Organizational Therapy and Positive Psychology

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

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..."

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?

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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.”
5. 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.
6. 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.”
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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!

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

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

We're soaking in it...

Views on the Future of Corporation

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

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

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

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:

1. Because women have the right to be safe. Period.
   
2. Because all people, irrespective of their gender, sexual orientation, or sexual preferences and proclivities have the right to be safe. Period.
   
3. Because no one "deserves to" or "asks to" be raped under any circumstances.
   
4. 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.
   
5. Because blaming the victim of any crime is wrong.
   
6. Because blaming the victim of rape is an especially pernicious repeat act of violence.
   
7. Because characterizing men as slaves to their supposed unbridled sexual desire is demeaning.
   
8. Because those charged with enforcing the law cannot be allowed to hold biases that impede their ability to do their jobs.
   
9. 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.
   
10. 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

“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

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?

“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

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!

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?

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

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!