From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work. We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt. There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work. But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate. People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold.
Doubt hunts us on the trail. It picks up our scent and dogs our heels ntil we find ourselves running faster and faster away from it. We expend our energy avoiding it and become exhausted and depleted.
In these moments what is needed is a stand. We must stop running from it, turn around on the path and face it down. We need to muster up the courage and confront the energy of doubt unless we wishe to have it erode our efforts from within.
Large scale change is never certain. Our running from the doubts simply feeds the fear of that uncertainty. IN the worse case, we become consumed by it and look outside of ourselves for confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do. The truth of it is that the certainty we need is not outside of us. If it is not within us, we will never find it. We must generate it in the field of our work together or abandon our work to the poisonous cynicism that wants to consume it in the end. At some point we choose to confront the predator or become its prey.
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Taholah, Washington
If this article is any indication, the future of management will require more hosts and less bosses. Hierarchies are disappearing, top-down and centralized is giving way to distributed, and organizations are becoming more open and engaging of stakeholders.
That is true everywhere in my experience, including here at the Quinault Indian Nation where we are reframing the tribal government’s strategic plan in several unique ways. First we have established a core team of stakeholders from the government and community who are willing to take responsibility for stewarding the plan. Second, the core team has proposed a new strategic plan model that organizes work not by the departments and programs of the Quinault government structure, but rather by “domains” which are yet to be determined but may end up being things like “prosperity” and “learning.” Organizing the aspirations and preferred futures of the nation this way means that the government departments need to talk to each other and the community to move the Nation forward. And finally the new plan requires engagement with many many people, to bring in the wisdom and ownership of the community so that the plan is theirs. Tomorrow for example we will be hosting an ongoing cafe in the lobby outside the Nation’s general council meeting, where we will be hosting conversations with community members and capturing wisdom with a graphic facilitator.
As a result, our planning sessions are a combination of work and facilitation training because the core team knows that to do this means that they have to talk to people. So we are exploring how to convene conversations that matter and that have an impact.
How is the shift in management changing the way you plan strategy?
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Tahola, Washington
From Euan:
Management is becoming about noticing and enabling rather than driving and controlling.Get yourselves a big melting pot of different social tools that engender different conversations and expressions of intent from your staff, watch like a hawk, spot the cool stuff, fan the flames and then protect the baby shoots from your spoilers.
Nice.
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Seattle, Washington
Tuesday wrapped wup with a great high energy keynote from Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, California..
This harvest was co-written by Nancy White, Teresa Posakony and Chris Corrigan
Van was nervous prior to his talk – some “jackass” came up and tapped him on his shoulder and interrupted his contemplation. “Don’t mess with me! I”m a spiritual agent.” I turned around and it was Peter Senge trying to wish me some good luck. We face the challenge of helping people to rise to the occasion of their lives. You get better, stronger, clearer, more articulate – a global phenomenon. At the same time the external world gets more complicated, scary, difficult to deal with. Both a sense of hopefulness and overwhelm and urgency. We are caught in between.
Paradox
Out of that paradox we will find incredible answers.
Van’s Story
It began with being pissed off about racism – a fundamental orientation towards the world. Born the year Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were killed, school integration – wanted to prove something to the world about Black excellence and competence. But it was carried with anger. It brought Van into activism and a complete emotional and psychological breakdown.
After 10 years on the front lines, going into public schools, 30-34 kids and one teacher, six books, no chalk and no TP. Seeing kids frustrated in that situation, understandably. IN a place to do something stupid that landed them not in the principles office, but in the police station. Into detention centers where staff made more than teachers. Going to a lot of funerals. Kids in caskets with the elders crying. Three year olds who saw flowers or balloons would cry with the association of funerals or pavement memorials. Van worked 20 hours days, slept in his clothes, pushed to a point where he was sick all the time. Would start all his speeches – excuse me, I’m not feeling that well today, but I’m not as sick as this system we are trying to fight. Work it into the speech. Can laugh now, but on July 17, 2000 something went “bop.” IN bad shape. And the system was still standing there… The system didn’t even say “owie!” Just doing its thing. And Van was lost.
Van was looking at a newspaper and read about a spirituality retreat. “I can’t tell nobody in Oakland that I’m going to a spirituality retreat, but I felt called to go.” SO being a brave, principled person, he lied. “I’m going to the Raider’s game.” Because he knows his people. As a Black activist, working 20 hours a day, twitch when you talk and snap – people don’t’ think you’re crazy. You don’t want to be in the neighbourhood when they say “you’ve been out in the wood beating drums with white people? You are SICK!” He knew he could not bring it to the community directly. He’d sneak to Marin in the night. He got there and said “what is this? This is 20 minutes from the neighbourhood and everybody’s happy!” They carry these big rolled up weapons – their yoga mats. “What is this!” “They eat this ambrosial food that makes them happy, called tofu, and cars that don’t pollute – priusie – I said to myself, how did this come to be, 20 minutes from my house you have all of this going on and back in Oakland we have cancer clusters, learning disabilities, birth defects, off the chart pollution.” Two different realities. In his broke down state, he had to just be a witness and get help. He realized the best people he met before his breakdown lived 20 minutes from the best people he met after his breakdown and they did not know each other. If this kept going, we’d have eco-apartheid. The eco haves and have nots. Within 20 minutes of each other. Four syllables. A prayer. A hope. Imagining the young people he worked with that this could be available. Green jobs, not jails. Just came to him. All of these new products and services – hybrid cars, organic food – the positive green wave with solutions to global warming. Will this green wave lift all boats? Will it include everybody?
Green
Jobs
Not
Jails
Held as a prayer and it became a CURSE!
He went back to the neighbourhood, “We must begin to focus on the solar power, permaculture, and organic food, this is the path to freedom… where you going don’t leave me.” Going back and forth to marin county and oakland telling them all they have in common.
He’s saying these ideas have become popular because “the age of issues is over” – poverty, civil rights, crime. Issue is another word for the word problem…. so social activism has been stuck in the problems with all it’s cynicism. MLK did not get famous for saying, “I have a problem, I have a critique, a have a bunch of issues and I’m thoroughly pissed off.”
The age of issues is over, the age of solutions is here. We need to dream again and bring people together around actual possibility. Being present to a prayer.
Now he’s taking us to the “fourth quadrant” – saying he’s holding
Vertical Rich–poor
Horizontal. Gray problems to Green Solutions
| Rich and gray
The conversations about environmental problems among affluent classes: polar bears, global warming, rainforests and other charismatic mega fauna. These are the right conversations from the place of self-preservation AND these are beautiful beings that are disappearing because of our actions. It’s good work |
Rich and Green
Affluent solutions…green consumption like hybrids, light bulbs, organic food, solar panels on the second home. Business opportunities for rich people and employment opportunities for others. This is good…better to invest in and buy things that help the planet and not harm the planet. |
To see these as all correct and good is to see a bigger picture than the environmental movement sees, which is to say that there is both/and about the environmental movements and environmental justice.. If we get these right, we bring down the system that believes that it is alright to have disposal stuff and disposable people. There is nothing that is throwaway, not species, goods, people or neighbourhoods. The fourth quadrant helps us to imagine radically different partnerships, full of green health, wealth, employment and prosperity for poor people. It is the quadrant for green collar jobs.
People’s Grocery in West Oakland. West Oakland has 35,000 people and no grocery stores, but i almost exclusively liquor stores which just serve crap. Or you take five buses to go to Whole Paycheck Foods. 35,000 people stuck in an island of poor nutrition in a sea of abundant fresh organic produce. The kids that started People’s Grocery deliver fresh organic foods in the ‘hood.
Green collar jobs can’t be exported…they have to be local. Millions of buildings need to be retrofitted for millions of green collar jobs. The job is to connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs doing. This brings neighbourhoods together because they all have something to offer to the fourth quadrant.
Van designed the Oakland Green Jobs Corps program…this could happen in Vancouver with Aboriginal youth and workers in the downtown eastside. Van is great…I’m just imagining this happening in Vancouver, Aboriginal youth riding this wave of green prosperity and need in Vancouver and the building boom which right now gives them skills that can be used in this emerging economy.
Van closes by showing a picture of three kids. Everyone has a plan for these kids but not US. The only way to make these kids part of the world is to deal in solutions that recognize that we are all in this together. Everywhere.
Someone in the audience asked what his connection is in the UN. They saw the green jobs idea taking off with connections through UN and internationally before taking off locally. Which just goes to prove it’s all magical, you can’t predict it… it’s all just intention and a prayer. Just keep going!
Another audience member talked about the Youth Ecopreneurs Program and asked if there are venture capital programs working with programs to support green jobs. Van did a keynote at the Investor’s Circle. They liked it and asked “how can we help you?” Van didn’t have an answer… he walked into the room assuming he would not get support. He told the story as an example of why it’s important to withhold judgement.
Finally an audience member asked Van how he sustains his vision. He replied that when he started out with this new way of seeing the world there was no one around him who got it. So he created a Board of Directors for himself. He invited Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Bob Marley and others to be on his Board. He consulted the imaginary Board on a regular basis when he needed advice, imagining what they would say, the points they would argue with one another and taking inspiration from their writings and speeches. I turned to my friends and said that this is the kind of thing you do until you find real people that will spar with you and make you better. Very cool idea.
[tags]stia2007[/tags]
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Seattle, Washington.
This morning’s keynote was a four person panel presentation from the team that created the Boeing Operations Centre, which is the primary face of Boeing’s interaction with their customers, helping them with maintenance and servicing issues. The presentation was given by Peter Weertman, Bruce Rund, Bob Wiebe and Darren Macer. This post is a collaborative harvest of that keynote by myself, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony.
One thing to notice about people that work at Boeing is that they almost always talk about their relationship to planes dating back to being kids, they take great pride in their work and they all see the work of designing and building planes to be very, very cool. Bob Wiebe, talking now, began his presentation like this, and almost everyone I know at Boeing also checks in to their work this way. There is a lot of heart and deep commitment in their work. It is more often than not a chance to express some aspiration or intention that was held from childhood and that is renewed every time they step on a plane or see one flying over head, Imagine having a relationship to your work like that.
This panel is presenting on a the process they went through to produce a new state of the art Operations Centre to support the needs of customers whose planes were on the ground. It required creating a “new normal” which wasn’t everybody’s normal, and it certainly wasn’t the old normal. Wiebe describes it as a process of moving forward and sliding back – a form of rapid prototyping. I’m hearing this as the practice of sparring in taekwondo, where you slip in and out and back and forth, trying things to see how your opponent reacts, adjusting your strategy to meet the challenge that is in front of you, and understanding that the opponent is also adjusting and changing, based on what you do. It’s a continuous feedback loop and engagement with a dynamic changing system, and this is the ground in which strategy and tactics translates into action.
The shortest distance between two people is a story…these guys started with stories. Are we designed properly to deliver on customer satisfaction? The group went on a learning journey and discovered how other companies do it and is covered that good operations support can actually support and drive customer satisfaction. Boeing looked at previous integration efforts and realized that the thing that made them fall short was the fact that they weren’t based on the most engagement possible. Engagement is critical to moving everyone in the system towards the new normal.
Airplanes now run at 1% not in operation, down from 3% previously. There is not a lot of space on airplanes. Utilization and passenger loads continue to increase. What this means to Boeing is that what used to be a couple of days to figure something out has now been reduced to a couple of hours. How to live with this? The solution again was to work, to engage, to be in conversation with each other, all in support of Boeing’s business objectives. From this came clarity of the voice of the customer and turned elephants to bold recommendations to action plans.
Bruce … helped lead the change in the ops centre. He used to run rough shod over people as his form of leadership. He learned as part of the new normal:
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make yourself part of the solution
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get up and talk to people
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peers get curious when you engage them at the level of caring for the work
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cross boundaries to collaborate – this is powerful
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stories of success and failure helped us to see causal loops
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bring level of response from expert to the customer
A power in this sessions is Boeing’s commitment to learning in complex systems. Their customer service was known as “black hole” because things come in and never leave. They mapped plans, causal loops, etc. under much pressure. Their path and action began with engagement. It makes me think of what to do in the in the complex systems we are all in – this is what we share – begin talking with each other. Go from never talked, never knowing the options to the simple, yet focused interaction of human beings learning together to improve. Begin with curiosity. Come back to the energy of childhood dreams of planes and invite that into the form of learning, listening, and wise action with the broader system including customers. “Open to the wisdom of the local effort and connect to others.”
Open up to the customer, to the stakeholder, to those who are in the system to collaborate around options and build trust. When Boeing was getting the engagement strategy started, they encountered some tough systemic barriers to communications arising from hero and expert behaviour. Two of the most tonic behaviours were experts saying to teams “That’s not the way I would have done it” which is behaviour that trumps engagement and reconsolidates power in the expert, undermining collaboration. The second behaviour was that the experts or the authorities reserved the right to make final decisions on their own time. This introduced delays in responses to customers that were unacceptable. The initiative introduced rules of engagement – or what we call principles of cooperation in the chaordic stepping stones process – that would serve emergence of the new normal.
World War II pilot: “You know you are getting close, because the flak gets heavier.”
“Help me understand, here’s what I think, tell me more, here’s the story…” This frame of structured curiosity is a fast way into what David Isaacs is calling “conversational leadership.”
This is really brining home for me the power of the chaordic stepping stones:
- Need: identifying the real red spot, in this case “Schedule pressure”
- Purpose: The initiative has to address the need. So let’s get clear on the purpose of the initiative.
- People: Who is involved? Who else needs to be involved? And who else? And how?
- Principles of cooperation: If we are moving towards the new normal, what are the new principles we need to work with to get us there?
- Concept: Start plugging away at prototypes. One of the overwhelming sentiments at this conference is that small wins, rapid prototypes and little shifts are the origin of the bigger changes. Conceptualizing and learning from that prototyping process gets us there.
- Structure: Build what works into the system. Tie it to relationships and infrastructure to create sustainability and shared ownership.
- Practice: Do it and learn from it and keep doing it and keep learning from it.
Darren is now describing how to operationalize the vision and they did it by physically
designing space that helped. This meant putting everyone who receives customer requests at the centre and fanning people out around them to physically embody the system. They got a big AV wall – inspired by the NASA command centre – and agreed to put stuff up there that was useful to everyone in the system. This is rapid harvesting, allowing the system to interact with the information it needs AND to see the impact of its work. They were playing with gaming concepts like each job is a dot and they have to get the job off the screen before it passes the magic time line. Everything was created live with engagement, rapid prototyping, and lots of shifting to see reality. They even have a TV running to see what comes through traditional news like the plan running off the runway in Chicago in 2005.
We used everything we could.
The first day – December 9, 2005. They were bring people together into the same room across many different groups, disciplines and silos. They did a lot of simulation and scenarios to pick up everything they could before going live and that the processes were as simple as possible. Lots of effort to get everyone to follow the processes – to the letter – then to notice what they learn so after a bit they could look back to these agreements to see what needs to shift. Anything they wanted changed they were to put on a sticky note and put on the way. They couldn’t take anything down until the change had been made or the reasons for not changing was communicated to everyone. They even changed the coffee pot… if you’re working 24/7 you need a good coffee pot.
This is how you learn about processes by tapping everyone’s wisdom and experience.
The truth of all of this is that Boeing didn’t have a lot of time. They had a lot of dedicated people who really wanted to make it work, and there were a lot of difficult times and situations. Darren is sharing that change can be personalized and that there are a lot of people at Boeing that don’t like him. People will find ways of sabotaging, undermining or opposing these kinds of efforts and the commitment to dedicate to change can be very hard. You need to develop a thick skin and mostly talk to people A LOT. If people have better ways of doing things, you have to understand and use them. If they don’t have better ways of doing things, they have to know that the channels are open and passion and responsibility is the operating system of learning. NOT talking to people will be the quickest way to make the tough experiences grind everything to a halt. So this kind of rapid action and change in a furiously turbulent and unpredictable environment with lots of moving pieces REQUIRES leaders to be almost a constant conversation with others listening skilfully, collaborating, finding new ways of working, rapid prototyping and making small changes.
[tags]stia2007[/tags]