I am personally engaged today with two qualitatively
different groups of people trying to develop, and tap into their own,
collective wisdom. One involves individuals and groups in “helping”
relationships in both the public and private sectors and academia struggling
to bridge the gap between theory and practice in ways that can make
more immediate sense for their own organizations and those of others.
The other involves a large major school system and its community that
for the past 5 years has been engaged in both developing and applying
collective wisdom in ways that those in the first group find hard to
understand because they don’t think it’s “possible.”
1. I’ve noticed that two forms
of “collective wisdom“ seem to be driving the first group’s
work, and many are themselves struggling to connect the dots between
the two so that the common sense driving the choices and decisions
of everyone in an organization are driven from a base of the same
collective wisdom.
• One body of collective wisdom is shaped
by the “wisdom” of others -- ideas/theories/world views
of holistic thinkers like Deming, Senge, Wheatley, et al. -- that
resonate and seem to make sense to them. This should be,
and/or is, the way the world functions. They are frustrated
by the pushback from organizations to these ideas that make so much
sense to them. They seek ways to help others “get it”
– to see as clearly as they do what needs to be done
and how to do it.
• The second, and more powerful, “collective
wisdom ” takes the form of knowledge tempered by the fires
of continuing experience. For many of them, this collective
wisdom reflects their own knowledge of “what’s wrong”
generated from their work experiences in organizations.
The power of this form of collective wisdom is that it invisibly
creates a mental model that serves to answer the question why things
are as they are, and have the results and consequences they do.
It therefore often serves as the unquestioned starting point for
changing the what’s and how’s.
• I’ve also noticed the nature of the
common experiences many seem to be having as they struggle to connect
the dots and integrate the two forms of wisdom.
For example, while the 1st body of collective wisdom
leads them to be systems thinkers who know that the organization
is the unit-of-change (because it already is a system), the embedded
experiences of the 2nd focuses their work on individuals as
units-of-change – i.e., what leaders, managers, workers do,
rather than what embedded organizational processes of leadership,
management and working must first enable them to do.
Metaphorically, they seem entwined in the “particle-wave”
paradox that quantum physics calls “complementarity.”
Without a way to re-frame their “collective wisdom,” they
get caught in “either-or” thinking, and have trouble envisioning
the “both-and” processes that can be both effective and
timely.
2. My experience with the second
group – a large, complex organization that is simultaneously
developing and applying collective wisdom -- is one of continual wonder
as the nature of my relationship has enabled me to observe organizational
learning from the inside-out. I attempted to document an early stage
of this in an article
2 years ago -- -- and I believe it has dual significance to for the
purposes of this collective wisdom initiative. First is the exciting
body of knowledge they are creating about how to transform a complex
organization through its work. Second, is the way-of-knowing
that has served as the lens enabling me to “see” and backmap
from individual to organizational learning.
Since my “formal” retirement from work where
I thought my value was defined by what I knew, I’ve come to realize
that it wasn’t “what” I knew, but rather
“how” I knew it. I really didn't know more than
others closer to problem conditions or closer to solution theories…
I just had a different way of "seeing" that enabled me to
perceive connections others didn't. I had been looking at the world
through a different lens, and what I had telling people through my writings,
videos, and presentations about that world and how to operate in it
made sense to some, and to others was complete gobbley-gook. (For examples,
see partial list at end)
More recently I’ve come to recognize that the
lens offered an effective way for thinking about and dealing with the
“particle/wave” complementarity in organizations. To determine
when and how I started thinking this way, I searched back through my
work over the years with schools and other public and private sector
organizations; my interactions with individuals such as Deming, Meg
Wheatley, Russ Ackoff, and others; my work with organizations like the
USOE’s ES’70 (Education Systems for the 70’s), and
the Ford Foundation’s Comprehensive School Improvement Projects;
and with education’s Quality Schools Network until I
found myself way back at a seminal point in my life where I had both
figuratively and literally “connected—the-dots.”
It was the last week of my military “career”
as a junior officer on the intelligence staff of the Commander-in-Chief,
Pacific and I was leaving to go to graduate school. I regularly briefed
the admirals and generals on what was happening where. My particular
part was related to what NSA does today -- interpreting electronic intercepts.
And since I knew it was my last time, I took a risk that went beyond
the “data.”
First I pulled out a wall-size map of Asia and the Pacific
on which I had marked locations of all the intercepts we had noted the
past year. On this standard Mercator projection-type map they appeared
as random events. Then I pulled out another large map – this time
a Polar projection – with the same points marked on it. But now
they fell into a straight line ending up in Kamchatka. I suggested what
it eventually turned out to be -- the track of a long-range missile
test range.
Apparently changing the reference point from which a
perception of reality is drawn (from equator to pole) doesn’t
change that territorial reality, but it can allow “dots”
to connect in ways that couldn’t be “seen” before.
Anyway, with learnings from that experience buried someplace in my mind,
years later I was in the office of the Rochester, NY superintendent
of schools. He gestured to a large wall chart of the school district
(in a typical “pyramid” format) and lamented that it wasn’t
large enough for most important people -- teachers and children -- to
be included,…or if they were, they’d be lost way down at
the “bottom.”
As I processed the experience later I realized he was
pointing to the “map” that is used, and universally accepted,
as the unquestioned frame for organizational problem-solving. But it
did not seem to adequately portray the “territory” in a
way that would make practical sense for problem-solving.
Recalling my Navy learning, I asked what was the “reference-point”
for the relationships that this pyramid-like map portrayed? What might
be understood if a “map” could be drawn in which relationships
were defined by a different reference point? The reality of that territory
wouldn’t change, but what “dots” might it now connect?
That started me thinking first about what the reference
point was for this organizational “map,” and what would
happen if, as with a polar projection, we looked at the same elements
in relationship to something else -- like a student. The "pyramid"
organization chart was (like the mercator map] a valid way to portray
the organizational world… but only for some things. Just as one
can't see the straight line that is the shortest distance between two
points on a mercator map (it shows up as an arc], the pyramid map makes
it difficult to “see” the :straight-line” logic of
effective, responsive strategies needed to produce results.
As with geographic maps, our organizational maps portrayed
connecting relationships that were defined by a common reference point
that became its organizing principle. The pyramid's reference point
was "Inputs" or resources that were to be transformed by the
organization's decisions into "outcomes" or results. What
each downward level on the chart indicated was the quantity of
resources handled by that level's decisions. (Traditional trickle-down].
But the lines connecting those boxes soon became the structure of human
relationships dealing with the use of those resources.
It’s still a great quantitative map…
that only seems to run into problems when one's concern shifts to issues
of quality -- which is the appropriateness of a product or
result to a customer or client's need. One cannot see on it how the
"boxes" relate to each other in terms of this different criterion
for success.
The point of this history is that the product of that
learning experience was the development of a “simple” tool
that captures that different perspective, and is based on “simple”
natural rules that seem to drive human problem-solving, and which has
shaped my thinking and work from that time on. It has served me as a
strategic plotboard for understanding and integrating the separate
theories-of-change we usually have for individuals and organizations,
and then for figuring out ways to capitalize on it.
I know it “works” by the value of the products
of it’s use – e.g., among these are the unique national
information system called the Growth Record described on Senge’s
website for his Education
Fieldbook; and most recently it provided the lens I’ve used
to capture, from the inside-out, the individual and organizational learning
experiences of the large school system over the past 5 years and feed
them back for their use in “20,000 foot” views, and for
those trying to understand how system thinking plays out in system actions
(See Systemic
Learning & Action).
But I realize now that what I never described or showed
was the “lens” itself. Part of my hesitancy to do this over
the years might have been a fear that it would seem too conceptual and
impractical. (Actually I had described it in a US Dept. of Education
report – The Communication of Experience: A Guidebook for
the Management of Information in the 1980’s and used it as
part of training for the Teacher Corps.) Over time, it may be that I
feared it would be perceived as “too simple” by some, and
at the same time, “too complex” by others. Ironically, what
I’ve discovered since then is that its value is in the way it
uses simplicity to address complexity.
But several events this past year made it necessary for
me to “out” it.
• First, I had no choice because I’ve been
working with some System Dynamics folks in MN and VT who are trying
to build a computer model from it that needed the kind of detail I
never before had to squeeze out of my mind. So I was putting together
a logical way of presenting what I was now referring to as a strategic
“plot board” of the “territory.”
• And I decided to formally “out”
it in an October presentation at the Deming Institute conference on
improving education.
Both experiences convinced me that I need meaningful
interaction with others who seem to be asking the same general questions
as I am regardless of the tracks they are pursuing to find answers that
make sense to them. I need thinking partners.
I would like to establish some mutually meaningful connections
with some thinking partners who might want to interact with me because
they see possible meaning and value in the products of my experience,
and who might, from their perspectives, help me better understand these
experiences.
I have two things to share:
1) The “simple tool” based on the “simple
rules” I referred to as my driving question that I believe can
help others develop the capacity to see and understand a differently-aligned
world of their work.
2) My continuing learnings from the systemic actions
of a large system for the past 5-6 years that I feel have implications
for leadership in education (and actually all organizations.) Many
of them fill in the age-old gap between strategy and tactics, and
between strategic thinking and strategic acting.
I most want to interact around my “thoughts-in-progress”
because when I look back at my 5-years of documented observations, it
becomes clear (and humbling) that (a) the system was acting as
if they already had the framed understanding “my lens”
offered, and (b) without my lens, they were developing the necessary
sense of the “whole elephant” and its internal interrelationships
out of their own experiences.
And more astounding for me, they were connecting theory
and practice and putting into action concepts and strategies that I
had been writing about, and fruitlessly advocating, for 20 or more years.
They all had fit the reality template in my mind but not, until now
apparently, the minds of others.
So why now…and here? I have some definite “answers”
for those questions, and would love sharing them with others interested
in exploring their implications.
