Below Julio Olalla offers a review of the book “The Crash Course.”  I wholeheartedly endorse his assessment that this is a book that everyone should read.  It will change your view of the future that is coming, and open up a bigger set of possibilities of how to cope with it.

Bob Dunham

“THE CRASH COURSE“,  The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy and Environment,  by Chris Martenson, PhD., John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2011

Review by Julio Olalla:

This is a book that everyone should read,. The author presents a strongly grounded picture of the enormous challenges we have in our world today, particularly the fact that we are running out of critical resources, we live in an economy that has growth as the answer for everything and we are collectively failing to act effectively in this new scenario.

The author writes “The world has physical limits that we are already encountering, but our economy operates as if no physical limits exists.”

And he continues “In the near future, humanity as a species will have to grapple with a condition that it has never faced before: Less and less energy will be available each year.” We must ask after oil, what comes next? The typical response (or denial) is “some new technology will be invented”, but the author reminds us that technologies use energy, they don´t create energy.

He claims that “Debt markets are making an enormous collective bet that the future economy will be exponentially larger than the present. It is a dangerous wager, and one which, if it does not pan out, places collective wealth of entire nations at risk.” And he adds to that what is happening in the Energy front:

“With a peak in energy extraction, a host of environmental issues suddenly come into play. Agricultural soils that were force to produce higher yields via the continuos application of fertilizers derived from fossil fuels will turn out to have been fundamentally depleted.”

The author explores the present situation of money and debt, oil, water, soil and oceans, with extraordinary amounts of data, to show that the next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last 20 years, and in order to prepare ourselves for that we must first learn what is happening in the Economy, Energy and Environment, not to feed a pessimistic approach but a realistic one.

Chris Martenson is a scientist and he used to work in the corporate world. Every claim he makes in followed by a lot of information and strong data. It is sobering to go through the book and realize how many of us today live in great ignorance, ungrounded hope or flat denial. He warns us that “unless we are careful, we might accidently pursue growth when what we really are seeking is prosperity. The problem is that prosperity has so often accompanied growth that is has become easy to confuse the two.”

He quotes Kenneth Boulding “Anybody who believes exponential growth can go forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

The book ends exploring different potential scenarios and the possibilities that each of them contain for us. “One thing that I absolutely don´t see happening is a one-way descent into chaos. Yes, -writes the author- there may be dips in the road, and, yes, it may be a long slog toward the light, but even so, we´ll pick ourselves up and carry on again”

The book is amazingly clear, didactical and thoughtful and visionary. Don´t miss it. It will change your thinking about the world and how you will act from now on.

By Julio Olalla and Robert Dunham

Major dislocations in how our societies operate in the world are coming, and we have seen a preview with the global financial recession of 2008.  Despite widespread scientific analyses of global issues including the causes of global warming, depletion of fisheries, reaching peak oil while energy demand is spiking, and the consumption of resources approaching the limits of the planet, there have not been significant changes in global consumption patterns or economic policies. We seem to be trapped in the current systems with no real options to a new game.  Demand and consumption increase, and the economic policies are to expand growth.  In fact no other alternative seems possible.

The consequences that are coming are unavoidable, will be massive, and will happen very quickly. Our economic growth policies are exponential, which means that the changes they produce are growing at an ever increasing rate, like compound interest.  For example, if we have a steady increase of population of only 1% a year, at a population of 6 billion it takes only twelve years to produce another billion people, down from 18 years for the prior billion.

To show how the time shortens for changes in such conditions, imagine putting drop of water in the palm of your hand, and then doubling the water every minute.  In six minutes, there would be enough water to fill a thimble. How long would it take to fill a major sports arena, say like the Astrodome? Only 50 minutes! And at what point would the stadium be 97% empty?  At 45 minutes.  The major changes of such exponential growth happen at the end, are massive, and happen quickly[i].

That such large scale disasters can happen is amply demonstrated by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse.  He reviews cases of the collapse of whole societies as a result of their cultural dynamics and choices.  Easter Island changed from a well-populated and prosperous island society to being barren and uninhabitable.  Ninety nine percent of the population of the Maya culture in Central America disappeared between approximately 900 AD and 1524 when Cortez arrived, from a vibrant civilization of 3 million or more to a population of 30 thousand[ii].

Although our current issues can be seen as global and systemic, they are side effects of the very logic, stories, and choices of our culture.  These outcomes are manifesting based on the choices that we make individually, and in our associations in towns and nations. What are other choices do we have other than to continue the exponential road to disaster?  And what do new choices demand of us as individuals and as a culture? Why would we make such new choices?

The consequences of our current trajectories into the future will require a response at some point.  Why are we not preparing with more urgency and are instead continuing the current trends?  We believe that this is due to the very common sense and stories that we live in, and that these are based in our current fundamental view of what it is to be human, and what is a good life.  Although the response to the problems we face will be worked out one way or another, our concern is what kind of human beings will we become in the process and what kind of life will we create when our current visions are no longer possible?

We see several reasons why we remain in unsustainable drifts to the future, and these open possibilities for designing and adopting new choices for our future, choices of new stories, ethics, and purposes.  One reason that we stay in the current drift is the story that “there is no other positive choice for the future other than growth.”  The logic is basically if we do not grow economically, we will not have jobs, and then a growing segment of the population will sink into poverty.  This is a story that produces the mood of resignation, that there are no other choices. Another reason is that as human beings we are used to living in local conditions without looking ahead beyond the near future.  An important reason is that we have lost the question of “what is a good life,” and the question has been preempted by the answer that a good life requires more consumption.  And yet another reason is that culturally we have largely lost the experience and narrative of the core meaning of life, what we can call our soul.  And we consider that we will have to rebuild our cultural narratives in the reverse order of these reasons.  We need to find our soul again.

When we speak of soul we mean that part of our being and our experience that has been honored in all ancient traditions, that part of life with connection and respect for that beyond ourselves, the depth of meaning and experience beyond mind, emotions, and body; the sense of the space of life itself in relationship to world, meaning, possibility, and eternity.  The Sufis say that we can never fully know what we are, but that we can experience that we are Love, and explore the richness of life. But even this narrative focuses on our experience in life, not just the material circumstances we find ourselves in. We have largely lost the belief in and respect for an inner life, and it has largely been preempted by the drug companies.  We have lost the traditions of facing life itself in its richness, challenges, and depths, and along with it the dimension of self-cultivation as a good life.  We find the good life outside ourselves instead of inside ourselves.

The materialist story will argue that life has been improved through the development of material wealth and ease.  Yet research shows that after providing for a safe, healthy, and basic material existence the acquisition of more wealth does not provide an increase in happiness, wellbeing, or meaning, and in fact the indicators show that wellbeing tends to decline with ever increasing wealth[iii].  We agree with the ancient wisdoms that life is a journey of becoming, and it is in this journey that we find meaning and wellbeing.  Through learning, self-cultivation, and deep engagement with life and living we will find ourselves, meaning, value, satisfaction, and even joy.  We must engage from our soul, find the sacred, and find our way in the inner dimensions of life.  We cannot fill the spirit shaped hole in our being with wealth, drugs, distractions, or accomplishments.  We must connect to life as aliveness and living itself.

We also must rediscover that our soul, our very being, is not separate from our world, the reality of nature, and our relationships with others.  We are social creatures, made for connection.  In our connections we find ourselves and our lives, we learn to fashion our relationships with ourselves, others, and our worlds.  And today our culture has taken us in a drift to separation, from the privileging of the rationalist perspective through science abstracting us from our experience, from the stripping of literal validity from religious narrative, and the disparaging of spiritual reality by the materialist demand for cause and effect.  We have not only lost our souls, we have lost our heart connections, and our connection to even our experience due to the habit of requiring the mind to explain everything.

We have another unique challenge in our historical era, the scale of technology.  Technology is not just the development and use of tools.  Our tools shape what we do and how we think.  Our tools use us, and control us. If you use email, you see that your practices and even how you think and organize your life is fundamentally shaped by email.  We have seen the stupendous and rapid evolution of smart phones, texting, and social media. In the guise of better connection and access to each other, research shows that this technology is also producing greater disconnection, where people would rather text each other than speak to each other.

Technology not only shapes our thinking, but it currently arises out of a foundational attitude that everything is a resource to be used.  We use nature, and even ourselves.  Used for what?  We need to put the human being and our lives back into the center of our concerns.  We must recover our valuing life and a good life as more sacred that our projects and our measures.

Our experience with students over the last decades is that these are not insurmountable barriers to our way of being.   In a matter of days we can begin to shift our experience and rediscover our hearts, our emotions, our bodies, and our care.  We can begin to see the world with new eyes.  We can begin to walk a new path, a path with heart.

We can then begin to reflect in a new way.  We can allow our concern to pay our bills to exist without it stopping reflection on what is happening in our world, what is happening in our own experience, and what a good life really is.  We do not claim that we, or anyone else, have the final answers to our challenges.  But we do say that honest reflection will open a new way to the future for us.  When we look at our own standards for a good life, a meaningful life, and look at the common stories of needing more wealth or consumption, we can begin to authentically feel what is needed.

Our view is that what is needed is health, meaning, and taking care of what we care about.  So many of the decisions made today are not producing healthy people, healthy organizations, healthy communities, or a healthy world.  Why?  Why would we choose anything other than a healthy future?  Profit is not valuable if we produce an unhealthy world, an unhealthy life.  We need to re-center our values around a healthy future, and face the stories that demand sacrifice of that health.  We cannot live a good life sacrificing health for “more.”

We also see that as a culture we must open and honor new central conversations.  We must take responsibility for the reality that our choices in the aggregate create our global future.  With new public conversations we can better understand the future that we are creating, the interconnectedness of our choices, and open new possibilities for our choices.  This is a matter of voice, and we cannot wait for others to have the right conversations, we cannot wait for our leaders to have the right conversations.  We must take our conversations seriously, and look to design them since they create our future, rather than assume they are just impotent chatter. Education should fundamentally be about developing these voices, creating these conversations, and opening these questions whose answers will shape our futures.

With new conversations among people who bring heart, who call for a standard of valuing the gifts that life provides, we can open a new conversation of the future where “growth” is not the only answer. We can organize for a good life, harmony with nature and each other, and a rediscovery of meaning in the cultivation of human virtue, celebration of human excellence, and the joy of connection and community.

By reviving the question “what is a good life,” we can begin to look how to have our technology, our systems, and our economics support a good life rather than just increased consumption.   A new economics can measure value-creating transactions supporting the self-cultivation of a meaningful life, where the inner life again has value, and we value our social activities of taking care of what we care about.

We hope to promote new conversations for creating our future that not only addresses the coming predicaments, but also the presumptions of what it is to be human and what is a good life.  We cannot produce a new future with the old common sense, with the old answers.  So we cannot rush into our new answers, and we can’t afford the old answers.  We don’t have time to rush.  We must reflect deeply and commit to new conversations for our future.

This will also revive another missing conversation. The conversation of citizenship – what is a citizen, and what are the responsibilities and practices of good citizenship?  We will next address that concern in the context of a good life and healthy future.

Julio Olalla is founder of Newfield Network, a leading school of coaching in the world, and is considered one of the best coaches in the world. He is author of From Knowledge to Wisdom.

 Robert Dunham is founder of the Institute for Generative Leadership, and delivers programs in leadership around the world. He is co-author of The Innovator’s Way.

In many companies today, all over the world, you still hear the term ‘soft skills’ referred to by leaders, managers and HR professionals.  It’s a myth that just won’t die.

Actually, there is NO such thing as soft skills.  The so-called soft skills people refer to such as the ability to communicate effectively , develop alliances, enroll others into a vision, navigate uncertainty with ease, coach team members, build trust – just to name a few – are the absolute hardest thing to do well.  Sure, you can learn math or engineering or medicine or finances and become very competent at those skills; but if you can’t get others to consider your ideas or follow your lead, then these “hard” skills won’t take you or the organization very far.

I’m not sure why some skills got labeled soft in the first place, maybe because they are hard to teach and even harder to measure.  Culturally, we have a great deal of trouble with stuff we can’t concretely measure but that’s a topic for another day.

Right now, I bet you can think of at least one colleague you work with that is technically competent at what they do but who doesn’t have the ability to build strong working relationships or lead others to achieve a mutually defined goal.  These missing skills will likely derail his or her career advancement at some point.   In fact, most leaders will tell you that the majority of organizational problems they face stem from poor communication skills and missing interpersonal skills among the team members and individual contributors.

If I had to pick the most important skill set of a leader I would say – and this isn’t the traditional answer you might be expecting – it’s the ability to ensure sure that the right conversations are being had at the right time and in the right mood at all levels of the organization.  Let me explain what I mean by that.

Consider this question for a moment:  What is it that you do in your job every day?   Most answer by describing some task or function that they carry out.  Others cite the results they produce measured in terms of sales generated or customer responses or lines of code written.

Consider instead that regardless of what field you are in and regardless of what level you are at in your organization, what you spend your time at work doing is… having conversations.   You coordinate action, you plan, you speculate, you make requests, you analyze, you strategize, you develop alliances, you build relationships, you respond to customers, you open new markets – and you do all of this through conversations.  You have these conversations with your colleagues, with your team members, with your vendors, with your customers, with yourself.  You have these conversations in your head, through email, in meetings, over the phone, through text, etc.   It’s so obvious once you point it out yet it is also transparent to us – just like a fish in water.

Consider that all these conversations you have either contribute to and support the results you’ve promised or your conversations are done poorly and actually get in your way of achieving those results.  What do I mean by poorly?  The request you made didn’t have clear conditions of satisfaction or a due date attached to it.  The complaint you made because the deliverable was late was offered in a mood of anger.  The cool idea you suggested to your boss was delivered when the boss was rushing to another meeting and you ignored the fact that it wasn’t the right time to make the offer and got upset anyhow.  Get the point?

A substantial part of organizational ineffectiveness and waste lies in our inability to have the right conversation, at the right time, in the right mood that supports our objectives and goals.  The success of a team or company depends on how effective the conversations are that they are having internally with each other and externally with customers, vendors and other alliances.  To be successful the conversations need to produce shared commitments; they need to lead to effective and coordinated action; and they need to align the cares of the individual contributors with the cares of the organization.

While it is everyone’s responsibility in the organization to pay attention to their conversational competency, it is what the leaders are being paid to do – to make sure these conversations are happening and happening well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  About Terrie Lupberger, MCC

A Master Certified Coach and former CEO, Terrie works at the intersections of leadership and coaching to elicit her clients’ greatest potentials.  Through her writing, coaching and teaching, Terrie supports her clients to develop the perspectives, practices and behaviors needed to achieve the results they seek.

Terrie has been coaching and contributing to the development of the coaching profession since 1995. For nine years she was CEO of Newfield Network, Inc., an international, coach training organization.  Prior to that Terrie was a Federal Manager for more than 12 years and also a partner in a consulting firm working with IT professionals.

Terrie’s varied organizational experience combined with her studies in human potential and philosophy have resulted in a unique world view and approach to working with clients that help them have greater impact with more ease.

Terrie welcomes your feedback and can be reached at terrie@terrielupberger.com.

In many companies today, all over the world, you still hear the term ‘soft skills’ referred to by leaders, managers and HR professionals.  It’s a myth that just won’t die.

Actually, there is NO such thing as soft skills.  The so-called soft skills people refer to such as the ability to communicate effectively , develop alliances, enroll others into a vision, navigate uncertainty with ease, coach team members, build trust – just to name a few – are the absolute hardest thing to do well.  Sure, you can learn math or engineering or medicine or finances and become very competent at those skills; but if you can’t get others to consider your ideas or follow your lead, then these “hard” skills won’t take you or the organization very far.

I’m not sure why some skills got labeled soft in the first place, maybe because they are hard to teach and even harder to measure.  Culturally, we have a great deal of trouble with stuff we can’t concretely measure but that’s a topic for another day.

Right now, I bet you can think of at least one colleague you work with that is technically competent at what they do but who doesn’t have the ability to build strong working relationships or lead others to achieve a mutually defined goal.  These missing skills will likely derail his or her career advancement at some point.   In fact, most leaders will tell you that the majority of organizational problems they face stem from poor communication skills and missing interpersonal skills among the team members and individual contributors.

If I had to pick the most important skill set of a leader I would say – and this isn’t the traditional answer you might be expecting – it’s the ability to ensure sure that the right conversations are being had at the right time and in the right mood at all levels of the organization.  Let me explain what I mean by that.

Consider this question for a moment:  What is it that you do in your job every day?   Most answer by describing some task or function that they carry out.  Others cite the results they produce measured in terms of sales generated or customer responses or lines of code written.

Consider instead that regardless of what field you are in and regardless of what level you are at in your organization, what you spend your time at work doing is… having conversations.   You coordinate action, you plan, you speculate, you make requests, you analyze, you strategize, you develop alliances, you build relationships, you respond to customers, you open new markets – and you do all of this through conversations.  You have these conversations with your colleagues, with your team members, with your vendors, with your customers, with yourself.  You have these conversations in your head, through email, in meetings, over the phone, through text, etc.   It’s so obvious once you point it out yet it is also transparent to us – just like a fish in water.

Consider that all these conversations you have either contribute to and support the results you’ve promised or your conversations are done poorly and actually get in your way of achieving those results.  What do I mean by poorly?  The request you made didn’t have clear conditions of satisfaction or a due date attached to it.  The complaint you made because the deliverable was late was offered in a mood of anger.  The cool idea you suggested to your boss was delivered when the boss was rushing to another meeting and you ignored the fact that it wasn’t the right time to make the offer and got upset anyhow.  Get the point?

A substantial part of organizational ineffectiveness and waste lies in our inability to have the right conversation, at the right time, in the right mood that supports our objectives and goals.  The success of a team or company depends on how effective the conversations are that they are having internally with each other and externally with customers, vendors and other alliances.  To be successful the conversations need to produce shared commitments; they need to lead to effective and coordinated action; and they need to align the cares of the individual contributors with the cares of the organization.

While it is everyone’s responsibility in the organization to pay attention to their conversational competency, it is what the leaders are being paid to do – to make sure these conversations are happening and happening well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  About Terrie Lupberger, MCC

A Master Certified Coach and former CEO, Terrie works at the intersections of leadership and coaching to elicit her clients’ greatest potentials.  Through her writing, coaching and teaching, Terrie supports her clients to develop the perspectives, practices and behaviors needed to achieve the results they seek.

Terrie has been coaching and contributing to the development of the coaching profession since 1995. For nine years she was CEO of Newfield Network, Inc., an international, coach training organization.  Prior to that Terrie was a Federal Manager for more than 12 years and also a partner in a consulting firm working with IT professionals.

Terrie’s varied organizational experience combined with her studies in human potential and philosophy have resulted in a unique world view and approach to working with clients that help them have greater impact with more ease.

Terrie welcomes your feedback and can be reached at terrie@terrielupberger.com.

Is your world full of possibilities? Or do you find you mostly see limits to your possibilities? For example, what do you think of the word “organizations” or the word “corporate”? I find leaders and coaches have an emotional reaction to such words and, in fact, often have a whole story of limits that they provoke.

The common sense of our culture is that words have meanings, and, in fact, definitions. But when we listen to what people mean with their words, we do not find definitions; we find worlds. Dictionaries have definitions, but words bring worlds.

For example, the word “love” does not show up for us as a definition but as a world of what is meaningful in a whole domain of experience and action. It brings a sense of what possibilities are open and closed to us; our whole history with love shows up; the practices and actions of love are illuminated. “Love” brings a predominant mood with it, perhaps of joy, sadness, or poignancy.

As our lives unfold, a word like “love” has a life of its own, also unfolding with our experiences, reflections, and observations in our world. We see loves that others have, loves that we will never experience, loves portrayed in literature and cinema, and find new depths of what love is in our lives. Love is not just a word—it is a world. And the same is true of words like “organizations,” “leadership,” or “teams”—the language of how we take action together as well as the language of other domains of our lives.

The language we live in shapes our world, what we see, and what we do. In the ontological and generative traditions, people are observers and actors—they see what their history has taught them to see from their growing up, their language, culture, education, family, training, and experiences—and they take the actions that their historical practices and habits have enabled them to take.

What we see and do are embedded in our stories, and not only do we live our stories, but our stories live us—our stories of life, of who we are, of what is possible and not possible, what things are, and how we do what we do.

With this perspective, every human being is a unique observer and actor with a unique history, embodiment, and stories. But we can miss the world that language brings for each person, its possibilities and limits, because we have the interpretation that words are limited to their definitions.

With practice, we can become an observer of the worlds that words, stories, and backgrounds bring. When we do so, we must beware of the trap of the cultural assumption provoked by the discourse of science that there is only one world, only one correct reality.

The biological reality is that we each live in the embodiment of our interpretations, and we each experience the world differently. We can miss that our own language and the world it shows is not the only possible world, not the only world that exists. When we are aware of this, we can learn to listen in a new way, listening and observing the many worlds of others and many possible worlds.

Awareness creates choice. When we are aware that we live in stories, we can become the author of our stories, rather than their victim. This is the territory of the coach and leader, to help fashion new stories, new ways to observe, act, and live together, for the sake of our individual and shared futures.

Such awareness and listening enables us to interact with others and be open to how they see the world and move in it. We can then explore what is possible with new shared interpretations and actions, new possible shared worlds. We will experience what the root of the word “communication” means: to “change together.”

When we see the worlds and stories we live in, we have this possibility to observe them, choose them, and design them. We can open new possibilities. For example, rather than live in our old story of what an organization is, we can open the inquiry and design of what an organization can be—or a leader, manager, team, coach, lover, parent, community member, or human being. We can connect more powerfully to our capacities for creation.

The guiding question for our design, our creation, our learning, our leading and coaching is: “For the sake of what?” What do we care about? What is worth taking care of? And since we are finite and can’t take care of everything, how do we choose what we will take care of? How will we make more meaningful stories, worlds, and futures? I believe that to explore these questions and fashion our answers, cares, commitments, and actions with others is a high calling for leaders and coaches.

As observers of words and worlds, we can change our listening and what we generate with our conversations. With practice, we can strengthen our ability to author and live new stories and enable ourselves with others to create new worlds.

May Leong is a graduate of the Generative Leadership Program.  We are publishing articles telling the stories of what happened in the lives of our program graduates based on their learning in generative leadership.  These articles will eventually be published in a book.

FROM ‘HARD WORK’ TO LEADERSHIP

By May Leong

Earlier in my career, as a new leader in a new market, I became Executive Director of the first global nonprofit organization devoted to promoting and supporting women in web technology. With 28 founding members worldwide, we grew to over 15,000 members in five countries in the first year.  The new Board and I were learning to navigate the uncharted waters of building the organization into a long-term sustainable, international nonprofit when we hit the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Easy funding dried up after years of rampant high-level investment in anything web-related, and a power struggle emerged among the Board members that resulted in me being asked to step down so another Board member could replace me.  A couple of months later I was invited back to lead that same organization and I jumped back in and started working even harder given how passionate I was for their mission.  It wasn’t long before I realized it was time to find a new leadership strategy to replace my ‘working hard’ one.

Looking back on that time it is easy to see where I made mistakes and where I got it right, both for myself and for those around me.  Fortunately, at that same time I was learning a new leadership discourse called Generative Leadership, and had the opportunity to reflect on how my leadership practices were generating (and not generating) the results I was committed to.  With the leadership skills I learned, I transformed my style from that of hard worker to a generative leader, which has helped me since to manage looming deadlines, customer expectations, the many and varied promises of my teams, and my own periodic mood of overwhelm.

WORKING HARD ONLY GOES SO FAR

As an Asian American professional, I share the work ethic that is not only the norm for many Asians, but also typical of high performers in most organizations – the misguided belief that if you just focus, put your head down and work hard, you will be rewarded with success because people will see your worth and reward you accordingly with promotions and accolades.  Working hard, however, doesn’t guarantee success as it can lead to one of three possible outcomes:

(1)   people appreciate your hard work but want more and you don’t get promoted

(2)   people don’t see your hard work because that’s part of the work culture and it’s just expected and you don’t get promoted

(3)   people appreciate your hard work and, if noticed, you get promoted

When you look at it, the odds aren’t in your favor, and there’s the additional challenge that working hard doesn’t necessarily qualify you for the next level of responsibility.  With all of these options you are likely on the road to some form of burnout as well.  Besides being a chancy strategy for getting promoted, I can personally attest (as I’m sure many of you reading this can too) that working hard over long periods of time leads to being overwhelmed, resentment and a costly disconnection with those around you in your personal and professional life.

I came to realize that working ‘hard’ is perhaps one of the least effective leadership strategies you can adopt.  That’s not what good leaders do.  Good leaders get their teams and individual contributors to make and fulfill clear and do-able promises that, when all combined, meet the objectives and goals of the organization.  Good leaders make clear requests of their folks; they pay attention to the mood of the team members, since we know that the mood of the team impacts results.  Good leaders coach and support their staff to meet their deadlines and resolve the issues that jeopardize outcomes.  They help team members see how their work contributes to the organization’s mission and results.  Nowhere in the litany of leadership books, articles and training materials does it recommend that a leader keep their eyes down and work hard.

I learned that leadership is not working hard, but fulfilling valuable promises with your team.

A POWERFUL LEADERSHIP PRACTICE – THE MAP

To be a more effective leader, I had to change my strategy of working ‘hard’.  With coaching that I received in the Generative Leadership program I saw that I needed to change my belief and my habits around this.  I learned to start focusing on the conversations, relationships and promises of my team members; as a result we became more successful and impactful at what we were doing.  To support me in breaking my old habits and embedding a new one, I was introduced to a powerful new practice developed at the Institute for Generative Leadership called the MAP (short for the ‘managing action practice’).  This practice has proven so useful that I’ve brought it to every organization I’ve since worked with.  I even use one for my personal life as well.

According to The Institute’s paper “The MAP – Crucial Questions for Managing Action and Results:”

The Managing Action Practice – the MAP for short –is a conversation designed around the key questions and answers for making and managing the fulfillment of promises. The questions and standards for answers are . . . absolutely necessary for the successful coordination of action that results in navigating effectively through changes and breakdowns, managing customer satisfaction, and fulfilling promises.

The MAP is a process – it is a series of reflections and conversations that reveal what actions are most needed in order to fulfill on the promises that you’ve made.   The MAP isn’t a plan, to-do list, or progress report.  Part of its design is that it requires busy leaders to be in regular conversations with themselves, team members and customers to ensure that promises are on track, aligned with everyone’s cares and needs, and still satisfying the customers.  It requires those who use it to monitor and assess their capacity (rarely done in most organizational cultures today where ‘no’ or ‘not now’ isn’t an acceptable response to a boss’ request).  It requires you to identify and name your ‘red flags’ – those concerns and challenges that might affect your ability to fulfill on your promises.  It makes you assess your mood and that of your team.  It has you consider where you need to renegotiate any promises because of changing circumstances, conditions, players or markets.

I could write an entire book on what the MAP conversations can do for an organization or team but in this short space let me offer you a few of the MAP questions to help you determine if you have any gaps in leading your own team or organization.

• Care – What do you care about?  Is that aligned with the promises you are making to this team or organization?  Why does your team or organization exist?  What are you and they taking care of by existing? Are the things you and the team working on aligning with these cares? Is there clarity around this for you and everyone on your team?  Do team members understand how what they do on a daily basis connects with their cares and those of the organization?
• Customers – Who are you trying to satisfy with your and your team’s outcomes?  Who gets to say they are satisfied with your work?  Do you know if all of your customers (includes anyone you have made a promise to internally or externally) are satisfied at this time?  Have you asked them lately?
• Promises – What are you promising, specifically?  (As a team you are promising certain outcomes and milestones by some timeframe to satisfy each of your customers.)  Are you and every team member clear about what those promises are?  Are the promises actually promises and is each owned by an individual?  Do you all have the capacity to fulfill on the promises or do you need to renegotiate some of them?  (I can’t tell you how many organizations I’ve worked with that make what we call “criminal” promises – saying ‘yes’ to their customer when they know full well they can’t possibly meet the deadline or standards.)
• Red Flags – What promises are in jeopardy of not being met?  What do we need to do about that?  What conversations do we need to have and with whom to renegotiate the outcomes.

FINDING MY WAY TO PASSION – USING THE MAP FOR MY OWN LIFE

The results I was seeing with the MAP in business inspired me to do the same for my own life.  Back to the time of the dot-com crash, it was having an interesting repercussion on the way we did business (all over the world, not just in Silicon Valley). Many people lost their jobs, and while losing one’s job was a normal part of the market economy making “corrections” to a bubble situation, we began to notice something different – companies were laying off employees regardless of their skill level, seniority, experience or hard work. That was the change I witnessed and heard about from various colleagues in other fields. We no longer worked in a world where one could count on company loyalty to its employees or where hard work would help ensure that you weren’t the next one out of a job. Anyone was now vulnerable to being laid off at any time for any reason.

Faced with this uncertain job market I still knew that whatever work I did, it had to be something I was passionate about.  I was ready to entwine my future in the nonprofit world because of the passion I felt for the various causes.  In doing a MAP for my life I began to realize that my time as an executive at this particular nonprofit was coming to an end.  I was ready for a larger scope, mission and horizon.  In seeing the great need that such organizations have for fundraising I worked with my Generative Leadership coach and with the MAP and decided this was where I would next focus building my professional skills and career.

When you ask most people what they wanted to be when they grew up, some might have said a dancer, astronaut, doctor or president of a company. No one says I want to become a top professional fundraiser. But perhaps now that our lives are touched by nonprofits on a regular basis and because even children are involved with activities that involve paying it forward, and giving back – phrases not common when I was growing up – this may change. I found that fundraising for the nonprofit missions that I care about is not just my career path, but is my passion.

MAPping AND FUNDRAISING

I’ve been a professional fundraiser most of my career and I know that most people who serve on nonprofit boards hate having to ask for money.  Paradoxically the number one reason that a Board exists is to fill a fiduciary role – being fiscally responsible for the nonprofit as well as moving it sustainably forward into the future through strategy and top-level implementation.  This commonly creates a big problem for the nonprofit’s executive director and leadership team.

I found through experience that introducing the MAP conversation to my Boards and using it as a way to reveal the needed conversations, actions and potential issues has been very useful.  Unlike a road map you use to get from Point A to Point B, the MAP has allowed us to generate multiple paths to reach our targets and engage in conversations such as capacity or ‘red flags’ with regularity and ease. It has also brought accountability to the role of Board member.

I remember on one of our campaigns our goal was to raise half a million dollars.  We came up with many ways to raise that money including:

• Ask      one donor to make that gift.
• Get      two donors, each, to make half the gift.
• Put      on an event (breakfast, telethon, auction) and raise the money through      sponsors, table captains and guests.
• Skip      the events and do a letter writing campaign.
• Save      on the cost of producing a printed appeal and conduct our campaign online.
• Run      a marathon, sell cookies, hold a wine tasting, do car washes, sell      tickets, etc.

We landed on four ideas, turned each into a promise with a measurable outcome and a customer for the promise.  Each Board member committed to promises that, all together, added up to the outcome we declared would mean success.  All the promises went on the MAP and we stayed in conversation weekly as to how everyone was doing and what obstacles needed overcoming.  What became clear after a few weeks was that some of the Board members didn’t want to be held accountable for their promises.  They were on the Board because of their belief in the mission.  The role they wanted to fulfill was that of advisor and making critical contacts and introductions.  That was a useful discovery!

The organization needed and wanted those contributions, so we had them make promises for what they were willing to do instead of having them make promises that they weren’t going to keep.  We aligned their promises and actions with the organization’s expectations and needs.  Instead of the typical nonprofit scenario where leadership is disappointed with the Board’s lack of accountability and the Board is disappointed with leadership’s ineffectiveness, we aligned all our actions, cares and expectations.  Needless to say, the mood in the entire organization greatly improved now that folks were taking actions more aligned with their cares.

Now when people learn that I have been a fundraiser for over a decade I usually get some interesting comments and questions ranging from: Oh it must be hard to do/ Is it hard to do? to Oh I could never do that/ How do you do that? to It’s such a noble thing you’re doing. And while yes it certainly is noble work, I would definitely agree that it is hard work, but not because of what most people think. I have no inhibition about and actually find it fun to ask people for money. The hard part is the preparation, making sure there is a good match, because in fundraising it is all about the three R’s: Relationships, Relationships, Relationships.

And those three R’s require lots and lots of good conversations to clarify cares, passions, actions, promises and concerns.  I find it easy to ask for contributions when I know the person I’m talking with cares about the cause, wants to support it and we both know they can support the cause at the level that’s being asked.  It is all about the different paths it takes to get to that conversation, as well as the many conversations before and afterwards. When you are clear on what you care about and the person you’re asking is clear on what they care about and you’ve made the right match, and built your case then magic happens – they can’t help but say yes.

LESSONS FROM TRAVELING WITH MY MAP

Traveling the road of the nonprofit field, especially in leadership and fundraising, has been fraught with bumps and lessons along the way. I’ve learned that, done well, it involves four important elements:

1. A deep level of commitment to what you care about and the alignment of your care with the mission or cause you’re involved with.
2. The patience to learn how different constituent groups work in the nonprofit system – they all work differently. I have found no two nonprofits to be alike, and even chapters or sites of one larger nonprofit all have their individual cultural microcosms.
3. The ability to deal with frustrations and setbacks, as well as the achievements, in a way that keeps everyone’s integrity intact.
4. The mindful practice of regularly checking in to see that all of the different facets needed for success are there, and when they are not, to champion the importance of including them (i.e., infrastructure, financial ability to attract and keep the best staff).

Over the years I have many people to thank for being patient with me, teaching me valuable lessons and letting me extend my entrepreneurial chops. It is because of the generosity of others, and my commitment to being a great leader and fundraiser that I rose through the ranks.  Using MAPs has helped me continue to stay centered and true to what I care about and what my team cares about, even when we get slightly off the path from time to time.  It reminds me to have conversations with myself and my team when being busy and working hard is just simply easier.  Using the MAP to have those conversations has enabled me to be a more effective leader.  It has helped me move my “leadership mode setting” from hard to smart. And keeping it there? Well that is one component I am still MAPing out.

We invite you to explore the questions below.  They are designed to provoke your thinking and may be difficult in the sense that you don’t arrive to quick or easy answers.  They are, however, worth considering for the sake of the leader you want to become and the impact you want to make:

1)     What do you care about and do your current actions align with this?

2)     What conversations do you need to have and with whom around your or your team’s promises?

3)     What mood are you in at work/ at home?

4)     What are some examples of where you are working ‘harder’ than you need to?

Biography:

May Leong is a passionate community builder, with over 12 years of experience directing fundraising programs for nonprofit organizations in Seattle, Washington, such as: Technology Access Foundation, YouthCare, Junior Achievement of Washington, The Northwest School, Nikkei Concerns, and DigitalEve.

Her prior experience included corporate and banking work, retail training, and teaching English as a professor at a number of college and university programs in San Francisco, Seattle, and Japan. Her business articles have been published in print and online newspapers and magazines in the US and Japan.

A first generation Chinese-American, May was born in Hong Kong and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She and her family have lived and worked in the West Coast for over 20 years. As an empty nester, she and her husband are enjoying date nights again. May is finishing the manuscript for her first novel (fiction) and has already started her second book (non-fiction).

Contact May at: may@maysgarden.com

What is it to learn?

When we lead, innovate, or propose new behaviors and actions with others we are on the path of learning.  The automatic response from people in our culture to new action is to take on “doing,” doing what they already know.  We live with the common approach that we get a theory or concept, and then we “apply” it.  And actions of this type imply that we do not fundamentally change in ourselves, we don’t learn in any meaningful way, we just “do” something differently with the skill set we already have.

However, success in any of these endeavors at a non-trivial level cannot happen without deeper learning.  We cannot learn courage by doing something we already know. We cannot learn love, or listening, or connection doing what we already know.  We cannot learn leadership, or coaching, or healing by doing what we already know.  We must enter the unknown. We must engage in new experiences.

Our predominant mode of learning is intellectual, conceptual or academic learning.  We have been taught to “understand,” and that we know when we understand.  We know when we can pass a test that shows understanding. We have devolved knowing into understanding, although understanding the instructions of the tennis coach does not in itself produce the capacity to execute better tennis.  The body must learn, not just the intellect. So it is with leading, being a professional, and with life.  We must learn fully in the body.

In learning in the body we shift what we pay attention to – we see differently, we make different distinctions.  Through practice doctors see different bodies than non-doctors, an architect sees a different building than that one a non-architect looks at. And we can also learn new actions.  Learning the science of health is not to learn the practice of medicine, and learning the theory of architecture does not enable you to design buildings without the practice and experience of designing buildings.

Learning in the body happens through practice, through the recurrence of facing and shifting our own embodiment, facing variations of situations, and learning to generate an outcome through embodied action.  Studies have shown that physical actions – and these include conversations, emotions, and presence – requires on the order of three thousand repetitions to produce transparent embodiment, a habit or skill.  And what is crucial to understand is that our bodies are always practicing.  It’s not an option to practice or not.  The only option is to choose what we are practicing.  And this requires new skills for most of us, new practices of awareness and attention, new practices of practicing.

Studies of high performance and mastery have revealed that masters practice in a particular way – they engage in “deliberate practice. [i]” This is a practice of learning – of staying on the edge, and slightly beyond it, of their current competence. Masters are always entering into what they don’t know and are not yet skillful at.

We have found that to embody new skills we cannot leave out emotions. The work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio shows that emotions – rather than being a separate compartment from reason that must be kept fully shut for rational behavior – are in fact part of the process of “rational” thinking and choosing.  We cannot be rational or intelligent in the world without full engagement with our emotional faculties.  The coach Julio Olalla shows that emotions are a “predisposition to action,” and open and close the possible outcomes for our actions.  We cannot produce excellence in performance from resentment or resignation.

And so we see that learning, the path to new actions, new outcomes, and new possibilities for the future, the world, and what we are about, must include our bodies and emotions in addition to our conceptual understanding. But with all these present, this may not be the whole story.

There is also another way to learn – to learn with heart.  But this “heart” we are referring to is not just the physical organ, nor is it just our emotional being.  Heart is a place in the body where we experience our connection with life, where purpose and meaning surge through us as felt experiences, not just opinions.  We know this in western culture when we say “I don’t have the heart for it,” or “my heart is really in it,” or an experience is “heartfelt.”  In this use of the word “heart,” we are referring more to the core of our being than its emotional side effect. In Chinese medicine, the heart is the coordinator of the body, hence our own embodied leader, and the place where action initiates and meaning arises.

In Chinese wisdom there is the term “gan dong,” which has been translated as “the transmission of knowledge that takes place only when the heart is moved.”  This is a way of learning in which understanding concepts is not adequate, and even embodied learning through recurrence may not be sufficient.

Thea Elijah, a teacher of Medicine Without Form, writes “Unfortunately for most of us, Gan Dong (the transmission of knowledge that takes place only when the heart is moved) was not a significant aspect of our early educational experience.  In and out of school, we were usually asked to accept ideas, concepts, theories and “data” as reality, often without any experiential component to the transmission.”  This kind of learning requires a particular aspect of our embodiment to be brought to engagement, and engaged in particular ways.

Learning with heart is not only a way of learning, but is also an important purpose for learning.  In the writings of Carlos Castaneda, he introduces the shaman don Juan, who says that the only path worth walking in life is “the path with heart.”  And in the end, learning is for the sake of life and living, living a good life for ourselves and others, creating a future in which we take care of what we care about.

As leaders we can guide, coach, and lead only when we are on the path of learning ourselves. I invite us to the path of life-time learning including and beyond understanding, walking the path of aliveness in the wholeness of our bodies, emotions, and heart.

By Bob Dunham

In the common sense of our culture a leader is one who has power, who gathers power, and who exercises it in a way that affects the futures of others. In the Institute for Generative Leadership we see this interpretation as inadequate to understand leadership well or to grow leadership capability to build a future we want to participate in.  Although leadership certainly includes the generation and use of power, we also claim that leadership must include care, care as the point for which power is used.

Our interpretation of leadership includes answering the question “For the sake of what?” do we wish to shape the future, to desire or wield power.  We can distinguish uses of power that have positive, and negative, effects on those who are affected by it.  Those who seek power only for the sake of power itself, power for only their own personal concerns, or power against whole communities eventually produce negative futures for others.  This happens because these kinds of leaders do not include the concerns of others in their view of the future and the power to realize it.  Some may try to produce the appearance of concern for others, but in the end they cannot hide their raw greed for power.  Negative leaders run the gamut from Hitler and Stalin, who built visions of a future that included the destruction of whole communities, to demagogues who create power through division and hate, and to those who pursue power for their own greed or will to power.

What we consider a positive form of leadership is one which is committed to a more positive future for all who are affected by it, including working through the tradeoffs and challenges that designing and producing such a future requires.  By positive we mean that people are better able to take care of their concerns, such as for a culture of freedom or social justice, for a more prosperous and healthy community, for a successful business, or for providing services and aid to members of the community in need.

Our interpretation of leadership, which we call generative leadership, is one that is founded in human existence, in the human power to shape the future – a future that has meaning and value for a community.  Leaders have certain concerns and take certain actions that distinguish them as leaders.  These concerns and actions are constitutive of leadership, since they constitute, or create leadership.  They are also regularities of leadership we can recognize.  Our interpretation of the constitutive regularities of leadership is that:

• Leaders take care.
• Leaders build power for themselves and others.
• Leaders make offers.
  • Leaders speak and move with a presence, a voice, and identity to have their offers heard and accepted.
  • Leaders build new narratives of and commitments for the future with others.

Leaders take Care

Our first answer to the question of “What is a leader?” is that a leader is someone who takes care of concerns, and builds the capabilities of others to take care of their concerns.  These concerns can be distinguished from the perspective that life in our current era is lived in distinctions of:

• Self
• Others

We can interpret our concerns in these two dimensions: 1) the concerns we have as individuals, as Selves, and 2) the concerns that we have for and with Others – the dimension of relationship.  These concerns are related, since our concerns for others are part of what shapes the Self that we are, and our concerns as a Self orient us to how we will relate to others.  But these concerns can also be differentiated.

Those concerns that arise due to the fact that we exist as a Self are those concerns that life brings us, the constitutive concerns of being human, such as taking care of our bodies, families, need for money to live, membership and community, play, work, career, and so on.  We all want the power to be able to take the actions to take care of these concerns.  We call these the concerns of the Self, and these are domains of action that we cannot avoid. If we don’t take care with our actions in these domains, we will have breakdowns.  We claim that living a good life is taking care of these concerns.

Some of these concerns belong to our relationships with others.  It is in our social relationships that we generate whatever power we have to lead, to be heard, or to shift the future.  We live in networks with others, and in communities where we couple and contribute to each other in our social practices.  In these social practices, we are granted power based on the value we create for others, for the value of our commercial offers, for the value of the love we give, for our taking care of what others care about.  In this way we move with social concerns, those concerns we share with others, our concerns for how our actions affect others, how others react to our actions, and the affect this has on us.  These concerns may also be ones that constitute our Self – who we say we are – but because they are fundamentally social, they can only be taken care of in our social interactions.

Our social concerns arise from the fact that we couple with others in our mutual interdependencies in life together.  In our culture important social concerns are work and careers as we interact with others to make money, and to build our professional paths.  In our current culture, the focus on producing value with our professional work often gets disconnected from what we care about, separating us from the concerns of our Self.

Strong and effective leaders bring passion to their leadership. This passion adds to their presence, power, and effectiveness.  We will base leadership on an authentic offer to take care of the concerns we share with others and have passion to address.

Leaders build power

We live in a world with others, and this is how power arises.  Our interpretation of power is that it is an assessment of a differential of capacity for effective action in some domain, which leads to making choices of who you trust for certain actions, and who trusts you.  Power thus shapes our relationships.

Getting power always comes from an act of being authorized by others.  In our families and communities, the power we have to take care of our concerns is granted to us by others in many ways:  by the money people pay us for the value of our actions; by the love of our families; by the care of our friends; by the trust we have from our public identities as professionals, community members, contributors, or experts in some domain of concern.  So it is in the domains of action that are social, that include others, that we generate our power and autonomy to take care, through the assessments that we produce in others.

It is in making offers to build the capabilities of others to take care of what they care about that we see the connection of taking care with building power.  Power is ultimately granted to us by others, and we are granted power by others when we have built power for them, addressing their ability to take care of what they care about.  In accumulating power, we build our capability as leaders to take care of what we care about and what others care about.

Leaders make offers

The fundamental social act that creates leadership is the offer.  It is an act of relationship, of creating a shared future with another.  In offering, leaders promise to produce a new future for others if they accept the offer and the commitments it requires.  Offers lead to an exchange of power, where the leader is granted power by others in return for the promise they make about the future.  It is in these exchanges that we not only shift the future with others, but also where we build our own identity and our own power.  Leaders initiate or promote these exchanges by making offers – offers that are commercial, offers to lead, offers that shift the future, offers of a new narrative of the future, and even the offer of possibilities that others see just from the way you move in your body and in the world.

Leaders build presence, voices, and identity in the world

In order for our offers to be heard, we have to have the identity and presence that produces enough trust in others for them to accept our offers, or at least be in conversation with us about the possibilities we represent for their future.  A key concern for our leadership is to become observers and actors of our presence, of our voice, and of the identity we have and are building in the world.

Leaders build new narratives of and commitments for the future

Whether it be building a new shop that attracts customers, taking a leading role in a community organization, running for political office, producing a new product or business, or producing a new vision of the future that shifts how people think, leaders build new narratives that others see their future in, and within which they make new commitments.  This of course depends on the identity we build, the presence we have, our voice and the offers we make, and how we conduct ourselves in our social relations and in the fulfillment of our offers.  The extent and impact of our leadership can range from affecting your relationship and future with another, to shifting the practices of a whole community in a way that it is history making.

The concern for any enterprise is its level of performance, and for most members of the enterprise is a concern for how to elevate the level of performance.  This elevation can be to fulfill the ambition for growth, to meet a changing marketplace, to match competition, or even for the sake of survival or to stay even in its outcomes and prospects. But over time this elevation of performance requires change, learning, and a reconfiguration of processes, practices, and even the understanding of how to function. Every organization eventually faces these changes into today’s world.

The point is to create a winning game, and too often leaders fall into the assumption that winning is just a matter of working harder in the current game. Yet having to work harder is a symptom that the current game isn’t as valuable, productive, or effective as it used to be.  It’s the wake up call to examine the game you are playing, the game that is needed, the gaps between them, and strategies to close these gaps.

This view applies from cut-throat competition in global cell phone markets to small companies trying to make it.

What is often secondary or even left out of the strategy for change in organizations is the shift to be made by the people, the shift in skills, roles, understanding, interpretation, attention, and practice. The shift is a journey that is sometimes addressed by “change management,” usually regarded as futile excursion into pain, a mandate for the often struggling management team, or a quick toss to a new CEO or executive savior. And if the change required is late and significant, larger companies are potential targets for corporate raiders or private equity slash-and-burn investors.

Starting with the human dimension as the source of power and focus for change for significant measurable results is an approach in used in our consulting company Enterprise Performance (EP) over the years, based on the discipline of generative leadership developed and offered by our sister company the Institute of Generative Leadership.  At the Institute we focus on the development of individual leaders and leadership teams in leadership skills. In Enterprise Performance we focus on the application of these skills to address real business and organizational breakdowns and opportunities for measurable results.

As an example Enterprise Performance was engaged to work with a software development group in one of the largest software product manufacturers in the world. (The EP approach is based on human coordination, and is not just appropriate for software – we have worked with semiconductor, medical, mortgage industry, technology, service, and other companies. At the time the group had seventy software engineers, and the group was having significant trouble delivering to and satisfying the six product groups that they were producing software for. Late and buggy software deliveries were producing delays in product releases, with tens of millions of dollars of revenue lost or deferred as a consequence.  The team was also in overload and burnout while failing to meet its commitments or produce satisfactory software on time. Our approach enabled the following positive shifts in the operating performance of this team:

Before Enterprise Performance Tune Up                                  After – 4 months later

As is explained in the discussion that follows, this shift was made by introducing the CTT management to the principles, and more importantly the practices, of managing commitments, capacity, managing customer satisfaction, coordinating work, and implementing their day to day management practices around this approach.  The client team made this approach such a success because they were committed learners, were motivated by considerable pain, and found that the new actions addressed the issues they were facing.

The Enterprise Performance approach addresses the key issues of “what to do,” “how to do it,” “how to learn to do it,” and “how to implement what I am learning in my world” in establishing more effective result-oriented perspectives and actions in a team.  The approach allows customization for a specific client and client situation from a rich discipline of management practices that have been developed, refined, and deployed in dozens of companies over the last twenty years and taught to hundreds of managers and executives.  The approach centers on the frameworks, skills, and practices to: make commitments that you can fulfill, and avoid overcommitting; manage your commitments to produce customer satisfaction in the fulfillment of the commitments and during the performance to fulfill; stay in communication with customers throughout the project to maintain trust, satisfaction, and open future opportunities with the customers; coordinate the making and fulfillment of commitments with the entire team that is responsible for fulfillment, so there is ownership and teamwork; make the progress and problems of work and projects visible so that they can be better managed, and customer expectations be taken care of; and establish clear accountabilities and communication practices  at the individual, as well as team, level.

Here’s some examples of key skills that the team had to develop in this project:

• Saying “no” when performance was infeasible, and address the situation rather than cover it up with an uncommitted “yes”.
• Clarifying the actual capacity of the team, and not allowing demands to exceed capacity at unsustainable levels.
• Negotiating and documenting clear commitments with the team’s customers.
• Clarifying roles, particularly around who managed the relationship with the customers, and how the team coordinated with the relationship          managers.
• Establishing visibility as to the progress with key commitments.
• Establishing regular communication with the customer where progress was reported, problems anticipated, and issues resolved together.
• Clear coordination practices for the team members.

The shift was a shift the skills, behaviors, and practices of the client team.  Through working sessions, clear actions and practices, and the support and feedback of skillful EP coaches the client team was able to change, adopt, and embody new skills in a matter of months. All of these practices were based on foundations of skills in action-communication and the making and managing of commitments, by all the team members.

What this project demonstrates is the importance of shifting the skills, behaviors, and practices of organizational staffs and their managers in order to shift the performance of the enterprise. The people are worked with as the responsible source of action, commitment, and outcomes, not as resistant components plugged into a new system.  The system, processes, and tools then follow. The EP approach is founded in what only the people can deliver in the organization – commitment, ownership, accountability, care and commitment.  When these are mobilized in clear and effective practices for coordinating action, they affect the performance of the enterprise directly.

The reason we have interest in Next Generation Leadership is because the last generation of leadership interpretations were inadequate.  They didn’t deliver the goods of enabling actual leadership and leadership results, however captivating the leadership framework and stories.

Leadership is a field that needs some clarity and usefulness where we outgrow our appetite for “next generation leadership” because the last generation didn’t produce satisfaction and effectiveness.  We need an understanding of leadership that is fundamental, clear, observable, necessary, executable, rigorous, and learnable.  We need an interpretation that brings us closer to the “eternally valid aspects” of leadership, regardless of culture or historical era.

Leadership, as with any other field of human endeavor, is a field of distinctions, practice, and discourse.  As a discourse, leadership shows up for us based on what story and distinctions we have for it, and these  shape and enable the actions we take as leaders.  Our personal discourse of leadership may be rich and enabling, or sparse and remote. For many people “leadership” is just a word that names something that is not clear, a bit mysterious, but seems important.  They lack the distinctions to see, learn, or carry out effective leadership, though they do experience occasional moments where it seems to happen anyway.

Leadership draws tremendous attention with many books, programs, and approaches, as we try to explain, show, inspire, and enable effective leadership.  The wide diversity of interpretations and approaches is also a symptom that we don’t have a clear shared interpretation of what it is.  We don’t have, for example, such a wide diversity of interpretations for basic chemistry – it’s pretty settled as a field of understanding, interpretation, and practice.  We still lack such a foundational understanding of leadership.  The diversity of approaches to understanding leadership is reflected in a wide diversity of business leadership programs, business management courses, executive leadership programs, and offers of leadership coaching.

“Generative leadership” is the name of the field that has been focused on developing just such a fundamental set of leadership interpretations and practices, to find identifiable fundamental structures and regularities of the ways that effective leaders observe, act, and generate results.  We don’t believe that generative leadership is the only, final, or right interpretation of leadership, but rather that it provides a fundamental and permanent dimension of leadership interpretation that addresses what is missing in the mainstream common sense.  It provides a focus on what is fundamental and non-discretionary about leadership and also provides a frame which allows for variations in style, culture, situation, and historical moment. It acts as a foundation and cross check on other interpretations to increase the value they can provide by addressing the generative aspects of: what is observable, executable, learnable, and produces leadership outcomes.

The roots of generative leadership extend back into a discipline called ontological design, developed by Dr. Fernando Flores, and it is related to the field of ontological coaching, developed by Julio Olalla.   The discipline draws from many other fields including neuroscience, linguistics, somatics and embodiment, cognition, biology, psychology and emotions.  Developed by Bob Dunham since 1981, generative leadership comes from the original questions of “what is action?”, and “how do human beings produce action and coordinate action?”  These questions are so fundamental that they also provide powerful new answers to other questions including “what is leadership,” “what is management,” “what is a team,” and “what is an organization.”

These generative answers – which mean ones that are observable, executable, learnable, and that produce the outcome that is named – are based on focusing attention and action on phenomena that are not part of our mainstream awareness.  These include commitment based management and coordination, the power of conversations to generate action and results, the role of care in producing passion and ownership, and practice based learning.  Some of the key areas of focus of these interpretations include the role of emotions, body, and language in generating action, the role of care in value and satisfaction, and the essential aspects of coordination that underlie effective team performance.

In generative leadership acts of commitment, like requests and promises, produce the generative power of language and conversation.  All action is understood to be preceded by conversations that shape and determine its outcomes, both through performance and coordination, and through the assessments of the outcomes.  All conversations produce some kind of commitment that shapes future action, and the impact of every conversation is based on the coherence of its language, emotional tone, presence and body language. What people listen when others speak is based on their history and background. Leaders know how to connect to the historical listening and the care of others, and to provoke commitment for future actions.

The point about these distinctions is that they are all generative – observable, executable, learnable, and always are part of generating the results.  This is the power of the generative way of “observing.” This way of being an observer – of what one sees and pays attention to – enables being an actor that takes different kinds of action based on these fundamental aspects of human communication, coordination, leadership, management, and teamwork.

Although these distinctions are not yet part of our mainstream education and training, they address phenomena that are always present and in which we are always moving as human beings.  We are in a situation similar to medicine hundreds of years ago when doctors didn’t know or study anatomy, but anatomy was always there determining what was happening as a result of their actions.  Physicians became more effective when they became aware of and skillful with what was already there – anatomy, biochemistry, and the systems and dynamics of the body.  We believe that leadership and management face a similar historical moment: that practitioners are conscientious, hard-working, and dedicated, but are blind to the anatomy and dynamics of their domain of action, which is there all the time and determining their outcomes whether they pay attention to them or not.

To address this Bob Dunham founded the Institute for Generative Leadership in 1998 based on work that he and his colleagues have been involved in since 1981. The Institute has trained hundreds of executives, business owners, managers, and professionals through the Generative Leadership Program (GLP program). Bob’s experience includes being an executive in multiple companies, including as Vice President of Motorola Computer Systems, Vice President of Business Design Associates, and Chief Operating Officer of Action Technologies. He actively consults with client companies in management and leadership development.

He is also co-author of the book The Innovator’s Way, the Essential Practices for Successful Innovation with Dr. Peter Denning, published by MIT Press.  He designs and delivers multi-year programs in leadership in the US and South America, including the Generative Leadership Program (GLP).  He also delivers the Coaching Excellence in Organizations (CEO) program in a joint venture with Newfield Network, one of the leading schools of coaching in the world.  He is a guest lecturer in the Executive Certification Program for Presidio Graduate School and in the Leading by Design Fellows Program for the California College of the Arts, and was Adjunct Faculty, Executive in Residence, in the Presidio MBA program in Sustainable Management for three years. Bob has also been published with a chapter in the book Being Human at Work, edited by Dr. Richard Strozzi Heckler, as well as in numerous publications, including Communications of the ACM, Training Magazine, the International Journal for Coaching in Organizations, and the Center for Quality of Management Journal.

The intent of the GLP Program, the CEO program, and others that are in development is to provide generative leadership training that enables people to become more self-generating as leaders, managers, team members, and human beings.  These programs provide what is not currently available from other forms of traditional and mainstream education and development: as an MBA leadership program, providing a new dimension to current forms of management leadership training, management development, and organizational performance development. We believe that we provide an essential element to what may someday be a degree in leadership that offers actual leadership skill, not just leadership studies. The results of the programs are being demonstrated by our GLP participants and graduates and our CEO participants and graduates that now number in the hundreds.

Our ambitions and purpose for generative leadership are not just to be thought of as next generation leadership, but to go beyond the next generation as an important foundation for future developments in leadership.  We believe that it is now possible to have leadership be clear, observable, executable, and learnable with appropriate practice and feedback.  The world is calling leaders to new levels of challenge and our understanding of leadership must provide generative foundations for leadership action and learning.

By Julio Olalla and Robert Dunham

                                     Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

                                                                  T. S. Eliot

We live in an era of global scale.  Our technologies and our massive global population accumulate and magnify our decisions and choices until they affect the entire planet.  At the global level we now have concerns about changing the weather through global warming, running out of water, destroying arable land, bringing thousands of species to extinction, and consuming resources at an unsustainable level.  We believe we can throw garbage “out,” but there is no “out” from the planet – we are living next to our accumulating waste. We have filled the planet and are at or beyond the edges of its capacities. Many say we have exceeded the “carrying capacity” of the planet[i].

At the same time our human systems are in breakdown.  The current financial crisis is the result of massive governmental borrowing against a future that must continue to grow and consume to carry the debt.  Fundamental standards of responsibility, risk management, and honesty have been thrown out in the pursuit of localized greed – for example the real estate bubble that caused the current global recession was created by a system that allowed ridiculous loans that could never be repaid to be made by lenders for the sake of the transaction fees, because the lenders sold the loans and would never be held accountable for the consequences of the loans’ performance.  Consumers took easy credit in a frenzy of consumption and speculation[ii].  Taxpayers vote for government services that they will not pay for[iii].

How did we arrive to such a state?  We are in a moment where the current Human Being faces the reality of the finite Planet and Nature in which we live, and of the consequences of the systems we have invented.  Yet the predominant answer to our problems is “Growth,” more of the same thinking that led us to our current situation.  The authors believe that growth, in the way it is currently thought about, is an aspect of our problem, not our solution.

We must look more deeply into our current cultural blindness, to the roots of how we came to act the way we do and to create the world we have.  If we are to change our world and create a new future, we must first look in the mirror and see what kind of people we have become, what kind of thinking we fall into, and what kind of relationship with our world we have chosen.  The world has become this mirror to the kind of human beings we have become, and we must first reflect on how we became who we are if we are to see a possibility for real change. Although there is new awareness and new interpretations arising in the world, we must face the common sense that led to our current situation.  That is what must change.

What can we see in looking at the world and the way we are in it, beyond our current inadequate and automatic explanations?  We see that a main theme of our civilization is that we ignore nature and our environment as something we must take care of.  We see the natural world only as raw material to be used, and in fact see people as “human resources” in the same way – raw material to be used. We still think and operate as though the world is much bigger than our impact on it, and have not awakened to the scale of impact that we have.  We have been so steeped in the interpretation that everything is for our use that we even use our “selves” as raw material to be used.

Used for what?  For whatever project will produce profit, growth, and financial return regardless of the consequences.  We have placed financial and economic growth as our ultimate value, our only solution, and the driver of our societal purposes.  We also see this as an area of mysterious technical problems, to be solved by the technical experts.  Greece and Italy have just chosen to put “technocrats” in charge of their governments to fix their financial situations.  Other concerns of our societies are considered secondary to our financial requirements, and the intent is to renew economic growth and consumption.

As we look at our world we also do not see the populations of our countries acting with responsibility for the consequences of their actions.  We have turned into a society of consumers getting what they can, willing to receive benefits that they take no responsibility to pay for.  The choices of the individual have been disconnected from the consequences they produce in the aggregate, and we have largely lost the responsibilities of the citizen, only acting from the appetites of the consumer.  We do not think globally and act locally, we tend to act locally and the global consequences are someone else’s problem.

If we look again in the mirror at who we are, we see that we are a culture that has lost meaning and virtue, and we no longer have the notion of a good life as one in harmony with nature, with each other, and for the sake of a healthy future.  We conceive of the good life as a permanent expansion of consumption.  Yet, we never stop and ask for the sake of what do we want to consume more?  We must transcend the common sense that more is better, and look for what is good, not just more.

We have lost public standards of what is important rather than growth, that we must have respect and gratitude for the gifts of life and nature, and not just destroy them in our consumption.  We have lost the place of the sacred, where by “sacred” we do not mean any religious meaning, but we refer to the sacred as those aspects of life that we revere, respect, bring gratitude to, and place higher than self-interest.  For example, our society currently allows companies to put chemicals in our environment that are shown to affect the development of fetuses, because profit is more important than a respect for the health of our children and environment.

How did we come to value our abstractions more than our lives?  How did we come to have numbers dictate our choices rather than our connection to life and meaning?  How did we come to give up our personal and social responsibility to take care of the future and the world we share?   Some would tell a story of the loss of religious life, and the advance of secular logic. But we see a more fundamental interpretation that shows the journey to disconnection in our culture, and the shift that must be addressed.

We live in an era of modernity (some call post-modernity) after five hundred years of the increasing focus on and celebration of science, rationality, and the powers of prediction and control. It has been such a long and deep immersion in this common sense that we can’t see how it has changed us as people.  We live in the story that the universe is just material and without inherent meaning, and that the only source of meaning is our own purposes and desires.  We see reality as raw material for our use, not a place of relationship.  How else can we destroy and befoul what sustains us, physically, emotionally, and spiritually? How else can greed become a virtue and a standard for our entire system of living together? And this has happened because we have exiled the power of emotions from our thinking, and relegated them to the internal, personal world with no relevance in the external world of action.  In fact science took as a first principle that only what can be replicated without bias by an observer, without influence by feelings, was worthy of being held as true and valid.  In this logic we are most effective when we separate from our emotions and our care is only a personal prejudice distorting true dispassionate and rational thinking.

We now have a tremendous problem with these unexamined assumptions that make up our current cultural common sense.  First, the assumption that emotions are not relevant for effective action has been shown to be false. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that rational behavior is not possible without the involvement of the emotional circuits of the brain[iv].  The field of emotional intelligence shows that 90% of the difference between high performing leaders, managers, and organizations and average performance is their emotional skills[v].  And the second problem is that our life long training in abstraction and rational techniques of thinking has left out the most important part of our thinking and choosing – the ethics and choices of meaning, of what we care about, what makes a meaningful and good life, and a good world to share.  We have lost the valuing of what is most valuable, of the gifts of life that we cannot replace.

On a pragmatic basis the environment gives us air, water, and the capacity for food.  Since the environment has been given, rather than produced, it has been taken for granted and not valued.  It has been used in ways that produce tremendous downstream costs that are not paid, because our accounting only values human action, not the essential actions of nature.  This is true at the level of ecology and sustainability, but also at the level of soul and meaning. Nature gives us beauty, is the basis of our own physical vitality and aliveness, and our embodiment gives us the capacities for love, connection and meaning.  And we sacrifice these as well on the altar of economics.

To show our perspective as one of practical action, and not just of fuzzy philosophizing, we must share with you that our life’s work over the last thirty years has been with the pragmatics of developing skills in the cognitive power of emotions, and employing them in order to produce a higher level of capabilities in leadership, management, organizational performance, professional coaching, as well as relationship and living a good life.  We believe that our culture has the insights to not only look in the mirror, but to reengage with the questions of “what is a good life,” “what is a good person,” “what is a good citizen,” and create new answers, actions, and outcomes for a healthy future and a good life.

We must recognize that we cannot impose prediction and control on all of life, and these approaches must not become the foundation of our relationship with life, with each other, the future, and the world. We must give up our consumption addition, we must give up the ethics of cancerous growth, we must recover our responsibility with nature, each other, and the meaning that feeds our souls. We must honor again what our deep care shows us about our choices, we must become emotionally competent to be wielders of the powers we have to reshape our world. We must take responsibility again for the consequences of our choices, both individually and together.

Although we do not claim to have the solutions to our global issues, we do know that in addressing them we must look at what kind of human beings we have become, and we must reconnect and reintegrate our emotional capacities into our thinking.  We must recover our capacity to connect with and care for what is most meaningful and harmonious in life.  We must recover our sense of living in a living world with which we have a relationship, and that this world takes care of us only to the extent we take care of it.  We must look in the mirror and reshape ourselves first if we are to shift how we shape the world.

Next, we will explore how our modern way of thinking has separated us from our soul, that part of us that most deeply connects to our care and meaning in life, and later we will explore the need for the revival of citizenship, a reengagement with our humanity, and a re-grounding of our thinking in the health of our relationships with each other, nature, and our future.

Julio Olalla is founder of Newfield Network, a leading school of coaching in the world, and is considered one of the best coaches in the world. He is author of From Knowledge to Wisdom.

Robert Dunham is founder of the Institute for Generative Leadership, and delivers programs in leadership around the world. He is co-author of The Innovator’s Way.