Caleb Love's List: Organizational Leadership

• Organizational behavior is a misnomer. It is not the study of how organizations behave, but rather the study of individual behavior in an organizational setting. This includes the study of how individuals behave alone, as well as how individuals behave in groups.
• The purpose of organizational behavior is to gain a greater understanding of those factors that influence individual and group dynamics in an organizational setting so that individuals and the groups and organizations to which they belong may become more efficient and effective
• At the individual level of analysis, organizational behavior involves the study of learning, perception, creativity, motivation, personality, turnover, task performance, cooperative behavior, deviant behavior, ethics, and cognition. At this level of analysis, organizational behavior draws heavily upon psychology, engineering, and medicine.
• Group Level of Analysis

  At the group level of analysis, organizational behavior involves the study of group dynamics, intra- and intergroup conflict and cohesion, leadership, power, norms, interpersonal communication, networks, and roles. At this level of analysis, organizational behavior draws upon the sociological and socio-psychological sciences.
• Organization Level of Analysis

  At the organization level of analysis, organizational behavior involves the study of topics such as organizational culture, organizational structure, cultural diversity, inter-organizational cooperation and conflict, change, technology, and external environmental forces. At this level of analysis, organizational behavior draws upon anthropology and political science.

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• As W. Edwards Deming says, nothing happens without "personal transformation." And  the only safe space to allow for this transformation is a learning community. But  at the heart of any serious effort to alter how we operate lies a concern with  three dysfunctions of our culture: fragmentation, competition, and reactiveness.

• Fragmentation results in "walls" that separate different functions into  independent and often warring fiefdoms, making our society increasingly  ungovernable. We know the problem as the dominance of "special interest groups"  and political lobbies. Pointing fingers at each other is now a favorite national  sport.   

    Many companies are trying to "reengineer" themselves away from stovepipe  structures and toward horizontal business processes that cut across traditional  functions and power hierarchies. While potentially significant, such changes  often prove difficult to implement and those that are implemented only "reap the  low-hanging fruit."
• Fascinated with competition, we often find ourselves competing with the very  people with whom we need to collaborate. Members of a management team compete  with one another to show who is right, who knows more, or who is more articulate  or persuasive. Divisions compete with one another when they ought to cooperate to  share knowledge. Team project leaders compete to show who is the best manager,  even if it means covering up problems for which, ultimately, everyone will pay.   Our overemphasis on competition makes looking good more important than being  good. The fear of not looking good is one of the greatest enemies of learning. To  learn, we need to acknowledge that there is something we don't know, and to  perform activities that we're not good at. But in most corporations, ignorance is  a sign of weakness; temporary incompetence is a character flaw.
• Reactiveness is a double ban on continuous learning. First, the attitude, "If it  ain't broke, don't fix it," prevents the steady improvement of products and  processes. Moreover, when something is broken, the reaction is to call an  expert-a specialist-to fix it. Regardless of the specialist's success, his  intervention will create a black-box mentality that prevents the organization  from developing its own capacities for continual learning.
• Fragmentation, competition, and reactiveness are not problems to be solved-they  are frozen patterns of thought to be dissolved. The solvent I propose is a new  way of thinking, feeling, and being-a culture of systems. Fragmentary thinking  becomes systemic when we recover "the memory of the whole," the awareness that  wholes actually precede parts. Competition becomes cooperation when we discover  the "community nature of the self" and realize our role as challengers to help  each other excel. Reactiveness becomes creating when we see the "generative power  of language," how language brings forth distinctions from the undivided flow of  life.

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• Problems like those created by our global food systems are largely invisible because people do not know how to see such systems. "The inability of leaders to see the systems and patterns of interdependency within and surrounding our organizations threatens our future," says Ford's CIO and head of strategy, Marv Adams. "Many big problems that could be solved are sitting there unsolved because of this failure."
• Two particular systems-thinking skills are vital: seeing patterns of interdependency and seeing into the future. It is one thing to say "we are interdependent" and another to actually understand what this means specifically, especially for problems created by the present systems that no one knows how to solve. Before the members of the Food Lab could work together effectively, they needed to share understanding of the systemic forces driving the "race to the bottom" and how they were all part of creating these forces: as companies pursuing business-as-usual models with little regard for the effects on farming families and communities or on environmental systems, as farmers unable to moderate pressures for continual production growth, and as consumers--all of us--whenever we buy food at the cheapest price with little thought as to where the food comes from.
• Once people start to see systemic patterns and understand the forces driving a system, they also start to see where the system is headed if nothing changes. The power of the "race to the bottom" metaphor for the Food Lab participants is that it helps everyone think about what "the bottom" means to them and their organizations, and to realize why this is not a future in which they want to live.
• Transforming larger systems will not arise from the traditional transactional relationships that characterize interactions among business, government, and NGOs. "The relationships among leaders across normal boundaries might be the most crucial ingredient to major change," says Hal Hamilton, director of the Sustainable Food Lab. Building genuine partnerships takes time and real commitment. It is not just that those who might form potential partnerships have never worked together; it is that they have mostly fought each other, often seeing one another as the primary obstacle to progress as they defined it. When they have interacted, it has been almost entirely to pressure one another to achieve their individual aims. It took many months of close work in a process that fostered deep reflection and candor before participants in the Food Lab found themselves developing real connections, trust, and respect for one another, gradually recognizing that their strength as a team came from their differences.
• Leaders who can build partnerships for seeing larger systems must also be open to not having all the answers. There is no "right model" for a complex system. For all intents and purposes, the global food or energy systems are infinitely complex. Good system models like those used in the Food Lab are by their nature incomplete and flawed. The criterion by which they must be judged is usefulness, not absolute accuracy.
• This means that effective leaders must cultivate open-mindedness in order to challenge continually their own favored views and to learn how to embrace multiple points of view in the service of building shared understanding and commitment. This is easy to say but extraordinarily difficult to do. The Sustainable Food Lab was designed so that its members have to continually face their very different ways of seeing. For example, after a visit with a small farmers cooperative, a list of observations from the team included the following items: "hard working, very political, not sustainable, very sustainable, needs to be modernized, needs time to mature, an excellent model." One lab team member commented, "I am so amazed that this number of people can look at the same thing and see something so different.... There is so much I don't understand about others' perspectives."
• But open minds ultimately also require open hearts, becoming vulnerable to see how we are all part of the problem. If people do not see how they are part of the problem, they will remain in blaming mode and never tap the deeper forces for partnership and change. Their attitude will always be that "they need to change," an especially disempowering signal when it comes from leaders at the top of an organization.
• The third opening, of the will, involves discovering that our deepest commitments arise almost despite ourselves. It involves letting go of the last remnants of what Otto Sharmer in the book Presence calls "our small 's' self" and letting come "the future that comes into being through us and with what we are here to do." This opening has been described by countless poets and mystics--indeed it is one of the oldest and most universal aspects of diverse spiritual traditions. It is what George Bernard Shaw called, "The true joy in life, the being used for a purpose you regard as a mighty one." Or as one of the Food Lab team members said, "We had come to a profound place of connection, with one another and with what we are here to do."

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•  Our research is dedicated to helping organizations become better learning systems. We define organizational learning as the capacity or processes within  an organization to maintain or improve performance based on experience. Learning  is a systems-level phenomenon because it stays within the organization, even if  individuals change. One of our assumptions is that organizations learn as they  produce. Learning is as much a task as the production and delivery of goods and services. We do not imply that organizations should sacrifice the speed and quality of production in order to learn, but, rather, that production systems be viewed as learning systems. While companies do not usually regard learning as a function of production, our research on successful firms indicates that three learning-related factors are important for their success: 

   
  1. Well-developed core competencies that serve as launch points for new products  and services. (Canon has made significant investments over time in developing  knowledge in eight core competencies applied in the creation of more than thirty products.) 
  2. An attitude that supports continuous improvement in the business's value-added chain. (Wal-Mart conducts ongoing experiments in its stores.) 
  3. The ability to fundamentally renew or revitalize. (Motorola has a long history of renewing itself through its products by periodically exiting old lines and entering new ones.)

• the learning process has identifiable stages. Following Huber, whose comprehensive review of the literature presented four steps in an organizational learning process, we arrived at a three-stage model: 

   
  1. Knowledge acquisition -- The development or creation of skills, insights, relationships. 
  2. Knowledge sharing -- The dissemination of what has been learned. 
  3. Knowledge utilization -- The integration of learning so it is broadly available and can be generalized to new situations.⁷
• Our two-part model describes organizations as learning systems (see Figure 1).  First, learning orientations are the values and practices that reflect where learning takes place and the nature of what is learned. These orientations form a pattern that defines a given organization's "learning style." In this sense, they are descriptive factors that help us to understand without making value judgments. Second, facilitating factors are the structures and processes that affect how easy or hard it is for learning to occur and the amount of effective learning that takes place. These are standards based on best practice in dealing with generic issues. (See the sidebar for definitions of the learning orientations and facilitating factors we identified.)

•  When starting to improve its learning capabilities, an organization may decide to focus on any stage of the learning cycle -- knowledge acquisition, dissemination, or utilization. While it may be possible or necessary to look at all three phases simultaneously, focusing on a single area is more manageable. The next task is to select an option for focus:

   

   
  1. Improve on learning orientations. There are two reasons for selecting this option. First, the organization may decide to shift its position on one or more learning orientations. Second, the current pattern of learning orientations has resulted in identifiable strong competencies, so improving or expanding them may be the best way to enhance the unit's learning capabilities. This focus assumes that facilitating factors meet an acceptable standard and that more can be accomplished by adding to the strong base established by the learning orientations. 

      

  2. Change both learning orientations and facilitating factors. An organization should select this option when it sees the other variables as inadequate. This option assumes that large-scale change is necessary and that changing one group of variables without changing the other will be only partially successful.

•  Whatever the organization's choice, we offer three guidelines for developing and implementing a chosen strategy:

   

   
  1. Before deciding to become something new, study and evaluate what you are now. Without full awareness and appreciation of current assumptions about management, organization, and learning, it is not possible to grasp what is being done well and what might be improved or changed. 

      

  2. Though the systemic issues and relationships in organizational life require that change be approached from multiple directions and at several points, organizations can change in major ways if people experience success with more modest, focused, and specific changes. As with many skills, there is a learning curve for the skill of managing and surviving transitions. Large-scale change requires that many initiatives be put into place in a carefully designed, integrated sequence. 

      

  3. Organizations must consider cultural factors in choosing and implementing any strategy, particularly when considering how it does specific things. For example, in a highly individualistic society like the United States or the United Kingdom, skill development focuses on individual skills; in comparison, more communitarian societies such as Japan or Korea have traditionally focused on group skill development. Moving from one pole to the other is a major cultural  change; to simply improve on the existing orientation is much easier.

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