Seeing Systems: The Power of Context. (Interview)

My interview with Dan Kennedy of NetSpeed Learning solutions is now up. The subject is the day-to-day costs of system blindness  - how we regularly fall into patterns of unnecessary personal stress, dysfunctional relationships, and diminished contributions to our systems. In the interview we also explore the productive possibilities for ourselves and our systems that come with system sight. One caution: The interview is broken down into segments according to topic. If you switch from one segment to the next, be sure to click off one  before switching to the next, otherwise you may be simulateneously listening to two different talks.

Is Evolution Going Anywhere? or Waiting for Homo Systemicus

When it comes to evolution, there is a choice. No, it's not between creationism (which virtually all serious scientists dismiss as wishful thinking) and evolution.  Yet there is a serious  debate among evolutionists with evidence marshaled on both sides. The issue is: Is evolution going any place- bigger, better, wiser - or is it a haphazard process in which whatever shows up as more adaptive  survives.I never knew there was an issue. What little I understood of evolution came largely from reading the marvelous works of Stephen Jay Gould, a proponent of the haphazard school. As far as I knew, there was no debate; haphazard was how it all happens; it's just by chance that we humans are here.

Now comes David Prindle's Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution in which Prindle grounds Gould's position not only in his research data but also in his democratic anti-elitism politics. Gould's position takes us humans down not just a peg or two but all the way down. There is nothing particularly special about us; had events gone just a bit differently I wouldn't be writing this and you would be here to read it.

Why do I care about this issue? Because, all data aside, I confess to my own version of wishful thinking  - that, somehow, evolution must be heading somewhere. Given the terribly stupid, blind, hurtful, and murderous things members of homo sapiens do to one another, this can't be the best there is.

I am casting my lot not exactly with, but in the vicinity of, Teilhard de Chardin who attempted to reconcile his scientific and Catholic sides with a view of evolution as moving toward greater spirituality, closer to God. My wishes are somewhat less ambitious. I am placing my hopes on the emergence and superior adaptive capacities of homo systemicus, whose members survive through their understanding of themselves as systems creatures, and their avoidance of the terrible costs of system blindness.

How best intentions show up in the Bottom world

There is an illuminating tale in the Financial Times of how our best intentions can be fundamentally misunderstood. The Top sends a message to the workers that they no longer need to come over to the canteen for their tea break, that they can take the break at their work areas. His intention is to save the workers the bother of coming to the canteen. The workers took his message to mean: No tea break; just drink you tea and continue working. The only way this Top learned about the confusion was by disguising himself as a worker. Short of that, we need to understand the contexts of people's lives and how our best intentions are likely to be received in those contexts. Front line workers are generally living in a Bottom context, that is, a world of Vulnerability in which the Tops are always doing things to them - changing healthcare plans, coming up with new initiatives, changing work requirements, shutting down operations; they're on the receiving end of decisions that affect their lives in major and minor ways. So even the best intention can be experienced as THEM DOING IT TO US AGAIN! The challenge is to get heard in the context, recognize how in that context messages can be understood, be very clear in the message, say it more than once, check to be sure that it has been understood. At a more general level do whatever you can to reduce that experience of vulnerability in the Bottom space.

The Organization Workshop: A Cross-Cultural Contribution to Capacity Building

Anne Litwin, Guest Contributor

I recently had a gratifying and deeply moving experience in bringing the Organization Workshop to a severely depressed and oppressed Southeast Asian country, which, for political reasons, needs to remain unnamed.

An American who has for years been living and working in that country experienced the Organization Workshop at a conference in the U.S. The workshop worked for her, but would it work in-country? The next year she brought along an in-country cohort to experience the workshop. She loved it despite the somewhat bizarre circumstance that in the workshop she was a customer representing a railroad company although, in her country, there are no railroads! Oh well.

The project then came to me because of other experiences I have had in adapting the workshop to non-U.S. contexts. The plan was first to conduct a workshop in country, and then do a training of trainer program. With some adjustments to the English words to make it easier for non-native English speakers to understand the concepts, and reworking the customer projects to fit the local context, the workshop was ready. The immediate impact of the workshop was astounding; as it was unfolding, participants were discovering ways to use the learning to enhance nutrition and health services.

    After a few days’ break I conducted the training of trainer program. This was immensely challenging for all of us as the trainers struggled to translate the workshop into the local language so that they could take it out to into the countryside to strengthen the organizational capacity at the local level!

    All in all, this was an amazing experience. Here’s what the client who started the process says about the impact:

"Thank you for bringing the Organization Workshop to us in Southeast Asia. You were the absolutely perfect person for this job. You were able to understand the different needs in our context and flex to the group.  And your style is so good here. The language you gave us has given us a very strong place to start. The results people are seeing in their organizations are great.
One organization that participated in the Organization Workshop reports significant positive changes in themselves as an organization – the way they work together, the empowerment of teams, middle integration, people meeting well without the director, and people doing things in a Door B way, and being very pleased about the results. That’s an exciting thing. Also, the director is recommending the workshop for other local organizations and, since he is quite connected, that should have a positive impact as well."

Anne Litwin & Associates www.annetitwin.com

The Organization Workshop and the Twentysomething Crowd

Susan Berg, Guest Contributor

Just last week my colleague Bill Wilson and I conducted four back-to-back Organization Workshops (OW) for a large defense contractor.  We’ve been doing this workshop for seven years as part of an annual leadership development program.  What’s noteworthy about this program is that the average age of the participants is about twenty-five.  Yup, I said twenty five.  We’ve seen about 1,000 of these twentysomethings over the last few years.

So what are these twentysomethings actually getting out of the OW at this tender young age?  And why develop them so early, when they have little to no management experience?  Can they really get this stuff?  Different worlds?  The meaning of power in the top-middle-bottom-customer spaces?

Well, the answer is yes and no.  Let me explain.  Let’s face it⎯at twenty-five you haven’t experienced a lot of ups and downs in organizational life.  But if you’ve been tapped for a program like this, chances are you have a lot of gumption.  And since people in their mid-twenties are in the “Warrior” phase of their lives⎯ you have a crew of people who are anxious to conquer the world and eager to learn.

And there’s no time to waste.  Businesses will be losing a lot of Boomer generation workers over the next ten years.  So if they are going to thrive, they need to develop this group of managers-to-be quickly.  This generation of twentysomethings will end up filling the gaps that Boomers leave in the workforce, so some of them will need to hurry up and get trained to step in quickly.

So what’s the YES side of what they get out of the program?  It is their willingness to jump in and engage, despite what little they know of organizational life.  They listen⎯hard⎯and there’s no sniping at the idea of simulating an organization.  They love learning this way.  In fact, sometimes they are willing to try out things that those of us who are “hardened” to the conditions of everyday life in organizations have just given up on.  For example, one group of tops last week, after a time-out of time (TOOT), realized they would be more successful by organizing cross-functional teams to work with each customer. 

Now, the NO side of this would be how easy it was for them to get side-tracked by non-mission critical demands from the bottoms.  They ended up tripping over themselves and getting distracted from their task to reorganize.  Overzealous youth?  Or typical Tops?  Hard to say.  But still the same pivotal lessons.

Probably being Top or MIddle is the toughest role for folks as early in their careers as these people are.  Most of them still feel like Bottoms. For twentysomethings, testing out their ability to focus on their power zone in an unfamiliar role⎯becomes a hotbed of discomfort⎯and opportunity.

But let’s not discount the fact that most of these twentysomethings have played sports or been involved in other community and team activities in their school years.  Some have already coached, so they have touched a variety of roles on a team.  And this helps them greatly as they choose how to respond to the conditions of the organization they have created in the OW.  Their team learning experiences pay off big here.

So if you’re wondering if the OW “works” with the younger crowd, the answer is indeed YES and NO.  But isn’t it the same for any age group?  When we’re older, we bring the bias of having been conditioned.  And when we’re younger, we bring the bias of inexperience.  And since the OW is all about exposing our biases, it seems to work either way.

We’ll keep you posted on our future experiences with OW and the Twentysomething Crowd.

Susan Berg and Bill Wilson, Power & Systems Senior Associates

For more help with the twentysomething crowd, check out Susan’s new book Choose on Purpose for Twentysomethings.

Familicide: The Ultimate Top Suck-Up

There are two approaches to how we handle our responsibilities as Tops whether in the family, the classroom, the team, the organization or the nation. In Approach A, our job is to be responsible for the system.  In Approach B, our job is to create a system that is responsible for itself. In Approach A, we suck up all responsibility to ourselves and away from other system members. In Approach B, we work at creating responsibility throughout the system including ourselves. Approach B encompasses A; Approach A does not encompass B.In these times of economic stress, there is an uptick in cases of familicide in which a father (usually) kills his wife and children and then himself. It is impossible to envision the depth of despair that leads to such action. In a fundamental sense, familicide is the ultimate in Approach A - Top Suck-up. The Top has taken on responsibility for the system (I have failed; I am ashamed), and, even more poignantly, he has taken on responsibility for the future of all family members; it is crystal clear to him that he is responsible for their futures. He has failed and he has no faith in their capacity to live through crisis, survive, and go on. Sometimes it takes the ultimate to shed light on the everyday. We regularly enter the Top world whether as new parents, new managers, or seasoned executives, and the powerful appeal of Approach A is always present with the unnecessary burden it places on us as we gradually disable other system members.

Crushed in the Middle

David B. Kellerman, top financial officer of Freddie Mac, hanged himself. This was a good man, committed, decent, hard-working. Maybe too decent, too good, too hard-working, too committed. He succumbed to the most intense middle crunch. He began working non-stop round the clock, sometimes pausing only to change clothes. He was caught between the competing pressures and priorities of regulators, investors, internal executives, lawmakers. Whatever action he took or planned to take might please some constituencies while sure to infuriate others. He told friends that it was impossible to appease everyone. Tragically, if that is the goal of a decent, humble man he is destined to fail.It is possible that there was no way to succeed in that crucible. Leaving was one option - suicide another form of leaving - was another. There is a familiar pattern that develops when one is in this middle crunch, and I don't presume to know if this was David Kellerman story, but I believe it is worth considering. The story goes something like this: When we are in the middle condition, trying to deal with conflicting needs, pressures, and priorities, the tendency is for us to slide in between others' issues and conflicts and make them our own. We become responsible for resolving their issues, and they hold us responsible for resolving their issues. We feel like we're a failure if we don't succeed, and they consider us a failure. It is easy for us in that middle condition to lose our independence of thought and action. All that matters is what other people want/demand. And our focus is on attempting to please them. The challenge in the middle place is first to understand that these are their issues, not ours. And further to understand that our job is not to please others but to do what we believe the system needs. We can take in all the inputs from others, all the time understanding that these are their issues, but ultimately it is our independent judgment that must prevail. Being in the middle is always a difficult condition to be in, and the more intense and conflictful the issues are the more difficult the condition. And the nicer we are and the more desirous we are of pleasing others, the more excruciating the condition and the more likely are we headed for failure.

When it comes to systemic knowledge, we enter the jungle of politics like naked babes. No one should ever enter organizational life without a deep understanding of middleness, how it can weaken us and diminish our contributions, and what it takes for us to withstand the pressure and do what we believe needs to be done.

Killer cults

The difficulty in calling one bunch of lunatics a cult is that it opens up one's own group to the same criticism. Today's New York Times describes the maniacally destructive religious cult, now embedded in the Israeli army, that kills Innocent Gazans because it fulfills their insane cultish beliefs. The essential message of this murderous cult is "We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land." Don't try to argue with these nutcases; they have their proof; it's right in the holy book. Thou shalt not kill...except of course when you should. They are not the only cultish nutcases; there are those Zionist Christians who in a fundamental sense are their allies. Their rock-solid belief - also backed up by the holy book - is that the Jews must conquer all of Palestine in order to fulfill biblical prophecy. Jews should not be too enamored with these allies since the end of this prophecy is an age old choice for Jews: convert or finito.The basic disease of all cults is their conviction that they know what is unknowable. Existence is a mystery that does not lend itself to simple-minded fables. Instead of these cockamamey belief systems that justify superiority, righteousness, oppression, and murder, cult members would do better to cast off their beliefs, live with the uncertainty of existence, and act on the basis of one simple principle: Do not do unto others what you would not have others do unto you. See where that takes you.

Rihanna, Chris, Love and Power

For those who are uninformed about American pop culture, Rihanna and Chris Brown are two young musical superstars - she 21, he 19. Recently Chris apparently severely battered Rihanna. Pictures and commentary have since flooded the internet with positions ranging from "She's nuts not to leave him" (they do appear to be back together) to "It probably was her fault." I'm less caught up in the debate than with a factoid that popped up in one article (sorry I've lost the reference) stating something to the order that it takes the average battered woman five assaults before she leaves the relationship. You have to wonder what's keeping her there, with explanations ranging from economic to emotional dependency.
My current obsession is unraveling the threads of power and love, lately the consciousness associated with each. The consciousness of power centers around difference and separateness. Power consciousness at the personal level is "I", at the territorial level it is "Mine," at the cultural level it is "US," the deep emotional connection with our religious, ethnic, national heritage (see Leading Systems, chapter 17, for more on US consciousness.) By contrast, Love consciousness is about connectedness. At the personal level it is "We," at the territorial it is "Our," and at the cultural level it is about "Oneness."
I suspect that in many battered relationships, we have the clash of power and love; he in his "I" she in her "We." He strikes out of his separateness, competitiveness, jealousy, and territoriality, and she experience that violence in the context of their fundamental connectedness. I am battered but we are still a "We."

Pay the AIG bonus...but not with our money

Andre Ross Sorkin in today's New York Times makes a case for honoring the AIG bonuses - his position being that honoring legal contracts is an essential foundation for enterprise; it would be chaotic if corporations, whether recipients of bailout packages or not, could simply choose to break a legal contract. Let's accept that. Still, the question is: Why would those bonuses be paid out of government stimulus money? AIG should pay its bonuses out of its pre-stimulus fund. Isn't that what it would have had to do if there had been no bailout? Pay the bonuses, but not with our money!

Sense and Stupidity

There has to come a time when one needs to stop being rational, intellectual, or even polite. For me, this is such a moment. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. With all their current tirades against "socialism," we are witnessing what has all the sense of a play put on by the residents of the lunatic asylum.Maybe it's the shock treatment. Something has selectively destroyed their memory if not their sanity. Remember their last play - Free Us Now! Wasn't it hilarious how they all dressed like Ronald Reagan and killed every regulator in sight. What a triumph. Of course, we, the audience, are now buried deep in that triumph.

A pause for sense. Unrestrained freedom has led us into the mess we are in. That is what unrestrained freedom inevitably will do. Unrestrained government would create an equal and opposite mess. That is the sad story of its history. These are two poles. Systems survive by negotiating their way between the two.  Neither pole  is or ought to be a final destination. Ideologues, in spite of all evidence, insist on making them destinations thereby cause great havoc to our systems and to us. Continuing to insist on these as final destinations makes them either stupid or venal or nuts.

There is no sign that the current administration is in favor of unrestrained government. Just take a look at who Obama's  economic advisors are; these are free marketeers of the first stripe. They have no taste for "socialism." Their job is to clean up the mess resulting from unrestrained freedom. 

Joshua Bolin of Augusta, Georgia has founded a new web site, Reagan, org. Prominently displayed is an oft-quoted  line from one of Reagan's speeches. Sure to draw great applause from the enemies of "socialism."

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

It may have been cute once, but there are millions of people across the globe who would be more than pleased to hear "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Like scraping dog poop off my shoe

Every so often I get a response like the one below to a blog  I had ironically titled Oh, Those Evil Jews. This one came this morning.

"Who needs the murderous greedy perverted zionist jews.
They should be eliminated from the face of the earth like the roaches they are."

My reflex response was to delete it, like scraping dog poop off the bottom of my shoe.  I immediately regretted it. This is too perfect to ignore. A pristine picture of Connection/Commonality Deficit. There's a lot of hate packed into two short sentences. When does this get to be a certifiable mental disorder? 

What if the underlying truth is: Despite our many differences, we are all more similar to one another than we are different? And what if the underlying truth is: Despite our separateness from one another, we are all inter-connected parts of the whole. That would be a reality too painful for some to accept.

If we're so similar, how can I be special, to whom can I be superior?

And if we're all connected, how can I destroy you?

The Real America

Last week I happened to be passing through Manteo, a small town on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, just as the town's annual Christmas Parade was unfolding. The mistress of ceremonies knew and, with her microphone on high, chatted with each and every parading group as it passed the reviewing stand. On and on they came: the grand marshal, the mayor, the girl scouts, the firemen and rescue squad, the boy scouts, a violin-playing group, a group of little people in hand-made costumes - crepe paper, aluminum foil, the high school band, the middle school trumpet players, floats from  one association after another. On some lawns there were the proudly defiant placards "Put Christ back into Christmas." This was Sarah Palin's "real America." I recognized how foreign that spectacle was to my piece of America. I live in Boston's South End. The only parade we know around here is the annual Gay Pride parade, a parade withs its own brand of unique costumes I suspect would not play well in Manteo. Still, there we have it, another piece of America. In those hours I spent in Manteo I experienced the rich diversity of America, so many different environments in which people can build lives suited to their needs, beliefs, and values. That is what creates our specialness; all of America in its rich diversity is the "real" America.The challenge for any system, whether it's a family, organization, community, or nation is to value and elaborate its differences while recognizing and valuing  commonality. Difference without commonality leads to negativity, mistrust, tension, and, in the extreme, warfare. Religious wars, ethnic wars, slavery and oppression are all based in conditions of difference without commonality. While commonality without difference creates pale, dreary, and impotent systems. There is a creative dynamism to a system that has room for both Manteo and the South End.

Who are these "others?"

The Jesuit & The Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man offers a likely fact along with what is for me an intriguing speculation. The likely fact: millions of years ago, two different  creatures  - with very different levels of consciousness yet from the same genus homo - strode the earth at the same time. Teilhard de Chardin's view of evolution was that, far from being hit or miss, it was heading somewhere, that the species was evolving to ever higher levels of consciousness. When I read the news these days, it is easy to believe that both points are true: that at this moment two similarly appearing creatures are walking the earth today; they look alike yet they have very different levels of consciousness. The soldier shoots a young man heading for the latrine, and as his mother screams over the bloody body. the soldier says to her, "Volia! Here is your gift." The holy man teaches the young that it is all right to murder innocents because through some twist of dementia they are not really innocent. These are the "others" who live among us but are not us. I hope that Teilhard de Chardin's vision was correct and that the time will come when these others with their primitive and murderous level of consciousness will be gone. And I hope it happens before they, in the name of God, take us with them.

FD: Footnote Deficit

In a recent talk, I once again mentioned the Peter Block gap, the fact that so many students in academic Organization Psychology and related programs have never heard of this man who just days ago was acknowledged by the Organization Development Network for his lifetime achievements. You would think that such recognition would get his name up on the academic screen. A graduate student approached me after the talk, assuring me that he did know Peter's work, but there was no way Peter's work - nor mine for that matter- could be cited in his research. It seems that Peter and I  suffer from FD - footnote deficit.
Maybe our work could be included in academic studies if it were accompanied by a footnote reading something like: "reflections from the field, as yet incompletely substantiated through rigorous research, yet having potential value."

If knowledge that can make a difference is our goal, then all of this seems pretty silly and unproductive.

The Socialists are coming! The Socialists are coming!

Beware  the Red Tide! The socialists are coming and they threaten to destroy the great American entrepreneurial spirit, taking us down the road to communism: Spreading the wealth! It's hard to know whether the latest Red Scare grows out of political cynicism, ideological rigidity, or just plain "real American" ignorance. Basic systems literacy - of which there is too little - informs us that individuation run amok (otherwise known as unrestrained free market) leads to the economic conditions we are currently facing, and that systems save themselves by balancing individuation with integration. It happened following the 1929 stock market crash and it is happening today. Ideologues don't know how to handle this. Facing disaster, it's hard to make the case for more freedom. I am no economist, but here is what I wrote in Leading Systems back in 1999.

"...the United states prides itself on being an individuated system - extolling the virtues of individualism, freedom, liberty, free markets, and so forth - and it demonizes integrated systems (communism, socialism) for their suppression of freedom. Yet the United States, in order to avoid potential collapse through rioting, class and racial warfare, and revolution, has a history of incorporating many elements of the integrating culture: labor laws, Social Security, health and safety regulations, minimum wage, civil rights legislation, graduated income tax. Although one can make the case that the stability of the individuated system depends on its being balanced by these elements...this does not stop the champions of individuation from continuing to demean [integration] as socialists, communists, threats to the vitality of the system - and to blame [integration] for whatever weaknesses the individuated system has."

                    Leading Systems, page 150

Ideologues can't just stand there; they have to say something no matter how ill-informed. So the current problem is not individuation run amok, it is greed. Individuation is greed, and when greed is working there's no problem. When we invest in the stock market, it's not out of beneficence, it's out of greed. We want our money to grow.

Ideologues just can't stand there, they must be in favor of something. So swallow your ideology and allow the government to bail you out. Just a little. It's that extra bailout that's dangerous, heading straight down the road to communism. It's solid "Joe the Plumber economics," and if we're relying on Joe the Plumber economics, you know those ideologues or cynical politicians or dumbbells or whoever they are are hanging by a thread.

As usual, what bothers me more than the convoluted explanations they are spinning, is that so many of my fellow Americans are swallowing the bait. Joe the Plumber, if only you had listened to these free marketeers and abandoned Social Security in favor of some privatized stock market investments.

How come they all know these problems?

How come they all know these problems? That's what was puzzling - and disturbing - the graduate student. Here's the setting. He's assisting me at a talk I'm giving at the Organization Development Network annual meeting. There are seventy plus people in the room. Mostly consultant from a variety of organizations world wide. As part of the introduction, I mention how, as an anthropologist in Power Lab after Power, I began to notice regular patterns occurring at the Top, in the Middle, and among the Bottoms, even though the people were randomly assigned to their positions. So the interaction with the audience went something like this.
I said "We found Tops regularly falling into territoriality." And then I asked the audience, "Have you ever seen that?" And a moan of painful recognition spreads across the the room.
Then I said "We found Middles regularly becoming alienated from one another, non-groups. Have you ever seen that?" Another room-wide moan of painful recognition.
Then I said, "And we found  Bottoms regularly falling into We/Them relationship and, internally, into the conforming pressures of groupthink." Another moan.
I am so immersed in these predictable phenomena  that I forget how stunning it can be when one first sees these regularities and grasps the fundamental notion that these relationship issues may feel very personal - it's about you and me and our personal characteristics - or specific to our organization or situation, when in fact they are neither personal nor specific. This is what shakes up the graduate student. Something else is going on here.  There is an opening, an opportunity to move from system blindness to system sight. And, maybe, some day down the road there will be fewer moans of painful recognition.

Charisma can be deadly

Today's news story reveals how smitten Washington insiders are with Sarah Palin, the U.S. Vice Presidential candidate who has positioned herself as the quintessential outsider. Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio voice, calls her a "babe." According to the news commentator, Bill Kristol and other conservative writers act as if they have a crush on her. Watching crowd reactions, it is clear that Sarah Palin has charisma, and that's what bothers me. Charismatic leaders can be deadly. They have the ability to inflate us with  just how special we are, and our specialness comes at the expense of those less special. Palin has fired up crowds with her reference to "real" Americans. And who in that crowd doesn't appreciate being recognized as a "real" American. Of course, if some are the "real" American, then who are the others who call themselves American but, obviously, must be something else? Not just something else, but something lesser: liberals, wine sippers, socialists. Not the real deal. The charismatic generates pride, but also anger. Anger at those others. And so you hear ugliness in the crowd - "Hang 'em." I don't know what to make of  Sarah Palin, how conscious she is of her demagoguery or how deep it runs. She may just be a tiny blip on an ugly history of demagogues who roused people with their specialness. There were the real Germans and the "others." Whites who were special and the "others." Straights who are special and the "others." Serbs who were special and the "others." Terrible things we "real" people can do to the less real ones. What troubles me most about this is not the demagogues; it is the rest of us. The fact that we can so easily fall for the bait. Are our lives so empty that we need to be puffed up by our membership in the "real." I dream of the day when some demagogue will try to fill us with visions of our greatness as opposed to those "others," and our response will be to turn our backs and walk away.

Eliteness, Greed, and Ethics

Don't you  hate it when situations are so complex that it's hard to  just go out and find the bad guys and  hang them.Let's be clear, I'm not having that trouble with Lehman Brothers, not as I learn how executives were awarded 20 million dollar bonuses (special payments) while the company was pleading for a government rescue. So the picture is clear: they grab their bags of big money, head off to one of several mansions while leaving the rest of us - including generations to come - to be taxed (dollars and dollars and dollars) for their failures. Talk about Wall Street and Main Street. Could the excesses of the Czars or Louis XVIth have been more outrageous!  No, I'm stuck this time. I'm missing the complexity that soothes as it invigorates. No sad stories about the high cost of high living, or soaring prep school tuitions, or the difficulties of finding a reliable nanny, or the outrageous berthing fees for one's yacht, not to mention  huge mortgages to be paid on mega-mansions. None of this would soften my heart. This is just the Elite, in their bubble, doing what the Elite do as the ship is sinking: taking care of themselves.  And my guess is, at the time these special payment decisions were being made, this just seemed like the right and natural thing to do. Don't we all agree? Yes we all agree.  Please, no more talk about the responsibility culture. After every scandal there is conversation about ethics and what are our business and law schools doing about teaching ethics. It might be more effective to teach about Eliteness and Ethics, and the special vulnerabilities and responsibilities associated with living in an Elite bubble.

 

Ubuntu: From Basketball to the Boardroom

Ubuntu is a fascinating concept of African origin.  Doc Rivers describes it this way: "A person is a person through another person. I can't be all I can be unless you are all you can be." Doc Rivers is coach of the NBA champion Boston Celtics. Ubuntu became the basis of the Celtics' winning strategy. Three superstars, each accustomed to being the single high-scoring superstar, instead chose to become part of a team in which  players were committed to one another's success, and in that process, they brought out the best in themselves. On first blush, ubuntu appears to be about unselfishness; it is that, but it is also selfish. I am enhanced through my commitment to you.In our individualistic society, ubuntu would be a huge transformation.  How would this work with Top Executives who are locked in turf warfare, or with Middle Manager peers who are alienated from one another? Those questions are explored in Act III, scene 2 of Seeing Systems. We don't call it organizational ubuntu, but we just might.

Is it Greed, or the Natural Fallout of Unrestrained Freedom?

Financial institutions are collapsing all around us; the stock markets around the world are plummeting, but, in the U.S., the Republican candidate for president continues to maintain that the underlying fundamentals are strong. So what's the problem? Greed, he says. We are threatened "because of the greed by some based in Wall Street." This is the position of unrelenting ideologues. Greed is what drives free markets; it is what produces wealth. When it is working well it is not called greed, it is called freedom, it is what comes when big bad government unshackles us. When unshackled freedom results in disaster - as it inevitably does - the ideologue never admits that freedom is the problem, that keeping the government off our backs is precisely what brought us to this point. Two pages from Seeing Systems should clear this matter up once and forever. "Amebocytes and Slugs: The Politics of Individuation and Integration," pp.187-188.

Russian mother and German Jewish father.

The story indicated that "he had a Russian mother and a German Jewish father." Notice that the mother is simply "Russian." I suspect that she is Christian Russian or Orthodox Russian, but evidently there's no need to identify her religion; as if her religion carries no useful information, whereas the tag "Jewish" does. For me this sheds light on dominance and otherness. If we dominants are Christian, then "Christian" becomes invisible; it is simply the way things are; whereas anything other than Christian stands out as something unusual, foreign, different, and possibly wrong, and as such deserving to be noticed as being explanatory in some way. I suspect that if we were not caught up in our dominance we would realize that "Christian" informs us as much as "Jewish." Chapter 60 in the second edition of Seeing Systems sheds much light on this matter of dominance and otherness.

If it's your own property, is it stealing?

Graduates of a Power Lab from the mid-70s may have some sympathy for O.J. Simpson - accused of stealing sports memorabilia. Simpson, one-time superstar athlete, claims he was only trying to retrieve his own belongings. Is it stealing to attempt to recover your own property? (Being masked and armed may weaken the case somewhat.) Here's the Power Lab story. Immigrants (Bottoms) in the Power Lab give up their luggage and personal belongings upon entering the society. It's not unusual that at some point a group of Immigrants set about retrieving their property. In this program a group did find the luggage and were in the process of reclaiming it when the Conference Center director intervened by calling the local police to report a theft. So here's the scene. The police arrive and they, the director, and the Immigrants are standing around the luggage. The director, pointing to the Immigrants, says: "These people stole this luggage!" A policeman asks: "Whose luggage is this." The Immigrants say that the luggage is theirs. A policeman asks the Director, "Is that true?" The director, after an awkward moment, indicates that yes, in a way, the luggage is theirs. Who knows what the police were thinking at that moment; what we do know is that, without a further word, they turned around, got back in their patrol car, and drove off. I suspect that O.J. Simpson's story will have a different ending.

Nelson Mandela's Lessons for Combating CCD

How to eliminate CCD, Connection/Commonality Deficit? In the presence of difference, we need to focus on commonality, the greater the difference the more compelling the need for commonality.  A few lessons from Nelson Mandela, as described in John Carlin's Playing the Enemy. (1) When in jail, Mandela learned the Afrikaner language so that he could talk to his jailers in their language. (2) Jailer/prisoner is a powerful difference, yet Mandela insisted on acting as equal to his jailers, expecting the same respect as he would give them. (3) When ANC leaders chose to replace the hated Afrikaner national anthem Die Stem (a martial tune celebrating  heroic events involving the crushing of black resistance) with Nkosi Sikele (a soulful expression of black people yearning to be free), Mandela disagreed and instead proposed that South Africa should have two national anthems played one after the other at all official ceremonies - Die Stem and Nkosi Sikele. (4) And then there is the radio show in which Mandela is taking calls from listeners. Eddy von Maltitz, a leader of one of the right-wing oppositional groups, is goaded by his followers to call in and unload on Mandela. Which he does for three uninterrupted minutes ending with the threat "This country will be embroiled in a bloodbath if you carry on walking with Communist thugs." How does Mandela respond? He ignores the difference and works to build commonality. "Well, Eddy," he says, "I regard you as a worthy South African and I have no doubt that if we were to sit down and exchange views I will come closer to you and you will come closer to me. Let's talk, Eddie." The response thoroughly discombobulated Eddy; he thanked Mandela and hung up. And this was the beginning of his transformation from confrontation to reconciliation.
Mandela's actions do not seem like "natural" ways of responding to the "other." Which should make us wonder about the virtues of "natural."

Difference in and of itself is not a problem; it only becomes a problem when it is not balanced by connection and commonality.

Will all the bad people please stand up

I wonder if there is any country whose members would say "We are a bad people; we do evil things." I suspect that, almost universally, across the globe, we all believe we stand for what is good, righteous, just.  But if the whole world is good, then goodness loses its meaning. Beliefs in our goodness  warm our hearts while blinding us to what we do. Seeing the discrepancy between who we believe we are and what we do can be painful. This comes at me as I listen to the U.S. Democratic convention while reading George Packer's article about Burma in the August 25 edition of the New Yorker. In the convention, speaker after speaker reminds us of how good we are. We eat that up. We love that about ourselves. Didn't the US invade Iraq to liberate an oppressed people from a murderous tyrant? That would have been good. Freedom is good. Democracy is good. On the other hand, Invasion for oil, for national interest, for reordering the Middle East? Practical maybe, but not good as in good people. Then there is Burma. First class tyrants, oppressors, murderers, pure greed, oppressed people yearning to be free, a beloved leader locked in house arrest. If ever there was a scenario calling for the dramatic entrance of the deliverers of goodness, justice, righteousness, and democracy, Burma is it. But then it's clear: it's not about goodness, is it?

Hashish, Binge Drinking: No Thanks, I'm Good

What is powerful, illuminating, and most of all aesthetically pleasing about systems concepts - when you've got them right that is - is that they function at all levels of systems from the individual (maybe even below) to the galaxy. Take individuation and integration as cases in point. You can talk about groups or organizations or nations or ideologies in terms of how much they favor individuation or integration. Free Markets and Communism tied us up for quite a while and continues to underlie our economic debates.  These concepts also describe us as  individuals: We are individuators or integrators, separators or connectors. Some of are low grade on these dimensions, others are high test. This is not about good guys versus bad guys; we are both. I am an off the scale Individuator, like Groucho Marx I would never join a group that would have me. I say this as  mere description, not out of pride, for being such a rigid unyielding Individuator has undoubtedly cost me and my organizations much in terms of lost connections,  lost opportunities to collaborate, and having less of an impact than, with a touch more of integration, I might have had. I just do not connect easily. That's the down side. The upside? Years ago, and I mean many years ago, I was at a Cambridge party - at the time heart of the New Age - and a chap offered me some hashish. Really good, he said. No thanks, I said. I'm good. He looked at me astonished. Okay. Your loss.  I'm good. It wasn't out of any moralist position, more knee-jerk Individuator. If hashish is the cool inside thing then I'm out. That phrase sticks with me now. That's the individuator's motto: I'm good. I don't need you or your group or what's cool. I'm good.  As an individuator I can get very judgmental of Integrators. Teenagers can be the worst. What are you wearing today? I don't know, what are you wearing? I say: Who cares? Go into your closet and drag out what you would really really love to wear today, put it on and strut your individuator stuff. Today's article in the Boston Globe is about binge drinking at our state college. It's all about the group. What are you drinking? I don't know, what are you drinking? If you're drinking yourself into oblivion, then please wait for me. Integrators are nice; they get along, they create community, they make things happen collectively. Still, it wouldn't hurt if they learned every once in a while to find the freedom in saying "No thanks, I'm good."

The Hidden Role of Radicals in the South African Transformation

I get this funny feeling as I'm reading John Carlin's Playing the Enemy. The book is essentially about the role rugby played in uniting black South Africans and white Afrikaners. Carlin describes Nelson Mandela's remarkable achievement in transforming a game initially hated by blacks as a symbol of their brutish Boer enemies into something like a national sport. But that is not what was missing for me.There are scenes in which, while incidents of brutal oppression are going, Mandela is being courted by the Afrikaner government: he is removed from prison, ensconced in an official's fairly luxurious home, given respectable clothes to wear, being able to entertain dinner guests. The author gives  the impression that all of this comes about essentially through Mandela's skills in ingratiating himself to others and generally "working the system," and it is clear that Mandela is an expert in this with lessons for all of us. And it is clear that the government knows that change must happen; there are world-wide protests against apartheid, crippling economic boycotts, world-wide communism is in collapse, the Berlin wall is coming down. What struck me as missing was much consideration given to the Pan Africanist Party and their slogan: One settler, one bullet. A fairly predictable dynamic in revolutionary groups is the split between the "hards" and the "softs." This is the same tension that develops regularly around strikes. Worker Hards and Softs become increasingly polarized, increasingly rigid in their positions, and one-time friends become enemies. Management and governments clearly prefer to work with the Softs, but their motivation to cooperate is heightened by fear of the Hards. When the powers that be are doing their deals with the Softs they don't like or want to admit the role Hards have played in bringing this reconciliation about. I'm no expert in South African affairs and I'm not proposing bullets for settlers, but I do wonder if the Hards had a bigger role in this transformation. And, if so, I wonder why that role isn't a bigger part of the history. Truth is: I don't wonder about that last part at all.

Fighting CCD with...Rugby?

Homogenization is the key to overcoming CCD - connection/commonality deficit. When two groups are completely alien to one another, the challenge is to find and elaborate their commonality.  This is the challenge that Nelson Mandela faced when in 1994 he became president of South Africa. The South Africa he was leading was emerging out of 30-plus years of oppressive apartheid. Apartheid (apartness) was the embodiment of CCD: South African blacks were deemed to be an entity apart from their white Afrikaner overlords, and so, given a solid case of CCD, it followed that: marriage between blacks and whites was prohibited, desirable jobs were listed as "whites" only, blacks were required to carry passbooks with fingerprint and other identification, blacks could vote in homelands but not in the country that controlled the homelands; blacks needed passbooks to enter South Africa from their homelands; simply protesting these and other apartheid laws was punishable by fines, imprisonment, and whipping. When organized protests did arise, they were put down savagely as in the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960.

One of the cultural features that sharply divided blacks and whites was rugby. According to John Carlin in Playing the Enemy, blacks, if they thought of it at all, considered rugby "the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish alien people." So what does Mandela do? Ignore Rugby, condemn it, criminalize it? Uh uh. He embraces it! He agrees to host the 1995 rugby world cup games in South Africa. He sets out to transform black South Africans into Springbok (the South African team) fans. He becomes the Springbok's leading fan.As he embraces the Springboks and rugby, the Springboks set out to learn Nkosi Sikele Africa, one of South Africa's national anthems.

This is powerful stuff. Mandela is brilliant in his commitment to homogenization in the face of a history of massive oppressive differentiation. His goals is not revenge or winning but creating a nation for all, differentiated and homogenized.

It is one thing to admire Mandela's brilliance,  his heart, and his commitment to South Africa; it is another to consider the lesson for the rest of us. Is there something about the "enemy" that we can embrace, not as a phony transparent gesture, but truly embrace?

From the Holocaust to Counting Medals: Cheaply Earned Power

Today's feature in Britannica Online: The holocaust story in which six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by Nazis and their all too willing accomplices for what? For being Jewish, unacceptably different. Other highlight of the day: This is the anniversary of the day in 1968 when Soviet tanks crushed the Czech reform government. For what? For daring to be independent. Today's story out of South Ossetia:  Ossetes "purifying" their villages by murdering Georgian neighbors. Ossetia also yearning to be free and independent and pure. We will never find peace with one another until we come to grips with the seductive power of our differentiations - the depth and strength and meaning we find in being different and separate. I am not simply little old me; I am GERMAN, OSSETIAN, GEORGIAN, SUNNI, RUSSIAN, AMERICAN, JEW... with all the power and emotion I draw from that. Which, by the way, is  power earned on the cheap; I have done nothing to earn it, simply having been born in this particular nest. So here's an exercise you might try. Visualize yourself stripped of all these identifications in which you take pride. Who are you without these?

I look in this morning's paper to see how many Olympic medals the US has won? Come on, Barry, what is this to you? You can't even do ten push-ups.

Who is Peter Block? Who is Barry Oshry for that Matter?

CCD - Connection/Commonality Deficit - comes in many forms ranging from the unspeakably horrendous - slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing - to the simply puzzling. A few weeks ago I was talking with a student deep into her doctorate work in organizational psychology.  During the conversation I mentioned Peter Block only to  be met by a look of incomprehension. Never heard of him. This struck me as bizarre; Peter's books have sold in the multiple hundreds of thousands and have been translated in several languages. One book - Flawless Consulting - has been recognized by the Organization Development Network as the most influential book for Organization Development Specialists over the past 40 years. Peter's awards have been numerous and the workshops he has offered through Designed Learning have influenced the lives of thousands. O.K., so maybe this was a small gap in her education. Ten days later I had the opportunity to test an emerging hypothesis with a second student also engaged in a doctoral program in organizational psychology.  Same result, no recognition.  It's likely that both students have their lists of researchers whose names are totally unfamiliar to me and, possibly, also to Peter. I may be drawing too sharp a picture, but other evidence also indicates one field - Organization - with two nests, feathered independently of one another. There are the Academics doing academic things in academia, and there are the what?...the Populars?... doing their writing, and training, and consulting as best they can without much concern for its solid, theoretical, research-based, academic grounding.

I have my own dog in this fight. I am nested among the Populars, yet I also feel like I belong in the nest of the Academics. The Human Systems framework presented in Seeing Systems and Leading Systems may be the best existing theoretical work on organization life. It meets all the criteria of theory: describes, predicts, offers more comprehensive diagnoses and intervention strategies than other theories.  The problem is - what with  tales of earthworms and slugs, poetry,  he/she dialogues,  and talking diagrams  - it just doesn't  look academic.

I suppose I could try to write differently, like I could also try to be taller. On the other hand: Loosen up, Academics! Pay attention,not all academics needs to be academic.