés in Toronto—please contact me for details and an invitation. And,if you are unable to attend, I would be grateful to hear your thoughts, either in the comments or directly by email.

To Transform the World...

2011-10-21T17:30:00.001-04:00

The business strategy underlying the new master's degree program we are creating:

"To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves. However small may be the world we live in, if we can transform ourselves, bring about a radically different point of view in our daily existence, then perhaps we shall affect the world at large, the extended relationship with others." - J. Krishnamurti

Business strategy, you ask? Indeed: it this reifying this realization that will make our proposed degree in leadership and organization development, and coaching distinct from similar offerings from larger, more established schools. By transforming the conventional practice of organization development away from the notion of project and change management; conventional leadership away from mustering resources to accomplish missions; and conventional coaching away from instilling hubris-laden over-confidence all towards the tactility of relationship-oriented effects, we will enable strategies to transform business, governmental, and educational organizations for today's world. And that, is an appropriate strategy for contemporary business.

Narrative Coaching and Organization Transformation

2011-10-20T17:52:00.002-04:00

I’ve just spent two days attending a Narrative Coaching workshop offered by David Drake (and the newly formed Canadian Centre for Narrative Coaching). The premise that underlies this particular modality of coaching is, “we are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves.” If we want to change ourselves and overcome obstacles that appear to be blocking our learning, our growth, our development, and (as so often seems to happen) our success, the first step is to change our story. It’s a tremendously useful and powerful technique, and one that is quite comfortable to me, since it aligns quite well with my prior work.

Besides being reminded that I can be a pretty effective coach in my own right (and thanks to the many participants who offered me the privilege of helping them make sense of their challenges), I was struck by the realization of how relevant Valence Theory is to helping organizations make sense of themselves, and of the changing environment to which they must adapt, in the context of narrative coaching. Valence Theory enables organizations to “instantly” transform their story, from an objective- and goal-based, mission-oriented-at-all-costs machine, to an organic, vital, responsive, and naturally adaptive organism comprised of people, environments, constituencies, and most important of all, relationships. This change in the framing of an organization’s story enables its members to make a different sense of their organization’s place in the world, and the effects that they enable and enact—as well as the goals they achieve along the way.

Among the things that excites me about the new master’s degree program we are creating here at the Adler Graduate Professional School is that the program will be internally consistent with the theories of organization, leadership, and coaching that we will espouse via our curriculum and course syllabi. This means that we intend to walk our talk, so to speak, and regularly check-in with ourselves and our member constituencies to ensure that, indeed, the story we are telling ourselves as we progress is one that best serves all of us. This aspect alone, it seems to me, will allow us to set our degree program apart from those that are offered at other schools. Most important, it will enable us to attract both the right students and the right faculty that will contribute their experiences and perceptions, and transform them into knowledge that will inform a very particular practice of leadership and organization development and coaching: praxis that will transform and heal organizations, and beneficially serve contemporary society.

Interested in Contributing to a New Masters Program in Leadership and Org Development, and Coaching?

2011-10-11T10:41:00.000-04:00

The opportunity to participate in creating something new happens upon us all too infrequently. When that “something new” involves something that truly matters to our lives, our practices, our workplaces, and indeed to society as a whole, the opportunity becomes a gift. We are at the beginning of just such an adventure—the creation of what we anticipate will become an accredited Master’s degree in Leadership and Organization Development, and Coaching at the Adler Graduate Professional School.

Consistent with our core team’s philosophy of how engaged and healthy contemporary organizations emerge through creating collaborative relationships, we are holding four evening Conversation Cafés to which we are inviting members of four, key constituencies: Coaches, OD Practitioners, Potential Students (anticipated to be mid-career professionals), and Potential Faculty. Each Conversation Café will be limited to a maximum of twenty participants so that we are able to create effective and engaging interactions among us all.

If the prospect of such a professionally-oriented Master’s degree excites you, we welcome your participation and contributions to help inaugurate a new program that is truly new.Each evening is nominally oriented to each of the four, identified constituencies; we invite you to attend the evening to which you are most drawn. However, if you are unable to attend on the specific night to which you most connect and are nonetheless moved to participate, you are most welcome to attend on any of the other evenings.

The events will be held on:

Monday, October 24 – Coaches & OD Practitioners
Tuesday, November 1 – Potential Faculty
Monday, November 7 – Potential Students

Each event will be held at the Adler Graduate Professional School, 890 Yonge Street (Yonge and Davenport), 9th floor, from 18:00 to 21:00. Light refreshments will be served. Because participation is limited by the dynamics of Conversation Café, and we anticipate there will be broad interest in this exciting initiative, please RSVP directly to me as soon as you are able—and certainly before Friday, October 21 for the first session. Please indicate the evening on which you would like to attend (with a possible second choice in case the evening you request fills up).

We are tremendously excited by the prospects for this new degree, and what it will mean to the practices of Coaching, Organization Development, and Leadership in our remarkably complex, contemporary world.

A Master's Degree in Leadership and Organization Development, and Coaching

2011-10-01T14:00:00.003-04:00

The last chapter of my doctoral thesis was a "Conversation with Nishida" in which I essentially posted a request to the universe to facilitate my life's work of helping organizations to heal based on the ideas of Valence Theory, a new, fundamental, emergent model of organization based on binding and interacting relationships among its multiple, member constituencies. My "inner Zen master," Nishida, instructs me to:

“Become a sensei for others,” he responds without missing a beat. “There are many whom you can inspire with your passion for healing that-which-is-not-well in human interaction all around us.” He spreads his hands wide, palms facing upward. “The writing does not matter; nor do the letters you will acquire after your name. To inspire others to perceive, to question, to contemplate, to reflect, to respond—to think new thoughts about all they may have seen for years throughout their lives but too readily accept or ignore. Those are the important matters to which you must now turn your attention. This thesis is done. Now you must begin.”

The universe tends to respond to such requests in unexpected ways. Defying all conventional logic (but what else is new?) I have been offered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a collaboration that will bring a new graduate program into being at the recently accredited Adler Graduate Professional School, (tentatively to be called) a Master's in Leadership and Organization Development, and Coaching - M.LODC, pronounced "melodic," as in "creating harmonious organizations. As we are right at the beginning of this adventure, whatever exists so far is contingent, speculative, aspirational, and - at best - cast in jello, so to speak.

There are quite a number of leadership-focused master's degrees, and several master's programs in organization development. What strikes me about them is that, although there are OD courses in the Leadership programs, and vice versa, there seems to be a distinction between them - a separation of sorts - born in the disciplinarity emanating from the prior cultural epoch about which I write. It is almost as if we take for granted that capital-L Leadership in some ways stands apart from the organization, in the sense of the leader of a parade standing out in front of, and distinctly separate from, those marching behind.

Over the past few weeks since I was offered (and accepted) this great opportunity, I have been wrestling with the questions of our nascent program's values, tactility, and worldview; in other words, its ba. What I think will distinguish the program we are developing from others that nominally offer a similar focus is a fundamental philosophy that organizational leadership has no meaning without the context of organization development. By this I mean that contemporary leadership does not stand on top of, in front of, or in any way apart from the uniqueness that is the organization-in-relation, that is, the valence-conceived instance of an organization. Contemporary leadership must be thought of as being embodied and enacted by process-and-people throughout the entire organization among all its member constituencies, integral to its continual emergence and autopoiesis. In this sense, leadership development and organization development are one and the same, enabled by approaches to individual and collective coaching that are not simply tied to sports-metaphor-laden, rah-rah, motivation-of-the-minute.

We welcome collaborators who feel a passion for this particular philosophical grounding to participate in our program's development (including course development) over the next few months. We will eventually be seeking core faculty, and thereafter (that is, once the new program is accredited) students interested in a very humanistic, relational, and constructionist approach to a Master's degree in Leadership and Organization Development, and Coaching. If you are interested in any aspect of participation - as collaborator, potential faculty, or future student - I invite you to connect.

Let the adventure begin!

Update (12 October 2011): We are holding a series of Conversation Cafés between now and early November to gather the thoughts and insights from the various constituencies that would participate in, and contribute to, this degree. More information is here.

Academic Stuff that Simply Make Me Smile

2011-09-23T19:57:00.000-04:00

I received a request today from the student-run, course materials photocopy service at UC San Diego:

We would like permission to duplicate the following reading material for [a first-year course in culture and technology] with Professor G.in the Fall Quarter 2011.
TITLE: What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?
We would like to print 100 copies and hope that if there is a permission fee for this use, it will be the lowest price possible since we pass along the cost to the students.

Here's how I responded to the request:

Thank you for writing. Most of my material (especially this article) is published under a Creative Commons license that allows for, among other things, educational use without seeking explicit permission.

However, since you've asked, let me assure you that you have my permission to reproduce the article for Prof. G's course without charge, and with only one condition: I would like you to pass along my appreciation to Prof. G for sharing my ideas and approach with his/her students, and to offer my best wishes for the success of the course experience for all involved.

Their response to that? "You drove a hard bargain!"

I LOVE doing stuff like this. Goes along with one of my learning mantras: "Together, we're all smarter!"

From Cargo-cult Management to Transformative Organizational Learning

2011-09-23T14:57:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of participating on a panel for the newly inaugurated, Ontario Learning Network, sponsored by Service Canada University for training and development for Canada's federal civil service. As an adult educator, I was invited to share some of my thinking on organizational learning; in particular, I chose to offer my thoughts on transformative organizational learning:

Transformative Organizational Learning addresses the capital-B, “Big Questions” that concern themselves with what might be possible if we could imagine a future with few, if any, constraints; and how can we begin to take small steps today advancing towards that brilliantly imagined future. ... In a transformative organizational environment, contemporary leadership is not about leading in the conventional sense of assuming control and mustering others in working collectively towards a predetermined objective, that is, in the conventional way most modern managers understand “leadership.” ... Rather, contemporary leadership is about enabling a conducive environment where you can bring people together and engage them to create a shared experience from which an alternative future becomes possible...

The article drawn from my short presentation is here. Download, read, share, enjoy, and most of all, think!

Bureaucracy at its Canadian "Finest"

2011-08-19T12:27:00.000-04:00

In one volume of his landmark, sociological trilogy entitled, The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells describes bureaucracy as, "organizations for which the reproduction of their system of means becomes their main organizational goal." In other words, bureaucracies strive to maintain the bureaucracy and its procedural systems at all costs (which often tend to be high costs) quite irrespective of the nominal purpose or tasks otherwise to be accomplished. The business of the bureaucratic organization is secondary to the preservation of the bureaucracy of the organization.

Such is indeed the case in what might be considered an archetype of a BAH (Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, Hierarchical) organization, the Canadian military. In a "landmark report charged with transforming the Canadian Forces," that was released this week, Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie identifies major restructuring and reallocation of funds away from non-operations-oriented staffing, instead recommending more resources be provided directly to "regular" Forces personnel - those women and men who are actually in the field, on the water, and in the air.

But bureaucracies will go to great lengths to reinforce and preserve themselves, with well-adapted immune systems that overwhelm "attackers" who might seek to create a more effective organization. In this regard, I will let Gen. Leslie's report speak for itself:

Reactions to previous reports urging reform
“If the results were likely to cause institutional angst, a variety of options existed, from waiting until the team disappeared, to conducting lengthy reviews of the recommendations and, finally to classifying the work to an extent that only a few could see it.”

On resistance to this report
“[At] a large meeting in December 2010 involving the generals, admirals and senior DND civil servants ... it became apparent the tendency was to argue for the preservation of the status quo. ... Though grimly amusing, these interactions proved that consensus has not and probably never will be achieved on any significant change.”

How DND handles funding cuts
“Most subordinate organizations have done their very best to preserve their structures, their internal funding (what they need to take care of themselves) and their process ... which usually result in overhead staying much the same while support to the front-line deployable unit is cut far more than originally forecasted.”

On waste and inefficiency
“These are symptomatic of old processes, new overhead layered on old, lots of committees and in certain areas a sometimes bewildering number of steps ...to actually achieve a government directed spending outcome.”

Although it might be easy to chuckle at the "grimly amusing" responses of a military (or even the non-military departments of government) bureaucracy, if you are a leader in your respective organization, how familiar do General Leslie's caveats sound to you?

Abolish Self-Appraisal? Not So Fast

2011-08-08T15:56:00.000-04:00

I’ve just spent the morning flipping through the Harvard Business Review blog, with the odd tidbit of divergent thinking catching my eye (and my Twitter timeline). One item that provoked a “yes, but…” reaction was this item from Dick Grote in which he recommends abolishing self-appraisals from the annual employee review ritual. His argument makes some sort of sense, from a deterministic, quant-oriented, managerialist perspective in which the manager stands in loco parentis, so to speak:

I found study after study that consistently demonstrated that individuals are notoriously inaccurate in assessing their own performance, and the poorer the performer, the higher (and more inaccurate) the self-appraisal. Research by the consulting firm Lominger, Inc. indicates that “the overall correlation between self-ratings and performance was .00. The most accurate rater by far is the immediate boss.”

Further, in their article “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” Cornell University researchers Justin Kruger and David Dunning report that, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine.”

One senior executive, describing his company's experience using a forced-ranking procedure to identify its A, B, and C performers, told me of the same problem: “The As are afraid they'll be considered Bs, the Bs are scared they'll be seen as Cs, and all the Cs are convinced that they're A players.”

A pretty sad indictment of self-appraisal, overall. For me, however, jumping to the conclusion that because people are not skilled at self-appraisal the practice should be eliminated suggests (through similar logic) that, since the vast majority of managers at all levels have little training or expertise in assessment, appraisal, or organizational psychology, and are pretty poor at it, all appraisals should be done away with. Similarly for coaching, correction, motivation, and almost every other practice that is part and parcel of a manager’s day-to-day work. (And let me tell you: working as an organizational therapist and leadership coach, there are days when I am sorely tempted to suggest just that!)

The effect of annual job appraisals – invariably tied to annual salary reviews – is to reinforce the carrot-and-stick motivational theory, a theory to which we have become so culturally indoctrinated that it is taken as a law of human behaviour from our earliest childhood memories: “if you take out the garbage, clean your room, finish your peas, and do your homework, you’ll receive your full allowance.” Why does any adult manager today believe that such a paternalistic approach to contemporary employees will result in anything other than coerced compliance and unthinking adherence to strictly stated procedures—the bane of motivation, innovation, and success? (As an aside, have a look at Dan Pink’s Drive for an understanding of what really motivates people.)

Appreciative Practices (an adjunct to the OD intervention of Appreciative Inquiry) is one way of helping everyone – managers and their staff alike – learn the process of appropriate and useful reflection that encourages both organizational and individual learning from one’s activities. Grote, in his blog post, suggests that “a more effective approach is for the supervisor, at the start of performance appraisal season, to ask each direct report to send him an informal list of his or her most important accomplishments and achievements during the appraisal period.” Sadly, this focus on the “most important accomplishments and objectives” misses what I believe to be the true measure of contemporary organizational effectiveness in a complex environment, namely one’s tactility or the effects one has had on those whom the individual touches.

By considering effects from a place of positive contributions, an employee’s true value to the complexity of the organization can be appropriately assessed. An employee may be a tremendous catalyst to innovation, or to overall group dynamics that facilitated a team’s over-the-top performance. It is almost always the case that a supposed failure (specifically: failure to achieve one or more objectives that were stated 12 months prior without the benefit of precognitive abilities in either the manager or employee) has many very successful catalyzing aspects wrapped up in that supposed lack of achievement. Further, such an approach enables and encourages the employee not only to focus on their own development, but to become aware of development opportunities among the various constituencies with which s/he interacts. I recently described such a case in which an organization that formerly was guilty of all the shortcomings of self-appraisal to which Grote alludes was easily facilitated to accomplish the benefits of reflective learning instead.

So, in a funny way, I support Grote’s call for abolishing self-appraisals as part of the annual performance review. In fact I would go a step farther: abolish the annual performance review altogether (and especially, decouple it from compensation). In its place, substitute a culture of continuous, reflective and appreciative practices. An employee will always know where s/he stands, and an organization will always gain the benefit of learning and innovation.

Organizational Therapy and Positive Psychology

2011-07-17T16:02:00.000-04:00

I was recently asked about positive psychology interventions in organizations, and the use of Appreciative Practices in organization development interventions. In part, here is the essence of my response:

In my role as an Organizational Therapist, I help organizations, their members, and especially their leaders to realize how problematic the traditional ways of organizing and managing have become, especially in today's context. A foundational part of this work is a new model of organization that I developed as part of my doctoral research ("Valence Theory") that serves to rebalance the priorities among organizational engagement among ALL of its members (that include those that are often called "stakeholders" - employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, as well as regulators, and other members of the same industry). A large part of this practice involves transformation of the organizational culture, and that draws heavily from the praxis of transformative learning (from adult education), as well as becoming a values-based, emergent, "organic" (in complexity terms) organization.

Among the big questions are these:

How do we help people to unlearn old behavioural dynamics (that are often about vested power, dysfunctional human interactions, command and control, etc.)? How can we learn instead to adopt those forms of mutual engagement that encourage individual and collective commitment to the higher purpose of the organization - those things the organization would like to promote, preserve, and protect?
How can we encourage and assist people within the organization to attain greater autonomy, accomplish stronger mastery, and connect with their individual higher purposes?
And, how can we attune organizations and their people to navigate among their daily (and longer-term) challenges being cognizant of the multiplicity of interconnecting and interacting effects, so as to enable those effects that serve their values, their purpose, and the greater good?

One among many interventions is to help people to adopt appreciative practices in their dealings with each other, and especially in the context of superior/subordinate relationships. (Note that the concepts of "superior" and "subordinate" ideally evaporate in an organization that successfully transforms towards becoming more consistent with today's societal conditions.) Appreciative practices themselves (derived in the organization development context from the research intervention of Appreciative Inquiry) are consistent with and supportive of positive psychology, incorporating interventions and practices that help people attain pleasurable, engaged, and meaningful lives. It's founder, Martin Seligman, does a great job of describing its tenets in this TED Talk. Nothing, of course, should be considered a panacea. Nonetheless, with the opportunity for substantial improvements in productivity, innovation, member engagement, commitment, social responsibility, and most important of all, happiness and satisfaction, positive psychology based, organizational therapy interventions are unquestionably and tremendously effective.

Practices Makes (Im)perfect Organizational Transformation

2011-06-28T19:31:00.000-04:00

I am in the process of outlining my next book, Conversations with Nishida: Organization, Leadership, and Transformation in a Complex World. In thinking through some of the themes to do with Transformation, I wrote,

Transformation is fundamentally distinct and different from mere change. All transformation reflects change; not all change is transformative. In these Conversations, it is crucial to maintain a clear distinction between the two. BAH can change and remain BAH. In fact, the overwhelming majority of change in the BAH organization – change that is managed through explicit change management interventions, modelled by such programs as Six Sigma, LEAN, or Agile, guided by a preconceived and targeted outcomes as opposed to effects – these changes rarely, if ever, effect organizational transformation, although the changes themselves usually have a significant effect on the organization and its members.

Organizational transformation, in the sense of these Conversations, is ontological—transformative change that affects the organization’s state of being in the world. Transformative change fundamentally shifts how an organization regards itself in relation to its various constituencies, and how its members constitute themselves in relation to each other…

As I reflect on the challenges of organizational transformation, I’m thinking about an organization that is in the midst of a major transformation of its organizational culture. As part of its evolution, the organization is beginning to adopt what I call Appreciative Practices (AP) to inform many of its collective and individual behaviours with respect to development, coaching, and correction. Appreciative Practices are derived from Appreciative Inquiry, a form of organization development intervention that focuses exclusively on strengths, and positive approaches to effect change. (Note: I link to Jackie Kelm’s site because the project in which I was involved used materials that she co-developed.)

In my work with the organization in question, I suggested that the content of their current practice of disciplinary action (that, as in most organizations, is characterized by a suitably ironic euphemism) could be replaced with an application of AP. The benefits are clear: using AP is more readily “hearable” by members who need coaching and/or correction; it focuses on improvements and specific desirable outcomes and effects, rather than errors and wrong actions (as in that old chestnut, “don’t think of an elephant” that makes you think of an elephant); and perhaps most important, it is less stressful and easier to deliver for the manager.

To my surprise, several people in the organization said that they could happily adopt AP for development and annual reviews, but discipline had to be… well, disciplinary! AP just doesn’t feel like an errant employee is being punished, and it is mandatory that they feel that they’ve done wrong.

In this instance, the transition from conventional discipline to AP in correcting and coaching seems to be not so much about changing the employee, but rather more about asserting legitimated organizational authority. Thus, part of effecting a transformation of a traditional organizational culture to one that is more consistent with the aims of AP (and more UCaPP as well!), involves understanding the power dynamics within the traditional structures, and how they must be equally and simultaneously transformed.

In traditional, BAH organizations, the control-resistance power paradigm is a closed, recursive, and iterative loop. Employee does wrong. Manager disciplines. Employee resents. Repeat. (Add the complication of a grievance loop in a unionized environment.) The more control, the more resistance, the more errant behaviours, the more discipline and control, and on it goes. (This, for example, captures the dynamics of the Toronto Transit Commission, and many government workers across all three levels.)

How to break out of this seemingly never-ending loop of power-control-resistance that is fuelled by conventional disciplinary actions, and threatens to stifle the transformed culture? In organizational transformation, the members must first transform their construction of identity, that is the Identity-valence relationship that they mutually create with the organization among its various constituencies. When one constructs oneself as a surrogate for an authority figure (think, “parent” or “teacher”) that metes out discipline, it is unavoidable that a manager will easily give up this fungible aspect of Identity-valence. However, enabling members to first transform towards Identity-ba – one who creates an environment of shared values, sensibilities, and volition to common action – enables an environment in which Appreciative Practices will create the desired behavioural changes without coercion. More important, as the overall environment changes, “misbehaving” employees who choose not to change will soon realize that they do not belong. Employing traditional disciplinary actions in the midst of a BAH-to-UCaPP culture transformation undermines the process by signalling an ambivalence, that the transformational culture is merely nominal, only words with no substance.

Another reason that organizational culture transformation must begin with the leadership.

Contemporary Leadership is NOT About "Leading..."

2011-06-27T15:18:00.001-04:00

Contemporary leadership is environmental.

It is all about enabling an engaging and conducive environment where you can bring people together to create a shared experience in which an alternative future becomes possible.

Would You Read This Book?

2011-06-26T17:44:00.000-04:00

I'm planning to spend a good part of the summer writing. The book, tentatively entitled, Conversations with Nishida: Organization, Leadership, and Transformation in a Complex World, will address questions such as: What is organization? What does it mean to lead in the contemporary world? How can we effect organizational transformation, both in the microcosm of individual groups and in the macrocosm of society at large?

The style of the book would be a series of conversations with a Zen master character, based loosely on the Japanese philosopher, Nishida Kitaro, from whom I obtained the idea of ba - a place of common sensibility, common understanding, common values and common volition to action - that I use in my work. My question to YOU is, would you read a book that deals with these questions, based on this reasoning:

Human behaviour and the social conditions in which we act are often considered as conforming to some “law,” almost as if people’s interactions are subject to a seemingly immutable law of nature. Human social systems – education, business, politics, and the like – are often modelled after such behaviours-as-laws that seek to explain and predict why and how people will interact in specific ways under particular circumstances. However, in human social systems there are no laws of gravity, thermodynamics, or relativity—laws that explain human phenomena that exist outside of, apart, and separate from the people that enact them. At one time in history, the dominant thinking asserted that the Sun travelled around the Earth; much to the chagrin of the medieval Church, the Sun (not to mention other natural systems) did not quite care about the dictates of the Pope (nor the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, for that matter!). Quantum entanglement notwithstanding, natural systems exist and behave quite apart from our limited, all-too-human understanding of them.

On the other hand, models and conceptions of human systems care very much about the dominant thinking of humans who participate in them. In this sense, our social systems of business and commerce, knowledge and education, politics and governance, and organization and leadership are self-generative: in other words, the way we think about our social systems actually creates those social systems. What has been especially true throughout the millennia is that, as society’s means of social engagement and interaction have changed, so too have the fundamental structuring institutions – the aforementioned social systems – of that society likewise changed. Further, as these social systems change and become more widely adopted and increasingly taken for granted as aspects of “human nature,” the formerly dominant systems – those institutions that simultaneously defined and were defined by the way things were – seem increasingly anachronistic and out-of-place in the contemporary world.

We can each, individually and collectively, simply accept the changes that seem to be washing over, and imposing their will upon us. We can accept the interpretation and implications of these changes asserted by corporate, political, and other powerful interests that may or may not be beneficial for humankind overall. Alternatively, we can become aware of the transformative effects emerging throughout our contemporary world and begin to correspondingly transform our mental models of human behaviours throughout the social systems that define a society. In other words, we have the power and ability to reshape our understanding of organization, leadership, and the nature of transformation. We therefore have the ability to reshape our world.

So, is there any interest out there to read more about this?

Requiescat in Pace, Aniko Meszaros

2011-06-20T17:45:00.000-04:00

Shocked and disbelieving are my two, initial reactions. My dear friend, Aniko Meszaros is finally at peace. Her life was short, tragic, and yet brilliant. Aniko was the proverbial shooting star, illuminating the world with her charm, wit, intelligence, creativity, and beauty. Tragically, she was haunted by a dark history and ever-present demons, and she struggled to allow the brightness within her to shine through in her work, in her designs, and in the lives she touched during the best of times.

The aesthetic brilliance that Aniko brought to her work is clearly evident at anikolab. The Projects link - including Real, Speculative, Research, and Performance projects - are but a small window into the way she experienced the world and its potential. I can only imagine what possibilities might have been realized had her life not been hampered, haunted, and ultimately cut so terribly short.

Even though I had not seen her since she moved west, I will miss her presence in the world. May you sleep in eternal peace, dear Aniko. God has a new designer in heaven.

10 Lessons of Organizational Culture Transformation

2011-06-13T14:26:00.002-04:00

If you're not familiar with my writing, a few notes of explanation. UCaPP is an acronym representing the phrase, "Ubiquitous Connectivity and Pervasive Proximity," (or "ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate," depending on usage), the description I use to characterize contemporary societal conditions. BAH refers to "Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, and Hierarchical," a description of traditional management and organizations. UCaPP organizations are mostly described as "collaborative" in the literature, but they are much more than that. For more details, you are invited to visit the wiki site for Valence Theory of Organization - after reading this post, of course!

I’m finishing up a seven-month contract that helped to initiate an organizational culture transformation in a newly acquired Toronto subsidiary of a large American organization. The American organization’s culture is strongly towards the UCaPP end of the BAH-UCaPP organization typology spectrum. On the other hand, the Toronto organization was strongly BAH when I was first introduced to it, and demonstrated many attributes and behaviours that would qualify them for organizational healing—being able to strongly benefit from my practice as an organizational therapist.

Although the formal educational program was prescribed by the parent organization, the Toronto site had specific needs that went well beyond those addressed by the otherwise excellent and insightful formal materials. Nonetheless, the results have been nothing short of outstanding: by the beginning of the program’s sixth month, overall productivity – units out the door – increased by 70%, with customer complaints down to a small fraction of what they were in January. Employment growth in new production staff has been nothing short of explosive, and the line and middle management ranks – initially fearful of what such growth would mean relative to the old ways of doing supervision – are (mostly) feeling quite good about how well they’re coping.

I’ve compiled ten lessons learned from this remarkably successful organizational culture transformation that, not surprisingly, are consistent with the predictions of Valence Theory. See how many might be useful to you as you reflect on navigating your organization through the complexities of today’s environment of uncertainty:

Culture comes from values; values obviate vision as the organization’s source of impetus. When people work from a place that aligns fundamental values among all members, shared knowledge of where to head is a natural outcome. On the other hand, a vision imposed by an small, elite group at the top of the organization necessitates continual reinforcement (and enforcement) through ever-growing, extrinsic incentive plans.
Like learning a new language, culture change venue scripts seem artificial at first, become more comfortable with practice, and evolve into the organization’s lingua franca. The challenge is to ensure that those who are not directly involved in the “language lessons” that serve to inculcate the new culture are nonetheless given opportunities to participate in the new vocabulary of practices, behaviours, and attitudes.
Relying on training as the sole or primary mechanism to effect culture change is completely ineffective. On the other hand, continual peer reinforcement on-the-job, coupled with a concerted program of individual coaching and counselling for key members, with a limited amount of well-contextualized education, are essential to begin the process. Notice I said, “begin.” The process of transformation necessarily continues long after the formal program has been completed.
There will be an occasion – and usually no more than two – in which the new culture’s principles will have to be violated in order to demonstrate the seriousness of the new culture’s principles. This usually results in one or two people being asked to find other employment. As I have pointed out elsewhere, “it is perhaps ironic that coercive, legitimated, and hierarchical leadership is occasionally needed to enforce the transformation away from coercive, legitimated, and hierarchical leadership.”
Embracing and committing to the new culture is always a matter of individual choice. What is not a choice is the tight coupling between embracing the culture and sustaining one’s membership (e.g., employment) in the organization.
The person who, in the past, has been identified by legitimated management (i.e., those who are most vested in the “way we do things around here”) as the trouble-maker, malcontent, or the one-most-likely-to-be-written-up-for-disciplinary-action, is likely your best ally in identifying necessary changes, and effecting culture change—as long as you can overcome his/her legitimate cynicism and long-reinforced distrust of management-imposed “change.”
In a UCaPP organization, compensation is at least partially – and ideally completely – decoupled from job performance. The more strongly extrinsic motivators influence an individual’s contribution to the organization, the more BAH the organization necessarily becomes, and the less committed is the individual to the organization’s values as its primary impetus.
In a UCaPP environment, no one is required to give “110%.” Instead, more productivity is paradoxically experienced as needing less expended effort. Conversely, in a BAH environment, 50% (or more) of the organization’s potential is wasted in counter-productive, energy-consuming behaviours and well-rehearsed defensive scripts.
Blindly adopting so-called best practices in a bid to become as successful as some arbitrary industry leader is a management cargo cult. Transformative education is founded on experiential learning, not plagiarism.
The vast majority of benefits of organizational culture transformation are necessarily qualitative, not quantitative. However, there are consequential, indirect benefits – some of them economic – that are measurable, although one cannot usually establish clear, deterministic, causal connections. This means that one cannot “prove” a priori, tangible benefits of organizational culture transformation, much to the chagrin of traditionally trained managers. Remember—when it comes to effecting sustainable, truly beneficial change throughout an organization and among its members, complexity is your friend.

Congratulations, Julie!

2011-06-03T23:42:00.000-04:00

Today, my daughter, Julie graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Physical and Health Education, achieved “with honours.” The U of T’s program in Kinesiology is a challenging one – challenging to be admitted in the first place, and challenging to sustain through four gruelling years. Beyond the physiology, anatomy, and other more obvious aspects of subject matter, much of the focus of the program, especially in the latter years, are on the social responsibility of those who undertake a practice of health and wellbeing in contemporary society. To this end, Julie augmented her education with a minor in Women and Gender Studies, and again concentrated on issues of equity, social justice, and a nuanced understanding of power dynamics. (As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!)

In addition to her diligence when it came to her studies, she also did internships with a professional sports team, and with OPHEA, the Ontario Physical and Health Education Association, an organization that “works in partnership with school boards, public health, government, non-government organizations, and private sector organizations to develop groundbreaking programs and services that support healthy active schools and communities.” And, to top it all off, through her undergrad years, Julie co-founded and produces Glamour Puss Burlesque, a successful burlesque troupe, retrieving a time-honoured art form with modern sass and sensibility.

Julie, your mother and I are tremendously proud of you. May you go from strength to strength, and from success to success!

Transformation of an Activist Organization

2011-06-02T16:49:00.000-04:00

Volunteer groups are often the most challenging in which to effect organizational transformation, since people don’t “have to” be there (as in, they aren’t earning a paycheque), and those who do come bring with them long-vested and entrenched ideas about how organizations are run. Most of them, after all, are members of well-established organizations from which they are earning a paycheque, and those organizations almost invariably locate themselves towards the BAH end of the Valence Theory typological spectrum. So, it is fascinating to observe (even more so to have the privilege to facilitate) the transformation of such an organization.

Last weekend, for the second time, I facilitated the annual retreat of a volunteer-run, activist organization. This group has been established for a very long time, although most of its currently active members are relatively recent (as in, joining within the past three to four years or less). In reviewing the intended activities and objectives decided at last year’s retreat, as I usually do, I took a page from Appreciative Practices to ask three key questions that I commonly ask of each planned initiative: What worked well? What didn’t work as well as it might have? What was missing that might have improved the experience? The current chair of the group was a bit wary of the first question; she says that one of the group’s shortcomings is that they consider that they do everything well, and lay blame at the feet of external actors and circumstances!

Despite her misgivings, (and this is part of the art of my facilitation, of course), I never allow a group to look for blame, but rather, learning. What the group learned through this part of their retreat day can be summed up in two important principles of Valence Theory. The first is embodied in the idea of Effective Theory of Action: it is important to differentiate between achieving the desired and intended effects for a given situation, and achieving the nominal objectives or goals of an initiative. In one instance in particular, an initiative that had been designated as the group’s secondary focus for the year, had accomplished pretty much none of its objectives. However, when we answered the question, “what worked well?” with respect to this initiative, it was clear that a whole bunch of desired effects had been created—in fact, far more than the group could even have imagined a year earlier. Was the initiative a success? According to conventional measures of effectiveness, no. But when considered from the ground of Valence Theory and effectiveness – focusing on effects enabled and rippling through the complex system of human interactions – the initiative was considered to be tremendously successful.

Through the first half of the day, the group struggled with the paradoxes of more and less formal leadership and structure, the need to coordinate and keep track of certain activities while allowing sufficient flexibility for people to jump in and take up responsibility for tasks of their own volition. They realized that for those projects in which there were common values, common understanding, common sensibility, and a common volition to action – characteristics that describe ba – things happened well, including outreach and engagement with “external” organizations. People felt a sense of individual autonomy and agency, and worked not independently (nor strictly interdependently, which suggests tight-coupling), but rather with a sense of collective responsibility and mutual accountability. The conclusion they came to – although I didn’t suggest the specific language – was that their organization functioned better in an environment of organization-ba. To this end, the group decided to recast its traditional governance model of a formal executive with a designated Chair in charge (including taking ownership of meeting agendas and running meetings, a very strong measure of control). Instead, the group’s governance has moved to a contemplative consensus model, with a coordinating committee to tend to the coordination and “business” aspects of the group’s operation, and rotating facilitators managing agendas and meetings (in which the facilitator attends to process and cannot speak to content).

I will be working with the group to facilitate a revisitation of their values to provide fundamental guidance for future decisions, and to help the cadre of future facilitators to learn and practice their craft in a way that is consistent with their transformed governance. And, I anticipate that I will be invited a year hence to once again facilitate their annual retreat. I am most interested to see the successes that the group will be able to effect operating now as a more-UCaPP organization, one that is consistent with the conditions of today’s world.

Requiescat in Pace, Gil Scott-Heron, 1949 – 2011

2011-05-28T10:34:00.000-04:00

We're soaking in it...

Views on the Future of Corporation

2011-05-17T11:49:00.000-04:00

Even though this video is a year old (which is, like, fo'evah in Internet ticks...), the notions from various Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and thinkers are interesting, instructive, and possibly offer some inspiration (and even more possibly, some hope). People like John Hagel of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, David Weekly of PBWorks, Brian Phillips, formerly of Thread.com, Jerry Michalski of sociate.com, and Dan Olsen of yourversion.com relate their observations from the midst of the UCaPP transformation of organizations with a number of aspects of figure - stuff that we can notice. What strikes me about how each of these men (notably, no women!) relate their experiences is how consistent they all are with the ground of the UCaPP organizational transformation, which is in my view, Valence Theory (big surprise, right? :)

As many of you know, I am not big at all (to say the least) on emulating so-called best practices. At best, it leads to happenstance success without the understanding and learning that makes success sustainable. At worst, it is like taking someone else's prescription for an ailment not completely understood or diagnosed. Nonetheless, suggestions and ideas that are consistent with balancing the five valence relationships are not a bad thing to do, so long as one does it with mindful appreciation for, and reconnection with, fundamental human interactions.

As it turns out, this happens to be the major theme of my keynote at the Cybergarden 2011 Conference, Transgressing the senses: Culture, technology, and technomind, later this week in Katowice, Poland.

Great Customer Service, Great Salsa Shoes

2011-05-13T14:25:00.000-04:00

It isn't often that I have the opportunity to write about great customer service - I'm more often ranting about misadventures of clueless BAH organizations like Sympatico. So, it's a real pleasure to relate my experience with Giancarlo Gabellini of Gabellini Dance Shoes.

Many of my regular readers (and friends) know that I'm an avid salsa dancer, one of the Salsa Dealers at Salsaholics Anonymous, and one of the organizers and host of Toronto's weekly, free, outdoor salsa party, Sidewalk Salsa (every Thursday evening from 21:15 to 23:30 at the south-east corner of Bloor and Spadina, from May through October). Based on the recommendation of Anthony Persaud, a few years ago I tried a pair of Gabellini dance shoes for my teaching and practice and found them to be outstanding - the right balance of support and flexibility, well constructed, and offering just the right mix of traction and spin with their suede soles. Having nearly worn out my first pair, I ordered another two pairs, one white pair for teaching and practice, another black pair (a nicer looking style) for "going out." Because of what seems to have been perhaps a bad batch of suede from the supplier, the sole on the "going out" pair wore down to leather and separated from the shoe very prematurely.

When I wrote to Giancarlo, he immediately responded with the suggestion to have the shoes repaired locally (and he offered to subsidize part of the cost). Moreover, he contacted all of the other purchases of that particular model of shoe to alert them to a possible quality control problem with the suede, and checked up on the manufacturer to request a higher-quality, thicker sole on all future orders. That's the type of attention to customer service that not only ensures repeat business, but merits endorsement and your patronage.

I love my Gabellini shoes (albeit in a different way than I love my favourite partner!). More important I love the way Giancarlo takes care of his customers. If you're a salsa dancer looking for a great shoe for practice, and especially if you're a male dancer looking for great shoes for dress, you can't go wrong with Gabellini Dance Shoes.

Leadership in Complexity - Introductory Seminar Next Monday, April 11

2011-04-04T16:00:00.002-04:00

You probably don't need me to tell you that the world is a complex place, and assuming the role of organizational leader is, among other things, challenging. Navigating amidst the complex ebbs and flows of what seems to be a perpetual sea of the unexpected is, nonetheless, the order of the day for organizations, their leaders, and indeed all of their constituent members.

As Marshall McLuhan so aptly observes in his book, Laws of Media,

As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu. Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides.

"Uncharted and unchartable" sort of sums it up, doesn't it? In my work with organizational leaders, the complexity challenge appears to be threefold:

To be able to perceive the complexity of the environments with which we have to deal;
To be able to focus appropriately on the critical factors that influence complex relationships;
To be able to resolve the tension between intention (i.e., planning and execution), and emergence.

Next Monday evening, April 11, from 17:30 to 21:00, I will be offering a public, introductory seminar on Leadership in Complexity that addresses these three issues with some very practical tools and techniques. The seminar is sponsored by the Canadian Organization Development Institute, and will be held in Toronto, at OISE, 252 Bloor Street West, Room 12-199. The cost is only $10, and you can register here.

If you are, or know of, a leader who would like to gain a better understanding of some of the issues, I invite you to join me and other leaders and organization development practitioners for a couple of hours of fish stories, Emergence Brainstorming, and Tactility. For more information, you can download the brochure, or just sign up and come out!

Update: (11 April 2011): Thanks to everyone who came out and played with us - it was a wonderful crowd and a more-than-full room. For those who are interested here are my notes from the presentation.

What Slutwalk Can Teach Organizational Leaders

2011-04-04T00:20:00.004-04:00

Today was the inaugural Slutwalk Toronto, and by all accounts, it was a great success. Slutwalk Toronto was spawned by some rather unfortunate – some would say uninformed and downright stupid – comments made by Toronto PC Michael Sanguinetti, namely that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” Even though he prefaced his outrageous comment by admitting that he probably shouldn’t say it, and the Toronto Police Service has officially apologized, it’s actually a Really Good Thing that PC Sanguinetti was explicit about his deeply held beliefs. It’s a Good Thing because it makes the entire issue of stereotypical attitudes towards sexual assault, and the blame-the-victim mentality that pervades the Police Service discussable. It’s a Good Thing because anything that helps society initiate conversations about sex positivity, acceptance, and the boundaries of consent is welcome and needed. And, it’s a Good Thing because the Toronto Police Service’s bureaucratic response to the emergent Slutwalk organization is highly illustrative of a lesson that can be learned by all leaders among all organizations. I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, for the record, here are the ten reasons why I joined with sisters and brothers (and other self-identified gender relations) in Slutdom and walked today:

Because women have the right to be safe. Period.
Because all people, irrespective of their gender, sexual orientation, or sexual preferences and proclivities have the right to be safe. Period.
Because no one "deserves to" or "asks to" be raped under any circumstances.
Because it is time that men in positions of authority come to terms with the fact that women are sexually assaulted irrespective of what they are wearing, where they are, or what they are doing as sexual assault is, first and foremost, a weapon of power and violence.
Because blaming the victim of any crime is wrong.
Because blaming the victim of rape is an especially pernicious repeat act of violence.
Because characterizing men as slaves to their supposed unbridled sexual desire is demeaning.
Because those charged with enforcing the law cannot be allowed to hold biases that impede their ability to do their jobs.
Because it is beyond time for us as a society to finally grow up and stop considering sexuality as we did back in junior high.
Because Slutwalk should not be necessary, yet it is.

When confronted with PC Sanguinetti’s faux pas, the TPS apologized, as one would expect they would. According the CBC’s reportage, “when the story first broke in January, Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said Sanguinetti's comments highlight a ‘training issue’ in the force. ‘If that type of, frankly, archaic thinking still exists among any of my officers, it highlights for me the need to continue to train my officers and sensitize them to the reality of victimization,’ he said.”

Indeed. A training issue. But what we heard today at the rally is that there is considerable training being done by the TPS in this topic. Some nine seminars—probably with quizzes! What’s wrong with this picture is that the seminars themselves are delivered by police officers who have themselves been enculturated in the police culture, mindset and worldview. What’s wrong with this picture is that the training materials were not developed by people who themselves have adequate training in issues of sexual violence, survivor psychology, managing women in traumatic crisis post-rape, or even adult education! And when confronted with these relatively easy-to-understand deficiencies, the Toronto Police Service responds by merely pointing to what they are already doing, as if accomplishing the training itself is the desired effect.

BAH organizations, like the Toronto Police Service, manage according to measurable outcomes to satisfy a plan that accomplishes the objectives or primary purpose of the organization. To the TPS, “serving and protecting” the public means that officers have to be adequately trained. Adequately trained means that officers are ordered to attend a certain number of classes, and must demonstrate that they have adequately learned the material (through a measurable means, like taking a test or performing a skill). At that point, the TPS has achieved (one of) its objectives, and the leadership have done their job. Sanguinetti’s lapse clearly indicates that he needs additional training—or perhaps he was simply too busy thinking about “sluts” in provocative evening wear during that part of the seminar (as they used to say in the old radio show, "who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?"). That the training itself might be inadequate simply cannot be the cause, because that would lay an accusation of incompetence on the senior leadership. Worse still, is the possibility of revealing the complete failure of the basic premise of BAH organizations like the TPS: the fundamental philosophy that objectives are achieved through specific outcomes; outcomes are measurable and their completion can be planned; the success of the organization depends exclusively on the success of executing the plan; and, any failure of that success is a failure of the organization’s senior leadership for whom dire consequences await.

Either way, the leadership is at fault, and that simply cannot be.

But here’s the thing: BAH organizations that achieve success through executing plans to accomplish specific outcomes that achieve objectives are great in complicated environments. Policing isn’t complicated. Policing is complex. In fact, most organizations do not exist in complicated business, market, and human environments. They exist in a world filled with seemingly intractable challenges, unexpected occurrences, and unpredictability at every turn. In other words, they exist in a world of complexity.

In complexity, specific outcomes are unpredictable because they are emergent, based on a large number of uncontrollable – not to mention unexpected – factors. However, we can anticipate the nature of the effects of the things we do based on the nature of the relationships that exist among the various elements at play. It’s really pretty simple when you get right down to it:

BAH organizations manage for outcomes.
UCaPP organizations manage for effects.
That's why UCaPP organizations do so much better when faced with complexity

With this understanding, it’s clear why the Toronto Police Service believes it’s doing a reasonably good job in training (most of) its officers, and why the thousands of people who marched today at Slutwalk Toronto beg to differ. It’s equally clear that because the TPS manages for outcomes, it will never be able to actually enable and bring about the effects for which they sincerely believe they are striving: effects like actually creating a safer Toronto for all of its citizens; effects like enabling women who are sexually assaulted to feel empowered to come forward and report those crimes without feeling victimized by the police themselves; effects for which the measurable proxy of “officer training hours per year” will necessarily remain woefully inadequate.

* * *

If you are, or know of, a leader who would like to gain a better understanding of some of the issues surrounding Leadership in Complexity, I am giving a public introductory seminar sponsored by the Canadian Organization Development Institute next Monday evening, April 11 from 17:30 to 21:00 in Toronto, at OISE, 252 Bloor Street West, Room 12-199. The cost is only $10, and you can register here.

Advice for the Leader-lorn: Questioning questioning

2011-03-24T14:42:00.000-04:00

“Advice for the Leader-lorn” is an irregular series in which Dr. Mark answers your leadership questions. If you have a thorny leadership situation that you’d like Dr. Mark to address, send your question to Dr. Mark.

Today’s question comes from M.D., who asks, “There’s that old lawyer adage, ‘never ask a question for which you don’t already know the answer.’ As a manager, my staff expect me to provide direction and inspiration, but I don’t want to appear to be overly directive. So, I ask a lot of questions which are typically aimed to make them think about options and alternatives that I want them to consider. However, lately, I’m torn because on the one hand, I don’t want to appear to be unknowledgeable, but on the other, I feel that I’m not uncovering all the information I need to make decisions. How can I change my style of questioning without my people losing respect for me because I suddenly ‘don’t know” what they think I’m supposed to know?”

This is an important question, M.D., and thanks for having the courage to ask it. Many leaders believe that, by virtue of their position, they are expected to see all, know all, and make the right decision—every time. It seems that we have evolved into living the myth of the omnipotent and omniscient leader. At one time – especially in the hierarchy of guilds – it was more-or-less true that one attained a senior position, and earned the privilege and respect that came with it, by virtue of one’s technical skill, expertise, and ability to mentor apprentices and journeymen. This idea morphed into the concept of the “lead hand” in the factory environment, later becoming the phenomenon of the highly expert individual contributor being promoted to supervise or manage their department.

As the practice of management itself became professionalized, mostly since the 1960s, the expectation that the manager or executive would have complete knowledge of their department persisted. Cartoons like Dilbert reinforced the idea that subordinate workers who actually knew more than their “pointy-haired boss” could do a better job of managing, especially when said boss masqueraded their lack of knowledge. And largely because of the latter, the former is often made true!

There is another adage that comes from the world of continuous process improvement via Professor Kaoru Ishikawa that may prove useful: “Each person is the expert in his or her own job.” By separating the notions of technical expertise from managerial – or even better, leadership – expertise in your own mind, you can begin to feel more secure in what you do, and enable your staff to develop their own sense of autonomy and mastery in what they do. Such a separation may feel like you are ceding some degree of control; if it does, you're on the right track!

The perception of giving up control – and a leader’s mostly futile and counter-productive desire to hold onto control at almost any cost – is often at the heart of directive, as opposed to inquisitive questions. Great leaders can inspire autonomy and mastery among their staff – in other words, give up a large measure of control – in favour of creating environments in which innovation and new ideas flourish. For the leader, this means authentically living in a space of inquiry, in which, as Marshall McLuhan observes in his book, Take Today, “Discovery comes from dialogue that starts with the sharing of ignorance.” Such leaders inevitably find two things: First, such discoveries, more often than not, increase the space of alternatives thereby enabling the leader to make more effective decisions. And second, their people come to respect their leader even more, since genuinely seeking their advice increases their sense of Economic-ba (that is, feeling valued); leading with humility while providing strong referent leadership are highly respected in the UCaPP world.

The Inner and Outer Aspects of Sustainability

2011-03-13T18:14:00.000-04:00

The Oxford Leadership Journal has a worthwhile article in the current issue by Sara Schley: Sustainability: The Inner and Outer Work. In it, she describes how even those organizations that subscribe to the notion of a “triple bottom line” - success determined equally though economic, social, and ecological measures - are often not recognizing the integration that is required among these elements. She explains how an intense focus on achieving triple-bottom-line results may actually be counterproductive, drawing people away from practices necessary to achieve holistic success:

First, the way that most people operate with the triple bottom line ignores the real synergy among its three dimensions – social, economic, and ecological. In practice, efforts tend to be fragmented; companies institute “social policies,” “green practices,” and financial reporting systems without ever linking them together.

The second reason that a focus on the triple bottom line alone isn’t enough is that it allows people to ignore the “inner work” – the personal practices and disciplines that provide the perspective and internal stability needed to make a difference in the long run. The very ideals and aspirations that lead people to an interest in sustainability can also drive people into a frenzied cycle of “fixes,” actions, and imperatives, ultimately leading to wasted efforts and burned-out people.

She goes on to explore the ways in which inner work - contemplative practices and awareness of the emotional connections and effects we create among our various decisions to act - provides the appropriate guidance needed to be truly effective in achieving an integrated, triple bottom line. The important thing to recognize about living in a complex world is the fractal nature of these effects: to accomplish a healthy, triple bottom line for our organizations, we each, individually, must remain committed to achieving a healthy, triple bottom line for ourselves and those whom we touch. That, of course, is the essence of tactility.

Advice for the Leader-lorn: Compassionate or Responsible – Which to Choose?

2011-03-09T22:46:00.000-05:00

“Advice for the Leader-lorn” is an irregular series in which Dr. Mark answers your leadership questions. If you have a thorny leadership situation that you’d like Dr. Mark to address, send your question to Dr. Mark.

Today’s question comes from Brazen Careerist member, J.S., who posts, “When in conflict [i.e., conflicted over which alternative to choose], which do you want your leadership to be: responsible or compassionate?”

A challenging question, J.S.! When a leader confronts opposite polarities for a decision that appear to pit “being compassionate” against “being responsible” in the leader's mind, one is almost automatically moved to ask questions like, “being compassionate towards whom in what context?” and, “being responsible to whom or to what objective in which context?” The answers to such questions are never obvious; nor are they easy. So what is important to do is to understand the context within which the polarity itself takes on useful meaning, which is distinctly different than simply asking the context of the decision itself.

The polarity exists as a polarity in the leader’s mind only relative to a particular frame of meaning. In this case, the polarities of compassion versus responsibility may gain useful meaning when framed in ethical terms; that, in turn, suggests checking in with individual, role, and overarching organizational values. First, one must do a values check with respect to the organization of which the leader is a leader, and a value check of the leader's intrinsic personal values. Notably, the leader’s intrinsic values as a person may not necessarily coincide with those of the assumptive role of “leader.” It is often the case that people – particularly in BAH organizations – will assume a set of behaviours and attitudes that they believe are consistent with an extrinsic expectation of the leader role. That, in part, is why otherwise good people do what turn out to be some very bad things. If there is a misalignment among the organization’s values (your organization has had this “values” conversation among its members, right?), the values of the leadership role, and the values held by the individual who occupies that role, then what you have is a mess—and importantly, no basis from which to be able to come to an appropriate decision.

When it comes to alignment of values, the leader must first be a whole human being, because without that grounding, there can be no ethical foundation for leadership; hence, there is no foundation for effective leadership in a contemporary context. The organization as an entity must understand its collective values, to ensure they are aligned with the whole values of its constituent members (specifically, all those whom the organization touches, which comprise more than those who show up for work at 9 a.m., and those entered in the accounting system).

Assuming there is consistency (more or less) in this intrinsic organizational values check, the next move is to appeal to the organization’s “Effective Theory of Action.” That is, the leader must consider the question, “will the decision have the effects that are consistent with those the organization intends?” (also known as the organization's tactility – whom it wants to touch, and how it wants to touch them). An organization’s tactility can be expressed via the five valence relationships that bind an organization’s diverse member constituencies—economic, socio-psychological, knowledge, identity, and ecological, with no one valence having precedence over any other, that is, an organization ideally strives for balance.

With this dual framing in terms of values and tactility, finding an appropriate and effective course of action that respects both polarities of being compassionate and being responsible should be either relatively straight-forward, or at the very least, rendered “discussable” and sufficiently well-framed to engage appropriate members in a useful conversation.

Lessons From Wisconsin

2011-02-26T13:19:00.000-05:00

Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker’s, vicious attacks on public sector labour unions are apparently dividing public opinion in the state, and further hardening the polarized divisions (no, not a snide reference to the state’s weather) that serve the private interests of major Tea Party backers. That this entire episode is a cynical, political manipulation that has no intention of serving the authentic and legitimate interests of the people of Wisconsin has recently come to light.

Before I continue, I need to state a disclaimer: I am anti-union in any reasonable workplace. I am also anti-management in any reasonable workplace. Both traditional labour unions and traditional command-and-control, legitimated management (with its associated privilege) are obsolescent artefacts of a prior era, in my opinion.

Now, with that out of the way let me state a truism:

Management create the unions they deserve;
Unions create the management they deserve.

Oppressive, dysfunctional workplaces that are held together by the letter of the collective agreement are always predicated on the ideation of a privileged management keeping unionized workers at bay, rather than a more contemporary ideal of collaborative engagement amongst all members of a workplace, creating a multi-valence incentive for workers to have more skin in the game than merely their pay cheque. One of the most salient, and little noticed, observations that came out of the recent bailout of the auto companies was the realization by union leaders that they now had to take on some of the reality responsibilities formerly delegated upwards to management, and they didn't like it. Why not? Creating such a holistic engagement with the organization compromised union leaders’ ability to make demands solely for the benefit of one privileged class – the unionized workers – over other classes, namely, all of the organization’s other constituencies. This realization illustrates a key point: to create engaged and committed workers, and interested (notably not self-interested) management, all of the organization’s constituent parties must equally and equitably participate in creating a truly collaborative environment, based on commonly constructed and emergent values, and a shared sense of the organization’s tactility.

What’s happening now in Wisconsin is a travesty. A privileged class takes out their supposed fiscal frustration on an underclass, falsely blaming the underclass for structural failings that the privileged themselves created. In response, the underclass is forced to protest, looking like a mob while the elites can claim the so-called high road of supposed fiscal responsibility. What is happening reinforces the apparent necessity for militant, union-vs-management confrontations, widens the gap between privileged and marginalized, polarizes the population, and necessarily increases the level of dysfunction and malicious compliance among organizations. Governor Scott Walker is wrong! wrong! wrong! and not because unions are de facto good, bad, or indifferent. He is wrong because, in the name of fiscal prudence, he is destroying the fabric of organizational effectiveness for the people of Wisconsin through an artificially forced polarization of issues, and his unwillingness to be reasonable himself in favour of cynical, partisan political ends that serve only the American oligarchy.

Although it may be easy to gratuitously criticize unions for their contributions to dysfunctional workplaces, I formed my opinions concerning the obsolescence of unions in reasonable, contemporary workplaces based on my research and writing on Valence Theory. I will admit that my visceral response to union dysfunction was informed during my graduate work, when I was forced to participate in a single-voice union whose radical politics were partially funded by my earned income. This was in a “workplace” that, in fact, was an academic environment in which the “employer” comprised our professors and academic supervisors, our “wage” was our university-provided graduate stipend, and our “benefits” were those afforded to all graduate students, irrespective of whether they had a union “job” or not. What the union sought to do was divide the students, seeking privilege for one class of students – those whom the union represented – while giving a big F! YOU to another. (Many graduate students at OISE were excluded from certain extended health benefits for years because the union provided benefits to its members who consistently blocked the referendum that would extend benefits to all students.)

In other words, a case of a privileged elite keeping everyone else down for their own benefit. Sound familiar? Unions and management are essentially mirror images of each other in almost every workplace. Reflect on this observation when considering closer to home (in my case, Toronto) issues such as eliminating city worker unions through service outsourcing, or how Bob Kinnear and his Amalgamated Transit Union 113 with its texting, sleeping, and sometimes downright hostile operators (not all of them – there are many fine and conscientious TTC operators) are a Frankenstein-like creation of TTC management, commissioners, and Toronto City Hall.

Unions are essential when the workplace would otherwise deal unfairly and inappropriately with the people who constitute them. Management who might want to eliminate unions can effectively and successfully accomplish this laudable goal by ceding their own power and authentically engaging all workers in participatory management and leadership practices.

Leaderless, Not really. Emergent Leadership, Yes. Complex, Referent Leadership, (In)definitely!

2011-02-15T22:42:00.000-05:00

Tunisia’s uprising and Egypt’s revolution, as well as the growing public unrest and heroic demonstrations elsewhere in the generally totalitarian-ruled Middle East, are often described as leaderless. Unlike, say, the Russian Revolution that helped define geopolitics in the modern era, there are no equivalents to Bolsheviks in Tunis, Cairo, Tehran, or Sana’a (Yemen); no Lenin or Trotsky out in front of the people spurring a disaffected proletariat to rise up against a privileged bourgeoisie. Contemporary technology that enables a UCaPP world has been both overly credited and debunked as a causal factor. Nonetheless, the use of so-called social media has loomed large in both the collective imaginations of the Western public and the conventional massmedia as a key influencer in what appears to be the characteristic attribute of contemporary revolutionary movements—that they seem to be without leaders.

University of Maryland sociology professor, Zeynep Tufekci, has a stellar analysis of the sociological factors of network-enabled revolutions, and why they don’t stay leaderless for long; it’s well worth the read. In particular, she describes two common behaviours of collections of people – human nature, you might call it – of how some individuals emerge to acquire leadership positions (preferential attachment), and how these individuals, once comfortably ensconced in their privileged leadership position, do almost anything they can to retain their privilege (the Iron Law of Oligarchy): “Basically, take an organization. Any organization. Stir a bit. Wait. Not too long. Watch a group of insiders emerge and vigorously defend their turf, and almost always succeed. Example one could be Western democracies.”

A very similar phenomenon occurs in start-up companies that initially grow “organically” (by which I mean something very specific). There is an overarching feeling of shared vision, shared sensibilities, shared values, and shared volition to action. It is this shared-ness that provides the impetus for both a start-up organization to achieve its requisite critical mass to sustain its critical first few years, and for a revolution to achieve its requisite critical mass of popular support to sustain its first dictatorship overthrow. In an organizational context, I describe this shared-ness or collectiveness as ba, specifically, organization-ba:

As the ba-form relationships become more pervasive throughout an organization, and interact with more complexity among the members, a greater sense of collaborative community, with common sensibility, appreciation of context, and volition to action develops. This unity and coherence I describe as “organization-ba,” a pervasive, encompassing basho [metaphysical “place”] that is a crucial, if not determining, emergent property of UCaPP organizations. The connection to Adler and Heckscher’s description of collaborative community becomes clear if organization-ba is construed as Weber’s suggested “value rationality.” In this, an environment of organization-ba becomes the enabling cause that yields “contribution to the collective purpose, and contributions to the success of others” (Adler & Heckscher, 2006, p. 39)*.

Referent leadership emergent from amidst organization-ba is a beautiful thing. I argue that referent leadership is significantly stronger (that is, more influential, persistent, and motivational to the membership) than legitimated leadership could ever be—think Gandhi, Mandela, or King, for example. Nonetheless, there is the matter of oligarchy’s iron law to which Tufekci refers. Indeed, I observed this occurring in near real time in one of my research participant organizations. It occurs to me, however, that the so-called iron law is one of those sociological artefacts of a prior (i.e., pre-UCaPP) cultural epoch that became well-entrenched in modernity. Like the epochal changes that preceded our time, rusting away of this iron law will take some not-insignificant time—some three centuries by my estimation.

But it is possible with deliberation and energy!

Although, realistically, there is a snowball’s-chance-in-the-Sahara that some sort of privileged, oligarchic leadership will not emerge in Egypt, transformation of traditional organizations towards emergent referent leadership, and the continuity of a start-up organization’s “special sauce” is indeed quite possible. Just as Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy can be undone by his notion of Wertrationalität, sociology’s iron law of oligarchy can potentially be undone through organization-ba in the complex environment of an organization conceptualized in Valence Theory.

One more thing: We are now in the 167th year of the (roughly) 300-year transition from the prior cultural epoch – McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy – to a fully UCaPP-realized world. A very few organizations are taking on increasing aspects of organization-ba to successfully become more-UCaPP organizations. Others are struggling to retain many of the UCaPP characteristics that originally made them great. Over the next fifty or so years, I fully expect the majority of organizations to become more UCaPP than BAH, as a generation of adults that never didn’t know the effects of massive interconnectivity take up their respective roles among workplaces around the world. Within the next century, I fully expect that there will be a popular political uprising against the oligarchic oppressions of traditional, Western democracy that will yield the very first instance of political governance based on complex, continually emergent, referent leadership. And that will truly be a beautiful thing indeed.

What makes a Social Entrepreneur?

2011-02-10T11:30:00.000-05:00

William Marre describes the differences between business entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs. What occurs to me in listening to his passionate description is that, fundamentally, the differences in entrepreneurial approaches are consistent with the differences between BAH and UCaPP. Business entrepreneurs focus on developing and executing a deterministic plan, one that they will control and drive, guided by extrinsic evaluations and quantitative measurements. Social entrepreneurs, on the other hand, appreciate and harness the power of complexity, realizing that sustainable success in the contemporary world is often a matter of emergence and organic (read literally as living) growth. He expresses it like this:

It's a very sophisticated trial and error approach. You try a lot of things and discard what isn't working. You head for the green lights and the open doors. And you amplify what is working. And you're persistent over a long period of time.

You have to be passionate.
You have to be committed.
You have to be flexible.
You have to be very aware of what is working and what isn't.
And it has to be really worth it to you.

Most of all, they're unafraid to do something right now.

You can feel his passion and commitment as he speaks.

(Thanks, Raza Moghal!)

Governing by Design

2011-02-07T21:12:00.000-05:00

Seed Magazine has a thought-provoking article on the application of design principles to governance, as part of their "global reset" series. One paragraph in particular caught my eye concerning the "radical thinking, creative solutions, and collaborative action" required to address the complex and often intractable problems that face both the world at large, and organizations in transformation. I offer it as a challenge to UCaPP leaders to truly incorporate these practices, outlined in the Seed article, into their day-to-day business:

This design approach would be:
transparent (complex problems require simple, clear, and honest solutions);
inspiring (successful solutions will move people by satisfying their needs, giving meaning to their lives, and raising their hopes and expectations);
transformational (exceptional problems demand exceptional solutions that may be radical and even disruptive);
participatory (effective solutions will be collaborative, inclusive, and developed with the people who will use them);
contextual (no solution should be developed or delivered in isolation but should instead recognize the social, physical, and information systems it is part of);
and sustainable (every solution needs to be robust, responsible, and designed with regard to its long-term impact on the environment and society).

A useful guide for a leader's periodic self-reflection and check-in, to be sure!

When UCaPP Companies Go BAH... and desperately try to halt the slide!

2011-01-29T19:43:00.001-05:00

Some interesting juxtapositions apropos the subject line of this post: Over the past month or so - and especially over the past week, I've noticed some extended visits to my Valence Theory Wiki site from a certain search, video, blogging, and smartphone-OS-maker (among many other ventures) company who shall "Goo" nameless. And then, I noticed this cover story in the current issue of Businessweek. And finally, there was this nonsense posted by the creator of the fun distraction, Googlewhack, Gary Stock, in which a person clearly possessing a bureaucratic mindset had their judgment switch firmly in the "off" position (as required by all bureaucrats; some more senior person at the organization helped the administrator of Adsense come to his/her senses and subsequently retracted the ridiculous threat).

So how do I put all this together? In my research, I write about the nature of founder's-ba, the particular instance of coherent common sensibility, common values, common understanding, and common volition to action - collectively called organization-ba - that tends to be characteristic of start-up organization cultures. Among the key challenges for small organizations as they grow is to preserve the "special sauce," if you will, that engendered the greatness that is one of their hallmarks. Goog... err... the organization in question, had organization-ba in spades, and apparently manage to preserve it through some pretty substantial growth. But as any company increases its ranks with those who have been socialized in a BAH society, through a BAH-oriented education system, and especially if its advisors, board members, and managers have had formal MBA training, there is a tremendous pressure to begin to look like "real companies" - become isomorphic in fancy, academic language. And, it makes sense from a structural contingency perspective: an organization's structure - that is, its functions and connections - should correlate to the contingencies of the external environment in which its situated.

If you've read my work, you'll know that I dispute that contention in the context of a UCaPP world (not to mention that the work of one of the most influential authors of structural contingency theory was empirically tested and found to be a complete myth - it sounded good on paper, but didn't hold up to reality, much like Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management). Although it is true that members in any organization must have clear functional responsibilities, it is also true that (a) functional responsibilities neither necessitate reporting hierarchies nor preclude collective responsibility and mutual accountability; (b) the need to socialize information increases, not diminishes, as the organization grows; and (c) embodying and living the founding values of the organization becomes more challenging when an organization hires for alignment of required functions rather than for alignment of values.

Clearly, the organization is concerned, and that's a hopeful sign. So what can they do? Well, besides calling me for assistance (seriously: if someone reading this has an "in" with Larry Page, I'd love to help - it would be a great project, and someone there clearly likes my stuff based on all the time they've spent on the wiki), the organization can begin to do some cultural soul-searching through interventions involving action research, strategic dialogue forums, and culture change venues (where needed).

And, if your organization - even if it isn't as large or as prominent as the one in Mountain View - can use some help with organization transformation, I still have a couple of free spots on my dance card.

Study: 89 Percent Of Networking Nonconsensual

2011-01-28T17:26:00.000-05:00

A recently published study is reviewed today in The Onion, revealing that 89% of all networking is nonconsensual, and can actually create lasting psychological trauma in the victim. We're not talking about simple Facebook wall posts or Twitter tweets (which, of course, carry with them their own, distinct risks - not the least of which is self-embarrassment). The networking examined by the principle investigator, sociology professor Thomas Raybeck of Emory University, comprise the far more threatening behaviours that might occur in "a remote corner of a dinner party, or follow[ing the victim] into the parking lot after yoga class. But these assaults have also been known to occur in full view of witnesses, who, more often than not, do nothing to stop it."

I don't know about you, but I think there should be a lobby formed to create a criminal charge of "Assault with a Deadly Blackberry" or "Criminal Negligence Causing Following Up."

The Zen of Organization

2011-01-14T11:45:00.003-05:00

There is no inside. There is no outside. There is only context.

(From a conversation this morning on systems thinking, complexity, the problematics of so-called interdependence, and Effective Theory.)

The Value of Complexity Thinking

2011-01-10T21:49:00.000-05:00

From an editorial by Dr. Jean Boulton, Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management and Managing Director of Claremont Management Consultants in the UK, to appear in a forthcoming special issue of Emergence: Complexity and Organization on Policy and Climate change:

So what has complexity thinking to offer? One of the great difficulties in answering this question is that the question itself is framed within a reductive, Newtonian, machine paradigm. We want complexity thinking to give us answers and solid ways forwards because we believe that optimal solutions and predictable outcomes exist. Part of what complexity thinking has to offer is that is gives ample evidence that the future, whilst not being random, indeed being path-dependent, is nevertheless not predictable. There are often turning points where the future may evolve in more than one direction; the future is a complex product of the past, mitigated by chance and by choices; where different decisions in seemingly different spheres interact and mutually affect each other. So, whilst we might not like the picture it presents, complexity thinking emphasises interconnectedness and dynamic change and emphasises the limits to predictability and indeed to knowledge. And there is an argument to say that if we accept the reality of this, we may indeed do a better job of developing policy and creating processes.

It seems to me that there is an opportunity to focus learning, organization, social enterprise, and policy development in a context of complexity thinking, emphasizing diverse sustainability among cultural, ecological, and built environments, and resilience in the face of the inherent unpredictability of seeming intractable problems of our world.

Someone should create such a place.
[Grin.]

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye

2011-01-10T15:16:00.000-05:00

Time to amend that old saw. Perhaps something along the lines of, "it's all just politics and freedom of speech until someone loses a life."

Whadaya say, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Sharron Angle, Fox News, the Tea Party, and to a lesser extent but not really different in kind, Stephen Harper? (...not to mention countless others on both sides of the political spectrum, spanning issues throughout the world, who believe that throwing epithets is productive and does not lead to throwing bullets and bombs.)

***

To be clear on my position: inflammatory, partisan rhetoric is contrary to the ideals of freedom of speech, and destroys, rather than supports, democracy and citizen engagement. Let us collectively resolve to respond in a loud voice as follows when next we are confronted with someone spouting hyper-partisanship and demonizing rhetoric : "WHY DO YOU HATE DEMOCRACY AND PEACE SO MUCH?"

Living With Intention, and Without Goals

2011-01-05T13:01:00.000-05:00

Over on Brazen Careerist, I was alerted to a post by Leo Baubata of Zen Habits in which he suggests that "the best goal is no goal." It is a provocative statement, to be sure, and one that is apropos the beginning of a new year, when many people resolve to accomplish this or that through the next twelve months. Leo argues:

I’d set a goal or three for the year, and then sub-goals for each month. Then I’d figure out what action steps to take each week and each day, and try to focus my day on those steps. Unfortunately, it never, ever works out this neatly. ... Your weekly goals and monthly goals get pushed back or side-tracked, and you get discouraged because you have no discipline. And goals are too hard to achieve. So now what? Well, you review your goals and reset them. You create a new set of sub-goals and action plans. You know where you’re going, because you have goals! Of course, you don’t actually end up getting there. Sometimes you achieve the goal and then you feel amazing. But most of the time you don’t achieve them and you blame it on yourself.

Here’s the secret: the problem isn’t you, it’s the system! Goals as a system are set up for failure. Even when you do things exactly right, it’s not ideal. Here’s why: you are extremely limited in your actions. When you don’t feel like doing something, you have to force yourself to do it. Your path is chosen, so you don’t have room to explore new territory. You have to follow the plan, even when you’re passionate about something else.

One must, I think, understand Leo's problem and prescription for living without goals with a Zen mind. It is not the goals themselves that are problematic, but rather, our attachment to them. Those who follow my work know that I express this using other words in my advice to leaders, and have developed it more fully and rigorously in my doctoral work on Valence Theory and practice of organizational therapy and healing.

Rather than goals and vision - notably, a sensory metaphor that connotes distance and separation - one must always be guided by values and tactility. Values represent one's deep-seated beliefs that guide her or his day-to-day practice of being in the world; tactility answers the question, "whom am I going to touch, and how am I going to touch them today?" Tactility is expressed in the effects we each, individually and collectively, enable and bring about in the world. Effects are markedly different from goals: a goal can be though of as an endpoint of activity; effects exist on a continuum of interactions through which each of us continually navigates. Ironically, they are often initiated by "accomplishing" goals (and may - or more often, may not - be what we actually intended to happen). It is the difference in value-based intention that provides the key distinction between mindful effects and often blind adherence to goals without appreciation of secondary or tertiary consequences.

By living one's values mindfully, guided by an intentionality towards the effects we wish to enable and bring about, goals become not only arbitrary but entirely unnecessary. More significantly, far more good in the world can actually be accomplished by each of us, and all of us.

Why American (and others') Politics is Irreparably Broken

2011-01-01T21:54:00.001-05:00

This initiative sends shivers down my spine. (Slashdot coverage is here.) Making explicit what has been implicit for years - namely, that the supposedly democratic systems of electoral politics in the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere can be cynically gamed - should provide an incentive for some clever folks to rethink the nature of national (and global) leadership to be consistent with a UCaPP world.

Nominally democratic, one-person-one-vote, electoral politics is itself an artefact of a prior cultural epoch - the world of the 17th century and early modernity. Its success is predicated on an engaged, informed, and actively participating electorate. In the first decade of the 21st century, it has become clear that electoral politics has entered a state of reversal, and has become more about winning and losing (essentially adopting a team sports metaphor in which the electorate "root" for, and support, the popular team as identified by the colour commentators; in actuality, it's the politicians and vested, usually-corporate interests that win, and the citizenry who lose). What ever happened to active and thoughtful engagement in the careful consideration of complex issues, good governance, sustainability of material, social and cultural environments, and societal resilience?

What is needed, I think, is a fundamental rethinking of what it means to lead, what it means to enable active engagement in complex processes, and what it takes to build a cultural infrastructure that supports both. Ironically (or perhaps not), this is too important a job to be left in the exclusive hands of the politicians, and too practical a job to be left in the hands of academics, self-styled intellectuals, and pundits - both of these options merely replicate the existing ways of doing politics-of-the-privileged.

At the risk of being too cliché about it, perhaps it is time to listen to Gandhi, to be the change we want to see in the world. Of course this assumes that "we" indeed want to see such change, and that is a large assumption, indeed. I think there is a way through this, and it begins with changing the ways in which we educate and socialize leaders, and the learning environments we create for, with, and on behalf of organizations, governments, public institutions, and communities. Perhaps apropos the turn of the year, working on these ideas will be a major theme for me through 2011.

Innovating Innovations in Healthcare

2010-12-15T21:14:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting the Centre for Innovation in Complex Care. It is an interprofessional, trans-institutional organization, housed at the University Health Network in downtown Toronto that is

dedicated to studying how to improve the entire process of care for patients with multiple problems. Its purpose is to engage our patients and clinicians to identify problems with current healthcare practices and develop solutions for addressing them. Innovative research and evaluation in a real clinical environment will allow our clinicians to utilize the latest technology to improve patient care.

It is also, much to my delight, a UCaPP organization, and it is its UCaPP nature that is its key to success in achieving true innovation throughout every aspect of the healthcare system.

The Centre has active projects that range from improving clinical communications via new Blackberry applications, to methods that are focused on improving the in-patient experience, to completely rethinking and redesigning the systems and processes associated with treating atrial fibrillation, currently the most frequently encountered arrhythmia for which patients are admitted to hospital (not to mention being “challenging, costly, and resource intensive”).

So what makes the CICC innovative in its approach and organizational design – that is, what makes it UCaPP – and how does this influence its success? Fundamental to all UCaPP organizations is the idea that change happens where it happens, and the impetus for change can come from literally anywhere in an organization, or in this case, anywhere throughout the healthcare system. CICC members include physicians and nurses, pharmacists and nutritionists, engineers and designers, researchers and patients. It includes members from all the teaching hospitals in Toronto, and institutions elsewhere in Ontario. To become a member, one “only” needs to initiate a project (more on that in a moment), and find collaborators, which precisely echoes the process I’ve observed in other UCaPP organizations. Their “rounds” – medical jargon for socializing knowledge – are generally open to any interested party, and those who are interested in innovations in healthcare that address systemic or global issues are welcome to initiate a project conversation that is consistent with the Centre’s vision and values. As its Medical Director, Dr. Dante Morra, said to me, “if you’re interested in addressing a handwashing issue on 13E, we’re not so interested. If you’re interested in addressing a handwashing issue throughout the entire system, come talk to us.” Project participation is largely through self-nomination, which means that there is an emergent and organic vetting and review process that occurs throughout its life. There are lots of opportunities to share information, through weekly operational rounds, monthly deep-dive reviews of active projects in which all members from among multiple areas of expertise have an opportunity to contribute, and innovation rounds that look at new opportunities coming into the Centre.

The Centre strikes me as non-hierarchical, with any individual being able to take relative leadership roles, depending on the nature of what type of leadership needed at any particular time for any given project. Most important, however, is that the collaborative leadership creates a tremendous sense of camaraderie, with individual autonomy among the members, collective responsibility for the success of each project, and mutual accountability for the Centre’s overall success. It’s through innovations like this one that healthcare will become sustainable, especially in the face of increasing challenges and demands.

A Letter Sent to OISE Dean Julia O'Sullivan Regarding the Peto Thesis Controversy

2010-12-13T16:34:00.000-05:00

Dear Dean O’Sullivan

I am writing to express my concern over the recent controversy surrounding the master’s thesis of a recently graduated student from the Sociology and Equity Studies in Education department, Jennifer Peto. Aside from Ms. Peto’s particular political views – with which I will admit I do not agree – my concern centres specifically on the questionability of the scholarship represented by the thesis, and hence on the reflected questionability of the scholarship produced at OISE in general. As a recent graduate of OISE myself, having earned both master’s and doctoral degrees in Adult Education and Counselling Psychology, I am dismayed by the prospect of the value of my degree being diminished, and my own scholarly contributions being called into question. After all, the worth of one’s academic credentials are only as valuable as the reputation of the institution from which they were obtained.

The common discourse in the popular press – The National Post and Macleans Magazine, to name but two examples – and on the floor of the Ontario Legislature directly calls into question OISE’s academic standards, including the rigour with which its graduate students are supervised, and the quality of work that is accepted as a graduate thesis. Indeed, an academic examination of eighteen thesis abstracts (including two for which the theses were reviewed in toto), prepared for University of Toronto’s President, David Naylor, and reported on in today’s press can be summarized with a sad indictment: having accepted what appears to be a sub-standard polemical essay as scholarship worthy of a master’s degree has “hurt the scholarly reputation of one of the world’s great universities … [and] are related to a larger systemic problem at OISE.”

Knowing the politics-in-use among the various graduate departments, I can appreciate the differences between the critical discourse and focus on transformative praxis in Adult Education, for example, and the discourse of radical activism-at-all-costs that pervades Sociology and Equity Studies. Others, who are not as familiar with the specific political agendas of various faculty members, like Prof. Sheryl Nestel, cannot so easily contextualize and distinguish the supposedly scholarly production of one department from another. To outsiders, all masters and doctoral graduates from OISE can potentially be tarred with the same brush of questionable scholarship, dubious supervision, and laissez-faire awarding of graduate degrees. It is not only the reputation of the Institute that is being called into question; it is the individual reputations and qualifications of each and every graduate that are equally being doubted.

I, for one, am proud of the “contributions to knowledge” represented by both my doctoral and (empirically based) master’s theses. I am thankful for the outstanding mentorship and guidance I received from my professors in the Adult Education program. I cannot passively stand on the sidelines while the reputations of so many hard-working scholars are being summarily cast onto an academic midden heap because of what appears to be the politics of relatively few individuals.

The Provost’s initial response to this controversy, that the thesis is merely “a student paper,” is alarming. There is a substantial difference between a thesis entered into the university’s compendium of knowledge production on Tspace and a course paper that, in many cases, often reflects the professor’s espoused worldview, replayed through lenses of the professor’s preferred political hue. As a first response in an attempt to diffuse the controversy, it was an unfortunate statement. On reflection, it seems to cast aspersions on, and uniformly diminish, the value of all scholarship produced throughout the university—clearly not the intent of the Provost.

As has been done in other post-hoc cases of questionable academic standards, I am calling for an independent academic review of the master’s thesis in question to determine whether it truly meets the standards for an acceptable thesis at the University of Toronto. To be clear: it is not the specific subject matter of the thesis that I am questioning, but rather the degree to which the subject matter has been adequately examined and vetted in accordance with the standards of academic rigour worthy of a master’s thesis at a top-tier university in Canada. In my opinion, at this point only an independent review will be able to establish the scholarly merit of Ms. Peto’s thesis, and therefore, the validity of the degree to which she was recently admitted at convocation. Only such a review will help to clear the air and to begin to rehabilitate the seemingly tarnished reputation of OISE, a reputation that deserves to be held in high esteem.

Sincerely yours,

Mark L. Federman, Ph.D.

Crowdsourcing Intelligence and Foresight

2010-11-23T21:25:00.001-05:00

James Surowiecki had an interesting and meme-worthy idea when he published his 2004 bestseller, The Wisdom of the Crowds. However, when reduced to its simplest ad absurdum, the concept breaks down in ways that are hugely problematic. It is not necessarily the case that an arbitrarily large group of poorly informed, often disengaged, and self-interested individuals will magically coalesce into a wisdom-dispensing oracle. Nonetheless, it is also the case that, putting aside disengagement, collective cynicism, apathy, and selfish interest, together we are all smarter (which is why I release most of my stuff under Creative Commons).

National security, going beyond the current burlesque sideshows at airports, is quite another matter. Its practitioners and purveyors are certainly engaged and often overly informed. (That they have multiple self-interested, ideological, and political interests is another matter.) However, a case can be made that the massive interactions among a myriad of environmental, economic, social, technological, cultural, philosophical, and yes, political circumstances and factors suggests that the more minds that can be directed towards the extreme complexity of global problems, the better.

Such is the case made by Carol Dumaine, a deputy director in the Office of Intelligence and Counter-intelligence at the US Department of Energy. Writing in Seed Magazine, she proposes a Global Foresight Commons that:

would expose discoveries, assessment processes, and foresight methodologies to the evaluation of a larger and more diverse community of people than currently possible. A single agency, government, or nation could not achieve the requisite diversity, involving millions of participants worldwide, that such a global foresight commons would entail. It would need to evolve organically, initially in a bottom-up fashion, with an international mix of early contributors, and would eventually need to attract the support of organizations that encourage their members to contribute their ideas to the commons. This system can be thought of as a robust and strategic form of Wikipedia, but with capacities for globally distributed synthesis, and for evaluation of non-proprietary, non-classified, forward-looking assessments: a “StrategicPedia,” as it were.

Interestingly, she echoes Marshall McLuhan's opinion of the artist, the person who lives their lives on the edge that demarcates the future from the present.

The gift of the artist is to reperceive the present by thinking what no one else has thought about. Great artists—and great scientists—detect the early tremors of seismic change in society, politics, technology, religion, and philosophy and represent the world as they see it through new eyes and new understanding. But the shock of the new often challenges orthodoxy, branding many creative minds as threats to the stability of society.

Sadly, governments are BAH organizations. I know of not a single one that has either the foresight or fortitude to give up what a government (and those individuals drawn to exercising the power of government) crave: control. To succeed, a proposal such as that which Carole Dumaine suggests must acknowledge that its participants are actually engaged in a UCaPP endeavour, and hence, must embrace principles of a UCaPP organization. A foundational principle of UCaPP leadership is that the leader must cede control to be able to create an environment of individual autonomy, collective responsibility, and mutual accountability. This, of course, is anathema to conventional (pseudo-)democratic processes based on partisan politics and geopolitical neo-liberal ideologies that are driving most of the Western world today. It also stands in stark opposition to what is presumed to be the risk-reducing, best-practice-du-jour based on a cult-of-the-experts, not to mention the experts' vested interest in their own expertise. Such abdication of true UCaPP leadership (by those who may have been elected to high office, but are often not worthy of those positions by any objective qualification) inevitably results in a collective inability to employ novel methodologies, to seek undiscovered possibilities, and to draw on the associative pattern-discerning power of para-disciplinary minds. UCaPP leaders welcome dissent in the context of a culture of inquiry; demands for compliance and hewing to a party line poorly serve a complex, massively interconnected world.

What Carol Dumaine proposes may be radical, but it is far from new. She simply points out that solving complex problems during a disruptive periods of change - like the one through which we are now living - necessitates Renaissance minds, "what Leonardo da Vinci called saper vedere, or knowing how to see. Da Vinci’s relentless questioning of everything challenged the conventions and taboos of his time."

The challenge is not to see what no one else can see, but to think new things about that which everyone already sees.

Not Your Father’s (or Mother’s) Normal: The future of “new-television,” at the Television Bureau of Canada

2010-11-21T16:00:00.000-05:00

On Friday, I had the opportunity to speak to the annual Sales Advisory Conference of the Television Bureau of Canada. This is an organization representing all of the major broadcasters in Canada; this meeting was concerned specifically with the future of the business side of television—advertising, marketing, and demographic shift research. The theme of their conference was “The New Normal,” and they asked me to speak about the future of television and television advertising. Here are some ideas that I introduced to the attentive and responsive crowd at the Four Seasons Yorkville on Friday morning.

As I derive in detail in No Educator Left Behind, our understanding of the term, “mass media,” changes with each change in cultural epoch. In the primary oral society of ancient, Periclean Athens, there was no mass media since there were no masses (as we have constructed that concept). The first mass media was literally “media IN masses” during the manuscript culture dominated by the medieval Church—people were instructed how to conduct their lives by those who had command of the (literate) Word of God in masses. But when Gutenberg began printing the bible on a moveable-type press, he signalled the beginning of the transition to what McLuhan calls, The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which information – mostly fragmented and segmented – can be “cast broadly” or broadcast. Media in masses transforms to become media FOR the masses, a conceptual understanding whose dominance persisted through to the 20th century.

Now, however, as we have come through the break boundary into the UCaPP (ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate) era (which occurred in 1995), the construction of the term, mass media, once again changes. It is no longer media for the masses, but media BY the masses. weblogs and wikis—publishing and the press by the masses; podcasts—radio by the masses; YouTube, Vimeo, Revver, BlipTV—television and cinema by the masses. And all of these represent a profound change from the Enlightenment model in which a sole author creates an artefact and “casts it broadly” using the technology of the day. Rather, all of these UCaPP technologies enable a mash-up/remix culture of collaborative construction in which new cultural creations emerge from prior creations in a process that is consistent with an ethos of sustainability: produce, reuse and recycle, and from the reusing and recycling, produce some more.

We now create a media ecosystem that includes both the artefact itself plus all of its contextual links that give it meaning in our contemporary, massively interconnected, UCaPP world. In particular, that ecosystem includes attention hooks that attract us to that media parcel, and those hooks link us in to the rest of the environment that includes the artefacts, the happenings, and the people, that almost magically emerge and appear in our individual and collective consciousness. Any given media artefact enables the emergence of a sort of complex, media ecosystem, more like a strange attractor in complexity terms, or what I have taken to calling a strange media attractor.

Similarly, audience itself is interconnected in diverse and complex ways via the media artefacts themselves, and these contextual links. It can no longer be simply understood as multi-way divisible demographic groups, but rather is complex and emergent, depending on the influencing factors of the myriad interconnections and experiences. The more diverse the environment enabled by the strange media attractor, the more robust is the emergent audience that is produced. The more the audience is produced, the stronger the strange media attractor becomes, to be reused, recycled, continually producing and reproducing each other. This, by the way, is the complexity science explanation for what you might otherwise call media branding in the UCaPP world.

In the same way that mass media are no longer mass media, and audiences are no longer audiences—television is no longer television. The key to understanding the future of television, or “new-television,” centres on appreciating the nature of complex, emergent audiences and how they interact with multi-modal, strange media attractors—these diverse collections and collaborations that include conventional content, a wide range of diverse experiences and interactions, often enabled by technology like apps, that span both the physical and cyber-worlds, and connection with and proximity to, other people.

Interestingly, the role of broadcasters remains largely the same in the UCaPP (business) world: they deliver audiences to advertisers. In this respect, the two largest broadcasters in the world are Facebook and Google. Google – now the world’s largest advertising company – their nominal claim to fame is that they became really effective at sending people away. When they started in 1996, this was a revolutionary idea, because at the time, the biggest marketing issue for websites was how to make themselves more sticky. Google succeeded because they became tremendously skilled at sending its users away to where they really wanted to be.

Facebook, on the other hand, became tremendously successful at bringing people together in all sorts of different configurations of events, and groups, and especially collaboratively constructed, shared experiences. Together with Craigslist, Facebook and Google deliver more consumers to more advertisers than any other organization in the world. They don’t explicitly seek to own content and regardless of what some might say with respect to privacy concerns, they don’t even seek to own you. I would think of them more like Hotel California—you can check out anytime you like – especially with your credit card – but you can never leave.

What Google and Facebook do especially well among their various properties and affiliates is they create emergent, complex audiences. They, themselves, are the strongest of the strange media attractors. They are open, they’re relatively agnostic with respect to specific content, and they don’t judge. Whether it’s YouTube enabling the emergent audience for Old Spice Guy, wrapped up and delivered to Proctor and Gamble, or Zynga’s addictive but annoying Facebook games, Farmville and Mafia Wars, the most successful broadcasters in today’s UCaPP world do one thing and one thing only, and they do it exceptionally well: They enable and create emergent, complex audiences. They make it easy and cheap for consumers to access the content they want. They make it easy and cheap for those consumers to be delivered into the hands of the advertisers. And, most important, they make it the most natural thing in the world for people who are ubiquitously connected to experience pervasive proximity, with other like-minded people, and coalesce into that complex, emergent audience around whichever media attractor wants to do business with them, no matter how strange they might be.

From these various understandings, and from the lessons (apparently not completely) learned by the recording industry, I was able to suggest some specific, recommended tactics and strategies for the television industry, based on openness, collaboration with a complex, emergent audience, focused on developing and monetizing these new, strange media attractors. Based on the individual responses from many of the attendees, I was able to provide some useful food for thought. There may yet be hope for an anticipatory transformation of the television industry, at least here in Canada, in a time of “The New Normal.”

CBC's Quirks and Quarks 35th Anniversary Show

2010-11-12T14:40:00.000-05:00

I had the privilege of being invited as a panelist for CBC's renowned science program, Quirks and Quarks' 35th Anniversary Show. The show will be broadcast live tomorrow, Saturday, November 13 at noon in all time zones, and streamed live from the CBC Radio One site (drop down the "Listen" tab from the top menu bar; you can choose which feed you'd like).

The show provides an outstanding survey of developments among many diverse areas of science and tech that have occurred (or should I say evolved) over the 35-year history of one of CBC's flagship programs. On the panel will be:

Cosmology: Dr. Barth Netterfield, Professor of Observational Cosmology, in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, at the University of Toronto

Neuroscience: Dr. Jody Culham, Associate Professor specializing in Neuro-Imaging, in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario

Climate Science: Dr. Danny Harvey, Professor of Climatology in the Department of Geography and Planning, at the University of Toronto

Renewable Energy: Dr. Aimy Bazylak, Assistant Professor of Micro-scale Energy Systems, in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, at the University of Toronto

Planetary Science: Dr. Ray Jayawardhana, Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics, and Professor in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, at the University of Toronto.

Genetics: Dr. Marla Sokolowski, Professor of Biology and Canada Research Chair in Genetics at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Fundamental Physics: Dr. Lee Smolin: Faculty Member, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.

Ecology: Dr. Madhur Anand, Canada Research Chair in Global Ecological Change, and Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Biology at the University of Guelph

Human Evolution: Dr. Shawn Lehman, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, at the University of Toronto

Technology: Dr. Mark Federman, Independent business and technology consultant. He was previously Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.

Listen on-air Saturday, or download the podcasts. Either way, it's well worth the listen!

The Agenda with Steve Paikin: Death of the Liberal Class (Video & Analysis)

2010-10-26T12:49:00.003-04:00

Last Friday, I was one of the panel on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin. The featured guest was Chris Hedges, author of the recently published Death of the Liberal Class. In it, Hedges argues that traditional, liberal institutions - the liberal church, universities, labour unions, the press, and the Democratic Party in the U.S. - have sold out to corporatist/capitalist interests. They are thus no longer able to fulfil what he claims are their proper and useful role in society, namely, to act as a mitigating channel for dissent and dissatisfaction among the populace, providing a means to deflect massive, disruptive, structural changes. There was a featured interview with Hedges, and then the "debate" - the panel on which I participated with Hedges, and two others espousing the political right-wing, more corporatist views, Reihan Salam, and Tony Keller.

I think I did reasonably well, even though the conversation was themed on geo-political policy, economics, hegemonic brinkmanship during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and whose life experience - Salam's or Hedges's - was more apropos to a reading of the hollowing out and decay of contemporary America. None of these are especially my ken, but I managed to hold my own (when I could get a few words in edge-wise).

Some observations: Of most concern, and perhaps most telling, was Salam's neo-liberal approach, validated by his personal success in light of the fact that his parents were immigrants from Bangladesh, and he grew up in a depressed part of Brooklyn. His story is exemplary of the archetypal, if mythical, American Dream Fable, but represents a particular instance of privilege that he does not afford to those whose livelihoods have been pulled out from under them by the very deregulations and so-called free-market economy that Salam and his right-wing think tank cronies espouse. Salam's claim that those so dispossessed, whose own "American Dreams" have become a series of waking nightmares, have simply migrated elsewhere to greener pastures is laughable, and certainly defies simple observation. Indeed, his attempt to refute economic statistics by counting the economic benefit of living on food stamps is ludicrous. His challenge to Hedges's case can perhaps best be summed up in his opening statement: "I just could not recognize the reality that I know from my daily life." And that, for most neo-liberal corporatists on the political right-wing, is the problem.

Tony Keller, on the other hand, is not as Ebenezer Scrooge-ish in his analysis as is Salam. In my opinion, Keller's perceptual limitation comes from his inability to understand the principles of complexity. He cannot see a "conspiracy" among all the various factors that, taken together, have "conspired" to disrupt the fabric of civil society (even though Hedges does not use a conspiracy metaphor). To Keller, who seems to espouse an old-style laissez-faire market approach, the interconnectedness among the various forces at work in a capitalist-driven society is invisible. He seemingly cannot understand that independently occurring economic and social factors do not necessarily have to deliberately collude to enable the type of emergent patterns that we are experiencing as a result of the apparent liberal sell-out that Hedges names. Keller's position is that human history has been a story of progress, and that progress is good (with a relatively minor concession made for the fact that not all progress has been unproblematic... oh really?!).

My own position (at the 4 minute point in the video) is simple to state: the constructs that gave us corporatism, capitalism, the liberal class, and modernity itself are now obsolesced, and we need a new framework in which to observe, theorize, understand, and undo the dysfunctions that we have clearly visited upon ourselves, and the wider world. That Salam is willingly blind to such disruption and dysfunction is not only sad, but naive in the extreme. That Keller cannot understand the connectedness that defines the contemporary world (UCaPP, for those who are playing along at home), represents the constraint of Industrial Age, managerial socialization. Arguments from neither of these simplistic contexts are useful; rather, they serve to bolster ignorance - literally, the learned ability to ignore much that is politically, ethically, and morally problematic in our world in favour of that which is instrumental, efficient, and merely economic.

Hedges's argument is useful and even truthy as far as it goes - that there has been a de facto collusion among predominantly economically driven forces, and those that have traditionally provided more progressive mitigation against the selfish, consumptive inclinations of that mythical, and anything-but-rational beast, homo economicus. The solution, in my view, is two-fold. First, we can recognize that, historically speaking, we are in the midst of a massive cultural transition from an epoch largely defined by the Enlightenment that solidified into modernity, to one that is being structured (although that term itself is problematic and must be taken in its broadest sense) by conditions of UCaPP, and has yet to emerge into a stable, homeostatic form. This suggests one particular inevitability: that the Salams and Kellers of the world will inevitably shuck off this mortal coil, and in their places will stand men and women who have been socialized into a more mutually responsible and collectively accountable sensibility. That final understanding, namely, that we are all responsible for and accountable to ourselves, each other, and the world at large - be it natural, built, material, or social - will inevitably dominate intelligent and reasoned discourse.

Second, we can hasten the day of societal institutions transforming to become more in-tune with this contemporary dynamic by adopting a worldview and analytic frame which are themselves more consistent with UCaPP conditions. Although I am an obviously an advocate of Valence Theory (that emerged from my doctoral research) and the ideas I express in No Educator Left Behind, as being quite useful in this regard, similar frameworks that recognize complexity and acknowledge a socially just economics would be equally acceptable and useful, at least to me, and likely to those of the more progressive persuasion as well.

What is not acceptable in a contemporary context is the penchant of the fogey generation - men like Reihan Salam and Tony Keller - to continue to apply 19th and 20th century principles to the analysis of our 21st century reality. And even Chris Hedges is at somewhat of a loss, as he continues to apply a distinctly Industrial Age model as the theme for a possible alternative.

On "The Agenda with Steve Paikin" on Friday

2010-10-21T16:05:00.003-04:00

I'm excited about doing The Agenda with Steve Paikin on Friday, October 22 (20:00 and 23:00 on TVO). The featured guest is Chris Hedges, in Toronto to do a three-week stint at the Monk Centre, and author of the newly published, Death of the Liberal Class.

The liberal class posits itself as the conscience of the nation. It permits us, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define ourselves as a good and noble people. Most importantly, on behalf of the power elite the liberal class serves as bulwarks against radical movements by offering a safety valve for popular frustrations and discontentment by discrediting those who talk of profound structural change.

The Death of the Liberal Class examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues there are five pillars of the liberal establishment – the press, liberal religious institutions, labor unions, universities and the Democratic Party— and that each of these institutions, more concerned with status and privilege than justice and progress, sold out the constituents they represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.

In listening to Hedges talk about his book, he strikes me as a latter-day Howard Beale, the character played by the late Peter Finch in the movie, Network, who implores us all to cry out, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" There is almost a neo-Marxist tone to Hedges's analysis, and he stops just inches short of calling for a revolution. But he is no crackpot radical. Chris Hedges is thoughtful and thought-provoking, and draws from history, philosophy, political economy, literature, sociology, and psychology to construct his well-wrought argument.

For the most part, I agree with Hedges's thesis. Where we differ, perhaps, is in the inevitability of his conclusion. I think there is a way out of the mess into which we've allowed ourselves to be seduced. I'm looking forward to the conversation tomorrow evening, and I'll write more on my specific ideas after the broadcast. If you're available to watch, it's Friday, October 22 at 20:00, repeated at 23:00 on TVO. I'll post the link to the video podcast when it's posted early next week.

Update: (26 Oct 2010): The video of the panel debate is now posted, along with my post-game analysis.

Rethinking Employee Engagement

2010-10-18T17:28:00.001-04:00

One of the LinkedIn groups I follow – Organization Development and Training – had an ongoing conversation that addressed the question of whether so-called employee engagement programs are effective. After all, a recent study by one of the name-brand, managerialist consulting companies, McKinsey, found that non-financial incentives like praise, recognition, attention, and the opportunity to take on new leadership responsibilities were only marginally more effective than the good old Taylorist approach of bonus incentive pay.

Given that a survey taken at a time of economic insecurity would find that economic incentives are more engaging than engagement programs is hardly surprising to anyone who looks beyond the restrictions of the assumptive box into which this study has been molded. But the conversation among OD practitioners expanded the question somewhat, and led to an observation from one person that employee engagement tends to be weakest among organizations which have no long-term purpose, but only a short-term vision—call it managerial myopia (nearsightedness).

The immediate response to that observation was a call for creating a balance between our individual passions and purpose, and those of the firm. The idea is that the organization’s interests being inherently superior to those of its members create a disconnection between individual’s (non-economic) motivators and those forms of engagement that turn on her/his intrinsic motivators. The responder observes that, “we are still wedded to the paradigm of the organisation holding the balance of power in a relationship. I think that increasingly that's a choice we make, not a truth.”

The idea of organizations holding the balance of power in a relationship being a “choice” is only partially true. Over the past four centuries, that balance of power, and the subjectification of organization’s members to its institutional authority have been the received and accepted model that has shaped not only organizations, but Western society as a whole. It is received knowledge, certainly, but knowledge that has been consistently received and reinforced, predominantly by those who hold the privilege of societal power. What this suggests is that we have yet to fulfil the prerequisites for any hope of sustainable success in truly engaging employees through non-financial, supposed incentives. We first have to “unreceive” the knowledge that an organization’s (predominantly or exclusively economic) interests necessarily take precedence over the collective values of all its constituencies. In other words, we need to acquire both a new way of thinking about organizations, and a new vocabulary and discourse that supports that thinking, to effect the changes necessary to shift the last 400 years of “that's always been the way things are.”

To balance passion and purpose, I have proposed the idea of tactility to replace vision as the guiding sensory metaphor. The issue is not where we see ourselves in the future (which never arrives, of course), but rather whom are we touching, and how are we touching them, today? Are we touching – that is, creating the effects – in ways that we intend, and what subsequent effects (secondary, tertiary, and so forth) are being set in motion?

Those effects can be articulated as valence relationships—those connections that bind us and enable us to react and interact with each other, and with other organizations, communities and environments. It is through the effects we create by way of Economic, Socio-Psychological, Knowledge, Identity, and Ecological relationships that our passions and purposes become connected and viscerally expressed. When we balance the totality of effects among an organization’s various constituencies, employees (among other members) cannot help but become more engaged, or conversely realize that they and the organization are irreconcilably incompatible. The result? Organizations and their members are more engaged and aligned with each other, with their communities, and with their passions and purposes.

Changing Education Paradigms

2010-10-14T13:34:00.001-04:00

From the remarkably good RSA Animate, the latest animation from Sir Ken Robinson, on Changing Education Paradigms.

I like how he traces the false epidemic of ADHD among children, and how he connects the necessary engagement with the aesthetic to promote creativity and divergent thinking with the ANaesthetic effect of drugs like Ritalin that essentially turn off minds, disconnect engagement, and create compliant factory machine components.

What I like most is how everything that Sir Ken says, and how he constructs his argument, exactly parallels and complements my own ideas on No Educator Left Behind. It's not the ego-stroking validation that pleases me, but rather the realization that there are credible people elsewhere in the world who understand, as I do, that the modernist education project is fundamentally wrong for our time, and that doing more of the wrong thing will not bring about the requisite changes to sustain an already transformed present, and inevitably transformational future. Not only our current education system, but also our current fundamental model of what education is and should be - the education paradigm - are wrong for our time: we are spending incredible amounts of time, money, and effort to create great citizens for the 19th century who become completely disengaged and increasingly unable to survive in the 21st.

Standardization and testing won't do it. Fancy tech in the classrooms (alone) won't do it. Rethinking the fundamental tenets of education, as I discuss in No Educator, is the place to start - we simply have to get back to the basics.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time?

2010-10-12T23:14:00.001-04:00

A perfect example of a completely misguided marketing message: the Charmin bear enjoying the softness and absorbency of the bathroom tissue, posed in front of a destroyed lake. The takeaway? "Use Charmin. Destroy ecosystems."

Marketing is about messages which, as Marshall McLuhan told us, are entirely effects. Looks like someone in this agency's creative department will be scrubbing toilets for some time to come...

Want to Change the World?

2010-09-14T12:57:00.001-04:00

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”—R. Buckminster Fuller

Fuller and Marshall McLuhan were acquaintances—perhaps one could even call them friends. Certainly, they shared aspects of a worldview when it came to understanding processes of change. (On the other hand, McLuhan was a Paul Revere-ish figure when it came to technology: “To arms! To arms! The media are coming.” Fuller, on the other, other hand, embraced the beneficent potential of technological change.) With regard to this “Bucky” quotation, I notice the explicit reference to obsolescence, and the tacit implication of reversal (which is my favourite among McLuhan’s four Laws of Media).

When a particular idea, conception, invention, or technology (all “media” in McLuhan’s construction) is no longer providing the structural impetus for a society or culture, it is, in McLuhan’s terms, obsolete. As he notes, this doesn’t mean that it disappears; in fact, it might be just the opposite. Obsolescence means that the thing or concept in question becomes ubiquitous in a banal sort of fashion—like some fashion (think, cloned couturier at Walmart, for example). It is almost always the case that the new medium – more precisely, the effects of the new medium – goes relatively unnoticed for a long while, all the time reframing, reshaping, and re-engaging the means and consequences of human interactions. But it is the new medium’s ability to diminish the dominant influence of the old – to force the latter’s obsolescence – that enables change.

It is often the case that a medium is pushed too far, forcing it into what McLuhan calls reversal—the state in which the effects of the original medium “flip” into their opposite. Whereas obsolescence is the tetrad quadrant of the past, reversal is the quadrant of the future. It is the means and mechanism of large-scale, systemic change.

Bureaucratic, administratively controlled, hierarchical organizations have been around for a long time—arguably since the 10th century or so, an in the modernist context, since the post-Enlightenment (i.e., 17th century) period. The Industrial Age confirmed the BAH organization as a “best practice,” more or less, and from that foundation 20th century thinking progressed (and I use that term loosely) towards structural contingency theories: the idea that an organization’s structure determines its effectiveness, and that structure is contingent on the environment external to the organization among its markets, customers, competitors, regulators, and so forth. It sort of makes sense, in a deterministic, linearly causal, Industrial Age, clockwork notion of factory-style organizations. It characterizes “the existing reality,” or at least the reality that existed as we entered modernity.

Problematic? Sure. Dysfunctional? Clearly. Changeable? Ah, that’s the proverbial $64,000 question. You see, that so-called existing reality is no longer the current reality, that is the reality of contemporary times.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. Build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

That is why I created Valence Theory, and why I focus on interventions that don’t fight the existing reality in organizations, but rather introduce a new model that is more effective – creating an explicit awareness of effects – in order to help all members of the organization truly change things.

If you are the type of organizational leader who believes that his or her employees are the problem, or the arrangement of the organization chart is the problem, or that the solution lies in simply implementing new technology that makes old processes more efficient, then I might be able to offer you assistance via individual coaching and counsel. However, if you are the type of leader who realizes that their organization’s existing reality will not sustain it through this current period of complexity and transition, I definitely can assist with a new, effective model and methods that make the existing model quite obsolete.

Zen and the Art of Organizational Transformation, Effectiveness, and Sustainable Change

2010-09-06T16:06:00.000-04:00

I’m re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the classic, 1970s, philosophical novel by Robert M. Pirsig about one man’s journey into the philosophy of science, epistemology, the elusiveness of quality, and the process of (re)discovering oneself through a reconciliation of the romantic with the classical (read: rational). I read it the first time when I was much too young (recommended to me by my manager early in my professional career), and now am appreciating the philosophical reflections on replaying an earlier life, cut short by technology. In a very real sense, that description characterizes aspects of my own journey. Like the author, I too have learned the benefits of having become a reflective practitioner, the value of applying philosophy to practical matters, and a quest for understanding the elusive nature of quality in systems of organization.

I was struck, the other day, by a passage early in Chapter 8:

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

The second issue (I’ll get to the first one shortly) raised in this passage – the notion that tearing down the factory, or implementing organizational change, for example – without seriously challenging the underlying assumptions that gave rise to the particular form in the first place, is relatively futile if what one wants to achieve is sustainable change. I’m biased of course: my entire research is directed towards creating a new, fundamental understanding of organization so that theories of leadership, effectiveness, and transformation may be consistent with contemporary circumstances, rather than those of classical, Industrial Age thinking. To paraphrase Pirsig, if one attempts to institute organizational change, let alone “transformation for sustainability” that seems to be in vogue these days, but the systemic patterns of thought that produced that organization (and its problems, quirks, dysfunctions, and ineffectiveness) are left intact, than those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding organization.

When one is seeking to restructure an organization, or to integrate multiple organizational cultures after one or more mergers, or to revitalize leadership, or even something as relatively minor (in the large scheme of things) as implementing new workflow processes in the hopes of improving operational efficiency, it is important to recognize the dynamics that caused the need for change in the first place. Understand those dynamics, articulate the nature of the desired effects (not goals or outcomes—effects), and then set about enabling new organizational structures, operations, leadership processes, and the rest. (Valence Theory, of course, provides the necessary vocabulary and tools for the recommended understanding and articulation.)

This brings me to the first issue that Pirsig quickly zooms by, leaving it in a cloud of assumptive dust: the question of effects. From the classical perspective – one that adheres to the Newtonian, clockwork universe of “cause (first) and (then) effect” – it is easily understood what he is getting at. He speaks of the importance of attacking not effects but the underlying causes which have to do with persistent, old-style thinking. I agree, but one should not give such short shrift to the effectiveness of effects. We may, among our organizations, seek to accomplish goals and objectives. However, in all of our myriad approaches to planning, there is no way of knowing whether the goals and objectives we strive to accomplish are, in fact, the correct goals and objectives. Those goals and objectives? They are simply a means to an end, and that end is the resulting effects we enact among the various constituencies with whom we interact. Please think about that last comment for a second or two: goals and objectives by themselves are meaningless; their context, and hence meaning, is solely derived from the effects they enable among the organization's various interconnected constituencies.

Sustainable organizational change is only sustainable relative to those social, material, and spiritual environments with which the organization engages, combines, and interacts. That means being completely aware of the effects one intends to enable and create, and the effects that actually emerge, through any introduced process of transformation or change. Admittedly, this is a significant challenge for contemporary leaders, not unlike that of reconceiving the notion of the unitary, classical nature of a motorcycle to reach the epiphany that Pirsig’s narrator realizes when he finally reconnects with the forcibly departed Phaedrus.

Classical notions are no longer adequate to understand the complex dynamics of the contemporary world, nor of the contemporary organization. Change is only sustainable if it emerges organically from the environment that contextualizes it.

[Technorati tags: zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance | robert pirsig | leadership | organization change | organization effectiveness | sustainability]

Salsa, and the Art of Organization Effectiveness and Leadership Development

2010-08-26T17:37:00.002-04:00

Among other things, I am a salsa instructor—a passion that is completely in tune with everything else I perform professionally, and the values that pervade my life. The key to becoming a great salsa dancer is the same as creating a great organization (and, not coincidentally, the foundation of great, contemporary education): connection, context, complexity, and connotation. Leads and follows must, first and foremost, be connected and in touch with each other. They must learn to clearly signal and read the next move, the next pattern, and the changes in direction and momentum that flow throughout the dance. Advanced dancers know that, while the lead directs the movements, the follow sets the style, and both must complement each other, dancing collaboratively to create a beautiful, flowing, and passionate dance.

Regardless of their relative skill, the partners must respond to the context provided by the music. They must follow not only the tempo, but the mood, theme, and sometimes lyrics should also be reflected in the grace and passion of the shared movement. Rather than simply responding to the external context of the music, the dancers must allow the music to flow through them, enabling meaning-rich connection to emerge as they combine their connected interaction with the environment of the music. This necessarily means that the dance is complex: a number of simple elements that interact among connected, but otherwise independent, autonomous agents, resulting in the emergence of patterns that cannot precisely be predicted beforehand from the starting conditions.

Finally, the fourth “C,” connotation, or the creation of meaning. When I dance in the role of instructor-with-student, we create a certain and very particular meaning, irrespective of my partner's gender or our relative dance roles (that is, me in either the lead or follow role). That meaning emerges from the other three “Cs”: the connection in our roles; the context of both the music and the instructor-student relationship; and the complexity of the learning process. On the other hand, when I dance with one among some of my favourite partners, the connotation or meaning is completely different, particularly with a passionate song.

Reinforcing and augmenting the foundation of the four “Cs” is one simple idea—what it is that I do, whether in my role as dance instructor or as lead with a partner:

I create a great environment of engagement.

When I perform in the role of Organizational Therapist, when I’m invited as a Leadership Coach, when I’m asked to facilitate processes of Organization Transformation and Change, the same principles apply: I create a great environment of engagement that enables organizations and their leaders perform like advanced dancers.

Organizational leaders must, first and foremost, be connected and in tune with the other members of their organization—and those members extend beyond those who might merely be on the payroll or attend at one or more particular offices. There must be clear and consistent signals indicating the next move, the next pattern, and the changes in direction and momentum for the organization. And although the leader might direct the movement, it is the other members – all the participating constituencies who are affected by the organization’s motion – who set the style of interactions. All members and constituencies must mutually complement the collective organization, and “dance” collaboratively in accomplishing the organization’s goals and aspirations. Most important, this collaboration is responsible for creating the desired effects in the total organizational environment, and enacting the organization’s emergent and collective values.

Healthy organizations are thus informed by the 4 Cs: connection, context, complexity, and connotation. They are connected among their members and constituencies through valence relationships. Because of these connections, each constituency introduces an often unique context that flows through and is incorporated into the organization and affects its emergent behaviours. In this sense, the organization does not instrumentally respond to an external context like a beginner dancer counting out the rhythm, but rather becomes part of the overall environment, allowing the “music” – the environmental stimuli – to flow through it and provide organizational impetus. This, in turn, means that simple, deterministic analyses (such as those provided by the more instrumentally focused structural contingency theories) are not entirely helpful; a more appropriate analysis is based in complexity. And that means that leaders must learn to be cognizant of emergent meaning, or connotation, as they consider both more immediate tactics, and strategies to address longer-term objectives.

More than all of this, healthy organizations are passionate. They are passionate about being present in the environment of their connected constituencies. They are passionate about engaging with their various partners. They are passionate about creating a beautiful and elegant flow of desired and intended effects throughout the metaphorical ballroom floor of their industry, or market, or community, or other social environment on which they dance and enact their collective organizational aspirations.

In my role as therapist, coach, and facilitator, I help organizations, their leaders, and all their constituent members collaboratively create this passion through authentic connection, appreciation of diverse contexts, understanding organizational complexity, and enabling emergent connotation or meaning.

Most of all, I do one, consistent thing: I create great environments of engagement.

(For those who might be a little more left-brain-oriented, here is a detailed, specific exposition of what I do.

[Technorati tags: organization development | organization effectiveness | organization change | organization transformation | leadership development]

"You Will Be Charged! Ignorance is No Excuse!"

2010-08-13T12:49:00.001-04:00

How's that for a nice, friendly introduction to Toronto-the-(once)-good? This was how a Japanese visitor to our fair city was greeted late last evening (after midnight) by one of our uniformed city ambassadors, otherwise known as a TTC fare collector at Spadina station. TTC Customer Service Advisory Panel, please take note.

A young Japanese man, Toronto guide book and tourist map in hand, had erroneously walked in through the bus driveway into the station. Somewhat confused by the non-obvious (to his eye) design of the station, he exited through the turnstile, and came around to show his weekly transit pass to the collector. (Yes, of course there is the "no entry" sign, but, hey: foreign visitor, rudimentary knowledge of conversational tourist English, and how well would you do against signs in Kanji?).

The collector was suitably incensed at the effrontery of the young man, and proceeded to give him a suitable dressing down, accusing him of a crime, informing him that he could be charged, and repeating these in that way some people have of dealing with those whose English is not up to scratch: louder and more insistent means that it becomes more understandable. The young man replied that (a) he had valid transport media (the weekly pass); (b) he was a foreigner and was unfamiliar with the particular ritual with respect to open driveways into a subway station (I'm paraphrasing); and (c) he understands and won't do it again. The collector wouldn't take (c) for an answer and continued with threats to have the young man arrested and charged, repeating, "Ignorance is no excuse!"

The collector is right: ignorance is no excuse. But, of course, I'm referring to the ignorance of the collector himself. Ignorance of customer service is no excuse for rudeness. Ignorance of your role as a goodwill ambassador of Toronto is no excuse for reading a visitor the riot act, especially if he's not rioting. Ignorance of the black eye our transit system has been wearing these past months over fare-collector rudeness (among many other things) is no excuse to add to the blackness regularly demonstrated by the good - and I used that adjective advisedly - members of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113.

As for me, I helped diffuse the situation as I paid my fare, and ushered the young man towards the correct subway platform. His comment to me was that he could not believe the rudeness - it was, after all, a simple mistake, and he was not trying to avoid paying a fare. I expressed my agreement, apologized to him on behalf of the truly good citizens of this city, ensured he knew how to get to where he was going, and wished him a much better and more enjoyable stay in what is normally a great place to visit.

Hello TTC? Hello Gary Webster? Hello Bob Kinnear? Is anybody home? Is anyone there really serious about your business? And, far more important (notice what I do as a professional practice - second item, and check out "The Messages" - up there in the top right corner of the webpage), does anyone realize that such front-line behaviour is indicative of some very serious, systemic issues that still infect your organizational culture?

[Technorati tags: ttc | toronto transit commission | collector | customer service | gary webster | bob kinnear]

Hiring Strategy - Experience or Education? Wrong and wrong...

2010-08-11T15:06:00.000-04:00

Friend Larry Lyon pointed me to a post entitled, Don't Hire Experience, Hire Learners. The gist of the post is a response to an article in the Australian Financial Review which suggests, “most employers say that if you have to choose between getting an MBA or getting two more years of experience, you’re much better off with the experience.” The post goes on to respond with a quote from the book Rework, which says, “Of course, requiring some baseline level of experience can be a good idea when hiring. ... There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six months of experience and one with six years. The real difference comes from the individual’s dedication, personality, and intelligence.” The post concludes that demonstrated ability to learn - like hiring an MBA - is a better indicator of success than mere experience.

Not exactly. This reasoning is an example of a false dichotomy, missing the essence of what's really going on in terms of effects and causes (in that order!).

My recommendation in response to all of this? Hire learners, yes. Hire MBAs? This is a dubious decision at best, because they don't necessarily know how to learn; rather, they know very well how to play a very particular game. To paraphrase a highly recommended radio documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: MBA - Mostly Bloody Awful (also, Mediocre But Arrogant, and Management By Accident).

Learning requires one to be comfortable with admitting what you don't know - MBA grads typically don't qualify. Learning requires having an open mind and not sticking to the "trite and true." Most people who have been in the work force for years in a BAH organization where they're supposed to shut up and do their job don't qualify.

Instead, hire the radical. Hire the iconoclast (I'm looking for work, by the way - I can actually help with these sorts of issues). Hire the person who dissents with virtuous subversion. Hire the curious. Hire the person who lives a culture of inquiry.But first, ensure that you are a leader who truly welcomes diverse voices that provide radical worldviews, and introduce virtuous subversion. Ensure that you encourage a culture of inquiry throughout your enterprise, and that you, yourself are truly a reflective practitioner. Be a learner among learners.

[Technorati tags: leadership | organizational learning | culture of inquiry]

On Values, Vision, Tactility, and Mission in Contemporary Organizations

2010-08-08T17:57:00.001-04:00

I had the good fortune to meet Ellen Hayakawa recently, and share a brief conversation (as well as a couple of blues dances). Ellen’s work is complementary to mine—she focuses on spirituality in a corporate setting, and “exploring the relationship between spirituality in the workplace and sustainability.” The conversation we shared enabled me to reflect on the relationship among tactility, vision, and values, and how several distinct ideas often become conflated, and therefore, confused in many people’s minds.

In the conversation, Ellen mentioned using a ground of personal and collective spirituality to enable an appropriate focus on “mission, vision, and values.” I had several comments in response—predictable comments for those who know me. First, I observed that the order of these aspects of individual and collective guidance were in the wrong order, exactly backwards as far as I was concerned. For me, values must come first, then an appropriate sensory metaphor (more on this in a moment), and finally the so-called mission, objectives, goals, tasks, and direct action towards accomplishment. Second, as I discovered in my research, vision as the dominant sensory metaphor for organizations, has pretty much run its course through the Gutenberg-inspired epoch that ended with modernity. In a world that is ubiquitously connected and therefore pervasively proximate (UCaPP), tactility is a far more appropriate – not to mention useful and socially cognizant – sensory metaphor.

Ellen argued her defence of both the order and sensory metaphor admirably. In doing so, she helped me to sort out some of the connections between the individual and the collective, and the relationship between one’s own sense of place and purpose in the world and that emergent sense characteristic of UCaPP organizations, namely the “place of organization,” or organization-ba.

The idea that mission is central to an organization comes from the modernist conception of what I call the “primary-purposeful organization.” Essentially, this means that an organization’s purpose – its mission – is primary above any other consideration. That purpose is imposed on everyone who joins the organization so that all are contributing to accomplishing the mission, goals, and objectives towards a common end. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But, what becomes quite fascinating to me is that, in a primary-purposeful organization, vision often seems to be an adjunct that is almost reverse-engineered to justify the mission. I have seen too many organizations engage in so-called visioning sessions that are actually attempts to align a conception of vision – often merely a future projection of goals and outcomes – to back-justify the mission at hand. And that mission is inevitably and directly tied to some sort of fungible Economic (tradable exchange of value, whether money is involved or not) connection with well-identified constituencies. So, as Ellen indeed describes it, the order of “mission, vision, values” is the way it’s done in most organizations. Understand the primary purpose – mission – reverse-engineer a consistent future for the organization’s direction – vision – and then ensure that the espoused values align with both. In a sense, this order hearkens to Argyris and Schön’s single-loop learning in which what is espoused becomes well-aligned with what is actually done, all in the name of consistency (yet another hangover from the Enlightenment). That Ellen can help organizations inject a spiritual sensibility and sense of wellbeing, enabling its members to connect with their own spiritual centres, is unquestionably admirable and worthwhile, because doing so in an instrumentalist, primary-purposeful ground is such a tough road to hoe.

Ellen’s insistence on the importance of vision is not the usual argument that I hear from other, more-conventional and traditionally socialized OD consultants (like, “you can’t know where you’re going unless you have vision”). Rather, Ellen directly connects one’s individual vision with one’s personal values and therefore, sense of direction in the world. Here is where I think traditional vocabulary becomes both limited and limiting. Values, as one of my friends likes to remind me, are those aspects, characteristics, behaviours, and attributes that one wants to promote, preserve, and protect. They indeed speak to how one locates oneself in the world, and creates connections that reflect the ba-aspects of connecting, binding, or valence relationships. As one understands one’s own values, and collectively and collaboratively joins with others of like-mind to promote, preserve, and protect those aspects, the process of organizational emergence begins to occur (even within extant primary-purposeful organizations) in a way that is intrinsically consistent with values, and indeed, the potential of human spirit and spirituality as Ellen so elegantly puts it.

From collective values, the nascent valence-conceived organization can then begin to understand what effects it aspires to create in the world. These effects – distinctly different from outcomes, goals, and mission – can be expressed among the five valence relationships (Economic, Socio-psychological, Identity, Knowledge, and Ecological), and represent the organization’s tactility, answering the question, whom do we want to touch, and how do we want to touch them today. For someone coming from a ground of spirituality in the workplace, this idea of touch and enabling effects in one’s wider social, emotional, material, and spiritual environment provides far better guidance for actually doing things than beginning with striving to accomplish an arbitrary goal somewhere in the future. Consistent with pervasive proximity in a UCaPP world, tactility is immediate and sustains; vision can be (and often is) illusory, transitory, and always in the distance (think, “mirage”).

If you, like Ellen, construct your organization based on mission, vision, and values, then welcome to the world of modernity. I’m sure you would do really well in the 20th century, and create great opportunities, and a strong sense of doing what is right for spiritual sustenance. However, if you truly want your organization to be consistent with the world as it is today – firmly located in the UCaPP world of the 21st century – it may be time to reorder your fundamental organizational priorities and retire that old chestnut of vision as the dominant, guiding sensory metaphor—an artefact, after all, of post-Enlightenment thinking. In other words, it may be time to consider transforming your vision of organization itself into one that is valence-conceived, and therefore organic, alive, and vital.

In my practice, transforming organizations and leadership today begins with articulating individual and collective values. The process of transformation proceeds by translating those values into mutual tactility, thereby enabling the organization to create its place – organization-ba – among the various diverse constituencies it touches. From this place of fundamental guidance, the organization can then determine what it must accomplish – its goals and objectives – to enact the effects that manifest its values. Not only does this process enable a far healthier organization, it sets up the organization for its own sustainability, and as a contributor to collaboratively sustaining our world.

Values. Tactility. Accomplish. Sounds like appropriate and useful guidance to me.

[Technorati tags: ellen hayakawa | values | vision | mission | tactility | sustainability | organization development | organization transformation]

Tomorrow: Online with the Globe on Narcissistic Leaders

2010-08-05T14:05:00.001-04:00

I've been invited to participate in an online conversation at the Globe and Mail site on the topic of their recent article, Narcissistic Bosses and Why You Should Love Them. I'll be joined by Eric Cousineau, the person about whose presentation at the Toronto OD Network I wrote a couple of years ago. It will be interesting to see what he has to say (I'm guessing that we won't necessarily see eye-to-eye on this one). The article cites author and academic Michael Maccoby, who:

...views narcissism as being largely beneficial, if not inevitable, in entrepreneurs and chief executives – beneficial because narcissists are innovators, inevitable because narcissists, being ambitious, are the most likely to rise to the top.

Really. I can't say that I agree with him about narcissists being innovators necessarily, but certainly about them rising - or perhaps stomping on people below - to realize their ambition of being at the top and in charge. His key thesis, that good leaders have an "interrelated set of skills - foresight, systems thinking, visioning, motivating, and partnering - that he terms 'strategic intelligence'" is generally unassailable. However, suggesting that these are exclusive traits of narcissists - even so-called productive ones - is nonsense. And putting up the strawman that the opposite of someone with "strategic intelligence" is a "consensus-building bureaucrat" offensively ignores the reality of collaborative leadership in a contemporary context.

The online conversation is here, and runs from 10 to 11 a.m. EDT, tomorrow, Friday, August 6. If you're available, please hop online and join the conversation.

[Technorati tags: narcissistic leader | michael maccoby | eric cousineau | leadership]

PBS Frontline: College Inc.

2010-08-01T14:59:00.000-04:00

Catching up on some old blog reading, I came across this exposé - or should I say, "investigation" - done by PBS's Frontline on for-profit, higher education corporations in the United States. The short version of the story is pretty straight-forward: Many regionally-accredited colleges in the US (and elsewhere) face significant financial pressure. Regional accreditation is the key criterion through which a college's programs qualify for US Federal Government student loans programs. For students who do not qualify for, or cannot afford, admission to either a state college or private, not-for-profit university, these for-profit institutions provide a way of obtaining at least a nominal, accredited qualification that may enable them to compete in a job market that increasingly demands formal qualifications. Put all of these factors together and you get the recipe for a perfect business: high demand among an under-serviced market, with immediate funding provided by the federal government, and those on-the-deferred-hook being promised that the value of their asset (the over-priced house... err... degree) will cover the future repayment of a loan they maybe shouldn't have qualified for in the first place.

Enter the private investors. There is considerable profit to be made by siphoning money from the federal purse now, to be repaid by anonymous individuals in the future, via investing in these down-at-the-heels colleges whose primary asset is not the quality of their research or, more importantly, the quality of their instruction, but rather the fact that their programs qualify for federal student loans. Hence, the astounding rise in market capitalization and economic valuation of such businesses as Grand Canyon University, Argosy University, Education Management Corporation, DeVry University, Chancellor University whose own claim to fame is the marketing potential of the Jack Welch Management Institute (ironically, among the close-up shots is a listing for a course in Business Communications and Ethics taught at that Institute), and the granddaddy of them all, University of Phoenix. The fact that the resulting average student debt load from these schools is almost double that of private (i.e., expensive) not-for-profit universities, and the employability of its graduates is apparently a fraction of that of traditional, higher-education institutions should not come as a surprise. The issue for the traditional business mind (hello, Mr. Welch!) is profit, so long as it violates no laws. The long-term effects, actual suitability for purpose, and consequences for any other constituency whom the business touches - those are apparently not part of "business ethics" in many traditional constructs.

The video is 55 minutes, but worthwhile viewing by anyone concerned with the state, and future, of higher education. What is considerably troubling to me as an Adult Educator is that many traditional, well-respected universities are beginning to follow the supposed economic imperative to be run more like a business, especially when it comes to the factory-model of undergraduate education (hello, University of Toronto!).

I should note that the program did not examine "hybrids": those traditional universities that have out-sourced the management and technical logistics of their distance-education programs to for-profit education corporations, while retaining control of their academic standards, faculty, and admissions.

[Technorati tags: for-profit college | argosy university | education management corporation | devry university | chancellor university | grand canyon university | university of phoenix]

Organization Therapy and Healing: The how-to guide

2010-07-31T01:10:00.002-04:00

I’ve been asked a few times recently to explain just how the process of organizational therapy and healing works. “So what exactly do you do?” is how the question is sometimes framed. More often, though, it’s along the lines of “I think my company / activist group / community organization / social justice movement can use some of what you do—how can I explain it to my boss / management / the leadership?”

Is Your Organization Ready to Heal?
Not all organizations – even if they are in trouble – are able to hear the type of guidance I offer. Just as individuals in crisis may try to motor through on their own, or focus on getting things done irrespective of their emotional and spiritual wellbeing (that, of course, affect how well they can get things done), an organization in crisis, transition, or cultural disarray may instead focus on tangible results irrespective of its members wellbeing.

First, therefore, the legitimated leadership in the organization have to recognize that they have some sort of problem, crisis, or at least large-scale discomfort that they would like to fix. Moreover, they are able to identify this sense of unease with problems concerning organizational culture, or dysfunctional human dynamics among their members.

Leaders might frame that concept in a variety of ways: morale issues; trauma and stress related to layoffs, mergers, or acquisitions; regular escalating conflicts among people; systemic complaints about lower and middle management abuses; or similar signs and indicators. The leadership cohort also have to at least minimally realize that the problems won't be fixed by the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the sinking ship (a.k.a. restructuring or a new org chart), or by a simple “town hall” or “all hands” meeting (although the town hall thing could serve as a wake-up call), or even through a leadership retreat event in which the organization’s vision becomes revision and the mission is put in remission. Something new must be tried.

Beginning Something New
This is where I come in. We have an initial conversation in which I attempt to get a first assessment on where, how, and when the organization is feeling pain. It could be coming from clients ("some of our best clients are telling us that they really don't like doing business with us like they used to"). It could be increased grievances against management. It could be more incidents of supervisor abuse or subordinate insubordination.

During that initial process of conversation and assessment (which could actually be several individual conversations followed by a group conversation in which I play back what I've heard—of course unattributed to any particular individual), I describe how I view organizations in the general case (i.e., using Valence Theory vocabulary). I may even give some generic (sanitized for confidentiality) examples of other organizations in similar straights that have been helped. I then coach the leadership through devising a discovery plan which has the aim of understanding the issues—and especially the issues that wouldn't come out when people are feeling unsafe. This often begins to look like a plan for an Action Research type of intervention.

Action in the Research
The findings of the Action Research investigation (and the duration of this varies immensely) are brought out in a process of formal dialogue (à la David Bohm) in which the legitimated leadership folks are in dialogue, and some non-leadership members are the process observers. This dynamic helps to model the erosion of hierarchical privilege and the beginnings of inclusive, more participatory, and collaborative leadership.

At this point, subsequent work depends entirely on what is found, and how the organization's members want to proceed. I should mention that by "members," I ideally mean everyone whom the organization touches via the five valence relationships, although at the early stages and iterations, management are sometimes more reluctant about including external "holders of stake." To begin the process of rebooting the organizational culture, I often advise beginning with a values and tactility session, as I describe in my thesis findings, that facilitates organizational members’ understanding of precisely what and how the organization wants to be. From there, the specific issues that were discovered during the first AR intervention can begin to be addressed in the context of the explicit set of organizational values, and the answer to the organization’s tactility question: whom do we want to touch, and how do we want to touch them today?

As a matter of fact, I just did a mini-version of this yesterday for the annual retreat of a volunteer, activist organization of which I am an ally. The action research part wasn't necessary, since the membership were polled with respect to specific initiatives and undertakings that were deemed important for re-booting the group after a successful, but seriously draining initiative that occupied them for the past, nearly two years. We did the values and tactility session using a close variation of a conversation café model, and I facilitated working through the proposed initiatives based on the fundamental cultural understandings that emerged from that opening session. As well, I helped them model changes in interpersonal dynamics and behaviours that, traditionally for this organization, inevitably resulted in huge gaps between espoused and in-use theories of action when it came to internal meetings. Much of what the group decided came out of a judicious application of my ideas of Effective Theory. They even adopted the UCaPP model of creating reference groups [see the section on "Sustaining a Complex Culture"] for new members. At the end of it all, they marvelled at how well the day went, how much they had accomplished, how good they all felt about the process, and similar sorts of wonderful and validating epithets about how I helped them to create a great environment of engagement among their members. Put simply, that's what I do.

Now, what can I do for you and your organization?

(For those who might be a little more right-brain oriented, here is a more creative exposition of what I do.)

[Technorati tags: organization therapy | organization healing | organization development | leadership development | leadership coaching | strategy | executive coaching]

Logic vs. The Bureaucratic Mind: Guess which wins?

2010-07-21T11:25:00.000-04:00

The Ontario Government is a marvel of bureaucratic thinking (but don't worry Toronto City Hall, and the Harper Conservative Regime - you're both doing really well in bureaucratic race to the bottom). The recent eco-fee-asco is not only politically damaging, revealing as it does the malaise that seems to pervade Queen's Park. It is actually far worse in its implications of a government so out of touch with sustainability issues, so blinded by a linearizing bureaucratic logic, so ineffective that it cannot perceive the effects of anything that it does, that it is hard to know where to begin, either in one's critique, or an effective remedy.

Here's the back-story: Money is a force-motivator. In other words, one can very crudely change behaviour by adjusting the amount of money one associates with that behaviour. Charge five cents for a shopping bag, and people will reduce their consumption of shopping bags, because it's not too difficult to bring your own. Bureaucratic logic (in this case, a.k.a. by its proper name, reductio ad absurdum) says that by charging some number of cents for containers of toxic products, people will reduce their use of toxic products. We can always bring our emptied plastic water bottles to refill with bleach, laundry detergent, and other household cleansers. And, if we really don't want to cart our own fluorescent tubes and those CFP "bulbs" the government has been foisting on us to the solid waste transfer stations so that we can sit in the queue among the garbage trucks, we could always reuse them as lawn ornaments. Or something...

In practice, eco-fees are a good idea IF AND ONLY IF they are applied to those who can actually do something about toxic and excessive packaging. Throughout the world - and especially in Europe - manufacturers are responsible for the disposal fees associated with their packaging - the packaging over which they have exclusive control. The result is a significant reduction in excess packaging because the fees placed on the manufacturers are indeed a force-motivator. Consumers have been known to unpack gadgets, small appliances, and anything else that is feasible in the stores, resulting in stores and manufacturers having a positive incentive to reduce trash.

Not so here, among the self-interested, so-called stakeholders (and I do absolutely hate that term). In this case, the self-interested holders of stake who form the euphemistically named Stewardship Ontario are the very manufacturers and retailers who would be stuck with the bill, if they didn't have the power to simply say, "consumer pays." Among the bureaucrats, there is no thought given to the logic which responds, "but consumers can't do much to change the packaging"; manufacturers and retailers can, so they should be the ones on the hook. Simple, logical, effective, and not so bureaucratically absurdum.

One additional point: the bureaucratic approach to fast-and-loose accounting, that allows the government to say, "it's not a tax" with a straight face, because Stewardship Ontario is technically not the government and, you know, only governments can collect taxes, doesn't fool anyone who doesn't want to be fooled. What is completely amazing to me is that Minister Gerretsen seems genuinely surprised at how poorly this all turned out. Then again, he is only advised by bureaucrats - unable to either perceive quality or innovate.
[Technorati tags: eco-fee | stewardship ontario | sustainability]

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything - Especially Social Media Marketing

2010-07-16T15:21:00.002-04:00

A number of confluences over the past couple of days with respect to advertising and marketing, social media, memes, and cultural evolution. In response to a tag from my friend, Leigh (and if you're in marketing, you'd do yourself a favour to have a conversation with her), here's the answer to the question about why social media and digital strategies work, don't work, sometimes work, are a big waste of time, are the greatest thing since Burma Shave, and combinations and permutations of the above.

People are social beings. Always have been. They enjoy sharing experiences. Always have done. When we fundamentally change the way we share our experiences, we change the ways in which we interact with one another, and that changes everything. In other words, "the medium is the message." And, by the way, we've recently changed the way in which we share our experiences, so remember the old assumptions about interacting with each other? They're now sort of wrong, and we need to understand the effects of those changes, so that those who get paid to capitalize on human interactions can actually earn their keep.

Clear?

[Technorati tags: marketing | advertising | social media | digital strategy]

First they came...

2010-07-13T17:44:00.000-04:00

With apologies to Martin Niemöller:

FIRST THEY CAME for the History and Philosophy program at OISE,

and I only signed the petition because I was in Adult Ed.

THEN THEY CAME for the Comparative Literature program originated by Northrop Frye,

and I didn't speak up because, who needs critical literary theory anyway?

THEN THEY CAME for all the language and culture programs,

and I didn't speak up because, you know, English is good enough for the global economy.

THEN THEY CAME for those who deal with contemporary issues in a way that is not mainstream,

and by that time, there were no organic intellectuals who could think outside of hegemony; who had any understanding of the importance of cultural context; who could fathom that the contemporary world is fundamentally different from 20th century industrialization; who could realize that there is more to the complexity of the world than only Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine, Business, and Government Policy...

...and by that time, there was no one left who understood what speaking up really meant.

[Technorati tags: university of toronto | centre for comparative literature | school of languages and literature]

Leadership and the Complexity of Social Networks and Public Policy

2010-07-08T12:58:00.000-04:00

Matthew Taylor from The RSA has a very simple, and worthwhile, blog post about the importance of understanding complexity approaches to public policy initiatives with respect to using social networking and technologies associated with social media. I'll reproduce most of it here because it raises critical issues for traditionally BAH organizations in general:

Two general points stand out:
Social networks are important; understanding and using them can make a significant contribution to tapping into civic capacity and meeting public policy goals.
Social networks are complex and the way they operate unpredictable.
Together, these findings suggest a major shift in the methodology of public policy. Traditional policy interventions – particularly in relation to social problems – have these characteristics:
They are large scale and expensive.
They aim for relatively marginal improvement in outcomes e.g. a few percent lower unemployment or higher pupil attainment.
They seek to minimise risk through systems of regulation, audit, and accountability.
But these design features do not fit the characteristics of social networks interventions, which are:
They will usually fail.
Occasionally small interventions will have major impact through contagion effects.
Sometimes interventions will have an impact very different to those planned (sometimes good, sometimes not).
An emphasis on social networks changes not just the focus and design of public policy, but the whole way we think about success and failure.

What Matthew identifies as the characteristics of public policy initiatives - large scale, expensive, aiming for marginal improvements of quantifiable outcomes, while minimizing risk through control systems - are key determinant characteristics of BAH organizations, irrespective of their public/private/social-economy sector. These sorts of controls preclude emergence by eliminating complexity effects. Rather, they implement what I describe as the BAH Theory of Change (see here, especially with respect to Change, Coordination, and Evaluation). The emphasis is on control, so that planned and predicted outcomes can be measured to demonstrate to those to whom one is individually accountable that, "See? I am suitable for this office that I hold because I can control and manage and accomplish what I say I will accomplish."

However, as I point out, that sort of leadership mentality is a BAH artefact, that is, an artefact of Industrial Age thinking. Any leader who holds this view, and in the same breath utters the phrase, "social media," (or any of its analogues, like Twitter, blogs, wikis, Facebook, viral videos, or similar), simply does not understand, and should be demoted to become the factory floor foreperson! The reality of today's UCaPP world is complexity, and that means unpredictability, and realizing that small interventions can have large systemic effects through massively interconnected feedback and feedforward networks. It means one must remain cognisant of secondary and tertiary effects, and rethink what it means to be successful in effect, rather than in outcomes. Here is the difference in mentalities:

BAH organizations replace the complexity of human dynamics in social systems with the complication of machine-analogous procedures that enable interdependence through interdependent action, individual responsibility, and hierarchical accountability. UCaPP organizations encourage and enable processes of continual emergence by valuing and promoting complex interactions, even though doing so necessitates traditional, legitimated leadership ceding control in an environment of individual autonomy and agency, collective responsibility, and mutual accountability.

Which one works for your government's public policy or your organization depends entirely on the culture of the organization in question. Which one works for today's public policy or today's organization is obvious in a UCaPP world. The key question for leaders is, "Do you want to be relevant, or obsolescent?"

[Technorati tags: complexity | leadership | social media]

Bureaucracy and Innovation

2010-07-07T07:37:00.002-04:00

Two things that go together like screen doors and submarines. In my research, I noted that BAH organizations are unable to innovate (and unable to perceive quality). Today's Globe and Mail provides a data point that is consistent with this observation: the decline of Microsoft.

But why can’t Microsoft innovate? And couldn’t that change? No, because no one wants to work there. It has become like working for a large bureaucracy – stifling and sterile. More important: no one’s getting rich off Microsoft stock options any more. Everyone wants to work at Google or Apple. Microsoft has no history of innovation, and therefore no culture that the innovative find attractive.

For innovation to occur, even in an otherwise BAH organization, one requires at least pockets of UCaPP - places in which the ba-form of the valence relationships can flourish. The more organization-ba one has, the more innovation can occur. Simple, right?

The corollary, therefore is, the more you want innovation in your organization, in your education system, in your public sector institutions, the more imperative it becomes to transform away from bureaucratic and administrative controls, and status hierarchies.

[Technorati tags: innovation | bureaucracy | microsoft]

The Crisis of Capitalism, and Effective Theory

2010-07-04T15:44:00.000-04:00

Those who know me well know that I do not particularly hold with Marxist discourse, nor do I believe that revolution of the proletariat (often performed as absurdist theatre via labour unions of the privileged) is entirely appropriate for the contemporary world. Therefore, none would be more surprised than I to realize that David Harvey's message of The Crisis of Capitalism (via the wonderful RSA Animate series) resonates completely with where I'm standing lately. Taking a neo-Marxist analysis of the latest, recent global financial crisis - an analysis that is too often lacking among mainstream economic and business journalism - Harvey observes that the crisis stems from what he calls, "the internal contradictions of capital accumulation ... and the role of crises in the whole history of capitalism." He notes that the last global financial crisis in the 1970s arose from the excessive power of labour, and the solution was to discipline labour in domestic markets (essentially by shipping labour production to markets that could be more easily exploited, a.k.a., so-called offshoring, as well as through neo-liberal political economies championed by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US). But the problem this time is considerably different. The root of the problem is "the excessive power of capital, and in particular, the excessive power of finance capital."

Harvey goes on to explain that part of labour's punishment since the 1970s is to repress wages globally. This, however, has the unfortunate effect (if you're a capitalist) of also repressing demand. Hence, in order to bolster demand, capitalists pump up the credit economy to such an extent that it becomes unstable, and boom... He goes on to explain the theory, "that capitalism never solves its crisis problems. It moves them around geographically." It becomes obvious, of course, that in the contemporary reality of a global economy (from which we truly cannot retreat), there are no more shells under which to hide the peas!

There is another problem, as well. In an Industrial Age mentality, there was an alliance between the financiers and the true capitalists - the ones who assembled labour, capital, and means, created production (yes, on the backs of the workers... sigh...) and earned profit, part of which was subsequently reinvested to increase production ability and access to markets. Today, however (and this is where Marxist analysis hits its limit), the original alliance between finance and capital breaks down as the financiers become (even more) greedy (than they originally were), and realize that the Marxist cycle that requires production to produce capital no longer applies. As money is now a cyber commodity, reproducing among electrons as they flow around the globe, financiers actually become richer as both labour and (traditional) capital become poorer through loss of real earning power and hence, real demand.

Harvey, although claiming to know the nature of the problem (with which I agree), also says quite explicitly that he doesn't know the nature of the solution. Well, that's not entirely true. He states very clearly that, we have a duty, those of us who are academics and seriously involved in the world, to actually change our mode of thinking." Yes! Absolutely! That is why I developed Valence Theory - to change our collective mode of thinking about how people come together, not merely in (conventionally thought of) organizations, but in the larger, global organization that comprises all of business, all of governments, all of civil society, all of indigenous peoples, all of the environment - all of everyone. We're all in this together.

The first step, I think, is to change our notion of what it means to be effective. Rather than simply limiting an understanding of effectiveness to accomplishing predetermined goals and objectives, or accessing and deploying ways and means, or both, effectiveness means being cognisant of the multiple levels of effects we enact through the decisions we make and the actions we take. For example, an effective analysis of Reaganomics, and the absurd subprime lending practices would have allowed policy makers to anticipate the inevitable outcome, as opposed to economists falsely claiming that no one could have predicted the fall. An effective analysis of offshoring policies and practices would have anticipated the demise of the very businesses that gloated about the efficiency of offshoring labour, and the coming crisis that has resulted from Western enterprises also (if inadvertently) offshoring its design, engineering, research, and innovation practices - those aspects of business that, in the 1980s, were claimed to be that which differentiated American industry from Chinese or Indian manufacturing.

A change of thinking? Absolutely. And absolutely necessary to think in terms of effects as Effective Theory demands, rather than in terms of simple outcomes - and certainly instead of money-as-scorecard. It is quite simply a matter of the type of world in which you want to live.

Here's the video. It is certainly worth the eleven minutes to watch.

[Technorati tags: david harvey | capitalism | political economy | marxist analysis | effective theory]

New Scrutiny for a New Age

2010-06-30T13:50:00.000-04:00

While the fiasco that was G20 policing only seems to be getting worse, and those who claim legitimated public authority, like Mayors, Premiers, and Chiefs of Police (not to name names or anything) are finding that unquestioning respect for their authority is diminishing among those who are most aware, astute, and thoughtful, AND the credibility of those who claim said authority is - how can I put this delicately? - in the dumper, perhaps it's time for a new approach to the entire problem.

The Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce - the RSA who is also responsible for the delightful and thought-provoking series of RSAnimates - has an interesting post from their Executive Director on Accountability and Public Scrutiny. Although Matthew Taylor is referring directly to the current situation of "hung Parliament" in the UK, some of his ideas apply equally well to a reconsidered analysis of how the G20 weekend in Toronto went horribly wrong (at least from the perspectives of preventing vandalism, enabling legitimate protest, and quelling some brutish police officers overstepping their legal authority). Taylor lists four elements of what he calls "post-bureaucratic" public scrutiny:

First, a much deeper and more imaginative commitment to public and user engagement in scrutiny. Like for example the award winning panel in Cheshire West and Chester which put huge efforts into engaging young people themselves in an assessment of services for ‘looked after children’.

Second, scrutiny has to offer a different order of evaluation – more rounded and in depth – than can come from other forms of performance assessment. Local government Secretary of State Eric Pickles has talked about ‘armchair auditors’ using new data sets like those now available on central and local public spending. Scrutiny has to show it can complement these forms of DIY accountability.

Third, scrutiny needs to spend less time on exploring whether policy solutions work and more on whether agencies are defining the problem adequately. A focus on problems inherently leads to a viewpoint which is both more ‘joined up’ and which sees the vital importance of public mobilisation.

Fourth, this focus on problems builds a bridge from scrutiny about the past to deliberation about the future. If scrutiny is going to be seen as relevant and worth funding it has to as much about getting policies right for the future as about reflecting on performance in the past.

I think the key for Canadian public policy - especially with respect to future engagements between the forces of authority and the forces of the public - lie in items three and four. ensure that the right questions are being asked, and deliberate about the future of policy rather than on defending or justifying past performance (which, one must emphasize, cannot be sloughed under the proverbial carpet). Very few of the right questions were being honestly asked by those in authority who held a primary focus on control (rather than enablement). Very few of the right questions were being honestly asked by those in the public who held a primary focus on speaking out (rather than being heard).

The result was clear: those who wanted to speak out were effectively, if brutally in many cases, controlled. No one was enabled to be heard. Sadly, the powers that be are not only unwilling to engage - in the attributed words of Police Chief Bill Blair, "I couldn't care less" - they are unable to engage. Equally sad, those who need to be heard have only learned to shout into the air; they too are unable to truly engage those with whom they disagree (largely because of their learned behaviours of confrontation and dialectical revolution, coming as they do from Marxist epistemology and ontology).

These are 20th century (and earlier) behaviours. It is long past time for all constituencies to come into the contemporary world and start to learn how to be effective today.

[Technorati tags: public scrutiny | protest | confronting authority | speak truth to power]

First-hand Testimony of Sunday's G20 Corral at Queen and Spadina

2010-06-29T23:56:00.000-04:00

This first-hand account from my friend, Terra Dafoe, who was detained with her boyfriend at Queen and Spadina for four hours in the pouring rain. They were heading home and were among the hundreds of innocent bystanders rounded up for allegedly "breaching the peace" by, you know, walking home. Here's an excerpt:

At this point it began to rain and thunderstorm. Like most of those around us, we were in shorts and t-shirts so it didn’t take long for the pellets of rain to drench most of us to the core. A handful of people, including some elderly huddled underneath shelter next to the McDonalds. Police promptly ordered them to stand in the rain instead. We waited for hours in the cold intense rain; rain so hard the nearby DVP flooded. Some police joked about being cold too, even though they were in full riot gear, and told us to ‘stop pretending,’ as we shook violently from the cold. At least one man right beside Lucius collapsed and was promptly dragged out of the crowd by police. We were offered nothing in the way of comforting words and one officer told a group of people to use their body heat to keep each other warm, telling a distasteful joke about who stays warmer, a naked farmer or one in full clothes. Some officers who interacted with us, also used this time to belittle us...

Despite Police Chief Bill Blair's protestations to the contrary, this was not warranted. They weren't looking for any sort of criminal conspiracy, nor were they protecting the peace. The police had been embarrassed the day before and this was their last opportunity to retaliate. "Charter rights? Not on my watch!"

By the by, Terra isn't some activist flake, by any stretch of the imagination. She's doing a PhD in Counselling Psychology, and her research involves new methods to assist the rehabilitation of particularly egregious criminal offenders. Her boyfriend, Lucius, is a CBC producer. Not to equate Chief Blair with the egregious criminal offenders with whom Terra works, but it occurs to me that the Chief could probably benefit from some of Terra's methods.

[Technorati tags: terra dafoe | lucius dechausay | queen and spadina | g20 | police brutality]

Understanding Bill Blair, Dalton McGuinty, and David Miller

2010-06-29T23:20:00.002-04:00

I love it when current events validate my research, and theories of organization and leadership. I have often been left with a sense of wonderment at people whom I would expect to be basically ethical when they act in sometimes egregiously unethical manners. How could Dalton McGuinty claim that draconian, anti-Charter regulations are in keeping with the values and standards of Ontarians? Why does David Miller deny that we need an independent investigation into the countless allegations of police excesses during the G20 weekend - an investigation that would vindicate his Top Cop if indeed, as the powers-that-be claim, there was no wrongdoing? And why oh why does Police Chief Bill Blair step deeper and deeper into the muck, and then proceed to stick his mucky foot deeper into his mouth? (Yeah, I know, big yuck factor there, but this whole mess is pretty yucky. Here's a clue: pink-washing isn't an all-purpose cleanser.)

Would you be surprised if I said that Valence Theory offers an explanation? I didn't think so...

It's all right here, under the section "Coordination":

When a person’s Identity-valence relationship to the organization is predominantly fungible, there is, by definition, a tradable value associated with the status, class, and privilege that the Identity connection conveys. It becomes difficult for that individual to separate a personal view from that of the organizational role since it is nearly impossible for someone so constructed to publicly separate his or her self from that f‑Identity-valence connection. Thus, it is not uncommon for an individual to feel compelled to assume either an untenable, illogical, seemingly irrational, or unethical position with respect to a particular issue because s/he presumes – often incorrectly – that is the appropriate position for the Identity-role to assume. Because the person cannot separate him/herself from that f‑Identity-valence connection, s/he (to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan) loves her/his label – Identity – as her/his self. Amidst the dehumanizing influences that characterize BAH organizations, a strong, extrinsically created, f‑Identity-valence connection helps to disconnect the individual from acting on personal judgements, feelings, and core values...

...Put another way, a BAH manager will ask him/herself the f‑Identity question: “What decision would a manager in my position take; how (that is, through what defensible process) would s/he come to that decision?” In contrast, a UCaPP manager would ask an Identity-ba question: “What decision accurately represents the collective values of this organization to create the intended effects – the tactility – to which this organization aspires?”
Considered in a slightly different way, understanding the action of f‑Identity can help explain seemingly arbitrary, onerous, or self-righteous decisions that occasionally occur in BAH organizations.

So the solution to this sort of behaviour is really very simple. If you hold high office or a position of responsibility, all you have to do is - as my grandmother used to say - settle down and act like a mensch!

Update (30 June 2010): Jon Stewart has noticed exactly the same phenomenon with Candidate Barack Obama becoming President Barack Obama. (Linked clip from June 15 available only in Canada; Americans must visit Comedy Central's site for the clip).
[Technorati tags: bill blair | dalton mcguinty | david miller | leadership | role | organization behaviour]

What is Democracy Without the Rule of Law?

2010-06-28T00:42:00.002-04:00

It is a very simple principle, one that dates back to the earliest document that began the entire experiment in rule by the people in the 13th century, the Magna Carta. The basic premise upon which our country is based is that no one is above the law of the land. We all, each and every one of us, those with power and privilege and those without, are all subject to the same supreme law of the land: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is most especially true of those who are empowered with the ability to detain and arrest, and to carry and use weapons that can inflict considerable injury and death. Those who are charged to protect life and property must not be allowed to abuse the trust that we have vested in them to behave with exemplary adherence to the law of the land.

This weekend, seemingly charged with the heady power of secretly passed new regulations of arrest, and the apparent freedom inherent in a lack of scrutiny and oversight, some individual police officers and commanders overstepped their powers. Some perpetrated untoward and unprovoked violence against journalists and private citizens seeking to exercise their Charter rights to voice their opposition to political policy enacted by their, and other, governments. These violations that may be tantamount to illegal action must be investigated by an independent tribunal, and those who may be guilty of such violations must be held accountable under the law.

It must be said, and I will happily acknowledge, those officers who exhibited considerable restraint when being deliberately taunted by some protesters who sought only to provoke a confrontation. There is no condoning such provocation, even in the name of free speech. If one's objective is to be heard on issues like poverty, homelessness, water rights, aboriginal rights, oppression of women, or a hundred other important causes, it makes absolutely no sense to distract from those important messages. Equally, kudos for the officers who arrested would-be members of the so-called Black Bloc early Sunday morning to prevent additional violence and mayhem akin to the shameful display of Saturday (and where were the jackbooted hoards with their shields and riot batons during the car burnings and window smashing?).

However, Bill Blair's insistence that his troops were enabling free expression and lawful dissent seems considerably disingenuous in the face of Saturday night's abuse of demonstrators and journalists in front of the Novotel Hotel, Sunday's mass arrests of innocent bystanders, and the unlawful detention of hundreds for four hours in the pouring rain. This last hurrah seems like a collective "Fuck You, Civilians" - a parting shot by the Integrated Security Unit's less-than-finest. A truly sad display of collective arrogance among those who are licensed to perpetrate violence at their leisure.

And so, a Call for Accountability. Click on the link, join the group, and invite your friends. It is important that there is a precedent set; that no person, even empowered by secret laws and regulations, can violate the law. If individual police officers know that they can be held to account for their collective action as a mob of thugs, they may think twice about such actions the next time. And, with a taste of the power of a police state, you can be sure there will be a next time.

Unless, of course, we all act to hold them answerable according to the Law.

Update (28 June 2010): Steve Paikin, host of TVO's The Agenda, is one of the most credible, honest, and upfront journalists I have had the pleasure to work with. Here he is with his first-hand, eyewitness account of police excess and unprovoked violence on Saturday night.

And, for those who do not believe that Toronto Police could possibly be behind the torching of the cars and the smashing of windows as agents provocateurs, here is video proof of a someone dressed in Black Bloc garb, being protected behind police lines, with threatening actions towards citizen videographers by plainclothes, undercover agents.

[Technorati tags: g20 | police | violence | abuse of power]

Dark Days for Toronto, and for Canada

2010-06-26T14:23:00.000-04:00

The G20 summit was touted by its supporters as an opportunity for Canada, and specifically Toronto, to be spotlit on the world stage - as if that in and of itself should be considered a virtue. However, what has indeed been held under the bright lights are the excesses of privilege, and the sad reality that Canada is more plutocracy than democracy. Much has been written questioning the unimaginable amount of money that has been spent on these few days. I'm waiting for the exposés that reveal which contractors-linked-to-Harper-Conservatives have newly lined pockets as a result of these wasteful expenditures, but that's for another day. My immediate concern is the glibness with which the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has so casually been thrown under the police van, and truncheoned into submission under the heavy hand of pre-fascist tendencies.

Some may accuse me of hyperbole and over-reaction. However, consider this completely disrespectful - dare I say shameful - riposte proffered by our provincial premier, Dalton-the-Glib:

“I just think it’s in keeping with the values and standards of Ontarians,” McGuinty told the Toronto Star on Friday amid a battery of complaints from opposition parties, city councillors, civil libertarians and regular Torontonians that the new rules were kept secret and, some say, may go too far.

Secret regulations that reverse the rights of citizens? No notice, signs, or warnings of new rules of arrest and search and seizure without cause? These are supposedly "in keeping with the values and standards" of the citizenry? In whose wet dreams would those be, Dalton-the-Self-Exalted? It almost goes without saying that no-notice-change-of-law are not in keeping with the values of ANY citizen with whom I am an acquaintance!

Quite a while ago, I posted two references to the creeping infiltration of a police-state mentality into what are otherwise democratic societies governed by rule-of-law. These are well worth reviewing now. One is Dr. Lawrence Britt's Fascism Anyone? The other is a reflection on How Police States Begin. It is important to say that I do not believe that we are YET living in a police state. However - and this is a HUGE however - what Police Chief Bill Blair, OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino, Premier Dalton McGuinty, and Prime Minister Harper all have in common is a sometimes not-so-tacit desire to eliminate that pesky inconvenience, the supreme law of the land, the Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With their demonstrated attitude that so profoundly violates the fundamental, espoused values and standards of Canadians none of these men deserve the offices, nor the trust and responsibility, that have been vested in them.

[Technorati tags: g8 | g20 | public works act | charter of rights and freedoms | dalton mcguinty | bill blair | julian fantino | stephen harper]

From Hyper-Consumption to Collaborative Consumption

2010-06-23T17:13:00.000-04:00

Those who have attended any of my keynotes over the past few years will know that I always find a way to introduce collaborative construction as one of the dominant effects of the UCaPP world. This is the idea that people with whom we are in pervasive proximity - and therefore in relationship - collaboratively construct the various and sundry cultural artefacts that populate our lives and help us to create meaning in a complex world. This, of course, includes collaborative construction of identity, among the most interesting aspects of the collaborative construction phenomenon.

Rachel Botsman offers a brilliant observation of how the idea of collaborative construction can be extended by graphically noting how hyper-consumption that characterized the 20th century has given way to collaborative consumption in the contemporary world. Even if you have already heard of Zipcar, or Freecycle, or Couchsurfing, (and there are many more mentioned) - and especially if you haven't - watch the video. It will expand your mind.

Collaborative Consumption Groundswell Video from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

[Technorati tags: collaborative consumption | rachel botsman]

If you find a lawyer with a sense of humour...

2010-06-22T22:40:00.001-04:00

...you'll have to kill him. Being able to perceive humorous parody and being litigious are apparently mutually exclusive. Just ask the purveyors of "Unicorn - the new white meat."

Note to lawyers: the suggestion to perpetrate any sort of violence on lawyers with senses of humour is itself a parody of lawyers without a sense of humour; to understand said parody one first requires a sense of humour which itself precludes the understanding of such understanding, to wit, the requisite sense or perception of humour being a necessary prerequisite to the perception or sensing thereof, thereby comprising an act analogous to that of begging the question in the first and second parts of said understanding of the understanding of the prior understanding.
[Technorati tags: lawyer | unicorn | it's a joke]

Look Ma: No Audience!

2010-06-22T12:18:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting beautiful, downtown Cornwall, Ontario (yes, it is pretty nice) to muse about the disappearance of “audience” at the annual conference of alPHa—the Association of Local Public Health Agencies. The issue arises from the observation that, although very few seemed to pay attention to the admonition to go and get vaccinated during the H1N1 flu-foorah, we all seemed to get the message that the flu potential was pretty serious and we seriously changed our behaviour with respect to public hygiene (among the key elements, I think, was the loosening of absentee policies for businesses – that is, not treating their employees like naughty schoolchildren – enabling people who were sick to stay home and get well, rather than feeling an obligation to either come to work thereby infecting transit users and office dwellers, or traipsing off to the doctor’s office to get a “please excuse Janey from office today because she’s sick” note; ditto).

The answer to alPHa’s question about how to better reach audiences today – at least the one the conference wanted to explore – is “social media.” However, I sensed that much of the default discourse wanted to focus on can those who have legitimated authority co-opt and subvert the complex effects of contemporary, massive interconnectivity, and turn it back into television, radio, and the printing press—broadcast media run by central authorities which have the effect of hypnotizing audiences into compliance. This is a tough mindset to break, especially for those who are necessarily tied to governments that are used to broadcasting, if not spinning, a message. There was considerable focus on YouTube’s ability to disseminate humorous and clever, if a bit shocking, health-message videos, and a few of us presenters attempting to convey the idea that it’s all about engaging, not messaging (Twitter notwithstanding).

After describing my 3,000-years-of-Western-history derivation of UCaPP and the historic generation gap through which we are all now living, I suggested that one of the effects of UCaPP is that (informal and non-formal) information and knowledge is environmental. Consequently, this means that truth no longer conforms to the post-Enlightenment notion of an absolute truth that exists outside of us that can be determined by direct observation, scientific experimentation, and statistical analysis. Truth is no longer exclusively that which is codified and endorsed by institutions that convey Knowledge authority.

Rather, truth in the UCaPP world is understood as being highly contextualized by the juxtaposition of diverse cultures, histories, and lived experiences. Thus, truth and knowledge can only be expressed in relative terms, that is, relative to the human systems that produce them. And, as I have described extensively in my doctoral thesis, those systems are generated, in large part, by the conceptions we have of these human systems, and those models are not merely descriptive, they are also generative. In particular, this notion speaks directly to positivists’ inability to see the limitations of science—namely that, when it comes to human and social systems, there is no objective truth that lies outside of human experience; that knowledge, understanding, and hence, responsive behaviour among social groups, are the result of a complex process of sense- and meaning-making, having only little to do with authoritatively transmitted information.

Social media create environments of conversation and engagement from which individuals immersed in interlocking social groups create sense and meaning out of an often confusing, contradictory, and complex world. This means that social media cannot be co-opted as the new form of broadcast. That strategy is doomed to failure at the cost of the credibility of legitimated authority. If we think strategically about it, social media are the means through which so-called experts may be invited in to participate in collaborative construction of knowledge. It means that the hierarchical structures of knowledge authority, and specifically the paternalistic model of public health education is rejected out-of-hand by those formerly known as “audience.” The good news is that social media provide a tremendous opportunity to use the relationships created as a result of UCaPP to empower each member of society individually, to imbue them with a sense of personal responsibility among all to whom they are connected. And that enables us all to collectively and collaboratively do the Right Thing, based on the emergence of shared values, and personal ethics in a pervasive knowledge environment. In effect, we can consider the society in a particular community as a valence organization.

Many thanks to the organizers of this year’s alPHa conference for inviting me, and to those with whom I had the opportunity to interact.

[Technorati tags: alpha | local public health agencies | social media]

And The Doctorate is OVER!

2010-06-12T22:08:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was the day of my doctoral defence. As of 12:30 p.m., I became the very proud and grateful owner of a shiny new Ph.D., based on the defence of my research on organization theory, in Adult Education and Counselling Psychology. Notably, I earned a pass "as is" (the highest ranking) of my thesis, From BAH to ba: Valence theory and the future of organization. My external examiner was Dr. Brenda Zimmerman from York University's Schulich School of Business, whose research specialties include Healthcare Strategy and Leadership, and - most appropriately for my research - organizational complexity and emergence. Here's what she wrote in her appraisal of my thesis:

Mark Federman’s thesis is a comprehensive, well written document. It is a bold, ambitious undertaking and he makes several contributions to organization theory.

First, he makes a compelling case of the link between historical contexts and dominant organizational forms. Classical economic theory and the Industrial Organization school have dominated the literature which serves to explain organization forms. Both of these fields are ahistorical. Business historians rarely look to a time frame beyond decades. This thesis extends the temporal frame of business historians by reviewing the period from 500 BC to contemporary times. This thesis may serve as an impetus for business historians to extend their temporal frame and for organization theorists, particularly those versed in structural contingency theory, to look more deeply at historical factors that influence organization forms.

Second, the lens of the five valences will help give a more nuanced understanding of the nature of relationships in organizations. Relationship centred literature for organizations is extensive. This thesis provides researchers with a more nuanced understanding of a set of five relationships. A further differentiation between fungible and ba aspects for each of the five relationships should also be helpful in helping researchers discern the nature of the challenges facing organizations.

Third, the empirical research provides a rich comparison across the typology and in particular how the leadership co-evolves with the organization form. The transformation from one end of the continuum to the other provides insights into some of the challenges of transitions which is now becoming more prevalent in understanding scalability.

Fourth, he very effectively weaves the artistic self-reflective mode with the more analytic academic mode. By doing so, he more authentically demonstrates the challenges of writing about a subjective experience while maintaining academic rigour.

Fifth, the cargo cult phenomenon is well documented in Organization A and could be a standalone piece of work after the thesis. Mr. Federman both articulates the concept and demonstrates empirically well.

In short, this is an excellent thesis. It is thought provoking and I look forward to an interesting conversation at the defense.

The conversation at the defence was indeed interesting, wide-ranging, and challenging at times. However, according to Marilyn Laiken, my supervisor, there was no debate whatsoever about the final decision.

Let me once again offer my sincere gratitude to: my research participants and those in the five participant organizations who helped facilitate their participation; and to all of you who read this blog who contributed your comments, ideas, suggestions, and questions.

If your organization is seeking guidance in issues relating to leadership, or organization development, dynamics, change, or culture, and you would like the assistance of what is literally the very latest research in the area provided by an experienced consultant, facilitator, and organizational therapist, let's talk.

[Technorati tags: organization theory | organization development | organization dynamics | organization development | organization change | brenda zimmerman]

Jeremy Rifkin on The Empathic Civilization

2010-06-10T00:15:00.000-04:00

It’s always nice to read an article or book, or hear a talk, that expresses one’s own ideas in a slightly different way, coming from a completely different ground. There’s an affirmation there—I’m not the only one who sees this phenomenon; I’m not just making it all up. And so it was with that sense of “yes, someone else gets it,” not to mention the brilliant presentation of RSA, that I thoroughly enjoyed the animated treatment of Jeremy Rifkin’s Empathic Civilization.

When we talk about building an empathic civilization, we’re not talking about utopia. We’re talking about the ability of human beings to show solidarity not only with each other, but with our fellow creatures who have a one and only life on this little planet.

Rifkin traces a history of human development similar to the story I tell about organization over three millennia. He then asks a provocative question:

Is it possible that we could actually extend our empathy to the entire human race as an extended family, and to our fellow creatures as part of our evolutionary family, and to the biosphere as our common community?

Essentially what Rifkin describes, albeit briefly in the animation and in far more depth in his massive book, is the creation of civilization-ba, and the types of connections that are consistent with Valence Theory. He describes how the technologies that create UCaPP – ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity – also enable the “empathic embrace” of Haiti among the entire human race mere hours after the disastrous earthquake.

At the Enlightenment, we were “materialistic, self-interested, utilitarian, and pleasure-seeking,” according to Rifkin’s reading of the philosophers of that time. But no longer: a UCaPP world means we are bound in relationships that enable Rifkin’s empathic civilization, and define my Valence Theory. I agree with Rifkin: we have to extend our identities to realize that we are all – as I express it – members of one organization, and to rethink the human narrative, as he expresses it. Only this fundamental reconception will save us from the worst aspects of what we can be: narcissistic, materialistic, violent, and aggressive.

Take ten minutes and watch the video. It’s well worth it.

[Technorati tags: jeremy rifkin | empathic civilization | human evolution | human development]

BAH Can Be Hazardous to Your Company's Marketing Health

2010-06-04T16:42:00.000-04:00

Telecom giant, AT&T, has been in damage control mode over the past several days, after a major customer service mishap spread all over the 'net and media like a Gulf of Mexico drilling rig blowout. It seems that customer Giorgio Galante wrote two emails concerning service pricing and phone upgrade eligibility to AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson in two days. In response, one of AT&T's "$12/hour “Executive Relations” college students" called Galante to say, in effect, "Thanks for the feedback, and if you bother our CEO again, we’re going to send you a cease and desist letter."

Clearly, the internal manual on responding to email-to-the-chief nuisances procedurally directs the ER flaks to serve notice of legal action against harassment. In this sense, the respondent was merely "doing his job" (and how many times have we heard that excuse?). But, in doing said job, one of the founding principles of the BAH organization is clearly revealed: bureaucratic, administrative procedures are designed to eliminate human judgement from decision-making. BAH organizations systemically rob the "doers" of the ability to think - especially about consequences - for fear of losing their employment over "what part of the policy don't you understand?" Little wonder that if you look behind any sort of disaster, there's a BAH organization and individuals with BAH mentalities just doing their jobs (and no, my earlier reference to BP, the US EPA, and Congress was not simply snarky and gratuitous!).

Yes, AT&T did their damage control thing and had someone with a legitimated title attempt to smooth over the faux pas. That, of course, is not the point, as the genie is already out of the oil rig (sorry). This episode should rather serve as an early warning that a BAH organization places itself at risk in the contemporary world. Not only is it at risk of these sorts of marketing malfunctions; the simple reality that a BAH organization can neither innovate nor perceive quality suggests that BAH is indeed hazardous to an organization's health.

(Thanks, Michael!)

[Technorati tags: at&t | giorgio galante | cease and desist]

Oh. My. God. I've Just Figured Out Why and How Viral Videos Happen

2010-05-27T15:01:00.002-04:00

And I'll be musing on it as a potential theme of my talk at an upcoming conference on Public Health Communications. Hint: it has to do with the generalized model of organization as expressed in Valence Theory.

Update (22 June 2010): Okay, so my talk went in a different direction. Short version of the realization: for viral videos, there is a strong interaction between knowledge-ba and identity-ba valences that help to create an inclusive environment in which fungible socio-psychological valence has traction (in other words, you create inclusiveness in order to enjoy the social capital of being part of the in-the-know crowd). This is distinctly, but fascinatingly different than the sometimes exclusivity of a privileged in-crowd that uses f-knowledge and f-identity to enhance the value of f-socio-psychological valence connections in a social group. The other interesting consequence of this realization is that this explanation in valence-theory terms is consistent with the observation that viral aspect of viral videos is emergent, and cannot be manufactured. If you're a marketing or PR person and need to explain to a client why you can't set a "and the video goes viral within 3 weeks" objective, this is it... sort of (having to explain valence theory is a whole other matter, of course).
[Technorati tags: viral video | viral marketing | valence organization]

(Attempting to) Create the News

2010-05-26T11:44:00.000-04:00

It's an age-old question: do the mass-media merely report the news, or do they create it? To my mind, there is little doubt that an editor or producer's ability to sway public opinion and convey a particular point-of-view is unmatched by any other profession. Even professional politicians rely on the same sorts of out-of-context video clips to create public opinion that is unfavourable to their opponents as do biased news reporters.

Questions of questionable ethics aside, there remains the issue of tactility - whom do the newsmedia intend to touch and in what ways? - that takes on an almost frightening dimension of incitement to hatred in many cases. The following exposé, broadcast on Australian television demonstrates the principles at issue.

So here's a question for Canadians and Americans: In what substantive way (i.e., difference in kind, not merely extent) does the original Australian news coverage of the altercation differ from Stephen Harper's attack ads, or the type of rabble-rousing nonsense used by Fox News to rile up the Tea Partiers?

[Technorati tags: media | bias | muslim | hate speech]

Valence Theory in the Forest

2010-05-22T00:06:00.000-04:00

The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement is a landmark achievement. I don’t mean that in the environmentalist sense, although the caribou habitat will indeed be preserved with species preservation taking priority. I don’t mean it in the business sense, although calls for boycotts of Canadian forest products will cease. And I don’t even mean it in the zero-sum game sense, although each side of the long-standing controversy and enmity between the forestry and environmentalist industries can claim some sort of victory. All of these are, in one way or another, true enough. But for me, the landmark aspect of the agreement is in how well it illustrates the principles of Valence Theory, and how its success over a very long and difficult series of negotiations may retrospectively point to the language of Valence Theory as a means to discover shortcut, effective approaches to seemingly intractable problems.

The details of the Agreement, and loads of commentary, are widely available. As I read the story as reported in NOW magazine, several aspects jump out at me. First and foremost, there has been a shift in approach by all parties from a focus on outcomes, goals and objectives to a predominant awareness of effects, as I suggest in Effective Theory. This switches the supposed “vision” of the various organizations involved to something closer to tactility: what effect does each participant organization want to have on each of the other constituencies; in other words, whom do they want to touch, how do they want to touch them, and how do they anticipate being touched themselves?

Second, there seems to have been another shift in the various relationships that exist among the many diverse, constituent organizations from strictly fungible to more ba-like aspects. For example, throughout the years of the controversy, each organization was vested in its purpose: the environmentalists in stopping old-growth logging, the forestry companies in maximizing profitable “harvests.” They wore their purposes as a large part of their identities, and their organizational well-being was vested heavily in the external representations of their success relative to their respective, but single-minded, purposes. However, over the period of what is described as “hard-nosed negotiating” all parties achieved a common understanding, a meeting of minds, a common sensibility about the totality of the ecosystem (both natural and economically constructed), and a common volition to action—all of these characterize organization-ba for the newly emergent “CBFA organization.” And, there is indeed a (closer) balance among all the valence relationships: Economic, Identity, Knowledge, Socio-psychological, and especially Ecological.

All in all, quite a remarkable accomplishment, and easily understood via the dynamics of Valence Theory. As Forest Products Association president, Avrim Lazar, observes, “This is of global significance because it is the way we all hoped the world would work. This is a business strategy.” Indeed, but it’s much more than that. It’s a model for significant social change, and new ways of understanding the complexity of emergent organizations across the planet.

[Technorati tags: canadian boreal forest agreement]

Private Member's Bill to Defund Electroshock

2010-05-11T20:37:00.000-04:00

Kudos to MPP Cheri DiNovo for introducing a private member's bill to defund electroconvulsive/electroshock therapy in Ontario. The research is overwhelming: ECT is not safe and not effective. In the words of Dr. Bonnie Burstow, "the government should not be in the business of paying to brain damage its citizens."

[Technorati tags: cheri dinovo | electroshock | electroconvulsive therapy]

A Response to the National Post on PsychOUT

2010-05-08T22:13:00.001-04:00

The National Post did what could be conservatively called a hatchet job in its report on this weekend's PsychOUT Conference. Here is the letter I submitted to NP's editor in response:

To the Editor:

In one lopsided article, filled with falsehoods, misconceptions, and outright lies, opinion columnist Joseph Brean did OISE’s PsychOUT conference a tremendous service. Better than the nearly 200 participants who attended the weekend conference at the University of Toronto, his “Mad Pride” story clearly demonstrated the profound importance of the conference’s message.

The conference participants were far more than the “motley crew” characterized in the article. They included PhD researchers, professors, health care professionals (nurses, psychologists, social workers and outreach workers), lawyers, delegates to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Person, among others from around the world. Research findings funded by multiple government agencies, including the Mental Health Commission of Canada, were presented together with testimony of both those who advocate for psychiatry’s abolition, and those who currently praise the care they receive. Unlike the bigoted opinions of “Mr.” Edward Shorter, who did not bother to lift himself out of his Hannah Chair, and “Mr.” Rohan Ganguli of CAMH, whose staff were apparently waiting for a special invitation (only the keynotes were specifically invited), all perspectives, views, and opinions were sought, welcomed, and given space throughout this inaugural event. That the obvious paranoia of the psychiatric establishment self-precluded their attendance may be a matter for their own diagnosis via the latest DSM (the so-called psychiatric bible whose main editor admits is problematic elsewhere in the newspaper). Throughout the conference, specific note was taken of the multiple, differing opinions relative to psychiatry that were represented; mutual respect and working in coalition for the improvement of the lives of those who have been marginalized by vested interests of power, control, and corporate profit were the primary outcomes sought by all attendees.

Brean – whose journalist contribution cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered objective reporting – made a point to denigrate and minimize Dr. Bonnie Burstow’s professional credentials, and her decades-long professorship at the University of Toronto, while emphasizing the credentials of those upon whom he wanted to bestow credibility. I take especial note that among the key critics quoted in the article, Edward Shorter’s role as a professor of psychiatry was conspicuous by its absence, hiding his obvious, but undisclosed, conflict of interest in the matter. But through his ridicule and fiction, Brean did the work of the conference in conveying its powerful message: Those who exercise power and control will seek any means possible to suppress the voices of those they oppress and marginalize, first by derision and humiliation, next through legislation – especially in the name of “helping” – and finally by employing the coercive force of the state—the police, judiciary, and (in the case of the academy) deans and provosts. The profound importance of PsychOUT’s message of coalition, inclusion, respect, agency, autonomy, and most of all, the primacy of human rights and dignity, can be made no clearer than through the whimpering complaints of the vested interests who decided to absent themselves, preferring ignorance to scholarly academic inquiry, and ridicule to engaged conversation.

Sincerely,
Mark Federman
Ph.D. Candidate, Adult Education and Counselling Psychology
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto

Update (11 May 2010): An excerpt of my letter was published, along with those of David Oaks, Geoffrey Reaume, and Don Weitz.
[Technorati tags: psychout | national post | joseph brean]

Horror

2010-05-07T22:04:00.000-04:00

Shocked. Angry. Incredulous. Sad to the point of tears. Moved beyond being able to cry. Frustrated. More than anything else, frustrated, with an overwhelming sense of desperate powerlessness.

Today was the first day of the two-day PsychOUT Conference at OISE—the first, international, scholarly conference specifically focusing on activism and organized resistance against the abuses of psychiatry, and the institutions and industries that support those abuses. I am volunteering at the conference (and moderating a paper session tomorrow on organizing youth resistance).

Were it not for the fact that I have witnessed, with my own eyes, events that corroborate and are consistent with some of the psych-survivor (and family members’) stories I heard today, I would not believe that such things were possible in Canada.

Had some of the descriptions of institutional and authoritative abuse come from the detention centres at Guantanamo Bay or Bahgram Air Base, they would have made headlines in the press.

Had some of the testimonies of family members being psychologically abused and manipulated to perpetrate beatings of children been written in a history book, they would have been examples of some of the worst tortures of Stalinism, or Nazism, or the contemporary hell-holes of brutal conflicts in some African war zones.

Had some of the pleas of individuals faced with impossible choices of seemingly inevitable death one way or the other, under threat (unless one of the presented options is chosen) of yet a third even more excruciating and slower death been enacted on a stage, they would have been scripted by Kafka or Orwell.

And yet, each and every one of them was perpetrated in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the privileged, supposedly civilized world. Each of them was perpetrated under the auspices of legitimated authority, most often wearing the white coat of psychiatric medical establishment, aided and abetted by governments, police, schools, and other institutions that have come to define civil society.

The conference brings together an often at-odds coalition of psychiatric survivors, individuals who self-identify as members of the Mad movement, and those who are vociferously anti-psychiatry in all its forms. Its focus is personal and collective empowerment, resistance to systemic abuses, and collaborative approaches to activism that results in overall beneficial change. Its messages are powerful, shattering, and profoundly disturbing. These are messages that should – no, must – be heard personally and directly by anyone who seeks to work in the healing and helping professions.

Let me also be completely clear on my own standpoint here: There are individuals who have been helped by psychiatric treatment. There are good, helpful, and caring psychiatrists. There are institutions that, in fact and effect, perform good and useful work with those in emotional and psychological need. I deny none of these. However, there are also pervasive and systemic abuses being perpetrated in the name of a particular model of treatment that is, by definition, limited in its ability to understand and give credence to those most in need of assistance, most vulnerable to systemic abuse, least able to be heard by the wider society. It is not that there are those who do good that we may ignore or deny the rest; it is that there are those who do unspeakable evil in the name of good that this conference exists.

[Technorati tags: psychout | anti-psychiatry | mad | psychiatric survivor]