Geoff Brown's 'Nancy White style' Map of Our Conversation with Viv McWaters
(Posted from Melbourne)
This will be the first of a series of posts distilling ideas from a series of conversations, meetings and conferences I'm involved in during my current visit to Australia. I have been meeting with thought leaders in the areas of facilitation, Open Space, improv, knowledge management, education, cultural anthropology, conversation, sustainability, stories/narrative, social networking, communities of passion, complexity theory and collaboration.
I have met Viv McWaters (and Pete), Geoff Brown, Laurie Webb, Shawn Callahan, Michael Sampson, and Michael Nugent (and Trish), and a variety of participants in some of their remarkable projects. Although they have different areas of expertise and experience, the same questions (issues we're all grappling with) keep emerging in our discussions:
- What works and what doesn't i.e. what are the enablers and preconditions for success in bringing about organizational change: changes in environmental sustainability, social responsibility, innovation, adaptation, process changes, new technology introduction, personal effectiveness improvement etc.?
- What is (for each of us) the Big Question -- the issue, doubt, problem or struggle that keeps us awake at night because we know we are still a long way from resolving it, and without doing so we cannot achieve our life's purpose? What are the commonalities, patterns and collective approaches to dealing with these Big Questions?
- How can bottom-up successes be scaled and/or replicated?
- What are the preconditions for effective collaboration?
- What will tomorrow's knowledge management (or whatever we call them) systems look like?
- What kinds of stories have the most power? How can we become better story-tellers?
- How can we make space and time for serendipitous conversations, the kind that produce astonishing insights, connections, and idea transfer?
- How can we make better use of our time, and get more accomplished?
- How does one design effective learning systems when we all learn differently?
- How can we make better use of metaphors in creating and finding meaning? (Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Love says: "I believe that all the world's [religious, political and philosophical movements] share, at their core, a desire to find a transporting metaphor. When you want to attain [some major change in understanding or belief or appreciation of some startling new concept] you need some kind of magnificent idea to convey you there. It has to be a big one, this metaphor -- really big and magic and powerful, because it needs to carry you across a mighty distance.")
- How can we become better conversationalists? And improvisationalists?
- How can we be sane and happy and productive in an insane and misery-filled and dysfunctional world (letting go, finding peace, presencing and all that)?
What interests me most about the questions above, the questions we've been discussing so passionately all week, is that the 'answers' (to the extent we have brainstormed or agreed on them) are probably not as important as achieving consensus that these are the important questions we need to address in order to make this world a better place to live and make a living in. So while I plan to write about some of these issues in the coming days and weeks, I will also be refining and reposting this list of questions.
In answer to the first question (what works and what doesn't in change programs), John Kotter has said there are eight preconditions to 'leading change' in organizations. The first and most important are (a) shared sense of urgency and (b) a guiding coalition.
My experience has been that real change in organizations rarely occurs by executive fiat. When ordered to do something new, people who aren't 'sold' on the idea will tend to comply only to the extent and for as long as they absolutely have to. By contrast, those who are sold on the idea, who are passionate about it, will sustain the change.
Likewise, having a guiding coalition of people championing and stewarding a change through will help to achieve immediate compliance, but not necessarily enduring change. Like it or not, people tend to do, in the long run, what they think makes sense, to the extent they are able to do so, rather than what they are told to do. This streak of self-management is inherent in human nature, I think, and generally a good thing, except perhaps in armies, and even then I'm not too sure.
So in our discussions to date about what works and what doesn't, the list of 'what works' is looking something like this:
- What the people who have to implement it and sustain it have passion for (e.g. meets a need)
- What is simple, easy, inexpensive and intuitive to do
- What people can see works well (e.g. because it's worked somewhere else)
- What is fun to do (play, learning)
- What, when done, has tangible, visible results ("we did that!")
- What the people involved believe they have the collective capacity to do well
- What the people involved are ready to do (energy, time, resources, worldview)
- When the people involved like and trust each other
And the list of what doesn't work is looking something like this:
- What doesn't make sense to those who have to implement and sustain it (e.g. the war in Iraq)
- What is conveyed with conflicting messages or conflicting sets of priorities
- What you need to bribe or coerce people to do (in other words, the old argument that 'what gets rewarded gets done' no longer applies)
Do you know of any examples of astonishing, sustained change? What made it possible? How were the obstacles circumvented or overcome?
(PS: A possible 13th question, after hearing her name from four different people here in Australia already: Is there anyone in the world Nancy White doesn't know and hasn't worked with?)
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
