“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” – Unknown

Over the past month or so Stephen Billing, a consultant from New Zealand whose work and writing I follow, has written quite extensively about the futility of “shared values”. What he has had to say has sparked quite a bit of discussion and debate. You can read the original posts here and follow the comments by clicking the links at the end of each one.

As I understand it Stephen is saying that the pursuit of “shared values” is futile because it obscures the fact that most change arises out of conflicting ideas and perceptions and ignores or disguises the messy uncertainty of taking the next step together that is the reality for most leaders and managers.

Another take on this would be to argue that the creation of “shared” value or vision statements and the like are attempts to control what happens through the creation of a single-logic, single-voice story about what is good and what the future ought to be like.

Why is it that we have become so passionate and certain that we need to talk about “shared” values, “shared” vision, alignment and the like? What is it that we are clinging to? What does this way of thinking enable? What does it constrain?

This is stuff in organisational life that we pretty much take for granted as part of the leadership and management landscape. And yet when I get into a straightforward discussion with people about these kinds of things, almost inevitably they begin to talk about how difficult these ideals are to actually achieve. Why is there such a gap between the ideal and the reality, I wonder?

One reason, I think, is that we often think and talk about values and vision in particular, as if they are “objects” that exist independently of us. Lets take a couple of examples that are pretty fashionable at the moment – happiness and workplace productivity. One could be described as a value and the other as a vision. But which is which? Do such a things exist independently of the ongoing process of relating and responding between people in a particular context? Are there such things as happiness or workplace productivity floating about somewhere if only we could grab them?

Clearly the answer is no … but, so what?

I think the “so what” relates to two important aspects of how we operate as we work together.
1.    What we habitually take for granted and therefore what we miss as a result.
2.    How we think we can change things for the better.
Let me try and illustrate this rather set out a theory.

Recently I have been doing some bits and pieces of work that are set within the context of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) process. For those of you who don’t live in Australia the COAG process has arisen out of the fact that we have State governments and a Federal governments with constitutionally defined roles. On a number of key issues: education, health and climate change for example, the COAG process is an attempt to create more collaborative, “joined up” approaches across all levels of government. To this end there are now a number of National partnership Agreements in place in which the States and Territories and the Federal Government have agreed how they will work together.

My work is with people who have responsibility for ensuring that the work that has been agreed to is actually done. What they have discovered very quickly, of course, is that while everyone can sign up to a generalised vision about climate change or educational reform (even ones that establish quite specific targets) it is a vastly different thing to agree what specifically will be done and who might be best placed to do it.

What is quite noticeable to me is that where people or groups are operating from the assumption that, in order to succeed, someone needs to “control” the process, they don’t notice the opportunities that exist to just get going on something and see what happens. As people try to define precisely what needs to be done and why, they miss the opportunities for experimentation and improvisation.

This is a big process and what I find exciting is what’s happening that isn’t what I have just described. The felt need to control exists alongside a whole lot of other stuff where people are beginning to recognise that what groups of people find  “valuable” and the assumptions they habitually operate with are highly contextual. I am discovering more and more people who are beginning to work in different ways, for different reasons, in different contexts – accepting that people’s views of the vision or goal may not be the same, but that they are close enough to enable co-operation. It works!

But the demands on individual and group attentiveness and the capacity for noticing what’s new and unusual in conversations and the stories people are telling is extraordinarily high. Why? Because it is out of noticing the sometimes small things and weak signals that don’t fit the pattern – or in not over-reacting to the strong signals and seeing them merely as resistance to be overcome – that opportunities for small. localised changes in the patterns of thinking and doing emerge.

Eventually, if enough of this happens, a new, bigger pattern emerges too.

On Patterns

“To understand is to perceive patterns”

Isaiah Berlin

“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”

Edward de Bono

“Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.”

Margaret Mead (1901-1978)

“Your self image is your pattern!. Every thought has an activity visualized. Every activity belongs to a pattern. You identify with your pattern or thought. Your patterns leads your life.”

J. G. Gallimore

“The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action,”

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)

“Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?”

Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991)

“The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez