Group Dynamics

Interview on July 20, 2005 with Cliff Shaffran

Biographical Sketch
Cliff Shaffran is Chairman of Quicksilver LTD, an international corporate strategy group
he founded in Hong Kong in 1987. He consults to major companies worldwide in areas
such as strategic planning, organizational development, and meeting facilitation. A
popular speaker, he has written numerous business columns and is the co-author of Your
Mind at Work. He is also a member of The Global Leadership Network, a nonprofit
sponsored project of The Mediators Foundation that focuses on promoting cross-border
leadership practices.
JE: Why are you so interested in decision-making?
CS: When I look at the big issues of the world today —disease, education, health, natural
resources, poverty, war — the world is as it is because of the decisions people have
made. We are the decisions we make. That’s who we are, individually, collectively and
globally. And when I look at the processes that people use to make decisions, they
haven’t changed much in a hundred, two hundred, maybe four hundred years. But the
world now is changing very fast and the processes that people use in business, and
anywhere, to make decisions about their lives and what they’re doing are absolutely not
keeping up with the pace of change. So what I see is a global need to have faster and
more creative and more collaborative decisions because, without that capability, we’ll
continue to do exactly what we have been doing.
INEFFECTIVE MEETINGS EQUAL POOR DECISIONS
JE: What are the primary obstacles to realizing that capability?
CS: If you look at the most inefficient component of every organization it is meetings. I
try to resist making absolute statements, right? Yet I’ve virtually gotten to be absolute in
that statement, and I’ve never found anyone to disagree. Nobody says, “Oh, I love
meetings, they’re fantastic!” And yet in meetings is where decisions are made. Decisions
are not made by someone sitting in a cave with their legs crossed. That can be a process
toward the decision making but really you need combinations of people today to make
decisions. So decisions happen in meetings, and meetings are unbelievably inefficient
and ineffective. And the biggest single reason why meetings today are ineffective is what
I call the stress syndrome.
There is high stress everywhere, much more than years ago because it’s not just, “Hey,
look at the world, look at the wars,” it’s “How do I know my industry will be here twelve
months from now? Let alone my company, let alone my job. And even if I work for a
great company, it can be taken over next week. And then what happens? I have a family.
I need to continue to pay the bills.” So you’ve got that stress.
Then you’ve got the daily stress inside the organization. “I’ve got to make the monthly
figures. Everyone’s pushing and then someone changes something and all the work I’ve
just done I now have to re-do, etc.”
So then you get down to a group of ten or fifteen people in a meeting and you’ve got one
thinking, “I just flew back from Asia last night and here I am in this damn meeting.”
Another person is thinking, “I have a great idea but I’m not going to put it out here
because the last time I did that my manager picked up the idea and now it’s his idea and I
got no credit.” Then you have things like no one is going to put themselves on the line or
out too far. And of course the last factor in this is whoever’s running the meeting says,
“We have three hours. We have to make a decision. Now let’s get on with it.”
And you’ve got all these things going on. None of them in themselves is big enough to
break you, but they continue to build up inside the human body. So the meeting starts
and, medically, your pulse rate is up ten to fifteen points and you’re in the beginning of
what I call the stress syndrome. You begin to enter the fight or flight reaction.
Now the thing is that once you begin in the stress area physiologically, you cannot be
creative. That’s scary. Because more and more you hear leaders demanding that their
people be more creative and yet the environment that they’ve created does not allow
creativity to happen. The fight or flight syndrome immediately has you looking in the
survival area to support yourself. So now you have a group of people in the room saving
their backsides, right? And creativity is about looking forward. The other thing is that
once you’re in that area it’s also very difficult to be highly collaborative because, again,
you’re protecting your turf or yourself or your area or your job or something. There are
too many undercurrents going on.
So now you’ve got these stressed people sitting around, discussing, making decisions at a
very low level of creativity and collaboration – two of the key things you need to produce
high results. I mean you and I and anyone else has been in a room with ten or twelve
highly intelligent people with a group intelligence of close to zero. That’s insane, isn’t it?
Where’s all that intelligence going?
One other area of complexity is that more and more meetings are multicultural or crosscultural. Someone from Texas and someone from California and someone from New
York are three different cultures to me. And then you’ve got men and women, and you’ve
got young and old. And you’ve got other multicultural mixes all the time. One has to get
to the depth of where people think from if you’re going to work on issues that affect them
all.
I see a continuum in life where fear is at one end and love is at the other. When decisions
are made closer and closer to the fear level and less and less from abundance and love, or
whatever word you care to use, then the outcomes are not good for the world we live in
— not good for ourselves, our community, our country, the world. And more and more
today, decisions are made closer to fear than they are to gratitude and abundance.
If the leadership is marked by dictatorial pushing, shoving, driving, and squeezing as
much out of every person as is possible, then you get a massive negative reaction to that
and you don’t get effectiveness. And the whole structure and processes of getting things
done is based more on that than anything else. I’m making a general statement—I’m not
talking about specific people or their differences, but how things are done in general.
The other thing is the world is getting faster and faster. Information and knowledge is
immediately available. We are being asked to do things at higher and higher speeds, and
our processes will not allow that to happen. So, we’ve got our backs against the wall.
Now what’s the point of saying all these things unless there’s a way of doing something
about it? The wonderful thing is that there is a way of doing something about it, but it
will take awareness on the parts of the leaders of key organizations to begin to make this
move.
INTEGRATING KNOWLEDGE OF THE BRAIN, HEART AND NERVOUS SYSTEM
What has made it possible to totally transform the quality of these decisions is the
knowledge of how the brain works, and a knowledge of how the heart works, and a
knowledge of how the nervous system works. Now we move into the areas of medicine
and neuroscience, where knowledge has really ramped up in the last 15 years.
What’s happened is that you have this wonderful mix of ancient wisdom and new
science. Research into our human being is enabling us to see in western terms what works
and what doesn’t work. Today we have knowledge that we didn’t have in the 70s. In the
80s we were just beginning to get a glimmer through people who started to work on
thinking, like deBono and Buzan and Hermann—there’s probably ten others—who led
this change.
And today you’ve got companies like HeartMath and Wild Divine and others who are
doing research on the heart. We find that the heart, which is formed in the human fetus
before the brain, is a totally self-operating system. Today you’ve got conversations going
on that the brain is the intellect but the heart is the intelligence. And there is massive
research going on in this area that will make an enormous difference in the world. And,
again, if you take business books and you look at what the gurus say, they agree more
and more that it’s a matter of using intelligence, of using our ability to think, etc. Far
easier said than done though.
So how do we take that new knowledge coming through and actually use it?
That is what I and my company and the people I’m associated with, my colleagues, have
been studying and implementing for the past ten years. In the last two or three years
especially, we’ve been taking the knowledge and experience we’ve had in more
corporate, commercial areas and starting to apply them to nonprofits and even to
individuals and couples and families. And what we’ve found is a sort of universality to
the information.
Again, when you look at all the major global challenges — disease, health, education,
etc. — the common denominator for all of them is people making decisions, so to me the
most critical thing in the world today is: how do you have people at all levels making
higher-level decisions more creatively and more collaboratively?
REVISIONING MEETINGS
JE: Starting from your example of the meeting where there’s so much stress and fear, it
would seem that there are two issues: one, what needs to happen to create an environment
and relationships that foster creativity and collaboration, and two, what are the processes
to be used in that new setting or new culture. And I’m sure they’re interrelated.
CS: I’ll read you something I just pulled out of the computer today. This is from one of
our clients, whose company was purchased about eight months ago by one of the biggest
companies in the technology industry. This is what he said in an e-mail: “So part of the
down side of working for a bigger company — long, boring, less-than-productive, deathby-power-point meetings. I’m sitting in one now. Yes, it’s so bad that I have time to fire
this off to you, and I’m sure I won’t miss a thing. Someday I want to join the revolution
to revamp the way meetings are conducted. This is killing me.”
We hear that and we all laugh, but it’s happening millions of times every day in the
United States. There was a very good survey done by The Economist intelligence unit. I
think they took about 194 corporations around the world and they just went to meetings.
And something like, well over 50% of people—and these were all senior executives —
said they weren’t satisfied with the output the meetings were giving them. And they said
that something like 86% of the time spent in meetings was not spent on strategic decision
making. So that means that 14% is, and the rest of it is spent on other stuff in order to get
that percentage. Now that is terrifying. I mean, this is what’s going on.
The research we’ve done shows that meetings are less than 20% effective in terms of
implemented action. When I say that to many people, they say “you’re being
overoptimistic with 20%.” Everyone recognizes it. This is the strange thing. When groups
of CEOs and chairmen of companies are given this information in more detail, they all
say yes. And then what? I’ll say to them, “You spend 70% of your time in meetings as an
executive in one way, shape or form, right? If there was any other part of your
organization where 70% of the time was less than 20% effective, what would you do?”
They say, “We’d close it.” And the only reason it can be maintained today is it’s the same
all over the world. The funny thing is that the people who really need to change are the
leaders— of a company, a division, a team, or whatever. So, to get back to your question,
what the hell do you do about it?
The first point that I’ll make is that understanding something about how the brain, the
heart, and the physiology work is absolutely essential for any change. Absolutely
essential. Because if one doesn’t understand how those things work then you don’t know
why you’re making the changes. What we’re doing here is looking at how to access the
incredible power we have as human beings. Doesn’t matter who the person is or even
how old they are. If you can get to your untapped potential and use it, then everybody’s
better off. Again, that understanding about the brain, heart, and physiology has to be
brought across very quickly to people so that they can feel it and move forward.
With that in mind, let’s take some meeting situations as examples and I can show how
they operate right now and then maybe some other ways to handle them. And a meeting
can be any two people that are getting together to think, to learn, to communicate.
SETTING UP A MEETING
I was phoned a couple days ago by someone I know at quite a large corporation. He was
the new head of human resources and there was a meeting coming up with 40 salespeople
who were going through some major changes. He was asked by the CEO to do some
team-building in this session. He asked me what I could contribute. My question was,
“Well, is this integrated with the rest of the program, or is it separate?” He said, “Oh, no,
it’s just 5- or 10-minute pieces. And I said, “Well, preferably, since you’re new in the
job, don’t do it, because (a) it’s not going to achieve anything, and (b) in the end, to the
group you’re going to look like someone who plays games and isn’t serious about the
business. That’s how you’ll come across.”
Then I said, “Tell me a little bit about the meeting. What is the room setup?”
He said, “Well, it’s set up like a classroom.”
And I said, “There’s your first problem. Because you can have very limited interaction
when you’ve got a classroom setup.” What we do in all meetings is have round tables
with four to six people per table, regardless of what the meeting’s about.”
Then I said, “Tell me the agenda.”
“Well,” he said, “this meeting is about getting across to the people that there have been
some changes made; the divisional heads that they’re now working with are going to
present their scenarios so that they’ll understand. And that will be done in basically 45-
minute sessions.”
I ask, “And then what happens?”
“Well, there’s another one. And then there’s another one.”
And I said, “So these people are going to sit on their backsides, basically for a day, and
have people talk at them.”
“Yeah, well the CEO feels that some of these things are very contentious and he doesn’t
want them to get into a discussion.”
And I said, “Well the reason he doesn’t want them to get into a discussion is because he
has and his team have no way of handling that discussion.”
Now you come back to emotion, right, which is the stress syndrome —it’s all about
emotion. The extraordinary thing about emotion and memory is that is has no time sense
in the human body. If I do something at this moment and you react angrily towards me, it
may be what I said but it may be something that happened when you were four years old
that got triggered. And we are all triggered by different things at different times.
FACILITATING THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS
So in this particular situation the CEO didn’t want people to be triggered emotionally
because how do you handle these people that start to rave, you know? Really good
facilitation encourages emotions to come out, but it also has processes for handling the
emotions. If emotions are not surfaced, then they sit inside and that will sabotage any
decision that’s made. In other words, as well as knowing how people think about things
it’s essential to know how they feel about things and, when you understand that, not to
ignore it.
The fascinating thing is that people who are in their forties, especially men —and they’re
in most positions of power today— were brought up to believe that emotion was either to
be avoided or covered up: showing emotion is a weakness. That’s a terrifying thought.
And, again as a general statement, people have a lot of trouble handling their own
emotions, and handling other people’s emotions is often impossible. As a result, they get
cold and hard and live at that level.
Back to this meeting. Here are 40 people in the room sitting on their bums all day. Now
the brain cannot be interested in having things tossed at it like that. Doesn’t matter how
interesting it is. Even the greatest motivators can’t hold you for eight hours without
involvement. All the good motivators involve. When people talk at you, the brain tunes in
when it wants to tune in and the other times it’s solving its other problems or thinking
about who they’re taking out for dinner that night or whatever it might be. You’ve got 40
people in the room and you’re probably accessing about 10% of their capability, and the
rest of it’s wasted. That’s massive inefficiency.
AGREEMENTS AND COMMITMENTS
Here’s a really important point, and that’s the difference between agreement and
commitment. Most executives look for agreement. In other words, we all sit around the
table, and I’m a very good executive, so I listen to what you all say and then I say, “OK,
well, here’s the decision, we’ll do x, y, z. Bill you do this, Jane you do this, Tom you do
this, and let’s come back in three weeks and we’ll put it together and everyone goes
ahead. That’s agreement, and it comes from the brain.
Commitment, on the other hand, comes from the heart. And as I said at the beginning,
knowledge of the brain-heart connections is critically important. What you want from any
group that says they will do something is commitment. You want them to feel that there’s
something in it for them and you want to be totally supported. The reason why many
decisions are poorly implemented is that if you only get agreement people don’t have the
resolve and don’t have the heart to do the job and will find any excuse to either not do it
or sabotage it. Millions of decisions are being made all day in situations where people are
nodding their head but they’re not involved. If you want commitment it’s essential to
have involvement, to ensure that each person is heard and valued.
When you have 40 people in a room you need to get into each person’s mind and heart
and into their feelings. And then when you share that information and look at options, the
decision surfaces. But that doesn’t happen today. Even if an executive says, “Boy that’s a
smart bit of thinking,” they’ll also say, “but that takes too long. We can’t do that because
the processes are too slow. We don’t have time, so we can’t do it.” So then you’ve got a
whirlpool going down and down and down.
NOT ENOUGH TIME
JE: I think people’s sense of not having enough time for a lot of these processes is a huge
obstacle.
CS: So, we’ll do something else and we’ll screw up and then we’ll have even less time.
Everyone says they don’t have enough time.
We did a series of programs for a company in Asia, and their biggest complaint about
their operation was they just didn’t have time – “There’s too much pressure, there’s too
much to do.” And here it really was tough. So we built the program around saving eight
hours a week. We said that at the end of the two two-and-a-half-day programs they would
have enough new skills to save eight hours a week. They recorded what they did and
about half of them saved time and the other half didn’t save it; they just weren’t that
interested. For those that did save time they had to be aware that now they had another
eight hours. And what were they going to do with the eight hours? They could work
more, spend time with the family, an go to a restaurant. They had to make that decision:
Want to just feel better? Fine. Want to lie on the beach? Fine.
EVERY PERSON CAN BE A FACILITATOR
You play backgammon? You can learn to play backgammon in an hour, but to beat Omar
Sharif, you might have to spend a lifetime at it. Facilitation is like that. You can learn
very fast and you can even learn enough fast to make a phenomenal difference in your
work. The beauty is that you can actually do that, and then keep learning for the rest of
your life. See in organizations we’re used to saying, “Oh we’ve got a tough meeting
coming up; we’ll get a facilitator.” And in comes a person who has no buy-in to the
outcome and they do a “job” – and there’re many people who do an excellent job, but the
reality is that every person can be a facilitator. In some of the organizations we work
with, when they have regular meetings they just rotate the facilitators. It doesn’t matter
who’s facilitating because they all know how to play the game. And the whole level of
interaction rises enormously.
It’s an unused skill. What I’ve found is most information in books and courses on the
subject—because they don’t begin from a knowledge of the brain, heart, and
physiology— is too laborious to learn. And yes there are a series of techniques, all of
which are fine, but the reason they all work is not obvious. I find that quite fascinating. If
you take the whole education system, schools and universities, nowhere in those systems
do they teach you to learn how to learn. They teach you subject matter. Nor do they teach
you how to live a full life. I’ve had the good fortune to talk to people who work in many
different areas and get phenomenal results. I ask them: “What is the essence of what
you’re doing?” I want to know the common denominators that all these people have, even
though they do things differently, so that we can bring all those common denominators
together to enrich this core area of making better decisions.
If you take meetings, what I’m looking at now are three things: presence, process, and
content. Now presence is all about being there.
JE: Showing up in the moment.
CS: Showing up in the moment and living in the moment. One needs to have all their
feelings there, not just a bit of left brain, right? The importance of that is absolutely
crucial.
Process. We break it down into six parts: preparing the meeting, developing the agenda,
setting up the room, facilitating the meeting, applying tools and techniques,
documentation and follow-up.
Content: Let’s just look at one thing, an agenda. Agendas are in the main a linear thing.
You have six items on the agenda, you do item 1, then 2, then 3 and at the end of each
item you make a decision or whatever—without understanding that everything is
connected to everything else (thank you, Leonardo). Not being able to share how these
things affect each other greatly slows down the implementation of any of them. So how
do you create agendas that are nonlinear? More provocative, exciting, fun, and promise a
much better level of decision making?
I’ll digress for just one moment here. When I ask groups of people, “What are meetings
for?” in 95% of cases I get what you’d expect: they’re to share information, they’re to
make decisions, and there are two or three other common things that are in there. But the
one thing that I rarely, rarely hear— and I think on the last two or three occasions I have
asked that the answer has come from women — is that the purpose is to build
relationships. People don’t see that as a purpose of a meeting. I see it as the greatest
purpose of a meeting. Because if that doesn’t happen, then you’re destroying
relationships. And the more you destroy relationships, the less you get collaboration — I
always go back to creativity and collaboration— and therefore the worse your decisions,
and so on.
So an agenda, to me, has as number 1, building relationships. To do so, everyone needs to
be heard and each voice valued. We’ve developed a series of processes for doing that,
which means that you can take the items that are on a linear agenda, look at what the
relationships between those items are, and build that into processes that build
relationships between people and allow everyone to be heard.
For example, as the marketing manager you may know more about marketing than
anyone in the room, but it might be the accountant over there who sparks an idea that no
one has thought of. Creative ideas don’t always come from the person labeled “the
creative one.” For example, advertising agencies are rapidly changing now because they
realize that “the creative guy” isn’t the only creative guy in the company. We’ve done
things with agencies where we’ve gotten them together with the client so you have the
client, the account manager, and the creative person working together on a solution. And
by the time the solution’s there, the client’s bought in. Look at the time it saves. Instead
of doing your creative work, making a pitch, being told what’s wrong, going back, being
pissed off, you know, this unbelievable process. In other words, the wider the knowledge
that you can get in the room at any one time the greater is the creativity and the more
people will learn.
With six things on an agenda and different groups of people in the room, to get
everyone’s thought on everything is going to produce better results, but you need a
process that accomplishes that. One of the key techniques is called mind searching, which
is a process for capturing collaborative thought very, very quickly.
BRAINSTORMING AND MIND-MAPPING
You know brainstorming, right? Brainstorming has been a critical and pretty successful
process over the years. If I ask a group, “What are the principles of brainstorming?”
they’ll say, “Well, there’s no criticism, you can speak at any time, things are recorded,
etc.,.” However, knowing how the brain and the heart work together reveals that the
process of brainstorming is flawed. And the flaw shows up this way. Twenty people are
in the room at the start of a brainstorming session. Let’s say the CEO speaks first. Does
that affect the thinking of everybody else in the room? Yes. Are you going to jump up
immediately and say the exact opposite? No. I’m using that as an example, but when
anybody speaks it affects everybody else’s head and feelings. Immediately, you’re
getting skewed information. By the time two or three people have spoken, many people
in the room aren’t going to say anything.
JE: Their own internal editor will kick in.
CS: Yes, (a) because they’re scared, (b) because they think, “Well it’s not different
enough,” or “I’ll look stupid now.” So one of the core elements of the mind-searching
process is that everybody puts their thoughts down on the subject before there’s any
discussion. Now, again, in order to speed up the process, you need to employ the right
techniques. You don’t have time to write out long sentences and, if you did, they’d be
difficult to compare. So we introduce mind-mapping courses. In two minutes anyone can
put all their key thoughts down, on any subject at any time, no matter what depth. Say
you’ve got six people sitting around a table— again I go back to round tables. If the room
is set up in classroom style, the technique can still work , but it takes more time and it’s
more difficult. So now you have people around the table, how do you share their
thoughts?
The process is that one person maps everyone else’s thoughts. If you go around the table
and you say, “OK, Bill, tell me your thoughts,” and you write them all down, and then
you ask Tom, and you write all Tom’s thoughts down, by the time you get to the third or
fourth person they’ve got nothing to say: the first ones have exhausted all the
possibilities. Now they are not involved, and consequently are not committed. So the
process is that you go around the table one at a time: “Give me your best thought. Give
me your best thought. Give me your best thought.” Now I’m mapping the combination of
what people are saying. Eventually after you go around the table a couple of times you’ve
got it all done. And then there is sometimes a little conversation, a little explanation, and
people are saying “Boy, I just learned something from this person I didn’t know before.”
So there’s a lot of learning going on. And you’ve got a map of that. Now you’ve got five
tables. Someone picks up the five maps and combines them while you get on with
something else.
Because it’s so critical, in almost every session we ask the question, “What are the
barriers to communication in this organization?” We can have forty people in a room and
that exercise will take ten minutes, not half a day. And there is a result from it, and it is
recorded.
Again, if people aren’t given some information on how the brain and the heart work
together, they’ll resist trying these new processes or even a different setup of the room.
But once they have a little information they’ll find it interesting and exciting.
So, you put your own thoughts down first. Then you use the principle of involvement
when you’re collecting the information from four people, and you have a learning
situation going on at that time. This is a facilitation process. It does not allow anyone to
dominate, for whatever reason. And the last thing is that you’re collecting all the
information and you’re bringing it back; you print it out and give it to everyone and they
use that information to go on to the next thing to do. So throughout a session where the
agenda is nonlinear, you’re continually collecting information but not necessarily making
decisions.
Then in the last quarter of the session — if it’s a day, the last quarter of a day — you’ve
got massive information that everybody has shared. Then you make your decisions on
each of the five or six things. And the decisions come like that (snapping his fingers).
Now, that’s just on an agenda.
The room has to be set up in a combination of ways, not just circular tables, because what
else happens there during the day? During the day people shift to different tables, and you
either put groups of people together or you do it randomly, depending on what you’re
doing. That gives you incredible flexibility.
Then we have a whole process of collecting the crucial questions in the room, using a
very fast level of prioritization. Two of the principles of facilitation are continuous clarity
and continuous prioritization so that you’re always looking at the cream on the top and
not the stuff on the bottom. My key principle of facilitation is to place feelings before
facts.
JE: Get those expressed or surfaced.
CS: If something happens in the room where somebody is obviously uncomfortable,
unless the facilitator handles that in an appropriate manner, you’ve lost that person.
Here’s a simple example. You ask a question. Two people put up their hands to answer.
If I pick one and don’t acknowledge the other, I have then started to lose that person. But
if I say, “OK, John, I’ll be right back to you. I just want to hear from Alex first.” That’s
fine. But then if I do that and don’t get back to that person, I’m in big trouble, or I’m
building up that resistance. So that’s just one tiny little piece that’s ignored so often.
THE FACILITATOR’S ROLE
In other words, the facilitator’s role is to be aware of every nuance that’s going on. Once
you create that atmosphere, an amazing thing happens: the group actually self-regulates
to an enormous extent. So when I hear, “Oh so-and-so gets up and he talks forever, and
he’s always the same,” I say, “Well, nobody’s taught him anything else. Why shouldn’t
he? No one stops him.”
The wonderful thing is the core elements can be learned by a group to the point where
you can apply them over a couple of days using real-time issues. This is not, “I go to
school and then I come back to work.” You learn in action, which is crucial. You can cut
down training budgets phenomenally this way, because the learning’s part of the process.
One of the things we get them to do at the end of each meeting is to ask the question, “At
the next meeting, how can we make it even better than this one?” I’ll also go to the other
extreme, “What didn’t you like about this meeting?” The groups that we develop can just
continue to work in their organizations.
JE: So there’s always an evaluative component?
CS: Yes. And that goes back to core learning processes, and the basis of core learning is
self-esteem. If you have high self- esteem, you’ll learn, fast. If you have no self-esteem,
you can’t learn.
So how is that core learning built into the organization? Because meetings actually take
up so much time in an organization, most of what you need to learn to achieve higherlevel decision-making you can learn during the meeting time you already have. You don’t
have to change that. This whole process doesn’t throw out any systems. You just make
everything you do better by applying this integrated set of principles.
THE LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN RESOURCE DEPARTMENTS
JE: There can be a lot of resistance in schools or other organizations to processes that try
to bring in people’s emotions because they’re seen as too “touchy-feely” or whatever. I’m
wondering if you’ve run into that response, and, if you have, whether you see more
openness now in companies and organizations to what you’re advocating.
CS: I’m going to go on a slight tangent, but it’s relevant to your question. One of my
greatest frustrations is that some organizations that have done really powerful work with
us for two or four days will say at the end, “Hey, this is great. We’re set now; we don’t
need any more.” And after a period of time most of the learning falls away and they’re
back to their old systems. If you ask an organization, any large organization, to take
something like what we’re talking about and continue to evolve it as a process, they’ll
say, “Well, that’s for HR to do…”
Well, HR traditionally has no real budget, and most don’t make decisions particularly
well. They also don’t have power. So working with HR in the main for something like
this is a waste of time, or has been a waste of time; I’ll put it that way. What happens now
is even if people get it, what do they do? They go back to HR and say, “We need some
more courses.” But you know what happens? As soon as there’s crisis in an organization,
what’s the first thing that’s cut? Training and anything creative. Why? Because
executives know intuitively that that’s not where they’re getting results. They know that.
Intuitively. Right? And it’s true because the training industry is as poor as the education
industry. It teaches content but not the processes you need to use for better decision
making.
The only people that really make a difference are the people who make the decisions,
have money to spend, and get real dollar value out of it. And even then we can’t go to a
company and say: We are going to show you where you are going to save or make x
million dollars. What they measure won’t allow that to happen. And even if they work
with us and they double their output in a 12-month period it’s not just because they did
this. It’s because they made better decisions. It’s because of many things. There is
resistance because there can’t be direct measurement of what they’ve learned to do.
However, what is happening today is that people really have their backs against the wall
because there is nowhere else to go. You can’t squeeze people anymore. You’re already
beginning to ruin their family lives, their work/play/family balance, and making them feel
impotent. And now American companies are competing with all the outsourcing that’s
going on. So what’s happening is that it’s coming around more and more that the people
in your company are your greatest asset. And their potential, which is untapped, is your
greatest source of the future.
A NEW APPROACH: THE FIVE C’S
We are actually at a point of major revolution in the world. Right now. Consciousness is
rising. And we’ve put all of this into five words that, it so happens, all begin with c. The
first one is consciousness, which is awareness, awareness of what the hell is going on and
the realization that you’ve got to get more from people and you don’t get it from
wringing them like a towel. You get it by opening up their capacity.
Then you’ve got creativity. And we talked about the stress side of creativity. Unless you
can open things up to the point that people do not feel stressed, you’re not going to get to
their creativity.
Then you’ve got collaboration.
The final two are interesting: choice. People need to have choice instead of just being told
what to do. And those first three —consciousness, creativity, collaboration — make
choice available.
And the last one is commitment.
JE: There does need to be a revolution in terms of how people look at what’s called staff
development. It can’t be something you do only when there’s extra time or money; it has
to be an integral part of the organization, something to build into the culture as an
ongoing effort. People can have a powerful retreat experience but, when they go back to
their organizations, if there aren’t mechanisms to provide ongoing support for what they
learned it becomes very problematic to hold on to it. In one of the articles you wrote, one
of your clients talked about a “community of practice.” To create a learning organization
it seems you need ongoing communities of practice around these new ways of relating,
thinking, communicating within organizations.
CS: One of the phrases I use is “inside-out organizational transformation.” It has to
happen from the inside of each person. You can’t dictate it. The work place is where
people spend most of their damn time, so they need to be the sources of this evolution.
What I’m finding is that organizations that are socially responsible are probably the
organizations that are going to do this first. The companies that are purely fixed on the
bottom line each quarter, which is the majority, are not going to be the first to change.
But eventually there’ll be organizations that lead.
I mean, not so long ago, there were no companies that were socially responsible. And
why should you be socially responsible? Because you’re going to actually make more
profit in the end. Nevertheless there are more people now who are saying , “If we’re not
socially responsible, then we’re destroying the earth,” I think that they’re the
organizations I’m now looking to work with, although working with the corporations has
been a fantastic experience and where we’ve found out a lot of what we’re now
practicing.
LEARNING TO THINK REFLECTIVELY
JE: Do you find that people need help working with different ways of thinking, whether
it’s creative thinking, or critical thinking, or some other mode?
CS: Sure. I’ve had a lot of fun over the last couple of years asking friends of mine or
people I work with, “Where did you learn to think?” Because where’s thinking school? I
mean it still doesn’t exist. And it’s been fascinating how many people have told me they
don’t know or say they’ve had certain experiences that have gotten them thinking in
different directions. In the 80s, it was conceptual thinking—How do you think in
concepts? Without being able to think in concepts, especially in a world of complexity, –
it’s very difficult to make decisions
One that I love is reflective thinking. What is reflective thinking? Say you get a group of
people in a room — this again becomes part of the process —and at the end of a day
they’ve made a major decision. But if you don’t have reflective time afterward you might
not end up with the best decision. Because what happens is the brain works 24 hours a
day. At nighttime the brain is associating all the things you’ve been doing during the day
with the rest of your body knowledge. Then, you wake up in the morning saying, “Aha!
What an idea!” If a group has a major decision to make, you want to build in reflective
time, letting people know that if anyone has anything to add, if anyone who wants to
make any comments, they can e-mail by midday the following day, or by the end of that
day. Or you say, “We’re going to have just one more telephone hook-up just to see what
else has come up.” When you do this, the difference in the quality of outcome is
phenomenal, mainly because the process rests on knowledge of how the brain and body
work together. And there’s about six or seven of these thinking processes. We do all of
them, or most of them, all the time; we’re just not conscious of how these different
thinking processes feed into the overall process of decision-making and how they enrich
the decisions we make.