I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That’s a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.
That is why the discipline of managing mental models – surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works – promises to be a major breakthrough for building learning organizations.
When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that “someone screwed up.
Advocacy without inquiry begets more advocacy.
When a change management fails, leadership change is brought in. A leadership change will always bring in change management.
When asked what they want, many adults will say what they want to get rid of.
In fact, most of the time, things do not turn out as we expect. But the potential value of unexpected developments is rarely tapped. Instead, when things turn out contrary to our expectations, we go immediately into problem-solving mode and react, or just try harder – without taking the time to see whether this unexpected development is telling us something important about our assumptions. “This more prepared mental state is really where a lot of the longer-term payoff is,” says Galloway.
Do we meet each person curious about the miracle of a human being that we are about to connect with? Or do we meet a poor person that we are about to help?
Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization – the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.
Then, if you bring a certain kind of open, moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness to what you’re attending to, you’ll begin to develop a more penetrative awareness that sees beyond the surface of what’s going on in your field of awareness. This is mindfulness. Mindfulness makes it possible to see connections that may not have been visible before. But seeing these connections doesn’t happen as a result of trying – it simply comes out of the stillness.
Until you do the inner work of learning how to see with “your eyes and your heart open,” as Kabat-Zinn puts it, deep problems will persist.
To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive.
Mastery of creative tension transforms the way one views “failure.” Failure is, simply, a shortfall, evidence of the gap between vision and current reality. Failure is an opportunity for learning – about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn’t work as expected, about the clarity of the vision. Failures are not about our unworthiness or powerlessness.
A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further – if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person – then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.
Conflict manipulation is the favored strategy of people who incessantly worry about failure, of managers who excel at motivational chats that point out the highly unpleasant consequences if the company’s goals are not achieved, and of social movements that attempt to mobilize people through fear.
Chris Argyris criticized “good communication that blocks learning,” arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because “they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.
Yet, there is a world of difference between compliance and commitment. The committed person brings an energy, passion, and excitement that cannot be generated by someone who is only compliant, even genuinely compliant. The committed person doesn’t play by the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules. A group of people truly committed to a common vision is an awesome force.
If managers focus only on short-term results, they are often justified in continuing to intervene to sustain results.
Organizations learn only through individuals who learn.
Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions’.
Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.