Supporting public sector leaders and teams
Leading
Leading from the “radical centre”.
Sep 6th
“The highest ideals on earth are realised when leaders strive to secure them through close attention to reality. Lofty idealism without pragmatism is worthless. What is pragmatism without ideals? At best it is management, but not leadership.”
Noel Pearson, 2010 John Button Oration.
In his 2010 John Button Oration on Friday evening , Noel Pearson joined other commentators in identifying a failure by the Labor Party in Australia to “renew its purpose” after the lose of the 2001 election. He sees the failure not as one in which the party is unable to show that it can manage the economy and ensure the continuing financial well-being of Australians but one in which talk of social justice has ceased to have any meaning or guiding power in the development and articulation of policy. He argued that social justice could and should be a real concept for any party that “… seeks to actively work to make a better society …” but that this can only happen if social justice is properly understood.
To make his point he then talked extensively about his concept of leadership. Firstly he made a distinction between structural leadership and natural leadership. Structural leadership is dependent, he suggested, on formal structures, be they political, organisational, cultural, religious or economic, that mandate authority, power and influence. Natural leadership, on the other hand, is simply the informal recognition of the power, inspiration and influence of self determination. He argues that there are many more natural leaders than structural leaders. I’m not so sure … but I’ll come back to this later.
This is very similar to view to that proposed by Ron Heifetz who argued in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers that leadership and authority are not the same thing. The important point being, I think, that it should not be assumed that simply because someone is in a position that is regarded as “having” authority that they will also exercise “leadership”. But neither does it exclude the possibility.
The point Pearson is making takes this a little further. He went on to refer to a pyramid metaphor of leadership with idealism on the one side and realism on the other. For him the apex of leadership is where the two sides meet. This is a place he calls the “radical centre”, that is, a point at which idealism and realism meet. What strikes me and what isn’t clear in the extract from the Oration published in The Australian, is just how tricky a place this is when viewed from the perspective of the person or group who seek to exercise leadership (in the idealistic self-determination sense) but not at the risk of achieving little or nothing.
Which brings me back to the question of whether there are more or less “natural” leaders. If I take a non-organisational view then it seems to me that structural leaders abound. Everyday each of us encounters people who by virtue of their role in relation to us and to others are deemed, or deem themselves, to have some form of authority or power, at least in the particular circumstance. These shifting power dynamics are integral to every relationship. What is often missing is the expectation that you or I or anyone else will, when we find ourselves adopting these identities in which we assume some “structural authority”, seek to find the “radical centre” – that unique balance among the competing forces that make aspiration and practical action a possibility.
Finding this “radical centre of leadership” whether it be in the public policy arena or in less grand contexts, would seem to me to involve the kind of mindfulness that Ellen Langer has been researching for the past three decades. This form of mindfulness consists of:
* Openness to novelty
* Alertness to distinctions
* Sensitivity to different contexts
* Implicit, if not explicit, awareness of differing perspectives
* Orientation to the present.
If we can be mindful in this kind of way, whatever we believe we have learned and much of what we take to be certain will remain conditional. In this state we will be much more likely to be able to hold the delicate balance between visions and ideals and their realisation through practical, engaged action.
Let me leave you with a quote from Peter Sutton’s book, The Politics of Suffering, winner of the recently awarded John Button Prize for 2010.
One of the costs of an era of social policy that has been dominated by cultural relativism, the rights agenda and the redistribution of power, has been the displacement of care as the primary determinant of special helping measures for citizens in trouble.
Leadership, complexity and change
Jan 12th
Image by Mrs eNil via Flickr
[Insert your professional field] “ … has developed a specialised discourse to allow individuals within the profession to communicate effectively about all matters associated with the design and implementation of [insert the things you do]. Yet have we locked ourselves into a self-perpetuating set of values and practices that make it difficult to move thinking forward? Have we positioned ourselves so strongly within the rhetoric of the profession that it is difficult to introduce new ideas, or indeed, think of ‘other ways of doing things’?
Our profession, with its own codes of practice, its own discourse and its own theoretical perspectives, has built itself into an institution that has taken on a life of its own.”
Marilyn Fleer (2003)
“For the structure of human exchanges, there are precise foundations to be discovered in the institutions we establish between ourselves and others; institutions which implicate us in one another’s activity in such a way that, what we have done together in the past, commits us to going on in a certain way in the future. … The members of an institution need not necessarily have been its originators; they may be second, third, fourth, etc. generation members having ‘inherited’ the institutions from their forebears. And this is an important point, for although there may be an intentional structure to institutional activities, practitioners of institutional forms need have no awareness at all of the reasons for its structure – for them, it is just ‘the-way-things-are-done’. The reasons for the institution having one form rather than another are buried in its history. ”
John Shotter (quoted in Fleer, 2003)
Marilyn Fleer’s words were written in 2003 (download a copy of the article here) in relation to early childhood education practices, but as I read them I was struck by how they could apply to many fields of endeavour. From my perspective they certainly apply powerfully to the activities of leading, managing and organising.
A significant focus for me over the past few years has been to explore some of the voices that sit at the boundaries of conventional thinking about organisational practices. Some of what I have taken from all this as being particularly useful in shaping both my thinking and practice, relates to complexity and the role of conversation, story and narrative in sustaining collaborative action.
There are some situations that are so complex that predicting and or controlling the outcomes of the actions that you take, either as an individual, a group or even globally, is difficult if not impossible. However it seems to me that there is more than one form of this complexity. One I call “natural” complexity – the kind you find in living systems in the natural world eg; ant colonies, local ecosystems, weather patterns etc. Natural complexity operates through “rules” that may evolve over time but do not do so based on the intentional and conscious intervention of the agents or actors in the system. The other I call “participative” complexity – the kind that involves human beings as engaged, intentional participants eg; teams, organisational cultures, villages, communities etc. Participative complexity operates through complex social processes of human interaction, eg; embodied responses and emotion, conversation, story and narrative as well as the development of conceptual frameworks and socially shared views of the world. These processes form and sustain and at the same time are themselves formed by the multitude of local interactions that make up day to day relating and responding. It is in this complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship that continuity and the possibility of change arise Whether it is continuity or change depends largely on how people both engage with and respond to each other.
These forms of complexity are present, to varying degrees, in almost all circumstances where public and social policy changes and initiatives are being attempted and so its easy to see them as the same. The danger of doing so is that we keep trying to make “rules” to govern how participative complexity might work, forgetting that the “participants“ are not mindless and instinctive rule followers! Perhaps we should describe ourselves as pattern makers and breakers! Our engagement with each other is open to be ”patterned“ in many different ways.
All this seems to me to have major implications for the way in which we think about and enact leading, managing and organising. Here are some things it seems to me that it is worth considering:
- Focusing less on predicting and controlling situations and circumstances that are high in “participative complexity”.
- Giving up on the illusion that we “design” organisations, policies, changes and strategies from the outside and developing more sophisticated ways of finding the way forward as engaged and committed participants.
- Rethinking and refining the extent and the way in which leaders and managers engage with people day-to-day so that these engagements become more open-ended, iterative and improvisational.
- Opening up organisational conversations to a wider range of voices and adopting approaches that enable apparently divergent views to co-exist, interact and compete for longer.
- Developing and nurturing ways of engaging that paradoxically combine influence, curiosity, uncertainty and responsiveness.
- Recognising that every engagement with others involves a power dynamic and being alert to the possibility of exercising any form of power in ways that suppress others and their voices.
- Opening up organisational conversations to the unspoken knowledge that already exists within the localised communities of common interest and practice while recognising that the moment you try to codify such knowledge you alter it irrepairably.
- Valuing expressions of doubt and uncertainty as potential indicators of useful perspectives and possible ways forward.
- Doing more rapid-cycle experimenting or prototyping when it is clear that the next steps let alone the “solutions” to complex social and public policy issues and challenges are far from predictable and linear.
- Focusing less on the measurement of long-term outcomes and targets and more on developing better ways of gathering information about the immediate impacts of change efforts so as to be better able to detect emerging patterns and trends and to be more sensitive to weak but important signals.
- Getting over our discomfort with qualitative (anecdotal) evidence.
- Recognising that the frameworks, models and “best practices” that we can value so highly are tools that we can use in the everyday interacts about how to get things done. Like all tools they were constructed to suit certain circumstances and to be used in certain ways. It might pat us to use them with less certainty outside the circumstance for which they were designed.
At this point I can imagine some of you suggesting that this is all well and good and asking how it could possibly be a practical approach for a leader or manager in an hierarchically patterned organisation. Is any of this at all practical or is it just another form of idealism?
I believe it is practical because in many ways I think what I have roughly described in a kind of manifesto for some different ways of working is often what actually happens. For example, I know that as a leader and manager I worked improvisationally and experimentally a good deal more than I preferred to admit. It’s just that because it doesn’t fit the dominant models leaders and managers rarely talk about what they do in this way.
BUT … I don’t for one moment think it’s easy. Working in this way, even tentatively, calls upon leaders and managers to do what Debra Meyerson described in her book that was originally called Tempered Radicals and has recently been re-issued with the title Rocking the Boat: How to Effect Change Without Making Trouble
Image by stuartpilbrow via Flickr
“As people act on identities and values that are different from the majority culture they disrupt and implicitly challenge normal ways of acting and thinking by making visible alternatives. In this way, small acts of self-expression can open the door to new practices and expectations.
Debra Meyerson
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Perhaps a “problem-solving” approach isn’t enough!
Oct 20th
- Image by michael.heiss via Flickr
Over the past few weeks I have been working on a relatively simple client project – helping a group of people refine their plan.
It is simple in one respect. In the end we will produce a written plan – one they can use both to guide their work and to come back to and reassess when they can see that things have shifted. In another respect, however, it is much more complex.
Because this group has been brought together relatively recently and because the work they are being asked to do is set in a context that is emerging, i.e. constantly changing in response to each thing that happens, many of the conversations we have had haven’t had much to do with defining the problems to be solved and the tasks to be completed. They have had a great deal more to do with questions of identity. No-one has asked it explicitly and directly but it seems to me that two questions they are exploring are:
- Who and what is it that people expect us to be and to do?
- How does that fit with our sense of what this situation seems to be calling for?
Sitting with questions like this can be really difficult. Here’s how UK consultant Johnnie Moore puts it:
… there is so much temptation to take big, decisive action, and take it quickly. It’s easy, for patience and sitting with ambiguity to be denounced as indecisive.
Well known US consultant and author, Peter Block has a similar view:
… we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs. We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now. What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing. We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.
I am not arguing here against problem-solving per se. When the issues we face are known and understood and the ways to work on them are known or at least knowable, then all is fine. The difficulties we are trying to overcome then, are difficulties of the intellect. Trying to figure out what to do based on known principles and good data.
It is when we are faced with difficulties that are more about emerging situations and particular circumstances that the conventional approaches seem to be less than helpful. What is most frequently a feature of these situations and circumstances, at least for people who lead, manage and organise, is what I will call the participative complexity of them. By this I mean that what happens is dependent on how the people who are participating in the situation act and respond to what’s going on and to each other. As a consequence, in these kinds of situations cause and effect is never linear or predictable. At best we can anticipate a range of possibilities – but even that is constrained by our own view of things.
As I reflect on the work we have done so far I am struck by how much we have begun to identify two different types of situation and to “plan” what will come next accordingly. In some instances the desired “outcome” is clear and a project plan will be very useful (provided we don’t kid ourselves that everything will go exactly to plan). In other circumstances a much more exploratory/experimental approach seems to be called for.
So my questions for this week are:
- To what extent are the difficulties you face in your work “solvable” by the application of known principles and good data (even if you don’t have it yet!)?
- To what extent do the difficulties you face in your work need to be approached “from within” – because you are a participant as much as anyone else – and because you won’t know what will happen until it happens?
- Whichever kind of difficulty you face, are you using methods or disciples that are useful in the circumstances?
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Social poetics: leading and managing from within the experience of joint action.
Sep 10th
Image via Wikipedia
“ What people most need to hear is inside them. It’s their own inner voice, based on their own experience, their own perception.”
Joanna Macy
“As we struggle with the tensions and interplay of my voice/your voice, my sense/your sense, what I am struck by/what you are struck by, infinite possibilities emerge.”
Ann Cunliffe
“For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
T. S. Eliot, East Coker, 1944
Last week my 11 year old daughter asked me, quite seriously, what I do for a job. I tried to explain by saying that I help people have meetings about things that are important to their work. When I said this she looked at me with a look that pretty much said, “… and you call that a job!”
Recently I started “coaching” a new client who said to me that she wasn’t interested in “waffly” conversations. What she wanted was to work out what needed to be done, develop a plan and then get on with doing it. After two sessions in which I think to the outside observer we just talked about what was going on in the particular situation she finds herself, she sent me an email just to confirm how helpful she was finding our work together. We have yet to make a plan, but we seem to have little difficulty knowing where we are headed and if we are making progress.
I have also begun noticing two things as I “facilitate” groups of people meeting and talking about things that are important to their work. Firstly, the situations and contexts in which people find themselves seem to me to be increasingly complex, paradoxical and unclear. The work is becoming much more about making some sense of where the group finds themselves and working out some next steps in a particular direction, than it is about making plans that will direct what people will do. Secondly, I have been experimenting with an increasing range of open-ended and “creative” approaches. People seem to thrive on them and make them their own in really interesting ways. Increasingly my “preparation” focuses much more on how the structure of the event itself will open enough space/time for conversation and dialogue and on how to get conversations started – not on where the conversations might end up. Mostly we end up with “raw material” to stimulate further conversation.
All this has led me to reflect quite a bit about the sense I have that what I do, along with a number of my colleagues, doesn’t really fit under the conventional, everday understandings of coaching, facilitation or consulting.
In the last few days I have been reading John Shotter’s latest paper (available free online until end of September if you register) which he begins by describing an exchange between a consultant and a senior manager who has been given the task, in a large corporation, of building a new capability in the area of sales and marketing. He draws attention particularly to the situation in which this manager finds herself which he describes as being required to “… bring into existence, within the already existing organization, a new institutional structure, with a wholly different character to it than any already in existence.” He points out that while a degree of planning will be required, and will be helpful in describing what the overall task will look like prospectively, it is not likely to be particularly helpful in getting a sense of and assessing the specific openings, real possibilities and actual resources available as she takes steps, in joint action with others, along the way.
Shotter proposes that what might be more useful in this process of “finding our way about” and “going on together” (two phrases he uses a lot) is an unusual (and yet strangely familiar) collection of methods he and his colleague Arlene Katz have termed “social poetics”. Here is a partial list of those “methods”.
- Paying attention to the “arresting moments” – the things that strike us as unusual or out of the ordinary in the everyday flow of relating and responding – thereby noticing and opening up the possibilities for novelty and change.
- Bringing words back to their everyday use and thereby bring ourselves back into the everyday situation from which our talk emerges rather than always operating from the theoretical and conceptual
- Using questions to call to mind and pay closer attention to the detailed use of words and their relationship to the concrete features and activities in the situation in the moment of their use rather than retrospectively.
- The continued use of particular examples as an antidote to our tendency to think and talk conceptually and cognitively and therefore “separate” our thinking and talking from our experience.
- The use of images, pictures and metaphors to help us open up new ways of talking and seeing and to sensitise us to alternative distinctions and relations that we may not otherwise see.
- Using comparisons to draw out other possible ways of talking, alternative perspectives and other options for action.
What struck me as I read through them, and particularly as I read Shotter’s discussion of the exchange between the consultant and the manager, was how much these ways of responding in coaching, facilitation and consulting contexts have become part of how I, and others I work with, operate. I’m not sure that this helps me to answer my daughter’s question, but it does help me to be clearer about what often comes to me rather intuitively. It also strikes me that these are often the things that leaders and managers do, or pick up on, in conversations that help people grasp more clearly where they are in a particular landscape of possibilities and action and open up new ways of thinking and therefore new avenues to “go on together”.
With this in mind I have begun two new projects:
- I will be researching and writing more about these methods with a view to articulating them more effectively and to making the connections with much of the things we already do. You can follow online or sign up for my weekly email.
- I will also be working on ways that I can engage leaders and managers in learning and exploring how these ways of working can contribute to their effectiveness in doing the work they need to do. If you are interested in hearing more about this or getting involved send me a message via the comments on this page.