VOLUME 8, NUMBER 2

Reflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change

F E AT U R E A R T I C L E S

The Generative Change
Community
Bettye Pruitt

Companies That Mimic Life
Jay Bragdon
Jeanne Veatch-Bragdon

Cross-Sectoral Leadershipfor Collective Action
on HIV and AIDS in Zambia
Katrin Kaeufer
Judith Flick

Just Business
Alan Mobley

Discovering the Sourceof Phenomenal Results
Anne Murray Allen
Greg Merten
Bob Johnson
EMERGING KNOWLEDGE

Holistic Training
Jon Kohl
BOOK EXCERPT

Theory U: Learning fromthe Future as it Emerges
C. Otto Scharmer

Published by The Society for Organizational Learningreflections.solonline.org
ISSN 1524-1734

PUBLISHER’S NOTE 8.2

One of SoL’s principles is that the process of learning isonly complete with action. In this issue of Reflections, we share a number ofreports from “the field” from those who are up to their elbows in work all over
the world. And since reflection is also an important part of the learning cycle, we
hope that their work stimulates you to make connections about how their concepts, methods and findings have relevance to your own projects in process. Feelfree to write directly to the authors with questions, insights, suggestions, andreports on your own efforts – and do copy us! SoL’s field of action is now so
C. Sherry Immediato
extensive that we need your help in identifying other work in progress.
We begin our research updates with a report from the Generative Change
Community (GCC), a global community of practice that nurtures and promotes generative dialogue foran equitable and sustainable world. This report, provided by project co-director Bettye Pruitt, describes
the process of defining generative dialogue by looking at cases and asking “what was generative in thisprocess?” Current cases include “shuttle dialogue” in Northern Ireland, bridging Sulu divides, and a
Nepal irrigation project. The report notes the impact on the projects of their participation in the GCC
community of practice case, and working definitions of generative dialogue. The case method used by
GCC, as well as their substantive findings, is likely to be of value across SoL.
In 2006, SoL published Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels, by Joseph H. (Jay) Bragdon. Jay’s work
hypothesizes a causal relationship between a living asset stewardship management philosophy and exceptional financial returns. In “Companies that Mimic Life: The New Profit Leaders,” Jay and Jeanne
Bragdon restate Profit for Life’s key premises, and present the results of recent independent research that
updates and reaffirms the strong investment returns of the 60-company learning lab on which this researchis based.
“Cross-Sectoral Leadership for Collective Action on HIV and AIDS in Zambia: Applying the U-Process
to Complex Social Challenges” is based on a pressing need. One in every six adults in Zambia lives with
HIV; life expectancy has fallen below forty years; more than 700,000 children are AIDS orphans. Thisinitiative began in 2006 to tackle this problem which persists in part due to local culture and policy. SoL
researcher C. Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U (see the excerpt in this issue) was tapped to help, using
the U-process methodology. Researcher Katrin Kaeufer and Oxfam’s Judith Flick report on the action
research plan, and the progress to date as the team completes the step of sensing the forces for change.
In “Just Business: Partnering for Sustainable Justice,” researcher and project director Alan Mobley
reports on the start-up of this venture in Detroit. The purpose of Just Business is to apply systems thinking,dialogue processes, and business expertise to issues of sustainable economic development in distressedneighborhoods. These areas have high crime rates and, concomitantly, large numbers of ex-prisoners
returning home upon release from prison. By involving a range of stakeholders, including regional businesses, the project aspires to break this vicious cycle.
Our final research update holds the promise of a more substantive report in the future. Anne Murray
Allen, Greg Merten, and Bob Johnson were all part of HP’s Inkjet Division during a period of remarkable
growth that spanned most of the 1980s and ’90s. “Discovering the Source of Phenomenal Results: The
Magic of Legitimacy and Love” is an update on their insights about the conditions that made such positiveii Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

PUBLISHER’S NOTE continued

business results possible. Using a process of reflection and dialogue that was characteristic of their time at
HP, they are involving former colleagues in their retrospective research in the hopes that more organizations will rethink their assumptions in favor of the deeply respectful working arrangements which are key
to the innovation most firms need.
In looking at reports from the field beyond the SoL community, research member Barry Sugarman
offers a review and summary of Steve Kelman’s book: Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational
Renewal in Government. This study focuses on successful systemic changes in the U.S. government thatwere supported in part by approaches that assumed support for change rather than resistance to it. Barry
highlights some case specifics and points to the contributions of this research that may be of interest toboth practitioners and researchers.
In “Holistic Training: Putting Trainees Back into Context,” Jon Kohl makes his second contribution to
the Emerging Knowledge Forum. Using his experience in creating development opportunities in the workof park management, he challenges us to consider what we can learn from nature’s apprenticing systems.
Just as a young beaver deprived of contact with a dam building community is likely to be an ineffectiveengineer, we need direct contact with the system of work in which we are embedded to be systemicallyeffective. He offers specific illustrations of the value of eco-tourism guides interacting with those involved
in fire management to create better outcomes.
Finally, this issue’s book excerpt features a chapter on individual learning from Theory U: Leading fromthe Future as it Emerges by C. Otto Scharmer. An in-depth explanation of the U theory introduced in
Presence (SoL, 2004), the book is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in profound collective
change projects. Other excerpts, comments, and a summary of Theory U can be found at www.solonline.
org/theoryu.
As we celebrate SoL’s 10th anniversary, it is especially rewarding to see the diversity of the SoL community increase as we take on thornier problems and greater opportunities. This would have been unlikely if not impossible without all the early work by SoL’s organizational members. We hope to report infuture issues on how corporate participation in projects that span boundaries provides practical value in
conducting day-to-day business. Until then, please visit the SoL website for opportunities to hear thesestories and interact with Reflections authors at upcoming SoL gatherings.
With best wishes for reflection that stimulates action,

C. Sherry Immediato
Managing Director, SoL

reflections.solonline.org

Write iii
n Immediato
Publisher’s NoteReaders

READERS WRITE 8.2

U si n g W o rld C af é P ri n ciples f o r D iscipli n ed
S trategic T hi n k i n g
Jim Myracle and Diane Oettinger have illuminated an innovative and highleverage approach to using World Café design principles and practice as part of an in depth learning anddevelopment program for high potential leaders (“Developing High Potential Leaders with Strategy
Cafés,” Reflections, Volume 8, Number 1). By integrating the use of a modified World Café approach(called Strategy Cafes) with a disciplined inquiry-based process focused on strategic thinking, it seems
that Jim and Diane are able to achieve a range of outcomes that might not be easily accomplished byeither approach used in isolation. This is a great example of a “mix and match” approach to the use ofcomplimentary processes in the service of business and social value.
I was impressed by the way Jim and Diane used the World Café’s seven design principles – setting
clear context; creating hospitable space; focusing on questions that matter; encouraging everyone’s contribution; cross-pollinating ideas and diverse perspectives; listening for key insights; and harvesting collective discoveries over the full week long program – whether they were using the “usual” World Café
format or not. It seems that by using the World Café design principles creatively throughout the program, there was an opportunity for these high potential leaders to:•	Create an ongoing learning and professional community across traditional functional boundaries• Learn a new approach to participating in “conversations that matter” and perhaps to hosting thesetypes of strategic dialogues in their own back home settings.
• Discover and practice a disciplined inquiry based approach to strategy development and•	Access and demonstrate their own collective intelligence on behalf of the organization’s future,both with each other and with senior leadership
I really enjoyed reading about the way in which Jim and Diane created the life-like Strategy Café
space in the tradition of the artists square at Montmartre, and can imagine the participants’ pleasantsurprise at being invited to use the Montmartre metaphor to stimulate their own creative thinking in“collectively painting a holistic and realistic picture of the current business situation that their company
is experiencing on the canvas or the flip charts.”
I found the overall architecture of engagement, with its pre-set rotations and groupings interesting
and useful. At the same time, I wondered if there might be other more self-organizing ways to invite
participants to create the appropriate “mixings” – perhaps by giving the group the same criteria that Jim
and Diane used so that they could discover, themselves, how to construct teams that offered diverse
perspectives into key strategic areas of inquiry. That might be something to experiment with in future
programs.
In that spirit, I might also offer the possibility of creating “learning/listening visits” between theteams, once they are formed and working on their evening assignments. This would encourage not only
diverse perspectives within teams, which were encouraged by the pre-assigning of groups – but also to

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READERS WRITE 8.2

reach for the original spirit of the word “competition” which means, “to strive together.” There might
be a time each evening when teams send roving ambassadors for a short period to other teams to listen
to key insights, learnings, and discoveries from other teams unique areas of strategic inquiry that might
be supportive to their own teams’ efforts. This might help to keep the spirit and insights of the wholemore visible to all participants throughout the week.
Jim and Diane’s choice of which strategy methodology to combine with the World Café was fortuitous, as we all participated in the evolution of this inquiry based approach to strategy when we collaborated together on a major large system change project at a Fortune 10 consumer products company.
We discovered that the re-shaping of issues, opportunities and challenges into core strategic questions(How will we….) has an unexpected and profound impact on the capacity of a group to both assess thestrategic landscape and to simultaneously create a collective mindset of curiosity and discovery (versus
assertion and advocacy), leading to deeper individual and collective strategic insight.
This simple shift of mind and practice toward a question-based approach to strategy, when combinedwith the World Café dialogue process, seems to liberate people to form a true “community of inquiry”
even when they have not had formal training in either dialogue protocols or strategy development.
I share Jim and Diane’s perspective about the importance of engaging senior leaders in advance of
their participation in programs of this nature (or any other type of World Café dialogue). Helping senior
executives enhance their own skills in and approach to “conversational leadership” is an increasingly
important capacity in today’s organizations where evoking knowledge sharing and the organization’s
collective intelligence are keys to long term success. Modeling appropriate and appreciative “hosting” isespecially important when senior leaders want to be role models for high potential leaders.
Lastly, what I think Diane and Jim are exploring in their work – beyond the focus on strategy development or other aspects of the “content” of the program – are innovative ways to bring the future alivein people’s own lived experience. Once people have a real life experience of being and talking together
in new ways about critical strategic questions at the heart of their organization’s future, they find thatorganizational change is not scary or overwhelming, but instead can be creative, exhilarating, and productive. It’s the collective embodied experience of new ways of working and thinking together aroundreal life challenges (in contrast to traditional training programs about change and organizational culture) that can set the platform for innovative paths forward. That’s the true promise of this approach tolearning and development for high potential leaders.
Juanita Brown
Co-originator
The World Cafejuanita@theworldcafe.com

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Readers Write F E AT U R E 8 . 2

The Generative Change Community:
Cases About the Meaning of “Generative
Dialogic Change Processes”
R
Bettye Pruitt

esearchUpdateThe Generative Change Community (GCC) is a global community of practice that nurtures and promotes generative dialogic change processes for an equitable and sustainable world. The community
seeks to integrate individual, organizational, and societal transformation through dialogic processes
and initiatives.
   The community is comprised of advanced practitioners of peace building, negotiation, mediation,
participatory action research, and multi-stakeholder dialogue in various fields of endeavor, such as
global network building, inter-sectoral collaboration, conflict prevention, and democracy building. The
Generative Change Community originated in October 2003 as the Generative Dialogue Project. In May
Bettye Pruitt

2007 it took its present name to better reflect the diversity of the work of its member practitioners.
   Besides SoL, its organizational sponsors include: the Asian Institute of Management-Mirant Center
for Bridging Societal Divides, the Fetzer Institute, GAN-Net, Generon Consulting, the Metanoia Fund,the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD, REDEH, the Network for Human Development in Brazil, the Swedish Foreign Ministry, Synergos Institute, the Third Millennium Foundation, theUNDP, and Wageningen International – Programme for Capacity Development and Institutional Change.
   The GC Community is moving from its formative stage into a stage of pursuing activities together,including core research, action research, generative change agent development, and continued community building. Becoming aligned about the meaning of “generative dialogic change processes” hasbeen crucial to forming a foundation for collective action.

How do we define generative dialogic change processes?

In order to move forward together, the GC Community Core Group recognized, it wasnecessary to develop a common understanding of what we mean by “generative dialogicchange processes.” We launched a series of teleconferences to pursue that question bylooking at specific cases. In the first half of 2006, we had four conversations on three cases:•	A multi-stakeholder dialogue to develop an irrigation project in Nepal, shared by Jim
Woodhill of Wageningen International•	A “shuttle dialogue” in Northern Ireland shared by Sue Williams, a veteran of peace
work there and elsewhere in the world and a colleague of GC Community member
Mari Fitzduff•	An ongoing dialogue initiative in Sulu, Philippines, “Bridging Sulu Divides,” sharedby Ernie Garilao of the Mirant Center for Bridging Societal Divides at the Asian
Institute of Management

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Feature n Pruitt In each of the conversations, we focused our attention primarily on the question, “what was
generative in this process?” With remarkable consistency, our observations pointed toward afairly simple definition:
Dialogic change processes are generative when participants experience a shift inawareness regarding their relationship to others and to the issues at hand, and thischange enables them to co-create positive outcomes for themselves and the people
they represent.

This definition aligns with the well-known observation of Einstein that problems cannot
be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them. Each of the three quite different cases offered insights on what this means in concrete terms. Write-ups of the cases andthe four teleconferences held so far are available at www.generativedialogue.org.
Shifts in awareness regarding relationship to others. Change in the way participants related

to others in the process was an important feature of each case. In the Nepal irrigation project
dialogue, for example, the shift manifested as an emergence of trust in a group representing
great disparities in socio-economic status and positional power, such that “everyone felt what
they had to say was legitimate.” Jim Woodhill noted that he gauged the extent to which thisshift occurred by observing a high level of engagement by everyone in the group, with irrigation experts teaming up with illiterate farmers and translating for them between Nepali andEnglish, so that everyone could understand and participate fully.
In the case of “shuttle dialogue” in Northern Ireland, Sue Williams emphasized that thechanges that occurred were small shifts, not “breakthrough transformations.” Indeed, thiswas an instance in which the participants never got to the point of talking directly to eachother but communicated exclusively with and through the arbitrators, who shuttled back andforth among them. Nevertheless, people who had never experienced communicating withthose who don’t agree with them became more aware of how their strongly worded messages might be perceived by others. “You try to help them avoid offending the other side
without intending to,” said Sue. Sue and Mari Fitzduff noted that this basic recognition of“the other side” as fellow human beings who might legitimately take offense at harsh language is the kind of change that must occur before people in situations of violent conflict canbegin to participate in “real dialogues.”
Finally, Ernie Garilao provided a powerful example from the Bridging Sulu Divides workshop he led earlier this year of the kind of change we are talking about. The workshop
started with an exercise of personal reflection and sharing in mixed groups of people representing different sides in the Sulu conflict:“We were prepared for animosities [and] ‘venting.’ Mari advised to get that out
right away. But, when they were doing their leadership stories – creating a personalleadership life story line (what did I learn from it, who influenced me, etc.) thensharing that in small groups – they were really listening to each other. Then when
they were asked to see what came out of the groups, they recognized how similar
they were in their hopes and dreams. They recognized their common humanity.
That broke down the barriers. [In the dialogue that followed,] I was surprised thatthe civil society leaders didn’t come forward with their view of the military as
occupiers . . . it came up in the dialogue but in ways that people could hearand discuss.” Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

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Shifts in awareness regarding relationship to the issues. At the heart of this change is recognition of the nature of one’s personal connection to the issue and, in the best case, acceptance of one’s responsibility for helping to achieve a positive outcome. The Bridging
Leadership framework for the dialogue process in Sulu is explicit about the need to bringabout this change. Getting people to take ownership of their role in both the problems andtheir resolution is central to the Bridging Leadership training that a number of key military
participants had completed a couple of years prior to the Sulu dialogue workshop. In addition, Ernie indicated that differentiating between individual and shared response to the issue
was a key part of the design of the dialogue itself:“In the plenary you can see the whole, so people can see their individual responses in thatlarger perspective, see their responsibility; envision new realities. This sets up the dialogue ina positive way: what can I contribute to success? What issues with other sectors do I need towork on to achieve the shared vision?”
The remarkable outcomes of the Sulu dialogue depended on both these developments:
the creation of a shared vision by the group; and the acceptance of personal responsibility
for change by key members. The shifts and the outcomes in the shuttle dialogue case wereless dramatic, yet still significant. In particular, Sue emphasized the importance of people getting in touch with their own needs and beginning to frame the conflict in their community
more in terms of those needs, rather than simply in terms of their opposition to the other side.
The process was transformative for them, whereas there was no change among the politicaland paramilitary leaders who continued to relate to the conflict strictly as a politicalissue. This was especially true of the parents on both sides, whose recognition of their needto protect their children emboldened them to challenge the leadership and insist on a resolution. “I was really struck by the willingness of the parents to assert themselves and takecontrol,” said Sue.

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Feature n Pruitt The example of this kind of shift in relationship to the problem in the Nepal irrigation
project dialogue focuses on the irrigation experts in the dialogue group. As in the Sulu case,these key actors came into the group with some openness to change, because they had alreadyhad to confront the shortcomings of previous irrigation project designs. Nevertheless, they
were initially uncomfortable and skeptical of the more participatory approach to design theworkshop represented. “Experts are used to standing up and telling people how it is,” Jim
noted. Yet they were able to set that expert role aside, embrace the process, and contributeto a “fundamentally different” irrigation project design based on a more systemic understanding of the context and challenges.
Co-creation of positive outcomes. All of these dialogue initiatives produced outcomes that

their organizers and participants considered significant. The Asian Development Bank, whichsponsored the Nepal irrigation project workshop, was pleased enough with the outcome totake the position that all project design processes should be more participatory and interactive in future. In the shuttle dialogue case, community members created a positive outcome
by accepting the reality that people on both sides of the dispute had legitimate needs, especially for security. The precipitating dispute faded away, and people have co-existed withfewer disturbances than before. The Bridging Sulu Divides workshop produced a widely
accepted Sulu Roadmap for Peace and some surprising and significant partnerships joining
the army, police, rebel groups, and civil society organizations in efforts to reduce violent
crime in the area, monitor police action against rebel groups, and ensure transparent andequitable distribution of resources for human development efforts.
In the Sulu case, Ernie described the most powerful episodes of co-creation in vivid terms:
the group was in a “flow” state, with such mutual acceptance and understanding that they
could complete each other’s sentences; and they had tapped into “the field” – the collective
consciousness that everyone in the group could sense intuitively. Jim observed moments ofthis kind of energetic co-creativity in the Nepal irrigation project workshop as well. Thesestates of collective flow, or connecting to the field, seem to define most concretely what generative dialogue is, and what it looks like.
To summarize, generative shifts move people . . .
From

To

Seeing others as separate and different,
defined by their roles, their positions on
the issues, or their place in a hierarchy

Seeing others as fellow human beings; “we’rein this together;” and all have somethingimportant to contribute

Seeing oneself as separate from the problem
situation, looking for others to change in orderto resolve it

Seeing oneself as part of the system thatsustains the situation, accepting responsibility
for changing oneself

Disconnected relationships withinstuck problem systems

Creative relationships energized by mutually
owned ideas for addressing problems

Acceptance of dysfunctional societal
structures and systems

Commitment to promoting change toward
healthy societal structures and systems

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What are our guiding questions?
Of course, these cases and others to be shared within the GC Community raise many morequestions than the one addressed here. For the community, answering the key definitionalquestion is just the first step toward building a deep and robust understanding of how generative dialogic change processes can contribute to societal change on a global scale – “for anequitable and sustainable world,” as our mission statement says.
Cutting across all of the community’s activities and providing a framework for the rigorous action learning and peer-to-peer sharing and support that are central to our strategy are
our core learning agenda and our commitment to rigorous inquiry through the use of the
GCC Process Inquiry Protocol.
The GC Community Core learning agenda has a dual focus on:•	The connections among individual-, group-, and societal-level change•	The potential for generative dialogic change processes to produce deep change
globally
The GCC Process Inquiry Protocol is a framework for collective inquiry adapted from a process tool developed by others for uncovering and articulating theories of change. “Theoryof change” is a conceptual tool used in various fields to support a rigorous approach to planning, executing, evaluating, and learning from experience in change initiatives. The overarching goal of the GC Community in using this framework is to create a solid platform forcollective learning that is sufficiently broad (crossing the boundaries of specific approaches,disciplines, and fields), sufficiently deep (at a level of detail that enables meaningful analysis),and sufficiently rigorous to make a significant advance in our understanding of generative
dialogic change processes and how they can contribute to change at a global level.

A b o ut the A uth o r

Bettye Pruitt is a social historian dedicated to developing practices and tools for collective learning.
In addition to her work as community coordinator for the Generative Change Community, she has
been part of the UNDP Democratic Dialogue Project, and is a co-author of Democratic Dialogue—A
Handbook for Practitioners (2007) published jointly by International IDEA, UNDP, OAS, and CIDA andavailable for free download at http://www.democraticdialoguenetwork.org/index.pl. Bettye has a Ph.D.
in history from Boston University and is a research member of SoL. She recently stepped down as
co-chair of the SoL Council.
bhpruitt.rcn.com

Endnote
1

International Network on Strategic Philanthropy, “Theory of Change Tool Manual” (May, 2005), p. 10,
available at www.insp.efc.be.

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Feature n Pruitt F E AT U R E 8 . 2Companies that Mimic Life:
The New Profit Leaders

Joseph H. (Jay) Bragdon and Jeanne V. Bragdon

ResearchUpdateIn 2006, SoL published Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels, by Joseph H. (Jay) Bragdon. The culmination of dozens of years of research, the book made a powerful argument for the connection between
organizational learning precepts and business success. Reflections published an early exploration ofthis connection with “Living Asset Stewardship: How Organizational Learning Leads to Exceptional
Market Returns” (Jay Bragdon and Richard Karash, Vol. 4, No. 1) The following article, coauthored with
Jeanne Bragdon, summarizes Profit for Life’s key premises, and updates and reaffirms the strong
investment returns of the 60-company learning lab it featured, the Global LAMP Index®.
Jay Bragdon

Jeanne Bragdon

In the past few decades, the business world has been quietly undergoing a radical change.
Companies that mimic living systems have been gaining market share over more traditionally managed firms, which generally model themselves on mechanical systems. These
two management styles affect people and Nature in very different ways. And this largely
explains the differences in their market performance.
Firms that mimic living systems have an existential awareness that they are living communities of people, committed to serving other people, and that they all depend on Nature
for their sustenance. These companies instinctively put a higher value on living assets (people
and Nature) than they do on non-living (capital) assets because they recognize living assets
are the source of capital assets, and the reason for their existence as firms.
This fundamental recognition creates spontaneous demands within the firm to live harmoniously and respectfully with the larger living systems on which we all depend (biosphere,
society, markets). This desire to affiliate with life is enormously appealing to people. It
explains why these companies tend to attract the most committed employees and strategic
partners, the most loyal customers and the most patient investors.
Firms that think of themselves as profit-making machines, by contrast, place a higher value
on non-living capital assets than they do on living ones. This predisposes them to trivialize
life: to treat people and Nature as tradable commodities, replaceable machine parts or moveable factors of production. When companies act on such tendencies, people feel threatened
and withdraw. Employee morale suffers. Customer service declines. Just as the living systems
approach becomes a reinforcing cycle of positive consequences, the mechanistic approachyields a cycle of negative consequences.
The contrasts between these two mental models of business have become increasingly
evident over the past few decades. The ill effects of corporate carelessness, many of which
weren’t apparent until tipping points had been reached, are now startlingly obvious. Global
climate change, toxic waste accumulations, ecosystem destruction, and related public healthissues have altered the ways we live, and we don’t like it. When given a choice of where to Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

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work or shop, most of us would rather support firms that respect life than those that trivialize it. It’s that simple.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, people who trivialize life, like those who once condoned
slavery, “blow out the moral lights around us.”1 They create a “house divided against itself,”2
which cannot stand because disrespect for life ultimately ends in ruin. It is self-destructive.
And we know it.
The eminent biologist, Edward O. Wilson says humanity longs for a vision of a “continuous and unending future.”3 This is what attracts us to life affirming companies. Beyond that,
we are drawn to activities that allow us to move beyond our self-centered focus, to embraceand enhance the living communities of which we are a part. Involvement in such enterprise,
and the lure of meaningful learning, excites our higher (quantum) thinking capacities. The
synergies are magnified when we work and learn with others inspired by the same goals.
In researching Profit for Life, Jay constructed a learning lab of sixty companies, collectively called the Global Living Asset Management Performance (LAMP) Index®. Each firmin the index is a pioneer in its industry of “living asset stewardship” (LAS). This term, usedthroughout the book, states the obvious that firms must nurture and steward people andNature – the source of all their other assets – if they want to have a future.

LAMP’s Exceptional Market Returns
Since publication of Profit for Life, we retained an independent consulting firm to analyze
the Global LAMP Index® in-depth as a prospective investment fund. In doing so, we went
beyond the tracking method used in the book, which was a simple average of index pricechanges with dividends added in. This time through, we wanted to pick up the value of spinoffs – for example, the extra return Hewlett Packard stockholders received when HP spun
off Agilent – as well as the compounding effects of reinvesting dividends.
Northfield Information Services, the firm that performed thein-depth analysis, is a global consultancy that advises many of theFirms that mimic living
world’s largest banks and institutional money managers on measystems have an existential
suring and controlling portfolio risk. The following table is takenfrom their study of the LAMP 60, in which they reported invest- awareness that they arement performance on both a market capitalization-weighted basis living communities of(column 2) and on an equal-weighted basis (column 3) comparedpeople, committed to serving
to four large capitalization stock indices (columns 4–7).
This table covers the 10-year period illustrated in Profit for other people, and that theyLife (1996 – 2005) as well as the most recent calendar year result
all depend on Nature for(2006). It affirms the superior performance of the LAMP 60 byboth standards of measurement in relation to the four major their sustenance.
benchmarks. Taking a closer look at the data, we see the equalweighted LAMP Index delivered top results in both rising and falling markets. The LAMP
60, when market cap-weighted, performed at the high end of benchmark results in all but one
year.
Northfield’s detailed analysis also revealed that, between 1996 and 2005, the averageannual return for the equal-weighted LAMP 60 was more than one percentage point higher
than results presented in Profit for Life. While we expected returns cited in the book weremildly understated, we had no idea the disparity would be this large.

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Feature n Bragdon Year-by-Year Comparison of LAMP60 vs. Four Large Cap Equity Indices, 1996-2006

Year

LAMP60MarketWeight

LAMP60EqualWeight

S&P Global
100

FTSE
World
Index

S&P 500

S&P 100

1996

27.24

28.20

23.54

12.79

18.84

23.54

1997

26.55

33.84

31.49

15.52

30.15

26.27

1998

33.07

33.73

34.68

23.02

28.58

33.21

1999

40.08

46.25

25.82

25.99

21.04

32.79

2000

-8.86

3.73

-14.33-11.07-9.09-12.56

2001

-7.10

-2.10

-14.03-16.14-11.88-13.802002-19.38-13.33-23.57-19.06-22.10-22.59

2003

34.88

42.55

30.92

33.88

28.69

26.24

2004

10.65

18.07

10.14

16.08

10.87

6.44

2005

7.48

12.28

5.46

11.32

4.89

1.16

2006

17.09

21.07

20.4

21.46

15.79

18.46

Average

14.70

20.39

11.87

10.34

10.53

10.83

Volatility

19.88

18.90

20.81

17.82

17.98

20.15

We were also pleased to learn that the market cap-weighted LAMP 60 had positive alphas– risk-adjusted measures of “excess return” in relation to benchmark indices – ranging from3.02 to 4.02. To put these results in perspective, most institutional investors are delighted tohave a portfolio alpha of 1.00 because few managers consistently beat an index after subtracting out their fees and trading costs. In calculating the alphas on the LAMP 60, Northfield
imputed management fees and trading costs to the index in order to make a level comparison.
The alphas they attribute to the LAMP 60 are therefore very compelling.
Northfield ran additional tests to determine whether the alphas of the market cap-weighted LAMP 60 were random or statistically meaningful. Included in this analysis were additional tests for “survivorship bias” – the tendency for failed companies to be excluded fromperformance studies due to the fact that they no longer exist. Here too results were affirming.
The probability that the LAMP 60’s stock selection process had randomly produced such
positive alphas was far less than one in a hundred.
In concluding its study, Northfield applied a “style analysis” based on a “combination ofindices that best match the return of the LAMP 60.”4 This approach yielded an alpha of 3.13
and indicated that our “selection technique was able to add value at the 95% confidence
level.”5
In sum, Northfield’s analysis of the LAMP 60 affirms our hypothesis that companies modeled on living systems are gaining market share from those that model mechanical systems.
This, we believe, is an adaptive response by a group of leadership companies to the growing
social and environmental damage resulting from traditional business practices. It is an expression of life’s relentless urge to survive.

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Why Don’t All Companies Adopt the Living Systems Model?
If companies that model themselves on living systems are so much more successful than theirpeers, it is reasonable to ask: Why aren’t the means of their success better known in the marketplace?
The simple answer is: inertia. The mechanistic model is deeply embedded in traditional
business practices because it has produced so many successes. It is rooted in over five centuries of empirical thought, which lifted themodern world out of a dreary feudal
agrarian past and into the prosperity of thescientific/industrial age. The flowering of
empiricism during the Renaissance andEnlightenment also supported a newfoundfaith in human observation, which later
became associated with the ideals of individual liberty and the American Declarationof Independence. In these and so many
related ways, empiricism is associated with
progress and growth. Its belief in clear,rational scientific methods is so ubiquitous
it underpins not only our capitalist orthodoxy, but the dialectical materialism oforthodox Marxism.
Today, most leaders in business andfinance – indeed most business schools –are so captivated by empiricism and its
material successes that few dare to question its linear thinking assumptions. The
most egregious failures of their habitualmode of thinking have become evident
only with long time lags. Global climatechange, for example, has been decades in
the making. Nevertheless, most business/finance leaders believe rational, scientificthinking is the very key to solving the environmental and social problems they havecreated.
We believe such blind faith in linear
cause-and-effect thinking is misguided anddangerous because the living world in which business operates, including the firm itself, often
behaves in irrational, chaotic non-linear ways. People don’t like to be treated like commodities or disposable machine parts, and either resist, quit or become depressed when managed
that way. Living systems that economists regard as “externalities,” such as the earth’s atmosphere, forests, soils, and waters are not as robust as they once assumed. There is a limit to
Nature’s regenerative capacity. When overstressed these ecosystems go into decline or pushback – as in the form of severe weather events and public health hazards – with dangerous
consequences for all who depend on them.6

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Feature n Bragdon Just as the worst effects of the mechanistic business model have been decades in the making, so too has been the development of the living systems model. Initially, it was hard to
distinguish between the two because they were both corporate, premised on capitalism andused similar vocabulary. But, as the living systems model matured and learned through thedecision-making of its leading advocates, its core operating assumptions, cultural norms,
practices and metrics became more distinctly different.
The operating leverage in companies that mimic life is hard for conventional business leaders and analysts to recognize because they don’t have the intellectual tools. To understand thisleverage, we have to think in holistic terms because the essential properties of living systems
are properties of the whole. They are found in synergies – mutually beneficial exchanges of
information and services within the organization – that make the whole more than the sumof its parts. This is how living systems operate. It is circular, with multiple feedback effects.
And linear thinkers have a hard time seeing it.

Attributes of Companies that Mimic LifeIn general, we see five distinct attributes of firms that mimic living systems. Not every company in the Global LAMP Index® is a perfect exemplar of these, but each fits the model inimportant ways and displays best living asset stewardship (LAS) practices in their respective
industry/sectors.
•	They are highly networked to facilitate feedback and information exchanges within thefirm and without. Many of these networks are informal, self-organizing consortia ofemployees, suppliers, and customers. When you layer these networks over one anotherand the firm’s chain of command, you get a structure that looks much like a double
helix.7•	They manage by means (MBM), understanding that people and relationships are theprimary means by which they build network capacity and create value.8 They strengthen and empower employees by practicing servant leadership.9 They also give employees
decision-making authority in their areas of competence and hold them accountable forresults.
•	They optimize their use of physical resources by “closing the loop” so the waste of one
process becomes food for another.10 In doing so, they aim for factor efficiencies by producing more value for customers with less input of energy and materials.
•	They are exceptionally open in the ways they share information with employees and intheir desire for stakeholder feedback. They know such openness builds trust, learning
capacity and adaptability.
•	They nurture the larger living systems of which they are a part (Nature, society, markets) because they understand the inherent connection of all life.
These five attributes generally describe the make-up of LAMP companies, and the things
we look for in our analytic work. For readers who wish to gain a deeper knowledge of LAS,
illuminated by in-depth case studies, Profit for Life is a valuable resource.

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A b o ut the A uth o rs

Jay Bragdon is a money manager for high-net-worth families, and a pioneer in the field ofcorporate stewardship. His book, Profit for Life, condenses nearly forty years of research on theempirical connections between stewardship and profitability. As a result of his early work in thefield, Jay cochaired the first national Conference on Corporate Responsibility in Investments atthe Harvard Business School. A member of SoL, he is currently a director of the Sustainability
Institute in Hartland, Vermont.
jhbragdon@aol.com
Jeanne Veatch-Bragdon, a land use and environmental law attorney in Woodstock, Vermont,
supported much of the research conducted for Profit for Life. Jeanne is also actively engaged
on local planning and conservation commissions and serves as Secretary to the Boardof Directors of the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vermont.
veatchj@aol.com

Endnotes
1 Lincoln-Douglas debate of August 21, 1858 in Ottawa, IL.
2 Lincoln-Douglas debate of June 17, 1858 in Springfield, IL.
3 Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, Stephen R.
Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press. 1993). Page 35
4 The T-statistic for results of the LAMP 60’s stock selection process ranged from 3.21 (market
cap-weighted results) to 4.32 (equal-weighted results). These statistics indicate standard deviations from the mean, which tells us the likelihood that the LAMP 60’s alphas would occur at random. A T-stat of 3.21 is 3.2 standard deviations from the mean, which occurs only rarely.
5 Sandy Warrick, “Evaluating the LAMP 60”. (Northfield Information Services. April 26, 2007). Page
15.
6	 For additional background, see: Ecosystem Change and Public Health – A Global Perspective. Joan
L. Aaron and Jonathan A. Patz, eds. (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001).
7 The term “double helix management” was coined by Professor Karen Stephenson. See:. Art
Kleiner, “Karen Stephenson’s Quantum Theory of Trust,” Strategy & Business, Issue 39. Fourth
quarter 2002. Kleiner says: “She sees organizations as a sort of double-helix system, with hierarchy and networks perpetually influencing each other, ideally co-evolving over time to become
more effective.”
8 The term “management by means” was coined by H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms in theirbook Profit Beyond Measure (New York: The Free Press. 2000).
9	 The term “servant leadership” was coined by Robert Greenleaf, and was defined in his essay,“The Servant as Leader” first published in 1970 by the Paulist Press. (repr., Indianapolis, IN: The
Robert Greenleaf Center. 1991)
10 The best current source on “closing the loop” processes is the Journal of Industrial Ecology published by MIT Press. See: http://www.yale.edu/jie/reflections.solonline.org

Feature n Bragdon 11

F E AT U R E 8 . 2

Cross-sectoral Leadershipfor Collective Action on HIV
and AIDS in Zambia: Re
Applying the U-Process toComplex Societal Challenges

searchUpdateKatrin Kaeufer and Judith Flick
Zambia is located in the middle of sub-equatorial Africa. Independent for more than forty years, thecountry has a population of about 12 million people. It is one of the poorest and least developed
nations: about two-thirds of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Zambia also has one of
the worst HIV and AIDS epidemics. One in every six adults lives with HIV; life expectancy has fallen
below forty years; more than 700,000 children are AIDS orphans. The Zambia Cross-sector Initiative
for Collective Action on HIV and AIDS was formed in 2006 to tackle this problem. SoL researcher C.
Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U (see the excerpt in this issue) was tapped to help the Initiative,
using the U-process methodology.
Katrin KaeuferT

he Zambia Cross-sector Initiative for Collective Action on HIV and AIDS was formedby leaders from business, education, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government, and faith-based organizations. Their goal was to make a profound and lasting impact on the problem of HIV and AIDS in Zambia. To achieve the project’s goal andcreate a breakthrough in thinking and action, participants applied the “social technology” of
the U-process, and explored whether the methodology was scalable and could be applied toother areas and regions. This implied:•	Applying innovative cross-institutional, cross-sectoral forms of collaboration in dealing
with HIV•	Applying deep listening and sensing, dialogue between all stakeholders, experiences ofconnecting to one’s self, one another, and to a higher sense of purpose; and other techniques to understand the blockages in finding a real break-through•	Prototyping innovative ways to address key blockages at individual, community,
national, and possibly global levels

Convening a Group for Transformative Change
Early in 2005, Judith Flick was reflecting on her leadership task as the newly appointed
Global Lead on HIV and AIDS for Oxfam Great Britain (OGB). In her role of Regional

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Director for Southern Africa for (OGB), she needed to drastically scale up OGB’s response to
the pandemic. She was struck by the incongruence between the huge amount of activity in
the AIDS sector and its impact on the spiralling pandemic. What could OGB add to this? Was
there any point in doing more of the same?
Meanwhile, Susie Smith, the Deputy Director for International Division of OGB who had
devoted years to the battle against HIV, and Martin Kalungu-Banda, then senior policy advisor and head of the private sector team for OGB, met with OGB staff to discuss why thebattle against HIV was not being won in Zambia. They decided to engage the Zambia Oxfam
staff in a four-day process of reflection and listening to the community. As a result, the staff
confronted their own denial of the pandemic, and began to discuss the need for their personal leadership in meeting the challenges it presented.
When Judith met Otto Scharmer, senior lecturer at MIT, she realized that the U-process
might help her find the connecting point between people’s personal experiences and theirprofessional task, while offering a perspective of new (possibly more effective) approaches tothe multidimensional challenge that the HIV pandemic poses. Together, they embarked on a“learning journey” to answer what they considered the key question: why is Zambia’s battle
against HIV not being won?

Five Stages of the Zambia U Learning JourneyStage 1: Co-initiate Common Intention
The first stage (April–July 2006) was to identify the geographical unit, initial intent, and ahigh level group of about twenty leaders from all sectors. As a Zambian, and through his
extensive professional work in business, government, and NGOs, Martin Kalungu-Bandaknew Zambian society very well. In early 2006 he began to talk to individuals whom heperceived to be influential and passionate about social change in Zambia. Based on theseconversations, Martin identified nineteen individuals who were invited to a first workshop.
The U Process: One Journey, Five Stages
1. Co-initiate common intent:stop and listen to others and towhat life calls you to do
VOJ

2. Co-sense the field of change:
go to the places of most potential
VOC and listen with your mind andheart wide open

5. Co-evolve through innovations:in infrastructures that facilitate
seeing and acting from theemerging whole

4. Co-create microcosms:
prototype the new to explore
the future by doing

VOF

3. Co-presence inspiration and common will:
go to the place of silence and allow the innerknowing to emerge

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Feature n Kaeufer, Flick 13

The Zambian Vision• Happy children attend school. When they return home, parents and guardians greet and care forthem. They have food and shelter. They are allowed to enjoy their childhood.
• Demystification of HIV/AIDS has been achieved: Zambia is an “open society” where HIV/AIDS isseen as similar to other diseases, and can therefore be talked about openly; it is a country where
people infected with HIV do not have to face stigma and discrimination.
• Inspirational and servant leadership functions at all levels, not only at the top but in all sectors andamong all types of people.
• Everyone has a means of livelihood, and there is a better distribution of livelihood opportunities
within Zambia.

These included individuals from the business arena (e.g. micro-enterprise, mining), the arts
(e.g. fine artist, football star), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as theOrganization of People Living with HIV and AIDS, Women’s Association, Trade Union,faith-based organizations, the government sector (Local Chief, National AIDS Coordination)and the medical/education sector (a medical practitioner and a professor).
This cross-sectoral leadership group was first brought together in July, 2006. During thatworkshop, the participants co-created the intention of the initiative and crystallized theirvision. Participants agreed that it was in all of their best interests to work towards beating
HIV/AIDS.
After developing their vision and intention, workshop participants were asked if theywould like to take leadership of their own process. This question was followed by a discussion about their prospective roles and responsibilities, and resulted in an expression of theircommitment to taking more ownership for the group’s development.
Through a subsequent workshop in November 2006, and several self-facilitated meetingsin between, the group identified systemic issues underlying the HIV pandemic.
Based on this analysis, the participants formulated initial ideas for prototypes, or areas inwhich they wanted to take action. In the course of this process, many of the group decided
to form a new group called the Trust for Collective Action against HIV in Zambia. The Trust
identified four areas related to these underlying systemic forces in which they wanted toexperiment:
1. Leadership: the need for enlightened leadership at every level
2. Care for children, including education: the need for alternative forms of care, and education for vulnerable children;
3. De-mystification of the disease: the need to address the stigma, denial and discrimination which prevent people from getting tested;
4. Livelihoods: examine the interrelationship between countries and continents, as well as
the vulnerability of people living in poverty.

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Six Systemic Forces
Systemic forces that oppose progress:• Lack of political will (vis-à-vis prioritization and distribution of resources)• No real ownership of HIV/AIDS issues ( i.e. denial, lack of conviction)• Poverty/economy (i.e. increasing vulnerability, “negative” employment such as prostitution, etc.)• Role of culture and religion (unequal power in relationships between men and women lead to risky
sexual behavior, etc.)• Stigma about HIV

Stage 2: Co-sense the Forces of Change
The second stage is one being taken at the present time (March 2007–June/July 2007). It isa focused inquiry into those four areas in order to prepare the ground for creating “life examples,” or prototypes for action. The leadership group identified five possible prototype areas:
1.	Changing the mind and heart of the president of Zambia on the subject matter, possibly
by offering him an HIV/Aids advisor.
2.	Finding a way to “wake up” other leaders.
3.	Changing the role of the media in Zambia.
4.	Inquiring into the reasons people do not go for voluntary counselling and testing bylistening to what happens in family contexts and understanding the dynamics between
livelihoods, gender relations, and sexuality. This includes looking into ways to motivate
people to go for testing, including the possibility of making counselling mandatory.
5.	Finding ways of caring for and educating youth who grow up without their parents.
To carry out this process, the leadership group identified people who could dedicate moretime to inquiring into these areas through research, networking, and conversation. These“inquirers” were trained at a workshop in March 2007 and conducted their work from April
to August 2007. Each inquirer works closely with his or her point person from the Trust (theleadership group). Every other week the whole group of inquirers and point persons from theTrust meets in order to share what they have learned, and what themes and questions are
emerging from the ongoing inquiry process.

Stage 3: Co-presence Inspiration and Common Will
The third stage will be to share, reflect on, and crystallize the key findings from a deeper
understanding of what our purpose is and how we can bring this into being.
The inquirers will present:• a refined description of the prototype idea
• the network of people who will be involved and the organization or setting where thisshould take place• the core people who can drive and implement the prototypes• and its funding options

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Feature n Kaeufer, Flick 15

During the same workshop the whole group will also reflect on the deeper themes andleverage points so that by August of 2007, the inquiry process will have brought all thecritical information to the surface. Based on this reflection and dialogue, the group will decide
which of the prototype ideas they would like to blend, modify, refocus and act on over thefollowing four to six months.

Stage 4 and Stage 5: Co-create and Prototype the New
Stage 4 of the process will focus on implementing and refining the prototype ideas. This is

expected to take place between July/August and November/December 2007. At that time, theresults of these prototypes will be presented to the leadership group in a joint workshop.
 The concluding stage, Stage 5, is a decision-making process about taking some of these
prototypes forward in the form of pilot projects. This means identifying institutions interested in further developing and scaling the approaches and solution strategies that haveemerged from the various lines of prototyping work.

Applying the U-Process to Societal Challenges
The work in Zambia exemplifies that the U-process offers both a methodology to address
challenges, as well as a way to learn how to make a shift in how we pay attention. The
Zambia team used the U-process to design the workshops, as well as to effect the overall
process. Each workshop began with an opening phase aimed at stopping the process of“downloading” old assumptions and ways of seeing, and beginning to see reality with fresheyes. The core of the workshops offered participants a place to connect or re-connect to their highest future aspiration, and all workshops ended with a concrete prototype for moving forward.
The U-process informs not only the overall architecture of the work on HIV AIDS in
Zambia, but also facilitates, on a more personal level, deeper connections. These connections
take place between people and the fate of their community and nation, as well as within
individuals, between one’s current and one’s emerging essential Self. That inner transformation may be the most subtle as well as the most difficult dimension of change to track.
However, it may also be the only hope we have to address the pressing challenge of our time:
how to use the real power to deal with these challenges, which comes from within, from adifferent way of looking at, connecting with, and responding to the everyday situations andchallenges in our lives.
A b o ut the A uth o r

Katrin Kaeufer leads the research effort at the Presencing Institute in Cambridge, MA. Her current
work includes research on social transformation, distributed leadership, and social technologies.
A SoL research member, Kaeufer earned her MBA and Ph.D. from Witten/Herdecke University inGermany. Her dissertation on Socially Responsible Banking was published as a book in 1996. Anexperienced consultant, she is also a founding member of the Presencing Institute.
kaeufer@mit.edu
Judith Flick has more than fifteen years experience in social development, mainly in Latin America
and southern Africa. Over the past six years, she has worked as a Regional Director for the Oxfam
Great Britain (OGB) and currently manages the Global Centre of Learning on HIV/AIDS in Pretoria.
A participant in the SoL/MIT ELIAS (Emerging Leaders for Innovation Across Systems) initiative,
she holds an MA in Social Anthropology from the Leiden University in The Netherlands, anda post-masters degree in Management for Business Administration.
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F E AT U R E 8 . 2

Just Business:

Partnering for Sustainable Justice

ResearchUpdateAlan Mobley“Just Business” is a project of the Sustainability Consortium of the Society for Organizational Learning(SoL). The purpose of Just Business is to apply the core competencies of SoL and its members – systems thinking, dialogue processes, and business expertise – to issues of sustainable economic development in distressed neighborhoods. These areas have high crime rates and, concomittantly, large
numbers of ex-prisoners returning home upon release from prison. Spearheaded by SoL member Alan
Mobley, the project, still in it early stages, is funded by the Open Society Institute and the Soros
Foundation networks.
Alan Mobley

Sustainable JusticeS

ustainable justice is about building a resiliant justice ecology by introducing sustainable
enterprise into communities with high rates of prisoner return.
America’s addiction to prisons has been as hard to digest as its cost to taxpayers: $60 billion a year and growing. Although the financial burden is spread throughout society, demographic analyses show that most of the effects of incarceration are concentrated in a
relatively few distressed urban communities of color. Penal migration – the cycle of removing
and returning people to and from a place – has been shown to harm communities to a point– a “tipping point” – where further removals and returns actually destabilize communities,
producing more crime, not less, depressed neighborhoods, sexually-transmitted and othercommunicable diseases, unemployment, and family breakups. These “tipping point communities” have become places of multigenerational cycles of crime, despair, and economic ruin
– and in the process have become places where most businesses fear to tread.
We didn’t get to this place overnight and there is no single, simple explanation, cause, or
resolution to crime, social disorganization, or disinvestment. Rather than despair over current justice realities, however, the present initiative sees the prisoner reentry crisis in tipping
point communities as an opportune leverage point to facilitate change. Through the practiceof building sustainable enterprises that stretch from prison yards to home communities, theJust Business project is a strategy to fundamentally alter the social, justice, and economic
landscapes in target communities.

Project Goals
Just Business works with SoL companies to build sustainable enterprise in the Americanneighborhoods that need it the most. Targeted communities are disadvantaged, mostly minority areas characterized by high crime rates, large numbers of people going to and returninghome from prison, and few viable, sustainable life opportunities.
Just Business aims to be an intervention in the lives of these neighborhoods. The projectreflections.solonline.org

Feature n Mobley 17

takes the phenomenon of prisoner reentry and uses it as a leverage point for positive socialchange. Rather than focusing only on the risks and needs of incarcerated community members and tailoring a program to their individual profiles, the JB plan is to focus attention on
their neighborhoods as well. Just Business aims to reduce the crime producing qualities ofhigh-risk neighborhoods by supporting legitimate entrepreneurship, employment, and business ownership. Ultimately, locally-owned and operated enterprises, supported by Just
Business project partners, are to anchor and fuel sustainable, positive change.
All interested and affected stakeholders bring assets to this shared project. However, people from such widely divergent life-worlds seldom
succeed in communicating with one another. For sustainable enterprise to succeed in disadvantaged areas,
relationships need to be cultivated, nurtured, supported, affirmed, and reaffirmed until a shared history, a foundational legacy of trust and achievement
emerges to perpetuate, and regenerate itself.
The Just Business model promises to produce significant “wins” for participating companies, the public sector, residents of selected neighborhoods, and thetax paying public that pays for systems in failure,
every step of the way.

Detroit ProjectIn Detroit, the immediate opportunity is to provide alink in the labor source supply chain for DTE Energy.
The company is looking to employ about 50 trained
people per year to work as tree trimmers and linemen.
The jobs will provide a living wage and benefits, and require one year of training for tree
trimmers and two years for linemen.
The JB proposal is to create an enterprise to train selected participants for jobs with DTE.
The training can occur in two stages: while participants are prisoners residing within theMichigan Department of Corrections, and post-release, when participants return to theircommunities. Dividing the training between in- and out-custody should serve to make productive use of prison time and corrections resources, provide continuity, stability, and support
for participants during the difficult first months of reentry, and heighten community involvement and investment in the transition process. Program graduates will receive professional
certification and an offer of employment from a DTE designated contractor. When a “criticalmass” of program graduates forms, then will begin the process of creating an employeeowned Just Business.

The Partners and Their Roles
Current project partners are SoL/Just Business, DTE Energy, the Michigan Department ofCorrections, and local and national philanthropy. Yet to be identified partners include one ormore local community-based nonprofit organizations to serve as project incubators and service providers. Primary roles are envisioned as follows:

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• DTE will provide the training curriculum and support for the program, employment
to program graduates, and will convene a business community of concern to support
education and training around the initiative.
DOC will provide program facilities, participants, and multifaceted support forparticipants during their training and reentry.
• Local philanthropy will provide funding and contacts for a multi-stakeholder
community organizing initiative (described below) to establish ties to the local nonprofit service-provider community, local community-development resources, and to
experts in relevant content area.
•	National philanthropy will provide funding for strategic planning, partner relations,and project management via JB.
• One or more community-based nonprofit organizations will provide portals forbroad-based community participation in project processes and serve as initial
incubator for the enterprise.
The resulting program, a locally owned and operated enterprise that would provide career
training and career paths for those involved in its operation, will serve as an anchor for community change and as a model locally and nationally.

A b o ut the A uth o r

Alan Mobley is assistant professor of Public Affairs at
San Diego State University. He first became interested incriminal justice issues in 1984, when he was arrested for
managing a major narcotics distribution network. While infederal prison, Alan Mobley earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and sociology, respectively, andstudied eastern philosophy and yoga. Upon release fromprison in 1994, he entered the doctoral program in criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine.
Since his graduation in 2001, Dr. Mobley has taught at theuniversity level, consulted for state and federal criminal
justice agencies, philanthropic foundations, and community
groups, and conducted research on entrepreneurship, faithbased corrections, prison privatization, and substance abuse
treatment. An award-winning teacher, author and SoL member, his work has been published in books and professional
journals, and he speaks widely on criminal justice reformand community revitalization.
alan.mobley@sdsu.edu

reflections.solonline.org

Recommended Reading
Alan Mobley
UBUNTU: The Spirit of African Transformation
Management
Lovermore Mbigi, with Jenny Maree(Knowledge Resources. Ltd., 1995)
Prisoners Once Removed: The Impact of Incarceration
and Reentry on Children, Families, and Communities
Edited by Jeremy Travis and Michelle Waul.
(Urban Institute Press, 2003)
Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community
Kay Pranis, Barry Stuart, and Mark Wedge(Living Justice Press, 2003)

Feature n Mobley 19

F E AT U R E 8 . 2

Discovering the Sourceof Phenomenal Results:

ResearchUpdateThe Magic of Legitimacy and Love
Anne Murray Allen, Bob Johnson, and Greg Merten
Anne Murray Allen, Bob Johnson, and Greg Merten and were all part of HP’s Inkjet Division during aperiod of remarkable growth that spanned most of the 1980s and 90s. The story of what enabled thatgrowth – the kind of learning environment managers created in the division – has been told in part inan earlier issue of Reflections (see “The Nature of Social Collaboration: How Work Really Gets Done,”
Dennis Sandow and Anne Murray Allen, Vol. 6., No. 2) and in SoL Research Greenhouse and Annual
meetings. [Greg Merten, former SVP for Inkjet Cartridge Manufacturing, spoke at several SoL events
about his personal journey of development and how it related to business success.] Now the three
former co-workers are teaming up – and tapping former colleagues – to examine, reflect on, and share
Anne Murray Allen

the “magic” of the organization’s success. The following article is adapted from the introduction of amanuscript they have just begun, and hope to publish as a book early next year.

W

Bob Johnson

Greg Merten

e had the privilege and fortune to have worked in a business that transformed ourlives. We worked for HP’s Inkjet business, specifically its global cartridge manufacturing operation. While we joined this business at different times and played
different roles throughout the years employed there, we have a remarkably similar appreciation for what we learned and gained from this opportunity. Each of us left HP and moved
out of the Inkjet business at different times, and into consulting or other business ventures
under different circumstances. But during our time in this remarkable business, we all experienced the same phenomenal business results, and concluded those were inextricably intertwined with our commitment to personal growth as human beings.
Today, as professionals working inside organizations of different sizes, regions, and industries, we too often see an operating model that creates the antithesis of what we experienced
at HP during the early ’80s through 2000. As we travel and work with others, we consistently see a disconnect between what employees say they want and need and what working
environment is actually being created. Increasingly we see that the norm is becoming one ofhierarchy directing action that cascades through a formal structure. Less and less attention
seems to be given to the informal structure and understanding how work really gets done.
Even if companies had a practice of investing in organizational learning and development
years ago, many are curtailing this now, citing hyper-competitiveness as requiring them toeliminate all “unnecessary” expense. In addition there is the perception and belief that speed
is of the essence and there is “no time” to talk about values, alignment or learning across theorganization. Fewer and fewer leaders really make it a top priority to think about the healthof the social system inside the enterprise They then act surprised and frustrated by high turnover, low morale, and disappointing results as if there was no connection.

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The Need for Healthy Work Environments
After experimenting with self-managed teams in the late ’80s and early ’90s, thependulum has swung in a very different direction. Employees across the board
report less job autonomy, less creative challenge, more stress, lack of caring
in the workplace, less loyalty to their employers and a sense that it is “everyone for themselves” in terms of getting their needs and goals met. What is
so tragic about this organizational pattern is that there is no research orevidence to support this approach as being successful or sustainable.
Indeed, there is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.
We believe there is a strong connection between work structure andour health and well-being. For example, in the 2004 Whitehall II study
from the International Centre for Health and Society at the University
College of London, researchers found a profound and direct connection between workers’ mental and physical health and the degree towhich they experience low control over their jobs. The two elements thatdefine “control” are the degree of authority over decisions and the use ofskills, including the opportunity to develop new skills. Specifically, people injobs characterized by low control had higher rates of sickness absence, mental illness,heart disease, and pain in the lower back. Having high demands placed on those studied did
not in and of itself create high stress; it was the combination of high demands with low control over how the work got done. Furthermore, their study found that the degree of control
over work decreases with lower positions in the organization.
The Whitehall II study is of particular interest because it seems to coincide with an observation of our own. We have seen organizations across multiple industries respond to hypercomplexity and change by becoming more authoritarian and providing fewer opportunities
for employee control, growth and development, often erroneously seen as a luxury in today’s
business environment. In fact, with today’s dynamic, global environment, authoritarian structures are not effective in fostering the rate of learning so critical to staying abreast of theemerging changes. We believe an unintended consequence of this response is the shaping of aworkforce and a society with diminishing levels of capability and social well-being. This inturn creates physical and emotional health issues which work against effective human andorganizational performance. We believe that today’s predominant operating model will notscale nor sustain creative human endeavor.
To some extent, we also see these patterns of operation as mirroring society as a whole.
Never before has the disparity between compensation for top executives and those at thelowest paid levels been so great. According to the SEC, the pay ratio between CEOs and theaverage employee has grown by a magnitude of ten over the last 20 years. Most would agree
that the performance of top executives hasn’t improved by the same factor over that same
period. The tendency to higher and higher executive salary with no real downside risk tocompensation is not due, as some would say, to what is required to get the best people. As amatter of fact, we believe that many who get these jobs are no more effective as leaders. They
simply know how to work inside the top-down model more effectively, and usually are goodat dismantling and downsizing organizations. They don’t necessarily have a distinguishedtrack record in real innovation and sustainable growth.
As contracts for vice presidents and other senior executives guarantee salary or high buyouts whether results are delivered or not, individual workers find it more difficult to makereflections.solonline.org

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ends meet. Lay-offs are common place and the gulf between the haves and have-nots grows
each year. One author, Marjorie Kelly, author of Divine Right of Capital, actually refers totoday’s corporate economic system as “feudal.” This dynamic contributes to a low-trust environment where most employees see themselves as much more at risk than their designatedleadership team. In addition, rising stress-related health concerns, affect overall health care costs
and further increase financial pressure on the human resource system. These are reinforcing
loops cannot continue without dire consequences to competitiveness and societal health.

Our Goal
We want to participate in creating a different cycle than what we observe today. We do notwant to see organizations and the people they employ and serve collapse, whether it is a slow
painful process or swift demise. We believe that cycles of stress, and cycles of decreasing socialand economic well-being can be interrupted. We care that organizations and institutions areable to transform themselves into healthier, more vibrant and creative workplaces that translate that energy into new value for customers and communities. We also believe that this ispossible and for those who are listening we say: This is for free. It does not require big bucks
but it does require commitment and an open heart, with a willingness to really find what you
as a participant and leader can personally provide. It requires a letting go of the illusion ofordered control of performance for the possibility and likelihood of performance far greaterthan what can be imagined in an incremental plan. As Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently
stated, it requires an integration of power with love. For healthy human organizations tothrive, this can no longer be an either/or decision.

Our Method
The three of us have spent innumerable hours over the last year in an ongoing conversation
to distill and converge on what we believe was the essence of our journey of extraordinary
business opportunity and personal development. We have found that while we can identify
what we call “key ingredients” for high potential organizations, we have struggled when we
have tried to break it down into a simple model or building block approach. For that reason
we enlisted a larger dialogue group which included colleagues who were also part of the
Inkjet business for the period we describe. Enlarging the conversation has increased our overall understanding and helped us to invite even more powerful insights into what it took torepeatedly create phenomenal results and sustain high levels of engagement across the business.
This approach has confirmed our experience that inviting group reflection and dialogue
gives way to the greater intelligence of the group especially if we are listening and paying
attention. In a sense, this dialogue group was a microcosm of what we experienced working
in the business. In the beginning, we did not realize what creating the Inkjet cartridge businesswould take personally, organizationally, technically, or financially. We discovered the journey
as we made it. While that may seem obvious, it is critical to our story to understand thatthrough specific practices of reflection and dialogue, our awareness grew. We developed ashared view of what was important and that in turn coordinated our action in ways otherwise
not possible. Many individuals and organizations experience life “blindly,” on automatic
pilot. They are unwilling to become aware of their experience, and, therefore, find themselvescaught in a cycle of unwanted or mediocre results. We believe we avoided that cycle.

22 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

reflections.solonline.org

Our Outline
We know that readers will want to know what business results we are specifically referring
to and why we label them as “phenomenal.” Chapter One will ground the reader in somefacts and the context for those facts. This introduces a core tenet of the book that everything
begins with a focus on the success of the business and value created for customers. We’ll get
into the “how” later.
Like so many journeys in life, one assumes there is a plan. Yet, probably no surprise tosome, we had no plan. As the second chapter clearly states, the story we are sharing is a storyof shared discovery and we were learning as we went along. It was messy and contentious attimes. However, there were some important principles and practices that were the underpinnings of the journey and these helped us see, frame, and move through choice points that
determined who we became as individuals and as a business. It is here that we introduce what
we mean by “legitimacy and love,” basing our definition on the established research andwork of Humberto Maturana, biological scientist and world renowned expert on living systems. This concept will weave through subsequent chapters. Then Chapter Three goes into
more depth on some of the key choice points and how they served as opportunities to open
up, align and co-create the future.
Our perplexing conversations with each other and our dialogue partners in writing thisbook caused us to see that regardless of the challenges we faced, the quality of results
occurred in ways that were often unexpected and sometimes just seemed magical. Chapter
Four will talk about how we define “magic” and why we find a reductionist explanation forwhat happened as totally insufficient. What we do know is when our operational patterns
and practices are right, legitimacy and love are present, the magic occurs over and over. It
was a recursive phenomenon.
Although we had no plan for this journey, we did take time along the way to reflect onwhat had happened, what we were learning, and how we would conserve what we felt was
critical to our success. Chapter Five describes the patterns we recognized as most critical toon-going success. These are patterns we believe still apply to anyone committed to building
healthy performance capability in any organization.
Most books talking about performance will offer a model which takes the reader step-bystep to similar results. In Chapter Six, we have explicitly decided not to reduce our message
to a simplified model. Our journey cannot be your journey. The merit comes from each person and organization discovering, through reflective practices, how to take your journeymuch more effectively. We offer stories and reflections which come from a place of deeppractice, not theory, and our hope is the reader can recognize these practices and be inspired
to experiment, integrate and apply them with their own.
Finally, our intent with Chapter Seven is to challenge all of us in one of three ways. If you
are someone who recognizes this journey as one you currently are on inside your organization
today, that you gain a greater appreciation for it and protect it as a bedrock of great performance. If you are someone who has ever even tasted a similar work environment with similar
results, we hope you will want it again – to create a healthier pattern and cycle that assures
the best in human endeavor, regardless of the cycles a business may face. For those who may
not have associated your previous experience with our journey, we hope we succeed in creating a curiosity, longing and restlessness to seek it for yourselves. For we believe this is exactly what our human nature calls us to: to make the contribution we know we are capable ofmaking alongside great people we care for and are inspired by.

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A b o ut the A uth o rAnne Murray Allen is founder and principal in her own consulting firm, AMA Associates, a practice dedicated to working with clients in building healthy performance-based organizations. Prior tolaunching this practice, Anne retired from Hewlett-Packard Company where she held various management and executive positions over a 16 year period. She has co-authored an article on “The Natureof Social Collaboration” and is currently engaged with her co-presenters in writing a book with thesame title as their presentation. She holds an MBA from the University of Denver.
amallen@peak.org
Bob Johnson is the President of Conversant/Storytellers, U.S.A. Prior to joining the firm in
2006, Bob had 25 years of experience as an HR executive at Hewlett-Packard. Bob has worked
with numerous executive and business teams to accelerate breakthrough business transformation,
catalyze employee engagement, and implement large-scale change. Bob has an M.B.A. and M.A.
in higher education administration from Michigan State University.
Greg Merten is a retired SVP from Hewlett-Packard Company, where he led the Inkjet Manufacturingorganization from various positions over a 20 year period. Leading this organization through phenomenal growth challenged Greg and his organization in about every conceivable way. Greg used thisopportunity to become a student of leadership and organizational effectiveness. Today, he shares
his experience with others that want to learn how to build extraordinarily capable organizations.
Greg is a graduate of Oregon State University with a BS degree in Electrical Engineering with asolid-state physics focus.

Recommended Reading
Anne Murray Allen, Bob Johnson, Greg Merten
From Being to Doing
Humberto Maturana(Zeig, Tucker & Theisen, Inc., 2004) Good interview format on Maturana’s life work. This includes
his research and work on living systems, biology of cognition, biology of love, cultural insights, with
biographical highlights.  While this book is only about 200 pages, it is not a quick read but one tobe savored and studied for its richness of thought and concept.   
Leadership and Self Deception
The Arbinger Institute(Berrett-Koehler, 2002) This book challenges the assumed behavior, impact, and control of any
organizational leader/manager. Through following the fictional story of one specific manager throughpersonal development and coaching, the reader is challenged to think about his/her own motive andskill set in becoming an effective leader.
Artful Work: Awakening Joy, Meaning, and Commitment in the Workplace
Dick Richards(Berkley Trade, 1997) This book challenges the reader and gives hope that everyone can and shouldfind meaning in their daily work. Suggesting new ways of thinking and creating artful work as opposed
to mundane and empty tasks and activities is the key. This book is helpful to all that care about
improving today’s work environment and challenging the status quo.

emerging knowledge forum

Holistic Training:

Putting Trainees Back into Context
Jon Kohl
Taking a lesson from his work with ecological systems, SoL member Jon Kohl makes a casefor training that honors both human nature and the tenets of the natural world. Learning
works best when it takes place within the context in which it will be put to use. And training
programs that recognize and build on the “holism” – as opposed to reductionism – of people’s natural ability to learn are more successful in the long run. Holistic training, designedwith the system or context in mind, greatly alters results, including individuals’ capacity tochange and redesign their own environment in more.
Jon Kohl

Beavers master engineer dams, lodges, and canals
that alter landscapes and communities of organisms.
The structures they build vary greatly depending on
the local environment. To acquire this capacity abeaver kit apprentices itself for two years not only tohis parents but to an entire family of beavers.
Imagine now extracting a beaver kit, the embodiment of so much building potential, and sending him
to a zoo for those first two years, then placing him
in a classroom with a simulated stream (if there aresufficient funds to provide it) under the tutelage of
one other beaver for a one-week training course.
What hope would the beaver have of performing theskills that have made his kind famous in the engineering world?
Even though it should be obvious that a beaver
deprived of apprenticeship in his natural context
would not make a readily employable engineer, weforce this training approach on fellow humans acrossa wide range of professions. We attempt to traineach other chopped out of context and using techniques laced with reductionist thinking.
That training suffers from reductionist thinking
should not really surprise a systems thinker, when allof modern civilization suffers this ailment. Rene
Descartes, of course, deserves a healthy portion ofreflections.solonline.org

credit for this predicament. He developed the idea of
reductionism, that the world is nothing more than
the sum of its physical parts. To understand theworld, then, a scientist needs only break it into parts,
analyze those parts separately, and re-assemblethem.
After Descartes, modern society proceeded tobreak down its reality into hair-thin fields of expertise, university departments, and special interest lobbies. Training as well reflected fragmentary andlinear thinking, where context dissolved out fromunder trainees. Training institutions asserted thatthey knew what was best for all students even ifneeds and contexts varied. Information flowed one
way from expert to novice. Curricula and teaching
fragmented into modules, classes, lessons, and units.
Over time standardized testing only tested for thepieces, rather than the wholes which – a long time
ago – those pieces composed. Context, complex
wholes, relationships, and feedbacks between parts
disappeared from consideration. Many training programs measured success simply by the graduation
rate rather than graduate capacity.
As went society and the education system, so went
vocational training. Because of a linear, reductionist
perspective, policy resistance (sometimes referred to

EKF ■ Kohl 25

as “triggering the organization’s immune system”),
the dreaded monkey wrench of systems thinkers,
increased its power to meddle with programs. Policy
resistance usually occurs when other actors with
their own goals respond to an intervention and neutralize or worsen the effects sought by the program.
When one studies the system, the whole context, one
can identify and integrate these “external” goals into
program design. I worked for many years in ecotourism capacity building. Some examples of policy resistance that I commonly encountered follow; readersfrom any domain or industry will see recognize
similar conundrums from their own experience.
• Building wider nature trails in order to easevisitor congestion attracts more visitors due togreater accessibility, increasing congestion
again.
•	Conservationists train nature guides to substitutelocal wildlife poachers. The reduction in poachers, and competition among them, attracts only
more poachers because the demand for bushmeat remains high.
•	A lovely coastal village promotes ecotourism to
improve community welfare. Tourism booms.
Outsiders build hotels, restaurants, shops,
night clubs, roads, and street lights. The town
grows, becomes crowded. Garbage piles up. The
water isn’t safe for swimming. And eventually
tourism dries up. Now, the community has many
expensive problems and little income.
•	Ecotourism raises the income level of poor
natural resource exploiters who, now with moremoney, can afford to redouble their exploitation of natural resources.
•	Interpretive guides are trained and hired tobring more money into a park. Their training
raises park managers’ expectations, who thenneglect proper business planning and the guides
end up costing more money than they canraise. Later managers lay off guides due to lackof funds.

26 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2• Managers send on-staff guides to a guide training course to improve the quality of their performance. When they return, managers expect
to see an immediate jump in customer satisfaction. When they do not see the jump, they decide that further investment in the guides is awaste of money. Considered ineffectual, theguides are fired.

Systems Thinking Responds
to a Broken World
Reductionism boomed for hard sciences, engineering, and other closed systems wherein most variables
can be identified, broken apart, and studied. But
reductionism has not done well in complex social
situations where people interact with resources in
multitudinous and ever-changing ways. In responseto the separation that reductionism has injected into
every day life, social movements have arisen advocating integration and holism, such as environmentalism, human rights, gender equity, green politics,
steady-state economics, holistic medicine, green
architecture, organic diets and vegetarianism, sustainable development, holistic education, total quality management, adaptive management, ecosystemmanagement, and systems thinking.
Systems thinking, in particular, improves not justsociety but training as well. This article draws on
Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art
and Practice of the Learning Organization (Currency,
2006) which unites systems thinking and organizational learning.
Systems thinkers perceive a world of wholes
rather than of parts. We emphasize interrelationships
and processes rather than linear cause-and-effect andsnapshots in time. We aim to find high leverage
points in a system where the greatest and mostenduring change can come with the least effort. In
short, holistic training – training with the system orcontext in mind – requires that to produce the bestengineer, we must leave the beaver in the forest. In
the following sections, we examine a variety of strategies to build the most effective, possible training.

reflections.solonline.org

Trainers Dedicate Themselves
to Outcomes, Not Outputs
Trainers define outcomes before a program begins
When a training institution focuses only on its immediate job rather than the whole context and how thesystem works, it often aims simply to generate outputs, rather than outcomes.
Outcomes are those program results that actuallychange the world in the ways we truly desire. Outcomes include increasing workforce productivity,
diffusing a new technology throughout a company,
conserving forests, and apprehending more criminals.1 Outputs, on the other hand, are only intermediary products along the way to outcomes. Thus,
winning grants for training, graduating students,
building prestige, developing materials, and creatinga graduate network are outputs.
While every program has important output
milestones, with a context-based perspective, programs can remain focused on the underlying goal ofsolving a real life problem. A training institution,
then, must create incentives and rewards for achieving outcomes rather than simply profit and prestige(which often result when maximizing student flowreflections.solonline.org

through a training program). For example, trainers
should award certificates of graduation to trainees
not upon completion of the training program, butwhen the trainee actually builds the product necessary to fulfill his or her job responsibility. Anotherimportant strategy is to design programs from a systems perspective; the example of Tikal National Park
follows later.
Trainers use adaptive management to learn
on the fly
Policy resistance lurks around every corner. To combat it, a program must continually learn. Contexts
continually change and, as the program advances,trainers receive a steady stream of feedback. In orderthat a program take advantage of this feedback
rather than chain itself to immutable lesson plans
and methods, its trainers must adapt on the fly. The
training institution must empower its staff to integrate feedback from their personal experience andfrom trainees’ reactions during the training, not wait
until the training’s end. Trainers should have thementality that every program is a pilot program.
They should understand that program delivery andEKF ■ Kohl 27

improvement is a never-ending process to get it rightand then get it right again when the context and theirexperience changes.

Once trainers have their own shop in order, focusedon outcomes and oriented toward adaptive management, they need to design a training program that
integrates the many aspects of the trainees’ context.

rarely works as expected. Simulations, role plays,
and thought experiments only work so far. True
learning, as Senge says, occurs when the person does
something, receives feedback, and modifies their wayof acting. The most authentic and richest feedback
comes from doing the activity in situ, live, and forreal. That is, the beaver learns best how to makedams by making them in a real stream with otherreal beavers – not in an artificial temperature-controlled stream at a beaver training center, 500 miles
away.

Curriculum integrates elements of trainees’ context

Training structure permits interaction with context

One training curriculum cannot fit all sizes. Eachtraining context differs. At the very least the curriculum can integrate examples and terminology fromthat context. Even more, the curriculum should be
adaptable enough to emphasize the needs of any
particular context. Trainers often achieve this flexibility with modules they can take off the shelf whenneeded.

When a program cannot take place directly in thecontext, a multi-segmented structure provides a timeaway-time-back approach that allows trainees toapply some of the introduced skills, and then returnto the formal coursework to discuss experiences withother trainees and instructors. When the course presents new skills, the guide has a more developed
experience base to which she can apply the next setof instructions. Also, in this format, groups of trainees can work together to problem solve real issues
encountered by the trainee on site. Being left alone tosolve problems fresh out of training commonly precipitates trainee failure.

Trainers Interact with Trainees’
Context

Curriculum teaches an understandingof complex context
Aside from defining knowledge and skills a trainee
should have about the generic craft and vision of theskill set, the curriculum should also include material
to help trainees understand issues, context, and how
they will relate to it. Generic curricula do not illustrate to the trainee how the trainee fits into a context, does not help the trainee fully understand his or
her role in the context. The curriculum does not systems thinking, but should use it in presenting thesystem in which the trainee labors on a daily basis.
Program is located as close geographicallyto context as possible
Training programs often sweep students out of siteand out of sight of their context. Programs teleporttrainees to a remote training location; and when the
program ends, they teleport them back. Trainers
assume that graduates can apply newly exposed
skills to the graduates’ home situation. This approach

28 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

Authentic skills building in actual context
generates the richest feedback for learning
Though practice and simulations can introduce a
trainee to some aspects of the skill set, only the fullcontext can offer integrated feedback on all elements
the trainee must manage. For example, a military
flight simulator can help a pilot trainee learn to manage an aircraft, but cannot simulate well the stress of
being shot at, mechanical failure, unclear orders fromsuperiors… and death tapping on the cockpit window.
A trainee learns best when given the chance tomake consequential mistakes. This affords the fullest
and richest feedback possible (with all the risks that
implies). The more a training program shelters thetrainee, the less feedback with which he has tolearn.

reflections.solonline.org

Programs that take place away from context often
stuff too much theory into the training in lieu ofauthentic opportunities to develop skills. Daniel
Quinn, author of the Ishmael series of books, argues
that schools in particular teach a grand range ofknowledge that students have no use for and thus
forget shortly after taking a test and leaving school.
Theory is effective when it answers a direct perceived
need by students, otherwise they are not able toapply it, receive feedback on performance, andimprove skills. And theory is lost.

Trainers Prepare the Trainee’s
Work Environment
Once the training institution, the program, and staff
are ready to train in context, they must focus on the
trainee’s work environment and colleagues. Those
who did not participate in the training inhabit thisplace. The training does not change this place. When
the work environment is exactly the same both before
and after the training, the trainee often encountersan unpleasant surprise upon return. The trainee mayfind his environment does not accept the changes
and new ideas that his has brought home. Consider
these examples related to interpretive park guides:• Supervisors do not help guides create and thenapprove interpretive themes because they do
not understand the purpose of themes.
• Senior management allocates money for follow-up training but only for information intensive courses that do not reinforce fresh new
guiding skills.
•	The guide sees the connection between ecotourism and conservation but is not responsible
for setting up the infrastructure to make thatconnection achievable.
•	Guides want to solicit donations, but no financial mechanism exists to account for donationsor the park may not even be able to accept
donations, thereby neutralizing the benefit of
the guide’s skill in encouraging donations.

reflections.solonline.org• Staff does not have any concept of guide quality so the guide has no support to develop
nascent lessons. There may be institutional
incentives (such as saving money or maximizing visitor throughput) that actively promotepoor quality.
In a sense the training program has to coordinate
with the unit, department, or organization where thetrainee will work to avoid counter-culture shock.
U.S. Peace Corps volunteers often complain thatafter their two years away in a foreign country theychange remarkably in maturity and outlook. Whenthey return, they find their home just the same. No
one understands their new perspective. No one
empathizes with their experience. Stress and a feelingof isolation overcome the volunteer. When this happens at home or in the workplace the danger of the
reductionist assumption glows red like a stop sign:that simply training the guide and releasing him backinto his small pond will be sufficient for continued
growth. It often won’t.
To avoid this effect, the program should enable
the trainee’s environment (also called “context”) to

Systems thinkers perceivea world of wholes rather thanof parts. We emphasize interrelationships and processes
rather than linear cause-andeffect and snapshots in time.
best take advantage of new skills and ideas. Here aresome techniques to achieve this:
1.	Facilitate a visioning process so the supervisor
has a clear vision of how the trainee’s skills andideas improve workplace performance.
2.	Train the supervisor in how to use the traineein new ways. The supervisor does not necessarily need to perform the skill, but must know

EKF ■ Kohl 29

what the skill is and how it can be used. For
example a community development project
manager needs to understand the participatory
methodologies of newly trained extensionist(but not how to run the workshops himself) inorder to make the program more participatory
and less top-down.
3.	Negotiate with program management new job
descriptions for trainees that give opportunity
for the trainee to use new skills.
4. Work with the trainee’s organization to support a network amongst trainees in order toreinforce mutual learning and problem solvingof issues that arise around the new skills.
In addition to enabling the environment, trainers
need to be concerned that the trainee’s workplace

program is structured such that the trainee can effectchange. If a program in which a trainee works backat home is poorly designed – no vision, poorly articulated objectives, no monitoring – then it doesn’t matter how good the trainee’s new skills are in a program
designed to fail. Trainers then must work withtrainees’ organizations to reduce output-thinking. If
trainees are trained in quality control, for instance,
the supervisor cannot simply see that person as the
person who will solve all quality problems. The system has to have mechanisms to allow the trainee tofeedback into it and improve it. Consider the following example, partially altered for purposes of thisarticle, from Guatemala’s Tikal National Park.
Guides contribute to forest fire prevention in Tikal
Tikal National Park deploys fire brigades to fightNegative Feedback Model Describing Relationship
Between Forest Fire Prevention and Ecotourism Fundraising
Government
allocation to
fire prevention
program
_

+

DELAY

Seasonal
dryness

Tikal Forest_
Health# forest fires_

Expected +needs forupcoming yearof fireprevention+# Fires desired(Tikal’s fire
prevention goal)

Capacity offire prevention
program_+Amount needed in
non-governmental
donations_Contributions +to fireprevention
program+++
Other nongovernmental
sources

30 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

Amountneeded from
ecotourism+

Cooperative’sfundraisingintensity for fire
prevention (throughuse of guides)

Cooperative’s
ecotourism
profitsreflections.solonline.org

seasonal conflagrations, yet resources needed towage the battle often fall short, especially in years ofabove average dryness. An international conservation organization that trains guides suggested to
Tikal that ecotourism can generate resources to support forest fire prevention. While the project needed
money most of all, it could have also benefited fromdonated tools and expert advising.
With the conservation organization’s help, thepark set objectives of how much it wanted to raisethrough ecotourism. It decided that with $10,000 in
donations that year, 50 shovels, and off-season advising from a fire ecologist, it could meet its expected needs.
The organization trained guides some of whom
formed an ecotourism cooperative that sold interpretive products as well as supplied additional locallyprovided services such as transportation, food, andlodging. The cooperative designated 5% of net
annual profits to park conservation which if projects
proved successful would yield about $5,000 to thefire prevention program. The guides themselves committed to raise an additional $5,000 through solicited visitor donations. Thus, the guides integrated thetheme of fire into their interpretive tours and after
each program the guides tactfully solicited from visitors monetary and in-kind donations; they also asked,
when appropriate, for a contact to a fire ecologist.
Consider the causal loop diagram (page 30) of theabovementioned system, answering the question,“How does ecotourism contribute to the reductionof forest fires in Tikal National Park?”
The number of forest fires immediately affects thegovernment’s willingness to combat forest fires,
affects overall forest health, and is feedback to managers on how much they need to adjust their firefighting effort for the following year. When they
compare their needs to budget allocations, they know
how much money they need from other sources.
They direct their own ecotourism or that of the cooperative to increase contributions which increases thecapacity (and hopefully effectiveness) of the program
which then reduces the number of forest fires.
The conservation organization, then, worked

reflections.solonline.org

with the client’s context and trained guides to solicit
donations through interpretive tours. It trained thepark how to set up a program where these donations
can be channeled to fire prevention. Hopefully the
program is ready to generate real system outcomes(number of forest fires, defined by Tikal’s fire prevention goal in the diagram).

Trainers Forge a Shared Vision
Binding Trainee to Context
and Purpose
The first rule of learning is that people learn bestwhen they feel what they are learning meets theirneeds. Thus a clear fit between their personal visionand the vision of their organization and their training program motivates learning. Senge explains thata shared vision brings people together, but cannot becreated with just one session. People and organizations accommodate each other’s vision in an ongoing and evolving dance. Every potential trainee
has a vision of benefits that the training will bring.
The closer his vision fits the vision of the training
program and the context in which he will work, themore relevant he sees the training and the faster hewill learn.
But resources are limiting and trainers will notalways be around to help graduates. For learning tocontinue after the main training component finishes,a graduate needs to learn to learn. In order to pursue
the necessary inputs to a trainee’s learning, he musthave a vision of what he is trying to build. Without
a blueprint (vision), the trainee cannot easily know
which materials to acquire to build his house (i.e.,fire prevention program in Tikal’s case).
Training staff also should have a vision of the
trainee’s context in order to customize the program
to best fit the trainees’ needs. The staff should visit
trainees’ sites, meet their supervisors, and understand the goals and limitations in the context. In
order that this knowledge becomes useful, training
staff also have to be able to rapidly feedback andimprove the program as discussed above.

EKF ■ Kohl 31

Mastery of Discipline Requires
a Long-Term Perspective
Senge points out that mastery of a discipline occurs
as the novice learns the rules of action, experimentswith them, and then after a while is able to implement those rules from the subconscious under stressand ambiguity – “people will have adapted the rules
into their own particular model, speaking in theirown voice.”2 One-time short courses usually cannot
achieve long-term capacity building. Program trainers can build long-term assistance infrastructure in a
number of different ways, each corresponding to different expense levels.
1. Least expensive is automated assistance designed for many graduates. This could take theform of newsletters and web sites with generalized information.
2. Better still is remote but personalized assistancesuch as chat rooms, email, and phone support.
3.	Trainers could also set up with client organizations associations and networks of trainees
who can learn from each other. The cost eventually is borne by the association members.

4. Most expensive, trainers can offer one-on-one
customized support, reviewing products, visiting sites, evaluating performance, and offering
additional lessons.
Reductionism often separates mind, spirit, and body.
But effective technical assistance reintegrates these
aspects of the person. Trainees often develop a close
relationship to trainers who understand very closely
what trainees experience and the challenges they face.
Effective long-term assistance, then, also attends tothe emotions, vision, and even spirituality of trainees.
The best training for the beaver of course is tostay home and build dams. But if he must be liftedfrom his forest, then the trainers have a wide variety
of tools to try to make up for his separation. It is an
upstream challenge to train holistically in a reductionist society that wants quick results at low cost.
But in an increasingly competitive, knowledge-based,
and protean global economy, holistic training represents a comparative advantage for both humans andbeavers.

A b o ut the A uth o r

Jon Kohl worked for many years developing park manager and interpretive guide capacitybuilding programs. He is now an independent consultant and freelance writer, spending timewith Fermata, Inc., a sustainable tourism planning company in the U.S., and collaboratingwith Unesco’s World Heritage Center to develop the systems thinking approach described inthis article. More information on his work and writings can be found at www.jonkohl.com.

Endnotes
1 Exactly what one considers an outcome depends on how one envisions thesystem. Apprehending criminals may be the result of newly trained officers,
but it may do nothing to reduce crime rates, which could be the true outcome.
2 The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge (New York: Currency/Doubleday), 2006, p. 377.

32
32 Reflections
Reflections■■Volume
Volume8,
8,NumberNumber22

reflections.solonline.org

B ook review

Review and Reflections
By Barry Sugarman
If you like cases ofsuccessful large scale
reform with concrete results, this isa good one. It’s about
the reform of U.S.
government procurement practice,
Barry Sugarman
a long-standing systemic issue (some would say “scandal”) involving everything thefederal government purchases(over $300 billion p.a.) – including battleships, IT, K-rations, contractors, and office supplies. The
story is about changing a system
so heavily oriented to preventing
fraud that it resulted in systematically supplying low quality goods
and services for public use – andalways after long delay. It’s astory about successful changes
that matter.
And if you like cases that haveinteresting implications for change
theory, Kelman gives us that too.
Change usually has natural allies,
he argues, it does not always faceresistance across the board, as thedominant change theories assume.
And once it gets started, it generates a self-reinforcing process,which he documents – but not the
one familiar to The Dance of
Change (Senge, et al, 1999) readers. These keen insights on thechange process are supported bycareful research, but all that careful analysis of survey data doesreflections.solonline.org

not make for easy reading.
Academic researchers won’t mind.
Other readers will enjoy the first
few and final chapters which
describe the setting, explain the culture of public management, andoutline the implications of thesefindings.
Let’s situate the story with an
example. This change initiative abolished the once all-powerful “milspecs” (military specifications)that employed an army of bureaucrats to write detailed specifications for every single item thegovernment might purchase.
These specs took a long time towrite and get approved, so they
could never be up to date. Even if
up to date, specs defined byremote procurement specialists,
neither true experts, nor actual
users, could hope to get it rightconsistently – and all errors wereeffectively set in concrete. Milspecs
covered everything, down to thecookies served to soldiers in messhall – cookies despised by the soldiers by comparison with thecommercial products – and more
expensive! This petty example
was typical of all milspecs.
Both suppliers and government
managers were locked into these
specs and the suppliers who qualified to meet them. Because government specs (not just the
military ones) were different fromnormal industry standards major

Unleashing Change: A
Study of Organizational
Renewal in Government
Steven Kelman
Brookings Institute, 2006

suppliers often did not bid, leaving the field to fewer, often second-rate suppliers. Then there
was the whole arcane bidding
process. . . . The old federal purchasing system produced enormous waste and frustration. While
it prevented some outright fraud,
it created great temptation for
dedicated public officials to break
the rules to save the mission.
Military cookies and meals illustrate the problem at a simple,
homey level. The old system basedon “milspecs” produced meals thatsoldiers considered barely edible.
The reformed system changed thecriteria to include acceptability to
the intended users, a huge change
in mindset.
All purchasing for the Department of Defense (DoD) was basedon milspecs before this reform.
After the reform, purchasing regulations for the federal govern-■ Sugarman
Review■ Joiner,Book Book
Excerpt
Josephs 33
33

ment (not just DoD) were basedmuch more on the needs of theuser (program managers in a government agency serving the public) and less on specs written years
before by a well-intentioned office
worker. The new regulations also
allowed government contractors
to consider the past history ofbidder firms (previously forbidden) so that better qualified contractors could be chosen. Every
year the feds spend over $300 billion on goods and contract services, so every 1% gained throughless waste or by getting better value
amounts to $3 billion. That’s justthe money savings, not counting
the gain in improved employee
morale and better focus on mission rather than navigating an
unwinnable bureaucratic obstacle
course.
Author Steven Kelman is professor of public management at Harvard University’s Kennedy Schoolof Government. During the Clinton administration he served in asenior post at the powerful Officeof Management and Budget as headof the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, so he was a highlevel participant-observer and an
important leader in this verylarge-scale change. Prior to that
he had been known for his research on federal procurement
and as an advocate for putting ahigher priority on getting goodvalue for the taxpayer and government. From time to time media
reporters find a “golden hammer” scandal to enrage taxpayers;
but the bigger problem Kelman
had identified is that managers of

34 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

government programs face constant frustration with the “redtape” of government purchasing
regulations which make it impossible for them to spend their allotted funds to get good value in theequipment or contract services
they need, when they need it.
Government procurement haslong been notorious for getting
second- and third-rate goods andservice, for taking far too long toagree on contracts and far too
long to get delivery and, after
long delay, often getting government contractors who poorly
matched their actual needs. Contractors alone were not to blame;
the old federal procurement system made these results inevitable.
Kelman’s term in Washington
coincided both with the broad
Clinton-Gore campaign on Reinventing Government and with a
specific initiative to reform defense
procurement in the gigantic DoD.
This is a good case for exploring(and teaching) the nature of large
scale change, lasting change – one
whose effects are still in evidence
over ten years later. Early on thecase for change was made well –Congress was initially skeptical; it
was based on value-based procurement thinking and the broader reinventing government ideology. Kelman was part of a powerful coalition of high-ranking change
leaders and senior sponsors,
including the Deputy Secretary of
Defense and the White House, so
the necessary legislative changes
were made. (This aspect of thestory is well-told in another casestudy.1) Important as they were,

those changes in formal regulation were not sufficient: the behavior and practices of thousandsof procurement officials had to bechanged too.
Kelman, as change leader, knewthat many practitioner-professionals must be enrolled in thisinitiative – not just to sell it totheir colleagues but to redesign
many key procurement practices
according to the new principles
and priorities. So he traveled extensively, meeting with local groupsof grassroots managers and listened carefully; he presented the
new vision, encouraging them tohelp in making it work, by leading improvement teams in theirown departments; he invited theirreactions and listened to them. In
effect he played the role of change
leader advocated in The Dance of
Change. He was a good listener toprocurement professionals andprogram managers (their clients).
Many of them became contributors to the process of adapting procurement practices to the newprinciples and regulations. Usinga Silicon Valley metaphor, he
acted as an evangelist for the new
operating system, enrolling early
adopters among application designers – not only practitioners but
also training providers. He helped
to enhance people’s existing motivation to pioneer the new opportunities, and also helped promote
the diffusion and sharing of the newpractices and solutions they developed. Process or OD consultants
as such had no part in this story.
Readers of Reflections willappreciate the fact that this well-reflections.solonline.org

documented case from the public
sector illustrates the principles oflarge-scale change that many of
us believe in. Personally, I enjoy
the way it illustrates the hybrid(two-sided) nature of the change
leadership process, combining (1)top-down change in formal structure and official policy/regulations with (2) grassroots leadershipthat translates that strategic intention into new practice patterns
and working relationships. My
synthesis of a hybrid theory oforganizational transformation is
published elsewhere.2
Kelman’s theory of large-scalechange challenges the common
view that change always meetswith broad-based resistance. With
this case he shows that there wasa natural (potential) constituency
for change, both among program
managers and procurement spe-cialists. When top executives (political appointees) favoring thischange came into office (onemajor change factor) their firsttask was to remove key structuralbarriers – by changing federal legislation – and then to encourage(“unleash”) these potential allies.
Kelman also claims that, once
initiated, momentum for further
diffusion develops in a reinforcing
cycle. He builds on the research ofEverett Rogers on early adoptersand social networks in the diffusion of innovations and he makes
interesting comparisons between
the motivations and mental models of early adopters (often “truebelievers” in the new principle ofbetter value for government purchasers) and the later adopters(who tend to be pragmatists, seeking the practical and personal
benefits to going along with the

A b o ut the A uth o rEndnotes

Barry Sugarman, Ph.D. conducts
research on system transformationin business and public domains,recently focusing on school reform.
He was formerly Professor ofManagement at Lesley University(1979–2000), also a former Research Coordinator at the Society
for Organizational Learning andResearch Associate at the MIT
Sloan School of Management.
bsugarman@rcn.com
http://web.mac.com/barrysugarman/1

new direction – it’s less work).
These two types see the change
differently. How do they influenceeach other?
Kelman believes that bothkinds of change agents were necessary to the success of this impressive change in the US federal
government: without the lateadopters it would have been far
less extensive; without the early
adopters it would have had trouble in implementation which would
have been much more superficial.
How do these two types interact
in the context of resolving a specific problem? Those tensions andhow they are resolved or held andcarried forward may be crucial
for the continued strength of thetransformation process. Having unleashed those change agents, we
now need to unleash more researchers.

Another version of this story makes for an interesting comparison – andfor a briefer reading. Kimberly Harokopus wrote an earlier account of thiscase, more focused on the coalition of senior government executives andthe politics of making the legislative and regulatory changes. She also
highlights some “lessons learned” for public managers. Harokopus, K. A.
2000. Transforming Government: Creating the New Defense Procurement
System. Washington, DC: IBM Center for the Business of Government.
This is a free download at http://www.businessofgovernment.org/main/
publications/grant_reports/details/index.asp?GID=34

2

Barry Sugarman, “A Hybrid Theory of Organizational Transformation,” published in Research in Organizational Change and Development, vol. 16.
Edited by W. A. Pasmore and R. W. Woodman. New York, Elsevier. 2007.
This can be downloaded from the solonline.org library or http://web.mac.
com/barrysugarman/iWeb/site/PAPERS.html

reflections.solonline.org■ Joiner,■ Sugarman
Book Book
Excerpt
Josephs 35
Review

B ook E xcerpt

Theory U: Leading fromthe Future as it Emerges

Individual Actions:Learning from a Three-Year-Old

C. Otto Scharmer
SoL, 2007

Fundamental problems, as Einstein once noted, cannot be
solved at the same level of thought that created them. In
this ground-breaking book, Otto Scharmer gives us a new
way to perceive, think about, and act on our extremely complex world. First introduced in Presence (SoL, 2004), the“U” methodology of leading profound change is expanded
and deepened in Theory U. Using a wide range of stories
and examples from his own experience, Scharmer shows
C. Otto Scharmer

us how we can open our mind, emotions, and will tomoments of discovery and mutual understanding. In this excerpt, the innocenceand openness of a three-year-old strike a sharp contrast to the experience of Traudl
Junge, Adolf Hitler’s secretary during World War II.

Learning from 		a Three-Year-OldO

ne day, as I was filling the
dishwasher, I ran out of
detergent. I wasn’t surethe box next to it was the rightkind of soap, but I thought, what
the heck, and used it anyway.
A few minutes later, foam began
streaming from the machine. Damn!
I stopped the machine. Wiped up
the foam. Inspected the mess: themachine was filled with water,
dishes, and vast amounts of soapy
foam. Since it seemed impossible
to empty the machine of its water,
I decided to forge ahead: to let it
run and to simply mop up thefoam for as long as it continued topour out. While preoccupied withmy mess, I was joined by our threeyear-old, Johan-Caspar, who was
fascinated by the show. He began
helping me wipe away the endlesswhite stream. As the rate of the

36 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

streaming foam began to slow
just a little, Johan-Caspar took
some short breaks. During thesebreaks he started talking to themachine in a low, intense voice.
“What are you saying?” I asked
him. “I am talking to the foam,”
he replied. “The foam?” I was
surprised. “Because the poor foamhasn’t got eyes to see. That’s why
he can’t find the right way. That’s
why he keeps coming out thewrong way.”
My three-year-old looked at
the same frustrating situation as I
did, but instead of wanting tokick the machine, he empathizedwith the streaming foam, communicating with the foam as if itwere a sentient being. He noticed
that this being had no eyes andbelieved that was why it had lostits way. It needed our help. One
situation, one set of data, twoways of making sense.

From then on we communicated in silence with the streaming white being. Johan Caspar
and I didn’t exchange any more
words. We just got into the rhythm
and flow of the work, paying attention to what that “white being”
needed us to do to help it find its
way.
Now let me deconstruct thisstory using the field model introduced in Chapter 15.
Filling the dishwasher and mindlessly adding the wrong detergent
is a perfect example of downloading. Then, once the foaming started, I jumped from Level 1 (downloading) to Level 2: “Damn!”(seeing the mess). Then I tried to
fix the problem. The challenge
was to get beyond the Voice ofJudgment (“Why can’t they build
dishwashers that have a simple‘empty the water’ function?”) andto stay cool and analyze the avail-reflections.solonline.org

able options. If I had continued
on the path suggested by my
Voice of Judgment, I would havefound many more things to be irritated about and probably would
have kicked the machine. That
course of action would have taken
me straight into the space of antiemergence: the cycle of denial anddestruction. First you kick themachine, and then . . . well, we allknow the story: the cycle of denial
and destruction is filled with feedback loops that reinforce thedestructive behavior.
That didn’t happen because
Johan Caspar entered the plane ata different level, Field 3 (he tuned
in to what he saw as an evolving
being, and then he started interacting with it). So he taught me tostop kicking and start diving inand feeling from inside. And
finally, when we found a rhythm
and flow of working together, no
more words were needed. We
knew what needed to be done andcarried it out easily (illustrating,in a nutshell, Level 4).
There are three points about
this story that I would like to highlight. One, mindfulness and presence can happen anytime, anywhere, in the midst of our everyday life. It doesn’t require us totravel to the moon and back(although for some that has actually been the way into this experience). What it requires is an inward shift of attention.
Two, the greater the pressureof the external challenge (the bigger the mess in front of me), themore natural it feels to enter thedark space of absencing (kicking

reflections.solonline.org

the machine), which I will explainin more detail below.
Three, the point of moving
into Fields 3 and 4 is to stop interacting with objects and start dealing with everything we work andinteract with as if it were a sentient being that we can directly
connect to from within (the foam
without eyes).

The Theater Stage andthe Collective Field
I still remember the amazing feeling of performing my first majorrole in a stage play at the age ofabout fourteen. You do everything you can to prepare, andyou’ve memorized all your lines
and stage cues. Then it’s time forthe opening scene. The curtain is
about to rise. The voices of theaudience grow softer. Suddenly
you feel as if the earth stops turning. Everything, all the months ofpreparation, shrinks into a little
heap of desperation and nothingness. It all vanishes. You forget
everything you ever learned. You
are frightened. You are alone.
Driven more by desperation thanaspiration, you hang in there. Not
because you are courageous, morebecause it’s now too late to run
away (a thought that briefly
crosses your mind). Then, before
you fully realize it, you see thecurtain rising. Too late. No more
escape. Time stops.
The colored theater lights blind
you and wrap you in an unfamiliar sphere of hot attention andenergy. As if in slow motion, youstumble into the first movements,

words, sentences, and gestures.
You are just getting into it when
you suddenly notice that you are
not alone. Another “being” seems
to be communicating intimately
with you. It is the audience. Theirattention creates a holding spacefor you – a place that guides you.
You feel it with every fiber ofyour body. You’re now in a placethat is watching and communicating with you. And it nourishes
you with an energy you havenever tasted before. A place thatconnects your source and being.
Your place.
In this example, I, as the actor,
approach the stage in the mode ofdownloading, having memorized
all 820 of the lines that
Shakespeare’s Prospero had tospeak. Then on stage, as the curtain rises, the resistance shows up
as fear: fear of failure, fear of getting stuck, fear of not being able
to remember a single line in frontof three hundred people. In a mixture of desperation and courage, I
stumble across a threshold andsimply start moving. After the
first few habitual moves my carefully prepared actions move fromFields 1 and 2 to Fields 3 and 4 –that is, I enter a flow of deepening/deepened presence and emergence.
What makes that possible? Acollective holding space: an audience of three hundred loving parents and friends, sitting there with
their minds and hearts wide open,
fully present to and in awe of
their children’s performance.
In this example, the resistance(fear) appears right at the begin-■ Joiner,■ Scharmer
Book Book
Excerpt
Josephs 37
Excerptning. It is followed by dropping
into a deeper flow through thecollective holding space provided
by the loving audience. The collective holding space makes the
shadow space of antiemergence
disappear. Collective forces canfree us or, as in the following
story, keep us locked into thesocial space of antiemergence.

Hitler’s Secretary
Traudl Junge was a simple, humble woman from rural Germany
who lost her father early andwhose difficult financial situation
prevented her from pursuing theartistic career she longed for.
More by accident than not, shewent to Berlin, got a job throughan uncle, and soon stumbled intoa typing contest, which she won.
Before long she was interviewing
with a soft-spoken, friendly uncle
type who was looking for a new
private secretary. His name was
Adolf Hitler, and he hired her totake occasional dictation.
At the end of the war, when
Hitler committed suicide in his
Führerbunker, she returned to theoutside, to the real world – aworld that lay in ashes and ruins.
She tried to flee to southern
Germany but was captured by the
Russians in Berlin. Because she
had never been a member of theGerman Nazi Party, she was released and settled in Munich.
Soon thereafter she came acrossthe gravestone of Die Weisse Rose
(The White Rose), a small Munichbased group of German resisters
who had all been killed by the

38 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

Nazis. She looked at the inscription and was shocked to see that
all the main figures of Die Weisse
Rose had been born in the same
year she was: 1920. At thatmoment of seeing she realizedthat for her and for her generation there was no hiding behind
excuses. The Weisse Rose figures
were the same age she was, andthe difference between them wasthat each of them had made a
conscious choice in their lives, achoice that she had never made.
She realized that whatever she
had done and participated in was
ultimately her full personal responsibility – there was no hiding behind the collective fate of her
generation. She gave no interviews until shortly before her
death, when she spoke to André
Heller, a well-known Austrian artist.
A few days before the interview
was aired, she told him that only
now, fifty years later, could she
finally begin to forgive herself.
On the day after the interview
aired, she passed away.1 Whatmakes her account of the final
weeks in Hitler’s bunker so
intriguing is the preciseness andclarity of her descriptions. Her
mind and memory seemed towork like a supersharp camera.
She remembered countless eventsin great detail. At the same time
she was also a gifted second-orderobserver: she was cognizant ofgaps in her memory when she
couldn’t retrieve exact images orexperiences.
Here is how Traudl Junge
describes the bizarre company
inside Hitler’s bunker. They weredeep down inside the elevenmeter-thick walls of the bunker,
with bombs dropping to the left
and right and on top of them. The
Red Army was only a few roadblocks away. Hitler’s army had
collapsed, gone from occupying
nearly all of Europe to total defeat. Yet, despite all the “disconfirming data” around them, all
the bombs that were being dropped right on top of them, somepeople inside the bunker were
holding on to their hopes andfantasies. They were clinging totheir old mental models, unable
to let reality sink in. The bombs
being dropped onto them were
not powerful enough to get themessage to penetrate through the
thick walls of their minds. Pondering why she didn’t simply leave
after even Hitler had suggested
that she do so, she said, “I was
afraid to leave the security of the
bunker.”That’s what the power of blinding (not seeing) and entrenching(desensing) is about: it keeps us
inside the thick walls of our own
bunkers so that we are unable toconnect with what’s really goingon outside. Still, her staying is somewhat incomprehensible. What was
the real mechanism that kept her
locked inside the bunker?
One way to make sense of thispuzzle is to imagine that she got
stuck in the shadowspace of antiemergence, which froze her deeper resources of intelligence (openmind, heart, will). She lost the connection to her authentic self andended up participating in the practices of antiemergence (see figure).

reflections.solonline.org

Downloading: Traudl Junge
described in great detail how life
inside the bunker continued, as if
the people were automatons. As
daily and even special rituals suchas the tea ceremony or the wedding between Hitler and Eva Braun(two days before his suicide) continued, they grew into hollow procedures of an absurd disconnect.
Blinding, or not seeing: “I waswalled in and separated from theinformation that I needed to understand what was going on,” said
Traudl Junge. “First when I got
there, I thought that I had arrived
at the source of information. But
later I realized that I had been in
the [system’s] blind spot.”
Entrenching and desensing:

During the final years of the war,
Hitler always traveled on a special train with curtains closed so
he wouldn’t see the war’s destruction. When he arrived back at themain train station in Berlin, his
driver was instructed to take aroute that would expose Hitler tothe least destruction. He didn’t want
any flowers in the bunker because
he “didn’t want to be aroundcorpses.” How ironic. The man
whose acts caused the deaths of
55 million people didn’t want tobe near flowers that were dying.
Absencing: Traudl Junge had
the most trouble recalling those
final days in the bunker. Her otherwise supersharp camera memory appeared to have black holes
when it came to remembering her
feelings and emotions during thoselast days. It is as if these emotions
were erased – or deeply frozen
inside her experiential body. She

reflections.solonline.org

described acting like a mindlessautomaton in her day-to-day routine – disconnected not only fromthe catastrophic events unfolding
outside but also from her real self:“We functioned like automatons,
I cannot remember any feelings, it
was like an in-between state where
I was no longer myself.”
Self-deluding: This is a total
disconnect between one’s imagesof the unfolding future and reality. Traudl Junge described many
meetings and turnaround strategies that all went nowhere because
they were grounded in such illusory assumptions. They only deepened the abyss between the world
inside the bunker and the courseof events outside. “We were so
separated from what was really

going on outside,” reflected Junge,“that we had no idea how theworld would continue to unfold.”
Aborting: Just as prototyping isabout creating microcosms of afuture life, aborting is about terminating and killing future life. In
the bunker this involved killing
first the dog, on whom the cyanide was tested, then all the children, as well as many others, whocommitted suicide prior to thefinal victory of the Red Army.
Annihilating: After Hitler killed
himself, Traudl Junge said that theremaining characters sat together
like a group of lifeless puppetsthat had just lost their puppeteer.
The group around Hitler wastrapped in a space of social antiemergence that revolves around■ Joiner,■ Scharmer
Book Book
Excerpt
Josephs 39
Excerpt

downloading, blinding, desensing,absencing, self-deluding, aborting,and destruction. The figure depicts
how this shadow space represents
the antithesis of the U space ofpresencing.
Just as the U space of presencing spells out the economics ofcreation, the shadow space ofabsencing features the economics
of destruction. Each cycle is basedon self-reinforcing dynamics. The
U space of social emergence isbased on the power of activating
the instruments of the open mind,
open heart, and open will. By contrast, the shadow space of social
pathology is based on the dynamics of being stuck in one Truth(rigid ideology), one center or collective (arrogance, hate), and one
will (fanaticism and violence) – inshort, the space of absencing exhibits all the key features of fundamentalism.
For Traudl Junge, one puzzlingquestion remained: Why didn’t I
leave?
She didn’t leave the bunker because she was caught in a deadly
pattern of absencing. The dynamics she was wrestling with are
now back in business. Because
these destructive dynamics arealive and well, we need a clearer
understanding of the process andpractices through which the pathological space of social destruction comes into being. That space
appears to manifest when humansystems face high-stakes situations in which the relationship totheir open mind, heart, and will is
cut off and frozen out.

40 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 2

The figure sums up the individual dimensions of the U:• Most people on Earth haveplenty of experiences across all
four levels. When first confronted
with the U, many people say: Yes,
I do know Level 1 and 2, I do
know downloading and seeing,but I am not sure that I know
Level 3 and 4, sensing and presencing. But then, on consideration
and after going deeper into theirlife’s and work’s journey, mostpeople find the hidden gold of
their various threshold experiences
relatively quickly.
•	The movement from Level
1, downloading to the bottom or
the deeper levels of the U, canhappen in any situation: when doing a four-week meditation retreat
or when messing up the dishwasher in your home kitchen.
• Being in the presence of people who operate from the deeper
levels can help a lot. In some cases,that can be a three-year-old. In
other cases, this wisdom awareness happens some other way,
through someone else. Sometimes
we call that leadership.
•	If you happen to connect toa source once, it isn’t good enough.
Most people did that already(often without fully noticing). The
issue is how to stay connected,
how to sustain that connection.
Because if you do not, you may bein danger of freezing that single
experience into something rigid
that catapults you into the antispace of social pathology (oneTruth, one Us, one Will). Whichbrings us to our next point.

• We can flip or revert fromthe social space of deep emergence into the dark space of antiemergence anytime, anywhere. It
can happen whenever we lose ourfull attention and wakefulness
and our firm grounding in a selfless or serving intent. It’s easy tosee how Hitler’s secretary got
sucked into a system that finally
had her holding on to the informational blind spot behind eleven-meter-thick walls. That’s easy
to recognize. But isn’t that samething happening to each of us day
to day, moment to moment?
Aren’t we also seduced by situations and systems that take advantage of our not being fully awake,not being fully intentional? As
with Traudl Junge, the system hits
us right in our blind spot.
So how can we sustain the connection to source? By being andstaying awake.
Thinking is an enormously
powerful process – one that usually remains untapped, unused
and unrecognized. Our thinking
creates the world! But instead of
discovering the creative power ofreal thinking, we are socialized
into patterns of downloading that
relate to real thinking like theshadows inside Plato’s cave relate
to the actual reality and the sun
outside.
The power of this metaprocessof thinking is frozen into fixed
forms and shadows in Field 1(downloading); begins to wake up
when we begin to connect withwhat is really going on outside(Field 2: seeing); begins to getreflections.solonline.org

wings that take us out of the prisons of our own mental models
when we begin to connect withthe others around us and withwhat the situation looks and feels
like to them (Field 3: sensing);
and finally turns into the sourceof fire. In its essence, real thinking

is pure fire. The fire of creation.
The fire we can tap into when we
begin to connect with the fourthfield.

A b o ut the A uth o r

Dr. C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT and the founding chair of ELIAS (Emerging
Leaders for Innovation Across Sectors), a program linking twenty leading global institutions
from business, government, and civil society in order to prototype profound system innovations
for a more sustainable world. He is also a visiting professor at the Center for Innovation andKnowledge Research, Helsinki School of Economics, and the founding chair of the Presencing
Institute. Scharmer has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and crosssector change initiatives in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He has co-designed anddelivered award-winning leadership programs for client organizations including DaimlerChrysler,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Fujitsu. He is the author of numerous articles and books,
including Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society,co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. More information about
Scharmer and his work can be found at www.solonline.org/theoryu or www.ottoscharmer.com.
scharmer@mit.edu

reflections.solonline.org■ Joiner,■ Scharmer
Book Book
Excerpt
Josephs 41
ExcerptReflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change
Volume 8, Number 2

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