Report on Robert Quinn’s presentation on Leadership and Change November 30th 2005 |
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Quinn started the day off by asking which things the audience was curious about and would want to take away with them. Answers included conceptual subjects like learning how the models Quinn describes in his books are developing and what deep change is, but also more practical questions like understanding what makes change happen, how to keep it going, how to facilitate it, how personal and organisational change are related and how they can enforce each other, how to build confidence in people, and how to change yourself while staying who you are. Quinn seemed happy with the answers; because these were in fact the things he was going to talk about during the day. The subjects of the day were: Understanding the Deep Change Process, Envisioning the Positive Organisation, Building a Positive Culture and Becoming a Positive Leader.
One of the most important points of the presentation was that excellence means deviance of the norm. Most organizations are used to regressing to the mean and sticking to the norm which makes change so difficult. In society the brain is dominant, rationality rules. But these are equilibrium-seeking mechanisms. Deviance is usually seen as a negative thing so we are all busy solving problems, which are cases of negative deviance of the norm. Also disciplines in education are organized around the norm. There for example is sociology 101 that focuses on normal social organizations, there is sociology 102 that focuses on crime, mafia, and other examples of negative deviance, or leaving the norm in a pathological way. The same thing has been true for other sciences as psychology, medicine and economics. However, since a couple of years things have been changing. There is now a growing attention for the positive deviance. What makes an organization excellent and a leader a positive example people want to follow instead of just solving problems? What makes a person really happy instead of solving the problems of an unhappy person? What makes someone feel good instead of fixing broken body parts? What would make customers delighted instead of offering utility to satisfy needs? However, the systems and organizations and disciplines have evolved over a long, long period of time so things are not going to change automatically overnight.
Systems have a big influence on what people do and what they don’t do. So blaming people for doing or not dong things is useless if you don’t take the responsibility of looking at the system that you’ve built or helped building in the past years. Taking responsibility however is difficult; denial is much easier. How human it is to be in a state of denial was proven by the fact that 70% of the audience said they sometimes were in denial, and the remaining 30 % was even in denial about being in denial and was advised to call home for some serious feedback. Jokes aside, denial can be a very serious problem for organizations. IBM that denied the market’s desire for PC’s and Ford that stuck with black cars are just two of the examples one can think of (in my report on Unleashing the Ideavirus of Seth Godin you can find some examples of corporate denial concerning the Internet). Denial means you don’t want to see, hear, know, believe, act. No matter how much data and indications there are, they are denied truth because you don’t know how to respond to them. We know we have to change but we just can’t, we’re just too busy, we have already changed so many times in the last years that we cannot change anymore, there just isn’t hope for the future.
Quinn calls this process ‘Slow Death’ and explains that is it very widespread and embedded within the human system. He also explains the story of the boiled frog. Apparently when you slowly boil a frog he is not aware of the fact that he’s dying. When you are denying the changes and signals, how matter how small and weak they may at first seem, in your environment, you are headed for slow death. This also happens in cases in which someone responsible for some unit or department reasons that he knows something has to change but he doesn’t do it for personal reasons (not my cup of tea, not my responsibility, I’ll be retiring in a year or two, etc). According to Quinn an ethical line gets crossed here. Another excuse that is often given for not changing is that "we’re too busy". That is like the quote from the NY Times in 1972: "Administrators [at Lincoln Center] are running around straightening out deck chairs while the Titanic goes down."
Another problem is that there is often just no vision. When times are uncertain you need a new framework to make sense of things. Just think of the way people are frantically looking for new ways to make sense of reality since pillars like religion and politics have lost their influence. Often the rhetoric of change is there but it is not embedded within the system and the behaviour leaves to be desired. It may then happen that you ask people to tell you about the vision and they take out a laminated card with on it some text or drawing of the vision. The card is not the vision though. A vision has to be lived. Morgan in Imaginization gives an example of people shooting a deer. What they bring home is not a deer though; it’s a corpse, literally lifeless, just like the rhetoric of change. It can be hung on a wall like a trophy or printed and laminated, but nothing is going to change. Vision has to be embedded within the meaning system, it has to be lived.
We have a checklist mentality when it comes to change. People want to see a clear presentation of how you arrived at positive results but change doesn’t happen this way. Excellence is about learning in real time says Quinn, it’s about ‘building the bridge while you walk on it’. He gives an example of an organization that had decided to make a video with exemplary transformational leaders. The video couldn’t be made because within every story of success was at least one situation in which the law was violated. Another problem is that people will tell all sorts of beautiful stories about how they have achieved excellence and positive change, rationalizing the whole process. We had this and that strategy, we motivated people using these techniques, we were very disciplined and persistent, etc. All the failures and happenstance decisions and choices that have been made along the way are neglected or forgotten. This is what is called ex-post rationalization. Often strategies and plans are made that will make the organization at most mediocre, and that is when they’re really really lucky. When the first questions that are posed are what resources do we have and how can we attain this and that result, you’re staying within the box. For real change and excellence you have to step out of the box and ask yourself: We’re going where no one has gone before so how are we going to get there? It is not natural for people to follow someone who doesn’t know where he’s going either and the only way in which people do this is when they trust the leader. 
People’s expectations and emotions play a big role in keeping things the same. Change can be very scary. So scary that people often prefer the old painful situation to a new but uncertain situation. Quinn gives the example of going to a psychiatrist. They have the feeling that they are dying slowly, they are suffering. However, there are many people that just don’t want the change. This might seem strange but when you look at it as a choice between slow death one knows and a fast death of the self one knows resulting in a new self one doesn’t know, it might be more understandable. People who say they love change are thus talking nonsense according to Quinn, unless they mean incremental change or change in the abstract. Real, deep change is terrifying because you do not know where it’s leading and you have to give up control. There are three options: or you don’t change and suffer a slow death. Option two is taking an active exit. This is not always effective since people are prone to make the same mistakes twice if they don’t learn from them. If you get divorced but are not aware that you have contributed something to the problems, you will do the exact same thing in your next marriage. After all: it wasn’t your fault, or was it?
If we look at a broken marriage as a failed effort to work together we can also look at ‘good marriages’. We all know how it feels when you do have a part in what is happening and when working together with others is going well. There is a sense of trust, respect and openness, people transcend their egos and there is synergy. You feel free, energetic and empowered and are having fun, feeling good about yourself. You have a clear vision of where you would want to go and are going beyond expectations. It is a challenge but you feel no fear, you feel confident. Many of these issues are also characteristics of being in a state of Flow as Csikszentmihalyi calls it. But usually we don’t look at work like this, we use the normal lens. Norm-al, acting according to the norm. Gone is the deviance that characterizes excellence. We are so used to not be conscious and aware of our perspective on reality that we have this whole collection of assumptions without knowing it.
Quinn uses the Competing Values Framework to get people to become aware of their own perspective and the perspectives of others. Confucius already said that “When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.” The values Quinn describes are Create, Collaborate, Control and Compete. All values are contributing and needed and competing values can keep each other in check. Increasing one type of value does not mean that the opposing value is disappearing. The main point is to help everyone to be the best they can be like is also stressed in Spiral Dynamics of Beck and Cowan. All values have something significant to contribute in their own specific way, and all values can act in a negative or a positive way. The goal is to have all values working together in their best way possible. Ken Wilber calls this AQAL: All Quadrants, All Levels. It is a matter of integration of differentiation. In every system there are opposing forces and big breakthroughs happen when these simultaneous oppositions are integrated. With one perspective, one lens, usually your own lens, usually the norm-al lens, you see just one part of reality and by taking multiple perspectives into consideration your view on reality improves. This is what Gebser has calls integral A-perspectivism. Not focusing on one dominant perspective but attaching equal value to all perspectives.
This introduces uncertainty in the system. When you have one view on reality you know what you are going to see, but when you invite other people to give their perspective you don’t know what they’ll be coming up with. This is what happens when employees or customers are asked for their opinions. Of course you have to act on those opinions; otherwise it becomes just another example of arrows and boxes on a laminated card. The change has to be personally meaningful to people, it has to enter their framework of reference. This also means that personal integrity and authenticity are very important. And these things obviously can’t be written down on a piece of paper. However we are used to inform people, poor knowledge into people, instruct people. This is the same problem many people allude to when speaking of the experience economy. Often we hold monologues instead of having dialogues, but when change does not become part of the human system, of the human experience, people again regress towards the norm.
Integrity and authenticity have to do with the putting aside of your own personal interests for the greater good. These are the people we trust. In this context Quinn discusses the Fundamental State of Leadership. In the FSL we are not focused on ourselves, but other focused. We are not internally closed anymore, we don’t stay within our comfort zone, in denial about everything that is happening outside, but instead we are externally open. We are not comfort centered and living in a reactive state, but instead we look at what results we want to create, we become result centered. And last but not least we are no longer externally directed and dependent on our surroundings for status, stuff, self-worth and success but we become our own guide, internally directed. These personal changes have also been described as the changes that people go through when they have suffered a trauma. They have improved relationships, increased openness, a clarification of purpose, and increased confidence. Spiritual experiences have the same outcomes. These are processes of very deep change that transform the person.
I think the most important points of Quinn’s presentations were the facts that 1) for any change to happen, people have to take multiple perspectives and dare to be different, and 2) change is an experience. You cannot explain an experience without first having it. You cannot expect change to happen in your environment without being open to change yourself. You cannot expect people to be their best selves if you are yourself a hypocrite. All change starts at the personal level. “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power”( Tao Te Ching).
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