Always striving …
Always striving …
This week we had a discussion about leadership with our leadership team that does not call itself a leadership team. Makes sense, right? Well, the background is that we organise ourselves in what we call 'a Teal way', building on work by Frederic Laloux. (Just as a disclaimer: I don't buy the spiral dynamics theory behind this work, but I am interested in the concept of self-organisation/self-management and distributed decision-making in organisations.) What this means is that we are organised in roles, circles of roles, and circles of circles. Decisions are whenever possible taken by a role that has the relevant accountabilities and only delegated up to a circle when the implications go beyond the individual role - essentially following a subsidiarity principle.
I could now write about whether this is a good way of organising or not and what the pros and cons are (e.g. why hierarchy still makes sense some time, which is the logic behind my first sentence above), but I'm not going to do that. Rather, I'm going to write about an observation I shared with my colleagues yesterday when discussing what leadership means in a self-managed organisation.
The 'transition' from a more traditional hierarchy with clear leadership functions to this flat structure has started a bit more than two years ago, long before I joined the organisation. Yet, we still often have discussions revolving around the question: "are we doing it right?"
Yesterday we were asked by our Teal coach to distribute ourselves on a scale from 1 to 10 on where we think we stand in terms of having achieved a self-managed organisation. Before that 'constallation', she showed us the typical picture of a landscape with a river in the middle and some mountains in the background, where on the left you have the 'old, bad' way of organising (represented by some industrial-type factory buildings, coloured in orange - as the stage 'below' teal is orange) and on the right you have the 'new world' where milk and honey flow, which represents the new way of organising (represented by more futuristic buildings, coloured in teal). In between, crossing the river, there is a bridge, which implies the transition, and which we can of course only cross with the help of a consultant - I'm being a bit cheeky here, obviously, having been a consultant myself for many years. However, I am having problems with both of these concepts - the landscape metaphor (all now is bad and there is a better, ideal world if we just manage to cross that bridge) and the 1-10 constellation, where 1 is implicitly bad and 10 is implicitly good, the end state, something we want to eventually achieve.
This is a pattern that is deeply ingrained in our Western culture. We first need to define an ideal future in quite some detail and then constantly compare our current state with that ideal future state asking whether we are making progress towards that state or if we are doing things right, according to that ideal blueprint. As we need to progress towards it, we need progress markers and key performance indicators. We also need milestones of course that we plant ahead so we know how far advanced we are and if we are advancing fast enough. So there is always a blueprint, a platonic ideal, that we are striving for. But why is that? How can we know in advance what is ideal in a future we cannot know or understand yet?
Later in the discussion, we were asked to suggest qualities of leadership taking from different leadership approaches. The approaches the consultant proposed were all somehow coming from the 1990ies and linked to Peter Senge's learning organisation. A colleague of mine, however, just finished reading the recent book Complexity and Leadership that contains a number of chapters based on work done by students of the DMan programme on complexity and management (I wrote about my visit to the conference of the programme recently). So we wrote down a number of qualities of leadership described in that book instead. This included things like 'radical pragmatism' or 'maintaining situation awareness.' In contrast to the 'striving towards the ideal', the way of approaching leadership from a complexity perspective is much more focused on the here and now - what is the situation we are in and what can we do with what we have at hand.
This logic of starting with where we are and what we have at hand rather than to strive towards an idealised future (often ignoring what is happening around us) is not only applicable to leadership, but to many more areas of life. It is also the logic behind the Vector Theory of Change approach we are exploring. There, we define a direction of travel rather than to define an ideal future and a path to get there. The focus is more on the here and now and how we engage with our partners to create a situation that is generally assessed as better in some way (what that means should be contextually defined, but be aligned with the overall vector or strategic intent we defined for it to be a meaningful engagement of the foundation).
The difference might seem small, but I think it is quite profound. Are we making a plan with a clear map of where we want to go and how we get there? Or are we defining a general direction of travel but focus on the situation and context at hand to make a meaningful and pragmatic contribution to what's needed now?
One question I'm pondering is whether we even need the sense of direction or whether it is enough for us to engage with the world following a set of principles and/or values and assess the change from a contextual perspective. The assumption here would be that as long as we are true to our principles and values, and engage with issues and priorities relevant to the respective context we work in, we are making a meaningful contribution to the world. What that means for strategic learning and evaluation is an interesting exploration. Yet I think the reality is that we need to function in a world where a high value is attached to defining a goal and measuring progress towards that goal. So we need to be pragmatic about that.
Photo
Silhouettes of two women on a jetty at a lake Sempach. My photo.