Visual Meetings

Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity by David Sibbet

Here are a few of my notes...

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It all hinged on a premise, that their perspective on life at work needed to shift from delivering well on orders and requests to getting out front and leading into the unknowns of a new market. We had to shift their internal mental models—their point of view.

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On day two of the Apple Leadership Expedition we invited all the participants to take a different point of view on their own careers. We asked them to use a simple graphic format called a “peak and valley diagram” as each one mapped out his or her career. The exercise involved drawing a line across a piece of paper, and then intuitively making a horizon line that represented the ups and downs in his or her life, and labeling the peaks and valleys. (See the steps-at-a-glance practice on this page.)

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Another colleague and I began a meeting with some generals in the U.S. Army by scattering a variety of interesting photographs around on the floor and asking everyone to pick one that appealed, for whatever reason.

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When I first learned to record graphically for groups, I was interested that Interaction Associates called the flip chart displays “group memories.” They asserted, and I concur from experience, that when a group sees its work recorded, their trust in its validity increases, and groups will use those charts as their collective memory. Since remembering what we commit to do in meetings is so critical in implementation, I think any investment in improving retention is a direct link to greater productivity.

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• John Ward led a workshop on kinesthetic modeling, using clay and model making to think through planning and other problems.

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Great Beginning Journal Activities

• Draw Seating Charts

· Practice Bullet Points

· Play with Lines and Borders

· Doodle Little People

· Play with Cartoon Bubbles

· Take Notes in Different Formats

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Well, the simplest thing to do visually was to just rest the pen on paper and make a dot. The next most simple thing was to move the pen and make a line, then to change directions on the line and make a shape, like a triangle. Formalizing the shapes into neat squares and rectangles seemed the next hardest. I could then combine the square and triangle and make what I called a hollow arrow. With some practice I could make this arrow spiral, and finally get around to the circle. Now, the circle wasn’t the hardest to draw, but seemed the most comprehensive. These seven basic shapes became my building blocks for diagramming and illustrating. I could create any kind of picture out of these elements.

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This was a directive from the top and they were in heavy resistance. I sensed this right away when I reviewed the stated outcomes and agenda for the meeting. So instead of going straight at the agenda, I stepped aside with a flip chart and drew a circle. I then drew some hollow arrows pointing at it. (They could be just line arrows.) Then I turned around and said, “Before we start let’s talk a bit about all the ways we can ensure that nothing productive happens in the meeting or this process.” I kept a straight face and waited. “We could avoid talking about it when we get back to work,” someone said. I immediately wrote it down. “What else could we do?” I didn’t give them time to think, and pretty soon we had 8 or 10 items and a lot of laughter. They realized I wasn’t naïve about the challenges and the meeting was quite successful.

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The seed shapes reviewed in Chapter 2 are perfect for diagramming out a meeting design. Use circles to indicate the actual meetings and breakout groups. Use squares to indicate documents that need to be produced. Hollow arrows can indicate projects that need to be completed but aren’t meetings. Link them together as small and big circles with outputs across a time line, and record with bullet points the different things you need to do. This informal sketch really provides some traction for thinking.

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I made six targets with each of the six value words in the center of each. The issue was having people know what these meant and how they would be translated into action. So the first ring of the target was for the definition and the second ring was for examples of what that value would look like in action in the various different parts of the business.

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Tattoo this principle on your inner brain: “People are more engaged by things that are suggestive than by things that are crystal clear.”

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According to their research the first question people have is “Why are we here?” This is all about imagining the purpose of the gathering. The second is “Who are you,” and an inner question of “what might you be asking of me in this meeting.” This is about trust. Then we ask the third question, “What are we doing?” Eventually we ask, “How are we going to do it.”

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As the meeting begins ask people to introduce themselves, and go around the chart writing people’s names in the circles where they are sitting, and writing down their jobs and whatever else they share.

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Have a Weather Report: A fun way to use sticky notes to start a meeting is to pass them out and ask everyone to write down what kind of weather represents how they feel right now. Are they “sunny and bright,” or “fogbound,” or “rainy,” or “blustery.”

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Create a wall with little monitor-sized squares all over it. When people arrive ask people their name and print it out in the squares, along with their company and title. Then ask, “What is the hottest question you have regarding this topic?”

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Meeting rooms and how they are arranged is itself a visual statement and part of what can be used to engage people in a meeting. A number of very active get-to-know-you exercises use rooms as spatial displays in 3-D. These work for any size group, but are especially good for larger meetings.

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Ask people in your meeting to line up based on different kinds of things:

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The Tibetans, for instance, have stories about a mythical race of fighters called the Shambala Warriors. They were renowned for their skills and ability to avoid conflict. A core principle was “looking for the rising sun in every opponent.” By this they meant looking for the inherent goodness that all people carry, even if 99% of what they were seeing was the darkness before the dawn.

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I read about this story in The Shambala Warrior by Chogyam Trumpa Rinpoche and it touched me deeply at one point in my life. I began experimenting with visualizing the rising sun coming up in people’s chests as I talked with them. It began to transform my listening.

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My task was to help them visualize their new vision with a large Storymap*, The Grove’s name for large information displays that let leaders tell compelling stories about organization visions and strategies. The way I involved everyone was quite simple. I asked them all to pair up and answer a simple question. “In the future, our stores are like _______.” I was asking them a very open question, to come up with a metaphor for what their stores would be like. We taped up flip chart paper and provided some watercolor markers. “Do a simple sketch and write out some of the characteristics,” I instructed. Thirty minutes later we had 6 or 7 sketches and a lot of conversation.

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“Disneyland,” one chart was headed. “We are like a county fair,” wrote another team. “We are a farmers market,” said another. “We are the town square,” said another. “We are like a campus,” said another. When we shared the simple drawings I listed out the characteristics that each team said they were pointing at—“Experiential, lots of choices, things for the whole family to do, colorful, exciting.” We narrowed it down to two—Disneyland and Town Square, and began to work on a vision drawing that would integrate the two.

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You can also ask everyone to begin moving and clustering the items as a large group, invoking a simple rule—anyone can move a sticky at any time. This results in little sticky note contests, where one will bounce around between clusters, but it always sorts out. Add a little more fun by suggesting that no one talk during this process. This gets everyone fully engaged in reading all the information, and avoids getting sidetracked with conversations that aren’t relevant.

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I worked with an HR team that had about 10 goals for the year on sticky notes and really needed to prioritize and get them focused down to 3 or 4. A free-flowing argument didn’t seem like the right way to get agreement. The leader and I didn’t feel that voting was appropriate. She wanted the group to really wrestle with which ones would be the very best to take on in light of the company’s overall goal, which had been discussed at some length.

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I suggested a simple “hi-lo” grid (shown here). The top represented things that would have a high payoff in relation to their company goals. The bottom was low payoff. Then the left side represented things that could be done somewhat easily and the right things that took a lot of effort. We talked a little about what easy and difficult meant, but not that long. The group was then asked to sort the stickies without talking, having the ability to move any sticky any time. In less than 20 minutes they had them sorted and it was graphically clear which 3 or 4 were the most promising goals to take on.

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Process maps are all similar in that they have time on one axis and channels of activity on another. How many channels of activity determines how complicated the map is.

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I wanted them to “own” the process and be involved and suggested to my British sponsor that we leave the third day open for their design. He would have none of it, fearing criticism for not being prepared. After much argument I finally proposed that we create little posters on half sheets of paper that illustrated each potential activity, and then involve the top managers in helping us pick the ones they wanted and organize them. This worked so well it is now a standard technique for doing group process design we call “Activity Block Agendas,” since it works with a large time block template.

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Laurie then asked us to quickly write a statement that included completions of the following questions: I am the one who ___. My name is___. What I need from you is___. My gift to you is___. What I have to say to you is___. My shadow is___.

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Collage imagery is very powerful to the people who select the image. This is because the image itself isn’t where the meaning lies, but in the connection between the image and what it evokes in the person who relates to it.

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GO SLOW TO GO FAST I remember Michael Doyle teaching us facilitation, saying “go slow to go fast.” He believed you either took time engaging people up front and having everyone understand what changes or plans they were making, or you would have to spend the time later during implementation catching everyone up—a process that greatly slows down the process of getting results.

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Christine Martell’s VisualsSpeak cards come in packs of different sized imagery to support all the kinds of dialogue you might want to support. Here are a few of the images, reproduced by permission. (See www.visualsspeak.com/ for more information.)

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Buckminster Fuller, a renowned inventor (the geodesic dome) and optimist about human beings’ ability to solve problems through design, believed that the we could learn to change systems from the way rudders turn big ships.

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Large ocean liners have rudders that are many meters tall. When the ocean liner is moving, many tons of water push on each side as it moves through the water. The question is, how does the crew actually move the rudder? I will pose this question to groups and people guess it’s connected with a very large steering rod, or they won’t know. The answer is actually quite simple. Out on the edge of the rudder is a much smaller little rudder. When this little rudder sticks out into the rushing water on one side or another, the power of the moving ocean pushes on this little “trim tab” and turns the bigger rudder. It does not take a great amount of energy to move the trim tab. This story is a story of leverage, and it encourages people to look for those actions they could

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Large ocean liners have rudders that are many meters tall. When the ocean liner is moving, many tons of water push on each side as it moves through the water. The question is, how does the crew actually move the rudder? I will pose this question to groups and people guess it’s connected with a very large steering rod, or they won’t know. The answer is actually quite simple. Out on the edge of the rudder is a much smaller little rudder. When this little rudder sticks out into the rushing water on one side or another, the power of the moving ocean pushes on this little “trim tab” and turns the bigger rudder. It does not take a great amount of energy to move the trim tab. This story is a story of leverage, and it encourages people to look for those actions they could take that will move the larger system with its own force. It is a kind of engineering judo.

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Our first exercise followed an initial tour of the actual CAS museum. We asked all the designers to interview some children at random that they encountered out on the floor, then come back and brainstorm some exhibit ideas, working in groups that mixed up the four firms. Right away everyone was thrown off his or her normal patterns. Not only are children guaranteed to have surprises, the cross communication between the firms was stimulating.

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We then went to Half Moon Bay, and following a naturalist-led field trip through a coastal redwoods ecosystem, teams again had a chance to brainstorm potential exhibits. This time they were encouraged to model them out using cardboard, straws, tape, and other media.

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Pixar is one of the most successful movie producers in the world, with hit after hit following its first all digital animated film Toy Story. The extras included on their DVDs explain their process, which relies heavily on storyboarding. I worked on a symposium with the head of their internal Pixar University and he said that they work with the story for as long as it takes to arrive at a narrative they truly believe in. Only then do they go to digital renditions and production. It may take as long as a couple years in the storyboard phase.

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I chose to lead the group in some idea mapping about the nature of their work in the informal spaces. The process was quite simple. I began by asking everyone in the meeting to identify the most formative teaming experience in his or her life. They were things like being in band, the military, large families, food services, laboratories, and a group of ranchers. We created table groups of the clusters and asked each to create some flip charts answering the question “Sematech is like a ____.” I asked them to draw a picture and label the parts. Twenty minutes later we had several dozen charts around the wall. Amid a great deal of laughter and good communication, we went around and people explained why they picked this or that metaphor.

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I then asked if there was one they would like to explore in depth. They picked a “ranch” as their topic. I drew a big square frame on the wall and a horizontal horizon line. “ What kind of soil does the ranch have?” I asked. “Chelate,” someone said, and everyone laughed. Chelate is very hard clay, I happened to know. “ What does the ranch raise?” I asked next. “Range animals,” someone said.

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After many years of asking small groups to work on different kinds of assignments, I’m always amazed at how they are able to finish their work and produce a chart presentation even though I’ve given very little instruction on how to facilitate the groups. I’ve come to think of this as “output oriented group process.” By defining the deliverable clearly, such as “bring this template back with your best ideas,” I provide a clear goal. The groups deal with it.

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• Coaching Feedback: Have small groups record “What Worked?” and “I Wish” feedback on flip charts or cards following their assignments. If trainers provide written feedback to individuals they observe this is also very helpful.

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We put up this chart during a brown bag lunch and asked people to pick what they wanted to hear about. The session took off like a rocket and was a lot of fun. This format invites people to explore the whole range of ideas, puzzling about them and then jumping in. It simulates how we informally explore any new topic, and is new and different.

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WORK WITH INNER IMAGERY

• Imagine succeeding

• Record your dreams

• Meditate

• Imagine pictures in clouds and scribbles

• Listen for imagery in people’s speech

• Practice active imagination about personal plans

• Free associate

2. PRACTICE FREE EXPRESSION

• Keep meeting notes in a blank sketch book

• Keep a personal visual journal

• Doodle

• Diagram your own ideas in branching idea maps

• Create quick sketches and gesture drawings

• Use colored pencils and creative media

• Play around with really big drawings

• Play Pictionary

• Work on large display paper

3. CREATE PRESENTATION CHARTS

• Prechart agendas, welcome signs, theme posters, check-lists, and models

• Practice block lettering and titling

• Learn a dozen or so simple seed shapes/icons

• Use color chalk pastels

• Trace cartoons and sketches to develop spacing and design

• Study the Group Graphics® Keyboard to learn display formats

4. RECORD VISUALLY

• Interview one other person and record it visually

• Record presentations from television, videos, or talk radio

• Practice being conscious about using different display formats

• Record a staff meeting

• Work with a facilitator to record a whole-day meeting

• Learn to check with people for accuracy and ask for feedback

5. FACILITATE VISUALLY

• Practice introducing activities as a facilitator and shifting to recording as the group gets going

• Both lead a group and visually record as you go

• Facilitate a team startup process or a planning meeting by yourself

• Use graphic templates for small group work

• Follow through with reproduction of displays and reports

6. DESIGN VISUAL PROCESSES

• Lead an agenda-design meeting and make suggestions about graphic processes

• Use large process maps and Storymaps® for change efforts

• Help groups explore visual metaphors and the deep structures of thinking

• Become aware of the role of archetypes and culturally embedded imagery

7. TEACH OTHERS

• Lead cocreative drawing sessions with colleagues

• Lead teams of facilitators and recorders in support of large meetings

• Teach learners to channel group energy intuitively

• Lead workshops on visual meetings and graphic facilitation

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I’ve seen this happen again and again, where the breakdowns and times when the agenda skids out of control become times of true engagement and progress. Getting it “right” with a group is actually overrated as a strategy if your aim is empowerment and facilitating the emergence of leadership. Try things, do different things, do unusual things, and learn from whatever you did about what works and what you can do differently next time.

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I think most groups have many more resources than are generally recognized, and these can be accessed to help you improve what you are doing if you provide groups the tools and your confidence.

The Dream Manager

The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly

Here are some of my notes...

An organization can only become the-best-version-of-itself to the extent that the people who drive that organization are striving to become better-versions-of-themselves.

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You do the math. What does your payroll amount to? If on average your employees are 75 percent engaged, disengagement is costing you 25 percent of your payroll every month in productivity alone.

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The real cost to your business is of course much higher when you take into account how disengaged employees negatively affect your customers and every aspect of your business.

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A company’s purpose is to become the-best-version-of-itself. The next question is: What is an employee’s purpose? Most would say, “to help the company achieve its purpose,” but they would be wrong. That is certainly part of an employee’s role, but an employee’s primary purpose is to become the-best-version-of-himself or herself. Contrary to unwritten management theory and popular practice, people do not exist for the company. The company exists for people. When a company forgets that it exists to serve its customers, it quickly goes out of business. Our employees are our first customers, and our most influential customers. A person’s purpose is to become the-best-version-of-himself or herself. Finding a way to create an environment that helps employees become the-best-version-of-themselves, while at the same time moving the company toward the-best-version-of-itself, may seem impossible to many; to others, these purposes may seem diametrically opposed; but in reality, they are astoundingly complementary.

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“These people all have dreams. We need to find a way to connect their job today with their dreams for tomorrow. I’ve been studying the turnover reports all week, and it seems that on average we keep an employee for about six months. A year ago, the average was three months. Imagine if we could increase that to three years. That alone would radically transform our whole business model.”

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“If we can help our employees beyond the quiet desperation of mere survival by teaching them to dream again, and help them to fulfill their dreams, we’ll create a loyalty and dedication that’s unmatched. And then our people will bring the passion and energy they have for their dreams to their work.”

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And while it may be argued that it’s not our responsibility to help our employees fulfill their dreams, I would pose the question: Isn’t one of the primary responsibilities of all relationships to help each other fulfill our dreams?”

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Some wanted to go to college, others wanted their children to go to college. Some wanted a car, others a vacation. One employee simply wrote, “a proper Christmas,” while another wrote, “a better life for my children.” Some wanted to learn English, others wanted to teach Spanish, and more than a few dreamt of owning their own business. What was the most common dream among the employee responses? Home ownership. More than 60 percent of those who turned in their surveys included the desire to own a home as one of their dreams.

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“I’m glad you asked.” Simon beamed. “As best I can tell, there are two things that keep people interested in a job: the sense that they are making a difference and the sense that they are progressing or advancing. Now, we are under no illusions here at Admiral, we are a janitorial company. We are not curing cancer and we are not organizing the cancellation of Third World debt. The sense that we are making a difference is limited, so we have to give our employees an abundance of the latter. We have to give them an opportunity to progress and advance. When people feel they are progressing, they are much less likely to start looking around for another job. It is when they don’t feel that they are advancing that they start to get restless.”

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“We all need it. Taking this job has made me see that I need a Dream Manager, too. Everyone needs a Dream Manager. To a certain extent, we can do it for ourselves. But we all need someone who can help us articulate our dreams, determine the priority of our dreams, pull together a plan for the fulfillment of those dreams, and hold us accountable on a regular basis for the actions that help us achieve our dreams or hold us back from our dreams,” argued Sean.

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“The most disturbing thing to me has been the amount of financial illiteracy. I thought it would exist among the lower-paid employees, but it’s amazing how prevalent it is even among the managers.” “Say more about that,” Greg coaxed. “Mark Twain once wrote, ‘Those who don’t read great books are at no advantage over those who cannot read.’ The same is true when it comes to money. Those who don’t manage their money well are no better off than those who don’t have money to manage. There are a lot of people here making really decent incomes who are still financially unfit. There are people here whose job it is to manage budgets or various accounting functions, who don’t have a budget themselves, cannot or do not balance their checkbooks, and are laden with consumer debt.”

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Let’s face it, the reason most people want to manage their money is so they can achieve their dreams. Dreams drive us. If you help your employees identify their dreams and pursue their dreams, they will do the same for your customers, and your business will boom.”

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“Well, I’ve been sitting here for the last thirty minutes, listening to this little voice in my head ask me questions like: How concerned do you think your manager is about your career? What about your employer? Do they care about your personal development? And the answer is, they don’t. Or if they do, they haven’t bothered to share it with me. What you are doing for Daniel, and me, and your other employees, is powerful…and I just want you to know that I am really, really grateful.”

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“If we really want to help people, we have a responsibility to help them identify and pursue their dreams. In that way, I’m a Dream Manager for my husband, for my children, for my friends, for my colleagues here, and for people who just pass through my life. Not in the same way Sean is a Dream Manager, but every relationship improves when we are mindful of each other’s dreams.”

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“And why do you think there is such resistance?” “Two reasons. First, because people are always looking for quick fixes and there are no quick fixes to situations that involve real, living, breathing people. The second reason is that too many businesspeople believe business is only about making money, so they can’t think beyond the paradigm that wants to use money to solve problems.”

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He’d known that the recruiting and training costs produced by turnover were enormous, but it was only now that they were solving the turnover issue that the many hidden costs of a disengaged workforce became apparent.

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Just last week, I read that research conducted by Bliss & Associates reveals the cost of turnover is at least 150 percent of an employee’s base salary.”

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As a manager, it would be easy to read this book and immediately begin to focus on the dreams of the people you manage. To do this would be to miss a most critical step.

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Get yourself a Dream Book. Start writing down your dreams. Dream without limits. Date your dreams as you add them to your Dream Book. Date them again when you achieve them.

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As you write your Dream List, I offer you these twelve areas to stimulate a good cross section of dreams: Physical Emotional Intellectual Spiritual Psychological Material Professional Financial Creative Adventure Legacy Character

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After one week, go through the list and apply one of the following three categories to each of your dreams: short-term (within twelve months), mid-term (one to five years), or long-term (five years or more).

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In January, I hold staff reviews and I encourage each of my employees to bring their list of one hundred dreams to their review. As part of their review, I like to talk to them about their dreams, and during that meeting I try to pinpoint one dream that I can help them achieve in the coming year. Sometimes it is a simple thing, something that can be easily attained. At other times, the dream requires considerable planning.

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Help your employees develop goal-setting and strategic-planning skills by chasing their personal dreams, and they will gladly bring these skills to their work because they cannot help but bring them. The hunger to achieve goals and dreams becomes almost insatiable, the desire for continuous improvement becomes a guiding force in their daily lives, and all of this will inevitably overflow into their work, and in the process, will elevate your team and your business.

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Book Motivated Money, reminds his readers that “Making money without having a dream to fulfill is pointless and obscene.” Most Americans today spend more money each year than they earn, descending further and further into debt. Collectively, Americans save less than one penny for every dollar they earn. Why do people save so little? The answer, I believe, is because they don’t know what their dreams are—and without a clear vision of their dreams, they simply fail to see the point of saving.

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If your company doesn’t have a Dream Manager Program, or won’t start one, start it yourself! Gather a small group of employees—coworkers—not more than perhaps eight. Meet with this small group once a week, before work or during your lunch break. Talk about your dreams. Get a Dream Book. Make a Dream List. Begin to develop plans and time-lines. Follow the Dream Manager Program if you wish. Encourage each other. Keep each other accountable. When you need professional advice (financial, legal, fitness, diet, etc.), seek it.

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Before long, others will want to join. Split your group in two groups of four, and allow four new members to join each group. New people with different dreams give us new perspectives on our own dreams and renew our enthusiasm to chase our dreams.

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The new breed of loyalty will be based upon an understanding between employees and companies of one another’s purpose—to become the-best-version-of-themselves.

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A manager’s role is to organize employee effort for the attainment of an organization’s goals and purpose. In the past, managers have relied heavily on the stick and the carrot. Now it is time to discover the awesome effectiveness of management by dreams.

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In all of this, we have overlooked the startling reality that if you play a role in teaching your employees how to manage their money, they will manage your money more effectively and be less distracted by personal financial concerns. If you play a role in helping your employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle, your health insurance costs will be reduced and your employees will be more effective because they are healthier. The examples are endless.

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Rule #1—You cannot reasonably expect people to do for your company what they won’t do for themselves.

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Teach them the importance of strategic planning in their own lives and they will understand its importance in the life of your company. The same is true for dreams and goals. If you want to engage employees in corporate dreams and goals, you must first engage them in their own personal dreams and goals.

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Thinking in Systems

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows

Here are some of my notes...

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes.... Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. -RUSSELL ACKOFF,' operations theorist

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"Now once again. What made the Slinky bounce up and down?"

The answer clearly lies within the Slinky itself. The hands that manipulate it suppress or release some behavior that is latent within the structure of the spring.

That is a central insight of systems theory.

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How to know whether you are looking at a system or just a bunch of stuff:

A) Can you identify parts? ... and

B) Do the parts affect each other? ... and

C) Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own? ... and perhaps

D) Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances?

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Many interconnections are flows of information-signals that go to decision points or action points within a system.

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You can understand the relative importance of a system's elements, interconnections, and purposes by imagining them changed one by one. Changing elements usually has the least effect on the system. If you change all the players on a football team, it is still recognizably a football team. (It may play much better or much worse-particular elements in a system can indeed be important.)

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If the interconnections change, the system may be greatly altered. It may even become unrecognizable, even though the same players are on the team. Change the rules from those of football to those of basketball, and you've got, as they say, a whole new ball game.

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Changes in function or purpose also can be drastic. What if you keep the players and the rules but change the purpose-from winning to losing, for example? What if the function of a tree were not to survive and reproduce but to capture all the nutrients in the soil and grow to unlimited size?

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A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same.

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A system's function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system's purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.

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Interconnections are also critically important. Changing relationships usually changes system behavior.

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A stock is the foundation of any system. Stocks are the elements of the system that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time. A system stock is just what it sounds like: a store, a quantity, an accumulation of material or information that has built up over time. It may be the water in a bathtub, a population, the books in a bookstore, the wood in a tree, the money in a bank, your own self-confidence. A stock does not have to be physical. Your reserve of good will toward others or your supply of hope that the world can be better are both stocks.

Stocks change over time through the actions of a flow. Flows are filling and draining, births and deaths, purchases and sales, growth and decay, deposits and withdrawals, successes and failures. A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.

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If you understand the dynamics of stocks and flows-their behavior over time-you understand a good deal about the behavior of complex systems. And if you have had much experience with a bathtub, you understand the dynamics of stocks and flows.

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Stocks generally change slowly, even when the flows into or out of them change suddenly. Therefore, stocks act as delays or buffers or shock absorbers in systems.

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The tub can't fill up immediately, even with the inflow faucet on full blast. A stock takes time to change, because flows take time to

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If you have a sense of the rates of change of stocks, you don't expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don't give up too soon.

You can use the opportunities presented by a system's momentum to guide it toward a good outcome-much as a judo expert uses the momentum of an opponent to achieve his or her own goals.

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Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.

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A feedback loop is a closed chain of causal connections from a stock, through a set of decisions or rules or physical laws or actions that are dependent on the level of the stock, and back again through a flow to change the stock.

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Feedbacks-the interconnections, the information part of the system-can fail for many reasons. Information can arrive too late or at the wrong place. It can be unclear or incomplete or hard to interpret. The action it triggers may be too weak or delayed or resource-constrained or simply ineffective. The goal of the feedback loop may never be reached by the actual stock.

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Reinforcing feedback loops are self-enhancing, leading to exponential growth or to runaway collapses over time. They are found whenever a stock has the capacity to reinforce or reproduce itself.

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If A causes B, is it possible that B also causes A?

You'll stop looking for who's to blame; instead you'll start asking, "What's the system?"

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The information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behavior; it can't deliver the information, and so can't have an impact fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback.

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A stock-maintaining balancing feedback loop must have its goal set appropriately to compensate for draining or inflowing processes that affect that stock. Otherwise, the feedback process will fall short of or exceed the target for the stock.

==========

Oscillations like these are frequently encountered in inventories and in many other systems. Try taking a shower sometime where there's a very long pipe between the hot- and cold-water mixer and the showerhead, and you'll experience directly the joys of hot and cold oscillations because of a long response delay.

==========

Part of the problem here is that the car dealer has been reacting not too slowly, but too quickly. Given the configuration of this system, she has been overreacting. Things would go better if, instead of decreasing her response delay from three days to two, she would increase the delay from three days to six,

==========

Changing the delays in a system can make it much easier or much harder to manage. You can see why system thinkers are somewhat fanatic on the subject of delays. We're always on the alert to see where delays occur in systems, how long they are, whether they are delays in information streams or in physical processes. We can't begin to understand the dynamic behavior of systems unless we know where and how long the delays are.

==========

Therefore, any physical, growing system is going to run into some kind of constraint, sooner or later. That constraint will take the form of a balancing loop that in some way shifts the dominance of the reinforcing loop driving the growth behavior, either by strengthening the outflow or by weakening the inflow.

==========

In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.

==========

Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate (limited mainly by extraction capital). But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource.

Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.

==========

Resilience is not the same thing as being static or constant over time. Resilient systems can be very dynamic. Short-term oscillations, or periodic outbreaks, or long cycles of succession, climax, and collapse may in fact be the normal condition, which resilience acts to restore!

And, conversely, systems that are constant over time can be unresilient. This distinction between static stability and resilience is important. Static stability is something you can see; it's measured by variation in the condition of a system week by week or year by year. Resilience is something that may be very hard to see, unless you exceed its limits, overwhelm and damage the balancing loops, and the system structure breaks down.

==========

Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely to come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures. As a consequence, education systems may restrict the creative powers of children instead of stimulating those powers. Economic policies may lean toward supporting established, powerful enterprises rather than upstart, new ones. And many governments prefer their people not to be too self-organizing.

==========

The result is called a Koch snowflake. (See Figure 46.) Its edge has tremendous length-but it can be contained within a circle. This structure is one simple example of fractal geometry-a realm of mathematics and art populated by elaborate shapes formed by relatively simple rules.

==========

The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better. This is something, unfortunately, that both the higher and the lower levels of a greatly articulated hierarchy easily can forget. Therefore, many systems are not meeting our goals because of malfunctioning hierarchies.

==========

To be a highly functional system, hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system-there must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing.

==========

The budworm/spruce/fir system oscillates over decades, but it is ecologically stable within bounds. It can go on forever. The main effect of the budworm is to allow tree species other than fir to persist. But in this case what is ecologically stable is economically unstable. In eastern Canada, the economy is almost completely dependent on the logging industry, which is dependent on a steady supply of fir and spruce.

==========

Everything physical comes from somewhere, everything goes somewhere, everything keeps moving.

==========

The lesson of boundaries is hard even for systems thinkers to get. There is no single, legitimate boundary to draw around a system. We have to invent boundaries for clarity and sanity; and boundaries can produce problems when we forget that we've artificially created them.

==========

Systems analysts often fall into the opposite trap: making boundaries too large. They have a habit of producing diagrams that cover several pages with small print and many arrows connecting everything with everything. There is the system! they say. If you have considered anything less, you are academically illegitimate.

==========

Ideally, we would have the mental flexibility to find the appropriate boundary for thinking about each new problem. We are rarely that flexible. We get attached to the boundaries our minds happen to be accustomed to. Think how many arguments have to do with boundaries-national boundaries, trade boundaries, ethnic boundaries, boundaries between public and private responsibility, and boundaries between the rich and the poor, polluters and pollutees, people alive now and people who will come in the future. Universities can maintain disputes for years about the boundaries between economics and government, art and art history, literature and literary criticism.

==========

It's a great art to remember that boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose.

==========

Rich countries transfer capital or technology to poor ones and wonder why the economies of the receiving countries still don't develop, never thinking that capital or technology may not be the most limiting factors.

==========

Insight comes not only from recognizing which factor is limiting, but from seeing that growth itself depletes or enhances limits and therefore changes what is limiting.

==========

We are surprised over and over again at how much time things take. Jay Forrester used to tell us, when we were modeling a construction or processing delay, to ask everyone in the system how long they thought the delay was, make our best guess, and then multiply by three. (That correction factor also works perfectly, I have found, for estimating how long it will take to write a book!)

==========

Perhaps having been an environmental critic of big business, you find yourself making environmental decisions for big business. Would that such transitions could happen much more often, in all directions, to broaden everyone's horizons!

==========

Change comes first from stepping outside the limited information that can be seen from any single place in the system and getting an overview.

==========

The difference, it turned out, was in the position of the electric meter. The families with high electricity use were the ones with the meter in the basement, where people rarely saw it. The ones with low use had the meter in the front hall where people passed, the little wheel turning around, adding up the monthly electricity bill many times a day.13

==========

Understanding archetypal problem-generating structures is not enough. Putting up with them is impossible. They need to be changed. The destruction they cause is often blamed on particular actors or events, although it is actually a consequence of system structure. Blaming, disciplining, firing, twisting policy levers harder, hoping for a more favorable sequence of driving events, tinkering at the margins-these standard responses will not fix structural problems. That is why I call these archetypes "traps"

==========

This is the systemic trap of "fixes that fail" or "policy resistance." You see this when farm programs try year after year to reduce gluts, but there is still overproduction. There are wars on drugs, after which drugs are as prevalent as ever.

==========

The alternative to overpowering policy resistance is so counterintuitive that it's usually unthinkable. Let go. Give up ineffective policies. Let the resources and energy spent on both enforcing and resisting be used for more constructive purposes. You won't get your way with the system, but it won't go as far in a bad direction as you think, because much of the action you were trying to correct was in response to your own action. If you calm down, those who are pulling against you will calm down too.

==========

The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality. If everyone can work harmoniously toward the same outcome (if all feedback loops are serving the same goal), the results can be amazing.

==========

The trap called the tragedy of the commons comes about when there is escalation, or just simple growth, in a commonly shared, erodable environment.

==========

The tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the users of that resource.

==========

Educate and exhort the users, so they understand the consequences of abusing the resource. And also restore or strengthen the missing feedback link, either by privatizing the resource so each user feels the direct consequences of its abuse or (since many resources cannot be privatized) by regulating the access of all users to the resource.

==========

THE TRAP: DRIFT TO LOW PERFORMANCE

Allowing performance standards to be influenced by past performance, especially if there is a negative bias in perceiving past performance, sets up a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals that sets a system drifting toward low performance.

THE WAY OUT

Keep performance standards absolute. Even better, let standards be enhanced by the best actual performances instead of being discouraged by the worst. Use the same structure to set up a drift toward high performance!

==========

THE TRAP: ESCALATION

When the state of one stock is determined by trying to surpass the state of another stock-and vice versa-then there is a reinforcing feedback loop carrying the system into an arms race, a wealth race, a smear campaign, escalating loudness, escalating violence. The escalation is exponential and can lead to extremes surprisingly quickly. If nothing is done, the spiral will be stopped by someone's collapse-because exponential growth cannot go on forever.

THE WAY OUT

The best way out of this trap is to avoid getting in it. If caught in an escalating system, one can refuse to compete (unilaterally disarm), thereby interrupting the reinforcing loop. Or one can negotiate a new system with balancing loops to control the escalation.

==========

THE TRAP: SUCCESS TO THE SUCCESSFUL

If the winners of a competition are systematically rewarded with the means to win again, a reinforcing feedback loop is created by which, if it is allowed to proceed uninhibited, the winners eventually take all, while the losers are eliminated.

THE WAY OUT

Diversification, which allows those who are losing the competition to get out of that game and start another one; strict limitation on the fraction of the pie any one winner may win (antitrust laws); policies that level the playing field, removing some of the advantage of the strongest players or increasing the advantage of the weakest; policies that devise rewards for success that do not bias the next round of competition.

==========

Shifting the burden, dependence, and addiction arise when a solution to a systemic problem reduces (or disguises) the symptoms, but does nothing to solve the underlying problem. Whether it is a substance that dulls one's perception or a policy that hides the underlying trouble, the drug of choice interferes with the actions that could solve the real problem.

==========

Again, the best way out of this trap is to avoid getting in. Beware of symptom-relieving or signal-denying policies or practices that don't really address the problem. Take the focus off short-term relief and put it on long-term restructuring.

==========

THE TRAP: RULE BEATING

Rules to govern a system can lead to rule beating-perverse behavior that gives the appearance of obeying the rules or achieving the goals, but that actually distorts the system.

THE WAY OUT

Design, or redesign, rules to release creativity not in the direction of beating the rules, but in the direction of achieving the purpose of the rules.

==========

If the desired system state is good education, measuring that goal by the amount of money spent per student will ensure money spent per student. If the quality of education is measured by performance on standardized tests, the system will produce performance on standardized tests. Whether either of these measures is correlated with good education is at least worth thinking about.

==========

THE TRAP: SEEKING THE WRONG GOAL

System behavior is particularly sensitive to the goals of feedback loops. If the goals-the indicators of satisfaction of the rules-are defined inaccurately or incompletely, the system may obediently work to produce a result that is not really intended or wanted.

THE WAY OUT

Specify indicators and goals that reflect the real welfare of the system. Be especially careful not to confuse effort with result or you will end up with a system that is producing effort, not result.

==========

But Forrester goes on to point out that although people deeply involved in a system often know intuitively where to find leverage points, more often than not they push the change in the wrong direction.

==========

Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.

==========

When you understand the power of system self-organization, you begin to understand why biologists worship biodiversity even more than economists worship technology. The wildly varied stock of DNA, evolved and accumulated over billions of years, is the source of evolutionary potential, just as science libraries and labs and universities where scientists are trained are the source of technological potential.

==========

Even people within systems don't often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving. "To make profits," most corporations would say, but that's just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. What is the point of the game?

==========

But there's nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond.

==========

Whole societies are another matter-they resist challenges to their paradigms harder than they resist anything else.

==========

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that.' You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don't waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

==========

Systems modelers say that we change paradigms by building a model of the system, which takes us outside the system and forces us to see it whole.

==========

It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not-knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.

==========

In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.

==========

Our first comeuppance came as we learned that it's one thing to understand how to fix a system and quite another to wade in and fix it. We had many earnest discussions on the topic of "implementation," by which we meant "how to get managers and mayors and agency heads to follow our advice."

==========

The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.

==========

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.

==========

Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it's a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it's a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who've been around a long time to tell you what has happened. If possible, find or make a time graph of actual data from the system-peoples' memories are not always reliable when it comes to timing.

==========

If I could, I would add an eleventh commandment to the first ten: Thou shalt notdistort, delay, or withhold information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.

==========

If I could, I would add an eleventh commandment to the first ten: Thou shalt notdistort, delay, or withhold information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.

==========

Pretending that something doesn't exist if it's hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You've already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So don't fall into that trap.

==========

If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don't let it pass. Don't be stopped by the "if you can't define it and measure it, I don't have to pay attention to it" ploy. No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

==========

Don't be an unthinking intervenor and destroy the system's own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what's already there.

==========

"Intrinsic responsibility" means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. Because the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions.

==========

The thing to do, when you don't know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment-or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. In a world of complex systems, it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. "Stay the course" is only a good idea if you're sure you're on course. Pretending you're in control even when you aren't is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What's appropriate when you're learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it's leading.

==========

Seeing systems whole requires more than being "interdisciplinary," if that word means, as it usually does, putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each other. Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct. They will have to go into learning mode. They will have to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system.

==========

Sherwood, Dennis. Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager's Guide to Applying Systems Thinking. (London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2002).

Theory U

Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges by C Otto Scharmer

Some of my notes…

In this sense, this is a book for those whom my MIT colleague, Donald Schon, called "reflective practitioners," managers, principals, team leaders, government officials, and community organizers who are far too committed to practical results and dissatisfied with their current capabilities to rest on past habits; pragmatic, engaged people who are open to challenging their own assumptions and listening to their deepest inner voice. For it is only through this listening that we will unlock our collective capacity to create the world anew.

==========

What I see rising is a new form of presence and power that starts to grow spontaneously from and through small groups and networks of people. It's a different quality of connection, a different way of being present with one another and with what wants to emerge.

==========

I first began noticing this blind spot when talking with the late CEO of Hanover Insurance, Bill O'Brien. He told me that his greatest insight after years of conducting organizational learning projects and facilitating corporate change is that the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.

==========

Having spent the last ten years of my professional career in the field of organizational learning, my most important insight has been that there are two different sources of learning: learning from the experiences of the past and learning from the future as it emerges.

==========

And just as every good farmer focuses attention on sustaining and enhancing the quality of the soil, every good organizational leader focuses attention on sustaining and enhancing the quality of the social field-the "farm" in which every responsible leader works day in and day out.

==========

The same activities can result in radically different outcomes depending on the structure of attention from which a particular activity is performed. Put differently, "I attend [this way]-therefore it emerges [that way]." This is the hidden dimension of our common social process, not easily or readily understood, and it may be the most underutilized lever for profound change today. Therefore, I have devised Theory U to help us better understand these sources from which all social action constantly comes into being.

==========

On all these levels we are confronted with the same issue: we cannot meet the challenges at hand if we do not change our interior condition and illuminate our blind spot-the source of our attention and action.

==========

"Good, but not quite first-rate scientists are able to take existing frameworks and overlay them onto some situation. The first-rate ones just sit back and allow the appropriate structure to form. My observation is that they have no more intelligence than the good scientists do, but they have this other ability and that makes all the difference."

==========

In order to enhance their resonance with the deeper fields of emergence, organizations need to establish three different kinds of infrastructures and places:

• Places and infrastructures that facilitate a shared seeing and sense-making of what is actually going on in the larger surrounding ecosystem (co-sensing)

• Places and cocoons of deep reflection and silence that facilitate deep listening and connection to the source of authentic presence and creativity, both individually and collectively (co-presencing)

• Places and infrastructures for hands-on prototyping of new forms of operating in order to explore the future by doing (co-creating)

==========

I started the interview the same way I often did, by asking "What underlying question does your work address?"

==========

"To me," continued Senge, "here's the essence of what systems thinking is about: People begin to consciously discover and account for how their own patterns of thought and interaction manifest on a large scale and create the very forces by which the organization then `is doing it to me.' And then they complete that feedback loop. The most profound experiences I've ever seen in consulting have always been when people suddenly say things like, `Holy

cow! Look what we are doing to ourselves!' . . . or `Given the way we operate, no wonder we can't win!' And what is always significant to me, in those moments, is the we. Not `you,' not `them,' but we.... A true systems philosophy closes the feedback loop between the human being, their experience of reality, and their sense of participation in that whole cycle of awareness and enactment."

==========

Dynamic complexity means that there is a systematic distance or delay between cause and effect in space or time.

==========

Social complexity is a product of diverse interests and worldviews among stakeholders.

==========

Johnson & Johnson's Michael Burtha portrays the movement of knowledge management from explicit to tacit when explaining that the real challenge lies in creating spaces for peers to share complex knowledge across units, functions, and organizations that will enable high-performance teams to operate effectively.

==========

Many people agree with Nonaka's assessment that knowledge cannot be managed. Why? Because it's a living process, not a dead body. Instead of managing or controlling knowledge, Nonaka says, we need to create the conditions that will allow all three aspects of knowledge management to emerge: IT systems, a knowledge creation process, and places that are conducive to this kind of work.

==========

As Saatchi & Saatchi's Kevin Roberts put it, "We've already moved from management to leadership-and we're about to go beyond leadership to inspiration. In the 21st century, organizations have to achieve peak performance by creating conditions that allow them to unleash the power of their people-not leading them, not by managing them, but by co-inspiring them. "17

==========

What's missing? The "cross-institutional places" in which we could enable productive conversations among all key stakeholders, including supply-chain members, customers, the community, investors, innovators, and the stakeholders that are marginalized or voiceless in the current system. That's the institutional blind spot today. We must find room for all the key players in any given ecosystem if we are to gather and co-create our futures. It is time for us, as I describe throughout our field walk, to begin to lead from the emerging future.

==========

The sociologist Robert Wuthnow of Princeton University reports that 40 percent of all Americans claim to be currently involved in a small group that meets regularly and provides support or cares for its participants. Roughly half of these groups are church-related.

==========

This "quiet revolution" shows a ballooning interest in topics such as personal mastery, dialogue, and flow. The power of attention and the experience of flow, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 27 have long been cultivated in the practice of dialogue. At its essence, dialogue involves a collective shift of attention from politeness to conflict, from conflict to inquiry, and from inquiry to generative flow.28 My colleague Bill Isaacs, the founder of the MIT Dialogue Project, has used dialogue as a change method in a steel mill, in a local health care system, and as a way to build leadership capacity in multinational companies.29

==========

When I met Fritjof Capra at a study group on systems thinking in the social sciences, we discussed countercultural movements and he said he thought they should always incorporate three aspects: the ecological, the social, and the spiritual. "The issue is that these movements tend to dissociate what in reality belongs together.

==========

I had "come home" to a circle of people I had never met or even heard of before.

==========

I find these root questions alive in the hearts and minds of people across various cultures and civilizations. They are:

i. How can we create a more equitable global economy that would serve the needs of all, including today's have-nots and the future generations?

2. How can we deepen democracy and evolve our political institutions so that all people can increasingly directly participate in the decision-making processes that shape their context and future?

3. How can we renew our culture so that every human being is considered a carrier of a sacred project-the journey of becoming one's authentic self?

==========

At this deeper level, the root of the social divide is not outside but within. It is the self. To be more precise: it is the separation between self and other, which materializes in social conflicts (meso level, or midlevel), and in the social divide (macro level). As long as we aren't ready to face and confront this inner abyss, we are probably still stuck in premodern patterns, which will do nothing really useful to facilitate crossing the current

==========

Finally, investigating the spiritual question at this deeper level leads to perhaps the most significant clash: the clash between the self and the Self.

==========

Institutions rarely cross the boundaries of this issue matrix divide. Each field has professional graduate programs, training courses, research programs, funding mechanisms, international gatherings of experts, journals, and communities of practice. What's missing is the discourse in between.

==========

"What has been lacking in the twentieth century is a central cultural thought that would unify all these things-economy, technology, ecology, society, matter, mind, and spirituality," he said. This decline in integrative awareness and thinking, we concluded, has been replaced by a focus on business and making money as the default common aim.

==========

When we learn to access that deepest part of the U, we begin to realize that love takes no position, as the author David Hawkins says.

==========

The Indo-European root of the word "lead" and "leadership," *leith, means "to go forth," "to cross the threshold," or "to die." Sometimes letting go feels like dying. But what we've learned about the deeper process of the U is that something has to change-a threshold must be crossed-before something new can come.

==========

When we truly pay attention, we stop our habitual mode of downloading and open up to the reality in front of us.

==========

Four learning barriers keep the virus alive and keep the system locked into the mode of downloading:

1. Not recognizing what you see (decoupling perception and thought)

2. Not saying what you think (decoupling thinking and talking)

3. Not doing what you say (decoupling talking and "walking")

4. Not seeing what you do (decoupling perception and action)

==========

The first step in the U process is to learn the skill of "stopping downloading." This applies to all areas: individuals, groups, organizations and even societies.

==========

On the other hand, I have been amazed that regardless of how difficult a situation may seem, at the moment you choose to actually look at the situation, to look straight into its ugly face, new powers to deal with it are given to you.

==========

The primary job of leadership, I have come to believe through my work with Schein, is to enhance the individual and systemic capacity to see, to deeply attend to the reality that people face and enact. Thus the leader's real work is to help people discover the power of seeing and seeing together.

==========

It was then that Ursula spoke up: "Thank you, George. Your story makes me wonder whether our physicians' network project presents problems too big to solve-or too small to be inspiring."

==========

"You all seem to agree," I began, "that the current system operates on Levels i and 2, while at the same time you also agree that the future system should shift to operate from Levels 3 and 4. So, given the fact that you are the patients and the physicians of this system and this is something you all agree on, what keeps you from operating that way? Because, after all, you are the system. The system is not "them" in Berlin, it's not "them" in Brussels. The system is right here in this room. The system is created through the relationship among you-nowhere else."

==========

As a facilitator in charge of moving a whole group through this collective field shift, part of your strategy should be to keep people from entering a debating/downloading behavior and mind-set; you intervene at the moment when people start issuing their usual debate-style statements.

==========

"It's really very simple," she responded. "Before I go up front, my practice for over thirty years is of opening my heart and consciously sending unconditional love to everyone in the room. It's creating a field or surround of love. What has helped me to deepen my capacity to be present is meeting with a circle of women called the Circle of Seven over many years."

==========

There are various leverage points to deepen one's capacity to operate from that deeper source. They are:

Pick a practice.

==========

That is, most of them do something in the morning, such as getting up early and using the silence of the first hour to connect to a source of commitment and creativity. Some meditate. Some use other contemplative practices. There is no standard recipe, just as there isn't a standard practice.

==========

It's just like in chaos theory: you reduce the behavior of complex systems to the relationship of three or so variables. When I started to see the essence of the health care system in terms of this equation, I realized that the core axis around which the whole system revolves is the relationship between patients and physicians.

==========

Sometimes it's very intense, but you literally have the experience that absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong. That doesn't mean it always turns out according to your plan. It means that whatever turns out is exactly what is right in that moment, and that is the music."

==========

He told me he believes that when he moderates, he has more than the visible people present at the table-he also wants to hear what the "invisible" have to say.

==========

When I was chairing the board of a new school, sometimes I would imagine invisible children at the table. I was actually working for these children who were not yet born or were not yet there. They were my reason for being there. I try to listen into the space. The future is also at the table.

==========

On a farm you don't go out and pull up a shoot once a day just to check on how things are going. Instead, you water it and give it time. Nor do seeds want transparency or publicity. So, too, in organizations. The last thing you want is to have people constantly checking.

==========

"I attend [this way]-therefore it emerges [that way]." The same applies to the collective level.

==========

In my ten years of working with organizations I have observed four basic patterns of conversational reality creation: downloading, debate, dialogue, and presencing (see Figure 15.3).

==========

Downloading: talking nice or exchanging polite phrases to

Debate: talking tough or exchanging diverging views to

Dialogue: thinking together from diverse perspectives to

Presencing: creating collectively from an authentic presence and source of stillness

==========

These inflection points constitute a social grammar. They are:

• Opening and suspension (open mind)

• Deep diving and redirection (open heart)

• Letting go and letting come (open will)

==========

Opening up these deeper levels requires overcoming three barriers: the Voice of Judgment (VOJ); the Voice of Cynicism (VOC); and the Voice of Fear (VOF).

==========

The capacity to operate from the deeper levels of the U can only be developed to the degree that a system deals with the forces and challenges of resistance. Anybody can have a peak experience. But only those who develop the discipline to face down these forces of resistance will be able to operate reliably from the deeper levels and spheres of social emergence.

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There are three points about this story that I would like to highlight. One, mindfulness and presence can happen anytime, anywhere, in the midst of our everyday life. It doesn't require us to travel to the moon and back (although for some that has actually been the way into this experience). What it requires is an inward shift of attention.

Two, the greater the pressure of the external challenge (the bigger the mess in front of me), the more natural it feels to enter the dark space of absencing (kicking the machine), which I will explain in more detail below.

Three, the point of moving into Fields 3 and 4 is to stop interacting with objects and start dealing with everything we work and interact with as if it were a sentient being that we can directly connect to from within (the foam without eyes).

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The problem is that this type of conversation-viewed from an organizational learning point of view-tends to result in dysfunctional behavior: it prevents a team from talking about what's really going on. They talk about the real stuff somewhere else-in the parking lot, on their way home. But at the meeting everyone's time is wasted when they do nothing more than exchange polite comments. If individuals and teams don't talk about difficult issues, what Chris Argyris calls "undiscussables," they won't reflect on them and nothing will change.6

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The bigger the gap between what is said ("I am fine") and the actual situation ("I am about to die"), the higher the likelihood of some kind of breakdown in the system further down the road.

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Field i

"How are you?"

"I am fine."

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Field 2

"How are you?"

"I am terrible."

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The debate style of conversation can be useful in organizations because it allows a team to get all the different views on a subject on the table. I have found that in East Asian and South East Asian cultures the best way to get into Field 2 is not through confrontational debate (as in the West) but by a process that starts by engaging participants in small groups and allows all participants to share their various observations and views on a topic. This avoids face-saving related blockages that prevent the diverse perspectives to come out. Still, it delivers the same fundamental Field 2 bottom line: the expression of different and diverging views.

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Field 3

"How are you?"

"Not sure. But how are you, my friend?"

"Not sure either. I too arrived with an uneasy feeling."

"Oh, really? How interesting. Tell me about it. What's going on in your life?"

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Dialogue comes from the Greek logos, "word" or "meaning," and dia, "through," and can be literally translated as "meaning moving through."I I

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Field 4

"So, Otto, I'm wondering if you'd like you and your work to be held by this circle?"

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"I saw myself standing on the bridge, and I knew I had to jump to make a difference. But an incredible inner gravity was holding me back. Part of me said, `Tell him why his way of doing stakeholder dialogue interviews is useless.' The other, the scary part, said, `Open your heart. Allow him to change you.' In that moment a memory was welling up in me: not long ago, when I

was working at the headquarters of a pharmaceutical company, I had been in exactly the same situation as Walter. I had to convince business units and production sites of lots of conceptual positions, statements, and `to-dos' that didn’t relate to my own experience. The more useless I felt, the more my communication style changed to teaching or instructing them.

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Sadly, these are not just imaginary conditions. They actually describe how we currently prevent our children from connecting to their deeper sources of knowing. But if this is the way we organize the world for most of our children, we also have the power to change it.

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The blind spot resides in the white space between the units and divisions. Most people can't see this white space because it would involve a deeper collaboration across organizational boundaries.

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Olsen, the CEO, although present, didn't associate his authority with any of the positions discussed and debated among the Operations Committee members. Yet by carefully listening to all the

arguments and weighing all the pros and cons, the risks and rewards, he undoubtedly influenced what happened in the group. Through this sustained listening practice he gradually created a culture in which people began to trust the collective process of debate rather than waiting for the CEO to dictate where to go.

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Perhaps its most interesting finding was the identification of "tolerance to experiment at the margin." Experimentation and failure are important today, argued the authors of the study, in order to grow the seeds for tomorrow's successes.

That is exactly what did not happen in East Germany. Everything was centrally planned. The failure to develop prototypes of innovative living microcosms was painfully evident.

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An effective infrastructure for learning lies at the heart of sustained performance.

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When you do that twenty-five years in a row-three after-action reviews on every shift-you become one of the world's leading logistics companies.

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In the case of people who deal with cultivating the context of social fields, we have to do this work by bringing more attention and focus into the various process dimensions of our organizational entities. This includes all four functional processes, core processes, stakeholder conversation and ecosystem innovation processes.

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What is, in the end, more valuable-a culture that is ennobling but economically unstable or a stable economic entity that changes its culture to whatever is needed to survive?"17

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I share this with you because I firmly believe the pressure on our frontline practitioners right now is enormous. Nurses and physicians in the hospitals, teachers in the schools, local line leaders in companies, and farmers all tell the same story: the pressure keeps increasing, and they can't take it any longer. They feel that the system is dysfunctional, they feel trapped, and they know that collectively they often produce results that nobody wants. Yet they don’t know how to change it or how to get out.

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"Providing health information is important but not always sufficient," he says. "We also need to bring in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that are so often ignored."

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Multi-stakeholder dialogue creates a discourse that involves all key stakeholders in a multilateral interaction. Rather than being tightly controlled, the agenda is open, evolving, and transparent to all participants; any stakeholder may raise issues and concerns and co-determine the agendas of the meetings.

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Still, such dialogue may be unable to turn opposing views into productive co-creation. While the communication forms in the third circle (dialogue) tend to be good at identifying controversial issues and articulating diverse views, they tend to be less effective at turning those views into collective action or at forming new stakeholder constellations around emerging opportunities.

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Furthermore, we have no places in a given community or ecosystem that intentionally connect leaders across institutions and sectors. Frontline practitioners cannot easily build shared understanding and conversations to better sense and seize emerging opportunities that cut across institutions and sectors. This obvious deficiency brings us to the other aspect of the root system of society: the grounding of the social field and its meta-processes in nature, in the power of place.

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As long as we are mired in the viewpoint of the outer two circles, we are trapped in a victim mind-set ("the system is doing something to me"). As soon as we shift to the viewpoint of the inner two circles, we see how we can make a difference and how we can shape the future differently. Facilitating the movement from one (victim) mind-set to another (we can shape our future) is what leaders get paid for.

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As such, the U approach is firmly grounded in process consultation (PC) as one of its principal parent disciplines.2

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Practice: Take four minutes each evening and review the day as if you are looking at yourself from outside. Pay attention to how you interacted with others and what other people wanted you to do or suggested that you do. Do this nonjudgmentally. Just observe. Over time, you will develop an internal observer that allows you to look at yourself from someone else's point of view.

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Newly appointed directors begin this program by engaging in three activities: a kickoff dialogue, which is a go-minute conversation about their leadership journey and challenges; a shadowing practice, where they follow an experienced director from another part of the organization for a full day (see a more detailed description below); and a series of dialogue interviews with their most important stakeholders.

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The opposite of co-initiation is marketing-to try to get people to "buy in" to your idea. That almost never works because it's just your idea. So part of the art of convening these players is to loosen your own grip on the idea-without necessarily giving it up. You lead by painting a picture that is intentionally incomplete; you make a few strokes; and you leave lots of blank space that others can add to and participate in. By operating this way, you shift the power dynamics from ownership to belonging, to seeing your part in a larger social field or whole.

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Practice: Here is a checklist for a foundation workshop, the kickoff event that for the first time convenes all the prototyping team members and connects them with the core group of champions that initiated and is sponsoring the project initiative. As always, there is more

than one possible design that can make the foundation workshop a success. But this checklist of desired outcomes may be useful for testing the design you come up with. To create focus and commitment, clarify:

What: what you want to create

Why: why it matters

How: the process that will get you there

Who: the roles and responsibilities of the players involved

When, where: the road map forward

Additional goals:

To uncover common ground by sharing the context and story that brought us here.

To spark inspiration for the future that the team wants to create.

To use "Minitraining" in dialogue interviews and deep-dive best practices.

To plan the action for deep-dive journeys: by identifying core people, organizations, and contexts that need to be explored and visited (a target list of the places with the most potential).

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Take deep-dive journeys to the places of most potential. Deep-dive learning journeys connect people to the contexts and ideas that are relevant to creating the possible future. The deep-dive journey moves one's operating perspective from inside a familiar world-one's institutional bubble-to an unfamiliar world, one that is outside, surprising, fresh, and new. A deep-dive journey is not a benchmarking trip. It is designed to access a deeper level of emerging reality by observing hands-on practices through total immersion. It incorporates a combination of shadowing, participation, and dialogue.

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Mr. B. realized that it wasn't people he had to change, but rather his relationship to them: How could they become the source of change? What would it take to help them to become the drivers of change, rather than making them react to his efforts?

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"When you become a director, you will be confronted over and over with one thing: `Listen. Listen and learn to listen more.' That's the first rule.

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Each team member of a deep-dive journey keeps a journal; each team has digital cameras, cell phones, and Web space for real-time documentation and cross-team sharing; to speed up the process, the teams should also receive both strategic and operational support in setting up their learning journeys (which does tend to consume some time).

Before each visit:

• Gather relevant information about the site you will be visiting. (Use the Web.)

Make it clear that you want to talk to/shadow/work with people and not get a standard presentation.

• Prepare a questionnaire as a team (but feel free to deviate from it).

• Conduct a mini-training session on effective observation and best sensing practices.

• Prepare a thank you gift and assign roles (speaker, time keeper)

After each visit:

Do not switch on cell phones or PDAs before completing the after-action reflection.

Plan a time for immediate reflection as a group.

During this reflection, each participant should describe his or her observations but try not to reach any conclusions in the first round. Stay focused on what emerges from the flow. Here are a few sample questions:

i. What struck me most? What stood out?

2. What was most surprising and unexpected?

3. What touched me? What connected with me personally?

4. If the social field of the visited organization were a living being, what would it look like and feel?

5. If that being could talk, what would it say (to us)?

6. If that being could develop, what would it want to morph into next?

7. What is the source that allows this social field to develop and thrive?

8. What limiting factors prevent this field from developing further?

9. Moving into and out of this field, what did I notice about myself?

io.What can this field tell us about our blind spot?

n. What can this field teach us about our future?

12. What other ideas does this experience spark for our initiative (our way forward)?

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Practice: Take an object (such as a seed) or a situation and observe with undivided attention for at least five minutes. When you notice your mind wandering to other ideas or thoughts, correct your course and return to the task of pure observation.

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Listening to Anna, Ursula suggested she do a round of stakeholder dialogue interviews. Anna later recounted, "That meant I had to change my approach. Rather than giving to them what I thought they wanted from me (and which obviously was wrong), I instead asked them what they needed me for.

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Practice is Spend four minutes each evening reviewing when during the day you engaged in Listening 3 (open mind and heart) and Listening 4 (open mind, heart, and will). If you cannot identify a single instance of deep listening, take note of that too. If you do this exercise for a month, your effectiveness as a listener will rise dramatically-without a single dollar spent on further training or coaching.

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Practice 2: Pick your various key stakeholders and have a dialogue conversation in which you put yourself into their shoes and look at your own job from their point of view. Before each interview, take your moment of stillness and intention-setting to open up. Here are the four questions that I have used in the case of the global car company mentioned above, and that you could use as a starting point for your own list of questions:

i. What is your most important objective, and how can I help you realize it? (What do you need me for?)

2. What criteria will you use to assess whether my contribution to your work has been successful?

3. If I were able to change two things in my area of responsibility within the next six months, what two things would create the most value and benefit for you?

4. What, if any, historical tensions and/or systemic barriers have made it difficult for people in my role or function to fulfill your requirements and expectations? What is it that is getting into our way?

8. Create collective sensing organs that allow the system to see itself. Maybe the biggest institutional gap in seeking profound systems innovation is today’s lack of collective sensing mechanisms. We have lots of collective downloading mechanisms (commercials, TV, and, unfortunately, much of our education system). By contrast, collective sensing mechanisms use the power of shared seeing and dialogue to tap an unused resource of collective sense making and thinking

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Practice 2: Pick your various key stakeholders and have a dialogue conversation in which you put yourself into their shoes and look at your own job from their point of view. Before each interview, take your moment of stillness and intention-setting to open up. Here are the four questions that I have used in the case of the global car company mentioned above, and that you could use as a starting point for your own list of questions:

i. What is your most important objective, and how can I help you realize it? (What do you need me for?)

2. What criteria will you use to assess whether my contribution to your work has been successful?

3. If I were able to change two things in my area of responsibility within the next six months, what two things would create the most value and benefit for you?

4. What, if any, historical tensions and/or systemic barriers have made it difficult for people in my role or function to fulfill your requirements and expectations? What is it that is getting into our way?

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Practice: One enormously useful practice for creating collective sensing organs is the World Cafe method,

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Don't be surprised when your resistance shows up again and again. It happens to everyone. But as you become a pro, you know in advance that it will pop up at certain

Stages and that your job is to be prepared to meet and deal with it through calmness, appreciation, and focus. Moving down the U invites you to suspend your Voice of Judgment, VOJ, reverse your cynical view of a situation, VOC, and overcome your fear, VOF, of letting go of your old self-that part of you that must die in order for the new to take shape.

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Practice: Go through the following four-step meditation (by way of reflective journaling or visual imagination):

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Intentional silence: Pick a practice that helps you to connect with your source.

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They all practice something in their everyday lives that helps them access their best source of creativity and self.

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Practice 2: Running a presencing retreat workshop. The flow of a retreat workshop follows the U: sharing key insights and ideas from the deep-dive journeys; moving into the space of silence; crystallizing ideas for prototyping initiatives and action planning.

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The road to accessing one's creativity includes the stages of (1) nothing much happening, (2) boredom, and then (3) noticing and responding to an inner impulse that evolves within yourself. It is difficult to learn how to do these things when you are managed by a tight system of exterior activities, rewards, and controls.

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Circles of Presence: Create circles in which you hold one another in the highest future intention. There is an invisible movement going on in the world. It's a movement that is manifest in a variety of forms and practices. These practices rest on the same underlying principle: to form a safe collective holding space in which the participants support one another in making sense of and advancing their life and work journeys.

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The spiritual energy economics at issue here can be summarized in a simple equation: E = D m. Personal energy (E) is a function of making a difference (D) in something that matters to me (m).

If your work doesn't make a difference, that's a problem. Or if you work on something that doesn't matter to you, that's also a problem. In those cases you will tend to deplete your energy. The work itself won't recharge you. But if you make a real difference, doing something that truly matters to you, then you are on a loop of ever-increasing energy: the more you give, the more you get back.

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Practice 1: Creative tension exercise: This practice was devised by Peter Senge and Robert Fritz, composer, filmmaker and organizational consultant. In its classical form, it works as a meditation in three steps: First ask (1) What do I want to create? and (2) What does the current reality look like by contrast? Then (3) Picture both images together (e.g., as a split screen) and note the creative tension between them.

This practice is an excellent tool to use as you start up the right-hand side of the U (crystallizing). I have found it useful to modify this exercise slightly in the U context this way: during the first step, focus on your future state in your journey. During the second step, do not only concentrate on how the current reality differs from your desired

Future, but try to figure out where in today's reality you find the seed elements of the future. Then, in the third step, picture the creative tension in a three-dimensional space. Move between the poles. Go into the seed elements (with your mind and heart) and evolve with them toward the desired future state, and return from there to current reality, and so forth. Many practitioners use this exercise successfully.

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First thing in the morning, ask yourself: "What are the one or two most important things for me to do today? How am I going to use the best quality time of the day?" The underlying principle here is that energy follows attention.

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Convening the players: A strategic microcosm connects key players across boundaries who need one another in order to take their system into the best future way of operating. For a microcosm constellation to be productive, it usually needs five types of practitioners:

(1) practitioners who are accountable for results (problem owners, such as the CEO of the hospital); (2) practitioners on the front line who know the real problems first hand (e.g., physicians); (3) people at the bottom of the system who normally have no voice and no say about how others spend their money and who bring a different view and focus that can help to reframe the overall issue (e.g., patients or citizens); (4) people outside the system who can offer a view or a competence critical to the success of the project (creative outsiders); and (5) one or a few activists who are wholly committed to making the project work (who have the right heart and who are willing to give their lives to make it work).

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This story, of course, is a beautiful demonstration of the U: create the intention to solve a problem, dive into it, work like crazy, and break the flow (stop), pay attention to the ideas that start to slip in through the back door of your mind; then develop and embody that idea.

Practice: Focus on what really matters. Work a lot. Take a shower. Get an illuminating idea. Dry yourself off and prototype the idea.

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Practice: Use the framework of Figure 19.2 to assess your current system: First, draw four circles; then identify each of the key stakeholders in your ecosystem outside the circles; in the circles themselves list the communication qualities of the key stakeholder relationships; notice which communication qualities (channels) are activated, and which ones are not. If possible, use this stakeholder communication assessment as a starting point for thinking together about how to move the system from the outer to the inner circles of communication and governance.

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Practice 2: Peer-coaching case clinics: Case clinics and peer coaching need a structure in order for teams to work together successfully. The structure below outlines one example.

Imagine you have 70 minutes per session and four persons per team. Here are some specific parameters you could use to construct your clinic.

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Example is Ralf Schneider and his team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world's largest global services company, designed a leadership development program that takes deep-dive action learning journeys to some of the current spots of societal crisis and breakdown.

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That is the idea behind the Social Presencing Theater we are, at this writing, in the midst of creating.14

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Practice is On the evening before facilitating or leading a workshop or gathering, take a few minutes to align your intention with the best future possibility of the group or community that you will be working with the next day. Establishing this relationship will help you to improve the quality of intuitions that slip through the back door of your mind when you have to respond to real-time situations.

Practice 2: When conducting large-group events, I have found it useful to hold a collective intention-setting session the evening before the event begins. It usually takes no more than five or ten minutes. When the room setup is complete and most of the preparations are done, you call the core group together and stand in a circle; everyone then says one or two things about what they personally consider to be the event's purpose or goal: What should this event accomplish, and what future possibility do they want to facilitate and serve? I have found that groups that engage in intention setting the night before are likely to establish a better field and holding space throughout the event than groups that do not.

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The U process can be thought of as a social breathing process. The left-hand side of the U is the inhaling part of the cycle: total immersion in the current field, taking everything in. The right-hand side of the U is the exhaling part of the cycle: bringing the field of the future into reality as it desires. Between these two movements, breathing in and breathing out, there is a small crack of nothingness. That silent pause is the mystery or source at the bottom of the U. It's where the letting go (of the old) connects with the letting come (of the new). That crack can be thought of as the eye of a needle: the Self.

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Education. Table 22.1 below spells out nine knowledge and learning contexts that a prototype twenty-first-century school (and university) would need to provide for its students and faculty.

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Innovations in cultural infrastructures that reinvent our institutions of education. Table 22.1 below spells out nine knowledge and learning contexts that a prototype twenty-first-century school (and university) would need to provide for its students and faculty.

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3 The four questions are: (i) What is your most important objective, and how can I help you realize it? (What do you need me for?) (2) What criteria will you use to assess whether my contribution to your work has been successful? (3) If I were able to change two things in my area of responsibility within the next six months, what two things would create the most value and benefit for you? (4) What, if any, historical tensions and/or conflicting demands have made it difficult for people in my role or function to fulfill your requirements and expectations?