Book Review-Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

It’s an odd title.  Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory refers to the kinds of changes that Lewis and Clark needed to make during their journey that were radically transformative of their assumptions and invalidated their experiences.  Despite this, they persisted in finding the path to the Pacific Ocean and returned before Captain Lewis’ decision to end his own life.

The Context

Before we can explain the lessons and the analogy, it’s appropriate to review what we know about churches and their pressures.  Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone shares the drop in attendance.  His more recent book, The Upswing, echoes the same general decline.  Putnam’s concerns are echoed by authors who are less secular.  John Dickerson in The Great Evangelical Recession sees the problem as both inside and outside the church.  Churchless takes a much more data driven approach to show that our beliefs are shifting.  We’re seeing lower attendance and less giving.

Some of these changes may be generational, with Tom Brokaw explaining that The Greatest Generation is quite different than those that followed it.  Chuck Underwood in America’s Generations is clearer about how attitudes have changed specifically away from religion.

All of this is to say there’s solid consensus that there are pressures making leading more challenging – and quite different than anything we’ve seen before.

Strange New World

The prevailing belief was that there was a water passage from the East to the West coasts of America.  If this passageway could be found, it would open up trade and commerce.  It was a task that President Thomas Jefferson believed Captain Lewis could accomplish for the young country.  Lewis wanted Clark as his co-director on the journey, which the war department ultimately vetoed.  This was a close kept secret, as Lewis and Clark co-led the Corps of Discovery without the Corps knowing who was “really” in charge.

Lewis and Clark worked their way across the country and encountered the Rocky Mountains and ending the hope that a water route could be found.  Ultimately, they traversed the mountains and found the Northwest Passage.  They had achieved their goal of reaching the Pacific Ocean but not in the way they expected.

Uncharted Territory

What is life but a journey into uncharted territory?  Tod Bolsinger’s point seems to be that the world in front of us is radically different than the world we came from.  It’s not that we’re exploring more of the same, we’re encountering fundamentally different conditions.

Instead of church being a foundation for developing good values, parents are taking their children to music lessons and sports teams.  They believe that the best way to develop their children is to focus on these extracurricular activities.  It certainly doesn’t hurt that these activities can matter in a competitive college application process.  (See The Years That Matter Most for more on getting into the best college.)

Leadership

Bolsinger builds his perspectives on leadership on a broad base, including the work of Ronald Heifetz.  (See Leadership on the Line for my review of one of Heifetz’ works.)  Specifically, there is a focus on what Heifetz calls adaptive challenges.  These are challenges that can’t be solved with existing, known, step-by-step responses.

For me, the literature on leadership is large.  Northouse’s Leadership: Theory and Practice, Burns’ Leadership, and Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership are the top of my list for those who want to get a baseline understanding of leadership.  However, the list of books that address leadership is quite long.  Some, like The Leadership Challenge and The Leadership Machine, attempt to reduce the process into digestible chunks.

However, one Christian-focused leadership book that stands out as a complementary work to Canoeing the Mountains is Heroic Leadership.  It challenges the assertion that we’re facing uncharted territory by sharing the world of the Jesuit order and how they integrated into radically different cultures to bring the good news to those who had never heard anything of Christ.

Leadership is often described as a relationship of mutual influence.  When we’re influenced, we’re going to change, and this is particularly true of leaders.

Change

Bolsinger shares Heifetz’ perspective from a presentation, quoting, “Most real change is not about change. It’s about identifying what cultural DNA is worth conserving, is precious and essential, and that indeed makes it worth suffering the losses so that you can find a way to bring the best of your tradition and history and values into the future.”  This is the heart of William Bridges’ model for change.  All changes bring loss, and Heifetz guides us to focus the losses on the expendable parts of our identity.  While we speak of change resistance, most people don’t resist change, they resist loss.

Bolsinger also references the work of John Kotter, who has his own model for bringing about change in large organizations.  In addition to Kotter’s views on change, Bolsinger shares Kotter’s Buy-In book, which describes the inevitable challenges of getting buy-in when people have different perspectives.

Bolsinger also quotes Margaret Wheatley: “It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be.”  (See Leadership and the New Science for more of Wheatley’s work.)  Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak explain how the people at the top of their fields got there.  They simplify it to purposeful practice.  The experts purposefully try to develop better skills.  They hire coaches to help them find the perfect form, the perfect pitch, and techniques for solving the challenges of the field.  Steven Kotler explains in The Rise of Superman how this continued progress can lead to feats that seem superhuman on the surface and only begin to make sense when viewed in the context of the work they did to develop that skill.

The message is that you don’t have to know exactly how the change will turn out – but you can continue to work towards better skills, relationships, and awareness of yourself, so that when an inflection point for change comes, you’re ready.

Holding Environments

Learning and growing occurs best in an environment with the right amount of psychological safety.  In The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson explains how the reported rate of errors increased after making it easier and safer to report errors without fear of retribution.  The confusing result is explained by the fact that the safety increased – and so did the improvement.  In leading organizations, we need to encourage and even press those we work with to do more and better – but we must also make it seem safer and better to fail.  It’s only by creating safety that we can help people grow.

In Play, Stuart Brown explains the critical role that play has in developing humans – and the characteristic safety that defines it.  We need a degree of safety to allow learning to happen.  We learn and grow along the delicate balance of safety and yearning for more.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Bolsinger writes, “Long ago we came to expect that being part of a church community means biding our time, biting our tongues and being part of something that is at best well-meaning.”  In the language of Albert Hirschman, he’s speaking of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.  Hirschman’s perspective is that, given a conflict, we have two options: exit the situation or use our voice to change it.  It’s loyalty that mediates how long we’ll remain in the conflict before exercising the exit option.  Bolsinger is speaking of a decision that our voice isn’t enough to change the situation, so we burn our loyalty – to the church and to Christianity – until we decide to exit.

The challenge with this is finding a way to have our voice heard.  It’s a balance between a soft voice that isn’t heard and a booming voice that isn’t listened to.  There’s a pathway through change that creates more spaces for voices to be heard.  One pathway for church leaders to consider is the path of Nonviolent Communication.

Alignment Hedgehogs

Bolsinger elevates Lencioni’s perspective from The Advantage that alignment is a powerful advantage.  He goes further to speak of Jim Collin’s perspective on hedgehogs – which know one thing very well – and foxes – which know many things.  (See Good to Great.)  Here, alignment is a good thing, but not an absolute.  In The Difference, Scott Page explains the value of having different kinds of people at the table to get performance.  Richard Hackman makes the same point in Collaborative Intelligence: we need multiple perspectives.  At an individual level, Phil Tetlock says that the greater the ability to take multiple perspectives, the better predictors will be at predicting the outcome.  (See Superforecasting.)  Nate Silver makes a similar point about prediction in The Signal and the Noise.  David Epstein in Range explains how generalists can triumph in a specialized world.

What does this mean to the church?  It means that we should have a central alignment on core mission.  Simon Sinek’s book, Start with Why, focuses on the need for a central organizing principle.  We do need to find that central focus.  Organizing principles can form the foundation of all we do.

Simultaneously, we must find ways to be open to changes and new and different experiences.  Without these elements, we’ll become stale, calcified, and unable to adapt to the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world we find ourselves in.  (See Focused, Fast, and Flexible.)  He says that to birth anything new, it requires sex – which is the combination of two things to create something new.

Trust, Betrayal, and Relationships

Bolsinger quotes Dennis and Michelle Reina, “There is only one thing that builds trust: the way people behave.”  In their book, Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace, they highlight the necessity of trust – and the expectation that you should expect betrayal – what Bolsinger calls “sabotage.”  I speak of the need for trust, which leads to vulnerability and intimacy, in my post, Trust=> Vulnerability => Intimacy, Revisited.  The relationships that we build through our continued consistency and persistence become invaluable tools when we’re faced with changes, challenges, and unexplored territory.

It’s Not Working

Bolsinger learned from an early coach, Kirk Kirlin, “When what you are doing isn’t working, there are two things you cannot do: (1) Do what you have already done, (2) Do nothing.”  Too many people in leadership positions cannot lead into uncharted territory.  Instead, they continue to do the things that have led to their organization’s decline, or worse, they freeze and do nothing.  It takes courage to realize that change is required.  It takes a willingness to accept reality for what it is.  (See Advice Not Given.)  When you see the mountains, you can’t expect to go Canoeing the Mountains.

Book Review-Leadership: Theory and Practice

Sometimes, the college textbook is the best way to learn something.  In Leadership: Theory and Practice, Peter Northouse reviews the various perspectives and theories of leadership, explaining what they are, what’s good about them, and what’s bad.  It’s a wonderful summary of some of the perspectives and theories that I’ve studied in more detail.

Of course, it’s necessary to define what we’re talking about when we say “leadership.”  Here, Northouse draws upon Rost (Leadership for the Twenty-First Century) and Burns (Leadership) before settling on a slightly more complicated version of “leadership is influence.”  It’s the ability for one person to influence the other.  His perspective that the influence is, at least in some ways, reciprocal comes through, as he avoids directly favoring any one approach and instead focuses on what has been supported by empirical research.

Few people realize that the concept of leadership connects back to the work of Aristotle.  Where “management” has been conflated with leadership, management is a much more modern concept, having arrived with the industrial revolution and the rise of large organizations at the turn of the century.

Power

Northouse draws from French and Raven’s famous “The Bases of Social Power” article, citing the following six bases of power:

Referent Power	Based on followers’ identification and liking for the leader. A teacher who is adored by students has referent power.
Expert Power	Based on followers’ perceptions of the leader’s competence. A tour guide who is knowledgeable about a foreign country has expert power.
Legitimate Power	Associated with having status or formal job authority. A judge who administers sentences in the courtroom exhibits legitimate power.
Reward Power	Derived from having the capacity to provide rewards to others. A supervisor who compliments employees who work hard is using reward power.
Coercive Power	Derived from having the capacity to penalize or punish others. A coach who sits players on the bench for being late to practice is using coercive power.
Information Power	Derived from possessing knowledge that others want or need. A boss who has information regarding new criteria to decide employee promotion eligibility has information power.

Leadership Traits

Early on, Northouse questions the trait theory of leadership.  This theory posits that some people are destined for leadership.  It says that the presence and absence of consistent traits will separate those who can lead from those who cannot.  Very quickly, we see that not everyone agrees on what these traits are.  He produces the following table of proposed traits:

Stogdill (1948)	Mann (1959)	Stogdill (1974)	Lord, DeVader, and Alliger (1986)	Kirkpatrick and Locke (1991)	Zaccaro, Kemp, and Bader (2017)
Intelligence alertness insight responsibility initiative persistence self-confidence sociability	Intelligence masculinity adjustment dominance extraversion conservatism	Achievement persistence insight initiative self-confidence responsibility cooperativeness tolerance influence sociability	Intelligence masculinity dominance	Drive motivation integrity confidence cognitive ability task knowledge	cognitive ability extraversion conscientiousness emotional stability openness agreeableness motivation social intelligence self-monitoring emotional intelligence problem solving

While the lists have a degree of overlap, there’s a lot of difference as well.  This is, of course, a small subset of the research that tries to find the magical traits divide those who are destined for leadership and those who are not.

The problem – besides the lack of consistency – is that, in many cases, there is evidence to support that supposedly fixed and unchangeable traits are actually teachable skills and behaviors.  This means that traits aren’t useful as a sorting mechanism.  However, they may help us to gauge what skills we need to develop in our leaders.  Emotional intelligence, for instance, has been shown to improve results and to be teachable.  (See Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership for emotional intelligence.)

Skills

This transition leads us to the next approach, where the work focuses on what skills a leader needs to have to be successful.  Here, there is some indication that skills are helpful – beyond the emotional intelligence referenced above.

Unfortunately, despite billions of dollars spent on leadership training, we’ve not been able to demonstrate value.  (See Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation for some clues as to why.)  From a research perspective, the skills model has generally had weak predictive value. That is to say that we’ve not found the set of skills that we can teach leaders that will shift the balance to better results.

Behaviors

What if leadership isn’t about traits or skills but behaviors?  The behavioral approach posits that there’s two kinds of behaviors: task behaviors and relationship behaviors.  Some research shows that being high in both kinds of behaviors is the best form of leadership.  However, there’s no universal agreement on the categorization.  A better categorization might be employee orientation vs. production orientation.  The focus might on people and results orientation.  The lack of consistency has hampered the ability to find a set of key behaviors that matter in all situations.

The lack of consistency and replicability is one of the drivers that led to a situational approach.

Situational

A situational approach starts with the idea that different situations demand different kinds of leadership.  The reason we can’t find a single approach – whether it involves traits, skills, behaviors – is because the situation changes, and there’s no one set of anything that can address every situation.

Here, too, we find the familiar 2×2 grid along two axes: supportive behaviors and directive behaviors.  Within the grid is a pathway that starts highly directive and not very supportive, called directing, up through increased support – called coaching – and back down the directive axis into a quadrant of low directive but highly supportive behavior, called supporting.  The pathway ends with a low directive and low supportive behavior quadrant called delegating.

Conceptually, it’s clear that situations differ, and therefore the leadership should change to meet the situation.  What isn’t clear is how to describe a framework that captures this in a measurable and demonstratable way.  In short, we don’t know how to match up the traits, skills, and behaviors to the conditions – or even how to describe the conditions.

Path-Goal Theory

If we shift the focus from the leader to the follower needs and motivations, we get path-goal theory.  It’s similar to information scent, which is derived optimal foraging.  (See Killer Web Content for more.)  Basically, this means we’re drawn to things that we desire.  Thus, the more signals a leader sends saying we’re likely to get what we want by following them, the more likely it is we will follow them.  These signals can come in the form of a directive leadership, which provides simple answers to problems, or supportive leadership, which signals a desire to enable the success of the follower.

While path-goal theory seems well founded, it’s also complex and encompasses so many elements that it can be confusing and, importantly, difficult to measure.  As a result, to date, there’s only partial validity supported by some studies.

Leader-Member Exchange Theory

What if every act of leadership is centered on the exchanges between the leaders and followers?  How would we measure the degree to which people are intellectually intimate with one another?  How might roles, influences, exchanges, and interests be looked at?  The answer is that we might look at the relationship strength and describe how these dimensions might change.

As a theory, it’s interesting.  It’s the first time we see a shift from people to the relationships between people – and important aspect of leadership that had not been considered.

Transformational Leadership

Taking the relationship further, transformational leadership is focused on how some leaders can inspire their followers.  It’s here that we begin to see the work of Burns (see Leadership) and a greater focus on the bi-directional influence exerted between leaders and followers.  It’s also the first place where we start to see the moral implications of leadership surface.  We start to see concerns about pseudo-transformational leadership, where the influence threatens the welfare of the followers.  Transformational leadership is supposed to be transformational for the leader, the follower, and their relationship, with the implication that it’s getting better or growing.

Transformational leadership is in contrast to a transactional approach, which isn’t much more than a direct exchange.  It’s really tit-for-tat.  I’ll pay you X for Y.  (See The Evolution of Cooperation for more on tit-for-tat.)  Tangentially, laissez-faire leadership – or almost a lack of leadership – has historically been seen negatively, but it appears to be adaptive in some situations.  By taking a step back, you allow followers to reach their capacity.  The research seems to show that combining different styles of laissez-faire, transactional, and transformational approaches is best.

We also begin to see work like Kouzes and Posner’s The Leadership Challenge, which proports to show a path towards more effective application of transformational leadership.  Their model is simplified but still includes 10 different skills that must be mastered for transformational leadership.  One of their skills is building a vision – something that’s consistent across many other authors with for transformational leadership.

Authentic Leadership

Authentic leadership “describes leadership that is transparent, morally grounded, and responsive to people’s needs and values.”  Despite this summary, there’s no single accepted definition of authentic leadership.  Speaking in broad, sweeping terms like the above is great – but it becomes problematic, because each of the terms can be questioned.  How transparent is transparent?  Do you share the balance sheet and the CEO’s compensation package?  What about pending litigation?

“Morally grounded” has its own set of challenges.  Whose morals?  As Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, he believes that there are foundations for morality.  We each lean on these in different ways, sometimes generating radically different moral beliefs that are equally valid from others’ points of view.

Here, Northouse elevates a persistent refrain about the capacity to lead millennials.  There is an elevation of the values of individualism and work-life balance compared to extrinsic rewards.  While I believe that generational leadership is worthy of study, I don’t believe that younger workers are fundamentally different than we were at their ages.  The data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics backs up this point of view, as any review of transitioning jobs has remained relatively stable for decades.

Servant Leadership

Promoted by Robert Greenleaf, servant leadership is fundamentally based on the simple premise that leaders exist to serve the people they lead.  While Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership is difficult to read, it’s a detailed exposition of his thoughts.

Perhaps the largest area of difference between servant leadership and other forms is the use of coercive influence.  Servant leadership shuns it, while other leadership forms believe that it’s a tool in the toolbelt for use when necessary.

Adaptive Leadership

Adaptive leadership extends the concept of situational leadership.  It was initially proposed by Ronald Heifetz in 1994.  (You can see my review of another of his works, Leadership on the Line.)  It proposes that there are situations that are fundamentally different.  In the first category are technical challenges.  These are the kinds of challenges that can be solved by simply applying methodological, cookie-cutter type solutions.  The other category are adaptive challenges – those for which there is no one answer.  He also allows for a blended category, where aspects are technical while the overall challenge is adaptive.

This is consistent with work across disciplines.  Horst Rittel and Melvin Weber proposed the concept of wicked problems characterized by 10 characteristics.  (See Wicked Problems.)  David Snowden believes problems break down into clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic, with the first two roughly corresponding to Heifetz’ technical category.  Snowden’s approach, called Cynefin, recognizes not only these categories of challenges but also liminal spaces where challenges transition between categories – and not always linearly.  (See also his book, Cynefin.)

Also embedded in the concept of adaptive leadership is the need for holding environments.  This is the requisite condition for creating psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson explains in The Fearless Organization.  One of the aspects of the holding environment that’s proven to be universally valuable is the capacity to speak about the unspeakable.  The chapter includes a reference to a student newspaper whose editors wanted to expose depression but were prohibited from running the story.  They make the comment that, “By telling us that students could not talk openly about their struggles, they reinforced the very stigma we were trying to eliminate.”  We see this in suicide prevention, as explained in Life Under Pressure.  Regarding substance use disorder, Bruce Alexander tries to correct the myths of the rats who were addicted to morphine laced water in The Globalization of Addiction.  Similarly, Jonathan Hari explains in Chasing the Scream how we’ve made substance use disorder prevalence worse by our policies and approaches.

Inclusive Leadership

It’s the same core idea as diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that are currently under attack.  In its purest form, it’s valuing everyone and trying to find space for their contributions.  In The Difference, Scott Page explains the power of diversity.  No matter how you define diversity, it improves performance – within the limits of good collaboration structures.  (See Hackman’s Collaborative Intelligence for more on the right frameworks.)

At the heart of inclusive leadership is creating and allowing for shared identity.  In addition to individual identities, the group develops the capacity to work together and bring their unique history and gifts to bear on the problems they’re facing.

Followership

Followership gets a bad reputation.  It’s not as glamorous as leadership – though it’s clearly necessary, because you cannot lead without followers.  Very little research or study is done on followership – and some of that is followership in cults.  (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing.)  Despite the lack of study, there are hidden clues in unlikely places.

Work Redesign shares the story of Ralph who probably ended up in burnout.  However, the decisions that Ralph made are important.  He decided that his contributions (to leadership) didn’t matter.  He decided that he wasn’t cut out to be a leader or wasn’t going to be a leader, and so in this binary frame of reference, the only other option was to be a follower.  In this frame, it seems only like losers end up following.

A better frame may be that we need everyone’s gifts.  Some will be followers.  Some will be the people that get the important things done.  Others will be leaders.  Somehow, we need to continue to study the dynamics of followership and Leadership.

Book Review-Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World

It was during a conversation with a friend that Margaret Wheatley’s work first came up.  In speaking of the non-linear and chaotic effects of change, he pointed specifically to Wheatley’s work in Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World.  The heart of the work is the deepening understanding of science that relies on probabilities and chaos to create the predictability that we expect.  The work was published in 2006, and since its publication, we’ve learned more about the world we live in and how our belief in formulaic certainty remains a pervasive illusion.

Managing Change

I built the Confident Change Management course with a keen awareness that 70% of change projects fail.  In fact, 70% of all large projects fail.  They fail to complete their work on time or on budget, or they don’t accomplish the results that were hoped for.  Wheatley expressed her confusion that we’d speak of change management – but that change seemed to be overwhelming us, making us feel less capable and more confused.

The answer seems to be found in the realization that change is more complicated and nuanced than we’d like to believe.  The good news in the discovery of the chaos that underlies our beliefs of certainty is that the chaos itself has a certain order to it.

The Relationship to Leadership

As we move into deeper understanding, we recognize that everything is about relationships.  Leadership is, as Burns and Rost said, about these relationships.  (See Leadership and Leadership for the Twenty-First Century respectively.)  These relationships hold electrons around the nucleus of an atom and the planets in orbit around the Sun.  Even through subatomic particles, we find that relationships rule.  Instead of individual parts with their own functions, we find that different parts operate as a part of the whole through their relationships.

These relationships weave together at higher levels of organization, as Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene.  Others’ work, like that in The Evolution of Cooperation, SuperCooperators, and Does Altruism Exist?, explains how cooperation is a better strategy for ingroups and competition is a better strategy for outgroups.  Collectively, these strategies lead to greater success.  However, the dynamics of these benefits change based on relationships.  The more cooperative the relationship, the greater the results.

Change Happens when Necessary

There’s a venture capitalist way of thinking about opportunities as either vitamins or antibiotics.  The point is that people buy antibiotics because they must – because there’s an immediate and critical motivating factor that causes them to take immediate action.  Vitamins are, of course, a good idea, but they’re only a good idea when people have the resources for them and when they remember.  The former are better candidates for investment (though this is only one dimension), because the demand system is built into the model.

In organizational leadership, organizations only change when they need to change to preserve at least some of themselves.  Organizations have come and gone because they didn’t change fast enough.  Organizations that did change may have changed so much that they’re very different organizations than when they started – but at least they’re still alive.  Success stories for radical organizational transformation are less prevalent, but it happens.

When we look at the successes and failures for organizational transformation, we can hone in on timing.  Organizations like Kodak had everything they needed to be successful.  They invented digital photography, but they failed to see the need because their core photochemical business was so profitable.  Organizations like IBM made it because of leadership that recognized the end was coming before it arrived.

Thus, even in the “necessity” category, some organizations won’t recognize the necessity quick enough and won’t pivot fast enough (because of capability or willpower).  As a result, the organization may die.  Resilient organizations are those that can detect when a change is necessary sooner – and can react quicker.

Probabilities Not Predictions

Jonathan Haidt proposes that the reason for consciousness is the ability to predict.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  The ability to predict future dangers justifies the massive cost that cognition requires.  Our brains consume 20-30% of our glucose (energy) while accounting for only 2-3% of our body mass.  They’re very expensive to operate even when they’re designed for energy savings.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow.)  It’s easy to see how our evolutionary history would lead us to crave the ability to predict in every area of our life.

However, as we reach a subatomic (quantum) level, we see the language shift from prediction to probability.  Instead of A+B=C, we get A+B will yield C 37.6% of the time.  Gone are the assurances of certainty, replaced by the bookie’s statistics and probabilities.

Some would argue that we can achieve certainty.  After all, we were taught that combining chemicals in a beaker would result in a new thing.  Despite the inexperience of the high school class doing the work, the results largely came out as expected.  The real difference between our high school chemistry and the lives we lead is scale.  When you’re scaled to billions and billions of atoms, the result may not be what’s expected in every case – but the number of cases where it didn’t are rounding errors, undetectable, incomplete reactions.  The other variable is time to completion.  Normally, these reactions are complete in seconds or minutes – not the months or seasons that most leadership challenges take.

We don’t want to know what the average result is for a set of circumstances like ours.  We want to know what will happen to our change, our initiative, our pet project.  We’re stuck with probabilities, and that’s not satisfying.

It Feels

Some things are hard to measure.  Some things that are measurable don’t have a measurement framework that make them useful.  Gary Klein explains in Sources of Power about the fire captains that knew how fires work and how to direct firefighters safely into battle a blaze, but they couldn’t describe how they knew these things.  Klein called it recognition-primed decisions (RPD).  More broadly, in the field of knowledge management, it’s called tacit knowledge, and some of it is difficult, if not impossible, to articulate.  (See Lost Knowledge.)

There’s a lot of interest, and some promising results, for artificial intelligence in the detection of medical diseases.  (More specifically, it’s the machine learning branch of artificial intelligence.)  The computer can consistently evaluate more criteria than a human can.  They’re getting better detection rates.  The problem – and one that we’re likely to wrestle with for a while – is that we can’t exactly explain what the models are looking for.  There’s no clear set of articulatable criteria that the system is using.  Even when we build systems to solve some problems, we can’t articulate why it works the way it does.  Sometimes, intuition and “feel” is all we have.

However, the work on prediction tells us that our “feelings” are notoriously biased.  They say that they’re too easy to lead us astray.  So, while we must consider how we feel about something, we must simultaneously be suspicious.  (For more, see The Signal and the Noise, Superforecasting, and Noise.)

Information as Nourishment

The Information Diet calls for conscious consumption of information.  It uses a new metaphor.  Instead of information being power, it’s nourishment.  (Although it doesn’t express this quite as clearly as Wheatley.)  Instead of looking at the collection of information to consolidate power, it’s a way to nourish and grow.  The model exposes the downside of information.  It’s possible to become overwhelmed by information.  Like overeating, too much information can make it harder for us to do anything.  The Age of Overwhelm focuses on the impacts of being overwhelmed and the need for better strategies for managing information.

Information managers, information architects, and librarians have long known that our current strategies for information management are failing us under the weight of an overwhelming amount of information.  They’ve been working to improve the tools we have – but the rate isn’t keeping up.  (See also The Organized Mind.)

I Crave Companions

Wheatley closes with a comment that is worthy of quoting: “I crave companions, not competitors.”  We need more people who are willing to support us and to journey with us through Leadership and the New Science.

Book Review-The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations

Every organization wants extraordinary results.  That’s what The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations promises.  Built on decades of research, the book lays out a framework for what James Kouzes and Barry Posner found.

The Need for Challenge

It’s hard to explain how to do something if you aren’t able to articulate what that thing is.  While they don’t go to the detail and rigor of either Rost in Leadership for the Twenty-First Century or Burns in Leadership, they provide a working definition and elevate the need for challenge.  Leadership is shown during challenge.

In Antifragile, Taleb makes the point clear.  It’s challenge that allows us to grow stronger.  We exercise muscles to break them down only to be rebuilt stronger.  Leadership has a similar quality in that leaders are led through a set of challenges that increases their capacity – without breaking them.

Of course, challenge itself isn’t a single dimension; it is often an environment of challenge that surfaces from our Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world.  (See Focused, Fast, and Flexible for more on VUCA.)

Skills

Much like The Leadership Machine, Kouzes and Posner believe that leadership is a quantifiable set of skills that can be taught.  However, the model that they propose is substantially simpler, consisting of five principles, each with two skills.  The principles and the associated skills are:

• Model the Way
  • Clarify values by finding your voice and affirming shared values. (See Exit, Voice, and Loyalty for more on voice.)
  • Set the example by aligning actions with shared values. (See Who Am I? and The Righteous Mind for candidate values.)
• Inspire a Shared Vision (See John Kotter’s Leading Change and The Heart of Change for more about shared vision.)
  • Envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. (See Bold for more.)
  • Enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations. (See Primal Leadership.)
• Challenge the Process
  • Search for opportunities by seizing the initiative and looking outward. (See The Outward Mindset.)
  • Experiment and take risks by consistently generating small wins and learning from experiences. (See The Fearless Organization and The Right Kind of Wrong.)
• Enable Others to Act
  • Foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. (See Trust & Betrayal and Building Trust for trust. For collaboration, see Hackman’s Collaborative Intelligence and Hansen’s Collaboration.)
  • Strengthen others by increasing self-determination and developing competence. (See Why We Do What We Do and Healing Developmental Trauma.)
• Encourage the Heart
  • Recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence. (See 365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees with Little or No Money, and 42 Rules of Employee Engagement for more.)
  • Celebrate the values and victories by creating a spirit of community. (See Digital Habitats and The Art of Community for more.)

Characteristics

Similarly the authors believe there are a set of characteristics that cause people to recognize people as leaders.  They are:

• Honest
• Competent
• Inspiring
• Forward-looking
• Dependable
• Supportive
• Intelligent
• Broad-minded
• Cooperative
• Fair-minded
• Ambitious
• Straightforward
• Caring
• Loyal
• Determined
• Mature
• Imaginative
• Courageous
• Self-Controlled
• Independent

These skills remind me of Gallup’s CliftonStrengths (previously StrengthsFinder) and the Values in Action assessments.  (See Strengths Finder 2.0 for CliftonStrengths.)

Laws

In addition, the authors believe in two laws:

1. If you don’t believe the messenger, you won’t believe the message.
2. Do What You Say You Will Do (DWYSYWD)

The Power of Story

It’s true that there’s power in stories.  The stories that you identify with can motivate and inspire.  (See Story Genius, Wired for Story, and Building a StoryBrand for examples.)  There’s an immense amount of power in making the people inside the organization the heroes of the stories that you tell, as Joseph Campbell discovered.  (See The Power of Myth.)

Despite the power of story, The Leadership Challenge failed to land on compelling stories for me.  They seemed dated, obscure, or glib.  While they propose that leaders should lead with stories, theirs, for me at least, fell flat.

The Guide

As a big-picture framework for thinking about leadership, The Leadership Challenge is valuable.  It paints with big, broad strokes that allow someone to get an overall sense of what they might want to see in the leaders in their organization.  However, the challenge is there’s not enough in the book to really implement any kind of real change without drawing from other sources.  You may have noticed numerous references while laying out the frameworks used by the book – they’re there because the concepts are solid, but the coverage in the book isn’t sufficient to understand or implement them.  Ultimately, it’s a good start if you’re looking to join The Leadership Challenge.

Book Review-It’s How We Play the Game

Generally, I don’t read biographies.  For me, they’re boring.  However, Ed Stack became very interesting to me, so I decided that there must be more to him and his book, It’s How We Play the Game, than meets the eye – enough that it was a worthy investment – and I was right.

A Sporting Chance

Ed Stack grew up around his father’s sporting goods store – Dick’s Sporting Goods – and took it from a two-store organization in upstate New York to the retail powerhouse it is today.  The journey, as one might expect, wasn’t straightforward and wasn’t without peril.  Stack recounts the good and bad times in the book.  Certainly, from a business perspective, it’s a reminder of the hard work and luck that allow an organization to grow.  However, that’s not the interesting bit.  The interesting bit is how the experiences shaped the character of a man and, ultimately, an organization in a way that supports communities and helps children develop life skills they’ll need.

When I was growing up, sports weren’t a real option.  Two factors conspired against me.  First, there was always a shortage of money.  I remember breakfast cereal with powdered milk – because that’s what we had.  I remember our cups were recycled margarine cups.  Sure, others had it much worse than I did – but it meant that the idea of spending on sports wasn’t a priority.  A roof, food, and clothes were more important.

The second factor was much more powerful.  My parents couldn’t agree on anything and often consciously or unconsciously put my sister and I between them.  Stack acknowledges that his own parents’ divorce put the kids between them.  In my family, the conversations occasionally came up about doing sports, but the fact was that practices and games would be on the weekends sometimes, and weekends were hotly contested times between the parents.  It was clear pretty quickly that I’d never make it to stay on a team, because I’d never make the number of required practices and games.

To be fair to my parents, I’ve never been particularly interested in or good at sports.  It’s not something that interests me.  I’ve been honored to know professional athletes in many disciplines – baseball, football, and auto racing.  I respect what they have done – without getting so wrapped up in it that I’d believe I ever would have been very good.  (I know I should have a growth Mindset, and that Peak performance is just purposeful practice – but knowing one’s own limitations isn’t a bad thing.)

Foundational Beliefs

Woven throughout the story of Stack’s life is the dedication to the community and the recognition of the value that youth sports bring – even realizing that very few youth will ever make it to play professional anything.  That’s okay.  The foundation of hard work and teamwork is an important life skill – one that Stack credits with keeping him out of too much trouble.

For my part, I agree.  The focus of the Dick’s Sporting Goods Foundation on supporting youth sports programs is laudable.  It’s a good way to support the belief that sports build the kind of character traits that we all want to see in our youth, our adults, and our society.  Just because my son wasn’t good at soccer didn’t mean he didn’t play.  He played enough to learn some lessons and to hopefully develop some character that will serve him later.

The Shot

The truth is that I came to the book because I was curious.  We’re working on some firearms means restriction in the suicide prevention work we’re doing, and Dick’s Sporting Goods was expelled from the Firearms Industry Association (NSSF).  We were working with them to get safe gun storage information in the hands of as many people as possible.  Expelling one of the nation’s largest gun sellers seemed odd.

I learned that it started with the tragedies at Sandy Hook, CT and Parkland, FL.  Stack was touched by the tragedies, and both personally and organizationally took a stand to make a difference in protecting children from mass murder.  They removed all modern sporting rifles – assault rifles – from most of their stores.  They’ve also limited the number of handguns sold across their stores.

The tricky bit is that I can applaud Stack and the organization for being committed to take action to make things better.  I can even say that the moniker of modern sporting rifles is not the way I’d describe them.  At the same time, calling them assault rifles is probably not fair either.  Do I think that they should be as easy to get as they currently are?  I don’t know.  Certainly, Dick’s decision to remove them from the shelves made them slightly more difficult to get –but not in a fundamental way.  What it did was allow the executives at Dick’s to have a clear conscious – and I can respect that.

I’m not interested in entering into a Second Amendment debate.  Much like Stack, I have guns, I enjoy shooting them, and I want others to be taught how to use these tools.  I’d hate for people to say that I’m anti-gun, because I’m decidedly not that.  The nuanced challenge comes in whether the answer was the right answer – and whether NSSF expelling Dick’s makes sense.

As for Dick’s decision, the problem is that I know the numbers, and while the mass shootings are tragedies, they make up a trivial percentage of deaths by firearm.  It’s something that can compel someone to action, but it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of injury and death.  I don’t say that to minimize the suffering of anyone injured in the all-too-frequent mass shootings.  I say it to put things into perspective.  The leading cause of death due to firearm is suicide.  That’s not fundamentally changed in decades.  The non-mass-murder aspect of firearm deaths is a large portion of the remaining.  Accidental shootings and mass-murder are relatively trivial in comparison.

For NSSF, it makes sense.  Someone is publicly moving in a direction against where the firearm manufacturers and industry is going, they shouldn’t be a part of the industry association.  I’m not sure why they’d want to be.  I think the tragedy is that both organizations – NSSF and Dick’s – are aligned in the desire to prevent unnecessary deaths.  They’re both committed to finding ways to stop gun violence.  They just find themselves on opposite sides of a particular sub-group of the problem – and as I explained above, it’s a trivial percentage of the violence that’s happening.  For reference, modern sporting rifles or assault rifles are a trivial amount of the overall industry.  It’s a position and talking point, but it doesn’t move the needle in terms of overall sales of the industry.

Dreams of Greatness

The number of kids that grow up to be professional sports athletes is vanishingly small.  The odds of winning the lottery are also small – but people still play, because they can dream of winning.  There aren’t many people who will make the investments necessary to reach peak performance.  Though Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool’s research about what it takes to reach peak performance was oversimplified by Malcolm Gladwell, the truth is that becoming the best takes a lot of work – work that most kids won’t invest.  (See Peak for a summary of the research.)

However, what Dick’s sells when it comes to kids is the dream of greatness.  It’s not that anyone really believes that their child will break world records, it’s that they want to have the dream for a while, because it makes everyone feel better.

That’s at least part of the point.  It’s in learning how to play the game that we discover how to hope, dream, and live.  It’s How We Play the Game that matters.

Book Review-Quiet Leadership

There are a lot of noisy leaders in our world today. There are too few people who have the courage and desire to demonstrate Quiet Leadership. The book is interesting, because, ostensibly, it’s introducing you to a six-step process for transforming performance. However, I found that it was hard to hold a line through the book and follow a straightforward path. Each step was clearly marked, but the path to the step and why it’s important was at times difficult to discern.

Lofty Goal

To be clear the idea that you’d be able to have someone read a book and through the reading suddenly be transformed in their performance into a more powerful leader is a good one. It’s the basic framework for any leadership book. The author says, “Follow my path to success.” The problem with this is that the author rarely followed the path they lay out themselves, and even if they did, they don’t describe the individual steps with sufficient clarity that they can be followed.

David Rock makes solid points in Quiet Leadership, but in the end the points feel more disjointed than a straight line down a path. So, this book is less likely to be a map and is more useful as a tip guide that shows you a few interesting points without necessarily transporting you to the destination.

The Business of Change – 1970s Style

If you’re a manager of the 1970s era, you were taught that employees needed to be managed. They would take advantage of the organization in any way possible, and your job as a manager was to prevent this from happening. The basic tension had existed for almost as long as organizations. Management and the Worker explains how it impacted the Hawthorne Works in the 1920s and 1930s.

More recent thinking and writing about management, including the works of Robert Greenleaf in Servant Leadership and Fredrick LaLoux in Reinventing Organizations, suggests a different view, one that focuses on how to unleash the power of employees. That’s the opening quote by Richard Florida from The Rise of the Creative Class: “People don’t need to be managed, they need to be unleashed.”

This is just one of many changes that would have the 1970s manager feeling as if they were on a foreign planet if they were to try to manage an organization today. It’s like The Planet of the Apes. The place is the same, but the rules are different. More importantly, the rate of change is so high that the 1970s manager wouldn’t be able to cope.

Predictions

“Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence,” says Jeff Hawkins. Think about that for a moment. Of all the wonderful things that a brain can do, it’s prediction that’s at the core. Jonathan Haidt said something similar in The Righteous Mind. It was our ability to have a theory of mind – a prediction about what others were thinking – that allowed us to work together and to conquer the planet. Mindreading seems like a parlor trick until you realize that it’s a game of attempting to predict what others are thinking.

One of the key problems with our predictions is that they’re subject to numerous biases, as pointed out in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Simple things like the anchoring effect, described in Superforecasting and How to Measure Anything, cause us to fail to correct our predictions sufficiently in the face of new evidence – and this can be catastrophic. (See The Signal and the Noise for the statistical approach to revision in the form of Bayes Theorem – which is the basis of machine learning.)

Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

Josh Waitzkin was a chess wiz and the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, and he’s also an accomplished martial artist. However, he believes that his greatest skill is in learning. In The Art of Learning, he explains how he does it. The answer in short is, “My instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it.” What discomfort? All discomfort.

For my son, I used to play Pokémon. I lost a lot. The national competition was in town, and I’d lose over and over again in random matches because I didn’t really understand the game. It sucks to lose so frequently, but at the same time, I could do it, because the real goal wasn’t winning the game. The real goal was to find a way to connect with my son. Over time, we’d do local and regional tournaments, and I got better – but never competitive in either sense of the word.

I had to get comfortable losing every match. I had to accept that I’d lose again and again if I wanted to be able to converse with my son. He and I got relatively matched in our skills and in the ways that we had our decks configured. It became a way that we could connect. (Read Comfortably Uncomfortable for more examples on being comfortable being uncomfortable.)

The truth is that we need struggle as humans. Even in the animal kingdom, there’s a need for discomfort. I mentioned in my post The Psychology of Recognizing and Rewarding Children and my review of The Book of Joy that helping sea turtles find the ocean dooms them, as they need the struggle to establish their orientation system. Baby chicks similarly need to escape their shells themselves or be doomed. In learning, it’s called desirable difficulty. (See How We Learn.) It can even be heroic.

When Joseph Campbell discovered the Hero’s Journey, he wasn’t expecting it. He didn’t expect that the formation of a hero in lore would follow a predictable 12-step pattern. (See The Hero with a Thousand Faces for more.) What’s most interesting about the journey is that we invariably discover the weaknesses of the hero, including the external and internal struggles. Even heroes, it seems, must struggle before they can become who they need to be.

Quiet Leadership says, “A big chunk of the world’s economy is built around reducing discomfort.” That’s a good thing if it’s directed towards our material needs and safety. We’ve learned to prepare and preserve food to reduce the burden of finding and cooking it. However, when the discomfort that we’re avoiding leads to ultimately unhelpful approaches that lead to addiction, we’re creating our own problems. (See Dreamland for more.)

Quiet leaders are not uncomfortable making other people appropriately uncomfortable. If it’s necessary for people to be concerned, upset, or angry, they’re willing to enter that space. It’s not conflict for the sake of conflict but conflict for the sake of everyone’s betterment.

Getting Personal – Changing Thinking

There’s probably nothing more personal than trying to change someone else’s thinking. Our consciousness is how we define ourselves, and changing our thinking therefore changes us… and that’s dangerous territory. When we implement change in organizations, we’re changing people’s behaviors and hopefully their thinking. (See Change the Culture, Change the Game for more.)

If you want to change your thinking, maybe it’s time to read Quiet Leadership.

Book Review-Management and the Worker

It started two years before The Great Depression, and the impact on what we know about management can’t be understated. Management and the Worker seems to share the insights that were discovered at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works based in Chicago, and it’s strangely richer than most of us may have been led to believe.

A Different Time

For those reading the book today, they’ll be struck by many things that would not be politically acceptable today. The workers – operators – in the relay assembly test room are repeatedly called “girls,” not women, workers, or operators. Such was the expectation then. There were jobs that women did and different jobs that men did, and it was reasonable to refer to them by gender.

In was also a time when graduating high school wasn’t common. Many of the operators didn’t finish high school, much less attend college. There were several cases documented in the book where the operators would turn over their wages to the family to help support the family unit and more than a few cases where the operator left school to get a job to help support the family.

Even back then, there was the conversation about the increasing demand for higher education, both completing high school and going to college. The concern was raised that it would become a requirement for someone to complete college to get a job, and that would eliminate the ability of poor folks to get jobs.

More interesting was the concept that single women could have jobs but that married women were taking jobs from men who needed a job to support their family. While this was at times overt, there were many cases where a societal pressure to discriminate against working married women was apparent. There were even negative comments shaped around the need for married couples to eat at a restaurant because the woman was too tired to cook.

The standard work week back then was 48 hours. This included a half day on Saturday. There was no expectation of a 40-hour week and the transition to a 40-hour week – and the resulting reduction in wages – was an unfortunate result of the Depression and the reduction of demand.

I address these here, because I want to both draw attention to the discrepancies and to explicitly share that the challenges we face with motivation of employees and the broader context of the employment relationship isn’t a sign of today’s times. It’s always been with us – we’ve just not seen it.

The Observer Effect

This book is largely focused after the famous illumination experiments that drove Hawthorne Works to be largely synonymous with the observer effect. The observer effect says that people will behave differently when they know they’re being watched. This truism has been extended and adapted over time, including “You get what you measure,” variations of which have been assigned to both Edward Deming and Peter Drucker.

The famous experiments that made the Hawthorne Works famous were variations in lighting that were done to measure the impact of lighting on performance. When lighting was increased, productivity increased. When lighting was decreased, productivity was again increased. This caused the experimenters to realize that they were unintentionally introducing another variable to the experiment. Later, they’d change bulbs with new bulbs of the same wattage. Employees were expecting increases or decreases, so they commented on these expected increases or decreases rather than recognizing that the lighting level hadn’t changed at all.

The experiments were initiated because the company was interested in how to increase productivity, and the results only spurred further interest in the way that employees worked. If the observer effect was so powerful, what other powerful forces were being left undiscovered?

The Relay Assembly Test Room

One of the many functions performed by the Hawthorne Works was the assembly of relays. Relays are electromechanical devices that are used in switching – particularly the kind of switching that was needed to operate the telephone network. The assembly operations were typically done with many operators in a large, open area. A particular section of relay assembly operators might be 100 people. To test changes in working conditions and their relationship to productivity, the Hawthorne Works pulled five volunteer operators into a specially-designed room where the conditions of work could be changed without affecting the entire group.

Care was taken to minimize the differences between the main room and the new relay test room. The intent was to have a controlled experiment, where only the changes in the working environment that the experimenters were testing would influence the results. However, what they discovered was that they unintentionally introduced major changes by separating the operators.

Social Loafing

The Evolution of Cooperation and Collaboration both speak about social loafing – or the tendency for people to slack off in a group expecting others to carry their weight. However, the effect wasn’t well known at the time of the Hawthorne Works experiments. What wasn’t realized was the extent to which the compensation system allowed for social loafing to occur, nor were they aware of how to establish countervailing forces to keep social loafing in check.

The details of the payment system for workers is largely irrelevant, but what is important is that one component of their pay was based on the productivity of the group. That is, if everyone performed well, then there would be more money in everyone’s paycheck. The problem with this is that, when spread across 100 workers, no one felt as if their individual contribution was enough to make a difference. The result is that some of the workers would loaf, because they didn’t expect that they could make a difference in their pay.

When the operators were moved into the relay assembly test room, their pool went from a pool of 100 to a pool of 5. That meant that individual performance did matter; not only that, the group norm was also something that could be influenced.

Forming a Group

One of the other side effects of the changes was that the group naturally formed into a group operating unit. That is, they started to look out for and support one another. They intentionally tried to cover for each other’s poor days and genuinely cared for their fellow workers. This wasn’t an intentional byproduct of the change – nor was it replicable in further experiments – but the fact that the group became an operating unit had a profound effect on productivity. The relay assembly test room’s productivity kept climbing even as the experimental conditions continued to be changed in ways that should have had a negative effect on productivity.

Subsequent test rooms with similar conditions never formed a group and therefore didn’t see the continuous rise in productivity. This was likely influenced by the design of these other rooms, which specifically did not change the compensation in a way that made the room’s participants dependent upon each other and solely on each other. In other words, they sought to avoid solving the social loafing problems – and in doing so, they may have prevented the group from forming.

Group Formation

It’s time to side-step the material in the book for a moment and share the work of Richard Hackman in Collaborative Intelligence. He was focused on how you brought people together and got them to function together as a team. He would have said that the test rooms created at Hawthorne Works would not have fallen into his criteria as a team, because they weren’t performing interrelated tasks. They formed a group identity, because, in the case of the relay room, they felt a responsibility to one another. They didn’t have the benefit of some of the way that Navy SEALs train together nor the life and death circumstances. (See Stealing Fire for more.)

The personalities and perspectives were such in the relay assembly test room that they spontaneously formed a group. Some of this may have been the wedding of one of the operators, forming a bond, or the personality of another operator to push everyone towards working together. There’s no one single cause; instead, the set of conditions were sufficient that it happened.

Allowances

Another unintended change in the test room was the change in supervision. While the operators were formally still supervised by the supervision structure of the main room, unofficially they were being managed by the experimental observer – and the relationship was very different. Instead of the kind of command and control experienced in the main room, the operators were treated with concern and compassion. One of the controls for the tests were the health of the employees, so their health was monitored.

Another was the ability to talk. While this at times exceeded the comfort level of both the observer and the individual operators, the ability to talk while they were working was greatly appreciated. While studies for fatigue were generally not successful in discovering fatigue, the ability to talk to one another was helpful in breaking up some of the monotony.

To frame this in the context of Reinventing Organizations, the test room was operating in Orange instead of Amber. The workers felt like there was a relationship to management instead of a competition with management in a struggle for power.

Power Struggle

Readily apparent and frequently repeated were the concerns that the test room was a front for management to squeeze more performance out of the workers – instead of the stated objective of providing optimum working conditions. The difference is subtle but important. If they’re just trying to improve performance, the organization can do so at the expense of the workers. If they’re trying to create optimal conditions, the workers must be inside the circle of considerations.

Concerns about whether the workers were being taken advantage of – or things were moving in that direction – was a persistent theme both in the relay assembly test room and in the subsequent tests that the organization embarked upon. The lack of trust of the worker with the organization was palpable.

While the test room continued to make progress in allaying those fears, it seems as if they were never really fully quenched. As a result, there would be, from time to time, situations where it became necessary to revisit the intent, purpose, and mission associated with the tests.

More for Less

One curious way where working less generated more productive output was the introduction of paid breaks to the schedule. Breaks were added, thus reducing the total time working, and the output still increased. The given explanation for this was that the operators were trying to compensate for the time they were being given.

However, there’s another more subtle factor here. Operators were allowed personal time for their biological needs, and though they weren’t asked to, they tended to use a portion of their break times for these purposes. In this way, it seems that when management – or in this case, the experimenters – gave something the workers gave back.

The introduction of breaks was very well received personally, thus it seems that the workers were willing to work harder during their normal work periods to continue to be allowed the privilege of the breaks. Being an experiment, they were removed for a time, and this predictably resulted in the workers looking forward to their return.

The Mica Splitting Test Room

Because the relay assembly test room was such a success, there were attempts to replicate the results without the complicating factor of changing compensation. The results were not as dramatic, but there were external factors, which likely impacted the situation.

By the time the mica splitting test room was created, the Depression was already in effect. It has created a reduction in demand for all things, including the kinds of parts that the Hawthorne works was creating. In part due to this reduction in demand, the mica splitting function was gradually being moved to another plant. This impacted the folks in the main room more rapidly than in the test room, but eventually there was no longer a way to shield the test room from the changes.

However, before the room was shut down, it was already apparent that the fear of losing their job was reducing worker productivity. As the concern for mica-splitting jobs increased, their performance decreased.

However, another key difference was evident in the mica splitting test room. The five operators never fully integrated as a group. While there are some personality reasons for this, there was also the fact that their compensation never got tied to the group in the test room. They were still compensated in part by what was happening in the main room.

Interviewing

Management and the Worker concludes with a review of the interviewing that was done in the plant and its impact. A significant effort was undertaken to listen to workers at every level and to ensure that their perspectives were captured appropriately. Despite the fact that there was never any real intent to act upon these interviews, the workers reported that conditions were improving.

This reaction reveals how just listening to employees discuss their concerns has a twofold effect on improving the situation. First, supervisors, knowing that the workers are being listened to, made changes to their behaviors – consciously or unconsciously. This resolved many of the concerns.

Secondly, and more importantly, there seemed to be a psychic discharge, where once the items were heard, they were of less concern in the mind of the worker. The net effect of which was that the workers felt better – whether the conditions changed or not.

It may be that there’s still a lot to learn from experiments that were performed 90 years ago. It may reveal more about the relationship between Management and the Worker.

Book Review-The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking

Conflict is a good thing. Conflict between our fingers and our thumb – our opposable thumb – created the ability to create tools and ascend to the most dominant lifeform on the planet. In The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, we learn how it wasn’t just the mechanics of our members but the integrative nature of our intelligence that has really allowed us to remain king of the biological mountain on this planet.

Genius

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Genius is in creating situations where we’re able to leverage the power of “and”. It’s not the finger or the thumb in isolation that allows us to pick up things and to create tools – it’s the use of both.

It was 15^th century Florence, Italy, when the Medici family assembled some of the greatest minds in one place to work on their own projects. In the process, they managed to create a kind of cross-pollination between experts and disciplines that kicked off the Renaissance period. They created a safe environment where different disciplines could sharpen one another.

Today, it’s easier to assemble great thinkers virtually for an hour or a few hours. It’s easier to hop on a plane and arrive in the same destination for a deep conversation about how my perspective and yours aren’t the same. It is, however, simultaneously harder to find the right people.

Non-Linear and Co-Causal

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg is the answer because of reptiles, but the real question is which one causes or creates the other. The challenge is to draw the causal arrow from one thing to another. However, integrative thinkers tend to think in terms of systems. (See Thinking in Systems for more about systems.) Instead of seeing a set of discrete, unconnected events, integrative thinkers see everything as connected and causing a network of reactions, some of which feed back and drive the very behavior that started things off while others inhibit the behavior. Instead of following the simple linear logic of A causes B, integrative thinkers think in terms of the influence that A has on B and the influence that B has on A and how they might reach a steady state – or might be completely unstable.

Some systems are dynamically stable. That is, the forces are designed in such a way that they dampen oscillations. Private aircraft are designed this way. It’s what makes it possible for a pilot to control them and for the changes to get smaller over time. Military aircraft are not dynamically stable, and micro-adjustments are made by the flight computer to compensate for the instability and execute the intent of the pilot rather than the commands of the pilot. The computer doesn’t wait for the pilot to respond to a slight pitch right or left if it wasn’t what the pilot was indicating on the controls; it quickly and automatically makes the control surface corrections to keep things in balance. The fact that the computer reacts faster than the instability operates allows it to keep things stable.

Dynamically unstable systems are more performant – thus why they’re used in military aircraft. However, the dynamic instability means that they are more susceptible to faults, failures, and “black swan” events. (See The Black Swan and Antifragile for more.) Integrative thinkers simulate what they see in their head. They automatically create models to look for how systems are going to react – rather than looking for the simple causal arrows. (See Seeing What Others Don’t and Sources of Power for more.)

Not Afraid of the Mess

Integrative thinkers aren’t afraid of the mess that the model causes. They’re not afraid to go in and tinker with things to see what the results are. Ultimately, integrative thinkers aren’t afraid of the mess that happens when you build models for everything and try to connect them, because they’re comfortable that, in the end, they’ll figure out how things fit together.

They accept that their initial models of the systems will be flawed. They accept that there will be forces they don’t see or understand. However, they’ll remain confident that, given enough time and experiments, they’ll be able to find their way to a model – and a map that works.

Map Is Not a Territory

One downfall of the integrative thinker is that they sometimes forget a map is not a territory – that is, their map and model, no matter how good they get, will always be fundamentally limited and remain imperfect. This can lead to poor decisions when you consider them against the actual system as compared to how their model was constructed.

One of the challenges with building a model is that it’s built on the back of our perceptions of reality, and those perceptions are themselves necessarily flawed. Our perceptions aren’t always what they appear to be. We believe we’re perceiving reality, but it’s closer to say that we’re making our reality up from our perceptions. (See Incognito for more.)

Integrative thinkers need to be on guard for where they may be ignoring conflicting signals that may indicate their model is imperfect.

Required: Deep Understanding and Empathy

To be an integrative thinker, it should be no surprise that there needs to be a deep understanding of the relationships between the various aspects of the system. Deep understanding is what the whole model-building process is about. However, there’s another aspect that transcends understanding and moves into the category of empathy.

Instead of just intellectually understanding what is happening, integrative thinkers develop an emotional connection to their models and the people who are stuck in the systems they’re modeling. They begin to be compassionate to those whom they see marching along in the system with no way out.

Refusing to Accept Tradeoffs

Integrative thinkers aren’t likely to accept tradeoffs. Instead of accepting the standard approach to balance A and B they look for ways to change things to get more of both A and B. Like the Nash Equilibrium they look for ways to create win-win situations where there is no obvious win-win. (See The Science of Trust for more on the Nash Equilibrium.) Their approach might be to reconfigure the pieces they have, remove pieces, or add in pieces that aren’t normally a part of the equation.

For instance, there’s always a tradeoff between the ease of storing information and the ease of retrieving information. However, creative thinkers look for ways to leverage technologies like full text search to make it easier to both store and retrieve information. Why make people enter an invoice number if it’s in the full text of the document and can be searched? Even more powerfully, why not use artificial intelligence to pick up the invoice number and place it into a metadata field for you? Thinking like this doesn’t seek to create balance in a zero-sum game, instead it looks to create a new, larger game.

Best Available, Right Now

Integrative thinkers have given up on the idea that they have the best answer. Instead, they just believe that they’ve got the best answer for right now. There is no delusion that they’ve got things figured out. Instead, they’re aware that the answers they have today are the best answers they have for now. Instead of maximizing and getting to the absolute best, they’ve settled – they’ve satisficed – for the solution that is good enough. (See The Paradox of Choice for more on maximizers and satisficers.)

In the end, the best answer you can get to right now about how to approach problems differently to find better solutions may be to read The Opposable Mind.