the Change Leaders Oxf17 -  'The Sustainable Organisation' summary

We are pleased to share the conference summary below. For those who attended Oxford conference, hopefully this will provide a great summary. For those who didn’t, some interesting thoughts for you to consider about 'The Sustainable Organisation'.

Warm regards,

Julie

Friday September 22nd started with key note speaker Ian Billick, the Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab (http://www.rmbl.org/about-us-2/our-staff-2/). Both Ian and RMBL are involved in critical scientific research related to climate change.

RMBL is an independent lab/ field station that was founded in 1928. It provides access, logistical support and community building (support, training) to scientists. The lab enables genome research and biological research and has a high level of scientific publications. The challenges they have:

• Infrastructure costs are rising, while the science budget is flat.
• Lack of virtuous cycles: there are no financial incentives for the research, e.g. it doesn’t result in intellectual properties that can be capitalised.
• Provincialism of place: the (unjust) perception that field research is only locally applicable.
• Identity politics: environmental interest nowadays identifies whether you’re conservative or progressive in politics.

Friday afternoon presented a kaleidoscope of tCL speakers.

• Rowan Gillies made us aware of the ongoing loss of species, with the extinction of numerous birds and their beautiful sounds.
• Kit Lykketoft shared with us the sustainability aspects of tourism in Copenhagen. The city is using a benchmark tool to compare with other cities, it stimulates accommodation to go for the green key certification and it aims at including the Sustainable Development Goals in their policies.
• Shekhar Pula presented the Stop the Ecocide Foundation. He works together with international lawyers to include environmental crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC). To reach that goal they work on public awareness building, political leadership and legal advancement (so lawyers learn how to deal with ecocide law). In addition, they work on including more island states in the ICC (impacted by the rise of sea level), so that they will have a larger voice at the table.

Next was a presentation by tCL’er Jacob Mayne of a unique new study that presents the voices of 130 senior and middle managers working for leading corporations in 25 countries, half in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) roles, half not. Jacob shared hopeful stories with us about companies that really make an effort to be more sustainable. Main conclusions (self-reported by managers, compared to 5 years ago):

1. Business case finally recognised;
2. Sustainability becoming part of management;
3. Business outcomes seen as more important than PR and compliance;
4. Middle managers take the lead;
5. Barriers are short-term focus and top management ignorance.

There is more interest in the change aspects of CSR.

The day ended with drinks, to thank Rick Torseth for his commitment to the tCL Board.

Saturday September 23rd started with a talk by tCL’er Lars Thuesen, who has been working with the UN Women Program in Moldova. He presented together with Ulziisuren Jamsran, the UN responsible for the project that focussed on violence against women. This project evolved from first working for women and gender equality, to then working with women, and then facilitating champions as the key change agents. The project focuses on building adaptive leadership, using positive deviance approaches, and implementing innovative collaborative spaces in the UN office, which was a huge change in the UN’s way of working.  The project not only works with PD champions amongst violated women, but also amongst the police and other stakeholders. Now they’ve even started working with one of the spouses of the women. With the help of the PD champions government has changed the law and also the women’s rights law has been adapted into an easy-to-read version for women. Challenges for the future are to scale up and disseminate the project; and to empower the women in the program to educate themselves, find work, housing, and childcare, etc.

Next was a session with tCL’ers Martin Thomas on the Multicapital Scorecard, based on a book that he co-authored. Martin presented Larry Hirschhorn’s Psychodynamic Framework, which takes into account the facilitating process for change by the legitimate authority, the inhibiting process for change due to inadequate authority resulting in anxiety, and the developmental process for change to create new rules. To come up with Context Based Sustainability Norms, an organisation has to define, together with stakeholders, what represents sustainable performance in their context. Next step is to show how the organisation performed, and then to define and agree the action plan. The biggest challenge in this process is to get the economics people to talk to the sustainability people.

After lunch we all moved to Egrove Park for the CCC 15^th anniversary celebration event. Marc Thompson welcomed us and invited us to split up in working groups to define the core elements in teaching, training and consulting on sustainable change for leaders. Facilitated by tCL’ers Dorthe Sorensen, Lisa Francis-Jennings, and Judith Campbell, we split up to work in teams that share a common idea of how such a program would look like. Late in the afternoon the teams presented their ideas in a market place.

Saturday ended with keynote speaker Gareth Morgan. He presented three key sets of ideas for understanding the challenges of sustainability: Complexity Science, “Field” theory, and Critical Realism. He then proposed a “min specs” approach, defining the minimum simple rules. His claim: significant change likely has to be driven locally, from the bottom up, because major institutions tend to be locked in fields of relations that are entrenched and tend to block major change unless there are major shared crises.

After this inspiring talk, we enjoyed drinks and dinner to celebrate CCC’s anniversary.

On Sunday tCL’s Haje Schutte introduced us into the world of public private partnerships for enabling a more sustainable society, based on the OECD publication “Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth”. Partnerships are at the core of sustainable development goals implementation, for example through blended finance, combining public money (to reduce risks for private sector) with private investments – no grants, but investments with a return on capital. These public private partnerships require a different way of working that bridges different cultures and interests, needs capable cross-sector leadership, is able to deconstruct complex problems, articulates a long-term vision, builds trust, leverages differences, and empowers people.

For these changes to happen, change leaders will be in high demand.

by Julie Mowinski

The 4E's and Change - Part 1

This article was authored by Mick Yates after a workshop as part of CCC1, with input from many participants

There is a real difference between Managers and Leaders (Peter Drucker, 1954; John Kotter, 1996). Leaders need to be great Managers, but Managers are not always great Leaders. Managers are essentially a 20th century concept, as complex, non-military work organizations grew. Managers run organizations, and Managers have a responsibility to perpetuate their Enterprise. However, whilst Managers can often institutionalize the “status quo”, Leaders are focused on change.

Managing was once defined as:

“Knowing exactly what you want men to do, and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way”. (Frederick Taylor, 1903)

Kotter, in his book on “Leading Change” (1996), uses the lens of change to drive a very clear distinction between Management and Leadership. He says:

“Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly. The most important aspects of management include planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem solving.

Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances. Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles”.

Change is thus central to Leadership. Without a need for change, the concept of Leadership is meaningless. Leadership is not an abstract concept – it is a practical activity, with a specific goal in mind. And it depends on the environment and situation at the time. For example, the need for change in India pre-independence demanded that someone (Gandhi) arose to lead and organize the cause.

In this sense, Leadership varies by situation as a good Leader in one circumstance may not be successful in another (changed) circumstance. A classic example is Winston Churchill, who succeeded as a wartime Leader and then failed in peacetime by loosing a General Election. He was unable to reflect the change in people’s post-war needs and attitudes. By contrast, Charles De Gaulle was a strong wartime Leader, who seemingly was always able to reflect the changing needs of the populace from wartime to peacetime. He still held consistent views on the future role of France – but by reflecting the popular mood change he succeeded in both situations.

Kotter suggested that there is a sequence in any change activity.

• establish a sense of urgency
• create a guiding coalition
• develop a clear vision
• share the vision
• empower people to overcome obstacles
• secure short term wins
• consolidate and keep moving
• anchor the change

In this author’s view, “vision” should be transposed with Kotter’s “sense of urgency” – hurrying to shoot before deciding what to shoot is not a good strategic choice. Change efforts often fail because the real end state of the change is insufficiently thought through. Second, our learning suggests that the detailed execution of a change is usually where it succeeds or fails, and this must be added to Kotter’s list.

Research was also conducted by Keith Grint at Oxford University on the common characteristics of successful change processes (2003/4). Mick Yates and the Change Leaders group worked on the ideas, leading to a suggested Best Practice framework.

Our work shows that the sequence of change activities fits well within the 4E’s Leadership Framework. This framework (discussed in detail in another paper in this series, and referencing Envision – Enable – Empower – Energize) is focused on “actions in use” rather than “espoused” competencies or behaviours.

The first three Es are the collective “what” and “how”, whilst the last E is the individual “why”, for the Leader and the team.

• Envision – Values-driven setting of goals and strategies
• Enable – Identifying tools, technologies, organization structures & people
• Empower – Creating trust & interdependence between Leader & Follower
• Energize – The personal Leadership motor to drive the entire system

We suggest an eleven point Change Framework.

Envision

1. an accepted need for change
2. a viable vision of an alternative state

Enable

1. change agents in place – with a guiding coalition
2. sponsorship from above
3. realistic scale & pace of change – with sense of urgency
4. an integrated transition programme

Empower

1. organization shape to show how tasks and people fit
2. a symbolic end to the status quo
3. a plan for likely resistance

Energize

1. constant advocacy – maintain momentum of change
2. a locally owned benefits plan

To explain each point in more detail, please see Part 2

For more details on the 4E’s Leadership Framework, which was Mick’s MSc work on CCC, link here
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by Julie Mowinski

Is Enterprise 2.0 the neuro-organisation?

This article belongs to Cécile Demailly’s blog here; a version in French is available here: Entreprise 2.0 et cerveau, quels parallèles ? .

Using metaphors enriches understanding and provides insights that are not only theoretical, but also incredibly practical. Gareth Morgan, in his book “Images of Organization”, mentions the Brain as one of them, among many others. It didn’t strike me as an interesting analogy until recently, when one of my neuro-psy teachers drew neurons connections on a chart. Dependant on the brain territory, you either get neuron highways, i.e. structured and persistent connections, or a fully meshed design where connections can be established on demand, in virtually an infinite number of ways.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) connections schema caught my eyes: isn’t it similar to what one can draw when picturing the most recent form of an organization, whether you call that Enterprise 2.0, the Collaborative Organization or the Connected Corporation?

Are our brains more evolved than our enterprises?

According to the Triune Brain theory revisited[i], the very first brain development was the Reptilian territory, dedicated to survival: act when everything is calm, escape, fight or play dead when there is a death threat. Second layer was the paleo-limbic, when mammals started to live in herds: it manages relationships in the group. The third brain territory that developed was the neo-limbic cortex, where our character and temperament sit, and where among other things our values are formed and referred to – this territory is present today in a limited number of mammals brains. The PFC is the last evolution stage of the brain and only exists in human brains, and a few apes: it helps us face complexity and new situations. It also manages pure creativity, when one is able to think beyond what-he-thinks-he-knows – see double loop learning from Chris Argyris, for example. That is how it creates new routes of neurons on demand, and how many more connections are kept alive than in other territories.

A small joke among neuro-psy practitioners is that politics are at the paleo-limbic stage, our education system is at the neo-limbic one, and the enterprise is trying to overhaul that same neo-limbic stage. A vision of hope.

Are we making the most of our brains? Forget the old rumor saying we only use 10% of it – this was in the 80’s when we didn’t know what the 90 other per cent was doing. They work at 100% . However, the whole brain does not hold the reins all the time. Where the neo-limbic territory governs automatic responses and actions based on a data bank of known situations (or supposedly known) related to given behaviors, the PFC benefits from a virtually infinite database of very diverse tokens and recollections in which it can search, evaluate and compare. The thing is, most of the time the neo-limbic governs, while the PFC is backstage – even sometimes when it should conduct. It is just like if the PFC has yet to accomplish its full development.

Parallels with todays corporation? The neo-limbic looks like the corporate culture and the processes, whether they are explicit or implicit. The PFC looks like the collaborative and collective potential – when there’s a whole world of talents and knowledge to mine and the power of connections to leverage. The former runs our organizations, the latter may have hints for innovating and solving pervasive issues – though not fully sure how to use it, not sure where it will lead.

Adapt or die – where the power of networking could fuel agility

One easily sees benefits of being able to put the PFC to work: adapt to any situation without chains or barriers, benefit from our total intelligence in any circumstance. Human beings who can do this are very few – as mentioned above, our brains have not yet reached this development level. One can train and improve though, this is some of what we learn to facilitate in neuro-psychology.

One paradox of using the PFC is that one has to let go the effectiveness and efficiency duty in order to become more effective and efficient. A clue is that serene people are in much better shape to address edgy situations. Easy to write, hard to grasp, harder to do!

Back to our comparison, a conjecture would be that the enterprise has to get ready to welcome what may come from collaboration initiatives, and get the most of it. That is, without planning ahead what the result should be, or how it should work. Just wait and see. And, it has to feed it with real and serious problems.

In both cases, brain and corporation, it does not mean the other layer (the neo-limbic / the corporate culture and processes) is off work; it just implies that both layers need to work together and rely on each other.

How can the enterprise get there? Probably one very important ingredient is a culture of change. Because whatever situation you address, there will always be a new and more complex one coming. The power of connected people needs to be tapped, but not tamed: new forms of collaboration, new forms of collective intelligence have to be fed with new issues.

The corporation does not age, but it can eventually die. It may become rigid, make errors in terms of adaptation, and then collapse – most corporations expire before they reach 40 years old[ii]. And in these times where everything accelerates, it is more than urgent to cultivate adaptability, even if it means welcoming uncertainty as a resource.

[i] Among other, by the Institut de NeuroCognitivisme in its neurocognitive and behavioral approach
[ii] a Royal Dutch/Shell survey of 1983, the Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge

by Julie Mowinski