Question:

The literature speaks about “change” being the destabilizing event- external - and that you can’t change “it” but the “transition” one goes through is what a lot of leaders don’t know how to leverage…which you refer as to the fall and the cauldron of change.  Do you think it’s important to make the distinction? 

Answer:

I think that when you lump all the Destabilizing Events into a category called “change” you lose the ability to discern where the Adaptive Strain is really coming from - is it internal or external, a response or an opportunity, etc.  When you think of change as a process that has distinct phases and components that you can examine, then you begin to see where and how each of them will (or might) impact the system. 

 

Think about GM right now - if each of the divisions, teams, employees and leaders thought about what they need to do to achieve a new and different future and each understood the DSE that were impacting them, not the whole organization, then they could respond to the local adaptive strain with a change cycle that would be right for their situation.  Over time, as the whole system evolved, each unique change cycle resolving strain and moving to a new status quo, the whole company would arrive at a place that no one could predict and yet would be aligned internally and externally - a living system. 

 

What most leaders don’t realize, or want to acknowledge, is that the collective can self-organize without them.  Remember that the core of the mechanistic mental model is that there is, and has to be, a designer.  But with no designer and no one in charge coral reefs have maintained an elaborate and highly complex system linked to the environment and evolving with  all the other species in the local area.  With no one in charge a vast number of neurons self-organize into a brain, mind, consciousness, and self.  When leaders can trust that, then they can leverage change. 

Response:

Thanks Carol, 

Yesterday a dear friend sent me a link to an important video that describes some significant Destabilizing Events that we are all facing today.  After watching the video, called HOME, I wondered: What can I do with this beyond watching it?

The purpose of this missive is to give you a chance to use what we are learning.  How much of the lessons of change are you able to apply to what is happening in the world today?

This will take about two hours - think of it as time for personal reflection and deepening your understanding of Adaptive Change.  First, watch the video (90 minutes):

  http://www.youtube.com/homeproject

Consider these questions for your reflection on what you just saw:

• What is your personal Current Status Quo regarding the topics covered in the movie?

• What is your personal Image of the Future?

• How does your Vision create Destabilizing Events that require you to change?

• How is the Vision described in the movie creating global Adaptive Strain that requires change on a global level?

• How big is the space of change opened by this Adaptive Strain?  You may want to think about how this space is segmented: business, government, people, leaders, everyone, academics, rock stars…

• What interdependencies, connections, and relationships did you notice in the film?  Watch it again if you missed these.

• How many different Ecospheres can you pick out and how are they connected to one large global system we call Life?

• What Personal Strain does this tension create in you?

• How are you responding to that strain: what are you doing, how are you feeling, what are you thinking?

• What must we conserve during this urgent global change cycle?

• What Destabilizing Events suggested in the film are playing out in your life today?

• What opportunities do they generate? Are these well represented in your Vision and Image of the Future?

• How ready are you to be, or become, changed over the next five years?  What feelings can you accept and what feeling will you avoid or ignore?

• Have you entered the Fall yet?  Or are just still looking over the edge?

• With respect to this Adaptive Strain, what must you personally end and let go of? 

• How about your work - what must change there as well?

• What aspects of the change cycle described in the film are you  resisting, denying, and defending?

• What composes your personal Rudder - your Passion, Purpose, and Principles? Are you using these to guide your change journey?

• What else do you need to learn about, think about, and begin doing to make this Adaptive Change cycle successful?

• What do you care enough about to commit to doing something today?

Adaptive Change is a change model based on the induction of organizational strain by dynamic internal and external forces.  It is based on a worldview that human organizations and systems operate more like our bodies or a prairie ecosystem than a well-designed machine.  The model is derived from a multidisciplinary approach to change and lives at the intersection of business, biology, physics, psychology, and ecology.  Many thought leaders have contributed to this new story of change.  Margaret Wheatley, Fritjof Capra, and Peter Senge have described its leadership and processes from a systems perspective.  Daniel Quinn, Paul Davies, and the late Gregory Bateson have brought a cultural and cosmological perspective.  Paul Hawken and Janine Benyus contribute an ecological and human ecological perspective.  Kevin Kelly is one of the leading technocrats. Ray Anderson and Dee Hock have learned by doing - using their businesses Interface and VISA.  

Adaptive Change is the result of the interdependencies within your organization (internally generated change) or between your organization and its Ecosphere (externally generated change). 

The Status Quo

Organizations spend a significant amount of time in a state we call the Status Quo.  During the hay-day of the Industrial Age, the Status Quo predominated, giving all of us a feeling of stability and a false sense of security. Change was an event, not a condition of life, and we rarely noticed all the small adjustments that constitute life’s dynamic equilibrium and “business as usual”.  Like the thermostat in your home or the hormones in your body, these fluctuations define what is a normal range of change for your company and industry.  They become the background upon which Adaptive Change is played out. 

Organizations and their Ecospheres are web-like structures, like the familiar spider web, which capture and transmit change at any place on the web across the entire system.  While we think of ourselves and our businesses as in a steady state, and often experience it as stable, the Status Quo is actually a network of interdependencies that fluctuate with the social-commercial-ecological environment that makes up the organizational Ecosphere; a uber-system composed of all the “players” in your commercial landscape - political, economic, social, technological, industry, and environmental.   This global web of human organizations (companies) and systems (financial, regulatory, trade) co-creates the dynamic forces that externally and internally impact your organization.  

Adaptive Strain, caused by Destabilizing Events, interrupts the existing Status Quo and disrupts the organization in such a way that Adaptive Change is required (Figure 1).  Depending on your relationship with the organization or department undergoing change you will, more or less, experience the Adaptive Strain that is induced by their Adaptive Change cycle.

Figure 1. Induction of Adaptive Strain.

Organizational Adaptive Strain

The dynamic web of interacting forces within each organization is co-created by the culture, norms, communities, teams, divisions, management, and individuals within them.  These systemic “forces” create the internal milieu of the organization as it responds to itself and to changes in the Ecosphere. Goals, strategic plans, launch of a new product, reorganization, or a change in leadership are all internally generated Destabilizing Events that create the Vision of a different future.  We “imagine” this future and “plan” to achieve it, but usually fail to realize that doing so requires change.  Ignoring the requirement for change while striving to become something different amplifies Adaptive Strain within the organization.   This happens when we resist or deny the Adaptive Change required to resolve the organizational strain. We feel, but may not recognize, Adaptive Strain when goals and strategies become hard to achieve or create “problems” when we try to implement them.  As a result, we remain stuck in our current Status Quo (Figure 2).

Adaptive Change is a new way of thinking about organizations and resolving tensions that emerge when complex systems interact within a volatile environment, a process that I call Adaptive Strain.  The Adaptive Change model integrates systems thinking, organizational theory, and the new sciences to better understand change from a self-organizating perspective and provides a tool and a road map for future experiments.  Co-creation, imagination, and emergence are the language of the new paradigm.  Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, and World Cafe are the proven processes of large scale change and self-organizing systems. 

How to change, I find, is more important than what to change.  Our most pressing challenges in organizational change efforts involved how to:

Embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, and our lack of control - all three, signals of self-organizing systems in operation

Trust the collective to think and act in ways that will successfully navigate the Adaptive Change - knowing that this happens in “mysterious” ways and without accurate prediction

Resist the temptation to fall back to linear, cause-and-effect problem-solving - especially under the guise of systems, biomimmetic, or holistic actions

These challenges of Adaptive Change require new ways of thinking and becoming aware of our environment (or Ecosphere) coupled with collaboration that is based in conversation and commitment.  When we overcome these challenges our organizations become open to:

Vision - the outgrowth of conversations that generate a shared future

Diversity - the creativity, power, and collective intelligence of community

Leadership - building relationships of trust, commitment, and collaboration 

But not everything is different at the end of a change cycle. What is conserved in this new paradigm, the gifts of the past, are as crucial to success as the innovations that change brings:

Community built on purpose, principles, and values.

 

Systems of human creativity connected to sustainable planetary resources.

 

Knowledge that can be infinitely recombined and utilized for new challenges.

 

 When you recognize Adaptive Strain, and the initiating forces of change, you can begin to design an Adaptive Change cycle in response; this intentional change cycle I call Metamorphic Change.  Together they generate resilience and create the Adaptive Organization.  This is our journey - understanding and imagining the 21st Century Organization.

We are entering an unprecedented time of change and opportunity.  It is a time of great uncertainty and challenge; new language describes our situation as complex and chaordic, new ways of thinking emerge as our mental models fail and add to, rather than improve, the problems we face. As recently described by Sumeet Banerji, CEO of Booze and Company, “Industry structure is fundamentally [being] reshaped by [today’s] discontinuity.”  This level of discontinuity challenges even the most sophisticated manager and leader. Taking the fullest advantage of this moment in history we have the opportunity to move beyond our outdated tools, designed to impact linear, mechanistic organizational structures.  We have the opportunity to design a set of dynamic tools that engage organizations and leaders in a new conversation - one that allows them to create a new paradigm for business.

Because it feels like a major “paradigm shift”, let me start the conversation by revisiting Thomas Kuhn.  Why a new paradigm?  “A paradigm is what the members of a [business] community…share.  Conversely, it is their possession of a common paradigm that constitutes a [business] community.”  Thomas Kuhn defines paradigm as the “disciplinary matrix” that arises when a community of practitioners in “full communication” pursue shared goals. To engage business in the work of changing their paradigm (their image, ideas, their “symbolic generalizations” and “concrete problem solutions”) can only be accomplished in collaboration.  The system of business is too big, too complex, and too focused on competition and profit to be done alone or one company at a time.

“If we don’t make collaboration a priority - by learning new behaviors and galvanizing the resources to work together - we risk losing our last chance to positively affect the future” - Margaret Wheatley

I believe the heart of this collaboration is to imagine a new future, structure, and design for organizations of business and commerce that mimics nature and elevates human contribution to the level of a community.  From there we can create tools to work within the system on the system, encouraging self-organization, learning, and a new paradigm.  There is in place a body of work that can stand as a foundation for this effort.  Our greatest challenge is to leave the past behind and work from within the emerging worldview.  From there we can learn our way forward and begin to re-invent our organizations, businesses, and the systems of commerce. 

“As long as human beings have inhabited the Planet Earth, we have existed in a self-organizing world.  Quite probably the majority are simply unconscious of this fact, and their adjustment to the forces of self-organization are equally unconscious.  Others are unwilling Wave Riders, who take deep umbrage at the uncontrollable forces at play, seeking their defeat and claiming to be in change. …  There have also been more than a few who truly understood the situation, if only intuitively, and learned to ride the waves to their benefit and to the benefit of their fellow human beings.” - Harrison Owen

 

In this emerging worldview, organizations become more than machines, workers more than cogs in a wheel, and leaders more than “Great Men”.  Like Sumeet Banerji, I believe the current level of discontinuity will produce a redesign of the organizations of business and commerce.  I also believe that those working inside the current organizational structure are ”doing” as fast as they can in order to keep up with global volatility.  That leaves the “thinking” to be done by others.  We are those others; the “midwives” of a worldview big enough replace the Industrial Revolution and hosts of a conversation that will produce a new paradigm of self-organizing organizations - Organizations as Organisms. 

I have seen the solution, and we are it.

Moving deeper towards understanding the driving forces of our time is an article from McKinsey, written by business guru Gary Hamel.

Modern management was invented a century ago to solve one overriding problem: how to organize work at scale with ever-increasing productivity.  This problem is still important, but organizations now confront a new set of challenges, which cannot be solved with Industrial Age management practices and structures. …Today, the overriding problem for every organization is how to change, deeply and continually, and at an accelerating pace.  – Gary Hamel  26 Feb 2009, Three forces that will transform management, McKinsey Publication

Dr. Hamel spotlights three forces that drive the new model of management, and they will surprise no one :

First, a set of new and inescapable challenges lie outside the performance of management as usual.  Although this would be a natural introduction to change, change is never again addressed.

Second, the internet creates collaborative tools without the need for bureaucratic (read organizational) infrastructure. To me this is the most provocative part of the article.  Hamel believes that the creation of organizational hierarchies will occur around natural leaders rather than beneath individuals in a formal hierarchical structure.  This fits in nicely with the idea of organizational structure becoming more web-like; self-organizing around a central idea, issue, challenge, or leader.  He goes even further, and states that this will effectively  ”democratize the workplace and give everyone the chance to help create strategy and offer advice on critical issues.”  Sounds dramatic, but isn’t this what self-organizing systems are all about??? 

Third, he points out that the Millennials are leveling the playing field of ideas; elevating idea value over hierarchical point of view, letting information flow freely rather than be used to wield power, and  preferring measurement of worth through contribution not credentialing. 

The take home, from Hamel’s perspective?

Just as organizations spent huge amounts of energy over the past decade reinventing their operating models – their logistics, supply chains, and customer support – they must now commit themselves to reengineering their management models.

This leaves us with the need for a new model of management, the need for a new paradigm for business…and there is  “just exactly enough time”!!  What ever are we to do….

My first thought is that we need to begin to understand the processes of self-organizing systems.  In addition, we need to understand how these fit into a change model that works.  Starting with a change model that works, consider the Adaptive Change model which is based on: the intersection of Mother Nature (Biomimetic), myth (Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey), and transformational change (via psychologist Virginia Satir).

The process of Adaptive Change contains two components: the psychological trajectory of transformational change ( in blue) and the procedural or structural trajectory of transactional change (in brown).  For both, destabilizing internal and/or external events generate adaptive strain and move the system away from the existing status quo, introducing a period of turbulence and disconnection from the environment.  This creates a container, or cauldron, in which the system can self-organize producing innovation ideas that generate psychological/ideological (in blue) and structural/functional (in brown) change.  New patterns of action, behavior, and thought emerge as the system moves toward a future vision and reconnects with the larger ecosphere.

If this is What we must do to change…How is the next question!!  Stay tuned…

On Tuesday, March 7th, Thomas Friedman wrote a most interesting column. 

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.” 

 Thomas Friedman is succinctly pointing out that we are living in a time of paradigm shift - a new worldview is emerging around us, created by us.  As we learn to view the events of our lives and work from within this new worldview, the organizations and systems of society will be transformed.  Transformation is never a comfortable place, the caterpillar has to die and be digested before the butterfly can be created, but it is not a random process, there is order to the chaos and imagination in the void.

The discontinuity produced by a paradigm shift is created because we are unaware of our paradigms until they are challenged.  They are the air around us, life sustaining and invisible.  Our mental models of the world, the unquestioned assumptions of our paradigm, are what author Daniel Quinn calls “Mother Culture” - the givens of life.  And, as he points out: “No paradigm is ever able to imagine the next one.”  This is due to the paradigm’s “disciplinary matrix,” described by Thomas Kuhn as, the background assumptions that arise when a community of practitioners in “full communication” pursue shared goals.  What paradigm of business are we living in and what paradigm of business are we shifting to? 

The Paradigm: Business as an elegant machine

Many great thinkers have already commented on the current paradigm, so I’ll be brief.  At its inception it was a huge paradigm shift: the concept that untrained, unskilled workers could be taught a single, simple task and then brought together in an appropriately designed structure to produce a complicated product like a car, a drug, a computer, or a spaceship.  The core of this idea was the independenceof the workers: I don’t need to know your task, only my own.  As long as our tasks are aligned and efficient, the job of a manager or owner, productivity can be increased and the system performs well.  When you don’t do your job or I don’t do mine, the system breaks down and requires repair: re-tooling, re-engineering,  or re-design.  The mechanistic paradigm of business is just that, the engineering of work flow, reduction of process to the level of the smallest task, organizational functions that operate like an assembly line, and structure that is hierarchical and based on command and control.  This paradigm worked well up until the 1990’s and produced the greatest period of technological growth to date.  That technological success sowed the seeds of the new emerging paradigm.  Because we were so successful we must re-invent our “disciplinary matrix” and move on.

The Paradigm Shift: Business as a Self-organizing System

Complexity Theory states that initial conditions are critical to the evolution of any complex system.  The initial conditions that drove the evolution of the old paradigm of business included:

• independent craftsmen making a single product, usually from start to finish
• an “apprenticeship” training process that began early in life and took years to master
• a marketplace that belonged to the wealthy upper-class and a  growing merchant class (established by the industrial revolution)
• a world of seemingly limitless natural resources
• cheap labor from the farms and urban centers

What are the initial conditions of the new paradigm, the forces that will drive its evolution?  To name a few:

• interdependent human organizations and systems
• global connectivity that includes communication, travel, work, and education
• network hubs, such as large urban centers, multinational corporations, and institutions of finance and commerce (G7, WTO, IMF, and computer-linked stock exchanges)
• a well educated, highly connected, socially engaged workforce
• a marketplace dependent upon consumerism in developed countries
• limited, and dwindling, natural resources

We are back to Thomas Friedman’s comments.  He closes with the following quote by Paul Gilding, an Australian environmental business expert:

In the meantime, says Gilding, take notes: “When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’ ” Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.

As we ring in the New Year, most of us have written, or at least verbalized, our goals for 2009.  We always fully intend to achieve these goals – to bring beneficial change into our life – which is the reason we set them in the first place.  Yet, without the explicit acknowledgement that goals are a form of change, all of our best intentions turn quickly into wishes.

Those of us in business have grown accustomed to writing SMART Goals – Specific, Measurable, Action Oriented, Realistic, and Timely.  Beginning this year, I am advocating DUMB Goals, goals that can be “accomplished” not just “set”; they are:

Destabilizing: We will never accomplish the goals we set if we remain stuck in our current thinking or status quo.  This is why SMART goals often fail – they don’t provide enough destabilization for our established patterns of behavior to dissolve and reorganize into something new.  It is the disconnection from our current way of doing things (aka our paradigm, mental models, beliefs, business as usual attitude, habits, etc) that allows us to achieve our goals.

Uncomfortable: As we disconnect from the current status quo and recognize the destabilizing events that drive our need for goals, life becomes temporarily uncomfortable, even yucky!  We suddenly recognize that we can no longer “be” the same and expect something different to occur – like our goals being accomplished.  We must also transform ourselves.  This is the emotional part of change – when we simultaneously feel the rug pulled out from under us and glimpse the opportunities that come alive during free-fall.  Managing our emotions and inner dialogue (the stories we tell ourselves) are critical to attaining our vision of the future and accomplishing our goals.  Ready to bungee-jump?

Mindboggling: Destabilization and disconnection have suddenly turned into “out of control” and “where do I begin”, and our “old friend” status quo beckons almost irresistibly.  Like a caterpillar in its cocoon we wallow around in our own personal nutrient-soup waiting for inspiration and, like the butterfly, it comes from imagination.  Taking one step at a time we begin to build our future out of our past, finding hidden resources until, suddenly, change changes and we find ourselves teetering on the brink of Goal Accomplishment.

½ Baked:  Why did we think this was hard?  We should have been doing this long ago! By the way, bring on those stretch goals, and let’s add this, tweak that, nothing is too big a challenge.  Now pieces begin falling into place almost automatically, sometimes so fast we can hardly keep up.  And, while the old status quo is no longer tempting or appealing, our ideas can send us off chasing unrelated dreams and desires.  This is when navigating from transformational ideas is critical, when learning our way forward brings goal accomplishment.

Finally, you reach that future you desire, goal accomplished!! “I only wish I had known it would be this easy at the beginning”, you shout to the world!! 

You could have – join me on a journey that morphs Goal-Setting into Goal Accomplishment by learning the change process that nature uses – Adaptive Change and Metamorphic (Intentional) Change.  Over the next couple of months I will be your personal Sherpa showing how smart DUMB Goals can be. 

What have we learned from the 2008 Obama campaign that we can apply to organizational life?  If nothing else - that Communication is Strategy and that Strategy is Change!  How did they do it - enlist a diverse and vast group of largely first time “political activists” and stay afloat during one of the most turbulent campaigns in history?

First - Make it Grassroots

Enlisting the hearts and minds of everyone in your organization ensures cohesive movement of the whole.  The Obama base was engaged by emails from the top (Plouffe, Michelle and Barack Obama, and Joe Biden) at the same time that a national-regional-local management structure coordinated their actions.  This architectural structure allowed leaders to stage their strategy step-by-step; global announcements of the next milestone preceeding regional and local tactics addressing the successful completion of each stage.

Second - Get The Vision Right

“Yes We Can” says it all and says nothing - positive, inclusive, dare I say it, empowering and yet unstructured enough to deal with whatever comes up in the moment.  The vision of winning the election created the space for a myriad of tactics and an emergent strategic plan.  Just like corporations are bound to their market environments, the Obama campaign was bound to the McCain strategy and tactics, the national environment (social, political, economic) the international milieu (which changed dramatically over the course of 2008), and the campaign’s emerging culture and structure (which was being created and managed simultaneously as it grew and attracted new members).  The vision was the touchstone of both why and what was being done by leaders and being asked of participants.

Third - Lead from the Pit of Change

Transformational Change (see Metamorphic Change at www.CairnConsultants.com) contains a “fall” into a creative space where chaos produces opportunity.  Leaders who can live in this space, harnessing chaos, constantly generate transformational movements toward an ever evolving “new status quo”.  In so doing they pull the organization into the future like the wind pulls a sailboat forward.  Changes in the environment (both internal and external) keep the chaordic “pit of change” alive with possibility and potential - spawning transformational steps that can be applied unevenly across the organization.  This creates a mosaic pattern that looks and acts like a complex adaptive system - an ecosystem, the human body, a living organization.  The Obama campaign led from this chaordic space by maintaining a steady course, even while course correcting, asking for only what each individual could give (time and money) and widely celebrating each small steps toward success.

Fourth - Stay Connected

The last email I received from the Obama campaign was the evening of November 4th.  Just prior to his victory speech, Barack sent one last email - a combination of congratulations for all the hard work and thank you for your trust and belief in “Yes We Can”.  It gave credit to the base and suggested that a new vision would be coming; that again Barack and his team would call on us to take up the work that remained to be done.  If this vision is anything like the last one, answering “the call” - committing to a relationship with the Obama team - will be easy.  In organizations too, visions and change follow one another in a cyclic fashion - creating and maintaining a network of momentum, commitment, and relationship, a sea of potential that is always pulling the organization forward.

Two weeks after the election an email from David Plouffe suggests the “New Status Quo”:

The inauguration is just 62 days away, and as President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden prepare to take office, they’ll need your support more than ever.

You’ve built an organization in your community and across the country that will continue to work for change — whether it’s by building grassroots support for legislation, backing state and local candidates, or sharing organizing techniques to effect change in your neighborhood.

Your hard work built this movement. Now it’s up to you to decide how we move forward.

Yes We Can!!!