How - Not Who - Do You Hire?

Like most people whose digiSelf has a presence on LinkedIn, I receive the periodic “Jobs You May Be Interested In” email. Not that I’m actively looking to relocate at the moment (fans of the proposed M.LODC program can breathe again!), but there’s the whole “make me an offer that I can’t refuse thing,” too. In this week’s edition, there was a notice for a “Senior Manager, Leadership Development Strategy” position at Scotiabank. Reading through the description, I came to the conclusion that I would be eminently qualified, and completely unhireable for that position.

Let me explain: First, I lack the number one desired qualification, namely, “at least 5+ years experience within the financial services industry.” Reframing this qualification suggests that leadership within the financial services industry is somehow uniquely different than leadership within any other industry segment. In other words, according to Scotiabank’s standpoint, leadership is fundamentally instrumental in nature as opposed to transcending the instrumental to become – as I argue – environmental. Moreover, this Scotiabank position is intended to, “oversee the Bank´s approach to Executive Recruitment.” (As an aside, I think their choice use of capitalizations is interesting in the way it transforms certain abstractions into proper nouns; but I digress.) It is clear that the “Bank” considers hiring somewhat more traditionally, as an instrumental exercise to find the right candidate who best meets the job description and requirements. Or, expressed another way, an exercise to find the machine component whose specifications most closely match those preconceived by the industrial machine itself.

Clearly, I would be a disaster in that role. For me – and for UCaPP organizations – recruitment and hiring is far less about the candidate directly, and much more about the aspirational intentions of the organization itself.

Say what?

Let’s unpack that last idea: According to Valence Theory, organizations are fundamentally emergent entities that arise from the relationships (of which there are five) among the people (or more generally, the member constituencies). Change the people and you necessarily change the nature and quality of the relationships. Therefore, each new hire irrevocably changes the organization. Although it seems relatively obvious that if you change, say, a major persona at a relatively higher hierarchical level in the organization – the CEO or a senior director, for instance – you’ll create a change in the organization, it is also true that introducing any personnel change effects emergent, transformational change – most often subtle change – in the organization. The so-called ripple effects of changing even a hierarchically low-level position introduces the potential for large systemic transformation throughout the complex system that is the organization.

Here’s a somewhat, but not entirely, contrived example that illustrates the point: An organization hires someone for an entry-level position who happens to be really enthusiastic about softball, or cycling, or possibly even salsa dancing. That person takes the initiative to organize social events that feature their interest which, in turn, brings people together in a social environment who previously may never have directly interacted. That recreational interaction in turn recreates the nature and quality of their workplace interactions and stuff happens that enables new, and unexpected, business-related effects. As I said, the so-called ripple effects of changing even a hierarchically low-level position introduces the potential for large systemic transformation throughout the complex system that is the organization.

Thus, the question of hiring becomes (among other things) a question about what we, as an organization, want to become. Into what do we aspire to transform and evolve? What effects to we intend to create and enable among our member constituencies and how will that new person contribute that creation and enablement? Or, more succinctly, what is our tactility? Hiring decisions are, in effect, organizational evolution and tactility decisions—how will we touch the person we are inviting into organization, and how will that person will touch us? The hiring process is about enculturation—how will that individual assimilate and embody our organizational culture, and how will our organizational culture embody the effects introduced by that individual?

So, hiring me, for example, into an organization means that the organization has some pretty inspired, far-thinking, and unconventional aspirations for the future of its leadership. Just the sorts of things we’re playing with here in the Faculty of Leadership and Organization at Adler Graduate Professional School.

In the Best Interest of the Students

An education-related story caught my attention yesterday, as a textbook example of how a bureaucratic mentality precludes reflective leadership and organizational learning—precisely the attributes required for being effective in the contemporary world. The details of the case are pretty straight-forward:

Lynden Dorval has been a … teacher in the Edmonton Public School system for 35 years. Last week, he was suspended indefinitely for what he says was insubordination for disobeying an order not to give zeros to students. [He says,] “…if [students] don’t hand in work or show up to write an exam … we have a comment policy where we’re supposed to put in comments indicating what they haven’t done. The problem with that is the marks program doesn’t count that for anything, so if a student had only done half the work then their average mark would be based only on that half the work. The average is calculated by whatever marks are in there.”

In other words, if a student does only one or two assignments on which s/he receives passing grades and does no other work through the term – including not taking the exam – the student will nonetheless receive a passing grade according to the Edmonton School Board policy. Mr. Dorval objected to this policy, ensuring that a student would receive a final mark that reflects both the work done and not done. The Board superintendent suspended Dorval for insubordination (notably only three weeks before the final exams when the students are most in need of a teacher familiar with what had transpired through the entire school year).

Seems pretty dumb on the surface, doesn’t it? Despite the seemingly ill-advised policy and inappropriateness of the suspension timing, what does this story have to do with leadership, and the problematics of a bureaucratic mindset? Well, have a listen to what the Board’s official spokesperson, one Cheryl Oxford, has to say about the superintendent’s decision:

“A student is to be assessed on their overall learning outcomes,” she told reporters. “So as opposed to being assessed on what they don’t know, they’re being assessed on what they do know. … All the decisions that we make are in the best interest of students. If the superintendent did not feel that this decision was not in the best interest of the students he wouldn’t have made it.”

Did you catch that? First, counting only those assignments that were done seems to ensure that students are evaluated on “what they do know,” presumably because what they haven’t done, they don’t know (as opposed to, say, simply not doing the work for whatever reason). To a system that is designed to purge human judgment – in other words, a bureaucracy – that sort of comment technically makes sense.

More significant, however, are the effects of the bureaucratic mentality. In his book, The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells describes bureaucracies as, “organizations for which the reproduction of their system of means becomes their main organizational goal.” This means that a bureaucratic system cannot afford to be demonstrated to be wrong: If it was wrong, it would impede its ability to reproduce its system of means. This underlying mentality often translates into bewildering and often arcane public explanations that seem to ignore what to those outside of the system would be simple, common sense. It is the reason why so many bureaucratically minded leaders choose to “stay the course,” rather than admit that a decision was ill advised (because that would be tantamount to admitting that the system which vested in them decision-making power made a mistake). Case in point: Ms. Oxford’s comment that, since all decisions are made in the best interests of students, the specific decision to suspend Lynden Dorval must have been in the best interest of students, otherwise the decision would not have been made. It is a circular (il)logic that steadfastly defends a bureaucratic system over any potential reflection on the usefulness of the policy, practical problematics of its implementation, or – heaven forefend! – unintended consequences like depriving students of their teacher right before final exams which, according to the unique bureaucratic reasoning of the Edmonton School Board, must, by definition, be in the best interest of the students.

Besides, by creating an incentive for students to only submit assignments on material that they know and ignore everything else, we can be assured to create good bureaucrats to fill the cubicles of both public and private sector corporate bureaucracies. After all, bureaucracies exist to reproduce their systems of means, and what is the purpose of the traditional education system if not to serve that bureaucratic objective?

Leadership in Complexity at the Public Service of Canada National Managers Community Forum 2012

The past two days, I had the great pleasure of performing two playshops on Leadership in Complexity at the 2012 National Managers Community Forum in Winnipeg. This is the same session that I did with the Canadian Organization Development Institute a year ago. Between the two sessions, over 200 participants experienced an introduction to complexity theory as applied to organizational leadership, beginning with answering the time-honoured question, “how are contemporary organizations like the Newfoundland cod fishery?” (Answer: Neither is complicated, although both are typically treated as such; in fact, they both are complex.) We listened to music from Sun Ra as an example of what complexity sounds like (although my son, the composer, suggested that we could have equally listened to an excerpt from John Cage’s 4’33”).

A large part of being able to perceive a complex system AS a complex system comes from being able to perceive the relationships among effects relative to a variety of contexts (or grounds) that provide the environment in which those relationships are enacted. Of course, given my McLuhan background, I suggest that the Laws of Media tetrads are among the best thinking frameworks to be able to enable that perception. This, of course leads to all sorts of applications including better brainstorming, or what I now refer to as “Emergence Brainstorming.”

Naturally, I introduced the participants to Valence Theory and referred them to the complementary talk to this session, “Take Me to Your Leaders.” And, as a cap to the entire afternoon, we developed tactility statements for the public service on each day:

Day 1: “The Public Service of Canada shares and transfers knowledge to create and support policy to enable regulations regarding social services via communications and media.”

Day 2: “The Public Service of Canada supports social identity and diversity as well as knowledge sharing through excellent governance to accomplish safety and security of the people and the environment, in addition to economic growth, stability, and health, through providing people support services.”

All in all, an enjoying and stimulating session for me and, I hope, for the participants. The notes for the session are available for download in English and in French.

Don’t Manage Conflict, Engage It (and each other)!

Responding to the detailed design document for our proposed Master’s in Leadership and Organization, Development and Coaching, friend and collaborator, Cinnie Noble notes the seeming absence of topics covering conflict management. She appropriately observes that,

Conflict costs organizations – financially (through litigation, grievances, absenteeism, retention etc.), AND in other ways such as the impact that ill-managed conflict has on morale, productivity, the ability to make decisions, problem solve, and be creative. Most organizations (and people) are reactive when it comes to conflict, and OD and coaching principles and practice have the potential for providing proactive approaches that prevent unnecessary conflict and help make effective conflict engagement the norm rather than something to be avoided – until it is too late.

Effective conflict management is not commonly identified as a core competency for leaders, and there is a paucity of information about what constitutes conflict competent leaders and organizations. Much leadership coaching work however, is focused on helping leaders develop the knowledge, skills and abilities to engage more effectively in conflict and better manage interpersonal and other disputes.

Mission statements and codes of conduct are commonly subject to interpretation and often do not consider cultural differences. Some expectations about how staff are supposed to ‘behave’ are otherwise unspoken and unwritten. In any case there are many problems about trying to instil respectful ways of interacting. In actuality, the results of such efforts are the 'stuff' of grievances, the need for mediation, investigations, human rights complaints and so on. In the well-meaning efforts to provide a framework for staffs' communications, many workplaces do not provide the requisite training, coaching or modelling to effectively implement and sustain ‘good’ behaviour. What is more, they do not provide the ways and means for staff to easily access assistance.

Conflict has yet to be fully embraced as an opportunity for organizations to achieve more positive outcomes. Such outcomes are for instance, to examine disparate ideas in order to innovate and create new ways to solve problems, to explore possibilities based on opposing views and differences, to improve relationships so that productivity increases and staff are healthy contributors.

Imagine if we, as leaders, were able to create an environment in which the nature of conversations that occur in that environment preclude what we term as “interpersonal disputes,” disgruntlement, and generally bad behaviours; an environment in which mission statements (which I think are relatively counter-productive in most cases) and codes of conduct (ditto, especially with a disparity between espoused and in-use theories of action) are not converted into weapons with the intention of beating recalcitrant employees into submission.

Our proposed master’s program is designed with this effect in mind. For example, one of the key objectives of our Human Thriving course is to enable leaders – right from the program get-go – to begin to think about the nature of what I would call fractal thriving: a concept recognizing that thriving people create thriving organizations create thriving societies. This leads to a fundamental, complexity-based question that can be more or less framed as, “what environmental conditions will most effectively enable the types of organizational relationships that support individuals’ ability to thrive over time?” With these guiding notions in mind, we can then begin to reconsider and reconstruct organizational practices from the ground up with these precepts as foundational design principles (which happens to be consistent with a Valence Theory conception of organization – interesting how that works! ;)

Raising and mindfully (re)considering the topic of conflict management is exceptionally useful and important because it helps us understand with a new clarity what is fundamentally important about this new program we are proposing. Additionally, it assists to emphasize what I believe must be a core value that pervades all aspects of our curriculum narrative. I’m hoping that the specific seminars on Positive Leadership principles and Appreciative Management practices in the Human Thriving course will set the tone early on. I’m also hoping – more than hoping; we’re planning for it, actually – that proactive leadership, coaching, and OD practices and principles enable organizational environments in which effective engagement among all members becomes the norm, rather than the exception, over time.

Through our program, we will plant the seeds—essentially creating an appropriately conducive environment for our participants in which whatever is to emerge that enacts these values will emerge. I am trusting in the capacity of those whom we will attract to the program to bring forth conversations that perhaps none of us can specifically conceive of from the outset. We will encourage the juxtaposition of diverse contexts (and understanding the intrinsic value in such diversity), provide a wide range of analytical tools that enable useful thinking about polarity issues, and primarily focus on the multiple ways in which a healthy human and organizational ecology can be created, enabled, and actively encouraged out in the world, especially starting from the societal mess in which we collectively find ourselves. In these ways, conflict management may well become a thing of the past, replaced by its more effective counterpart, positive conflict engagement.

Adventures in Curriculum Design - Master of Leadership & Organization, Development and Coaching

Many of you have been following and participating in the development of our proposed Master of Leadership and Organization, Development and Coaching at the Adler Graduate Professional School. Thanks to great contributions from a variety of collaborators, we anticipate that we are within a couple of months of submitting our application for accreditation to the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities—after that, we await their review, suggested revisions, and final determination.

We have truly benefited from the ideas, insights, and guidance of many people, beginning with our Conversation Cafés last fall, and culminating with curriculum design charrettes at the beginning of this year (check the AGPS label for related postings). Specifically, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Linda Page, Marilyn Laiken, Melinda Sinclair, Peter Chiaramonte, Cinnie Noble, and Venita Indewey for their valuable contributions in helping to create what I think is a truly exceptional degree curriculum.

Now, it’s time (once again) to hear from YOU. I have posted the draft of the Program Content section of our application, and I invite you to take a sneak peak at what we’ve created so far. The complete document is quite long (the government has specific requirements for its layout and contents), but there is no need for you to read it entirely to get an appreciation of what it is we’re planning.

Here’s a quick guide on where to find specific items that you might find interesting:

• Pages 2 through 8 are the derivation and discussion of the program learning outcomes. 
• Page 9 is the quick summary of learning outcomes. 
• Pages 10 through 12 map the learning outcomes to specific courses. 
• Pages 12 through 18 outline the course descriptions by year and trimester, much like one would find in a program calendar. 
• Pages 28 through 57 contain the “good stuff”—course syllabus outlines for all our courses (two pages per course).

The document can be downloaded from here. It will be available for the next two weeks only, that is, ONLY UNTIL FRIDAY, APRIL 20, after which we will be consolidating the comments and completing our application submission.

I invite you to download the document and read through as much or as little as might interest you. Please offer whatever feedback, ideas, inspirations, critiques, concerns, kudos, considerations, plaudits, or brickbats you think might help us bring to life what we intend to be a truly outstanding master’s degree for leaders, organization development practitioners, and coaches who are interested in a research and empirically-oriented education to augment their practice, and transform organizations worldwide for the better.

Take Me to Your Leaders

A few weeks ago, I led a colloquium at Adler based on my popular keynote, Take Me to Your Leaders. During the talk, I explore the notion that it's time to rethink what it means to lead in the contemporary context of highly collaborative – and highly effective – organizations.

Throughout history, the concept of "organization" evolved according to conditions of society at the time. Unquestionably, today's conditions have changed significantly since the Industrial Age model that shaped the 20th century, and thereby shaped management education over the last hundred years. In a contemporary organization, conceived in a world that is ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate, I contend that the role of leadership is no longer to “lead” in a conventional sense (that is, create a vision, execute a mission, provide incentives to keep everyone in line), but to bring people together to create a shared experience in which an alternative future becomes possible. This realization raises a fascinating question: what does it mean to be a leader when it is no longer to lead?

The Value of Complication vs. Complexity in Organizations, Management, and Leadership

I’ve been spending some time working through syllabus topics for our courses in our future Master’s in Leadership and Organization, Development and Coaching. I’m up to the course on Complexity: Theory and Applications, and have been doing some reading of various papers and journal articles I’ve amassed over the years. In particular, a number of the articles struggle – more or less – over the issue of complication vs. complexity.

As I (and others) metaphorically, if archetypically describe in several seminars I do with complexity themes, “baking cookies is simple … going to the moon is complicated … raising children is complex.” Often, common language sets “complexity” in direct, polar opposition to “simplicity.” That, in turn, has the effect of encouraging people to shun complexity thinking because – as it is often expressed with some degree of exasperation – “my life is already too complex as it is.” And, it is indeed the likely case that their lives are quite complex, especially if they live in relative proximity to any social grouping in society. We tend to be social animals, we connect via a wide variety of relationships, we remember experiences and anticipate possible outcomes that affect (and oftentimes effect) decisions. We adapt to environments, situations, circumstances, encounters with specific individuals, and the results are most often deterministically unpredictable. Contemporary life is, indeed, complex.

In order to maintain the illusion of control, we often attempt to simplify the complex dynamics by creating mental models that are more cause-and-effect, deterministically predictable. Organizational leaders – especially those who are de facto managers – do this all the time. They plan, execute the plan, achieve the prescribed results—and then execute those who fail to “meet expectations” (since, truth be told, they are the ones who reveal the fallacy of control illusions).

However, most of my Valence Theory work, and my current experiences in designing this degree program, suggest that if one navigates emergent effects on a trajectory towards the ultimate effects one intends, a complex system will tend to behave as your friend. On the other hand, the more control one attempts to impose on the complex system, the more likely it is that nonlinear, emergent effects will bite your butt in the form of so-called unanticipated consequences. Such controls recast a nonlinear, complex system into a reduced, complicated model that will likely have very different outcomes. As I have previously written, “As in the fashion of a Newtonian clockwork universe, that complexity is replaced by the complication of B[ureaucratic] A[dministratively controlled] H[ierarchical] procedures in an attempt to replicate an organic system of humanity with the equilibrium of non-human machinery.”

But why do we do it?—aside from the observation that we simply don’t know any better, that we have had between four and eight centuries of socialization in BAH. It occurs to me that there might actually be a fungible-Economic rationality behind introducing complication into a complex system:

Introducing complication into a complex system is a means through which value is extracted from the system to the benefit of the complicating agent(s).

This heuristic seems to work when applied to conventional management, governance (and especially government), investment banking, systems of knowledge and so-called intellectual property. It’s an intriguing idea, don’t you think?

Crisis of (non-)Leadership at Toronto City Hall

Yesterday’s decision to oust now-former TTC Chief General Manager, Gary Webster, signals a potentially disastrous new twist in the incumbency of Mayor Rob Ford. Let me state up-front that I’m no fan of the current mayor and most of his policies. I’m also no fan of Mr. Webster’s style of technocratic leadership of the Toronto Transit Commission, nor his brinkmanship and inability to engage appropriately with the Amalgamated Transit Union. But those subjective opinions on the men involved have nothing to do with my deep concern over what this foolhardy decision means for the future of our city.

The firing-without-cause is explained by Councillor (and TTC Commissioner) Frank DiGorgio as follows: “Excellence in bureaucracy isn’t defined like excellence in private enterprise … . Excellence in a bureaucracy … is the ability to put forth the positions that are consistent with those adopted by the mayor.

Sadly, what Mr. DiGorgio describes is not “excellence,” but rather the root of problems in traditional, dysfunctional bureaucracies. These sorts of bureaucracies are the mindless, non-learning organizations that tend to repeat their past mistakes, in which “accountability” is a euphemism for blame and witch-hunts, whose leaders behave like Alice-in-Wonderland Red Queens—the sort of petty tyrants whose only response is “off with their heads” when s/he doesn’t get her or his way. Such bureaucracies operate under the myth that the leader is all-knowing, all-wise, and (at least in the context of the organization) all powerful. Said leader – who necessarily believes this myth – too often suffers under the delusion that afflicted the fabled Emperor whose unfortunate sartorial choices left him considerably exposed for all to see.

In the public sector, the role of staff (so-called bureaucrats), including senior/executive staff, is to provide the subject matter expertise and reasoned analysis that can give good guidance to the elected representatives, so that they can make the types of well-informed decisions the public (supposedly) elected them to make. What we want as citizens is for political considerations to be left out of the complicated and complex analysis of situations, for the circumstances to be presented as fairly and – dare I say it – objectively as possible. It’s the politicians role to add the political dimension, to justify decisions taken when proposed policy is at odds with reasoned analysis, and to ultimately be accountable to the electorate for those decisions. To insist, as Mr. DiGorgio and Councillors Vince Crisanti, Cesar Palacio, Denzil Minnan-Wong and Norm Kelly did, that the role of the civil service is to provide only analysis that conforms with the mayor’s desires and whims is to create a smoke-screen behind which cowardly politicians may hide when decisions are misguided, ill-informed, or simply turn out wrong for the benefit of the city and its citizens.

What Mr. Webster’s principled stand in providing his best analysis and honest opinion did was to say to the (political) Commissioners, “if you want to decide on an alternative course of action after hearing this analysis, I cannot in good conscience provide your cover; you must take the responsibility.” What the (political) Commissioners accomplished yesterday was to put a freezing chill on honest analysis by the municipal civil service. The message is clear: “If your analysis disagrees with the Mayor’s (uninformed-by-facts) opinions, your livelihood is at risk.” A culture of fear-induce sycophants does not a healthy, well-run, thriving city make. Certainly it does not demonstrate Mayor Ford’s vaunted “respect for the taxpayer.”

This is not leadership. This is abdication of responsibility. Sadly, would-be Emperor Ford – sans clothes – will not abdicate his role.

Curriculum Development for a Masters in Leadership and Organization Development and Coaching

You know it’s working well when you step back, look at the curriculum outline and syllabi you’re creating, and think, “I’d love to take this program and these courses.”

It’s been several months and several great (and intense) conversations among a small group of collaborators. I think it’s time to bring you all up-to-date on the development of our future Master’s degree in Leadership and Organization Development and Coaching at Adler Graduate Professional School. As you might remember, last fall we held three Conversation Cafés to which I invited over forty people from among our various constituencies (potential faculty and students, and professional OD, coaching, and leadership practitioners) to contribute their thoughts, ideas, insights, experience, and wisdom about what should such a program look and feel like. What philosophy and ethos should shape a program that will enable future leaders, OD practitioners, and coaches to contribute significantly and substantially to the complex and immensely challenging environment in which we are now all immersed? The results of those engagements are here, here, and here, and enabled us to draft the learning outcomes of our proposed program:

1. Savoir³: Referring to Savoir, Savoir Faire, and Savoir Être – Ways of Knowing, Ways of Doing, and Ways of Being. To demonstrably understand and embody the three principles of Savoir³ throughout students’ and graduates learning and practice.
2. Emerging: To demonstrate and embody principles of self- and organizational emergence and mindful change.
3. Knowledge Integration: To demonstrably integrate foundational or core knowledge, knowledge created via processes of formal inquiry, and knowledge harvested through active and directed reflection on practical experience in the praxis of leadership, organization development, and workplace-oriented coaching.
4. Complexity: To demonstrate an ability to help organizations describe, assess, and enable appropriate courses of action in terms of complexity as a guiding model for understanding human dynamics.
5. Effect-oriented Practice: To develop and demonstrate the capabilities to facilitate individuals and organizational groups towards becoming more effective with respect to navigating intended and desired effects in complex, workplace environments.

Beginning with these learning outcomes for the program, the small group of curriculum development collaborators participated in a facilitation that invited them to brainstorm competencies that we would intend for our graduates to acquire during their journey through the master’s program. We then took the eighty (yes, 80!) competencies and collectively grouped them into emergent themes (using a silent method based on grounded theory), subsequently naming the themes. Then, using curricula and course descriptions from seven other, well-established university programs that offer master’s degrees in either leadership, or OD, or coaching, we sorted their courses into our themes. This enabled us to discover both the gaps in our thinking, and the missing opportunities among other programs—opportunities that we had identified through our process.

Finally, through a series of conversations among the members of our collaboration, we discovered which themes would become courses in their own right, which would meld together, and which better served as threads to be woven throughout the fabric of our master’s degree.

Here is a preliminary outline of the curriculum that we are currently contemplating. Each course would be designed for twelve sessions. Most will comprise nine instructional or content-based seminars, two seminars in which students will present their final work for the course, and one integration seminar. The integration seminar will be a unique feature of our program, one that will set the Adler master’s degree apart from almost every other master’s program. This seminar will be designed to integrate the knowledge from the current course with all of the other knowledge acquired in the program to-date, so that the learning is more holistic and contextualized, rather than distinct and separated by course boundaries. The integration seminars will also include many, if not most, of our faculty so that our professors will understand what is going on in other professors’ courses (the lack of which is a distinct limitation in most university programs elsewhere).

The integration is not limited to course knowledge alone. One of the requirements for graduation, post-thesis, is for completing candidates to conduct “integration and emergence seminars” for incoming students. During these sessions, students near graduation will present their research, their reflections on program experiences (both in-class and from their practicum placements), and most importantly, their reflections on their personal journeys of emerging through their time in the program. Incoming students will be able to directly connect with students at the end to obtain an idea not of where they will end up, but of a possible trajectory for their own learning and development.

The curriculum design is, of course, subject to change as we continue with the development of our program. Nonetheless, it will give you a flavour of what might be coming for those considering graduate education in leadership and organization development and coaching (noting that the courses are not necessarily listed in any particular order):

• Trajectory Seminar (orientation course)
• Human Thriving
• Foundations I: Context of the field
• Foundations II: Current and contemporary models
• Foundations III: Emergent thinking, themes, and models
• Critical Perspectives
• Complexity: Theory and Application
• Human and Organizational Ecology
• High-performing Teams
• Professional Practice
• Inquiry I: Methodologies
• Inquiry II: Methods
• Practicum I
• Practicum II
• Integration and Emergence Seminar (directly connected to Trajectory Seminar)
• Thesis

If you would love to take this program and these courses (or if you might like to teach some of these courses in this program) I’d love to hear from you.

Adler Colloquium: Take Me To Your Leaders, March 2 at 18:00

Save the date! On Friday evening, March 2, 2012, from 18:00 to 20:30, I will be leading a colloquium based on my popular keynote, Take Me to Your Leaders: Collaborative leadership and trust. The evening will begin with a talk that explores the notion that it is time to rethink what we mean by leadership in the context of highly collaborative – and highly effective – organizations, followed by an active, participatory experience for all the participants.

Throughout history, the concept of "organization" evolved according to conditions of society at the time. Unquestionably, today's conditions have changed significantly since the Industrial Age model that shaped the 20th century, and thereby shaped management education over the last hundred years. In a contemporary organization, conceived in a world that is ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate, I contend that the role of leadership is no longer to “lead” in a conventional sense (that is, create a vision, execute a mission, provide incentives to keep everyone in line), but to bring people together to create a shared experience in which an alternative future becomes possible. This realization raises a fascinating question: what does it mean to be a leader when it is no longer to lead?

For current and future leaders, and anyone interested in organization development, behaviour, and the psychology of human interactions in workplaces, this colloquium offers new insights, ideas, and inspirations towards re-imagining organizations for the 21st century.

The colloquium will be held at Adler Graduate Professional School, 890 Yonge Street, 9th floor. Pre-registration is requested (and advised). (I will also be giving a brief update on the development of our proposed Master of Leadership and Organization Development and Coaching.)

Are You just a leader, or Are You a Great Leader?

As Canada’s parliament returns to work today amidst a swirl of advance news concerning bold – read: controversial – initiatives concerning pensions and Old Age Security, I am moved to reflect on Prime Minister Harper in the role of leader. In particular, I imagined what I might say to the Prime Minister in my role of leader-educator if I had an opportunity to have two or three minutes with him, one-on-one.

It is well known that Mr. Harper keeps very tight control over what his government says and does. I would guess that he does it – in most, but not all cases – not out of malice but rather from a place of deep conviction that what he is doing is right for the country as a whole; that he (again, mostly but not always) alone knows what is best for the sustainability of the country as a viable, sovereign entity, and the future wellbeing of its citizens. Considerations of hubris aside, in one sense, I think he is correct:

All leaders are right—until they are not. 

The difference between a leader who merely seeks control and imposition of their vision at any cost, and a Great Leader who inspires their country (read: organization) to greatness, is that the latter actively seeks ways to understand when they are heading towards “not.”

(Mr. Harper: My perception is that you do not seek to understand.)

More on The End of Vision

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

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

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"

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!

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

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

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

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

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!