Mindfulness and fighting wild fires, and the value of simulations for training

Professor Karl Weick at the University of Michigan has written extensively on the need for "mindfulness" in emergency situations, such as, literally, fighting forest fires.

A mindful crew or crew-chief will be aware that they are operating on a mental model, and that model may be incorrect, so they must be alert to even very small signs that they have completely misconstrued the situation.

There are lessons here, on a longer time scale, for every leader, civilian or military.

Here are some public documents on the subject.

http://www.wy.blm.gov/fireuse/2009mtg/presentations/HROs-mindfulness.ppt

Teaching Mindfulness to Wildland Firefighters (Fire Management Today, Spring 2008, Dave Thomas)

For the last 3 years I have taught half-day workshops, conducted 1-hour lectures, and provided general awareness speeches about the Weick/ Sutcliffe model of High Reliability Organizing as described in their book Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity.

This article is a series of musings, conjectures, and recommendations pulled from this teaching experience. My intent is to pass on some of the lessons that I have learned teaching High Reliability Organizing, and to pose recommendations for further study...

Today, however, mainly due to the heating of the Earth through global warming and a build up of fuels -firefighters are working within an environmental framework of weather and fuel never experienced before. Errors that we might have "got away with" in the past could more easily become catastrophic today....

Next, I explain the irrationality (mindlessness) of always learning our primary safety lessons through trial and error. It is our job to be better at anticipating errors before they occur, before a brutal audit forces us to notice the discrepant events in the fire environment. The following quotation, which reinforces this view, is taken from French disaster expert Pat Lagadec:

"The ability to deal with a crisis situation is largely dependent on structures that have been developed before chaos arrives. The event can ... be considered an abrupt brutal audit: at a moment's notice, everything that was left unprepared becomes a complex problem, and every weakness comes rushing to the forefront."...

High Reliability Organizing

NEW! France-USA High Reliability Organizing in Incident Management Teams Project
Just like NYPD detective "Popeye" Doyle, who traveled to Marseilles in the 1970s hit movie “the French Connection” so too, did a Forest Service NIMO team this past December. Only it wasn’t for crime busting this time. It was a landmark match-up between two French and American Incident Management Teams to capture what makes these teams so successful in complex, rapidly changing, stressful situations. It is hypothesized that they exhibit many of the behaviors that directly align with high reliability organizing (HRO) concepts and principles.

( More to come)


More information:

The France-USA HRO Project (French Web Site, from Bouches du Rhone with video)
http://hro-fires.com/exercices_live.html

High-Reliability Organizing - Roberts, with Weick and Sutcliff:
http://www.wildfirelessons.net/HRO.aspx

Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, Berkely CA
http://ccrm.berkeley.edu

Communication and Information technologies:
New tools for DISASTER management
Jean-Michel DUMAZ (1)
Bouches-du-Rhône Fire Department – MARSEILLE - FRANCE
2nd International Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction
November 27~29, 2007

The Bouches du Rhône
Fire Department


Wade

Wanted - Leadership on jobs? Ok, here you go!

The New York Times has an editorial today titled "Leadership on jobs".

In part that article says:

September was ... the longest unbroken stretch of losses since record-keeping began in 1939 — ... And that understates the damage. ..

The unemployment rate for September ... also understates the damage. It would have been higher but for the fact that 571,000 people dropped out of the work force last month — in general, it’s assumed, because they’ve despaired of finding work. If they had kept looking, they would have been counted as unemployed.

The combination of a rising unemployment rate and a quickening pace of labor-force dropouts is especially worrisome. ... For adult men, who have been particularly hard hit by job loss in this recession, the employment rate fell to ... its lowest level since the government began keeping track ....

===
And for adult African American men, the odds of finding a job that justifies staying in school are now effectively zero.

The Times continues

====

A shrinking labor force represents a tremendous waste of talent and potential, a loss of value that will not be entirely retrievable. Widespread joblessness among men is particularly devastating for the economy and many families, because men tend to earn more than women and to have jobs offering health insurance.

To make matters worse, unemployment among men and women is proving relentless. ...over a third have been out of work for ..., the highest percentage of long-term unemployment on record. By the end of the year, benefits will expire for more than one million unemployed workers. ...

===

and finally

====

The real work, however, lies ahead. Economic recovery will not automatically replace the jobs that have been lost so far in this recession. Nor will higher levels of learning and skill — necessary as they are — magically create jobs, especially in the numbers that are needed.

... Congress and the administration also have not done enough to directly create jobs.

==

OK. I agree that a lack of jobs is a serious problem, and finding a way for the unemployed to continue to eat and pay the rent without resorting to a life of crime is an urgent need and a moral imperative.

BUT, at the same time, we also need to look at the problem that most of the "jobs" that ARE out there are walking disasters that justify their own Dilbert cartoon strip. People show up for "work", mess around all day, have depressing and incredibly hostile "meetings", get paid and go home. During the day they sort of "follow orders" that make no sense, working on projects or products that have no future, in a sort of simulation of actual productive work. Everyone knows its just a matter of time until the company folds and the new pink slip arrives, and most of their energy is spent either trying to figure out what their next job will be, or doing their best to destroy the work of those around them so maybe those people will get laid off FIRST as times get rough and there is more and more "work" for fewer and fewer people to do. Meanwhile, upper management appears to have lost all contact with reality, as well as their own imperative to actually "show up" for "work". There seems to be no relationship between ultimate survival of the firm, or actually delivering quality goods and services to actual paying customers that meet actual needs, and the tasks that fill each day.

How bad is it? In white collar offices, the phrase "I'm going home so I can get some work done" is commonplace and makes perfect sense -- because the American "workplace" is the LAST place on earth where actually useful, productive work can be carried out.

Tragically, this is NOT a cartoon strip. Here's the truth -- if the government expends huge resources to create MORE "jobs" like these, it will only complete the task of destroying the entire American productive engine. In the long run, unless we are actually creatively producing goods and services that meet important needs, we will all go out of business.

The shattered dreams of those without jobs only masks the shattered dreams of those WITH jobs, that they might do something meaningful with their lives, not just claw and fight to survive one more day on a sinking ship that everyone keeps on pretending is floating.

The workplace continues to be a haven for "workplace abuse", a parallel to domestic abuse. It is not unusual for a boss to feel he has the right, if not the obligation, to yell at, cut down, and humiliate the "workers". It is not unusual for a boss to demand over and over that people "work harder" while having no accountability for the work making any sense or being efficient or effective. And, as the staff is cut even more to make it more "lean", it is not unusual to demand that workers give up evenings and weekends to deal with crises that could have been avoided if management had done its job and planned better or even with compassion.

So the workplace is depressing, and worse than simply non-productive -- it is as one person described it to me, a "life-sucking" world that produces sham goods and services at a tremendous cost in human suffering, depression, anxiety, and associated illnesses such as obesity and diabetes. It's only a miracle that there is as little visible workplace blow-back violence as there is, and I suspect that is largely due to the fact that the most psychologically abused workers are in such a state of hopeless helplessness that they can't even get organized to fight back. They are told to stop complaining and "be glad you HAVE a job!"

At the same time, there are now some great examples of what human beings can do together in totally different contexts. Highly productive, energizing, creative work can be done, with an actual joy in doing it. Some people look forward to "going to work" and spending the day slaying dragons with their co-workers in victory after victory.

This is not simply "icing" on a cake. In my own reading of things, the whole reason "the economy" is in trouble, and shedding "jobs" and entire companies if not entire industries, is that that pruning of dead wood is a healthy response of the national body to this disgusting and useless pretense of work. Also, it seems to me, that if THIS problem of pretend creation of wealth is not addressed, it's not just companies, but entire COUNTRIES, that will be pruned from the global body.

This is, at the core, an economic downstream effect of a spiritual problem -- we've lost our bearings as to why we are here, and what we should be doing while we are alive.

There is no way, in my reading of this, that people can simply create "more jobs" or "better paying jobs with better benefits" unless the question is addressed of what the heck kind of task all those "person-hours" are dedicated to accomplishing. More, better paying jobs is a downstream effect that will arrive AFTER we focus our collective national person-hours on the RIGHT tasks, not this collection of socially meaningless, and valueless, goals and objectives.''

The efforts the collective national workforce are putting out are not valued, precisely because they don't justify a high value, and are, in face valueless.

The erosion of jobs, companies, and at the rate we're going, entire cultures and countries, only reflects this loss of direction and lack of an uplifting focus on a long-term spiritual level.

We need jobs, yes, but we need jobs that produce, as output, sustainable improvements in our society, and, that are produced by creating vital environments, full of life and vitality and mutual support and encouragement, where people help each other focus on and be caught up in the immense joy of working productively on important issues, and succeeding at overcoming obstacles in getting there.

We are essentially attempting to power our "economy" by running on our starter engines, instead of utilizing our true capacity for enormously productive work that we are born with -- our capacity to plug into a community of others and find ourselves mobilized, motivated, energized, and empowered as the full creative life-generating power of the universe finds a channel through us to others and flows through that channel.

We have it entirely backwards. Humans can't build an economy, and then, when that is in place, move up Maslow's Hierarchy to start working on a community. We need the community first and the purpose and empowering engine to float the economy.

That is not something that will come "later", in some way, "after we get jobs at all." Where there is no spirit, there shall be no life, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, paraphrasing the Bible. What we HAVE is dry, lifeless bones, where the wind blows across empty fields, with the plow abandoned across the furrow, to further paraphrase TSE, "our lives unwelcome, our deaths unmentioned in the Times."

Eliot saw exactly this during the last great world-wide depression. Here's a section from his poem "Choruses from the Rock." What's crucial is not that he saw the problem, but that he also saw, through the symptoms, what the actual underlying problem was, and therefore how to address it and fix it.

After 50 years or so of pondering this question, I agree with him. Here's a few snippets of that poem, slightly rearranged. This was written in 1934.

But you, have you built well,
that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?
Where many are born to idleness,
to frittered lives and squalid deaths,
embittered scorn in honey-less hives?
What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor,
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance.

Will you leave my people forgetful and forgotten
To idleness, labor, and delirious stupor?
In a street of scattered brick where the goat climbs,
Where My Word is unspoken.

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.

We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.
Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?
A thousand policemen directing the traffic
Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

When the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city?'
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?'
What will you answer? 'We all dwell together
To make money from each other'? or 'This is a community'?

O weariness of men who turn from GOD
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action...
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator.

Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

A larger section of that poem, which I posted in October, 2007 when the Michigan state government shut down briefly, being unable to come up with a budget, is here.

The entire poem is difficult to find on-line, and there are many postings of small portions of it which give no indication that there are parts missing. But, I did find it in images so you can read it. The whole poem can be found here, along with most of the rest of Eliot's poems.

Eliot carries his thoughts into a Christian reverie, but don't be put off by that if you are not Christian -- there is nothing in the core thought that is not really universal, and could equally well be a Moslem or Jewish or Hindu reconnection with the spirit of life that animates this planet, and is willing to animate us, if we only turn to it and let that happen.

(Side-bar: I'm not sure that atheists, regardless how well intended or well educated, can connect with this type of wireless broadcast power to make it through the day. Looking at how "collegial" most university campuses tend to be among educated, atheistic faculty and scientists, there is little evidence that "community" is a driving value, or a sufficient reason to rise above petty squabbles or let go of long-standing bitter grudges. The drive to compete and noticeable sag in energy and increase in green envy when someone ELSE succeeds or looks good is not a strong sign of an academic "community". )

This poem is worth reading and rereading. The "new bricks" reference is what inspired the name of this weblog, by the way, and is in the hopeful section of the poem,

Yet nothing is impossible, nothing,
to men of faith and conviction.
Let us therefore make perfect our will.
O GOD, help us.

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
Out of the formless stone,
when the artist united himself with stone,
Spring always new forms of life.

The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service.

The lights fade; in the semi-darkness
the voices of the WORKMEN
are heard chanting.

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
and clay for new brick
and lime for new mortar.

Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone

Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers

Where the Word is unspoken
We will build with new speech

There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

THIS is ultimately what "learning organizations" and "positive deviance" are about -- envisioning meaning and plugging into the resultant power to build new life, if we can break our eyes away from death and open our hearts to the joyous creation of life in the face of all odds.

Wade

Who will lead Michigan out of economic wilderness?

"If not our big prestigious universities, who will step forward to lead Michigan's complacent people and hapless politicians out of the economic wilderness?" asks Tom Walsh in today's Free Press. [emphasis added]

======================================================

TOM WALSH
Who should shake state out of rut?
October 16, 2007
BY TOM WALSH
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Michigan has no excuse for not being a thriving leader in the knowledge-based, environmentally conscious global economy of the future.... But we're lazy. Complacent. We have a sense of entitlement and no sense of urgency.

Watching the levees break
...
"Our" Hurricane "Katrina has been out on the horizon for a generation, and we just watched it come," said Rick Snyder, CEO of venture capital firm Ardesta in Ann Arbor, and former president of computer maker Gateway Inc.

Culture, Snyder said, "is our biggest problem." Michigan's tremendous industrial success through much of the 20th Century left many of its people with a sense of complacency and entitlement, an assumption that good jobs and wealth always would be available. And even though the impact of automation and global competition has been evident for several decades now, Michigan's response has been tepid, he said.

Snyder said the state's political leaders, as is clear from the recent budget battle and tax hikes, have shown virtually no leadership to help pull Michigan out of its no-growth economic stagnation of the past seven years.

Therefore, Snyder said, it's important that the state's major universities show economic leadership by boosting their community involvement.

Are Michigan's major universities ready... to take bold, sometimes controversial positions on issues in those many areas where business and economics meet public policy?

If not our big prestigious universities, who will step forward to lead Michigan's complacent people and hapless politicians out of the economic wilderness?

Contact TOM WALSH at 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com.

U.S. Army as a learning organization

I've praised the U.S. Army as a model "learning organization" that has evolved a way to ask "hard questions" and internally debate extremely contentious issues, and to learn from its "mistakes" and improve next time.

Please note that I am very carefully trying to avoid stating any position regarding what decisions got made, in the interest of focusing on the underlying process of decision-making and mental-model adaptation itself. How did that work? Did it work well? How could it be tweaked so it would work better, not just for one specific instance, but in the general case, from now on?

In short, what can we learn from this experience that will be a permanent step upwards in how we make important decisions collectively, as a country, with both free-speech and a command structure to balance. What can we learn that we can apply to any organization's leadership?

The "unity" above the "diversity" of these two almost-opposing interests is the theme. Where is the sweet spot that we can rise-above the conflict and satisfy both interests without compromising either?

That's the serious question all sides should agree is worth asking.

Then, when we're done looking at the smaller problem we need to spin to a different lens and look at the larger question of how the American people and Congress worked in terms of utilizing information, interests, and politics to make the decisions involved. Did that work? Are people happy, looking back? Can that be improved? Can we learn something?

If so, what? If not, why not?

Is something interfering with our ability to learn from the past and adapt to the future? If so, what is it? What can we do about it? As with "the Toyota Way", we need to do what we were discouraged from doing in grade school, and keep on asking "Why?" at least 5 times trying to dig back to "root-causes" and go far enough to find the upstream things that can, in fact, be changed.

The lesson we should have learned from looking at Toyota's spectacular performance, and the "Making the Impossible Possible" video, is that mostly what is in the way tends to be simply cynicism and the incorrect belief that "nothing can be done" and "We have to live with that." Toyota's lesson in "lean processing" is "No you don't. In fact you must not put up with it. Stop and fix it!"

It often turns out that the cynicism is both unjustified and unsupportable. Change can happen, over time, a little bit at a time, with persistent efforts by everyone. Toyota has proved that.

Maybe, there are better ways and better models for us consulting with each other to make hard decisions about emotionally charged issues.

So, today's NY Times has a relevant article that hits many of those points, particularly the dynamic tension between keeping the command and control structure (and the US Constitution) in place, but also keeping the flow of surprising news going upward, so that we're not trying to violate the basic law of cybernetics and operate with the eyes disconnected from the hand.

For those at my talk Friday, here's the relevant image:


I added emphasis to the excerpts below.


At an Army School for Officers, Blunt Talk about Iraq
New York Times
October 14, 2007
by Elisabeth Bumiller

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Here at the intellectual center of the United States Army, two elite officers were deep in debate at lunch on a recent day over who bore more responsibility for mistakes in Iraq — the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, or the generals who acquiesced to him.

No, Major Montague shot back, it was more complicated: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top commanders were part of the decision to send in a small invasion force and not enough troops for the occupation. Only Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff who was sidelined after he told Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, spoke up in public.

“You didn’t hear any of them at the time, other than General Shinseki, screaming, saying that this was untenable,” Major Montague said.

... Here at the base on the bluffs above the Missouri River,... rising young officers are on a different journey — an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq.

Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days — all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world — showed a divide in opinion. Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: ...

But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army’s internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth’s senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.

On one level, second-guessing is institutionalized at Leavenworth, home to the Combined Arms Center, a research center that includes the Command and General Staff College for midcareer officers, the School of Advanced Military Studies for the most elite and the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which collects and disseminates battlefield data.

...The goal at Leavenworth is to adapt the Army to the changing battlefield without repeating the mistakes of the past.

Much of the debate at Leavenworth has centered on a scathing article, “A Failure in Generalship,” written last May for Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results,” Colonel Yingling wrote.

The article has been required class reading at Leavenworth, where young officers debate whether Colonel Yingling was right to question senior commanders ...

Discussions nonetheless focused on where young officers might draw a “red line,” the point at which they would defy a command from the civilians — the president and the defense secretary — who lead the military.

“We have an obligation that if our civilian leaders give us an order, unless it is illegal, immoral or unethical, then we’re supposed to execute it, and to not do so would be considered insubordinate,” said Major Timothy Jacobsen, another student. “How do you define what is truly illegal, immoral or unethical? At what point do you cross that threshold where this is no longer right, I need to raise my hand or resign or go to the media?”

But Colonel Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf war and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president of a nation where civilians control the armed forces.

For the sake of argument, a question was posed: If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?

“Yeah, we’d call it a coup d’etat,” Colonel Fontenot said. “Do you want to have a coup d’etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you’re willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be O.K.? I don’t think so.”

Some of the young officers were unimpressed by retired officers who spoke up against Mr. Rumsfeld in April 2006. The retired generals had little to lose, they argued, and their words would have mattered more had they been on active duty. “Why didn’t you do that while you were still in uniform?” Maj. James Hardaway, 36, asked.

Yet, Major Hardaway said, General Shinseki had shown there was a great cost, at least under Mr. Rumsfeld. “Evidence shows that when you do do that in uniform, bad things can happen,” he said. “So, it’s sort of a dichotomy of, should I do the right thing, even if I get punished?”

One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should the war have been fought?

“That’s a big, open question,” General Caldwell said after a long pause.

Leadership and Social Justice

I want to suggest a model of social policies and leadership for consideration.

In this model, the social organization may be of any scale - a team, a department, a company, a nation.

This seems to me another one of those concepts that applies to many different levels of the organization of living matter in our world, from cells to our entire planet seen as one.

I'll model the social fabric as a sort of flexible "rubber sheet" with the normal state being "flat".

There are, it appears to me from observing the world, two ways that leadership, in the middle of this sheet, can operate.

( You may need to click on the picture to zoom it up to full-size to see the details. )

In one mode, which looks like the letter "W", the central leaderhship attempts to concentrate resouces centrally, pushing themselves upwards, at the expense of ever larger numbers of the people, who are consequently pushed downwards. That's illustrated in the left side of the picture.

Disparites grow, and the leadership gets higher and higher - but only measured locally with respect to the surrounding deepening poverty. As seen from outside, leadership's castle is rising in the middle of a rapidly sinking swamp. The net result from outside is that everything, including leadership, is, net, going downhill.

In the other mode, which looks like the letter "M", the opposite is true. Leadership attempts to boost the people around themselves, and encourges them to "pass it on". In fact, leadership may actually take a hit to get those around boosted to an even higher level than the central leadership, even to the point where the whole company or country is rising and the leader is falling proportionately behind them.

But, as seen from outside, the entire enterprise is rising, and even the leadership is rising.

These two policies are derived from two mental models of the role of leadership. In one, the role of the elite is to have perks and get richer than their neighbors. In the other, the role of the leader is to raise up the level of the whole enterprise, even if they themselves get a proportionately smaller "piece of the pie."

The "W" model is self-sustaining for a while, and is based on central leadership having a limited horizon and being oriented primarily in an "us" versus "them" relationship with their own people. But, because the whole enterprise is sinking ever deeper underwater, psychologicallyl and economically, sooner or later it will fail to be self-sustaining and even the illusion of prosperity in the center will vanish. Often, and I guess this is based on theories of leadership from Machiavelli and the Middle Ages in England, the central figure maintains power by keeping the underlings in constant battle with each other, so they won't "gang up" on the King.
The leader in this model is under constant strain and threat that, at any moment, if they let down their guard, the curve will "snap back" to a smooth bell-curve shape and they will be flung downards. If you glimpse in the "cockpit", it's more likely you'll see a fist fight in progress than someone actually flying the plane. An explicit goal may be "disunity" among "minorities."

The "M" model is not constrained, and can continue to grow without bounds, because every part of it is rising above the waters, and prosperity is spreading farther and farther. It requires somewhat "selfless" leadership with a broader vision of the mission, or even a selfish, but more informed view of how things play out. The leader in this model maintains power by providing prosperity that comes from all the underlings working together so that stuff actually gets done.
Explicit goals will definitely include repairing "disunity" among sub-populations and sub-cultures. The "motive power" or "secret of success" is a very low key but very constant pressure from the top (top-down) to move towards unity. Holding the stress of that shape is leadership's job that cannot be done by anyone else in the organization -- the very first component of the top-down series of descriptors has to be "unity with diversity." If the central leadership becomes tired and "lets down their guard", the worst that will happen to them is that they'll be pulled UP into the bell-shaped curve. Knowing they can do that any time they want gives them the strength to never have to utilize that option.

As with "Leading by Questions" by Marquart, the M model is actually a much easier leadership model, with far fewer threats to the palace, and much less requirement to "know everything" or otherwise attempt to justify your own existence to constant threats of people who want to switch places with you. The larger problem is succession of management and even finding or growing anyone who can and is willing to take the reins.

The trend in management literature these days is from the "W" model increasing towards the "M" model, and we hear terms like "servant manager".

We need to be careful about extrapolating upwards from local data. It may seem from the bottom rungs of a company, say, that higher and higher levels of management seem more and more remote and interested in personal profit, and therefore we should dislike "the system".
Like so many other curves, in the multiscale, multilevel life shape that we live in, what actually happens is that the curve twists and we realize that for any CEO who wants to rip-off a company, there is a higher-level investor, such as John Templeton, who prefers the company not be ripped-off, and sees their profit going down the drain if that rip-off happens. Every boss has a boss, and if you go far enough up that chain, you're back to core-values again. It's only the middle that's a mess. There is much more cause for optimism that this thing can be made to work than people think by using the wrong method of one-level world extraplation to judge a multi-level system of life.

Whatever level organization you are considering, one question that could be asked is whether the model in use locally would "make sense" or "scale up" if "everyone" used the same model. That can be a very powerful "symmetry" test, and "scalability" test. I had a roommate once (JJC) who had a test for candidate roommates - if there were two of that person, could they get alone with each other? Great test, and we can all think of people who would fail it. I believe the "M" model above is scalable and works even better if shared. I think that is not true for the "W" model, which again means it is fighting a losing battle, depleting resources to fight an even larger context in a battle that cannot be sustained forever. Far better to transition from the W model to the M model, if that can be done stably and without violence. Then, you can "lead" and say, "Hey everyone, look what we're doing that can work for you too!" A post for another day.


references
-------------------
General reading:
The Utility of Humilty, CIO Magazine, Dec 1, 2002 (on-line)

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don’t ( Jim Collins, HarperCollins, 2001)

Hostmanship - a Serial Review #7 - in comparison to Servant Leadership, from the weblog Leading Questions, 4/27/2007. (accessed 6/1/07).

Hostmanship is a leadership approach that mirrors what is called servant leadership, a business leadership concept developed by the late Robert Greenleaf. His work is carried on by an organization under his name. The Greenleaf center describes servant leadership this way.

Servant-Leadership is a practical philosophy that supports people who choose to serve first, and then lead as a way of expanding service to individuals and institutions. Servant-leaders may or may not hold formal leadership positions. Servant-leadership encourages collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and the ethical use of power and empowerment.

Here's Robert Greenleaf's own definition.

The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”

Taken from the Servant As Leader published by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.

And, going back a little further in time than 1970,

And one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him.
"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law". And He said to him "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."
"This is the great and foremost commandment."
"And a second is like it, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
"On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.

Words of Jesus from the Christian Bible, NAS, Matthew 22:35-40.

On Military leadership:

1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in order.

The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual - (FM22-100)

Battle Tested Wisdom for

Leaders in Any Organization

Quotations from Chairman Powell - a Leadership Primer
from GovLeaders.org

Quotes on Leadership
From "motivating quotes"

Ancient Chinese Wisdom

A leader is best
When people barely know he exists.
Not so good
When people obey and acclaim him.
Worse when they despise him.
But of a good leader
Who talks little
When his work is done,
His aim fulfilled, They will say "We did it ourselves."
Lao Tse

More recent Chinese thought

Pay attention to uniting and working with comrades who differ with you.
Quotations from Chairman Mao

I apologize for not having relevant quotations from Hindu and other traditions. Please feel free to add them to the comments here. My point is that, whether ancient or modern, capitalist or communist or Christian, Jew, or Muslim - the same wisdom is found and held up for our attention. When such different groups agree on something, we should look into it if nothing else because it appears to be "common ground" that we can build some "unity" around.

The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations - part B

Yesterday, in my post The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations, I reviewed a few of the lessons Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline teaches that we can learn from thinking in circles, not in lines.

There are other properties of loops that are critical, but as subtle as the difference between the behavior of a spinning bicycle wheel (a gyroscope) and a stationary one, or attempting to throw a plate or a playing card that is spinning rapidly versus one that is not spinning. At first glance you might say - it's just spinning, so what? But the behavior of trying to throw a plate and a "Frisbee" is quite different - the plate may go 20 feet and the Frisbee 100 yards.

Spinning rapidly in a circle matters. All feedback is not the same. The speed of feedback in a feedback loop also matters. The feedback rate matters ( loops per second or per day or per year).

But this morning I want to start looking at vertically oriented loops in hierarchically structured organizations - for which a triangle or pyramid shape is more helpful than a circle for discussion.
(Imagine the pyramid shown on the back of every US dollar bill.)

Say that the "boss" is the eye on the top of the pyramid, and that the boss's orders come down the right side, through the "chain of command" (which is actually a branching tree shape.)

At the bottom of the organizational pyramid, where it actually touches the reality and "ground truth", employees attempt to carry out those orders, and imagine that activity moving us from right to left across the bottom of the pyramid. Finally, status reports ("mission accomplished!") move back up the chain of command being consolidated at each level all the way back to the boss at the top. So, we have a vertically oriented loop, or cycle, because now new orders come down the chain and that loop pattern repeats.

So far, so good.

In a static, simple world, if all employees except one named "Joe" report success, and Joe keeps reporting failure, the classic model would say that the action management needs to take is to replace Joe. The model says all employees are interchangeable machine parts and if a part fails to do its job, the part is broken and should be replaced. This is a simplified version of McGreggor's "Theory X" of management, very popular in the machine age, from 1850 - 1950.
Another implicit assumption is that the boss completely understands the tasks to be performed, and is the resident expert. If people don't "perform" it must be because they are "lazy" and what is needed is a "bigger whip." Employees are told to "jump" and they don't need to understand why or agree -- they just need to ask "yes sir, how high sir?"

That model worked for early industrial models, such as workers in textile mills, or slaves picking cotton.

But, in a dynamic, complex world, that model breaks down and doesn't work. Actions and responses that worked yesterday suddenly no longer work. The "cheese has moved." The organization has to learn new responses to the same old inputs. The response of the outside world to an action is no longer predictable, and has to be judged based on rapid-feedback and a quick poke to see what happens and learning from that. We move into McGreggor's "Theory Y" of management where the expertise is now on the bottom of the pyramid, where front-line
troops are as likely to reply "What bridge? The bridge is gone!" as "OK, yes we crossed the bridge." Now an ever-changing set of facts or dots of information have to be aggregated upwards and "reporting" has to change into continuous "sense-making" of shifting patterns and images of the battlefield truth.

Again, this model is not that strange. It's the basic model we use when we have to move a bit of food from the table to our mouth on a very windy day - we move the hand a little, see where it is now, move it a little move, see where it is now, etc., in a very rapid sequence that automatically adjusts for the wind. If we don't adjust for the wind, the hand and food will miss the mouth on the downwind side. We don't "compute" wind velocity and use Newton's laws to figure out what to do - we just do it and watch while it's happening. It's no big deal. It's the basic "cybernetic loop" of tiny intent, tiny action, tiny perception, and repeat the loop rapidly over and over. It's a loop we can use to cross an unfamiliar room in the dark. Move slowly, stay alert and aware, and adjust as you run into things. It works. It doesn't require quantitative analysis or calculus or a computer or a PhD in robotics. It just requires using a very basic action and sensory loop over and over.

And, like any feedback loop, causality disappears in the normal sense. Motion alters perception and perception alters motion and the two become one, in a very real sense, a single motion-perception action and a loop as an actor.

Again, no big deal. So why is this important?

The big deal is that our society is in the middle of adjusting to this change from "Theory X", and a stable, static world with expertise at the top to "Theory Y" with a very dynamic, unknown world and the expertise at the bottom. In fact, because of the property of loops, there really is no longer much of a "top" and "bottom" in the classical Theory Y sense of the terms.

Just as the level of the water could be seen to control the hand on the faucet, the staff at the bottom of the chain of command can be seen to be controlling the General at the top of the pyramid -- and both those models are wrong, because it's actually the shape of the feedback loop that now has taken on a life of its own, on a whole different scale, and is controlling both of them.

Senge's point, and mine, is that most of the organizational problems we see around us are because we haven't managed to get that much right. In some health care organizations, an extreme case of the expertise being on the "bottom" of the pyramid, the top management still thinks in "Theory X" terms and tries to see itself as the expert in everything and "gives orders" to move in a certain way. The body reports back "No -- what bridge?" and the boss sees this as stubbornness, stupidity, or hostility and things just get worse from there.

Arguably one of the best "learning organizations" around is the US Army. I've mentioned many times before role of Doctrine in FM22-100, the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The pyramid model I just described is the theoretical basis for the doctrine, and every field action is supposed to be followed with a "lessons learned" session. News, particularly surprising news about a misfit between upper management's concept of where the battle or bridge should be and what actual boots on the ground see in front of them, is supposed to be free to travel upwards. Management, as it were, is supposed to listen to the staff and learn what's actually going on, not what management imagined yesterday was going on. It's not insubordination to say "Sir, What Bridge Sir?"

By simple trial and error experience, repeated millions of times, the Army has finally figured out what works and what doesn't and come to some conclusions that are startling to the Theory X old guard, but not at all surprising to the Theory Y thinkers. For one thing, listening has to go upwards, at every level. It's as important that superior officers listen to junior officers as vice versa. If new conditions at the bottom don't result in a new picture of what's going on at the top, the whole pyramid will simply drive off a cliff or otherwise carry out actions that bear no resemblance to reality.

And, because the picture of reality is not perceived directly, but has to come up the chain of command and be re-filtered and consolidated at a dozen different levels, that process has to be incredibly accurate, frank, honest, and unbiased. Even a 10% "adjustment" in facts, repeated over and over at each level of consolidation, can result in a reported "reality" at the top that is 180-degrees out of whack.

In a profound sense, the key word is integrity, and not just integrity when the going is easy, but integrity when the going is tough - not because of enemy action but because of "friendly fire from above". That kind of integrity is also part of the other key word in the doctrine - character.

If the information flows freely and rapidly and can spin up to a high rate of rotation, as with a bicycle wheel or gyroscope, this whole design pattern becomes very stable, agile, nimble, and capable of navigating the most bizarre terrain as events unfold in surprising and unexpected ways. BUT, if there are pockets of resistance to the flow of information, such as cover-ups, that model breaks down. Or, if there are superiors who think "superior" means they know everything and they don't need to learn from their men, the model breaks down. So, another few important words are honesty and humility.

See US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100
and What relates Public Health and the US Army?
and the whole posting from my Capstone slide 7 Theories are Changing which has twenty more references to the literature on high-reliability organizations in nuclear power plants and chemical plants and aircraft cockpits and hospital intensive care units, and what makes them actually work in practice. It just keeps coming back to the same thing and the same model that's right in front of us be we haven't finished mastering.

And, again we have a place where our religious heritage has been observing what makes society work for thousands of years and has more wisdom to offer on this than scientists, although the science is beginning to catch up at last. Our religions have been stressing virtues - integrity, honesty, compassion, humility, etc. - for centuries but we haven't really been listening or haven't thought that "mattered any more in the modern age." Actually, the basic cybernetic model is ageless, and true at any size and scale. It's going to be something we have in common with aliens from other worlds when we meet. It's a universal truth every bit as solid as other physical "laws" we rely on.

These are truths that are seen by Hindus, by Muslims, by Christians, by Jews, by atheists, and by learning organizations like the US Army. They can serve as a basis for unity among even such diverse groups and cultures. They can link science and religion without either side having to admit they were wrong about something and lose face.

Grasping and implementing that truth certainly looks like it could give us far more "bang per buck" than investing in new technology, new weapon systems, new gizmos and gadgets, and other ways to shift the detail complexity around.

Also, see my early post Virtue drives the bottom line with many links at the end to such literature. (excuse the formatting near the top of that post - I'm technically challenged by the html editor.)

Another author's take on this subject is "Spirituality in the Workplace - The Sixth Discipline of a learning organization, by Harish Midha at the University of Toronto.

Peter Senge's latest book is Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future and readers interested in that book might also be interested in Stephen Covey's book The Eighth Habit. All these books teach the same gospel - that we are going to have to come to grips with the nature of community to "make it" through our social problems of this century, and that community requires us to realize the power and impact of "virtues" when amplified by the feedback properties of complex systems.

Another post I wrote exploring the role of community, virtues, and organizational learning and agility is The Importance of Social Relationships (short)

I also recommend: Pathways to Peace - beautiful slides and reflections to music on the value of virtues

A general summary of what I think are my best dozen posts on related subjects is here.

This is also relevant:

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

Enjoy, and please, for reasons this whole post embraces, send me feedback! A human can't sustain a thought without some measure of social support! Criticisms and objections are welcome. Use the comment box below, or send to my email in my "profile" box above.

Wade

Book: Building the Bridge by Robert Quinn

University of MIchigan Business School professor, Robert E. Quinn, the author of Deep Change, has written a new book Building The Bridge as You Walk On It - A guide for Leading Change.

The book shows how some very successful business organizations have converted theory into practice, using integrity and character to be the revitalizing firet hat makes it all work. In fact, Quinn argues, every one of the largest, most-successful companies seems to use this type of transformational leadership.

He has a web site for this book and other books at www.deepchange.com.

The University of Michigan Ross School of Business iTunes site
has a "seminars" section and a great talk by Robert Quinn can be
downloaded via iTunes fromt here titled "Building the Bridge from Good
to Great".

Professor Quinn presents the case that extraordinary organizations achieve extraordinary results, measured by the bottom line, by using a transformational change that comes about by first transforming the character of the organizations leadership.

Through stories, anecdotes, and exercises, he tries to make these concepts accessible, event though they fly in the face of traditional, highly-competitive theories of how to maximize wealth and productivity of a business organization by setting the managers at each other's throats in a competition to see "who is best."

The leadership style that is consistently found in the highest-performing organizations stresses character, integrity, humility, collaboration, and a leader who is oriented to care first about the organization and second about themself.

Quinn says (page 90):

[...The] fundamental state of leadership is ... the movement towards ever-increased levels of personal and collective integrity. Ever-increasing integrity is the source of life for individuals and groups.... It is the antithesis of slow death...

He goes on to discuss how continual application of this sort of "tough love" can create a collective movement in the organization to a much more empowered and creative state, and how that movement takes on a life of its own that can outlast the person who induced it, possibly even completing its work after the person has left.

He quotes Victor Frankl (1963):

What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the stiving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.

Teaching Resources and course Syllabi for various courses are available on-line for free as well.

Free access to previous research presentations in audio format, downloadable to iTunes or whatever you use, are also available.