The Alchemist: A Transformative Leader

I posted previously about The Seven Transformations of Leadership article by David Rooke and Bill Torbert.

My colleague Mary Stacey, along with Torbert, is running “Action Inquiry: Transformational Leadership in the Midst of Action” this week at the Shambhala Authentic Leadership in Action Institute.

Thinking of that, I reread the Rooke and Torbert article recently, and the characteristics shared by the Alchemist leaders (the Nelson Mandela level of leadership) jumped out at me:

On a daily basis, all were engaged in multiple organizations and found time to deal with issues raised by each. However, they were not in a constant rush — nor did they devote hours on end to a single activity. Alchemists are typically charismatic and extremely aware individuals who live by high moral standards. They focus intensely on the truth. Perhaps most important, they’re able to catch unique moments in the history of their organizations, creating symbols and metaphors that speak to people’s hearts and minds.

I’m many leadership levels away from an Alchemist, but appreciate these characteristics as a way to notice and create the situations that will further my leadership growth, and to notice Alchemists in action so that I can learn from them. Maybe even to see a little bit of alchemy in myself.

The Scenario Planning Process

During the Authentic Leadership in Action program, I attended a module on Scenario Planning. We met four times over three days and used a scenario planning process to discuss the future of leadership. My main purpose in attending was to understand how to facilitate the process so that I can use scenario planning in my work with various groups.

Here’s the quick and incomplete outline for scenario planning, based on my observations of what we did over the three days. (You also can find a recipe-like straightforward scenario planning outline on Wikipedia.)

Part One: Set the Stage
Introduce the idea of scenario planning, along with some of the famous examples for where it has been used in the past (for example, the Mont Fleur scenarios in 1991-1992 on the future of South Africa – see pdf article here).

Part Two: Agree on a Question
The group needs to agree on the purpose for the scenario planning. We did this by posing a question we were going to answer with our scenarios. As the module had been advertised as “The Future of Leadership”, it took us about ten minutes to agree on appropriate vocabulary and edits for defining our question, which ended up being:

“What leadership will we need in 2020, and what do we thus need to do and feel and think now?“

(Initially we had agreed on 2015 as our future date, but in the course of the next six hours ended up revising our future date to 2020 as we identified driving forces that we thought would play out over a longer time period).

Our group spent three hours going from our starting point through to identifying our question and then introducing the idea of driving forces.

Part Three: Identify Driving Forces
Before our second three hour session, we were asked to each identify two trends or driving forces that we saw in the world which we thought were relevant to the 2020 future of leadership. Trends could be predetermined or uncertain, and if even one member of the group identified a trend as uncertain then it went in our uncertain pile rather than the predetermined pile. I had trouble imagining that we could view anything as predetermined for 2020, and then the facilitator suggested “humans will take actions that defy prediction”, and I agreed that that was predetermined.

The group didn’t specify whether we were talking about the future of our organizations, our communities, Canada, the world, or otherwise before identifying driving forces, and this probably led to a lack of cohesion in what each of us returned to the group with. The facilitator unilaterally decided we were talking about global trends and global leadership, so we continued along that vein for the remainder of our sessions.

Finally, in identifying what was a driving force we used the concept of enough. We didn’t have to quantify how much something was a driving force, other than to agree that we thought it would affect the future “enough” that we would call it a driving force. (Example: by 2020 more kids will be on the internet. How many more? We don’t know. But enough. Enough to make a difference.)

Sample driving forces the group identified included: world food crisis, political and economic power shifting from global West to global East, average lifespan increases, urbanisation continues, computer power continues to expand, increased instances of terrorism lead to increased perceived threat of terrorism, generation Y will enter the workforce, increased instances of multigenerational workplaces, retirement age in Canada will be older, complex problems will highlight the insufficiency of technocratic solutions, growth of the global middle class and/or increased polarity between rich and poor… and many more trends.

Part Four: Identify Most Significant Driving Forces
Going on the expertise within the group (although a more extended scenario planning process would probably involve consulting experts and conducting research), we identified the scenarios we thought were most significant in shaping the future we would see by 2020. Each of ten group members had five “significant” stars they could allocate to driving forces (we had around 60 driving forces posted on post-its throughout the room). You could spread your five stars out, or place more than one star on particular driving forces that you thought were most significant.

The facilitator said that here was the point where we were “engineering our own paradigm shift; we don’t know [yet] what we need to understand”, and that regardless of how we went through steps 1-3 of the process, here was where we found out what would matter: “Do the stories wake us up to something?”

Up until now I had found the process frustrating and scattered. We diverged rather than converged. I let driving forces I thought were uncertain go into the predetermined category without argument, because I wanted to get on with it and thought I had disagreed enough. I was frustrated at the amount of time the facilitator had spent introducing outside theories (e.g. on generation cycles – the “G.I. generation”, the “silent” generation, the baby boom, Gen X, Gen Y; or the trajectories of technological waves) and the lack of time given to the group to generate their own ideas and bring in their own outside knowledge. But sticking with the process up until this point allowed me to participate in the next sections, which is where things started to feel like they were coming together, and we started to have insights as a group.

Part Five: Exploring Top Ten
After allocating our stars of significance, we counted them up to identify the driving forces that were our top ten as a group. Then pairs of two took each driving force away to flesh out what the future would entail based on this driving force as significant. For example, our discussion of “multigenerational workplaces” led to a discussion of knowledge transfer between generations, IT and demographic changes, trends towards grassroots and local businesses, entrepreneurial and self-employed workers, the internet and telecommuting, and climate change increasing the likelihood of living and working locally.

This section of the process was interesting in that we started getting a sense of all the different perspectives in the group. From people in their twenties to people in their fifties, from people in human resources, to health care, to theatre administration, to non-profit, to education – there were many different views in the room as to what made for a driving force, and what would play out as a result of a particular force. This section makes for a really rich process, as each individual starts to see that his/her own perspective is incomplete, and starts viewing different things as potentially important as others in the group discuss their viewpoints.

As each pair presented back to the group with the outline of their driving force scenario, we asked “What is the heart of this scenario?” Based on the heart, we named each of them:

1. The New Mosaic (multigenerational workplaces and the move to local living)
2. Bagel Effect, or The Centre Cannot Hold (increasing complexity of problems leading to institutional breakdown)
3. Where Have all the Dogs Gone? (increased awareness of our ecological footprint, perhaps prompted by mass species extinction)
4. Canada Comes of Age (Canada leading the world in a new model for sharing and managing natural resources)
5. Emerging World Leapfrogs (global West to global East power shift)
6. Dream of Somewhere Else (migration as a driving force)
7. Technological Transformation (IT changes as the driving force)

Finally, we voted as a group on our top three scenario outlines. Then each of the top three were assigned to groups of three or four people. We went away with assignments:

1) as a scenario group, identify three major events, expressed as newspaper headlines, that would have happened along the way to the 2020 future of our scenario
2) individually, write two paragraphs on “what my life is like is 2020″ based on a character.

(Character selection:
Without knowing we were picking the story for the character we would be assigned, we were asked to write down our answers to the following questions, and then use our answers to construct our character.
1. Pick a number between 3 and 77 (this number became our character’s age).
2. Pick a number between 3 and 10 (this number became the number of people in our character’s household).
3. Pick a city, large or small, in the country in which you live (this number became the city in which our character lived).
4. Pick any country in the world (this country became a country where our character had spent some time).
5. Pick an occupation where leadership matters (this occupation became the occupation of someone in the character’s household).
6. Pick a colour of the rainbow (ROYGBIV – if you picked red, orange, or yellow, your character was female; if blue, indigo, or violet, your character was male; if green, you got to choose).
7. Pick a hobby or spare time activity (this activity became a hobby for someone in your character’s household).
)

Part Six: Identify Three Major Events
The group with which I was working had the “Canada Comes of Age” scenario, in which Canada pioneers a new model for global resource sharing. The newspaper headlines of our three major events became:
2009 – Canada Faces Severe Water Resource Crisis (e.g. Ontario’s Georgian Bay is emptied through dredging, Alberta faces water crisis brought on by oil industry)
2010 – The Montreal Protocol Sees 10 Nations Agree to an 80% Reductions in Emissions by 2020
2015 – New Generation of Political Leaders Takes Office (in which we named Canadians who, we thought, could make up a new, youthful generation of leaders with a more global outlook).

Part Seven: Draft Character Stories
At this point we had spent nine hours in total in the scenario planning module. We were going to return on day three for our final three hours. The night before the last day, we each individually drafted our character stories, imagining the future in 2020 based on our scenario for the character we had been assigned. Other than what’s above, we were given no instructions or limitations for drafting the character stories, which led to a wonderful diversity and richness in the stories presented on the last day.

Part Eight: It All Comes Together
The last three hours of this whole process were the best, and made it all worth it. Seeing the threads that came up repeatedly throughout our different three scenarios, and hearing how each of us envisioned different elements of the future, opened up new possibilities and questions for all of us in how we perceive the future, what we think could be important, and how we will thus think about preparing leaders today.

The three groups presented the overview of their scenario and the major newspaper headlines associated with it, then read their character stories. After each scenario’s character stories were read, we had a few moments of silence while we each sketched a picture or images of what had stood out for us in the scenario. Then we discussed what we thought/felt in taking a virtual step into that future.

The “Centre Cannot Hold” scenario included future events:
2011 – collapse of all IT systems globally.
2012 – United Nations and International Monetary Fund disband, all international loans are forgiven.
2016 – collapse of health care and welfare systems in Canada.

The “New Mosaic/Shifting Communities” scenario included future events:
Oil hits $200 a barrel.
Canadian health care collapse such that government will fund only acute health care emergencies.
4 major terrorist attacks within two weeks lead to population movement out of urban areas and away from symbolic target possibilities.

Scenario Overview
In the twelve hours we spent together, I don’t know that we answered what leadership the world would need in 2020. We did have a lot of eye-opening discussion and were able to look at our top three scenarios at the end of the session, and ask ourselves:
If Scenario A/B/C happened, would we wish we had invested in 2008 in which leaders: national level/corporate leaders / local community leaders / family and individual leaders? In all of the scenarios we ended up exploring, as different as they all were, investing in family and individual leaders would have been a good move starting in 2008 (as all scenarios ended up with a shift to more local living). From the vantage point of our 2020 scenarios, investment in 2008 in both national leaders and corporate leaders was less certain as a good move.

In the final analysis, I decided I did think scenario planning was a worthwhile process to have on hand for groups trying to understand future needs. While it reveals no answers, it does create mindset shifts in potential possibilities, identifies trends that will become important regardless of which future scenario takes place, is an excellent reflection tool for individuals (as they reconsider what is important and incorporate the viewpoints of others in the group), and allows for stepping back from the immediate and considering the big picture – a really big picture, in this instance. Being drawn in by the personal stories each individual writes of their future character makes for a strong impact.

The drawbacks of the process are that it takes a lot of time and commitment to complete it even in the most casual fashion, that it would take even more time to consult experts and do research to further inform the driving forces, and that the whole first half of the process can be pretty frustrating as the group waits for a clearer picture to emerge.

Revisiting Scharmer – Four Ways of Listening and the Leadership Blindspot

After the fantastic experience of attending a plenary session led by Otto Scharmer and getting to talk with him during a dinner break, I’m revisiting the post I made earlier in which I described Otto’s classification of four ways of listening. The understanding I got from Kahane’s book isn’t very complete (and probably my new understanding is far from complete), but here’s a better explanation.

Otto’s working assumption for his presentation is that we do not understand the essence of leadership. That there is a blindspot in leadership and the blindspot is around understanding the inner source from which leaders operate when they do their best work. His proposition is that the success of a leader depends on the inner source from which the leader operates (and that two people could do exactly the same thing with different results if they are acting from different inner sources). Our leadership challenge, therefore, is to shift the inner place from which we operate.

Otto illustrated this shift with the example of listening. He outlined the listening example at the level of the individual, the group, the institution, and the system – below just outlines the individual level.

If I am represented by a circle, then the first level of listening (downloading, or “I and me” listening), is when I am listening from the centre of my own circle, from within my own walls. Everything I hear is filtered through my own boundaries and limitations, and really I am only hearing that which reconfirms what I know to be true.

The second level of listening has me move to the outline of my circle – I am listening from my external wall, looking out the window. Listening from the inside but looking at what is outside, a more objective listening. Otto called this factual listening, or “I and it” listening.

The third level of listening he called empathic listening, or “I and you” listening. At this level, you are outside the walls of your circle, your circle boundaries become a dotted line, and you listen from outside yourself, from the perspective of another. “An everyday version of an out-of-body experience”, he described it. It happens when we listen from outside of our own boundaries and forget our own agenda. We listen from the perspective of another person. As a facilitator, this is the level of listening with which I most identified – listening from the perspective of another, or from the perspective of a group. This perspective is what coaches try to see, when they look out at the coachee’s perspective and try to understand the coachee’s reality from his/her point of view.

But here is the challenging level, the level that takes real effort to achieve. The fourth level, which Otto called listening from the emerging future, or “I and now” listening. Here you are listening not just from a particular spot outside your own circle, but from a field of possibility – a field of spots outside your own circle, a field of spots of future possibilities, a field of your potential future selves. Otto described it as “connecting with that which is just about to happen now”.

For groups (rather than individuals), these four levels are termed downloading (conversation coming from within, from an internal agenda); debate (we start to speak our mind and objectively debate; we look at possibilities but still are stuck within our own viewpoint); dialogue (where the group achieves the capacity to see itself from without, to see the larger system we collectively enact, seeing the system from outside and how we are part of the system); and collective creativity, where we can listen from a realm of future possibilities.

And all of those are just the listening examples! What Otto drew it back to was leadership and the inner source of leadership. How do we identify the inner place from which we are leading? Are we leading from inside the boundaries of our own preconceived notions? Are we leading from our own boundaries, but considering objective possibilities that are out there? Are we leading from outside of ourselves, or our group, and looking back at ourselves from another perspective? And is it possible that the best place to lead would be from the emerging future, from what is just about to happen now, leading from a field of possibilities that we create together?

As a management consultant told me, an employee will never achieve more than the possibilities that their manager has imagined for them, because in imagining those possibilities the manager is limiting the possibilities for the employee to realize his/her potential. In very real ways, the fields of possibilities we imagine can determine what we are able to do; or, we could always be limited by what we imagine as future potentials. The flipside is that if we’re able to shift to include a larger field of potential future possibilities, we expand the range of what actually is possible.

Action Learning and Authentic Leadership

The Peer Learning session went well, with questions from participants getting me to think more deeply about the material and how to present it. We added in a new section on Action Learning and looked at the cycle of doing, reflecting, theorising, and planning, and the opportunity each stage offers for deeper learning. We had a guest observer from ICA Associates, facilitators extraordinaire, and I look forward to hearing his feedback.

Tomorrow I head to the four day Authentic Leadership in Action intensive hosted by the Shambhala Institute. The plenary sessions include talks by Peter Senge (of Fifth Discipline fame, a professor at MIT, and a founder of the Society for Organizational Learning) and Otto Scharmer (also at MIT, author of Theory U, and founder of Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors).

Each participant also signs up for a particular module to participate in over the course of the retreat, and I’m signed up for The Future of Leadership: Scenario Planning and the Changing Nature of Organizations and Communities. Since first reading about scenario planning, I’ve been interested in how to design a learning event using scenarios to plan for future possibilities. In this module, I think we’ll actually participate in a scenario session, envisioning future possibilities that leadership could take over the next decade based on different combinations of organizational changes and challenges.

Upon return I’ll post some of the learning and reflecting from the intensive.

Four Ways of Listening

Next week I’m attending the Authentic Leadership in Action regional intensive hosted by the Shambhala Institute. One of the speakers, Otto Scharmer, outlines four ways of listening. I read Scharmer’s take on listening in Adam Kahane’s book “Solving Tough Problems”.

Scharmer’s four ways of listening:

1. downloading, or “listening from within our own story”. In downloading, we start with our own perception and understanding, and only listen for what confirms what we already believe. We listen for evidence of our own belief system.

2. debating, or “listening from the outside”. In debating, we exchange information from an objective perspective, rather than being a part of the exchange.

3. reflective dialogue. In reflective dialogue, our listening is starting to include a personal engagement. We listen to ourselves, and we listen to others, listening “from the inside”.

4. generative dialogue. In generative dialogue, we listen from within the whole – ourselves, others, and the system we create together.

As Kahane describes Scharmer’s listening taxonomy, downloading and debating are “insufficient to create new social realities”. But when we can listen from within ourselves, open up to others, and perceive from within the system, then new realities can emerge.