In this interview of me by Madelyn Blair, we discuss both the need for dialogue and how to do it. And we try a little experiment with Madelyn and I in dialogue.
In this interview of me by Madelyn Blair, we discuss both the need for dialogue and how to do it. And we try a little experiment with Madelyn and I in dialogue.
Posted at 01:31 PM in Asking Effective Questions | Permalink | Comments (0)
One of the things that gets us into trouble when we talk to people with whom we disagree, whether that disagreement is about politics or problems we’re facing at work, is that we come to such meetings with firm ideas about a solution. Thus, we often think that our task is to convince others of what we know to be right. That’s all pretty understandable.
But there‘s another way to think about our ideas – the dialogue way.
Being engaged in a dialogue still requires us to be prepared – to think through what would be the best answer – to have done our homework, so to speak. But then when we arrive at a meeting, the dialogue way is to hold that idea lightly.
What does it mean to hold an idea lightly? When I think of holding something lightly I think of holding a fragile Christmas ornament in my hand, or of how a butterfly lands on a delicate flower, barely bending it’s stem. Holding an idea lightly acknowledges that all that we know is subject to change as we open ourselves to the knowledge and wisdom of others. Bohm says, “We have to have enough faith in our worldview to work from it, but not that much faith that we think it’s the final answer.”
It’s really quite wonderful that the ideas we hold can change -that we’re not stuck with the ideas we had as teenagers or what we thought before we became parents or we learned the hundred and one lesson that life teaches us. That our ideas can change is what human development is all about. Without that possibility, we’d all still be in the Stone Age.
When Bohm asks us to “hold an idea lightly” he is acknowledging that we enter any dialogue with ideas in our mind – whether those are facts we have accumulated from our schooling or understandings life has taught us. He does not say we should not have such ideas, only that when those ideas are challenged in dialogue, we are willing to view them as “possibilities” rather than “truth.” That’s not easy because we get very attached to our ideas. And when someone challenges them we feel like they're challenging who we are. But we need to remember that we are not our ideas! Ideas are the necessary, temporary, constructions our minds make. They are often very clever, certainly very useful - that is, until we encounter a better idea. We should all feel very grateful that we are not our ideas because that would close off the possibility of learning and changing.
Posted at 06:20 PM in How We Learn in Organizations , Sharing Tacit Knowledge | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Bohm, dialogue, human development
Teams are an important place to begin to change an organization’s culture. However, team culture is just the start; what is needed is for the culture of the whole organization to move from being transactional to being more relational to enable all organizational members to care for the whole. While it is not possible for everyone in a large organization to have the kind of warmth and caring that is possible to develop between team members, it is possible for individual team members to intentionally build close relationships with individuals in other parts of the organization.
In hierarchical organizations, there is a tendency to leave the care of the whole to those at the top. But as organizations become flatter and have a greater need to quickly and continuously change, caring for the whole necessarily becomes the responsibility of everyone in the organization. To be responsible for something, you have to have knowledge of it. Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos provides the knowledge that enables that responsibility.
There is little doubt that our organizations have become fragmented and that fragmentation is the source of many organizational problems. As the world and thus organizational issues have become more complex through technology, specialization, multiple geographies, languages, and differences in values and cultures, there is a need to both grasp and make use of the divergent perspectives that exist across an organization. As we saw with SEEQC, conversation is the mechanism that combines divergent knowledge into understandable forms for organizational members. Although any understanding necessarily resides in each individual member’s mind, it is through the webs of conversation that intersect functions and departments that members create a similar representation in their minds. The denser the web of conversation, the more connected the organization and, thus, the less siloed an organization becomes.
Webs of conversation allow individual contributors to take action while holding in their minds a representation of joint actions across the system. Asch (1952) describes this phenomenon, “There are group actions that are possible only when each participant has a representation that includes the actions of others and their relations. The respective actions converge relevantly, assist and supplement each other only when the joint situation is represented in each and when the representations are structurally similar. Only when these conditions are given can individuals subordinate themselves to the requirements of joint action. These representations and the actions that they initiate/bring group facts into existence and produce the phenomenal solidity of group process” (p. 251-252).
Weick (1993) describes the shared understanding among high-performing crews on carrier decks. On those decks, jet aircraft take off and land on a rolling platform no larger than a football field and without the benefit of radar, which could reveal their position to an enemy. Weick explains, “When they interrelated their separate activities, they did so heedfully, taking special care to enact their actions as contributions to a system rather than as simply a task in their autonomous individual jobs. Their heedful interrelating also was reflected in the care they directed toward accurate representation of other players and their contributions. And heedful interrelating was evident in the care they directed toward subordinating their idiosyncratic intentions to the effective functioning of the system” (P 193).
One of the early thinkers about the problems caused by silos was Russel Ackoff (1995), a Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, from 1964-1986. His speech, “How Not to Build the Best Automobile in the World,” has become a classic example of why conversations need to occur across different parts of an organization.
Suppose you’re building the best automobile in the world. You would go about it by first bringing each of all the car models in the world to one place. You would then hire the best automobile engineers and mechanics in the world and ask them to determine which of the cars has the best engine. If the engineers say that the Rolls-Royce has the best engine, you would pick the Rolls-Royce engine for your car. Similarly, you would ask your engineers to find out which of the cars has the best exhaust system and pick that for your future car. Using this method, you and your team would go through the necessary parts for building an automobile and in the end have a list of the best parts available in the world. You would then give the list to your engineers and mechanics and ask them to assemble the car. What do you think you will get? The answer is obvious: you don’t even get an automobile! The parts won’t simply fit together. An engine from a Rolls-Royce won’t work well with an exhaust system from a Mercedes. The performance of the automobile is dependent on the interaction of its parts, not on the performance of the parts taken separately.
His story, if an amusing exaggeration, graphically portrays the problem organizations face when they are siloed. They suffer from internal competition for resources and limited multidisciplinary teamwork within and between operations and departments. For example, when organizations are siloed, those in marketing often believe that production has no idea about the problems they face with clients. Likewise, those in production think marketing is unaware of the extensive activities needed to design and test products. And they are right! In siloed organizations, departments have little awareness or sympathy for the problems and difficulties those in other parts of their organization face. But if an organization has found a way to hold conversations cross silos, then when a problem arises, someone in marketing might say, “I have a friend over there in production; let me give her a call.” Or “I’ve learned a thing or two about how finance works from a friend in that department. Here’s what I think we might do to resolve our issue.”
Unfortunately, remote work, which has significantly increased the well-being of employees, may also be increasing silos. A study (Yang, L. et al.) examined the increase in silos that occurred when Microsoft workers became remote. Examining 61,182 emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls, and workweek hours of Microsoft employees in the first six months of 2020, the authors found that “firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network to become more heavily siloed. It resulted in fewer ties that cut across formal business units or bridged structural holes in Microsoft’s informal collaboration network” (p. 49). They also found a decrease in synchronous communication and a related increase in asynchronous communication. The latter is problematic because it is more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information using asynchronous communication. So the problem of lack of conversation across silos may have now become an even more significant problem! Linda Gratton confirms this finding in her new book, Redesigning Work (2022).
Although many valuable conversations across silos happen by chance, for example, in the lunch room, at the coffee machine, or after work at the bar, they are insufficient and, with increased remote work, less likely. However, an organization can intentionally develop webs of conversations across silos. When each team member has close relationships with colleagues in other parts of the organization, the silos that are currently so troublesome are greatly reduced, and a sense of belonging and community grows among the whole. Organizations need to implement processes that are specifically designed to create conversation across silos.
General McChrystal (2015), while the US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, recognized this need and redesigned his forces to become a “team of teams,” which he described as “an organization within which the relationships between constituent teams resembled those between individuals on a single team” (p. 132).
McChrystal says, “We didn’t need every member of the task force to know everyone else; we just need everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunk next door, or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival” p. 128). McChrystal recognized and then designed a web of conversation across his task force.
Many researchers have studied coordination across silos and used various terms. Edmondson (2012) used the term “teaming” to talk about the need for organizations to coordinate across boundaries, calling it “teamwork on the fly.” She (2012) notes, “It cannot be overstated that people tend to focus on their own tasks, they need to give adequate attention to how their task fits into the larger picture of the collective enterprise”(p.84). Granovetter (1983) created the term “weak ties.” He explained that strong ties grow between team members. In contrast, weak ties occur between acquaintances in other parts of an organization, and weak ties are pivotal to the flow of information across an organization. Another researcher, Burt (2004), coined the term “structural holes” to explain differences in social capital. Structural holes are the empty spaces between teams. His research revealed that individuals who cross the structural holes in a network, have earlier access to a broader diversity of information, have significantly more “good ideas,” are promoted earlier, have higher salaries, and receive more positive performance reviews. Bolton, Logan, and Gittel’s (2021) theory of relational coordination proposes that “relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect help to support frequent, timely, accurate, problem-solving communication, and vice versa, enabling stakeholders to effectively coordinate their work across boundaries”(p. 2). Kegan and Lahey (2016), in An Everyone Culture, describe three organizations that have effectively reduced silos while helping individuals develop by holding daily cross-organization interactions between pairs and groups. Pentland (2015) uses the term “idea flow” to describe “the ease with which new thoughts can permeate a group. Pentland has found that the two major determinants of idea flow are “engagement” within a small group, like a team, department, or neighborhood, and “exploration”—frequent contact with other units. In other words, a team of teams”(p. 2).
Below, I describe three processes that facilitate Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos. Out of the many possibilities, I have chosen processes that I have had some involvement with so can relate in some detail. I start with Action Learning, a process designed by Revans, who was my long-time mentor and a teacher that greatly influenced my thinking.
Reginald (Reg) Revans – Action Learning
Revans had trained as a physicist in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the 1930s. There he rubbed shoulders with the greatest scientific minds of the age. He studied under Rutherford, who discovered the structure of the atom, and JJ Thomas, both considered fathers of nuclear physics. Five Nobel prize winners (or would win the prize in the future) worked at the Cavendish Laboratory while Revans was a doctoral student there. Each physicist and their doctoral students worked on a different aspect of physics. John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton worked on the first nuclear particle accelerator, which allowed them to split the atom. Edward Appleton demonstrated the existence of a layer of the ionosphere that could reliably transmit radio waves, and Sir Mark Oliphant pioneered the development of microwave radar.
A practice Rutherford initiated at the Cavendish Lab was a Wednesday afternoon tea attended by the five Nobel Prize winners and a few lucky doctoral students, Revans among them. Rutherford had one rule for the afternoon tea: no one was allowed to speak about their successes. They could only raise issues about the problems they were facing in their research which they had been unable to solve. Others would listen as the speaker described the problem and all the ways he had already tried to solve it. Then the group would puzzle together on what might explain the failure, often suggesting perspectives the problem owner would not have thought of on his own. And as often, the problem owner would leave the afternoon tea, perhaps not with an answer, but with a different way of thinking about the problem. (Revans, personal communication, 1980-1985).
Several concepts are notable in this practice at the Cavendish Lab. 1) The cleverness of Rutherford to know he needed to design a way for the scientist to learn from others who were working within another field of physics (with the small inducement of iced cakes and tea). 2) His recognition that each had a different knowledge base, with a different set of problem-solving approaches that could be useful to others. 3) The humility and willingness of these great men to lay out their failures and seek the help of others. Rutherford created a process for collaboration that facilitated the birth of the new science of nuclear physics.
Later, when Revans became the Director of Education at the National Coal Board (from 1945-1950), he implemented a process much like what he had participated in at Cambridge as a doctoral student. He called it Action Learning, which brought together small groups of managers from different coal pits. The managers met every few weeks to help each other with the problems each was facing. Revans saw that what was needed was not for experts to tell the managers what to do, but for them to have the opportunity to learn from their own experiences through collective reflection on their actions and outcomes. He believed that people, through in-depth discussion, could not only resolve any problem but could also help each other develop themselves as human beings. And indeed, the coal pits that adopted action learning reported a 30 percent increase in productivity.
The current practice of Action Learning (Dixon 1998, Pedler and Burgoyne 2008), based on Revan’s work, brings together small groups of 4-6 people from different parts of an organization, who meet twice a month for three to four months to support each other in addressing a real-time challenge each is facing in their own work. During the meetings, each person has their own ‘airspace’ to discuss a challenge they face with the team they lead; other team members adopt a helpful questioning approach (no advice and no solutions). As a result of the joint reflection, each individual decides on an action to take before the next meeting. When they reconvene two weeks later, each member reports on the outcome of their action and again thinks with the team about the next action to try. One of the main premises of action learning is that learning and action require each other. Revans (1980) often noted that there is no learning without action and no (sober and deliberate) action without learning.
As an example of the kind of learning that can happen in an action learning team, I recall an incident in a large oil company where I introduced action learning across multiple departments. This particular team had already met together four times over a period of a couple of months. One of the members, Jim, a newly promoted manager, was explaining his difficulties with a manager in another department with whom he needed to collaborate. When it was Jim’s turn to tell his action learning partners about his recent problem, he said, “The guy just won’t listen. When I try to explain, he cuts me off. He never lets me finish. I’m trying to figure out how to get him to listen to me so we can solve our mutual problems.” In the preceding four sessions, the action learning team had gained a great deal of knowledge about each other from their interactions. In response to the problem Jim had just explained, one of the team members said, “Jim, I’ve noticed in our group, sometimes when you tell us about something, you go on for quite a while, often repeating yourself, as you try to get your thoughts together. Do you think that also happens when you talk with this manager that is cutting you off?” Jim thought about that and agreed that he probably did go on and on with the manager. With this insight, Jim worked out what to do about his problem. The action learning team members knew Jim well enough to reflect with him on his interaction patterns. They had developed relationships that allowed them to speak honestly with each other. And Jim felt trusting enough to tell the group about the problem and think seriously about their observations.
Typically, multiple action learning teams meet concurrently across an organization. Some organizations find it helpful to have a coach meet with each team for the first couple of meetings to help them get started. In other situations, an organization may hold a large group meeting for all potential participants to explain how action learning functions before members are assigned to teams that then work independently.
Silos are reduced through action learning teams because, as each team member explains their situation, others learn about that part of their organization, its tasks, the problems it faces, and its members' knowledge and skills. Meeting over several months builds relationships that endure long after the team has ended its series of meetings.
There are several other forms action learning can take. For example, Revans built an exchange of teams between London hospitals, with a team from one hospital going to another hospital to address its problems. In his work in Belgium, he created teams from an organization in one sector, for example, banking, that spent time with another sector, for example, city government, to address their problems. There are many ways to make use of Revans ideas, but the practice described in detail above is the most useful for reducing organizational silos.
Henry Mintzberg – CoachingOurselves
Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian academic teaching business and management. He is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has taught since 1968. Like Revans, Mintzberg believes that practicing managers learn by reflecting on their own experience. In 2004, Mintzberg published, Managers Not MBAs which details what he believes is wrong with management education. He views prestigious graduate management schools like Harvard Business School and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania as obsessed with numbers in their overzealous attempts to make management a science. He sees this as damaging the discipline of management. What he believes is needed is post-graduate programs that educate practicing managers using insights from their own problems and experiences.
Mintzberg has used this philosophy to design a Management Program at McGill University. He believes that practicing managers can benefit enormously by reflecting on their own experience and sharing the insights with each other. The managers in his program stay on the job and come into the classroom periodically for 10-day modules—five in all, over 16 months. He notes these modules focus not on the functions of business (marketing, finance, etc.) but on the mindsets of managing: reflection (managing self), analysis (managing organizations), worldliness (managing context), collaboration (managing relationships), and action (managing change).
Phil LeNir, a practicing manager and, as it happens, Mintzberg’s son-in-law, bought into Mintzberg’s philosophy and wanted to make it work within his engineering organization. Partnering with Mintzberg, they jointly developed CoachingOurselves, based on the idea that managers learn the most from sharing their experiences with each other. CoachingOurselves is a peer learning process that brings together small groups of 4-6 managers from different parts of an organization once every two weeks, for six or more weeks, to participate in 90-minute guided discussions, online or in person. There are some hundred potential topics for groups to choose from, depending on their needs, for example, Rewards and Recognition, Decision Making, Enhancing Communication, etc. Each group chooses the topics of most interest to them. The topics are based on the work of recognized thinkers in the field of management. But the written guidance is minimal, perhaps a page of a thought leader’s ideas, then questions for the group to discuss that connects their own experience to the topic. This format creates the space for participants to have conversation, share concerns, draw on others’ experiences, and in the process, develop connections across silos.
One participant, contrasting CoachingOurselves with a highly facilitated course he had recently participated in, said, “I didn't like it (the highly facilitated course) at all because the technology took away my freedom to be me. It started telling me what to do, what to say, what not to say. So, of course, I reverted to, ‘Okay, well, I'll just do as I'm told.’ And then I'm not really doing what I need to do to have some productive outcome from the time I'm spending going through all this.”
Fujitsu’s Social Science Laboratory in Japan, with about 1100 employees, provides system integration and IT solutions to large organizations. The Laboratory has been implementing CoachingOurselves for 14 years. Over time they became interested in finding out, “What’s the impact on this organization when we put this kind of social learning process in place?” Calculating the benefit of any social/learning program is difficult, but the Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory had the research capability to do so. They gathered some impressive data that supports Conversation Across Silos. Here is what they found.
CoachingOurselves at Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory started in 2007. Figure 1 shows that the percentage of employees that participated in CoachingOurselves from 2007 through 2015 impacted the increase in sales and profit. The red line in Figure 1 shows the participation rate. The green bar represents profit, and the blue bar sales. Figure 1 reveals that until the percentage of employees participating in CoachingOurselves grew to about 30% around 2012, there was little change in profit. Above the 30% participation rate, profit steadily increased as participation in CoachingOurselves increased. By 2015, when 60% of employees had participated, profits had increased 90% over what it had been in 2007. The data in Figure 1 are correlational; that is, Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory was becoming more profitable, at the same time participation in CoachingOurselves was increasing. Interesting, but not compelling evidence that CoachingOurselves was the cause of the increase, e.g., correlation, not causation. However, Figure 2 leaves little doubt that causation, not correlation, resulted in the profit increase.
Figure 2 shows the business results of each of the six different departments within Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory against their participation rate in CoachingOurselves, first for 2014 and then for 2015. The participation rate between the six departments ranges from just under 30% to over 80%. What becomes clear in Figure 2 is that when over 30% of department members met together in 30 90-minute sessions over nine months, they were able to work together in a way that benefited Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory’s performance. Causation, not correlation!
The question is, what was happening in those 90-minute sessions that gave rise to the increase in profits? Possible factors that made those interactions impactful were:
1) using the content as a spur to talk about the problems they were facing in their work,
3) through discussion, helping each other address those problems,
4) forming connections and friendships through repeated meetings,
5) gaining in-depth knowledge about other parts of Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory through their conversations which then served them when they faced problems with those other parts.
Pentland has conducted studies at a number of companies that support the findings at Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory. He outfits “employees with badges that produce detailed, quantitative measures of how people interact. At a Chicago-area IT consultancy, he collected a billion measurements in one month—1,900 hours of data—and found that engagement was the central predictor of productivity, exceeding individual intelligence, personality, and skill. The teams with the highest levels of internal engagement and external exploration had much higher levels of creative output.” Fast Company p.2
A final example of Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos
is University Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. University Hospital is a teaching hospital connected to the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio. The hospital is a Level 1 trauma center with 35 surgical suites over two floors and 420 private patient rooms. It has been ranked Best Hospital in the region by US News & World Report for five years in a row.
But like all hospitals, it has faced similar and pervasive problems: nurses with too much to do, doctors who can spend only a minimal amount of time with patients, and too little communication among the healthcare team caring for patients. As anyone who has been hospitalized knows, traditional teaching hospital care involves 1) physician-led rounds where the conversation among your nurse, physician, and students is about you, not with you; 2) hospital staff that come and go during the day, including the Physical Therapist, Nutritionist, Pharmacist, Social Worker, Respiratory therapist, Phlebotomists, etc.; 3) you answer the same questions over and over, and often receiving conflicting information from the different healthcare professionals that come in and out; 4) the plan for your day is not transparent to you, you don’t know when or if you will be sent for tests, or when you will again see your doctor; 5) the loss of the sense of control is frustrating and sometimes scary.
Recognizing these problems, as early as 2004, University Hospital began working to provide better coordination across silos. But it was not until hospital personnel began implementing multidisciplinary rounds, called Collaborative Care, that change began to happen. Collaborative care has improved care at University Hospital for both the hospital care team and the patients.
Multidisciplinary rounds are not where the changes began at University Hospital, but they are the change that is most visible to patients. So put yourself in the position of a patient, lying in a hospital bed after a serious operation, and in comes a whole team of medical professionals, a doctor, pharmacist, nurse, physical therapist, hospitalist, respiratory therapist, nutritionist all standing or sitting around your bed at the same time. These healthcare professionals take time to introduce themselves one by one, and they ask you about yourself, not just your illness, but also about your work and hobbies. They want to get to know you. They also introduce themselves to your family, that are present in the room, and ask about them as well. That first meeting is the beginning of building a healthcare team that includes you and your family.
During that first meeting, a few team members sit down to be at eye level as they talk with the patient. Patients soon realize that the care team members are talking with them, not at them or about them. And perhaps most important, they are listening. (Ultimately, caring may be more about listening than talking – as humans, we are aware of the caring of others when we sense that we are being heard). The interaction among those around the bedside begins to feel like a conversation among friends. Everyone understands the language in the room; none of the medical team uses specialized jargon that only healthcare professionals can interpret. As the conversation continues, the patient, family, and healthcare professionals jointly develop the next steps of care, written on a large wall chart – the “goal board” so that everyone can see the plan.
The attendance of a full team of healthcare professionals is not a one-time occurrence. They will return again tomorrow to review the plan. Each time they return, a stronger relationship builds among all team members. This closeness is evident from their gestures and expressions and is noticeable to the patient as they watch healthcare professionals lingering for a moment to say goodbye or to touch their hand.
I had the opportunity to work with the hospital along with the originators of Collaborative Care, Paul Uhlig (2018), a cardiothoracic surgeon, and Ellen Raboin, (a healthcare researcher/consultant. As people in the hospital attempt to explain what Collaborative Care is, I frequently hear them tell this story that illustrates why it works so well.
This was a patient who was not doing well after heart surgery. He was a farmer who lived alone in the woods. His nearest neighbor lived several miles away. His operation had gone very well, and everything measurable about his recovery was coming along fine. His laboratory values, chest x-ray, and vital signs were normal. But he was not eating well and was not walking. He was growing weaker and beginning to have difficulty coughing and clearing his lungs. Everyone on the care team could see his deterioration and worried about him. No one knew what should be done differently.
One morning during collaborative rounds, someone noted on the goal board that the patient had a dog. When the dog was mentioned, the patient’s eyes lit up for a brief moment, then tears came to his eyes. The social worker comforted him, and the team listened attentively as she asked about his dog. He said he loved his dog. His dog was his family. When he came into the hospital, he had left his dog with his neighbor, but he had not been able to talk with his neighbor since his surgery. He was worried sick about his dog. What was most important to him was to make sure his dog was OK, but he didn’t know how to do that. His worry occupied his thoughts. The goal of finding out how his dog was doing was placed on the goal board in his room, beside the other goals for his treatment. Knowing the dog's importance to him, the team sent a sheriff to check with his neighbor. His dog was fine. The next day the patient was much better, and several days later, he was able to go home.
I heard many similar stories illustrating how meaningful conversations between the whole care team and patients revealed a way to speed healing and express caring. One patient wanted to be well enough to watch her son play in a special football game. A father knew his hospitalized daughter needed a special blanket she always slept with. Another family knew their sister was having a stroke because her unusual symptoms were like their brother’s. A son knew his father was having a life-threatening reaction that wasn’t listed as an allergy. The Collaborative Care team believes having time to talk with patients and their families brings a needed perspective to their treatment.
Although a physician and head nurse participate in collaborative care rounds, they do not run the meetings at the bedside. A nurse, social worker, or other staff might facilitate the discussion. But as the meeting moves, leadership continually shifts to the person with the most knowledge about the particular issue under discussion. For example, the pharmacist will take the lead if the patient asks a medication question. Over time, and through distributed leadership, team members appreciate each of their colleagues’ wealth of knowledge. That understanding and the respect it generates significantly increases the insights available to the team for problem-solving.
The change began at University Hospital not with multidisciplinary rounds but with several months of planning conversations among healthcare providers from different disciplines. The conversations were about how they wanted multidisciplinary rounds to function and how to make them happen. They ran simulations to study how they might talk together in an actual patient room. Often during these reflective discussions, they were joined by Paul or Ellen, not to tell them how to resolve the issues they faced but to add perspective from other hospitals that had worked through the same problems.
When Collaborative Care began holding multidisciplinary rounds for real, two other kinds of collaboration meetings were held that were central to moving from what had been a very hierarchical system to distributed leadership. These two meetings were 1) a daily 30-minute reflection meeting that the multidisciplinary team held as soon as rounds were finished and 2) a system meeting that included hospital administrators and care providers.
The content of the daily reflection meeting was not about patients; that discussion had already taken place in its fullness at the bedside. The reflection meeting was about working more productively as a care team and engaging patients and their families more effectively. The reflection meeting was critical because any team functioning in a traditional setting will have a great deal to unlearn and learn to work effectively as a Collaborative Care team.
The system meetings, held once a week, were a place for longer-term planning and organizational change related to issues of structure, staffing, learning, and leadership to be addressed. For example, visiting hours might need to be altered to allow family members to be in the hospital during rounds; how nurses were assigned to beds might need to change so that a consistent and co-located team could work and learn together.
Paul and Ellen hold that the best way to begin creating a Collaborative Care environment is to have weekly system meetings. They are where the relationships between those interested in collaborative care are formed. And the nature of the relationship between multidisciplinary care team members is what makes it work.
University Hospital has calculated a 0.7-day reduction in stay in those units engaged in Collaborative Care. That means $1.5M in avoidable costs and the treatment of 780 more patients over six months. But that outcome is not the most important; rather most important is that the patients feel more in charge of their own care and feel respected as human beings, not just a disease. And perhaps, surprisingly, caregivers feel greater satisfaction in their work. (personal correspondence)
In Collaborative Care, Conversations across Silos occur in many formats that increase participants’ understanding of the whole system and how the parts of the system interact. That understanding grows through daily rounds at patients’ bedsides but also in the daily reflection meetings that follow the rounds, the weekly meetings of the whole system, and the practice meetings in the months of planning. You can’t change just one thing because everything is connected in a system.
Rules of Thumb for Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos
I draw on these three examples to identify the characteristics of Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos and to suggest how they do so. Conversations across silos spreads the culture of caring and belonging that was developed in conversation for teams and, in addition, strengthens coordination across the whole of the organization, reducing the fragmentation caused by silos. Like in neural networks, the more you stimulate connections with an organization, the stronger they grow. The stronger the connections, the more resilient the organization becomes. This is the principle of the collaboration culture. Collaboration and institutional learning go hand in hand.
A Mix of Employees
Conversations across silos bring together people from across an organization in conversational formats that provide opportunities for them to understand how other parts of an organization function. One participant of CoachingOurselves noted, “We’ve worked in the same organization for years, but I never truly understood what you did until we started having these sessions.” The mix of employees also improves problem-solving, given that it brings together people with different specialties, environments, and investigative approaches. In problem-solving, diversity trumps homogeneity, as we saw with the scientist at the Cavendish Lab. Diversity enables the participants to find more and more effective solutions to each other’s problems.
Meeting Multiple Times
For members of these groups to openly share their concerns, mistakes, and needs, they must develop trust in one another. Creating trust takes time. Nilsson and Mattes (2015) describe two types of trust, Initial and Gradual. Initial trust is based on a) belonging to a group, b) information about team members from third parties, c) trusting the system, or d) perceived shared interest. On the other hand, gradual trust results from repeated first-hand interactions over time. Gradual trust is based on a) experiencing another’s capability to perform a specific task, b) that person’s reliability to perform the agreed-upon task and c) witnessing the integrity and kindness of another in the work situation. The conversations in the above examples occur in multiple meetings with enough time and regularity for members to build gradual trust. With that trust, participants experience the immediate benefit of helping each other address current problems and the long-term benefit of knowing others well enough to call on them for advice about conflicts or difficulties between parts of the organization.
Small Groups As the Unit of Learning
Small groups are where most of the learning in an organization takes place. But for that to happen, groups need to be small enough (4-7 participants) to enable people to get to know each other and build trusting relationships. Groups must be large enough to contain diverse views yet small enough for members to engage each other. Engaging each other means members have time to state their ideas and the reasoning behind them fully. And then sufficient time for others to ask questions that helps them gain a deeper understanding of what has been said. When a group exceeds seven or eight, it tends to no longer be in conversation; instead, the exchange becomes more like turn-taking, with each member declaring their perspective to the others without exploring meaning, which potentially leads to developing new thinking.
Personalized Learning
The learning that results from conversations across silos is unique to that group of participants. The topics of conversation emerge from the situations participants are currently facing. The extended time over weeks allows participants to decide upon an action to take, take that action, and then reflect with others on the outcome they achieved. Learning is most effective when there is time for the complete action-reflection cycle. As John Dewey famously said, “We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.” It is while learning from each other that relationship grows. It is difficult to be helpful to another person without caring about them, having compassion for them, and understanding. Without the human element, help becomes formulaic.
No Moderator Or Appointed Leader
Facilitators are unnecessary and often get in the way of learning and relationship-building. If a group is on its own, which they are in the CoachingOurselves modules, Action Learning, and Collaborative Care, the group has to get good at establishing its own social norms. Phil LeNir notes, “If you always have facilitators, aside from it being costly and unscalable, the group never does what we as human beings are good at – establishing social norms to learn and work together. When facilitators are present, it is taken out of our hands.” (personal correspondence, 2022) In the end, it is not having shared norms that is most important; it is the joint creation of shared norms. A group that creates shared norms over time is also free to alter them when needed and thus improve their effectiveness.
The Percentage of Participation Matters
The larger the percentage of an organization’s members participating in conversations across silos, the greater the impact on the organization. This rule of thumb was evident in the Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory study. But it is also common sense that the greater the density of the web of conversations across an organization, the better the organization knows itself. The members of an organization must know each other if those members are to participate in the governance of the whole. With the expanded understanding of other parts of the organization that occurs through conversation across silos, members can help guide an organization toward agreed-upon goals
Group Based Learning
The goal of conversations across silos is to continuously improve organization performance by reducing fragmentation while expanding the culture of care and belonging developed in teams. With this rule of thumb, I am questioning a belief, long held by organizations, that an organization will improve by providing individual training. That might work for technical training, but as Heifetz (1994) has noted, it doesn’t work well for adaptive issues. Adaptive issues, such as how to work together effectively, deal with conflict, make better decisions, bring about needed change, etc., are embedded in an organization’s culture and are learned and unlearned through the daily conversations among organization members. Too often, we have seen that nothing much changes when individual learners return to the system after a training program. Organizational performance and culture are both group efforts. Learning with and from each other is more productive for individuals and the organization than individuals learning separately. Conversation across silos allows members to discover that they are not isolated in thought – that others have similar ideas. Changing a culture within teams and then between units of an organization is a big step toward changing an organization’s culture.
As these rules of thumb illustrate, we know how to reduce the silos that fragment our organizations. Perhaps the difficulty lies not in a lack of knowledge but in an underlying and possibly unrecognized belief that silos are a natural aspect of organization life, a nuisance that we simply have to put up with.
To conclude, conversations across silos have the possibility of benefiting an organization in five ways, 1) reducing organizational fragmentation by helping each part of the organization understand how it is connected to other parts, 2) becoming a source of new ideas, new ways of thinking, and problem-solving for the team by helping team members learn about the knowledge individuals in other parts of the organization have, 3) extending a culture of care and belonging beyond teams, 4) developing long term relationships that are sustained long after group meetings end, 5) and with a broader perspective on organizational issues, team members can help to guide and direct the whole of the organization, which is the topic of the next section.
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Posted at 06:03 PM in Effective Conversations | Permalink | Comments (0)
Organizations are groups of people who come together to accomplish agreed-upon goals. Whether corporations, governments, or non-profits, all use conversation to create and achieve their goals. Most obviously, conversation is necessary for decision-making about collective action. But it is also through conversation that knowledge is developed and exchanged. It is by means of conversation that different units of an organization, teams, and individuals coordinate their actions. Relationships that support meaningful planning are developed in the conversation between individuals. Conversations are expressed through our words, tone of voice, level of attention we give each other, facial expressions, smiles, or frowns. Through our laughter and tears, conversation binds us. All this at a time when technology has made it possible to talk across time and space, see each other, and hold those conversations that create meaning in our organizations.
Stephen Hawking, (1994) who in his later years, could not speak except through artificial means, said: “For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”
Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, an organization's culture is created and maintained through its webs of conversation (Weick, 2012).
However, in many organizations, conversations are neither frequent enough nor are they designed for purpose. For example, a decision-making conversation needs to be designed differently than one whose purpose is resolving a dispute and different yet from one in which knowledge is generated. While technology has increased the performance speed for many functions and the opportunities for conversations to take place, it has not increased the speed at which human beings can engage each other in meaningful conversation. This article is about how and why to engage in those many conversations.
Two critical organizational conversations need to be strengthened, each having a different focus or intent. When taken together, they can improve the quality of organizations’ interactions and, thus, organizations' ability to design meaningful and productive work that helps them work toward goals that benefit all of humanity. The two conversations are:
These conversations allow team members to know each other as whole persons, their families, ambitions, hopes, and disappointments. Within a team, members learn about each other’s work experience, knowledge base, and skill sets and, given that breadth of understanding, can work together productively to expand the team’s knowledge and capability. Teams are where a culture of belonging is born within organizations, offering the possibility of restoring human connection to our organizations.
These are conversations that individual team members intentionally build with those in other parts of the organization. When each team member develops close relationships with colleagues in other parts of the organization, the silos that are currently so troublesome are significantly reduced, and a sense of community grows across the whole.
I will discuss the first of these two in this post.
Conversations to Generate Well-Being and Learning Within Teams
We are a specie that, by our nature, cooperate and collaborate - it is built into our genes. Mark Solms (2022) a psychoanalyst, and neuropsychologist, explains that, just as we have a fight/flight response in our brains for our protection, our brains also have instinctual dispositions that are pro-social - there to ensure we build connections with others. Those pro-social instincts include attachment bonding, nurturing, and, perhaps surprisingly, play. They are built into our brains because, as human beings, we need the help of others to survive and flourish, not only in childhood but also as adults. We have long known that infants will die if they are not picked up and cuddled, regardless of how well-fed they are. Adults also have a physiological need for and respond to caring and compassion. For example, a nurse touching the hand of a relative in a hospital waiting room lowers their blood pressure. A colleague expressing concern when they notice we are troubled decreases our release of cortisol, the chemical our adrenal glands secrete that increases blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and slams our digestion to a halt. How amazing that experiencing a heartfelt connection with another reduces the release of harmful cortisol! These pro-social dispositions of attachment bonding and nurturing are not just that, “I want to be looked after and cared for” but also, “I want to look after and care for others.” Our brains are hard-wired for both giving and receiving compassion.
Given that we spend a significant part of our lives within a work environment, it is vitally important that our work environment provides us opportunities for the attachment bonding that Solms has shown we require. Or in layperson's terms, we need to feel valued, cared for, and appreciated in our workplaces, whether that work is online, in an office, a hospital, a call center, or preparing and serving food.
The US Surgeon General’s Report, (Murthy, 2022) calls attention to the health issues resulting from workplace stress. “Stress can increase one’s vulnerability to infection, the risk for diabetes, and the risk for other chronic health conditions” (p. 6). The report lists five essentials for workplace mental health and well-being, one of which is Connection and Community. The report explains that organizations' first task is to create inclusive and belonging cultures. Belonging is the feeling of being an accepted group member or connectedness in one’s interpersonal relationships. Pro-social behavior promotes positive social relationships through welcoming, helping, and reassuring others.
Working with a team of researchers at Stanford University, Pfeffer (2018) provides a long list of work conditions that cause ill health or death. Researchers estimate 120,000 preventable deaths caused by workplace conditions occur yearly. Among those causes are cultures of low social support, that is, “not having close relationship with co-workers that provide social support to mitigate the effects of work stress” (p.43). The researchers estimate the lack of social support alone contributes to 3000 deaths yearly in the US. Even more devastating are work cultures in which people suffer insecurity and stress, which researchers estimate contribute to 29,000 deaths yearly. Pfeffer describes workplace cultures where people feel they are always under the gun. This kind of stress has been exacerbated by computer monitoring of work, ranging from how many calls someone handles in a call center, how many patients a doctor sees, and how many tests a physician orders. A culture of insecurity and stress tends to pit workers against each other in ways that prevents creating community. This description by a former GE manager is particularly telling, “Everybody was fighting to control things and own things. Immediately I had to kind of fight to hold on to my turf for the job that I’d been hired to do… You assume that there were only going to be so many people who got promoted. You almost had a celebrity death-match, like with Jim, who was my peer. It was this idea that probably either Jim or I would get promoted, no matter how good we both were. That kind of cage-fighting mentality was in the culture” (p. 161).
However, through his research, Pfeffer also identified many organizations, which are intentional about taking care of the health and well-being of their employees. Among them are, Divita, Barry-Wayne Miller, Patagonia, Zillow Group, and Landmark Health. Interviews with workers at Divita illustrates the positive contrast. “When confronted with breast cancer, work colleagues, launched big sales to raise money for her and brought her food, lots of food. A single mom describes, almost in tears, how the company and the coworkers helped her after she was hit by a car in a crosswalk and broke her pelvis, leaving her scarcely able to care for her young child. In both instances, what is clear is that the individuals appreciated not just the specifics of the help that they received, but as important, the sense that they were part of a community” (p. 159).
As Murthy and Pfeffer illustrate, in our attempt to be effective and efficient in organizations, we have bound up our conversation with each other, limited it, and reduced its power. Too often, we have excluded expressions of care and welcome from our vocabulary, viewing them as inappropriate in a work environment and leaving us with only formulaic responses that are empty of warmth and caring. Murthy offers this challenge to us all, “Organizational leaders, managers, supervisors, and workers alike have an unprecedented opportunity to examine the role of work in our lives and explore ways to better enable all workers to thrive within the workplace and beyond”(p. 5).
Taking to heart Murthy’s (2022) challenge and Pfeffer’s (2018) data gives us, as members of organizations, the courage and insight to engage in the needed conversations. We recognize that having a different kind of conversation with our colleagues is the right thing to do, even given that, in most organizations, it may not be the norm. Murthy challenges each of us to bring about a more welcoming culture, knowing that an organization's culture is created in the conversations between its members. For a culture to change, those conversations have to change. As members of our organizations, we impact the tone and quality of those conversations in every interaction we have.
All conversations contain two messages; one is the content, and the second is the regard in which each speaker holds the other, or in other words, the nature of their relationship, as perceived by each speaker. This second message is revealed through body language, eye contact, gesture, and tone. Although often unintentional, each speaker sends one of many hundreds of messages that may be negative or positive, e.g., feeling superior to the other, enjoyment in the other’s companionship, deference toward the other, viewing the other as a resource or tool rather than a human being, feeling a sense of trust, respect for another’s knowledge, pleasure in seeing the other, and many more. Just reading the list may recall feelings from past conversations you’ve had. The underlying message is difficult to fake, so regardless of how carefully the words are constructed, we experience the underlying message the other sends. I’m not suggesting we be more careful about the messages we inadvertently send; instead, I’m suggesting that if we heal our organizations so that we create more caring and compassionate relationships, our unintentional messages will be congruent with our spoken words.
There has long been agreement in the organization literature on the characteristics of workplaces that promote well-being. Going back as far as McGregor’s (1960) Theory X and Y, Emery (1969) psychological requirements for productive work, Pink’s (2011) autonomy, mastery, and purpose, Schein’s (2018) humble leadership focused on personal, cooperative and trusting relationships, and Edmondson’s (2012) psychological safety, which she defines as the presence of a blend of trust, respect for each other's competence, and caring about each other as people. Clearly, there is not a dearth of knowledge about the conditions that promote both well-being and rewarding work.
Teams are where care and support can be most readily fostered in the workplace. Teams are the heart of an organization. They are where our most robust relationships are built because they are where most of our conversations occur. They are the best opportunity for individuals to develop, learn, and find purpose and meaning in their lives. Because they are small enough, given the chance, members can build open and caring relationships with each other. The opportunity involves setting aside time for team members to learn about each other. The reality is that I can’t support you or you me unless we know enough about each other to recognize our mutual needs and gifts. Building relationships requires not just one but repeated interactions between team members. We learn to “know” each other by being in conversation over time. We, of course, all know that. We even know how to do it; it’s just that in too many of our organizations, we think we shouldn’t!
A team at TechnipFMC that Kim Glover leads exemplifies creating a belonging culture. Most of the twelve team members are in Houston, but several are in other countries. The team is divided into three sub-teams, each responsible for one or more specific products. However, each team member is also a member of a second team, creating a complex matrix of product teams. Being matrixed gives each team insight into what other product teams are doing, increasing the possibility of collaboration and pollination across teams. Each product team holds a weekly meeting to coordinate the projects they’re working on, and at the start of each meeting, members are intentional about catching up on each other’s personal lives. A second practice occurs once a month when, for 24-48 hours, all twelve members engage online in “Working Out Loud” sessions. Each team member logs into the Working Out Loud session to share what they are currently working on as well as social items, for example, who has a new dog, is getting married, or has viewed a fascinating new video. And, of course, team members comment on each other’s messages. Another practice the whole team regularly engages in is team development activities, for example, everyone reading the same book and then holding discussions about it or the entire group taking a personality inventory and then talking through the results. Such activities help team members share the same language, learn about each other, and grow their relationships. Following are quotes from interviews I conducted with TechnipFMC team members.
Chris (Scotland) -I lost my grandmother a few weeks ago, and every single person sent me messages and not just a message to say, "I'm sorry to hear,” but "how are you today?" And then after the funeral, "How was the funeral?" "How are you feeling?" "Is there anything I can do?" So we're a very close team, even despite the fact that we're thousands of miles away.
Victor (Brazil) - In a session, I was working from Brazil, I forgot to set up a specific access for the session. Tom-Erik in Norway and Taras in Russia always joined early. When Tom-Erik tried to join he couldn’t get in. Then Taras saw the problem and helped him get in. When everyone was finally online, Tom-Erik said, ‘I had a problem accessing the session because the different technology access wasn’t working.’ He didn’t say, ‘Victor did this the wrong way.’ No, he just shared what happened. For the team, this way of talking is normal. They didn’t attack me. Here in Brazil, these kinds of things are always personal. They would have said, ‘Victor really messed up!’
Brian (Houston) -One thing that we've done on this team is make it feel like a family. Like friends. Because then you're able to really, really start communicating.
Stacy (Houston)- What I really like about this team is we work hard, and we play hard too. We get along with each other. We nurture and support each other. There's a cohesiveness that goes beyond just getting your work done because if you work with someone not knowing anything about them, it's very sterile. When you work with people that you’ve developed a bond with, then when hard issues come up, the communication flows more easily because you have that bond and that relationship.
When team members have the opportunity to gain awareness of the knowledge and experience of others and have built a culture of belonging and trust, the team also becomes the primary place where learning takes place, and insights are developed, insight being the recognition of the relationship among ideas that result in problem solutions. Insights emerge when conversing with others who hold disparate views on a topic they feel safe to express. A team’s culture of belonging and trust provides that safety.
We can learn facts from books, training, etc., what McGilchrist (2019) calls “public knowledge.” But we gain “private knowledge,” that is, how to “be in the world,” for example, how to deal with problems, support others, and even think about who we are by experiencing others we value and admire. In this way, learning and a sense of caring are intertwined. Experiencing requires engaging with the other and, through that engagement, developing morals, in the largest meaning of that term, by emulating their actions and thinking. What Victor learned from Tom-Erik, was much more than how to set up the technology (public knowledge). He learned how to respond when someone makes a mistake (private knowledge). He learned it by experiencing it. This deeper understanding stayed with him, so it came to mind when I interviewed him.
As the tasks that teams are asked to take on become increasingly complex, a team’s ability to learn becomes ever more critical because they frequently cannot just select a solution from a list of possibilities; but instead must learn their way to a solution. As Snowden (2015) explains, in the face of complex initiatives, all that teams can really manage is the starting conditions, that is, having a diversity of members, time available to explore, and a physical space where members can illustrate their ideas. Answers are emergent rather than being known in advance. The team's task then is to probe, sense, and respond. Probe means to try multiple small experiments. Sense means watching what seems to be working, and responding means moving in that direction. By learning their way to a solution, a team can produce more innovative results than the team could have imagined in advance. But it also means that a team will probably have many failures before it achieves those innovative results. Complexity requires both the team and the larger organization to have a tolerance for failure and the emergent learning that is derived from it. And finally, learning from each other requires caring about each other enough to take the time to teach each other. It involves a sense of belonging that promotes the safety for members to be willing to suggest their half-baked ideas. It requires members to feel valued by others, so they know their ideas will be respected because learning and relationships are two sides of the same coin.
For the teams at SEEQC, learning their way to solutions is the only possibility. SEEQC is a company whose task is to develop the first fully chip-based quantum computer platform for global business. The company, headquartered in Elmsford, NY, has facilities and teams in London and Naples. To build a chip-based quantum computer, something no other company has done, SEEQC needs employees with in-depth knowledge in three very different disciplines, quantum physics, computer science, and electrical engineering. Within those three disciplines SEEQC has individuals working as chip designers, chip manufacturing engineers, test and integration teams as well as teams working on firmware and software. Unfortunately, universities don’t offer degrees in that combination. So the thirty-five employees at SEEQC not only come from multiple disciplines and have to learn from each other while trying to accomplish a never before accomplished task, but they also come from different countries and cultures with local norms and customs. John Levy, the CEO and one of the co-founders of SEEQC, explains, “Building a quantum computer is probably the hardest thing anybody's ever done. It requires a level of understanding that is about as deep as you can go in the world of research and technology. It’s very collaborative work because no one in the organization has every needed knowledge and skill”(personal correspondence). So SEEQC considers itself a learning organization by necessity. For example, on Fridays, the team holds a deep dive into the problems the teams are working on, so members can teach each other about their work. One employee explains, “I'm a chip designer, but you're a quantum engineer, and we both need to understand these domains that we're in. I need you to understand what I do, and you need me to understand what you do if we're going to be successful!” In addition, every Tuesday, the team holds a deep dive where someone presents the latest academic paper they've read and analyzed, then on Wednesday, there are meetings to discuss the progress in each work domain. Levy explains that it's almost like being back in school, except they are a commercial company with a very commercial focus. Holding learning sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday is necessary for the teams at SEEQC to get collectively smarter. Levy explains, “As much as we have developed a culture of learners, we also have a roster of teachers. If I say to somebody, ‘I don't get this. Can you explain it to me?’ They will pull me aside and spend as much time as needed, and not just because I'm the CEO. I've seen them do that with anyone who asks. We have no problem with humility because nine out of ten things we do, don't work, at least on the first attempt.” The team at SEEQC analyzes failure in a highly systematic way in order to understand what didn’t work and to quickly iterate a set of new solutions to isolate the source of failure while exploring several hypotheses until the technology can be validated.
One of the things that SEEQC illustrates for us is that we need to accept failure as an essential part of learning and change. Yet our experience and history with failure teaches us something quite different. Our experience is that we are punished for failure; if we failed a test at school or took a chance to write a paper in a unique way, we got a bad grade. Likewise, in many of our organizations, we are encouraged and rewarded when we succeed and embarrassed when a project fails. We learn not to take chances or try something new without assurances that it has worked elsewhere. Yet nothing new is created without first failing.
Granted, the complexity of the problems SEEQC addresses are well above the norm. Still, in our rapidly changing context, nearly every industry faces growing complexity, e.g., pharmaceutical, medical, automotive, energy, artificial intelligence, architecture, etc. So understanding how to learn our way to solutions has become critical.
Johnson and Johnson (1989) describe the kind of interaction necessary for teams to develop new insights, which necessarily arise out of a synthesis among differing views. They explain that to create such insights, team members must be able to hold two or more disparate ideas in their mind at the same time. That requires them to not only be able to repeat what another has said but to understand the reasoning that led to their position and the implications that could result. That level of understanding occurs when team members have the opportunity to ask each other questions about their meaning; probe their thinking in the back and forth of conversation. We know that understanding has been achieved when someone says, “Ah, now I see what you’re talking about. That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about it that way before!” Such conversations offer a new way of thinking about an issue to emerge.
Johnson and Johnson’s (1989) research shows that when individuals are competent in taking others’ perspectives:
That kind of in-depth interaction takes time. In large groups, airtime is limited. If two people in a large group engage in the type of perspective-taking described above, others are left to remain passive observers. But because teams are small, they are where two, three, or even four-way conversations can happen to explore multiple perspectives.
Learning at this level not only takes time but also requires being together physically. An in-person group meeting has a symbolic significance, much like what we feel when the whole family is gathered around the dinner table. It reminds us that we are part of something larger; where we get a sense of the whole. The awareness of “being part of something larger” is critical to a group’s willingness to do the hard work of making sense of the complexity they face. It is all too easy for organizational members to lose the sense of what others do and how what others do relates to what each member does - particularly when members are working remotely. If we take as a given that teams need to interact periodically to create new insights, then the question remains, how often and under what circumstances do teams need to come together?
Both in-person and virtual meetings offer their own benefits:
Virtual work allows for the following:
But it is also true that in this increasingly digital age, we stand to lose something integral to what makes organizations both humane and productive places to work: the relationships and a sense of purpose that can only be built by having in-depth, face-to-face conversations about important issues.
In-person convening fosters:
The way to satisfy both needs is to blend sophisticated virtual tools with periodic face-to-face meetings. I think of this as the “oscillation principle,” allowing teams to tap into the best attributes of virtual work and face-to-face convening. The policy of enabling members to choose any two or three days of a week to be in the office is helpful for family life and certainly promotes well-being. Still, it supports neither relationship building nor the development of joint insight. It is far better to use the time spent in the office for the whole team to be together.
ProQuest is an example of a team that oscillates between working from home and physically coming together. It is also an example of a team that intentionally builds a sense of belonging among members and builds practices that facilitate the teams' ongoing learning.
The team of 30 software engineers comprises programmers, analysts, product managers, and designers in ProQuest’s research solutions division, with members scattered from San Diego to Amsterdam. The whole group meets face-to-face three times a year for a three-day Summit.
Putting together a summit takes a lot of planning, most of which falls on the shoulders of Taco Ekkel, the team lead. He explains, “We have learned that it’s important to invest in preparing for the Summit. Before the Summit, the whole team brainstorms, “What do we want to discuss? What are the larger things that will come up in the next four months? What sessions we should have? What needs to be whiteboarded?” Most Summits are held in New York, San Diego, or Amsterdam. On the morning of the first day, the meeting starts with an overview by senior management, providing updates about the business context, finance, sales, and new software products the team will need to design. After the overview, the group breaks out into work teams for the first sessions. Each work team’s task is to create the basic design of several of the new products, which that team will then create over the next four months working remotely. At the Summit, each team meets around a whiteboard where members sketch how a new design feature will function. Anyone is free to jump up, often with an eraser in hand, to make a change – and of course, what is added is just as easily changed again by another. Anne describes an interchange in team he was working with. “There was a feature in a software product that we were trying to make ‘smart.’ I was playing the role of a dummy and I remarked that ‘it was not very clever.’ Then someone sketched on the whiteboard how it would actually work. But another team member said, ‘You’re doing that same function in two places, here and here.’ Finally someone said, ‘This is how to improve it’ and drew it on the whiteboard. Everyone could see that worked. So we put an exclamation point by it, which is our sign that a decision has been made. When the exclamation point goes up it almost never changes.” The whole group reconvenes around 4:00. All the whiteboards are rolled into the main room, and each team uses its whiteboard to show what features it worked on and how each was solved. The last item on the daily agenda is Lightening Talks. As Lita, a team member, comments, “Lightening talks are voluntary. Different team members talk about what they think is neat or interesting, for example, ‘I programmed in some different language’ or ‘I thought of a different kind of identifier for people.’ Each person is given 5 minutes.” A large clock is displayed with a loud buzzer that sounds when time is up, and there is a lot of laughter when the speaker has to be pulled off with the “hook” when they go over the allotted time. There are typically five or six Lightening Talks at the end of each day – no more than 30 minutes. Taco notes, “We stop at five and will be at the bar at 5:30 because the work is intense in the sessions, and the energy of everybody is depleted.” The evening social time is as much a part of the Summit as the sessions, strengthening relationships and trust. Team member Jason says, “My favorite part is the time after the meetings, over drinks and dinner, a time to be more social. A lot of times, you’re not talking about exactly what happened in the meeting, but you get an idea of how people are about different things. You hear about people’s families.” Lita adds, “It is easier for me to talk with them about a work issue if I know something about them personally.”
In between Summits, team members constantly communicate with each other remotely using various forms of social media, including Chat, Trello, and Flowdock. In addition, each team holds a daily 15-minute on-line “stand-up” meeting. ProQuest usually saves larger conversations about new features for their Summits. Ekkel reflects, “We’d never really effectively get them conceptualized without the richness of face-to-face contact coupled with sketching,”
The primary factor that guides the frequency with which teams like ProQuest oscillate and the optimal length of in-person meetings depends on task interdependence, that is, the extent to which one team member’s work impacts what other team members do (Maznevski, 2000). There are three levels of team interdependence, going from the least to the greatest: pooled, sequential and reciprocal. With pooled interdependence, team members primarily work independently of each other. Examples are insurance claim reviewers, call center responders, appliance repair mechanics, and some sales teams. In such jobs, the outcome of all the workers is combined to reach the team’s target. There are no handoffs between team members, so the team does not need to come together to ensure that handoffs go smoothly or resolve joint issues. Coordination is achieved by standardizing the task. However, like other virtual team members who function without the presence of colleagues, they can suffer loneliness and feel disengaged, which reduces the team’s total productivity. So many teams come together in-person yearly.
With Sequential interdependence, the team carries out a series of tasks, each performed by a different team member, like a virtual assembly line. Each team member’s success depends on the person who completes the previous task on time and at a high level of quality. A team’s performance can be improved by each team member fully understanding the needs and requirements of the person who will receive their handoffs. Because tasks change over time, teams often hold weekly, online, synchronous conversations to stay updated on problems and concerns. Many have daily, virtual standup meetings lasting no more than 15 minutes to check in with those who need help and to head off problems. Teams with sequential interdependence might meet face-to-face, initially to build strategic alignment, do the necessary upfront planning for coordination, and establish trust relationships critical to sequential interdependence. Although the team’s ongoing tasks are sequential, the initial meeting requires reciprocal interdependence. Without the conversations that develop trust relationships, team members lose awareness and concern about those they depend upon. Team members with sequential interdependence often meet face-to-face at least twice a year to renew that trust and to implement changes learned from their ongoing experience.
Teams with Reciprocal Interdependence require continual interaction between co-workers. Team members must diagnose, problem-solve, and collaborate to accomplish their tasks, as was illustrated by SEEQC. They must continually adjust to each other’s actions as the situation changes. Examples of reciprocal interdependence are product design teams and strategy development teams. Reciprocal tasks require in-depth discussion that involves input from diverse perspectives. A virtual sales team may have technical experts, developers, and marketing people who must interact to craft a proposal for a client. As the client gives feedback on the proposal or adds new requirements, the team will need to convene to make modifications. Coordination is achieved by mutual adjustment anytime a new factor is introduced. Mutual adjustment entails synchronous conversation that is best achieved face-to-face. Attempting to make such changes asynchronously, whether by email or team apps, can result in misinterpretation of others' meaning and often the false assumption that agreement has been reached. Reciprocal teams optimally meet quarterly face-to-face. Between meetings, they primarily rely on visual communication tools such as Skype, Zoom, or Google Hangout. They may also use team apps like Slack or Teams to maintain documentation. As Weick (1995) notes, “The same event means different things to different people and more information will not help them. What will help them is a setting where they can argue, using rich data pulled from a variety of media, to construct fresh frameworks of action-outcome linkages that include their multiple interpretations. The variety of data need to pull off this difficult task are most available in variants of the face to face meeting”( p. 186).
It is not uncommon for teams to have some tasks that are reciprocal and others that are sequential. ProQuest views the initial design of its projects as reciprocal so brings team members together on location. As Ekkel noted, “We’d never really effectively get them conceptualized without the richness of face-to-face contact coupled with sketching,” While the ongoing development tasks are sequential, with one team member handing off a task at the end of the work day to another team member in a different time zone. The retrospects at the end of the team’s time together, which looks for ways to improve the process, is again reciprocal.
What can these examples tell us about how to go about how teams build relationships and create insights? Clearly, they illustrate that there is no right way to create warmth and caring in a team setting or to increase team members' knowledge. There are as many variations in how organizations help members care for and learn from each other as there are organizations. We can conclude that no set of practices will fit every organization. But what we can take away are some basic rules of thumb. Rules of thumb are more like guidelines than practices – we think of practices as something to be imitated, but rules of thumb are more ways of thinking.
Connection Before Content
Group members need to build a sense of connection and rapport with each other before they can attempt to solve problems together. If a group is going to concentrate on a difficult issue, they first need to learn who others are, the skills they bring, the experience they represent, and the values they hold. Members are more open with each other when they know in what way others are like themselves. Group performance increases when everyone in a group is aware of each other member’s expertise (Stasser 1999). Initially, members just need to engage each other enough to identify with each other for example, this person has had similar experiences to mine; this person is knowledgeable about this topic; this person values getting a task done right. However, to work effectively, a group will eventually need to build trust that grows over weeks and months. That means having continuing opportunities to learn about each other. Much of that trust grows from working together, but it is greatly assisted by providing ongoing opportunities for members to learn about each other. Connection Before Content, applies not just for initial relationship building, rather relationships must be renewed and reaffirmed each time a group reconvenes, whether online or in person.
Work and Social Can Be Intermingled
It is unnecessary to draw a sharp line between work and social or try to make sure they are separated. Work and social support each other. For example, at ProQuest’s in-person meetings, teams work hard during each of the three meeting days, creating new software designs, but before they go off to dinner and Karaoke, they hold Lightning Rounds, which helps team members know each other. As Lita wisely notes, “The social makes the work easier, and work gives members something to talk and joke about around the dinner table.” Weekly team meetings at TechnipFMC involve catching up personally and working on organizational issues. These examples show us that the work environment is not lessened by another person being warmed by another’s smile. Nor is it less productive because a team member, who has a great sense of humor, cracks a joke about the ridiculousness of something the team has been trying and failing to do. There may be no better way to feel connected than laughing together.
Multiple Practices
Outside of work, you and your friends have many ways of staying connected - going to dinner, taking walks together, texting, having coffee at Starbucks, and watching videos – it is the same for work teams. It is not one practice they put into place, but multiple practices, some of which are initiated by the members themselves (the project matrix at TechnipFMC was suggested by the team members). Moreover, once a culture of caring and warmth is built, connection occurs spontaneously, as in TechnipFMC’s response to the death of Chris’s Grandmother. Likewise, SEEQC has three different meetings weekly to learn and connect.
Repeated Interaction
The practices in these organizations are not one-off events; they are activities embedded in how the team operates. Both learning and relationship grow through repeated interaction. As Taco said, “After four months,we are out of steam and have a loss of shared sense of direction.” - there is a need to meet again. Likewise, TechnipFMC’s monthly online “Working Out Loud” sessions build this continuity. If a team meets one time at a yearly retreat, relationships may be formed, but it is unlikely they will be sustained over a year. Even pleasant memories fade without a continuing opportunity to check in, offer aid, and share what is happening. Building connections works best if such interactions have a regular schedule. The teams at SEEQC have a regular schedule of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Naming the Practices
Giving a name to a practice, for example, “Working Out Loud,” “Lighting Rounds,” or “Team Check-ins,” is as essential as occurring regularly. A name suggests a deliberate practice the team has implemented for a valued goal: to keep us connected. SEEQC, calling itself a “Learning Organization,” names continual learning from each other as who they are.
Designed but not Facilitated
The practices in the examples above were designed; that is, an individual or group thought about how to create a meaningful experience for the team. But notably, none of the practices are facilitated. There is no leader or coordinator of “Working Out Loud” or “Book Discussions.” There is confidence that members know what they need to do to build meaningful relationships. As Pascal (1982) eloquently said, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”
Warmth and Caring are Contagious
Kindness is catching. When another is warm and welcoming to us, it is easy to reciprocate. And when we hear about another’s trouble, we want to let that person know they are not alone, that we also have experienced troubles – we know how they feel. When we have something to celebrate, we want to tell others about our success and see their faces light up with pleasure. When new members join a group like ProQuest or TechnipFMC, they quickly experience the group's acceptance and return it. At SEEQC, members are always willing to stop to explain something a colleague needs to understand.
Relationships and Learning are Intertwined
None of the activities described at ProqQuest, TechnipFMC, or SEEQC are unique to these organizations; many will already be familiar. What is perhaps worthy of note is the intention in these organizations to frequently and consistently engage in activities that help team members learn about each other and care about each other. Members of SEEQC express their care for others and belonging when they are willing to take the time to explain something to a colleague from another discipline. Humans are designed to be part of communities. Employees need to feel like they belong and know that they are part of something bigger than themselves. A sense of community is powerful in motivating employees to make the world a better place and put in their best work.
Posted at 05:28 PM in Effective Conversations | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Belonging, community, conversation, Murthy, Pfeffer, SEEQC, Solms, teams, TechnipFM, Well-being
This is the second of two posts on this topic. Here is a link to the first post.
In the previous post, I outlined why we need team members to experience more caring relationships, referencing Pfeffer in Dying for a Paycheck and Murthy in the US Surgeon General’s 2022 Report. Both Pfeffer and Murthy explain that stress and lack of social support in the current work environment harms employees’ health and well-being. Murthy suggests, “Organizational leaders, managers, supervisors, and workers alike have an unprecedented opportunity to examine the role of work in our lives and explore ways to better enable all workers to thrive within the workplace and beyond.” This post focuses on the kind of practices that need to be put into place to move from the current harmful culture to a culture of inclusion and belonging.
An organization's culture is created in the conversations between its members. For that culture to change, those conversations have to change. All conversations contain two messages; one is the content, and the second is the regard in which each speaker holds the other, or in other words, the nature of their relationship, as perceived by each speaker. This second message is revealed through body language, eye contact, gesture, and tone. Although often unintentional, each speaker sends one of many hundreds of messages that may be negative or positive, e.g., feeling superior to the other, enjoyment in the other’s companionship, deference toward the other, viewing the other as a resource or tool rather than a human being, feeling a sense of trust, respect for another’s knowledge, pleasure in seeing the other, and many more. Just reading the list probably recalls your feelings from past conversations. That underlying message is difficult to fake, so regardless of how carefully the words are constructed, we experience the underlying message. I’m not suggesting we be more careful about the messages we inadvertently send; instead, I’m suggesting that if we heal our organizations and create more caring and compassionate relationships, our unintentional messages will be congruent with our spoken words.
Teams are the place to begin to change an organization’s culture because it is where most of our work conversations occur. And teams are the place to start because a team can establish a culture of warmth and acceptance regardless of an organization's overall culture. Even so, team culture is just a start; what is needed is for the culture of the whole organization to move from being transactional to being more relational and for all members of an organization to care for the whole. We will come to that later, but as change begins with teams, we start there.
To change the culture, teams need to design and put into place practices that engender a sense of well-being and belonging among team members. In this post, I describe the practices of two very different teams and, drawing on their examples, suggest the design elements of practices that build team relationships. I focus on the design elements because my intent is not to suggest you copy these specific practices but to provide guidance for creating practices that will work for your team.
Given that you have already met some of the team members of TechnipFMC in an earlier post, I start with some of their practices. Most of the twelve team members are located in Houston, but several are in other countries. The team is divided into three sub-teams, each responsible for one or more specific products. However, each team member is also a member of a second team, creating a complicated matrix of product teams. Being matrixed gives each team insight into what other product teams are doing, increasing the possibility of collaboartion and pollination across teams. Each product team holds weekly meetings to coordinate the projects they’re working on. And they’re intentional about taking the time to catch up on each other’s personal lives at the start of each meeting. A second practice occurs once a month when all twelve members engage in an online “Working Out Loud” session for 24-48 hours. Each team member logs into the WOL session to share what they are currently working on as well as social items for example, who has a new dog, is getting married or has viewed a fascinating new video. And, of course, team members comment on each other’s messages. Another practice the whole team regularly engages in is team development activities, for example, everyone reading the same book and then holding discussions about it or the entire group taking a personality inventory and then talking through the results. Such activities help team members share the same language, learn about each other, and grow their relationships.
The second example from a few years ago is ProQuest, a team whose members were scattered from San Diego to Amsterdam, and all worked remotely. The team of 30 software engineers was comprised of programmers, analysts, product managers, and designers in ProQuest’s research solutions division. The whole group met face-to-face three times a year for a three-day Summit.
Putting together a summit took a lot of planning, most of which fell on the shoulders of Taco Ekkel, the team lead. He explains, “We have learned that it’s important to invest in preparing for the Summit. Before the Summit, the whole team brainstorms, “What do we want to discuss? What are the larger things that will come up in the next four months? What sessions we should have? What needs to be whiteboarded?” Most Summits are held either in New York, San Diego, or Amsterdam. On the morning of the first day, the meeting starts with an overview by senior management, providing updates about the business context, finance, sales, and new products. Then the group breaks out into work teams for the first sessions. Each work team’s task is to create the designs for the new products, which that team will then create over the next four months. At the Summit, each team meets around a whiteboard where members sketch out how a new feature will function. Once an idea is diagrammed on the whiteboard, it belongs to everyone in the room. Anyone is free to jump up, often with an eraser in hand, to make a change – and of course, what is added is just as easily changed again by another. The whole group reconvenes around 4:00. All the whiteboards are rolled into the main room, and each team uses its whiteboard to show what features it worked on and how each was solved. The last item on the daily agenda is Lightening Talks. As Lita, a team member, comments, “Lightening talks are voluntary. Different team members talk about what they think is neat or interesting, for example, ‘I programmed in some different language’ or ‘I thought of a different kind of identifier for people.’ Each person is given 5 minutes.” A large clock is displayed with a loud buzzer that sounds when time is up and a lot of laughter when the speaker has to be pulled off with the “hook” when he goes over the allotted time. There are typically five or six Lightening Talks at the end of each day – no more than 30 minutes. Taco notes, “We stop at
five and will be at the bar at 5:30 because the work is intense in the sessions, and the energy of everybody is depleted.” The evening social time is as much a part of the Summit as the sessions, strengthening relationships and trust. Team member Jason says, “My favorite part is the time after the meetings over drinks and dinner, a time to be more social. A lot of times, you're not talking about exactly what happened in the meeting, but you get an idea of how people are about different things. You hear about people’s families." Lita adds, “It is easier for me to talk with them about a work issue if I know something about them personally.”
On the two additional days of the Summit, each team continues to design the features they will be working on over the next four months, and in the evening, continues the merriment. Initially, the group met four times a year, but then realized that often they had not finished what they had discussed in the last Summit. So over time, they moved to three times a year. However, Taco explains, “After four months, we are out of steam and have a loss of shared sense of direction." So for the ProQuest team coming together for three days, every four months seemed the most effective frequency.
In between Summits, team members constantly communicated with each other using various forms of social media, including chat, Trello, and Flowdock. In addition, each team held a daily 15-minute “stand-up” meeting.
So what can these two examples tell us about how to go about building relationships within teams? They illustrate that there is no right way to create warmth and caring in a team setting. There are as many variations in how organizations help members care for each other as there are organizations. We can conclude that no set of practices will fit every organization. But what we can take away are some basic rules of thumb.
Work and Social Can Be Intermingled It is unnecessary to draw a sharp line between work and social or try to make sure they are separated. Work and social support each other. For example, at Proquest’s in-person meetings, teams work hard each day creating new software designs, but before they go off to dinner and Karaoke, they hold Lightning Rounds. As Lita wisely notes, “the social makes the work easier, and work gives members something to talk and joke about around the dinner table.” Weekly team meetings at TechnipFMC are about catching up personally and working on organizational issues. These examples show us that the work environment is not lessened by another person being warmed by your smile. Nor is it less productive because a team member, who has a great sense of humor, cracks a joke about the ridiculousness of something the team has been trying and failing to do. There may be no better way to feel connected than laughing together.
Multiple Practices Outside of work, you and your friends have many ways of staying connected - going to dinner, taking walks together, texting, having coffee at Starbucks, watching videos – it’s the same with the members of these teams. It’s not one practice they put into place, but multiple practices, some of which are initiated by the members themselves (that was so with the idea of the project matrix at TechnipFMC). Moreover, once a culture of caring and warmth is built, connection occurs spontaneously, as in TechnipFMC’s response to the death of Chris’s Grandmother, described in the earlier post.
Repeated Interaction The social practices in these organizations are not one-off events; they are activities embedded in how the team operates. Relationships grow through repeated interactions. As Taco said, “After four months, we are out of steam and have a loss of shared sense of direction.” - there is a need to meet again. Likewise, TechnipFMC’s monthly online “Working Out Loud” sessions build this continuity. If a team meets one time at a yearly retreat, relationships may be formed, but it is unlikely they will be sustained over time. Even pleasant memories fade without a continuing opportunity to check in, offer aid, and share what is happening. Building connections works best if such interactions have a regular schedule.
Naming the Practices Giving a name to a practice, for example, “Working Out Loud,” “Lighting Rounds,” or “Team Check-ins,” is as essential as occurring regularly. A name suggests a deliberate practice the team has put in place for a valued goal: to keep us connected.
Designed but not Facilitated The practices in the examples above were designed; that is, an individual or group thought about how to create a meaningful experience for the team. But notably, none of the practices are facilitated. There is no leader or coordinator of “Working Out Loud” or “Book Discussions.” There is confidence that members know what they need to do to build meaningful relationships. As Pascal so eloquently said, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by reason, but by the heart.”
None of the activities cited above are unique to these organizations; many will already be familiar to the reader. What is perhaps worthy of note is the intention in these organizations to frequently and consistently engage in activities that both help team members learn about each other and care about each other.
Posted at 02:44 PM in Effective Conversations , conversation | Permalink | Comments (0)
We are a specie that, by our nature, cooperate and collaborate - it is built into our genes. Mark Solms, a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, explains that, just as we have a fight/flight response in our brains for our protection, our brains also have instinctual dispositions that are pro-social - there to ensure we build connections with others. Those pro-social instincts include attachment bonding, nurturing, and, perhaps surprisingly, play.
Prosocial instincts are built into our brains because, as human beings, we need the help of others to survive and flourish, not only in childhood but also as adults. We have long known that infants will die if they are not picked up and cuddled, regardless of how well-fed they are. Adults also have a physiological need for caring and compassion. For example, a nurse touching their hand will lower the blood pressure of adults when they are in stressful situations, such as a relative in a hospital waiting room. Likewise, having a colleague or friend express concern when they see we are troubled decreases our release of cortisol, the chemical our adrenal glands produce that increases blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and slams our digestion to a halt. How amazing that experiencing a heartfelt connection with another reduces the release of harmful cortisol! These pro-social instincts of attachment bonding and nurturing are not just that “I want to be looked after and cared for” but also “I want to look after and care for others.” Our brains are hard-wired for both giving and receiving compassion.
Given that we spend a significant part of our lives within a work environment, it is vitally important that our work environment provides us opportunities for the attachment bonding that Solms tells us we require. Or in layperson's terms, we need to feel valued, cared for, and appreciated in our workplaces, whether that work is online, in an office, a hospital, a call center, or preparing and serving food.
The US Surgeon General Report, released in 2022, calls attention to the health issues resulting from workplace stress. “Stress can increase one’s vulnerability to infection, the risk for diabetes, and the risk for other chronic health conditions. The report lists five essentials for workplace mental health and well-being, one of which is Connection and Community. It explains the first task for organizations is to create cultures of inclusion and belonging. “Belonging is the feeling of being an accepted member of a group, or of connectedness given one’s interpersonal relationships. Prosocial behavior promotes positive social relationships through welcoming, helping, and reassuring others.”
In his book “Dying for a Paycheck,” written before the pandemic, Pfeffer documents the health consequences of not experiencing attachment bonding in our workplaces. Among other statistics he reports are that 28,000 deaths yearly are due to stress from overwork, lack of job control, and the absence of social support in the workplace. He says, “For men, prolonged exposure to work-related stress has been linked to an increased likelihood of lung, colon, rectal, and stomach cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.” “The American Institute of Stress reported that a staggering 80 percent of Americans experience regular stress at work.”
In our attempt to be effective and efficient in organizations, we have bound up our conversation with each other, limited it, and reduced its power. Too often, we exclude expressions of care and welcome from our vocabulary, viewing them as inappropriate to a work environment and leaving us with only formulaic responses that are empty of warmth and caring.
Teams offer the greatest opportunity for restoring connection in organizations. Teams are small enough that, given the opportunity, members can build warm and loving relationships with each other. But accomplishing that requires setting aside time for team members to learn about each other. The reality is that I can’t support you, or you me, unless we know enough about each other to recognize our mutual needs and gifts. Building relationships requires not just one but repeated interactions between team members. We learn to “know” each other by being in conversation over time. It is, of course, not just the words we say in conversation that builds relationship with another. It is also our tone of voice, our eyes lighting up with warmth, smiles, the level of attention we grant the other, and even the periods of silence while we absorb what another has said rather than rushing to respond with a counter position. We, of course, all know how to do this; it’s just that in too many of our organizations, we think we shouldn’t,
I’ve had the opportunity to work with many organizations where team members visibly care for and support each other. In another post, I might describe many of the “techniques” organizations use to build those relationships among team members. But for now, I just want to illustrate what warm, authentic relationships in a team can look like. The following are quotes from interviews I conducted with the team that Kim Glover leads at TechnipFMC.
Chris (Scotland) -I lost my grandmother a few weeks ago, and every single person sent me messages and not just a message to say, "I'm sorry to hear,” but "how are you today?" And then after the funeral, "How was the funeral?" "How are you feeling?" "Is there anything I can do?" So we're a very close team, even despite the fact that we're thousands of miles away.
Victor (Brazil) - In a session I was running from Brazil, I forgot to set up a specific access for the session. Tom-Erik in Norway and Taras in Russia always joined early. When Tom-Erik, tried to join, he couldn’t get in. Then Taras saw the problem and helped him get in. When everyone was finally online, Tom-Erik said, ‘I had a problem accessing the session because the different technology access wasn’t working.’ He didn’t say, ‘Victor did this the wrong way.’ No, he just shared what happened. For the team, this way of talking is normal. They didn’t attack me. Here in Brazil, these kinds of things are always personal. They would have said, ‘Victor really messed up!’
Brian (Houston) -One thing that we've done on this team is make it feel like a family. Like friends. Because then you're able to really, really start communicating.
Stacy (Houston)- What I really like about this team is we work hard, and we play hard too. We get along with each other. We nurture and support each other. There's a cohesiveness that goes beyond just getting your work done because if you work with someone not knowing anything about them, it's very sterile. When you work with people that you’ve developed a bond with, then when hard issues come up, the communication flows more easily because you have that bond and that relationship.
It’s a strength, not a weakness, to want the teams we work on to express goodwill and support for each other.
I haven’t made any claims in this post that building warm relationships within a team will improve the bottom line. But, I know that’s not the reason for building caring relationships within our teams. The reason is that feeling valued and appreciated helps us all have better lives and live longer.
What would it take for your team to be a place where you feel valued, cared for, appreciated, and cherished?
Posted at 03:13 PM in Being Helpful , Effective Conversations | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: care, Pfeffer, pro-social instincts, relationships, Surgeon General Report, Teams, work stress
The Covid worldwide epidemic has caused me to reflect on the societal changes that followed the Black Plague in the 1300s. That plague killed 75—200 million people, a third of Europe’s population. Between the Black Plague and the Great Famine that occurred approximately 20 years earlier, it is estimated that by the 14th century, the world population was reduced from 474 million to 350-375 million. The European social and political system at that time was feudalism, in which the King rewarded nobles and knights for their loyalty by granting them land (fiefs) as well as control over the vassals or serfs who lived on the land.
The plague, which indiscriminately killed nobles and peasants alike, brought into question the prevailing belief that God had given royalty the right to rule. Following the plague, there were religious, social, and economic upheavals. The plague created vast labor shortages freeing the serfs to leave their Lords' lands to seek wages elsewhere. Land, which had been the primary source of wealth for the noble class, was now worthless without the free labor of serfs to till the land. A middle class of commoners arose, who enjoyed greater freedom than the serfs had experienced. They became craftsmen and merchants, and their travels both spread and grew the existing knowledge. These changes laid the foundations for the fall of feudalism over the subsequent 100 years and the rise of a capitalist market economy. From this perspective, the Black Plague did not cause subsequent societal changes. Rather, the shift in the foundational beliefs that had held the feudal system in place caused its downfall. It was a change in mindset that led to the Renaissance.
With this recognition that crises can be a catalyst to reject existing societal ideas, I am reflecting on the possible mindsets that could be altered after Covid. The World Health Organization estimates that Covid has killed 6 million people worldwide and is not yet over. I am particularly interested in changes that may occur in the working life of people. The US has a culture where:
With the pandemic still active, it is not yet possible to predict what far-reaching societal changes may occur. Still, recent surveys suggest potential changes:
With growing new mindsets about work and the advent of technology that opens information to not just a privileged few but to all employees, it is possible to envision more equitable and innovative forms of organizing. We have already seen a rise in organizations that are more decentralized, democratic, networked, and collaborative. Digital platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, and Upwork have allowed a larger pool of workers to be directly matched with consumers. A greater variation in what it means to “work,” manifested in the deconstruction of jobs and a 30% rise in the “gig” or freelance economy, suggests fewer long-term employment ties to organizations.
Is something occurring that is not so much a response to the death and loss we have experienced during this present-day plague but a kind of freedom from expectations we have placed on ourselves and perhaps now begin to recognize as self-deception?
Are we experiencing a release from the ideas that were binding us? Are we beginning to travel electronically, toward a new era, as the serfs of old once did?
Posted at 06:18 PM in Change Management | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Black Plague, Covid, crisis, deconstruction of jobs, gig, mindset change, remote work, work-life balance
The Hallways of Learning
Hallways are the places where some of our best conversations occur. Ask any conference attendee and you’re likely to hear the familiar comment, “The sessions were OK but I had some great hallway conversations.” The analogy of the hallway is a useful way to talk about how learning occurs in organizations.
Learning in organizations can be categorized into three types, only one of which happens in hallways. First, individuals use their experience and training to construct meaning for themselves. When individuals keep this meaning to themselves, rather than making it accessible to others, we can liken their learning to a Private Office. For example, imagine a field representative who installs and repairs the company’s product, and overtime, determines that a given part fails repeatedly under certain identifiable conditions. At this point, the field representative is constructing private meaning. Unless this private meeting is shared with others, the organization will not learn.
A second category of learning is that which occurs when individuals make their personal meaning available to others in the organization. This category is analogous to the Hallways of the organization where important exchanges take place. Hallways are places where ideas get tested against the thinking of others. As long is meaning is held privately, it is protected from the discovery that it may be wrong or limited in perspective. When it is made accessible to others, the data on which is based can be challenged and the reasoning and logic that led to the conclusions can be examined. Hallways are places were joint meaning is made. In other words, meaning it’s not just exchanged, it is constructed in the dialogue between organizational members.
Collective meaning is the third category of learning. It is the meaning that organizational members hold in common. Collective meaning is like having a Storeroom where the mementos of the past are kept. It is the glue that holds organizational members together and allows them to act in concert with each other. It provides a sense of belonging and community. Collective meaning saves the organization time. There is no need for lengthy discussions about those issues that organizational members are all in agreement about – time can be spent on more critical issues. The meaning in the Storeroom can, however, have a negative impact on the organization. In a rapidly changing world, collective meaning that was advantageous at one point in time may have become obsolete, yet may prove difficult to change.
Hallways are the only space where it is possible for an organization to learn. It cannot learn in the Private Offices, although individual learning can certainly take place there. It cannot learn in the Storeroom, where it is only possible to affirm what is already known. If organizations are going to learn, they will need to construct Hallways in which the in-depth exploration of meaning can occur. The real hallways of our organizations will not suffice for the level of organizational learning that is necessary. Rather, organizations to need to develop processes that have the positive characteristics of real hallways, yet are more focused and intentional.
Many organizations have developed processes that serve this Hallway function. Some are Knowledge Management processes, such as, After Action Reviews, Peer Assists, Communities of Practice, and Storytelling Circles. Others are whole system in the room processes such as Open Space Technology, Knowledge Cafes, and Appreciative Inquiry. Still others result from the rise of post-bureaucratic organizations that by design create more Hallway structures, for example self- managed teams, networked organizations, Holocracy, and Humanocracy to name a few. The frequency of such processes in organizations, which has grown rapidly over the last few years, attests to both the need for Hallways and ingenuity of organizations in creating new forms of collective learning.
Based on Dixon.N,Strategy & Leadership; Mar/Apr 1996; 24, 2; ABI/INFORM
Posted at 02:19 PM in Effective Conversations , How We Learn in Organizations | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: AAR, collective sensemaking, CoP, Holocracy, humanocracy, knowledge cafe, Peer Assist, post-bureaucratic , self-managed teams, shared learning, storytelling circles
In our organizations, there's a lot of hype and confusion about how to access expert tacit knowledge. We want to get hold of that knowledge so we can innovate and solve problems faster and more effectively. Everyone has seen the iceberg image that depicts the vast amount of tacit knowledge below the waterline, and we're hungry to make use of that wealth of knowledge. The iceberg is an accurate image in that it shows a much greater proportion of tacit knowledge than an individual's explicit knowledge. But the appearance is deceptive in that it depicts tacit knowledge as residing in a large storage area, like a structure that's somewhere in our brains. The reality is that our tacit knowledge is more like LEGOS scattered across the living room floor. Our tacit knowledge is made up of many bits and pieces located in different places in our brain - related to different experiences we've had, some of which might have occurred a long time ago. They're not connected to each other and are relatively dormant until they get activated by a problem or idea. That's why experts don't respond
very effectively to the request to "Tell me everything you know about X." The expert has no problem to trigger those connections. Nevertheless, we're fascinated when an expert facing a problem reaches deep and pulls out an idea that "just might work" in response to a puzzling situation. We'd like to transfer that deep knowledge to others.
A second characteristic of tacit knowledge is that there's something very personal about it. We've worked hard to gain the knowledge we have, and it's precious to us - a source of pride and ownership. One study* found that employees distinguish between tangible information such as written documents or computer programs and intangible information embodied in human memory. The former they see as belonging to the company, while the latter they see as part of themselves, directly reflecting on their identity and self-worth. The study showed that we're not likely to share that knowledge unless we know it will be respected and appreciated.
Think about what you know about being a good facilitator or a good leader. Much of that knowledge came from experience. It's not just a list of practices that you've learned; it's something that's now part of you, that resides not only in what you do but in who you are. The Center for Creative Leadership conducted a now-famous study** to determine how outstanding executives gained their knowledge. Not unsurprisingly, only 10% of that knowledge came from training. A larger 20% came from relationships, that is, from working for an outstanding manager, likewise working under a really poor manager. But a whopping 70% came from experience, that is, a start-up for which they were responsible or taking the lead of a challenging project. It came from trying out things, stumbling, succeeding, and sometimes figuring out the hard way what not to do. If you asked one of those executives to say what they knew about being good at their job, they could probably tick off a number of items. And if you said, "Ok, is that it?" It's likely they would say, "No, there's a great deal more, but it's more of an attitude or a way of interacting that I just don't have words to explain" - that's tacit knowledge.
So can you transfer tacit knowledge to others?
Yes! It's possible to transfer some of what a person knows; after all, that's what apprenticeship is all about. Medical students do "rounds" with a senior physician, and student teachers spend a semester with an experienced teacher. The best way to transfer tacit knowledge is to put people together over a period of time, so they can observe, ask questions, try things out and get corrections. (I've written about some systematic ways to do that) So, yes, you can transfer some of a person's tacit knowledge, but it takes time, not just days, but weeks and months. Can you transfer all of the tacit knowledge an expert has? Sorry, no.
But, it's important to remember that someone doesn't have to learn all of the knowledge that an expert has because it's quite likely that many employees, within a given practice or subject area, already know 80-90% of what the expert knows. What they're after is that last small percent. In that sense, if an organization wants to "transfer" the knowledge of an expert that is leaving the organization, it's best to partner the expert with someone that already has a great deal of knowledge, a "nextpert," and to do so well before the expert is going to leave. That doesn't mean the "nextpert" has to be with the expert every moment; the "nextpert" can plan to join the expert when he or she is working on particularly challenging problems.
Another way to think about using tacit knowledge, and perhaps a more realistic way in the long term, is lateral transfer. It's not just experts that have tacit knowledge; all of us have a great deal of unique tacit knowledge born out of our life and work experience. The question is how to trigger that knowledge for innovation and problem solving. One of the most effective ways is to create diverse teams; members from different cultures, disciplines, and work experiences. As they work together to find solutions, one team member may say something that triggers a piece of tacit knowledge I have, and I may be able to put those pieces together to come up with a novel idea. In other words, to make use of the tacit knowledge in an organization, create an environment where there is a rich and diverse supply of ideas within teams AND where the team members have enough time together to puzzle over the problem. The possibility of triggering tacit knowledge is significantly increased in a diverse group over a homogeneous group. That's probably why studies show that diverse teams are more innovative.*** Both time and diversity are critical components in making use of tacit knowledge across an organization.
One of my favorite examples of making use of cognitive diversity and time to solve problems was told to me by my mentor, Reg Revans. In the 1930's Reg was a doctoral student at the Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge. There he rubbed shoulders with the greatest scientific minds of the age. He studied under Rutherford and JJ Thomas, both considered fathers of nuclear physics. There were five Nobel prize winners (or physicists that would later become winners) at the Laboratory while Revans was a student there. John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton were working on the first nuclear particle accelerator, which allowed them to split the atom. Appleton was working to demonstrate the existence of a layer of the ionosphere that could reliably transmit radio waves. Sir Mark Oliphant pioneered the development of microwave radar and, of course, Rutherford himself, who would discover the structure of the atom.
Every Wednesday, there was an afternoon tea attended by the five Nobel Prize winners and a few lucky doctoral students. Rutherford had one rule for the afternoon tea, no one could speak about their successes. But they could raise issues about tricky problems they faced in their research, puzzles they had not been able to solve. The others would listen, ask questions and offer perspectives that the problem owner could not have thought of on his own. One afternoon, following a particularly long and difficult discussion, Reg recalled Rutherford remarking, "Well, gentlemen, what has impressed me most these last few hours is the extent of my own ignorance... What does yours look like to you?"
There are several important lessons I learned from hearing Revans tell that story many times:
Out of that experience, Revans developed a process much like what he had participated in at Cambridge. He called it Action Learning, where small groups of employees/managers from across an organization met every few weeks to help each other with problems they were facing. And it works, just as it did for the Nobel prize winners. If you want to know more about Action Learning or the other processes that make use of tacit knowledge, give me a shout at [email protected].
References
*Constant, D., Kiesler, S., and Sproull, L. 1994. 'What's mine is ours, or is it? A study of attitudes about information sharing'. Information Systems Research, 5:4, 400−421.
**McCall, M. Lombardo, M. et al. 1988. Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job, Center for Creative Leadership.
***Rock, D., Grant, H. 2016 "Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter." HBR November 04, 2016
Posted at 12:52 PM in Effective Conversations , Sharing Tacit Knowledge | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: action learning, diverse teams, knowledge sharing, nextpert, Tacit, transferring expert knowledge
When organizations face adaptive challenges that are complex and unpredictable, the people who have ideas vital to dealing with the issues are those whose work is impacted by the challenge. They know the subtleties of the process and hold the tacit knowledge of how it works and therefore how it will have to be adapted or reinvented to meet the new realities. The leader’s task, when faced with such a challenge, is not to make sense of it for that group, rather it’s to create a forum where it’s possible for those involved in the work to do the sensemaking for themselves. No one can make sense for someone else.
There are four types of conversations that are broadly applicable to any situation, and that are especially necessary for harnessing a group’s thinking during adaptive challenges: 1) conversations for relationship-building, 2) conversations for mutual understanding, 3) conversations for possibilities, and 4) conversations for action.
We are using the term “conversation” to mean,
the interaction that occurs when each person is actively working to understand the meaning the other is trying to convey.
Although each of us can recall times when we’ve engaged in that kind of mutual and authentic exchange, it only rarely happens inside of organizations. Organizational meetings too often seem to be opportunities for each person to make declarative and politic statements about their own position, with little interest in trying to understand the meaning others intend to convey. To convene a conversation rather than the typical meeting requires that the leader act as a conversation architect. The first task of the leader/architect is to determine which type of conversation is required at any particular juncture.
Conversations for Relationship-Building
Until those invited into the conversation have built a sense of psychological safety with each other, serious work on the issue will not take place. Rather people will tend to speak in general terms, rely on clichés, give voice only to what it seems safe to say and withhold any information that might possibly embarrass themselves or others. In other words, only a small part of the knowledge available in the room will be spoken. To break through that caution, the leader/convener has to create the opportunity for people to learn about each other – a relationship-building conversation.
In this context, a relationship-building conversation is often a conversation about the meaning of the task or work for those brought together in conversation. The question the leader poses to the group to initiate such a conversation, draws on the adaptive challenge, rather than being in the nature of an icebreaker. For example, if the challenge is about the difficulty of teams working virtually, each person might be asked to describe a time when they felt most effective as a part of a team. Such a question allows others to hear about what is valued or important to that individual. Through these conversations, held as a series of small groups, members discover their mutual interests and identify areas of expertise and experience. In this way a relationship of trust and mutual respect is built, and the group establishes a sound understanding of the assets and resources it brings the adaptive challenge.
Conversations for Mutual Understanding
Conversations for Mutual Understanding are the conversations we hold to make sense of what we know – to create meaning out of a mess of unstructured data and information. That involves exploring and uncovering each other’s perspectives, reasoning, and ideas about the topic. Weick* says
“...the same event means different things to different people, and more information will not help them. What will help them is a setting where they can argue, using rich data pulled from a variety of media, to construct fresh frameworks of action-outcome linkages that include their multiple interpretations. The variety of data needed to pull off this difficult task are most available in variants of the face to face meeting.”
The Conversation for Mutual Understanding is required before individuals can align, decide, and coordinate effectively. COL Lee Shiang Long, Head of Joint Communication and Information Systems Department (JCISD) for the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), describes a practice that senior leadership use consistently. Two conversations are held, often in two different settings. The first of the two is held in the form of planning seminars and workshops for mutual understanding. Here the officers are trying to understand the situation, not to persuade others to their point of view. Everyone in this conversation speaks as an equal in trying to make sense of he complexity. Subsequently, a second meeting is held in the form of decision forums, where decisions are made about the issue under discussion. The physical separation of the two meetings ensures that one does not spill over into the other. Without such separation it is all too easy for a group to move towards a decision before all the valid information is considered.
As Abigail Adams said long ago, “Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended with diligence.”
Conversations for Possibilities
By their very nature, adaptive challenges require learning and innovation for resolution. Conversations for Possibilities are those conversations in which we release ourselves to create and innovate, opening up pathways to a future beyond what already exists, rather than a perpetuation of the past. These are forward-focused, transformational conversations that must eventually root themselves in reality, but not before we’ve entertained scenarios unfettered by our current assumptions. At the essence of these conversations is the belief that creativity is a conversational phenomenon, not dependent upon a few inherently creative individuals.
The best Conversations for Possibilities are those in which the group:
- has a common understanding of a minimal set of givens and non-negotiables so that their conversation has necessary boundaries;
- entertains ideas of various scale, allowing the possibility of small moves creating big impacts;
- has enough time to conduct multiple rounds of idea generation, which creates richer ground for true assumption-busting, innovation, and learning. Mark Twain had it right when he said, “If you want to have a good idea, have a lot of them.”
Conversations for Action
Conversations for Action generate decisions, commitments, and coordinated actions with others. They are the most frequent conversations held in organizations. In fact they are often the only type of conversation held - the default conversation.
Conversations for Action may include discussions of feasibility; establishment of deadlines; requests and offers between individuals or groups; specific commitments; decisions and measures of success; and how fine-tuning a decision will happen. The wealth of action planning and decision making tools available speaks to our struggle to be as explicit and structured as this conversation usually requires.
In fact these conversations often fall short because the commitment or decision is not clear or publicly owned by a group or individual. A nod of the head in agreement is one thing, but publicly acknowledging the actions each member will take to support the group decision helps to move the group from lip service that too often occurs, to considered thinking about what it will take to make it happen.
• Goldberg, M. The Art of the Question, 1998, Wiley.
• Weick, K. Sensemaking in Organizations 1995, Sage.
• The title headings of “Conversations for Possibilities” and “Conversations for Action” are reflective of Fernando Flores work
Posted at 02:36 PM in Effective Conversations | Permalink | Comments (2)
As we return to normal, there seems to be general agreement that organizations need to take a hybrid approach to work. But how that hybrid is designed can make all the difference. In planning how to return to work, leaders are faced with balancing issues related to: 1) employee preference for managing their work life balance, 2) the potential of reducing the cost of office space, 3) concerns about what increased commuting will do to the environment, and 4) the need to rebuild a sense of belonging among team members.
The first three issues can be addressed by implementing a policy that requires employees to be in the office only a couple of days each week, and giving them the choice of which days. But addressing the fourth issue, rebuilding a sense of belonging within teams, requires that all the members of a team periodically come together face-to-face. That coming together might occur every other week, once a month, or even once a quarter, depending on the level of the team's task interdependence. The face-to-face time might be for three days or for the whole week, but as we have learned through conducting retreats and other meaningful group interactions, three days is the minimum needed to build and renew relationships after a period of being apart.
Rebuilding a sense of belonging, involves the careful design of the activities that occur when the team is together. While working from home, all of us have missed the feeling of connection and friendship that is so difficult to maintain when we are limited to a technology connection. As good as our technology is, we find ourselves anxious to get off the computer at the end of a virtual meeting, rather than staying on to catch up, as we would at a face-to-face meeting. In the workplace, it is the hallway conversations that sustain our relationships as we talk with each other about family, vacations, sports, and all the other commonalities that unite us. It is noticing others in the lunchroom, on the staircase, passing by an office, and stopping for a brief chat - all those chance meetings that keep us feeling like we are part of a team.
Hallowell names these encounters human moments, "an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space." A human moment requires both physical presence and emotional and intellectual attention.
Equally important, we need time to think together about the work we are doing, to tell each other what happened at the last client meeting or why we believe the new policy is too limiting. We need time to correct minor misunderstandings between team members, so they don't grow into big ones. We've all experienced the mix-ups that are so ubiquitous to email, as well as how easily those mix-ups are dispelled when we see the other coming down the hall with a big smile on their face, clearly pleased to see us. High tech requires high touch! The deeper we move into the use of technology, the more we need to be intentional about designing ways to retain touch that comes from human moments. Weick explains that an organization's culture is formed in the everyday conversations we have. We need face-to-face time to engage in those conversations, which are the rock bed of a culture.
When we are together that "week" in the office, we need to set aside time to have pizza lunches with the whole team, to celebrate accomplishments, to express appreciation for each other. We also need that time to plan together and to jointly solve problems that the team is facing. Google’s Project Aristotle found personalized relationships were the most salient characteristic of its highest-performing teams. Co-location, even temporary co-location, makes personalized relationships possible.
The task of renewing relationship during our time together is facilitated by modifying the design of our work spaces. It makes no sense for workers to come together only to have them sitting in a cubicle in front of their computers – they could have just as easily done that remotely. Instead, team members need welcoming, informal spaces where small groupings can think together and larger spaces where the whole team can circle their chairs to address a difficult issue, where food and drink are readily at hand, and where both serious and playful activities can take place.
If we think carefully about what we want to accomplish when we bring people back to the office, we can design 21st-century work and workplaces that take advantage of what we have learned about getting work done virtually and what we know about what teams need to be successful.
Posted at 01:53 PM in conversation | Permalink | Comments (0)
This blog post is the fourth in a series of posts on dialogue. In the first, “The Most Important Knowledge KM is Ignoring,” I explain that the way we talk in organizations too often prevents us from solving the most challenging problems we face. In the second, “An Organization That Changed Its Culture by Implementing Dialogue,” I offer a brief case study of an organization, The Virginia Department of Corrections, that has implemented dialogue at every level. In the third post, "The Promise of Dialogue" I spell out the promise that dialogue holds and list the attributes of dialogue. In this post, I define the underlying beliefs and structures/processes that need to be in place to bring about that promise.
It is not difficult to bring a group of people together to hold a dialogue. If skillfully facilitated, such a convening will significantly benefit individuals by providing them with a way to examine and perhaps challenge their assumptions, including their beliefs about individuals or groups they have previously defined as "other." ("Others" are people whose belief systems are viewed as incomprehensible, and thus individuals within that group are likely to be labeled as ignorant or self-serving.) A modification in beliefs about "others" may not happen in one meeting. However, through a series of such meetings, participants can quiet their inner voice enough to hear others, to acknowledge the truth in what others are saying and feeling, even when they disagree, and to listen to the questions that arise in their minds in response to what others are saying (Bohm).
It is also not difficult to bring a group together in dialogue, whether a training class or an organizational unit. Dialogue can help the group uncover assumptions they make about their own unit and those who work in different parts of the organization (e.g., management, engineering, finance) and strengthen the relationships between the parts that meet together. Over time, dialogue can become the way that members of a unit or group interact with each other, that is, listening to each other, speaking their own truth, and examining their own thinking process. However, even this will have a negligible impact on the organization as a whole.
Transforming a whole organization's culture to be dialogic is difficult because an organization's culture is created through the ongoing exchange of ideas and beliefs that occurs daily among all of its members. Although managers might like to think it is they that shape the culture, it is the everyday conversations that establish the culture and, therefore, would need to evolve for an organization to be dialogic. "An organization's results are determined through webs of human commitments, born in webs of human conversation." (Flores) Changing those everyday conversations necessitates that both those in leadership positions and employees 1) hold a set of underlying beliefs congruent with dialogue and 2) that they put in place structures and practices that support dialogue.
Underlying Beliefs.
As we do not have a term in English that means both workers and management, I use the term "members" in the following list to connote both. The underlying beliefs that support a dialogic organization include:
All members may not hold such beliefs initially, but as the beliefs are lived out through an organization's dialogic processes, they are confirmed in members' minds. Likewise, changing the beliefs of members can alter an organization's processes and structures.
Organizational structures/processes that facilitate dialogue:
The following structures/processes support the underlying beliefs that members hold in a dialogic organization. See the chart below to connect each of the structures to the corresponding belief.
Relationship of Beliefs to Structures/Processes
Underlying Beliefs | Organizational Structures/Processes |
Workforce members have the knowledge and wisdom to address an organization's adaptive challenges jointly |
|
Members have the will to act for the good of the whole |
|
All voices are equal; none are privileged by rank, level of expertise, gender, or race Everyone deserves to be spoken to with respect Everyone has a truth that has been developed through their life experience that should be respected, even if not agreed with |
|
It is a part of the human condition to make mistakes, and it is through openly speaking about mistakes that organizations learn from them |
|
The knowledge /information within an organization is transparent to all members |
|
The purpose of an organization includes a moral goal related to the well-being of members as well people within society at large and the environment in which all people function |
|
Organizational change is continuous rather than being a one-time event. Therefore an organization needs structures in place that allow it to sense the environment and to adapt continually |
|
Knowledge workers do not function well in hierarchical environments |
|
Posted at 02:46 PM in Effective Conversations , Change Management , Collective Intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: action learning, after action review, Coaching Ourselves, Dialogue, hierarchy, learning from mistakes , moral purpose, open books, Organization Change, positive interdependence, transparency, working out loud circle
This blog post is the third in a series of three. In the first, “The Most Important Knowledge KM is Ignoring,” I explain that the way we talk in organizations prevents us from solving the most challenging problems we face. In the second, “An Organization That Changed Its Culture by Implementing Dialogue,” I offer a brief case study of an organization that has implemented dialogue at every level. In this third post, I spell out the promise that dialogue holds.
In a world of increasing complexity, where there are no simple or obvious answers, dialogue brings a ray of hope to address the many troubling issues we face that do not lend themselves to resolution through scientific study or big data. In this post I am primarily focused on how dialogue can address our organizations’ adaptive issues, whether those organizations are for-profit, non-profit or governmental. Most of us spend as much as one-third of our lives inside an organization, so organizations must be places that promote well-being, including autonomy, mastery and purpose (Daniel Pink) of both employees and managers. Dialogue offers a pathway for organizations to achieve that goal by drawing on the understanding of all of its members to address the adaptive issues the organization faces.
The promise of dialogue is that if we can jointly make sense of the issues we face, we can find a way forward. Too often, when we come together to talk, we each arrive with our own ideas about how to address an issue, and much of our taking together is about convincing others that our view should prevail. Of course, the problem is that each of us has a limited perspective on any issue – limited to our own experience and knowledge base. When we can collectively make sense, new possibilities that no one could have conceived of on their own, emerge. Karl Weick once said “Small improvements in seeing can occur when individuals enlarge their personal repertoires of what they can do. But larger improvements in seeing should occur when people with more diverse skills, experience, and perspectives think together in a context of respectful interaction.”
Coming together in dialogue involves:
The list of attributes reveals that dialogue is about how we relate to others and our willingness to acknowledge our own limitations, including our blindness to our own assumptions and our unawareness of our implicit basis. I suggest that dialogue is not so much a difference in technique or skills as it is a difference in relationship and humility. I seriously question whether more technique is necessary. There is already a great deal of technique that relates to giving clear feedback, asking clarifying questions, sharing airtime, paraphrasing to check out what is understood, and so on. That is not to say that people always make use of the techniques that are available to them. But it is to say, that even when they do, using a technique may not change their intent to manipulate or control. People may have altered their words but not the nature of their relationship with others.
I acknowledge these seven attributes are a “big ask” of any group. They require each of us to take responsibility for how our organizations function. We accept that responsibility by creating opportunities for, and participating in dialogue, not just with those with whom we agree, but also with those with whom we disagree.
Posted at 01:11 PM in Effective Conversations , How We Learn in Organizations , Collective Intelligence, conversation | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: adaptive issues, assumptions, conversation, Dialogue, sensemaking, speaking up
In a previous post, The Most Important Knowledge KM is Ignoring, I suggested that implementing dialogue throughout an organization could change the culture to one where staff and management have more open and honest conversations with each other. In this post, I describe an organization, the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC), that has accomplished that goal.
VADOC has responsibility for 32,000 inmates and another 30,000 individuals that are in the parole and probation system. A staff of 12,000 work for VADOC in 46 facilities across Virginia.
Starting in 2012, a new Director of VADOC, Harold Clarke, was appointed. Over the next eight years, he implemented dialogue practices across all the facilities and at every level.
Being a dialogic organization has resulted in VADOC achieving the lowest recidivism rate in the United States at 23.4%. Recidivism is calculated as the percent of inmates that are reincarcerated within three years of their release. The average recidivism rate in the US is 42% and the highest over 60%.
In describing their work, VADOC staff often contrast how they work now, with before dialogue was implemented:
I’m one of old heads, I’ve been around a long time. Life in the department has completely changed since Director Clark came on. It’s hard to say this, but I feel safer going to work each day. I really appreciate dialogue. James Sayer, Corrections Sergeant
Not only has dialogue changed the way I work with my co-workers and with the folks I supervise, but also just learning dialogue skills has changed the way I associate with my family. I’m also a small business owner and through that, it is helping to change my community. I’m proud to be a part of this organization. Venus Laney, probation officer
I’ve been around corrections for 25 years, and I have embraced all the initiatives that Director Clarke has brought to the Department of Corrections. I have grown professionally by buying into those initiatives. And it has made me a better clinician and a better colleague working with others. I feel that it is helping the returning citizens (inmates) that I work with. Jennie Amison, Offender Workforce Development Specialist at the Community Corrections Alternative Program
Harold Clarke served as Director of the Corrections in Massachusetts, Washington, and Nebraska before being appointed as Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Corrections. In each state, he had experimented with implementing dialogue. By the time he came to Virginia, he had some very clear ideas about how to make dialogue work within an organization.
First, he recognized that dialogue had to start at the top, so he began by training the 28 members of his executive team in dialogue skills and then consistently using dialogue in his team’s monthly meetings. Over the next few years, he cascaded dialogue down through the layers of the organization, to unit heads, wardens, shift commanders, etc. until all staff at every level had been trained and, like the executive team, had processes in place to continue learning and practicing dialogue.
The major dialogue skills and actions that VADOC has implemented are the four dialogic practices that Bill Isaac’s identifies in his book Dialogue:
And the four Kantor conversation actions:
I have described these skills and actions simplistically here, but the dialogue training involves a much richer discussion of them as well as extended practice using them. VADOC has appointed 265 Dialogue Practitioners, who, in addition to their regular duties, take on this role. As a Dialogue Practitioner, their task is to continue the on-going learning of current staff as well as training new staff. Carrie West, who was recently appointed to a new role as VADOC Statewide Dialogue Coordinator, explains the benefits of dialogue from her perspective.
Having dialogue in the department has changed how people communicate with one another and how they handle situations. Once offenders understand that you’re listening to them, you give them the opportunity to voice or be a participant in our dialogue. It was eye-opening, especially to see dialogue come to fruition in the female facilities - listening to them participate and giving us their concerns. I’ve been in the department for a long period of time. Before we implemented dialogue, you were kind of, like the old saying goes, “Children are to be seen but not heard." I've seen that change. I’m appreciative of dialogue being incorporated into the department, and I’m glad to be a part of it.
Beyond the actions and practices listed above, several other concepts are taught, as are numerous processes that use dialogue. Harold Clarke explains “I see dialogue as a vessel into which we can place all of our challenges and thoughts, make sense of them and be able to communicate them to others effectively." Harold recognized that any new habits require practice to become ingrained, and any new process that isn’t reinforced will be lost. Two of the many dialogue processes put into place are Learning Teams and Working Dialogues, both regularly reinforce the skills and practices.
Learning teams – Every member of VADOC is assigned to a learning team, a small group of 10-15 employees from different units, that meet for an hour monthly to use real-life situations to practice dialogue. Staff concerns and any new policies from administration are discussed in these meetings. Concerns and suggested changes developed in Learning Teams flow back up the chain of command through the Dialogue Practitioners, who play in a role in facilitating learning teams, and supporting Working Dialogues.
Working Dialogues – Every unit holds two Working Dialogues a month to address issues and problems specific to that unit. There are three phases of a Working Dialogue:
Phase 1 - Dialogue to build a joint understanding of the Current Situation
Each participant answers each of the three questions on a scale of 1-10. If the combined score is below 8, the group examines the issue further or invites in missing voices.
Phase 2 – Dialogue to jointly create Desired Outcomes.
Phase 3 – Identify the changes required to get from the current situation to the desired outcome.
There are many other dialogue processes in place at VADOC, such as the Offenders Resettlement Journey, Threshold Meetings, Future Search, Check-ins, Dialogue Coaching for supervisors to ensure accountability, Leading Energies, in fact, too many to describe in this post. But all bring staff and sometimes offenders together in dialogue.
In his book, Dialogue, Isaacs suggests that dialogue should promote the True, the Good and the Beautiful. In introducing dialogue, Harold Clarke has held those ideals, if not the specific terms, in mind. A set of deeply held beliefs guide his use of dialogue:
Given his beliefs and long history of work in prison systems, Harold concluded that the staff, practicing dialogue regularly, could create a healing environment that would also provide staff and inmates with a way to hold each other accountable. That is, a way that staff could interact without having to hide mistakes or withhold information - where they could freely ask each other for help when they needed it, and where they could use all the knowledge of a team or unit to solve the many difficult problems that arise in a prison setting.
The words of Sergio Escobar, who is both a Records Manager and a Dialogic Practitioner, provide a strong validation that Harold is succeeding.
It’s funny how being a Dialogue Practitioner has opened so many doors within the institution. It is amazing that we have become not just Dialogue Practitioners but ambassadors of a safe container. People have come to me with things they don’t want everybody to know. In a safe container you are able to gather the information and pass it to where it needs to be passed on. It’s made VADOC a better place to work.
Posted at 02:35 PM in Effective Conversations , Change Management , conversation | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: culture change, dialogue, healing environment, Isaacs, Kantor, prison, psychological safety, recidivism, VADOC
David is a new member of a team of analysts in an intelligence agency. The team has been discussing the build-up of soldiers and weapons on the Southern border of an important country. The team is getting ready to send a report to the Pentagon about the build-up which will influence the decisions that Generals at the Pentagon might make. David has intelligence, from sources he used before joining the new team. His sources indicate that although there has been troop movement, it is not specific to the Southern border. The other team members are in agreement about the danger and are discussing the wording of the report. David says to himself, “I think they are wrong.” But being new, he feels he needs to be seen as a “team player.” So he keeps this contrary knowledge to himself.
The problem in this incident is that the team decides without all the available information. Another problem is that David feels uncomfortable about betraying himself by withholding what may be pertinent knowledge.
Melissa is a member of the HR team in a large organization. She has just received a memo from her boss, Sara, that asks Melissa to immediately initiate a recruitment process because of a new initiative that is being planned. After reading the memo, Melissa calls Sara to explain that there are already adequate names in the pipeline to draw from for the upcoming initiative without starting another costly recruitment drive. But Sara responds, “We can’t tell the big boss that he’s wrong, so go ahead and start the new recruitment process.”
The problem in this incident is that management does not get all the knowledge needed to make a decision that will cost the organization a considerable amount of money. It is also problematic because Melissa finds herself laboring over a task that she knows is not useful, which results in feelings of frustration and helplessness.
Such incidents may seem trivial, but my research shows that such actions are ubiquitous across all levels of organizations. They result in poor decision making due to the lack of accurate and full knowledge. The players in these incidents are, however, not intentionally being obstructive; instead, their behavior is the way that staff, and management alike, protect themselves and others from embarrassment and conflict and ensure that they are viewed favorably in the eyes of others. Argyris called such incidences "defensive routines". They are routines or patterns embedded in the culture of the organization. They are so much a part of the culture that employees lose the recognition and significance of their actions, writing them off as “just the way it is around here.” For example:
Defensive routines work, in the sense that they prevent embarrassment and conflict but in so doing they also prevent the organization from learning about challenges, which if faced directly, could lead to needed correction or new ways of thinking that could generate useful development.
Similarly, top management hides knowledge from staff. The recent revelation that the Pharma industry has been incentivizing doctors and pharmacist to promote opioids which they knew were addictive, and which resulted in thousands of deaths is an example. The VW emissions scandal is another example. It is hard to imagine that such actions, if openly discussed with staff, would not have been reconsidered. And there are undoubtedly many more such instances that are not so public.
Over the last 20 plus years, KM has been primarily concerned with the creation, maintenance, distribution, and access to organizational knowledge. KM has been much less concerned with the most critical knowledge problem organizations face, which is that at all levels, staff hide and distort knowledge from each other.
KM should also take responsibility for the quality and accuracy of the knowledge in the organizations they serve or at the least, for the reduction in behaviors that distort or hide knowledge. How to accomplish that is known, but not easy.
Just conducting training programs is not the answer because defensive routines are embedded in the culture, as evidenced by similar routines found at all levels of an organization. Those routines are so ubiquitous that they are largely invisible. Moreover, the problem is not a lack of skill; everyone knows how to say clearly what they mean and how to acknowledge their own mistakes. Rather, it is the culture of fear, protection, the competition to get ahead, game playing, and fragmentation that prevents accurate and full knowledge from reaching those who need it.
What KM needs to take responsibility for is changing the way people talk with each other. Organizations need to engage in two types of talking. The first is dialogue, a kind of talk where all the organizational members related to a specific organizational issue, think together about how they understand a problem and offer their different perspectives that bring fresh insights to the topic. The second is discussion, where those impacted by the issue make decisions about what actions to take based on their joint understanding. However, as noted in the incidents described above, discussion is often fraught with members withholding knowledge from each other and attempting to get their way by not fully saying what they mean.
Dialogue, where members do not try to solve a problem, rather work to understand the problem they are jointly facing, is a necessary precursor to discussion. Dialogue requires us to listen respectfully to others, cultivate and speak in our own voice, and suspend our opinions about others and their ideas. It is the precursor because until all members come to a common understanding of a problem, any discussion just becomes a power struggle. Dialogue is the precursor because it develops the needed relationships and trust between those who are talking together. And most importantly, it is the precursor because, over time, holding dialogues changes the culture of an organization to one in which, even when in discussion, it is possible to maintain trust and relationship with others.
For dialogue to change the way organizational members routinely talk to each other, it has to become the expected mindset at every level of the organization, e.g. "the way we do things around here".
There are organizations that have accomplished this, for example, The Decurion Corporation, a developer of theatre chains, Bill Isaacs’ work in South Asia, Harold Clarke’s work leading the Virginia Department of Corrections and my work with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Implementing dialogue across an organization is a big task, but one where KM could make a profound difference in the quality of knowledge in organizations.
Posted at 03:17 PM in Effective Conversations , Collective Intelligence, conversation | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Argyris, decision making, Decurion, defensive routines, dialogue, discussion, knowledge accuracy, knowledge management, speaking up, Virginia Department of Corrections
The most effective way you can increase the flow of knowledge across an organization is to connect organizational members to each other.
By connect I mean, “I know what you are currently working on and what problems you are facing” and you know that about me. It means, if I need help, I know what questions I might be able to ask you about. I also know how I might be able to help you, for example, when I come across something I know you are interested in.
I’ll give you a personal example. I have a good friend - we both like reading mysteries. I recently came across a great site. Here is how it works, if I type in the name of an author I like, the app generates a map of other authors that people, who also like that author I typed in, regularly read! I quickly sent my friend a link to the map.
You have to know what another person is interested in, to know what to share with them.
Connected also means there is a sense of trust between us, so that I know you will respond if I ask for help and that you won’t think less of me for not knowing the answer. The two main reasons employees give for not asking for help is 1) they don't want to bother the other, imagining they are too busy and will be irritated by the request, or 2) they don't want others to think they are not competent! Both reasons are less relevant when employees are connected because asking and sharing are ways to maintain the connection between people. It signals, I am aware of you and am interested in your success.
The short way to think of the strategy I am suggesting is, Connection before Content, that is, before you can exchange content productively, you need to have built a connection.
That is true at several levels in an organization. For example, at the level of a project team. Hackman, who is probably our greatest authority on teamwork, explains that before a project begins, the leader needs to bring the team members together – in person, when that is again possible. Hackman suggests pairing up team members and asking each to write out what they think the goal of the project is and then discuss what they wrote with each other, in order to come to some kind of agreement. Secondly, he has each one of the pair interview the other about what experience they bring to the project that will help the team reach their agreed upon goal. And finally he has each person introduce their partner to the rest of the team, explaining what skills and experience their partner brings. Team members need to know who has what knowledge if they are going to to make the best use of the team’s resources to solve problems. Connection before content.
It is equally true at the department level, where again each member needs to know both the tasks and the experience of their colleagues to work most effectively. One way department members can gain that knowledge is to start department meetings with a "check in" during which each members reports on what they are currently working on. That allows others to offer help, as well as, to coordinate. You may recognize this as an Agile practice of holding 15 minute morning meetings. Connection before content.
And it is true for a community, where there are lots of ways to build connections, e.g. “working out loud circles,” Communities of Practice, having robust profiles up, brown bag lunches, your department offering fresh coffee and donuts at 10 each morning for any department they need to stay connected with. Connection before content.
As we all know, relationships deteriorate over time if they are not renewed. So even if a group has met before, taking a few minutes before a meeting to reconnect reestablishes the relationships and trust that increases knowledge flow.
I realize that these examples raise the concern that one-to-one is a slow way to proceed and that we should be thinking about how to scale knowledge. But if every employee is engaged in one-to-one exchanges, then the whole organization is learning. Moreover, they are getting knowledge that pertains directly to their work, not something that they might possibly need to know sometime in the future.
The idea that you can scale knowledge sharing by posting something that everyone in the organization will learn from is a bit of an illusion, as The World Bank found out when they studied readership in 2014. The published report examined how frequently posted policy reports were downloaded or cited - not just by the 10,000 bank employees, but by everyone. About 13 percent of policy reports were downloaded at least 250 times while more than 31 percent of policy reports were never downloaded and almost 87 percent of policy reports were never cited. (Which World Bank Reports are Widely Read, Doerte Doemeland and James Trevino, 2014) Those numbers suggest that we should question the value of relying solely on publishing to share the organization's knowledge.
That said, every company needs to publish explicit knowledge like policies, SoPs, processes, etc. But if a company wants knowledge to reach employees when they need it, they need to focus on Connection before Content.
Posted at 12:47 PM in How We Learn in Organizations , conversation, Sharing Tacit Knowledge | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: CoP, Hackman, knowledge sharing, tacit knowledge, Team sharing, working out loud
We all decry the polarization that we currently observe on many issues, race, politics, guns, healthcare, climate, immigration. Columnists and scholars have produced reams of arguments intended to change the opinions of those on the opposing side. However, it is difficult not to conclude that rational argument, as important as it is, does not reduce polarization.
Both the failure and a possible solution lie in our understanding of implicit bias. Dewey names three core beliefs that result in polarization:
Kahneman (2011) explains two types of thinking our brain does. “System 1 is the brain's fast, emotional, unconscious thinking mode. This type of thinking requires little effort, but it is often error prone. Most everyday activities (like driving, talking, cleaning, etc.) make heavy use of the type 1 system. Type 2 system is slow, logical, effortful, conscious thought, where reason dominates.”
Implicit bias is based in System 1 thinking. Implicit refers to attitudes or stereotypes that impact our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious way, making them difficult to control. For example, I cannot choose to no longer associate penguins and ice in my mind. None of us intentionally built that association, but there it is. When you say “penguin,” I see a fat little upright black and white bird standing on ice, and no amount of telling me not to associate the two is going to work.
We all have implicit biases, many of which we are unaware. Those biases are different for each of us based on the part of the country we live in, family influences, peer associations, media influences, etc. We may hold biases related to any of a number of human characteristics, race, people in poverty, rich people, overweight people, short people, disabled, and so on. If you doubt that you are subject to implicit bias, go to implicit.harvard.edu and take the free tests to see how you score on any of those topics, and more.
So what to do?
The answer, according to Lauren Barthold, is dialogue. But for dialogue to address implicit bias takes several steps and only happens over time. The first step is a dialogue in which partners hear each other's first-person narratives, that is, listens to someone, who is on the opposite side of an issue, talk about their life and experiences, however, without talking about experiences that are associated with the issue on which they conflict. What hearing another person’s experiences does is humanize them, that is, we begin to see them as someone who is capable of reasoning, and who is even well-meaning. We can see similarities between ourselves and the other, for example, concern about children or care for the disabled. Kahneman explains that it is stories, not argument, that lie at the basis of our beliefs. He claims arguments are constructed “ex post facto” to support a belief that already exists.
Hearing another’s story allows us to see the other as more than a stereotype. Still, hearing first-person narratives alone will not remove implicit bias. But it is possible for those stories to result in smaller changes in our thinking. For example, one possible outcome is that the listener decides to be more aware of when “others” are not represented in a conversation or a meeting, and to act on that awareness. Another outcome might be the willingness to engage the "other" in a joint project, which provides the opportunity to get to know them more fully. Such actions, over time, can start to replace implicit associations with more recent and positive associations.
Another possible outcome of hearing first-person stories is an awareness that encourages us to modify the language we use in talking about “others.” Such a change might include using labels that would be preferred by the other, rather than terms they might find derogatory and that serve to perpetuate stereotypes in our own mind as well as in their minds. The example Leslie provides is that instead of labeling the other with nouns such as “a Muslim,” we might instead use adjectives or descriptive phrases as in, “a person who follows Islam.” In this way, the description depicts one aspect of the individual, not their whole identity. Such a language change is subtle, yet reflects a broader perspective on the other; that is, they are more than their view on a particular issue. Changing to labels preferred by the other could impact the way we speak about the other as well as to the other.
Barthold explains, “The claim is not that dialogue will immediately eliminate implicit bias. Rather, the claim is a dialogue can motivate an individual to explicitly choose an egalitarian goal (such as inclusion or the use of more neutral language) which, over time, can be habituated to replace the nonegalitarian implicit association.”
Posted at 02:51 PM in Effective Conversations , conversation | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Dewey, dialogue, first-person stories, implicit bias, Kahneman, Lauren Barthold, polarization
In our country we are having great difficult talking with those who are on the other side of an issue, whether that issue is about politics, climate change, abortion, race or policing. We don’t have difficulty talking about the other side, it is talking to the other side that causes us problems.
There are a few simple ground rules that prevent such conversations from becoming acrimonious. The ground rules are not new, in fact, they have been around a long time.
The oldest set of ground rules I am aware of came from the Public Conversations Project that started in 1989. The staff of the Public Conversations Project believed a healthier civic life was possible—one in which people could speak truthfully and compassionately without letting their differences tear their communities apart. The ideas for the guidelines were borrowed from family therapy practices. Understandably the initial pilot dialogues were focused on abortion. In 2010 the Public Conversations Projects became “Essential Partners” and broadened their scope to facilitate a wide range of issues with communities around the globe.
Ground Rules for The Public Conversations Project (now Essential Partners):
The group I do volunteer work for, is Braver Angels (formerly Better Angels). This national non-profit was formed in 2016 to reduce with the political polarization in the US. Braver Angels holds workshops across the United States that bring together Reds and Blues to understand, not change, the other side. Across the country over a thousand workshops have been held. Here are the Ground Rules for Braver Angels, which are remarkably similar to Essential Partner’s list.
Braver Angels:
There are, in fact, now quite a number of organizations that are working toward similar goals and that have remarkably similar guidelines. In her book “Overcoming Polarization in the Public Square” Lauren Barthold names some of these, Ben Franklin Circles, Colossian Forum, Heterodox Academy, Living Room Conversations, Open Minds Platform, Story Corps, and the Zeidler Center for Public Discussion. And summarizes their ground rules which are, again, similar to the two lists above:
In order to have a constructive conversation where people speak thoughtfully and listen respectively, we will:
I have been pondering why such simple guidelines work. None of these organizations suggest that participants need extensive training to talk in a civil manner to each other - the guidelines themselves seem sufficient. The conclusions I’ve come to are that the guidelines work because:
What following such ground rules does, is begin to humanize the other side. Participants learn that the other side has reasons for their positions, that it is not that they are just stupid, unfeeling or out of touch.
Clearly such simple ground rules do not resolve the issues between polarized groups. But it does create the empathy and respect for others, that then allows people to think together in more substantive conversations. But a more substantive conversation is not possible without first having a conversation that lays the foundation of respect and empathy for the other side.
Posted at 04:38 PM in Effective Conversations | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: polarization, Braver Angels, civil conversation, conversation, dialogue, Essential Partners, facilitation, ground rules
People are more willing to share their knowledge and expose their
thinking when they have built a trust relationship with others. If a group is going to concentrate on a difficult issue, they first need to learn who others are, the skills they bring, the experience they represent, and the values they hold.
So we start meetings with “small talk,” that is, getting to know more about one another, not just the
weather, but what is important in their work right now, or what they have done recently that they are most proud of. “Small talk” is not really small at all, it is how we acknowledge the value of our relationship to the other. When a group has come together many times, the period of connecting can be brief, but not neglected altogether.
Circles represent unity. They help individuals in the group view themselves as part of the whole. For example, the United Nations meeting hall is designed in concentric circles to provide a visual representation of what the UN stands for – unity among nations. A circle represents equality - there is no “head of the table.” The circle shows that all voices are equally valued. A circle is also a clear indication to those in the room that they will be expected to actively participate.
It is a useful symbolism to begin and end a meeting with chairs in a circle. It can be a big circle of up to 35, or many small circles of 5. Ideally it is a circle of just chairs, without a table. Participants have a profoundly different experience when they converse in a group without a table. Tables put us across from each other in a position reminiscent of negotiation. Conveners and even some participants will feel a bit awkward for the first few minutes without a table, but that feeling goes away quickly as people get connected. Circles also allow everyone to see everyone else’s eyes. It is difficult to have a conversation with someone whose eyes you cannot see.
When a group is too large to have everyone in one circle, I often make concentric circles and have even made a circle three and four layers deep. Although concentric circles limit seeing those sitting directly behind, they still have symbolic value and provide the best compromise between having too large a circle where it is difficult to hear others.
In many meetings a U shape is set up to enable seeing a screen placed at the opening of the U. But a large U has a very different feel, because the focus is on the screen rather than on each other. And of course a U is open, which loses the sense of boundary that a circle provides. The straight sides of a U make it difficult to see those that are on the same side. Even if there is to be a PowerPoint presentation at some point in a meeting, it is better to start with a circle and then open it to a U during the time the group is viewing the slides.
Knowledge is created when diverse perspectives are brought together in conversation - when people are able to build on each other’s ideas. Dividing members into small mixed groups that are made up of multiple levels, different disciplines, or mixing customers with employees, legitimizes having different views and makes possible giving voice to a diversity of views.
Learning from others is also best done in conversation. If you need help from others about a problem you are facing, you get the best help if you pick up the phone so you can explain your situation and they can respond, not in generalities, but to your specific situation. You might start with an email, but if it is a difficult situation, it probably needs to move to a phone or Zoom call.
Conversation is not so necessary if the knowledge you are seeking is about a technical problem, for example, “What software do your use for tracking donors?” But if it is a more complex issue you need to be able to ask questions of the other and to share your context.
Whether it is through an email or in person, asking is a little risky; we are often fearful that others will think we are less competent or will be offended. That is the reason for “connection before content” – so that others build enough trust know how we will react and to use and our competence.
Asking also means when someone says something we don’t agree with, rather than explain why they’re wrong, we ask what their reasoning is. We seek to understand their thinking. Stephen Covey famously said, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
When we are offering our knowledge to others, we first ask about their context, so we can provide answers that are specific to their situation, not generalized information. And the person seeking answers might explain, “In your situation you have five doctors and it’s an urban area, but I’m work with only two doctors and most of the patients live miles away. So how could I could apply your process in my context?”
Small groups produce the richest and most in-depth thinking – they are the unit of learning in organizations. When I say small group, I mean a group of four to seven people. The group needs to be large enough to contain diverse views, yet small enough for members to engage each other. Engaging each other implies that members have time to fully state their ideas and the reasoning behind them. And then time enough for others to ask questions that will gain them a deeper understanding of what has been said.
If a group exceeds seven, it tends to no longer be in conversation; rather the exchange becomes more like turn taking, with each member declaring his or her own perspective to the others.
Moreover in groups with more than seven, members become concerned about “air time,” that is, thinking they should not talk too long or too often in order to give everyone a chance to offer their views. Although concern about air time is well meant, it prevents members from engaging each other. For example, what too often happens in a larger group, is that when a member hears something he or she disagrees with, rather than inquiring into the other’s reason or asking how the other came to that idea, the member simply offers his or her own contradicting view. That response tends to polarize positions rather than moving the group toward the integration of ideas.
After small groups have been in conversation their ideas are brought together in a large group setting to integrate their insights into the thinking of the whole. There are lots of ways to do this:
In a lengthy meeting, small and large group discussions regularly alternate.
This is an interesting phenomena. We usually think of learning as a listening activity. But two researchers at the University of Minnesota have done research that shows that we organize information differently when we talk, than when those ideas are just swimming around in our heads. And by mentally organizing the information in preparation for speaking, we create greater understanding for ourselves. It’s the old adage about teaching a subject if you want to really understand it. I do a lot of interviewing in my consulting practice and consistently, at the end of an interview, the interviewee remarks that the interview was helpful to clarify some of the issues they had been thinking about.
This principle is also central to transferring knowledge. Listening to an expert provides us new ideas; but as long as those ideas are just in our heads, they are neither fully formed nor implementable. It is only when the listener puts an idea together in a way that allows them to explain that idea to others, that the idea takes shape. Keep group small enough so that everyone has an opportunity to put their thinking into words.
Reflection is an invitation to think deeply about our actions so that we are able to act with more insight and effectiveness in the future. Reflection is useful at 4 levels: 1) Individuals: evaluating or processing one’s experiences in the interest of self-development. 2) A team or community: reflecting together to improve the work of the team and improve the way team members work together. 3) An organization: reflecting to consider the organization’s strategy and it’s culture, and 4) intra-organizational: focusing on enhancing the organization’s relationship with partners and clients and with equally with the community in which it is located and natural environment.
Characteristically, reflecting is more effective if it is done with others.
Explicit knowledge is “know what,” the facts and algorithms that can be written down so others can both understand and make use of the knowledge. Examples are SOPs, job aids, and well-documented process steps.
Implicit knowledge is ‘know how” that is, knowledge gained through experience, e.g. the rules of thumb a person uses in designing a meeting or insights about how to approach a difficult client. Implicit knowledge is most effectively shared through conversation. We tend to call on our implicit knowledge when we are faced with a problem or when asked a question by another.
Tacit knowledge is deep knowledge, what a person knows, but often cannot articulate; it is what is often referred to as judgment. Tacit knowledge can only be learned through observation of a master or being coached by a master. Examples of tacit knowledge are, what makes one speaker more engaging than another, how a conductor acts to get the best from an orchestra, what a skilled facilitator does to help a group reach agreement, or how an experienced physician makes a diagnosis. Perhaps as much as 90% of the critical knowledge in an organization is either implicit or tacit.
The basic idea of community is reciprocity. That is, if I help others, then when I need help, they will help me. It is of course not a one to one reciprocity, but a generalized reciprocity – meaning that I may not receive help from the specific person I helped, but I will from someone in the community.
Receiving help from others also requires expressing appreciation for their help; and with more than a simple “thanks” in an email. Real appreciation includes acknowledgement of the helper’s extra effort, their kindness, and even how what they offered was of use to us. The three actions of knowledge sharing are Share, Ask and Appreciate.
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Posted at 05:53 PM in How We Learn in Organizations , Knowledge Management Strategies , conversation | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: AARs, implicit knowledge, integrating knowledge, knowledge creation, knowledge management, knowledge sharing, learning, reflecting, tacit
In my last post, I wrote about the problems that hierarchical organizations cause employees, including depression, anxiety and heart attacks, as well as being subjected to the inequality of privilege and income disparity. I also suggested that society, as a whole, is impacted when the executive suite engages in illegal or immoral actions (e.g. The VW emissions scandal) that are covered up by controlling the information flow. That post was focused on management hierarchy and suggested that many organizations have found it possible to function effectively with reduced hierarchy.
In this post I introduce an article, “The Responsibilities of Members in an Organization That Is Learning” that speaks to the responsibilities of all employees related to those same issues. I use the term “organizational members” in this article because we have no term in English that refers to people at all levels of an organization. The term employee, in its common usage, references only those not in management positions, although we would all readily acknowledge that managers are also employees of organizations. This article addresses the responsibilities of all “organizational members” irrespective of level. It is noteworthy to recognize that people, like myself, who study and consult with organizations, direct our insights and advice to managers, and only rarely to all organizational members, as I do in this article. In the linked article I elaborate on six responsibilities of members:
I use the word responsibilities, rather than possibilities or actions in the title, to underscore the idea that by doing nothing, organizational members collude in holding the problems mentioned above in place.
Download Responsibilities of members in an Organization that is learning
Posted at 06:18 PM in How We Learn in Organizations | Permalink | Comments (0)